The FBI's Big Brother Computer

...But they are open to inspection by the heads of federal agencies, some congressional committees, a special counsel to the President, and state governors...

...though they have never been arrested or convicted of a crime...

...If the FBI is really serious about restrictions on state computer use, he said, NASIS states don’t want any part of it...

...Maryland’s computer network will link police department dossiers with records kept by state health and education agencies and “other interested departments and agencies...

...The FBI was to be merely a clearinghouse for the transfer of inf-ormation among the states...

...The FBI ended up deferring to the states the question of whether the computers should be used solely to store law enforcement information...

...Krueger Could Be You All the talk of the potential threat posed by the FBI and other computer banks usually seems a little abstract, dramatized, and overplayed-except for people like Gregory Krueger...

...Hoover wrote: “What will the center mean to the average, law-abiding citizen...

...He finally resorted compile such information...

...He is corporations...

...He said separate crime computers would not be required and that Hoover supported this new position...

...Such distribution was approval to what it is already doing by resumed six months later, however, when allowing the federal government to collect President Nixon approved the Justice data through the states...

...About half of those 361 had never been convicted of any crime, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is contesting the New York law and has instituted about 50 lawsuits around the country...

...In an interview with Newhouse News Service, Mitchell claimed the Justice Department has a virtually unchecked right-not subject to the Constitutionto keep records on persons who are “violence prone” in their protests of government policies...

...But Hoover was not to have the last word, because Mitchell, Hoover’s boss, sensed that if the states got into a funk over the matter, the entire coast-to-coast intelligence network would be jeopardized...

...The District of Columbia’s computer already is programmed to include a “Prisoner Control System” for information taken at “mass field arrests and civil disturbances...

...Reacting to the SEARCH proposals, Jerome J. Daunt, then head of the FBI’s NCIC system, wrote: “There can be no absolute right to individual privacy in a society...

...Later the FBI eliminated even this safeguard, and as the plan now stands, criminal records will be mixed with such things as tax and credit data in computers not confined to criminal work...

...This is a far cry from the original SEARCH proposal that “the recording of data about an individual should be initiated only upon the report of a crime and the commencement of criminal justice system proceedings...

...As explained to Ervin’s subcommittee, the FBI computers would merely index-like a telephone directorythe names of persons who had committed serious crimes...

...The Treasury Department is allowed to share this information with other agencies, such as the FBI...

...This means that information of questionable reliability or legality, gathered from sources such as wiretaps and paid informers, will be readily available to the nation’s lawmen...

...Meanwhile, the FBI was insuring the freedom of the computer from any regulation at all by flopping back and forth on both sides of the state vs...

...The SEARCH people felt that these guidelines would produce a data network that was “limited and relatively hazardless,” thus protecting the individual, but at the same time would provide swift information to a policeman who needed to know whether the driver of a suspicious car had a dangerous criminal record...

...The FBI labeled the safeguards “very questionable...

...Moments later, the computer printed out the message that Krueger had an FBI identification number-meaning only that at some time a police agency somewhere had sent his name to the FBI file...

...and people with outstanding parking ticket warrants...

...Congress took only one timid step toward at least finding out what the data bank would contain, but later looked the other way when its requests for information were ignored by the Justice Department...

...Notwithstanding the ‘big daddy’ problem,” Magraw wrote, “we believe that we must build comprehensive information systems so that government can better legislate, plan, and administer to assure the survival of our society...

...The National Science Foundation has a data bank on scientists...

...A Senate subcommittee has found that federal investigators already have access to 264 million police records, 323 million medical histories, 279 million psychiatric reports, and 100 million credit files, and such records are now being stored in several places...

...The act created the Law Enforceme nt Assistance Administration (LEAA) , within the Justice Department, which the Nixon Administration has adopted as the bulwark of its “war on crime” and forerunner of revenue sharing with states...

...After the first officer stopped him, Krueger’s name was sent by teletype for a routine check to the National Crime Information Center...

...Iowa’s system will also connect with the state’s Revenue Department, the Highway Commission, county treasurers and county recorders (notorious for being highly active in local politics), the Commerce Commission, the Department of Public Instruction, the Conservation Commission, the Department of Social Services (which keeps welfare records), and others...

...Senator Charles Mathias, one of the few in Congress to express any awareness of the FBI takeover, called it the “raw materials of tyranny...

