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["Toni Hawryluk" <tonihawr AT msn.com>]

----- Original Message ----- From: 
sanrico AT highdesert.com<mailto:sanrico AT highdesert.com> 
What Price Privacy? 

Thanks, Sandy, but here's what I see :

Rewarding 'friends' with positions - to ensure compliancy -

*whose* ? and to whom would this 'watcher' then be loyal ?????

More payoffs to guarantee what is going to own this country .. 

 

excerpt :

" .. privacy is the purview of chief information officers, which were 
required under a 2002 computer security 
law<http://www.senet-int.com/FISMA.html>." 

 

There's already a 'big brothe'; in most companies - but 

apparently not enough of them are loyal  to the __it in the

______ House .. *yet* ..

 

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65973,00.html/wn_ascii<http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65973,00.html/wn_ascii>

What Price Privacy?  
02:00 AM Dec. 09, 2004 PT

A huge spending bill signed into law by President Bush on Wednesday could 
create a new hot job-growth sector: chief privacy officers. 

Every federal agency, regardless of size or function, will have to hire a 
chief privacy officer and employ an outside auditing firm biennially to 
ensure compliance with the nation's privacy laws, according to a 
little-noticed provision. 

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) included the language in the $388 billion 
spending bill. 

Currently, only the Department of Homeland Security is required to have a 
chief privacy officer, though other agencies, including the Internal Revenue 
Service, have had one for years. 

The provision is given added weight by the intelligence reform bill -- 
awaiting the president's signature -- which says that Congress believes 
intelligence agencies should have privacy and civil liberties officers. 

The officers will be charged with making sure new technologies do not impinge 
on civil liberties and that federal databases comply with fair information 
practices<http://www.epic.org/privacy/consumer/code_fair_info.html>. 

The job of a privacy officer, according to DHS's chief privacy officer Nuala 
O'Connor Kelly, is to "further an agency's mission by creating good rules for 
the responsible use of personal information." 

While civil-liberties and open-government advocates have long pushed for 
high-level privacy officers, some worry that the new provision might actually 
be too broad. 

Law professor Peter Swire<http://www.peterswire.net/>, who served as 
President Clinton's chief counselor for privacy, argues that not all agencies 
are the same when it comes to privacy. 

"Some agencies face major privacy issues, including the Department of Health 
and Human Services and the Justice Department," Swire said. "Others really 
only have privacy issues for their own employees. The level of auditing and 
scrutiny should be much greater for the key agencies." 

Outside audits could be enormously helpful in getting agencies to treat 
privacy as seriously as they do security, according to Ari Schwartz of the 
Center for Democracy and Technology<http://www.cdt.org/>. 

"If privacy experts from the outside come in and say, 'Did you do X, Y and 
Z?' and those things were not on the agency's list, that's the only way you 
can improve a privacy project," Schwartz said. 

Still, Schwartz hopes the Office of Management and 
Budget<http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb> will issue guidelines that direct 
efforts toward agencies with the most information, so small agencies with 
little sensitive information will not drown in bureaucracy. 

However, the OMB could decide that the provision only applies to the Treasury 
and Transportation departments, since the provision was included in the 
funding section devoted to those departments. 

Shelby intended the bill to apply to the whole federal government, according 
to his spokeswoman, Virginia Davis. 

The idea is not without its detractors, however. 

On Monday, House Government Reform Committee chairman Rep. Tom Davis 
(R-Virginia) introduced a bill to repeal the provision outright. 

Davis says privacy is the purview of chief information officers, which were 
required under a 2002 computer security 
law<http://www.senet-int.com/FISMA.html>. 

The intelligence-overhaul bill also complicates the question of jurisdiction 
by creating a privacy and civil liberties commission that will oversee the 
nation's intelligence efforts.