"Senator: Expect data privacy and patent law rewrite"

News.com reports that Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who is set to become chair of the Senate Judiciary Committeee, delivered a speech hinting that he would re-introduce data privacy legislation that he had introduced with Sens. Specter, Feinstein, and Feingold in the last Congress. In his speech, Sen. Leahy called for greater oversight of government data collection and data mining, and stiffer penalties for data privacy violations by private parties. According to Sen. Leahy, "[w]hen it comes to protecting Americans’ privacy, what we have today are analog rules in a digital world." The text of the originial Leahy-Specter bill from 2005 is available here.