Posted on 03/22/2002 11:28:25 AM PST by TEXICAN II
165 Charlotte Twight is a professor of economics at Boise State University. The Independent Review, v.IV, n.2, Fall 1999, ISSN 1086-1653, Copyright © 1999, pp. 165–200 Watching You Systematic Federal Surveillance of Ordinary Americans
CHARLOTTE TWIGHT
I magine for a moment a nation whose central government mandated ongoing collection of detailed personal information—individually identified—recording each citizen’s employment, income, childhood and subsequent educational ex-periences, medical history (including doctors’ subjective impressions), financial trans-actions (including copies of personal checks written), ancestry, living conditions (including bathroom, kitchen, and bedroom facilities), rent or mortgage payment, household expenses, roommates and their characteristics, in-home telephone service, automobile ownership, household heating and sewage systems, number of stillbirths, language capability—and periodically even demanded to know what time each person in the household usually left home to go to work during the previous week. Imagine further that such a government assigned every citizen a central government identifica-tion number at birth and mandated its use in reporting the information just listed.
Suppose the same government were 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 sixteen hun-dred pages of information about the individual. If a contemporary novelist were to portray the emergence of such a government in America, his novel undoubtedly would be regarded as futuristic fiction in the same vein as George Orwell’s 1984. Yet this national portrait is no longer fiction. The model for the foregoing de-scription is a government that now wields exactly those awesome powers over the citi-zenry— America’s federal government in 1999.
In this article I substantiate each of the preceding statements and provide citations to the laws, regulations, and working papers establishing and designing such intelligence systems. The logical outgrowth of such all-encompassing federal collection of personal information has increased gov-ernment power and concomitant individual dependence on government. Governments have long recognized the capacity of information collection to erode individual autonomy by fostering deep personal uncertainty about the uses to which the information might be put. Paul Schwartz (1992) has described the linkage clearly:
Personal information can be shared to develop a basis for trust, but the mandatory disclosure of personal information can have a destructive effect on human independence. . . . Totalitarian regimes have already demon-strated the fragility of the human capacity for autonomy. The effectiveness of these regimes in rendering adults as helpless as children is in large part a product of the uncertainty that they instill regarding their use of personal information.
With respect to U.S. government data collection in the 1990s, he added: Americans no longer know how their personal information will be applied, who will gain access to it, and what decisions will be made with it. The re-sulting uncertainty increases pressure for conformity. Individuals whose personal data are shared, processed and stored by a mysterious, incalculable bureaucracy will be more likely to act as the government wishes them to behave. (1374) With extensive federal data collection creating ever greater incentives to behave as government wishes us to behave, the societal result is metastasizing government con-trol. Indeed, Schwartz views the computer’s ability to digitize personal information as offering “the state and society a powerful way to control the behavior of individuals”
1. Government collection of trade data and business information is not discussed here. Those important aspects of government data collection were highlighted recently by the Environmental Protection Agency’s expansion of its “Toxic Release Inventory” to require businesses to report production data so detailed that Kline and Co. (a member of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals) judged its impact as “the equivalent of having the U.S. voluntarily turn over its code book to its enemies” in wartime (quoted in Gupte and Cohen 1997, 176). Posting the information on its Internet Web site, the EPA “overrode heated industry protests and made it easy for corporate trade secret thieves to make off with billions of dollars’ worth of America’s most proprietary trade secrets” (Srodes 1998, 14). See also 15 U.S.C. sec. 4901–4911 (1998); 15 U.S.C. secs. 175–176, 178, 182 (1997).
