Homeland Security vs. Personal Privacy

Privacy Czar Plays Homeland Role by , Federal Computer Week, November 21, 2002
After a two-year absence, a privacy czar of sorts is returning to the federal government. The Homeland Security Department will have a privacy officer whose job will be to ensure that activities of the new department do not erode the privacy of ordinary Americans. But in light of recent legal, technological and political developments, the new privacy chief will have a tough job, privacy advocates predict.

November 20, 2002 -- Civil libertarians have warned that the homeland security bill passed by Congress and the Senate, taken in context with broadened surveillance powers and new database technology, represent an unprecedented threat to personal privacy.

• Read the San Francisco Chronicle's article "Personal Privacy Takes Alarming Hit, Critics Say."

The Senate voted overwhelmingly yesterday to create a new Homeland Security Department. The House passed a nearly identical version of the bill last week. The department will pull together 22 agencies now scattered across the government, including the new Transportation Security Administration. An issue that drew debate involved permission for the department to develop a Total Information Awareness program.

The Information Awareness Office aims to develop new technologies to sift through "ultra-large" data warehouses and networked computers in search of threatening patterns among everyday transactions, such as credit card purchases, travel reservations, suspicious emails, and improbable medical activity, such as the treatments of anthrax sores.

Formidable foreign policy and privacy hurdles remain before any prototype becomes operational. In order to deploy such a system, new legislation would be needed, some of which has been proposed in the Homeland Security bill that was approved by Congress yesterday and which is expected to soon pass the Senate. That legislation would amend the Privacy Act of 1974, which was intended to limit what government agencies could do with private information.

• Read the Washington Post's article, "US Hopes to Check Computers Globally."
  
  
• Read the New York Times' article, "Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans."
  
  
• More on DOD's Total Information Awareness program.

A special three-judge federal panel ruled Monday that the USA Patriot Act allows intelligence investigators and criminal prosecutors to more easily conduct electronic surveillance to combat terrorism and espionage. In overturning a lower court's decision, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review said that Attorney General John Ashcroft's request for new powers was reasonable.

Civil libertarians and defense attorneys described the 56-page ruling as a tremendous setback, arguing that it would allow the government to spy on US citizens with few restrictions and little oversight. A senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a non-profit public policy research foundation, said the result would be "rubber-stamp judicial consent to phone and Internet surveillance, even in regular criminal cases, and FBI access to medical, educational and other business records that conceivably relate to foreign intelligence probes."

• Read the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review's ruling (PDF).
  
  
• Read the Washington Post's article, "Broad US Wiretap Powers Upheld."
  
  
• Read ZDNet's article, "Secret US Court OKs Electronic Spying."

Meanwhile, the Transportation Security Administration is ramping up its smart card-based programs designed to put identification into the hands of transportation workers nationwide and allow frequent travelers to get through airports quickly.

• Read Federal Computer Week's article, "TSA Preps Smart ID Programs."

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