...First, the FBI quietly assumed full control over the entire national data system, then greatly expanded the computer bank’s potential, and finally shelved the original proposals for privacy and security...

...LEAA actually compiled the document, but Congress has never been provided a copy...

...New York State’s information system has taken on the aspects of a private credit bureau...

...Inquiring policemen would be referred to the state computers for the complete dossiers...

...On March 30, 1971, Daniel B. Magraw, then NASIS president, made his organization’s position known to the FBI...

...Hruska’s legislation Department’s appropriation bill, which furthers the anarchy by vesting the responsi- permitted the FBI to send its records to bility for the accuracy and security of federally chartered or insured banks and information in the states (an official who other institutions-on approval of the Atabuses computer data in “good faith” is torney General...

...college students known to have participated in disturbances...

...In other words, there are no specific safeguards...

...With this accomplished, Hoover and Attorney General John MitcheU decided that the “raw” materials in the FBI’s electronic dossiers would not be evaluated for accuracy...

...A 1970 amendment to the Safe Streets Act required the Administration to supply a report of its activities in law enforcement computers by the summer of 1971...

...The records will contain extensive economic, social, and personal information, constituting virtually a complete dossier of each individual’s existence...

...Individuals would be permitted by law to inspect their own files, and provisions would be made to correct erroneous information and to purge outdated data...

...federal control debate...

...people with a history of mental disturbances (would Thomas Eagleton have been listed...

...It will probably be touted as a great advance for law enforcement...

...Even if the FBI were given more control The potential harm that release of over what each state puts into its criminal police information to employers and corporcomputerand therefore, what ultimately ations can cause is increased by the fact that makes its way into the national files-that the FBI’s intelligence network can record agency has never shown much discretion in arrests without noting whether the individuusing the data it already possesses...

...After making these suggestions, SEARCH fell quickly out of favor with the Administration and the FBI, whose director had made repeated assurances that individual privacy would be well-protected inside the computer bank...

...We feel that’s our job...

...The Administration has not acted to The key to Gesell’s ruling was that the control any of these runaway computer FBI had no legal authority to give its records systems, and apparently doesn’t want to...

...information regarding civil disturbances...

...But the real end to the safeguards came in December, 1970, when Attorney General Mitchell, in a secret internal directive, transferred control of the intelligence network from its parent LEAA to the FBI...

...For white urban males the figure is 60 per cent, and for all males it is 47 per cent, according to the 1967 President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice...

...The NCIC will guarantee the security of information in its files against access or removal by unauthorized persons...

...The act also requires banks to record the Social Security number of each customer...

...Robert Gallati, stated that its files would never be made available for private employment checks...

...In testimony last March, protected from any penalty under the bill) Justice Department officials said the FBI while giving the widest power to disseminate routinely turned over information to various the data to the Attorney General...

...At the constitutional rights subcommittee hearings conducted last year on Army spying by Senator Sam Ervin, these promises were reiterated...

...government...

...information regarding anti-American or anti-U...

...The proponents of the FBI plan also promised Ervin that the complete records of each individual would remain in the hands of state agencies, in order to avoid the creation of a federally based intelligence operation...

...They said it would be inefficient to divide up the public memory when each state could easily put all its data ir1 the crime bank...

...The FBI got all the states’ data into its central computer on the grounds that only a federal agency would be able to supervise, protect, and keep the system under uniform control...

...Of the first 20,000 persons fingerprinted, 361 were found to have been arrested, and 54 lost their jobs...

...In addition, every major municipal police department in the country will be hooked into the network, either with its own computer or a less expensive teletype operation...

...Big Daddy or Big Brother...

...0 The Justice Department has a computerized file on 14,000 Americans, including elected public officials and political moderates thought to condone civil disobedience...

...information on persons who insist upon personally contacting high government officials for the purpose of redress of imaginary grievances, and so forth...

...All 50 states will be able to “talk” to each other through the FBI master computer...

...Critics of the military data banks never got around to the issue of whether any government agency has the right to remember what citizens have done, and the FBI is putting together its computer system with almost no opposition, no publicity, and no specific Congressional approval...

...That right, Mitchell asserted, comes from the inherent powers of the federal government “to protect the internal security of the nation...

...S. and foreign radicals] ,” Mitchell said...

