The Clinton administration released Monday an Office of Management and Budget paper examining the government's role in assuring the "proper balance between the competing values of personal privacy and the free flow of information."
Acknowledging that "personal information is currently collected, shared, aggregated, and disseminated at a rate and to a degree unthinkable just a few years ago," the report, "Options for Promoting Privacy on the National Information Infrastructure," focuses on information privacy in four areas: government records, communications, medical records, and the consumer market.
Although the paper did not make specific policy recommendations, it examined three different proposals for privacy agencies: a federal body with regulatory power, a federal body without such power, and a nongovernmental or advisory entity.
But while privacy advocates credit the report with presenting a comprehensive overview and analysis of current law, they say the paper evades key issues.
"This is the most comprehensive policy paper we've seen from the administration, but it's still a little silly," says Marc Rotenberg, director of the DC-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. "It's sort of like a bunch of people from the [Office of Management and Budget] got together and said, 'Let's write a paper about privacy online without ever using the word encryption.'"
Raising the specters of law enforcement and national security concerns, the Clinton administration has placed strict controls on the export of encryption software, which allows for security and privacy in electronic transmissions such as online credit card transactions.
The report also sings the administration's oft-repeated refrain that the Internet, while useful, beneficial, and the surest bridge yet visible to the 21st century, is still a potential threat that "facilitates low-cost, simultaneous dissemination of harmful or illegal material to a far broader audience, making anonymity potentially a much bigger problem" than it is on the phone.
Rotenberg said the document is "particularly good" in reviewing the confused tangle of laws that have sprung up in an attempt to cast a regulatory net over the Internet's prodigious growth. "The administration's basic problem with regard to the Internet is that it's suffering from an amazing amount of policy incoherence," he says. "You've got the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, Ira Magaziner, and the OMB in on this. Whatever else it is, this paper is a good first attempt at bringing everybody under one roof."
