WASHINGTON -- If you're the kind of person who frets about ever-eroding privacy rights, Steve Forbes wants to be your president.
In the first campaign speech by any presidential candidate on the topic, the publishing luminary left nothing to the imagination: Voracious databases know more about you than your mother does, and the Clinton administration is particularly to blame.
"Bit by bit, day by day, we are being seduced by politicians promising security as they take away our sovereignty, promising prosperity as they gnaw away at our privacy," Forbes told a crowd at the conservative Free Congress Foundation on Thursday afternoon.
Hearing someone grouse about Bill Clinton and Al Gore at a Free Congress Foundation event is about as remarkable as a Macy's post-holiday sale, but Forbes' plan to muzzle federal infocrats is one that even the ACLU can cheer.
Forbes said that he'd appoint only Cabinet officials who take privacy seriously, "block all efforts to create a national ID card," and ditch all encryption export regulations with the stroke of a presidential pen.
"It's a subject getting no attention on the campaign trail. Yet it's a subject we dare not ignore, particularly at the dawn of a new century, and a new, information age economy. Too much is at stake," Forbes said.
Much of Forbes' speech was devoted to how the executive branch is "engaged in the greatest assault" on privacy in the history of the United States, a claim the Clinton administration dismissed on Friday as campaign hyperbole.
"I don't recall [Forbes] being involved in pushing for medical records privacy regulation or financial privacy regulation," a senior White House official told Wired News. "Nor do I remember him pushing the Internet community to do anything to protect privacy. The president and vice president have a very good and very strong privacy record."
Liberal groups said they agreed with some of Forbes' points, but not with his focus on the evils of government collection of personal information.
Andrew Shen, a policy analyst at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said that Feds should regulate companies' practices. "Having these regulations in place is not a bad thing," Shen said. "It's not a bad thing for the federal government to propose regulations."
Forbes also said he would:
- Create a one-page census form that does not "amass huge amounts of information on the personal lives of the American people."
- Reduce what info the IRS demands from taxpayers -- by moving to a simplified one-page tax form.
- Appoint only judges and Supreme Court justices who will "strike down laws that overstep the bounds of government, robbing the people of their privacy and freedom."
