Originally published September 23 2005
New call for federal privacy rules
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Given the losses by contractors like ChoicePoint and Acxiom, federal identity experts are looking to create restrictions on data access and safeguards.
"There are some valid uses of commercial data," Nuala O'Connor Kelly, chief privacy officer for the Department of Homeland Security, said in closing remarks at a two-day public workshop hosted by the office she runs.
She pointed to the roles data brokers have played during Hurricane Katrina's aftermath in providing, for example, information needed to verify the identities of displaced storm survivors seeking their prescription medications.
The Transportation Security Administration, for one, took heat recently for failing to provide adequate disclosures of personal data usage.
To start building that trust, the government must more clearly define its purposes for acquiring certain information, said Jim Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Then it should ask, "Is it accurate enough for this purpose?
The Privacy Act of 1974 already requires government agencies to disclose information about their data use in many cases and to allow people to correct errors in their own data sets.
But some panelists noted that the law's wording makes it unclear whether such regulations apply to government interactions with commercial data brokers, which the measure did not anticipate.
Michael Daconta, Homeland Security's metadata program director, spoke of the need to bring "discipline" to the way that agencies manage personal data.
Say, for example, the government wanted to compare a cruise passenger list and to a terrorist watch list, but the cruise company feared that turning over the complete list for the sake of a few potential violators would anger its customers.
The anonymization system would hash each of the lists so that they would be indecipherable to the opposite parties but, even in this encrypted state, could be programmed to flag matches among the lists.
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