Putting People on File

...The Nixon Administration's most recent device to monitor public behavior was linked to its Family Assistance Program...

...For this reason, among others, it is just as well that Congress killed FAP...

...The possibilities, though, are hardly conducive to joy...

...It is technically simple to program sabre, the American Airlines computer, to print out a record of your or my travels during the last year or two for the pleasure of the FBI or the Internal Revenue Service...

...But should the program be revived, the dossier feature will probably be resurrected, too...

...Given the dispiriting record of the American police on civil liberties, it will be no blessing when law enforcement authorities are able to flash each other larger quantities of erroneous, incomplete, and prejudicial information at a faster rate, while ordinary citizens possess little or no remedy...

...Where attempts were made to check the accuracy of information, or to offer individuals the chance to rebut derogatory data, these safeguards tend to be preserved once the computer appears...

...The Westin-Baker report is worth reading, though it is a good idea to start with the final section...

...Their general judgment is both mildly surprising and mildly reassuring...

...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Are the information pooling and official surveillance that computers render possible—if not easy—creating an American police state...

...Because the book is much too long, frequently repetitious, and composed in the regrettable bureaucratic prose presumably demanded by its sponsors, many will not persevere to the final 50 pages focusing on privacy, due process and the First Amendment...

...Still, it is a modest blessing that the computer users unimaginatively collect and process much the kinds of information that they always collected during the dark ages of manual and office-machine record-keeping...

...To be sure, in the absence of such protections the computer masters seldom think to supply them, and job applicants denied positions on the basis of faulty arrest records or would-be borrowers refused loans on the evidence of erroneous credit reports will not be gratified to know that damaging information now flows to employers and banks with increased speed...

...Until exposure by Congress, the Pentagon maintained (and for all anyone knows continues to maintain) surveillance records on a very large number of citizens defined as potential threats to social harmony, among them Congressmen and public officials...

...It is scary out there, even if the initial 400 pages soften the harshness of reality...

...Other features of current policy are yet more disquieting...

...Nixon judges typically resist the legal innovations necessary to cope with the new technology and frown upon extensions of judicial protections...

...In the main, enterprises or government departments that have computerized their collection and analysis of data have merely carried over the practices, good or evil, of the precomputer era...

...The present political climate and the absence of effective judicial opposition suggest that the possible is on its way to being translated into the practical...

...In this concluding section, the picture darkens abruptly...

...Westin is chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union Committee on Privacy as well as editor of the ACLU's forthcoming Civil Liberties Review...

...There are civil liberties issues intricately involved in the programming and use of computers, and it is unfortunate that this volume's format swamps the readers with so many technical details that these crucial questions are blurred...

...This is to say that the FBI, which traditionally supplies local police departments with arrest records, now simply transmits them much more rapidly...

...In the course of 55 visits to major computer installations, Alan F. Westin, Michael A. Baker and their associates diligently inspected the programming practices of banks, credit agencies, universities, hospitals, merchandisers, and law enforcement authorities...

...The short answer furnished in this "Report of the Project on Computer Databanks of the Computer Science and Engineering Board of the National Academy of Science" is, not yet...

...Moreover, as computer technology evolves, compiling individual files becomes cheaper and easier...

...Without challenge, the Secret Service keeps a file of 50,000 individuals whom it considers (by what criteria...

...Even more disquieting, Kennedy and Johnson appointees have likewise been extremely reluctant to interfere with the collection of data by government agencies—especially when the stated justification is the protection of the President or the preservation of public safety...

...to be potentially dangerous to the President...

...American Express can order its computer to sort restaurant transactions so as to identify the diners at Humberto's Clam Bar or the Neapolitan Noodle on the occasions when the Mafia was executing a contract...

...As for the public authorities, the city of New Haven in Connecticut and Santa Clara County in California actually tried to merge the separate computer records of their various departments, but the technicians soon discovered the difficulties of reconciling divergent practices, the unacceptable alterations required in the procedures of civil servants, the unexpected expenses involved, and, worst of all, the uncertainty about the questions the databank should be equipped to answer...

...And, the computer wizards know how to combine information from the schools, universities, welfare agencies, military services, hospitals, housing authorities, and police departments to produce detailed, individualized dossiers...

...The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration offers generous financial support for the computerization of local police departments, a more complete exchange of information, and the creation if not of a national police force certainly of a national system of information processing...

...HEW apparently contemplated dossiers that would merge the information separately available to IRS, law enforcement agencies, public housing authorities, and welfare, health, school, and university officials...

...Within the Department of Health, Education and Welfare a team worked on plans to generate extensive individual files on each of the 28 million potential beneficiaries of FAP...

...Since such programming is expensive and devoid of commercial value, however, American Airlines, American Express, and their rivals refrain from making full use of their computers' abilities...

...The Nixon Administration has displayed little attachment to freedom of press, speech and association...