EFF challenges FBI’s ambitious IDW project
The FBI has launched an ambitious data-collection project — Investigative Data Warehouse, or IDW — which already has more than 560 million items of information in its possession, to which more than 12,000 law enforcement agents have access
The FLAG Project of privacy watch dog Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed suit against the Department of Justice (DoJ) asking for records about the FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW) — a large database which contains hundreds of millions of entries of personal information. According to the FBI, the IDW was developed to collect a swath of personal information — “photographs, biographical information, physical location information, and financial data” — for use in antiterrorism investigations. The FBI said earlier this year that there were over 560 million items in the IDW, and that nearly 12,000 law enforcement agents had access to the information. EFF filed its suit after the FBI failed to respond to two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for records disclosing the criteria for inclusion in the database and the current privacy policy protecting this sensitive information, among other critical issues.
The FBI appears to be in violation of the Privacy Act of 1974. The law requires that the FBI should have filed a public notice describing the database and the criteria for including personal information. “Americans deserve to know what information is collected under what circumstances, and who has access to it,” said EFF senior counsel David Sobel, the director of the FLAG Project. “And what if this database contains false information about you? How would you correct that? These are serious questions that the FBI needs to answer.”
EFF launched the FLAG Project last month. FLAG has already filed a lawsuit earlier this month demanding that the FBI release records concerning DCS-3000 and Red Hook — tools the FBI has spent millions of dollars developing for electronic surveillance of personal communications. “The public needs as much information as possible to evaluate tools that put our privacy at risk,” said EFF staff attorney Marcia Hofmann. “The Department of Justice must abide by the law and publicly release information about these surveillance programs.”
-read more at EFF FLAG Web site; see also the FOIA complaint filed against the Department of Justice here
