Leaders of two much-criticized projects that privacy advocates fear will collect massive amounts of data on U.S. residents defended those projects before the U.S. Congress Tuesday, saying the projects will be much more limited in scope than opponents fear.

James Loy, director of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) , and Anthony Tether, director of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), countered concerns that the TSA's proposed Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II) nor DARPA's Total Information Awareness (TIA) research project would house new volumes of data that could be later used to check up on U.S. citizens.

Instead, CAPPS II will run an airline passenger's name, address, phone number and birth date through a sophisticated data analysis process to determine if that passenger presented a terrorism risk, Loy said. And DARPA is simply providing other agencies such as the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with the tools to mine data for important trends, Tether said, but the agency isn't planning to collect data itself.

Asked how DARPA would ensure that any information about U.S. residents caught in TIA's net would be correct, Tether said that's up to agencies like the FBI to decide. "At DARPA, we develop the tools," he said. "We don't collect any data. We're not the people who collect data; we're the people who supply the analytical tools to the people who collect the data."

Loy and Tether, along with Steve McCraw, assistant director of the Office of Intelligence at the FBI, testified Tuesday at the U.S House Committee on Government Reform's Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and the Census. The subject was whether data mining programs can improve national security.

As details of both TIA and CAPPS II have slowly come out this year, the two proposals have come under fire from privacy advocates and Congress, mostly from Democratic lawmakers. Opponents questioned how such data mining technologies would be used, what databases would be collected and how the public could correct any mistakes in collected information.

But the criticism hasn't come only from liberal-leaning civil rights groups and lawmakers. On Tuesday, Lori Waters, executive director of the conservative "pro-family" Eagle Forum, said she continues to have concerns about the scope of both programs.

The CAPPS II program doesn't have any Congressional limits on the data it collects, Waters said, and little information has been available on either program. "What is the goal of CAPPS II? What is the goal of TIA?" she asked. "There are questions that need to be answered before we pour millions of dollars into this type of technology. We haven't seen any evidence that these will be effective plans."

Representative William Clay, a Missouri Democrat, also criticized the two programs for a "dark cloud of secrecy" hanging over them. "I would like each of you to go back to your respective agencies and figure out what you can do to help build confidence in your activities ... and make this process a little easier on the American public," he said.

Loy said his

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