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  • From: "Toni Hawryluk" <tonihawr AT msn.com>
  • To: <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] sneak'n'tell not Hide and Watch
  • Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 16:06:54 -0800

----- 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.




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