With government assertion of the power to require businesses to contact the government for approval before hiring anyone, we have been told that it will help in “cracking down on illegal immigration.” With government mandates for private physicians to record what we say to them confidentially, we have been told that it will “reduce health-care fraud,” promote “efficiency,” allow “better emergency treatment,” make it “easier for the patient"” to keep track of his medical records, and the like. With the power to track what public school teachers record concerning our children, we have been told that it will assist in students’ selection of a “career major,” enhance assessment of school courses, and facilitate identification of students needing help. With government assertion of power to require banks to keep microfilm of all the checks we write, we have been told that it is to “reduce white-collar crime” and “inhibit money laundering.” Who could oppose such worthy goals unless he had something to hide?

Imagine further that such a government assigned every citizen a central government identification number at birth and mandated its use in reporting the information just listed. Suppose the same government was actively considering mandatory nationwide use of a "biometric identifier" (such as fingerprints or retinal scans) along with a new counterfeit-proof permanent government identification card incorporating the individual's government-issued number and other personal information, through magnetic strips and embedded computer chips capable of holding up to 1,600 pages of information about the individual. If a contemporary novelist portrayed such a government arising in America, his novel undoubtedly would be regarded as futuristic fiction in the same genre as George Orwell's 1984.

Yet this national portrait is no longer fiction. The model for the foregoing description--a government now wielding exactly those awesome powers over the citizenry--is America's federal government in 2000.

Paul Schwartz has described the U.S. government data collection:

Their target is ordinary American citizens carrying out ordinary day-to-day activities. These include Databases keyed to Social Security numbers, examining unchecked use of those numbers and probing current legislative efforts to establish a national identification card that include;Labor databases, revealing new statutory provisions aimed at building a federal database of all American workers and requiring employers to obtain the central government's approval before hiring employees;

Medical databases, assessing creation of the "unique health identifier"Education databases, revealing federal databases that establish detailed national records of children's educational experiences and socio-economic status; Financial databases, requiring banks and other financial institutions to create permanent, readily retrievable records of each individual's checks, deposits, and other financial activities

Largely linked through an individual's Social Security number, these databases now empower the federal government to obtain an astonishingly detailed portrait of any person: the checks he writes, the types of causes he supports, what he says "privately" to his doctor.federal officials always provide a seemingly appealing reason for such governmental intrusion into our private lives.The reasons have been diverse. With the spread of government-mandated use of Social Security numbers for database after electronic database, we have been told that it will “reduce fraud” -- tax fraud, welfare fraud.

In some cases the database maneuvers were deliberately obscured from public view by means of what Claire Wolfe calls “land-mine legislation” that people don't notice until they step on it. In other cases Americans were encouraged to view new proposals piecemeal that may be “lulling the public into a false sense of security.”As Solveig Singleton and others have reported, “In the U.S., census data were used to find Japanese-Americans and force them into camps,” a historical reality that gives fresh meaning to a 1990 U.S. Census instruction stating “It is as important to get information about people and their houses as it is to count them.”

A coordinated government effort now under way to require even greater use of SSNs will further centralize federal monitoring of all American citizens. They are in some casaes so well concealed, the provisions are difficult to spot even when you already know they are there.But make no mistake they are collecting information. "Information" is defined to mean "information about an individual" that "includes, but is not limited to":

Vital statistics; race, sex, or other physical characteristics, earnings information; professional fees paid to an individual and other financial information; benefit data or other claims information; the social security number,
employer identification number, or other individual identifier; address; phone number; medical information, including psychological or psychiatric information or lay information used in a medical determination; and information about marital and family relationships and other personal relationships. Pervasive government extraction of personal data stored and linked via compulsory use of SSNs is today's reality.

Equally stunning are proposals to require biometric identifiers as the unique health identifier. The HHS White Paper describes biometric identifiers as “based on unique physical attributes, including fingerprints, retinal pattern analysis, iris scan, voice pattern identification, and DNA analysis.”

