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The serial number is accessible to the cellular telephone network, and as cellular telephones add Internet browsing and E-mail capabilities, it will potentially have the same
[Page: S14540] GPO's PDF
Other examples include DIVX DVD disks, which come with a serial number that permits tracking the use of each movie by a centralized network-recording system managed by the companies that sell the disks.
FEARING THE MISUSE OF ALL THOSE NUMBERS
Industry executives say that as the line between communications and computing becomes increasingly blurred, every electronic device will require some kind of identification to attach to the network
Making those numbers available to networks that need to pass information or to find a mobile user while at the same time denying the information to those who wish to gather information int o vast data bases may be an impossible task.
Privacy adv ocates argue that even if isolated numbers look harmless, they are actually harbingers of a trend toward ever more invasive surveillance networks.
``Whatever we can do to actually minimize the collection of personal dat a is good,' said March Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Inf ormation Cen ter, one of three groups trying to organize a boycott of Intel's chips.
The groups are concerned that the Government will require ever more invasive hardware modifications to keep track of individuals. Already they point to the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which requires that telephone companies modify their network switches to make it easier for Government wiretappers.
Also, the Federal Communications Commission is developing regulations that will require every cellular telephone to be able to report its precise location for ``911'' emergency calls. Privacy gro ups are worried that this feature will be used as a tracking technology by law enforcement officials.
``The ultimate danger is that the Government will mandate that each chip have special logic added'' to track identifies in cyberspace, said Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist at San Diego State University. ``We're on a slide in that direction.''
Mr. Vinge is the author of ``True Names'' (Tor Books, 1984), a widely cited science fiction novel in the early 1980's, that forecast a world in which anonymity in computer networks is illegal.
Intel executives insist that their chip is being misconstrued by privacy gro ups.
``We're going to start building security architecture into
our chips, and this is the first step,'' said Pat Gelsinger, Intel vice
president and general manager of desktop products. ``The discouraging part of
this is our objective is to accomplish privacy. ``We need to find ways to distinguish between security and
identity,'' said James X. Dempsey, a privacy exp ert at the Center for Democracy
and Technology, a Washington lobbying organization.
So far the prospects are not encouraging. One technical
solution developed by a cryptographer, David Chaum, made it possible for
individuals to make electronic cash payments anonymously in a network.
In the system Mr. Chaum designed, a user employs a
different number with each organization, thereby insuring that there is no
universal tracking capability.
But while Mr. Chaum's solution has been widely considered
ingenious, it has failed in the marketplace. Last year, his company, Digicash
Inc. based in Palo Alto, Calif., filed for bankruptcy protection.
``Privacy nev
er seems to sell,'' said Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and a computer industry
consultant. ``Those who are interested in privacy don 't want to pay for it.''
Privacy Isn
't Dead Yet
It seems self-evident that information abo ut your shoe size does not
need to be as well guarded as information
abo ut tests ordered by your doctor. But with the Federal and state
governments' piecemeal approach to privacy pro tection, if we release information abo ut one facet of our lives,
we inadvertently expose much about the others.
During Senate hearings in 1987 about Robert Bork's fitness
to serve as a Supreme Court justice, a reporter found out which videotapes Mr.
Bork rented. The response was the enactment of the Video Privacy Pro tection Act. Another law
prohibits the Social Security Administration (but hardly anybody else) from
releasing our Social Security numbers. Still other laws limit what states can do
with information tha t we provide
to motor vehicle departments.
Congress is now seeking to add some more panels to this
crazy quilt of narrowly drawn privacy
law s. The House recently endorsed a bill to prohibit banks and
securities and insurance companies owned by the same parent corporation from
sharing personal med ical
information. An d Congress is
grappling with laws to prevent some information abo ut our mutual-fund holdings
from being sold and bought as freely as hot dogs.
But with superpowerful computers and vast databases in the
private sector, personal inf
ormation can 't be segmented in
this manner. For example, in 1996, a man in Los Angeles got himself a store
card, which gave him discounts and allowed the store to trace what he purchased.
After injuring his knee in the store, he sued for damages. He was then told that
if he proceeded with his suit the store would use the fact that he bought a lot
of liquor to show that he must have fallen because he was a drunkard.
Some health insurers try to ``cherry pick'' their clients,
seeking to cover only those who are least likely to have genetic problems or
contract costly diseases like AIDS. Some laws prohibit insurers from asking
people directly about their sexual orientation. But companies sometimes refuse
to insure those whose vocation (designer?), place of residence (Greenwich
Village?) and marital status (single at 40-plus?) suggest that they might pose
high risks.
Especially comprehensive privacy inv aders are
``cookies''--surveillance files that many marketers implant in the personal com puters of people who visit
their Web sites to allow the marketers to track users' preferences and
transactions. Cookies, we are assured, merely inform marketers about our wishes
so that advertising can be better directed, sparing us from a flood of junk
mail.
