feb05c.indd


Ber nadette Murphy W a s h i n g t o n  H o t l i n e  

Privacy and government information 
issues: Looking forward, looking back 

Privacy: What happened in 2004 
Last year in the 108th Congress, a number 
of bills to amend the USA PATRIOT Act in 
both positive and negative ways were intro­
duced; none of them passed. 

The good news is that a rider was slipped 
into the nine­agency omnibus appropriations 
bill that Congress passed late on November 20, 
2004, requiring every agency to have a chief 
privacy officer. This person will create policy 
for privacy and data protection, assuring that 
technology does not “erode privacy protec­
tions relating to the use, collection and dis­
closure of information.” Also the “Intelligence 
Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004” 
included a Civil Liberties and Privacy Oversight 
Board, as called for by the 9/11 Commission, 
although the final version of the Board is sig­
nificantly weaker than what the commission 
or the Senate originally had called for. 

The bad news is a driver’s license stan­
dardization provision in the “Intelligence Re­
form and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004.” 
This provision creates a possible precursor to 
a national identification system by requiring 
all states to conform their driver’s licenses 
and state IDs to a single uniform national 
standard. ALA has long worked in opposition 
to proposals for a national ID system as a 
threat to personal privacy, and the ubiquitous 
use of driver’s licenses as the main source of 
identification in most transactions, including 
library cards, increases the risk that personal 
information would be easily accessible. 

What’s to come in 2005? 
Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act is 
scheduled to sunset on December 31, 2005, 
unless Congress acts to rescind the sunset 
provision (Sec 224) of the act. We can ex­
pect a fight on this. 

Bernadette Murphy is communications specialist at ALA’s 
Washington Offi  ce, e-mail: bmurphy@alawash.org 

We anticipate the SAFE Act being rein­
troduced in both the Senate and the House, 
possibly in a strengthened form, and the 
Freedom to Read Protection Act being rein­
troduced in the House. 

We can also expect PATRIOT expansion bills 
to be introduced in both chambers. We expect 
more efforts to strengthen compliance with Sec­
tion 215 orders and with the gag orders. 

Access to government information: 
What happened in 2004 
During the 108th Congress, the bill creating 
the Department of Homeland Security con­
tained provisions carving out “protection” 
for “critical infrastructure information” (CII) 
and called for guidance to be issued on ac­
cess to and the handling of “sensitive home­
land security information,” a subcategory of 
“sensitive but unclassifi ed” information. 

What can we anticipate in the 109th? 
The good news is that Senator Cornyn 
(R­TX) intends to introduce legislation to 
strengthen the Freedom of Information Act 
(FOIA), in procedural ways (but not getting 
rid of any exemptions). 

We anticipate legislation being introduced, 
most probably by Democrats, to strengthen FOIA 
by revoking the CII provisions of the Homeland 
Security Act, to address the Executive Order of 
Presidential Records and overclassifi cation of 
records. The odds are against success of these 
bills, but we will work hard to promote them. 

We can also expect more legislation to take 
bites out of FOIA and to expand the range of 
information that can be excluded, under the 
rubric of “sensitive security information” or 
some variant thereof, from public access. 

The Government Printing Office has pro­
posed to undertake a number of initiatives 
related to preservation of government docu­
ments (print and electronic) and creation of a 
national bibliography. If done properly, these 
stand to improve the public’s chances of long­
term access to government information. 

C&RL News February 2005  132 

mailto:bmurphy@alawash.org