Presentation from Peter Swire - Symposium on Enforcement, Compliance, and Remedies in the Information Society, Fordham Law School, New York, May, 2008.
The Obama administration is trying to take the lead on a number of technology issues, including cybersecurity, network neutrality and broadband availability. But one prominent omission is privacy, a topic about which the administration has said very little.
At the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Washington on Tuesday, one administration official did address privacy somewhat. Susan Crawford, a member of the National Economic Council looking after science and technology policy, listed some of the efforts by the Federal Trade Commission to press for new rules for behavioral advertising. But she didn't mention that all of those rules were written under the Bush administration.
Peter Swire, an Ohio State law professor who served on the Obama transition team, offered one reason it might be difficult for the administration to find its voice on privacy. There is a split, he told the conference, between the typical view of privacy among technology experts and the emerging view of people brought up in the social networking, Web 2.0 world.
""So many people in America think this does not affect them. They've been
convinced that these programs are only targeted at suspected terrorists. … I
think that's wrong. … Our programs are not perfect, and it is inevitable that
totally innocent Americans are going to be affected by these programs," former
CIA Assistant General Counsel
Suzanne
Spaulding
tells FRONTLINE correspondent Hedrick Smith in Spying on the
Home Front.
9/11 has indelibly altered America in ways that people are now starting to
earnestly question: not only perpetual orange alerts, barricades and body frisks
at the airport, but greater government scrutiny of people's records and
electronic surveillance of their communications. The watershed, officials tell
FRONTLINE, was the government's shift after 9/11 to
a
strategy of pre-emption
at home -- not just prosecuting terrorists for
breaking the law, but trying to find and stop them before they strike.
President Bush
described
his
anti-terrorist measures as narrow and targeted, but a FRONTLINE investigation
has found that the
National Security Agency
(NSA) has engaged in wiretapping and sifting Internet communications of millions
of Americans; the FBI conducted a data sweep on 250,000 Las Vegas vacationers,
and along with more than 50 other agencies, they are mining commercial-sector
data banks to an unprecedented degree."