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Leahy, Specter want floor time for privacy bill |
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By J. Taylor Rushing
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Posted: 03/25/08 01:58 PM [ET] |
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The Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat and Republican have called on Senate leaders to schedule a vote on their privacy bill tightening rules on the use of personal information in the wake of the State Department’s breach of all three presidential candidates’ passport files. Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and ranking Republican Arlen Specter (Pa.) on Tuesday also repeated their calls for Attorney General Michael Mukasey to open an immediate investigation into the situation, instead of waiting for an internal State Department review, as Mukasey has declared. “The Justice Department should not wait to be handed ‘a box full of evidence,’ as you said at your recent briefing, before determining whether federal laws were broken,” Leahy and Specter wrote Mukasey. In a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the senators asked for floor consideration of the Personal Data Privacy and Security Act, which was approved by the Judiciary Committee last year but has yet to receive a full Senate vote. The bill sets deadlines for when privacy breaches must be acknowledged to consumers, implements more scrutiny of private contractors handling sensitive government data and strengthens laws and penalties that regulate how private information is obtained, stored and used. The State Department acknowledged last week that the passport data files of Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) have all been breached while in the department’s custody. |
