THREATS TO PRIVACY COMPUTER DATA BANKS WILL COLLECT AND STORE DOSSIERS

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32604, 12 May 1971, Page 16

THREATS TO PRIVACY COMPUTER DATA BANKS WILL COLLECT AND STORE DOSSIERS

(Bg,

IAN BALL,

writing to the “Daily Telegraph." London, from New York)

(Reprinted from the "Daily Telegraph." by arrangement)

If pollution was the status social problem of 1970, privacy or rather the theft of it by unthinking, unforgetting computer data banks seems to be looming as the fashionable issue for 1971. On both sides of the Atlantic, Government investigative groups are looking into the problems posed by the creation of electronic clearing-houses for dossiers on individuals and organisations. (

In Britain, the review is being conducted by an interdepartmental Committee on Privacy under the chairmanship of Mr Kenneth Younger, a former Minister of State at the Home Office. In America, the Senate Sub-committee of Constitutional Rights has been spending several weeks hearing evidence on how the Government collects, stores and uses or abuses, information 'about citizens.

While spurred by a common concern that society is moving towards the Orwellian nightmare more rapidly than the author’s own timetable, these investigations differ in a significant way.

The terms of reference of Mr Younger’s committee were restricted by the Wilson Government to an examination of the problem in the private sector only. In Washington, what is being probed is information gathering by the Federal Government. Problem’s two sides Neither country will have faced up to the task of safeguarding citizens’ rights until it examines both sides of the problem. The British public is entitled to know what use Whitehall makes of the computerised records it obtains on us through mcreasingly inquisitive census forms, industrial surveys, taxation returns, law-enforcement records and so on. America’s consumer crusaders, led by < Mr Ralph Nader, are busy assembling data on the private 1 snoopers that will almost certainly lead to legislative ■ remedies. To anyone who cherishes i his right to be left alone as . a shield of dignity against the : world, the problem has al- > ready assumed frightening dimensions. Consider these : examples of the results of I electronic surveillance by i Governmental and private I agencies. ! The Pentagon has admitted * that it has dossiers on 25 mil- ! lion American “personali- ; ties,” some considered to constitute a threat to security , and defence, others, such as Senator Adlai Stevenson 111, included because they occupy I a public position. In addi- ' tion, the data bank keeps ’ files on 760,000 organisations , and "incidents.” But the really disturbing thing about i the Pentagon’s data bank is t that the records are in con- . stant use. By official admis- , sion, the military’s comput- , erised dossier bank processes . 12,000 requests on an average day. The Government has not said who is making these requests and for what purpose.

t Multitude of dossiers ' One commercial organisa- . tion in Britain, British Debt I Services, already has dossiers on 20 million people. : It was able to buy for £15,000 J the electoral registers for the i entire country and boasts i that it has all county court i judgments over £lO since In the computerised files of . the Bureau of Narcotics and . Dangerous Drugs in Washingi ton, three dossiers deal with boys under three years of age. i Exposed to narcotics by parental neglect, these children could be stigmatised for life. Local authorities in Britain already possess about 300 computers and are buying more. The Civil Service has just under 200 with 76 more on order. Later this year, police forces throughout England, Scotland and Wales will have access to a computer. An American airline, with its own world-wide computerised reservation network, i has been asked to aid official i surveillance by feeding into i a Government computer ini formation on where and in i whose company its passen- . gers travel.

This last refinement is an example of what is perhaps the greatest menace of all to individual privacy. Computer men call it “interfacing,” the ability of computers to chatter away to each other, exchanging over telephone lines thousands of bits of information every second. Already in America computer link-ups to exchange private information about people are standard practice within Government service and in such businesses as banking, credit-rating and medical and life insurance.

Case of John Cipher

In some shiny machine somewhere in America, there is an electronic dossier on every man, woman and child. A crook or political trouble-maker could easily find his career documented in a dozen or more central data banks. Even 'someone who has reached middle age without proving to be a serious nuisance to society is almost certain to be the subject of a half-dozen different dossiers. Let us take an imaginary citizen whom we shall call John Cipher. The Passport Office computers have one dossier on Mr Cipher. It will contain all the personal information he was obliged to reveal when he first applied for a passport. Let us say he once lost a passport while riding

in a taxicab in Paris at 3 am. This, probably only in summary form, will be entered in his dossier in the Passport Office computer.

Let us further imagine that Mr Cipher, while on a tour-; ist trip to Hong Kong, inquired at the American consulate about the chances of' his being cleared to visit Communist China. If he filled out a formal application this act almost certainly would be recorded in the State Department’s computers as well as those in the Passport Office. Late tax return Mr Cipher did his military service in Vietnam. One night, on a dare, he smoked a local reefer. It did nothing for him and he has touched nothing harder than Virginia since. But a lieutenant caught him at it and Cipher received an official reprimand. The Department of Defence computers, which contain his entire Service record, will certainly not have overlooked this reprimand.

He may have been fined; once for submitting a late tax return. The Internal Re-1 venue Service data bank will record this black mark against his name. But poor Cipher may simply have paid; the fine and not told the tax man that his return was late because at tax-return time, both his parents died in a plane crash. The tragedy may also have taken his mind off such mundane things as making a home-mortgage monthly payment. If it was a Government, loan, the computers at the Federal Housing Administration would probably have stored indelibly another adverse fact about Cipher. On • another occasion, Cipher, moved by Martin Luther King’s assassination, may have sent a donation to his Civil Rights organisation. If so, we could expect to find that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s data bank has a small dossier on Cipher. Individually, perhaps, these departmental dossiers may not constitute a threat to Cipher’s right to be left alone or his right to speak his mind. But what happens when all these computer memory banks swap information?

> The Government has already acknowledged that lia certain amount of interdepartmental computer exchange takes place, chiefly ifor security and law-enforce-ment purposes. If the computer men ever decided to 'pool together an of the variious data on Cipher to build a master file, the picture of i him that emerged might very i well show him as a very unl savoury character, a fiscally . and personally irresponsible I individual, a drug user, even :|a Communist sympathiser. That is a mythical exercise, but a chilling one all the same. Its lessons have been drawn by civil libertarians in Britain and the United States. Many of these are already warning that it is too late to crusade against Government plans to establish national data banks with dossiers on everyone, that when departmental computers talk to each other we already have such centralised surveillance.

i The time has come, they say, for urgent legislative ‘safeguards to ensure that computers are used simply to ! increase Government efficency and not to curb rights. '! In America Congress may soon be asked to consider a Jaw of “habeas data." In Britain, Mr Leslie Huckfield, Labour M.P. for Nuneaton, , has presented a Control of Personal Information Bill to establish a data bank tribunal ; and put large private data banks under strict Government control.

But on each side of the j Atlantic the reformers are . dealing with somewhat apath- . etic electorates. Modem I society has become inured .to the probers. When was the last time you told a civil ’ servant or a market-research . interviewer to “mind your ■ own business"?