AMERICANS ON FILE

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31678, 14 May 1968, Page 21

AMERICANS ON FILE

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright)WASHINGTON.

Do you drink heavily at home? Have you been married tnore than twice? Are your sexual preferences exotic? How are you and your wife getting along?

All these questions are of Interest to numerous United States Government Agencies —and the ansivers, or what purports to be the truth about millions of Americans on these intimate matters, are tucked away in official Washington dossiers, the New York Times News Service reported: Take the last question. It would seem that the Federal Housing Administration could not care less about the marital stability of potential home buyers. Yet, according to Professor Alan Westin of Columbia University, the author of the most important study to date on privacy, the F.H.A. has private agencies investigate the marital status of applicants for Government-insured home loans.

The F.H.A. explains: “The reputation and marital amicability of an applicant for a mortgage loan are a vital part of our risk determination. One of the leading causes of foreclosure is divorce." National Centre

A national data centre has been proposed to pool all the scattered statistics on United States citizens in Government files and provide instant total recall—and exposure. The names of most Americans already appear in 2,800 m. Government files social security records, police records, medical and psychiatric histories, court actions, security reports, and others, including personnel and job files. The Defence Department has 14 million life histories in its security dossiers, the Civil Service eight million Nobody knows how many are stored at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but it admits

to files on 100,000 “Communist sympathisers.” The Budget Bureau, which would run the national data centre, would begin by pooling and standardising statistics now dispersed around 20 Federal agencies. These Government agencies already have 100 million punch cards and 30,000 computer tapes containing information about people and companies. The centre would allow the agencies to share information with each other. Scholars, businesses, and State and local officials would also have access.

Opposition

But the idea for the central data bank has ’faltered. It appears to have run into a wall of hostility, and the biggest reason for this is a Democrat Congressman, Cornelius Gallagher. Mr Gallagher has held a series of hearings and made many speeches in Congress on the subject, invariably generating public alarm that the proposals would lead to a giant invasiop of privacy. The stalemate has resulted in spite of five Government reports in two years—all of them favourable and one of them commissioned by the White House—and hearings last May and June before a joint Congressional sub-com-mittee which later insisted that work should begin at once on the statistical bank. The sub-committee said it

would eliminate duplication in Government files and ease some of the public’s burden of filling out endless and overlapping forms.

It said such a data centre could regularise information from many sources, and thus make it accurate, and that it would be of immense help to the Government in all kinds of research and planning. The facts-and-flgures men at the Budget Bureau also insist that they want a purely statistical data bank, rather than an “intelligence” centre, and that they would deal with statistical summaries and samplings based on individuals rather than with individual case flies. The civil libertarians, however, say central data banks pose an Orwellian threat to personal privacy.