Civil liberties groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology are throwing their support behind a piece of legislation that would require U.S. agencies to report to Congress about the personal information they collect.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) introduced the Citizens' Protection in Federal Databases Act of 2003 on Tuesday. The bill would require federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to disclose when they subscribe to commercial databases of personal information.

Wyden's legislation would require reports from U.S. agencies including the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense and FBI. The reports would have to disclose agency contracts to obtain commercial data, how the agencies analyze the data and the privacy guidelines used by the agencies.

The bill also prohibits all federal agencies from conducting searches of commercial data to create hypothetical scenarios of future terrorist attacks.

Wyden argued that no comprehensive privacy laws now exist that regulate the federal government's access to, or use of, public or private databases. "This legislation would hold the government accountable to Congress and the American people when federal agencies seek to dig through an American’s most personal information," he said in a statement.

Representatives of the Justice Department and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), home to the much-criticized Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) research project, did not respond to requests for comments on Wyden's bill.

In January Wyden introduced an amendment blocking funding for TIA until it could be reviewed by Congress. In mid-July, the U.S. Senate voted to block funding for TIA. One of the goals of TIA, according to DARPA, is to create hypothetical scenarios as a way to pinpoint possible terrorist activities.

Wyden expects support in the Senate for his legislation, a Wyden spokeswoman said. "It's clear that Senator Wyden's colleagues share his concerns about some of TIA's initiatives," she said.

Both the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the EFF issued statements in support of Wyden's bill. The legislation is a first step in recognizing that new laws are needed to protect privacy, the CDT said, because "serious privacy concerns" arise when law enforcement and intelligence organizations use data originally collected for commercial reasons.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.