Actually, by tracing the steps we take once we gain a new
piece of information, co okies
reveal not only what we buy (a thong from Victoria's Secret? Anti depressants?)
but also how we think. Nineteen eighty-four is here courtesy of Intel, Microsoft
and quite a few other corporations.
All this has led Scott McNealy, the chairman and chief
executive of Sun Microsystems, to state, ``You already have zero privacy--ge t over it.'' This pronouncement
of the death of privacy is
premature, but we will be able to keep it alive only if we introduce
general, all-encompassing protections over segmented ones.
Some cyberspace anonymity can be provided by new
technologies like anti-cookie programs and encryption software that allow us to
encrypt all of our data. Corporate self-regulation can also help. I.B.M., for
example, said last week that it would pull its advertising from Web sites that
don't have clear privacy pol
icies. Other companies like Disney and Kellogg have voluntarily agreed not to
collect information abo ut
children 12 or younger without the consent of their parents. And some new
Government regulation of Internet commerce may soon be required, if only because
the European Union is insisting that any personal inf ormation abo ut the citizens of its
member countries cannot be used without the citizen's consent.
Especially sensitive information sho uld get extra protection.
But such selective security can work only if all the other information abo ut a person is not freely
accessible elsewhere.
A Middle Ground in the Privacy War ?
Jim Hightower, the former agriculture commissioner of
Texas, is fond of saying that ``there's nothing in the middle of the road but
yellow stripes and dead armadillos.''
It's punchy, and has become a rallying cry of sorts for
activists on all sides. But is it right? Amitai Etzioni, a professor at George
Washington University, thinks not. He thinks he has found a workable middle
ground between the combatants in one of the fiercest fights in our high-tech
society: the right of privacy.
< p> Etzioni has carved out a place for himself
over the decades as a leader in the ``communitarian'' movement.
Communitar ianism works toward a civil society that transcends both government
regulation and commercial intrusion--a society where the golden rule is as
important as the rule of law, and the notion that ``he who has the gold makes
the rules'' does not apply.
What does all that have to do with privacy? Et zioni has written a new book,
``The Limits of Privacy,'' that
applies communitarian principles to this thorny issue.
For the most part, the debate over privacy is carried out from two sides
separated by a huge ideological gap--a gap so vast that they seem to feel a need
to shout just to get their voices to carry across it. So Etzioni comes in with a
theme not often heard, that middle of the road that Hightower hates so much.
What he wants to do is to forge a new privacy doc trine that protects the
individual from snooping corporations and irresponsible government, but cedes
individual privacy rig hts when
public health and safety are at stake--``a balance between rights and the common
good,'' he writes.
In the book, Etzioni tours a number of major privacy iss ues, passing judgment as he goes
along. Pro-privacy dec isions that
prohibited mandatory testing infants for HIV, for example, take the concept too
far and put children at risk, he says. Privacy adv ocates' campaigns against the
government's attempts to wiretap and unscramble encrypted messages, he says, are
misguided in the face of the evil that walks the planet.
The prospect of some kind of national ID system, which many
privacy adv ocates view as
anathema, he finds useful for catching criminals, reducing fraud and ending the
crime of identity theft. The broad distribution of our medical records for
commercial gain, however, takes too much away from us for little benefit to
society.
I called Etzioni to ask about his book. He said civil
libertarians talk about the threat of government intrusion into our lives, and
government talks about the threat of criminals, but that the more he got into
his research, the more it seemed that the two
He's horrified, for example, by recent news that both
Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. have included identifier codes in their products
that could be used to track people's online habits: ``They not only track what
we are doing,'' he says. ``They track what we think.''
His rethinking of privacy lea ds him to reject the notions
that led to a constitutional right of privacy, be st expressed in the landmark
1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut.
In that case, Justice William O. Douglas found a right of
privacy in the ``penumbra,'' or
shadow border, of rights granted by other constitutional amendments--such as
freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, freedom from
having troops billeted in our homes.
Etzioni scoffs at this ``stretched interpretation of a
curious amalgam of sundry pieces of various constitutional rights,'' and says we
need only look to the simpler balancing act we've developed in Fourth Amendment
cases governing search and seizure, which give us privacy pro tection by requiring proper
warrants before government can tape a phone or search a home.
``We cannot say that we will not allow the FBI under any
conditions, because of a cyberpunk dream of a world without government, to read
any message.'' He finds such a view ``so ideological, so extreme, that somebody
has to talk for a sense of balance.''
I was surprised to see, in the acknowledgements in his
book, warm thanks to Marc Rotenberg, who heads the Electronic Privacy Inf ormation Cen ter. Rotenberg is about as
staunch a privacy adv ocate as I
know, and I can't imagine him finding much common ground with Etzioni--but
Etzioni told me that ``Marc is among all the people in this area the most
reasonable. One can talk to him.''
