Statement of Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, in Support of the Citizens' Protection in Federal Databases Act of 2003

Arguably the most American of ideas is the conviction that if you aren’t doing anything wrong, then there’s no reason for the government to launch any sort of investigation into your activities. It’s called individualized suspicion. Without it, our jails would be brimming with innocent Americans.

However, the idea of individualized suspicion is under attack today, not so much by any particular public figure or bureaucrat, but by progress. Technology has advanced to such a point that the police, using computers, can break the doctrine of individualized suspicion at will and with impunity. In fact, they can, and are, accessing your personal information without you even knowing it.

And that’s why Sen. Wyden’s amendment is so important. By putting mechanisms in place to ensure accountability for our intelligence and law enforcement communities in how they go about gathering and using information about Americans, the measure muzzles the surveillance beast by demanding some reliance on individual suspicion before investigations begin.

Further, the bill would go a long way to preventing one of the more dangerous potential applications of the new “”data-mining”” technology — computer programs that troll through millions of trillions of bytes of information on Americans – everything from credit card records to pharmaceutical purchases – in the hope of matching individual behavior against dreamed-up scenarios about terrorist plots.

Data-mining in this fashion is especially troubling because it’s not – as proponents often claim – like using an FBI profiler to find the age or sex of a particular criminal. It’s actually more like a cross between “”Minority Report”” and turnpike racial profiling. Unfettered, data-mining in this “”Total Information Awareness””-mold has the potential to turn into a system that just singles out persons from particular Middle Eastern countries who it says might commit a crime sometime in the future, but aren’t really doing anything wrong now.

Sen. Wyden and his fellow privacy hawks in the House and Senate — conservative, moderate and liberal alike – deserve our thanks and our support. In the spectrum of civil liberties issues, privacy is one of the most crucial in the post-9/11 era. The further we get away from that terrible day, the easier it is to think clearly about what makes American freedoms as strong as they are. And the answer that Sen. Wyden’s measure represents and that we advocate for every day is that our Constitution and Bill of Rights lay out a system that guarantees security and liberty in equal measure. We can – and must – be both safe and free.

Thank you Sen. Wyden.