The result—and often the purpose—is a profound erosion of individual autonomy. In this article, I focus on central government data-collection programs that share one defining characteristic: they compel production, retention, and dissemination of personal information about every American citizen.1 Their target is ordinary Ameri-can citizens carrying out ordinary day-to-day activities. Although these programs by no means constitute the whole universe of federal data collection, they are today the government’s most critical informational levers for institutionalizing government control, individual dependence, and unprecedented threats to American liberties. Even within this circumscribed sphere, the immense volume of federal data collection defies brief summary. Accordingly, I confine the present inquiry to government devel-opment and recent expansion of • Databases keyed to Social Security numbers—examining unchecked use of those numbers as a fulcrum for government data collection about individuals, and probing current legislative efforts to establish a national identification card; • 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” and implementation of the national electronic database of personal medical informa-tion mandated by the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act; • Education databases—revealing federal databases mandated by the 1994 Goals 2000 Act, Improving America’s Schools Act, and related legislation that estab-lish detailed national records of children’s educational experiences and socioeco-nomic status; • Financial databases—describing provisions of federal statutory law 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. Of course, federal officials always provide an appealing reason for such govern-mental intrusion into our private lives, however inadequate the reason or unconstitu-tional the intrusion. In this case, as in others, backers of these measures, in their effort to minimize resistance, predictably use political transaction-cost manipulation to that end, increasing the transaction costs to private individuals of perceiving—and taking collective action to resist—governmental encroachments (Twight 1988, 1994). There is always an asserted benefit to be obtained, a plausible cover story. The ostensible reasons have been diverse. With the spread of government-man-dated use of Social Security numbers for database after electronic database, we have been told that it will reduce fraud—tax fraud, welfare fraud, the usual litany. 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 regard to government mandates for private physicians to record what we say to them in confidence, 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. To rationalize government assertion of power to track what public school teachers record concern-ing 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 micro-film 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? The immense powers now exercised by the federal government have made these rationales inevitable. Having empowered the federal government to exert centralized control over far-flung human endeavors, most Americans want government officials to administer the programs effectively and responsibly. But administering them effec-tively and responsibly necessitates functions such as “reducing fraud” and “promoting efficiency” in the programs, legitimate objectives that often become chameleonic ra-tionales that ultimately are invoked in the service of illegitimate ends. The pattern is unmistakable. With vast federal power comes vast federal surveillance, providing plau-sible cover for those seeking to extend the central government’s purview even further. Political transaction-cost manipulation has framed the issue in other ways besides these appealing rationales.
In some cases discussed later, the database maneuvers were deliberately obscured from public view by means of what Claire Wolfe (1997) 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, a strategy that fore-stalled public perception of the confluent streams of nationwide government-man-dated data centralization and their likely eventual result.
Incrementalism again served activist policy making. Information-law scholar Simon Davies (1994) judged the public’s “greater acceptance of privacy-invasive schemes” to be in part a result of “proposals . . . being brought forward in a more careful and piecemeal fashion” that may be “lulling the public into a false sense of security.”
Given that piecemeal progression, legislators and members of the popular press today seldom discuss the likely cost of government data centralization in terms of lost liberty. Perhaps “liberty” does not resonate so strongly or create so powerful an image for most people as “cracking down on illegal immigration” or “reducing health-care fraud.” Liberty, after all, is an abstraction whose concrete reality often is not appreci-ated until its opposite is experienced firsthand. Yet we ignore at our peril the long-cited “use of personal information systems by Nazi Germany to enable the identification and location of a target race” (Davies 1994). Less than sixty years ago, race-based government roundups of law-abiding citizens also occurred in America, similarly facilitated by government data collection. As Solveig Singleton (1998a) 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 that “it is as important to get information about people and their houses as it is to count them.”2 By 1998, however, the events of the 1940s have become only a “vague memory”—and, except for the elderly, not a living memory at all (Davies 1994).
So today Congress proceeds apace. Having exposed most areas of our lives to ongoing government scrutiny and recording, Congress is now working to expand and universalize federal tracking of law-abiding citizens’ private lives. Concurrently, new developments in biometry are producing technologies that most observers concede “imperil individual autonomy” and pose “real threats to the fabric of contemporary society” (Davies 1994). The next generation awaits the full flowering of those tech-nologies and their availability to governments. Our privacy, our personal identity, our independence, and our freedom hang in the balance.
Linking Personal Records: A “De Facto National Identification Number”3 The Social Security number (SSN) has become the key to detailed government por-traiture of our private lives. Even the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) now describes American Social Security numbers as a “de facto personal identifier” [U.S. Dept. of HHS 1998, Section III(A)(1)]. Kristin Davis, senior associate editor for Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine, recently described “the growing use of social security numbers as an all-purpose ID” as the “single biggest threat to protect-ing our financial identities” (quoted in Miller 1998). Since the Social Security
2. See also Singleton (1998b). The 1990 U.S. Census form required respondents to answer questions about their ancestry, living conditions (including bathroom, kitchen, and bedroom facilities), rent or mortgage payment, household expenses, roommates and their characteristics, in-home telephone service, automobile ownership, household heating and sewage systems, number of stillbirths, language capability, and what time each person in the household usually left home to go to work during the previous week. The form stated that “By law [Title 13, U.S. Code], you’re required to answer the census questions to the best of your knowledge,” adding that the information requested “enable[s] government, business, and industry to plan more effectively.” Nowhere did it state that, in sec. 221, Title 13 of the U.S. Code also specifies a maximum penalty of $100 for someone who chooses not to answer. See U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (1990), Form D-2 (OMB No. 0607-0628).
Medical Records Privacy is NOT privacy. It is the PROTOCOL FOR establishment of extensive & connected files on every living soul in this nation-it has only been delayed & now is activly re-considered.
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