So I called Rotenberg, too. He said he deeply respects
Etzioni, but can't find much in the book to agree with. For all the talk of
balance, he say, ``we have invariably found that when the rights of the
individual are balanced against the claims of the community, that the individual
loses out.''
We're in the midst of a ``privacy cri sis'' in which ``we have been
unable to come up with solutions to the privacy cha llenges that new business
practices and new technologies are creating,'' Rotenberg told me.
The way to reach answers, he suggested, is not to seek
middle ground but to draw the lines more clearly, the way judges do in deciding
cases. When a criminal defendant challenges a policeman's pat-down search in
court, Rotenberg explained, ``the guy with the small plastic bag of cocaine
either gets to walk or he doesn't. ..... Making those lines fuzzier doesn't
really take you any closer to finding answers.''
As you can see, this is one argument that isn't settled.
But I'm glad that Etzioni has joined the conversation--both for the trademark
civility he brings to it, and for the dialogue he will spark.
Mr. TORRICELLI. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce
the Privacy Pro tection Study
Commission Act of 1999 with my colleague, Senator KOHL. This legislation
creates a Commission to comprehensively examine privacy con cerns. This Commission will
provide Congress with information to
facilitate our decision making regarding how to best address individual
privacy pro tections.
The rise in the use of information tec hnology--particularly the
Internet, has led to concerns regarding the security of personal inf ormation. As many as 40 million people
around the world have the ability to access the Internet. The use of computers
for personal and business
transactions has resulted in the availability of vast amounts of financial,
medical and other information in
the public domain. Information
abo ut online users is also collected by Web sites through technology
which tracks an individual's every interaction with the Internet.
Despite the ease of availability of personal inf ormation, th e United States is one of
the few countries in the world that does not have comprehensive legal protection
for personal inf ormation. Th is is in part due to
differences in opinion regarding the best way to address the problem. While some
argue that the Internet's size and constantly changing technology demands
government and industry self-regulation, others advocate for strong legislative
and regulatory protections. And, still others note that such protections,
although necessary, could lead to unconstitutional consequences if drafted
without a comprehensive understanding of the issue. As a result, congressional
efforts to address privacy con
cerns have been patchwork in nature.
This is why Senator KOHL and I are proposing the
creation of a Commission with the purpose of thoughtfully considering the range
of issues involved in the privacy
deb ate and the implications of self-regulation, legislation, and federal
regulation. The Commission will be comprised of experts in the fields of law,
civil rights, business, and government. After 18 months, the Commission will
deliver a report to Congress recommending the necessary legislative protections
are needed. The Commission will have the authority to gather the necessary
information to reach conclusions
that are balanced and fair.
Americans are genuinely concerned about individual
privacy. Th e Privacy Com mission proposed by Senator
KOHL and myself will enable Congress and the public to evaluate the
extent to which we should be concerned and the proper way to address those
concerns. The privacy deb ate is
multifaceted and I encourage my colleagues to join Senator KOHL and
myself in our efforts to gain a better understanding of it. Senator KOHL
and I look forward to working with all those interested in furthering this
debate and giving Americans a greater sense of confidence in the security of
their personal inf ormation. S. 1902. A bill to require disclosure under the Freedom of
Information Act regarding certain
persons and records of the Japanese Imperial Army in a manner that does not
impair any investigation or prosecution conducted by the Department of Justice
or certain intelligence matters, and for other purposes; to the Committee on the
Judiciary.
JAPANESE IMPERIAL ARMY DISCLOSURE ACT OF 1999
Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce
the Japanese Imperial Army Disclosure Act of 1999.
This legislation will require the disclosure under the
Freedom of Information Act
classified records and documents in the possession of the U.S. Government
regarding chemical and biological experiments carried out by Japan during the
course of the Second World War.
Let me preface my statement by making clear that none of
the remarks that I will make in discussing this legislation should be considered
anti-Japanese. I was proud to serve as the President of the Japan Society of
Northern California, and I have done everything I can to foster, promote, and
develop positive relations between Japan, the United States, China, and other
states of the region. The legislation I introduce today is eagerly sought by a
large number of Californians who believe that there is an effort to keep
information abo ut possible
atrocities and experiments with poisonous gas and germ warfare from the pubic
record.
One of my most important goals in the Senate is to see the
development of a Pacific Rim community that is peaceful and stable. I have
worked towards this end for over twenty years. I introduce this legislation to
try to heal wounds that still remain,
particularly in California's Chinese-American community.
This legislation is needed because although the Second
World War ended over fifty years ago--and with it Japan's chemical and
biological weapons experimentation programs--many of the records and documents
regarding Japan's wartime activities remain classified and hidden in U.S.
Government archives and repositories. Even worse, according to some scholars,
some of these records are now being inadvertently destroyed.
--
--
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