February 15, 2011 12:47PM 

# Physician, Heal Thyself 

By [Jim Harper](https://www.cato.org/people/jim-harper) 

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Announcing a new Senate subcommittee devoted to privacy, Senators Leahy (D‑VT) and Franken (D‑MN) said nothing about privacy threats from government.

A “boom of new technologies over the last several years has … put an unprecedented amount of personal information into the hands of large companies that are unknown and unaccountable to the American public,” Franken said, according to [an AFP report](http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5haEtqIWJSDta21uBRkM-F-UiepMg?docId=CNG.ebeff272fc0b04d38c80f83bba916cbc.ae1).

A boom of new technologies has put an unprecedented amount of personal information into the hands of the federal government—in some cases, illegally. It takes a lot of gall to point at commercial data collection from the atop the dunghill of federal privacy invasion. But there’s a lot of gall to go around in Washington, D.C.

##### Related Tags 

[Technology and Privacy](https://www.cato.org/technology-privacy) 

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