NCJ Number
212325
Date Published
2005
Length
12 pages
Annotation
This testimony by Paul Rosenzweig (Senior Legal Research Fellow in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation) before the U.S. House Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary discusses permissible procedures in antiterrorism investigations under the fourth amendment.
Abstract
The testimony opens with a discussion of the overarching principles of the fourth amendment, which seeks to balance, albeit with inevitable tension, the rights of individual citizens to be protected from government intervention absent specified legal grounds for such intervention and also the responsibility of the government to protect citizens from harmful threats. The chapter then turns to a discussion of the specific policy of "data mining" or the Total Information Awareness program (TIA), which pertains to the government's power of information collection on citizens. This testimony notes that it is Congress' responsibility to decide how widely the analytical tools provided by TIA are used while distinguishing the tools themselves from the databases to which they might have access. As for concerns that the use of new data-collection technologies will intrude on civil liberties by affording the government access to new databases, this testimony shares those concerns, as it discusses various controls that should be exercised over the operation of TIA. The testimony offers the following legal recommendation for the structure and operation of TIA: "TIA should be implemented only in a manner that mirrors existing legal restrictions on the government's ability to access data about private individuals." The testimony concludes with a brief discussion of FBI investigative guidelines. Discussion questions