The Department of Homeland Security seeks clues to possible terrorist activity by looking for patterns in myriad records of crimes, arrests and unusual behavior, traffic tickets and incidents involving the possession of firearms.
James Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group, said: "In many cases, the private sector is subject to stricter standards than the government. The Fair Credit Reporting Act, for example, imposes limits on commercial uses of personal financial and other data, but there are virtually no limits on government uses."
Dempsey said the Constitution provided little protection to an individual with personal information stored in a commercial database to which the government gained access. The Supreme Court has held that a person has no legitimate "expectation of privacy" in information held by a bank or other third party, because the materials are business records, not private papers.
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