The ACLU's Janlori Goldman just may be the most effective privacy lawyer in America.
Six and a half years ago Janlori Goldman rode into the nation's power center dragging behind her the ideological baggage of a Luddite: Technology and its advocates are destroyers of privacy.
For Goldman, director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Project on Privacy and Technology, such thinking has always been woven into the fabric of American society: We all have the right to be left alone - the right to tell Government to stay the hell out of our lives.
But Goldman's self-confessed Luddite days are gone. She doesn't brook with the nay-saying privacy advocates of the past. Instead, she's concentrating on "moving privacy issues forward." To do that, she says, you have to work with the government, keeping privacy issues on everyone's legislative agenda.
In our nanosecond culture, where state governments cross-reference their motor vehicle databases and credit card companies sell your address to the highest bidder, Goldman focuses on several issues, from preventing a display of your telephone number on someone's Caller ID device without your knowledge to blocking a prospective employer's access to your medical history.
Privacy protection is "the issue of the '90s," Goldman says, sitting in the "most private office" in the building - a cramped corner hideaway on the third floor of the ACLU's Washington, DC headquarters. From this unassuming building, a 12-year-old Little Leaguer could toss a rock through any of a dozen windows of the US Supreme Court building.
"Privacy is my life," Goldman says. Colleagues say her work consumes her. When Congress is in session, she works late into the night and on weekends. Five months into her first pregnancy, she favors casual, loose-fitting dresses. On her desk sit more than a dozen books with the word "privacy" somewhere in the title, not counting a five-volume set called The History of Private Life. The sparsely adorned walls are dominated by a framed, 1940s Hollywood movie poster of George Orwell's 1984. A vintage IBM clone sits unused, keyboard unceremoniously stacked atop the monitor. Since her pregnancy, Goldman says she's "a little concerned about that VDT [radiation] thing."
Scanning Goldman's resume and appointment calendar shows that as the ACLU's only full-time privacy watchdog, she has studied, given testimony, attended every conference, or at least meditated upon every major privacy issue that has passed through the halls of Congress within the last six years. (She admits to blocking out time to "just sit and think about privacy.")
Her goal is to get protections built into legislation. While there's a lot of talk about privacy being built into the Constitution, "it's only barely there," says Jerry Berman, the Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Washington office (Berman hired Goldman when he was still at the ACLU). Given that there is little privacy written into common law, Goldman is constantly striving to write privacy protection into new legislation. For the most part, she says, privacy lives in a series of loosely structured voluntary guidelines adopted by various industries, such as insurance and credit reporting companies. "I tell these industries we need legislation to go after the bad guys," Goldman says. "If the good guys in industry are already adhering to voluntary guidelines, I ask them 'why not make it law?'"
Everything Goldman does is aimed at building coalitions between industry, consumer groups, and the public. After securing a consensus among these disparate groups, Goldman starts hammering out a legislative agenda that she eventually takes to Congress. During former administrations, Goldman would labor through seemingly endless mark-up sessions on privacy bills, where "every little detail was hammered out," she says. Congressional committees tried to nail down the "fine points" of each bill. "We nit-picked over everything" during the Reagan-Bush years, she says. "Now there's not as much hardball as I'd like to see in this early stage" of a new Congress, she says.
Goldman is worried about pushing any kind of major privacy legislation to the floor of Congress right now, however, because she's afraid the Republicans will remove the strongest protection language and replace it with weaker language. The political winds blowing in Washington right now could move the President to sign weakened privacy legislation because "something is better than nothing," she says. "After working years on a bill, you don't want to accept anything less than full strength."
Besides lobbying Congress, Goldman often meets with companies that have sought her out for free advice on privacy issues. (She's quick to point out that the companies provide no extra fees and no consultant charges. Her paycheck comes every two weeks from the ACLU, everything else is gratis.) Sessions with company marketing executives usually take on a question-and-answer format. Company execs demonstrate some new product or service, and after taking it all in, she tells the company if she sees any privacy problems. "I point out to them where information needs protection, where they might have to give people an option to opt out of their database, and where people will want to be assured the information being presented in the product isn't going to be abused," she says.
After listening to Goldman and others, American Express now offers a slick package called the American Express Privacy Resource Kit. Its purpose is to assure customers that every time they use their American Express cards, the company isn't somehow secretly tracking and selling their personal buying habits, Goldman says.
A 1990 Harris poll on privacy found that about 79 percent of those interviewed were "very concerned" that some aspect of their private lives is threatened every day. "If an industry or government doesn't speak to those fears, assuring the public of their privacy, [industry or government] is going to lose out," Goldman says. If a business can't convince the consumer that privacy protections are in place, consumers will simply take their business elsewhere, Goldman says. "It boils down to the bottom line...privacy is good for business," she says.
Goldman's current passion is building privacy legislation into the health-care package that will eventually come out of the White House. Her first move was to talk to groups of doctors, explaining to them the value of keeping a patient's health-care records private. She also spoke with several industry groups, telling them that people don't want their employers prying into personal health-care records. Next she talked with insurance companies, explaining to them that people wanted to be assured that their records aren't for sale and will not be available to prospective employers.
After convincing these groups that they have equal stake in stronger privacy laws, she brought representatives from each group together in a single room and emerged with a legislative blueprint for protecting health-care records. "Anytime diverse groups come together, Congress takes an interest," she says.
After receiving her BA from Macalester College in St. Paul in 1979, Goldman took a job as a social worker helping Russian immigrants who had relocated to Minnesota. But funds for the program were cut, leaving her adrift. She decided to attend law school at Hofstra University. "I believed the system worked and I could help it work better," she says of her motivation for becoming a lawyer.
While still in law school Goldman worked on legal cases involving Vietnam veterans who claimed they were victims of Agent Orange, the infamous defoliant used to help cut back the jungles for the American troops. That taste of litigation whetted her appetite and after graduating in 1984, she signed on with the ACLU's regional office in Minneapolis as a litigator.
Goldman's entire legal pedigree has been shaped within the liberal priesthood of the ACLU. It's where she developed the Luddite thinking, a kind of "Us versus Them" mentality that Goldman says is part of the ACLU's culture. That kind of thinking was "very appealing but not terribly sophisticated," she says.
Berman hired Goldman in 1986 to help carry what had become an overwhelming load. "A lot of people talk about privacy," Berman says, "but Janlori came into the job with a clear-cut passion for the work, knowing that legislation would be the driving force for privacy issues in this modern age."
Even Goldman's adversaries have good things to say about her work. "I think Janlori has really become the leader of the privacy advocacy bar," says Ronald Plesser, a Washington lawyer with the firm of Piper & Marbury, who represents the Information Industry Association and other business clients on privacy issues. "She's tough and she's principled. I think everybody in the industry and in public interest groups respects what she says."