...And he called on Congress to set a national policy governing FBI records with “adequate sanctions and administrative safeguards...

...Mitchell believed that the nation’s security was more endangered from within than without...

...More importantly, it will mean no intrusion whatsoever upon the right to privacy...

...With that erroneous information in hand, the lawmen took him into custody and whisked him to headquarters...

...Then it abandoned any chance for safeguards at all by deferring to the states, many of whom were already flooding their computers with the wildest imaginable data...

...Magraw reiterated to Mitchell his complaint concerning the FBI rule that computers be dedicated solely to police work...

...After spending $1.5 billion to buy guns, munitions, helicopters, and even tanks for the nation’s policemen, the LEAA began a highpowered effort to construct the police computer centers...

...Since these promises were made, a number of significant developments has occurred...

...0 The U. S. Civil Service Commission maintains a “subversive activities” data bank of over two million cards in electronically powered rotary cabinets...

...0 Access to the data banks would be granted only to police, court, and correctional officials...

...Moments after the 19year-old student was stopped by an Iowa policeman on a recent speeding charge, he was confronted by two other officers, menacingly waving their pistols...

...The FBI’s Big Brother Computer by Michael Sorkin The FBI has taken over where the Army’s spying on civilians left off...

...The study warned that major threats to privacy accompany the FBI’s growing intelligence network, and it showed that half of the 108 computer projects then in existence involved collecting data on pofential troublemakers, like war protesters...

...This was a blow to SEARCH supporters...

...An organization called NASIS (National Association of State Information Systems) became a lobby for this point of view...

...Although a number of states openly say that they are not complying, Roderick refuses to disclose’ the results of that meeting...

...With the increasing availability of fingerprints, technological developments, and the enormous increase in population,” Judge Gesell said, “the [FBI identification] system is out of effective Your File Is Their File Even if the computer data network were limited to actual arrests, the odds are about one in four that information on you will be in the computer...

...A Hazardless Network The money tree for the police computer network was the Safe Streets Act of 1968, a result of the panic after Watts, Newark, and Detroit...

...Mathias said the moves “add up to a quantum jump toward a national criminal justice data bank-a leap taken without full public knowledge or specific congressional authorization...

...In 1967 a proposal to gather the files of federal agencies into a national data bank caused such a fuss that Congress abandoned it...

...Asked what security safeguards have been provided to ensure privacy, Swanson responded: “The [computer] management group considered the issue of security and privacy of such importance that they were unwilling to consider the issue except at the highest level, in broadest policy terms, until the system design was firm enough for effective operational procedures to protect security and privacy to be developed...

...The LEAA report recommended legislation to curb the use of such information...

...If Krueger had panicked and run, he might well have been shot for a crime that never occurred...

...What happened to Gregory Krueger is going to be recurring in different forms from now on...

...Importantly,” continued Hoover, “nobody can misuse the NCIC data banks to embarrass you with some ancient traffic violation or tidbit of personal credit...

...While Congress refused to pass legislation creating a national data pool, an informal version is already being established by the fact that these computers will be able to interface, or trade information with each other...

...In less than five years, the computer system has evolved into some.thing that the early proponents said it would never be, with hardly anybody noting the discrepancies...

...Less than a month after the Hoover letter, Mitchell dashed off a soothing “dispatch of his own to Magraw...

...Menard The disposition of the case would be shown later tried-unsuccessfully-to have his rec- only if the agency supplied an optional ord expunged from the Los Angeles Police follow-up, and a great many states do not Department and the FBI...

...The only requirement is that “control” of the computer be in the hands of a criminal justice agency, such as the state police...

...1 assure you that the security and confidentiality recommendations are not simply desirable guidelines,” the FBI chief told Magraw...

...0 The record would be required to show whether an individual was found guilty or innocent after his arrest...

...Before long, 75 per cent of the nation’s police agencies will be plugged in, and by 1975 the figure should rise to 95 per cent...

...There is no requirement that the computer show whether a person has been indicted or tried, or if he was, whether he was found guilty or innocent...

...After taking over the data bank system, the FBI abandoned all but one of the SEARCH recommendations, the one that would require criminal data to be stored in computers dedicated solely to criminal work...

...It could be provided,” he answered, “including information on what kind of cars they drive...

...While the Army was supposedly destroying its files on the grounds that domestic affairs are no concern of the military, the FBI began to compile the largest single depository of information ever gathered about U. S. citizens by their government...

