I urge you to support S.1789, the Personal Data Privacy and Security Act.
The past several years have seen an accelerating trend of government's use of
commercial databases in an attempt to evade the spirit of the Privacy Act of
1974, which placed limits on the government's collection and maintenance of
personally identifiable records but neglected to consider such practices in
private-sector contractors.  S.1789 would, amongst other positive changes,
limit the government's ability to augment its data with additional information
purchased from private-sector companies such as ChoicePoint.  Recent
high-profile breaches of data security, committed both by government agencies
and by credit scoring companies and other businesses in the private sector,
highlight the need for stricter privacy requirements.  Indeed, US data
protection laws are so outmoded that the European Court recently ruled that it
would be illegal for European states to transfer passenger records to the
United States since it was impossible to ensure that the US Transportation
Security Administration would hold such records to the same standards of
privacy that are routinely maintained in Europe.  For all these reasons, it's
high time to update US data protection laws.  S.1789 would be an important
first step in doing so.