The issue is not just privacy; it is government power. Dr. Richard Sobel of Harvard Law School understood that aspect clearly: “What ID numbers do is centralize power, and in a time when knowledge is power, then centralized information is centralized power. I think people have a gut sense that this is not a good idea” . Whether that “gut sense” will find effective political voice is the troublesome question.

The National Center has statutory authority to “collect, analyze, and disseminate statistics and other information relating to education” in the U.S. and elsewhere. It is specifically authorized to collect data on such subjects as "student achievement," the "incidence, frequency, seriousness, and nature of violence affecting students" and, still more intrusively, "the social and economic status of children."

The Commissioner of Education Statistics is empowered to establish “national cooperative education statistics systems” with the states to produce and maintain “comparable and uniform information and data on elementary and secondary education, postsecondary education, libraries” and anyone else the Commissioner “may consider appropriate” including “other Federal departments, agencies, and instrumentalities.

With citizens largely prevented from blocking transfer of such information, the prying into people's private lives goes on.

Privacy in America is further jeopardized by federal statutory law now requiring banks and other financial institutions to create permanent records of each individual's checks, deposits, and other banking activities. With the FDIC in December 1998 proposing to require banks to scrutinize every customer's banking records for evidence of “unusual” transactions, in effect seeking to mandate warrantless searches of private financial records, the legislation authorizing those intrusions and U.S. Supreme Court cases upholding them reveal much about privacy's tenuous status in America today.

The pivotal legislation was the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970. In the name of assembling banking records with “a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, and regulatory investigations and proceedings,” Congress empowered the Secretary of the Treasury to require every federally insured bank to create:

1. a microfilm or other reproduction of each check, draft, or similar instrument drawn on it and presented to it for payment; and

2. a record of each check, draft, or similar instrument received by it for deposit or collection, together with an identification of the party for whose account it is to be deposited or collected.

That requirement entailed microfilm records of every detail of every customer's bank account--each check, each deposit--with each account identified by the holder's Social Security number. The statute authorized similar record-keeping to be required of uninsured institutions, including even credit-card companies. The Treasury Secretary, simultaneously passed the “Currency and Foreign Transactions Reporting Act” requireing individuals and financial institutions to report the “payment, receipt, or transfer of United States currency, or such other monetary instruments as the Secretary may specify, in such amounts, denominations, or both, or under such circumstances, as the Secretary shall by regulation prescribe.”

In 1974 Congress passed the Combined Privacy Act, to regulate disclosure of personal information by federal agencies. Even that long ago, Congress recognized the damage that federal record-keeping and disclosure could do. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was unequivocal in its assessment, stating that in meritorious cases “it is extremely difficult for individuals to obtain relief under the Privacy Act.” Representative Jim McDermott (D., Washington), one of the few members of Congress who actively resisted the authorization of a national electronic database for health care, recently stated that “There is no privacy anymore,” adding that “It has been eroded in so many ways that you can find out almost anything about anybody if you know how to work the computer well enough.”

Republicans and Democrats alike bow to temptation when the perceived stakes are high enough. Republican President Richard Nixon in 1971 expressed his intention to select an IRS commissioner who “is a ruthless son of a bitch, that he will do what he's told, that every income tax return I want to see I see, that he will go after our enemies and not go after our friends.” Democratic President Bill Clinton, for similar reasons, illegally transferred 900 or more FBI files to the White House. And, ironically, federal agencies such as the IRS have routinely used privacy legislation to shield evidence of their own misdeeds. Does anyone contemplating today's ubiquitous federal collection of personal data still imagine that political leaders cannot and will not abuse this system for their own ends?

Indeed, what important personal information is not now at the fingertips of curious federal officials? John Perry Barlow's once said that “trusting the government with your privacy is like having a peeping Tom install your window blinds.” Bernadine Healy wrote, the "Government does a lot of things well, but keeping secrets is not one of them.”

Reprinted with permission from the Independent Institute. 100 Swan Way, Oakland,CA. 510-632-1366.
Edited suplemented and formated by the Palm Beach Times