...Where SEARCH had sought to limit its information to lawmen alone, Iowa is considering making its information available to anyone willing to pay for it...

...0 President Nixon’s proposal to revamp the welfare system will require detailed records on five to 20 million of the nation’s poor, that of necessity will have to be computerized at the federal level...

...There are already 135 local and state police agencies that are using or will soon be using the memory links to the FBI...

...When the program was established in 1964, its director, Dr...

...And when the data bank is in full operation, it will be a relatively easy matter for credit companies and other businesses to buy much of the information for use as they see fit...

...While Mitchell never gave any public reason for the changeover, it is suspected that he wanted the intelligence system to have fewer external controls than LEAA’s administrators would permit...

...The files include “information on professional gate-crashers...

...This was the same rationale Mitchell had used the previous year when he said the government had unlimited powers to eavesdrop on people the Justice Department thinks are seeking to “attack and subvert the government by unlawful means...

...adults and juveniles with arrest records...

...But the local police mistakenly assumed that since Krueger’s name was in the computer, he must have been a wanted felon...

...But the FBI has bypassed Congress and is building its computer network-to be fed from all 50 states through 40,000 federal, state, and local agencies-by executive fiat...

...Literally millions of Americans will have criminal files even Michael Sorkin is an investigative reporter for the Des Moines Register...

...Senator Ervin says the Meanwhile, the Justice Department has ruling persuaded the FBI to discontinue its introduced legislation, through Senator unauthorized distribution of records for Roman Hruska, that would give belated employment purposes...

...An case of a Los Angeles man, Dale Menard...

...NO authoritative figures are yet available on how much LEAA has spent so far, but $75 million is a reasonable estimate...

...0 At the national level, only names would be recorded or “indexed...

...arrest record even though there had never U. S. District Court Judge Gerhard A. been a conviction...

...It will mean many things, all of them good...

...or who have confronted or opposed law enforcement personnel in the performance of their duties...

...If you don’t happen to end up in the crime computer, there is it’ growing chance that you will make it into one of the many other data banks being set up in Washington...

...In June, a federal judge in San Francisco temporarily barred the government from requiring banks to disclose this information, pending a ruling on whether such disclosures are constitutional...

...From their experience in the selected areas, the SEARCH people proposed strict safeguards on how computerized criminal data should be used...

...Stuffing the Data Bank With the FBI shift to a laissez-faire policy on safeguards, the states are free to develop their own systems...

...A jeopardized by the FBI’s policy of distrib- recent study of New York area employment uting arrest records to any agency that agencies, for example, indicated that 75 per contributes identification records to the cent would not accept an applicant with an Bureau...

...Gesell ruled in June, 1971, that the FBI must stop distributing material from its files to anyone outside the federal government, except for law enforcement purposes...

...The Computer Coup Instead of opposing the FBI’s rejection of all these guidelines, Congress helped it along with a little-noticed amendment to the Organized Crime Act of 1970 which authorized the FBI to keep centralized criminal records...

...The trade newspaper Computenvorld described the FBI’s takeover of the SO-state computer system as “grafting an elephant onto a flea...

...Further, big defense conauthorized to give all the information- tractors such as Lockheed Aircraft, can erroneous, unconstitutional or otherwise-to secure the same records through the Departother federal agencies, foreign governments, ment of Defense...

...0 The Secret Service has created a computerized data bank to protect high government officials from harm and federal buildings from damage...

...to a lawsuit, charging, among other things, This omission creates a system guaranthat his chances for employment were being teed to keep many persons out of work...

...Nevertheless, many states apparently are unwilling to comply with even this restriction...

...Daunt said he disliked the recommendations so much he even objected to their being published...

...All other government agencies, as well as private persons, would be barred...

...Swanson was asked if an auto dealer, for example, could purchase the names and addresses of everybody with driver’s licenses in order to send out advertising...

...0 The Department of Housing and Urban Development is considering automating a data bank of more than 300,000 files covering individuals or firms which were the subject of, or mentioned prominently in, any housing investigations dating from 1954 to the present...

...0 The Department of Health, Education and Welfare has set up a file on migrant children to facilitate the transfer of school records...

...According to Donald Roderick, Daunt’s successor as head of NCIC, the FBI will now permit each state to set its own rules and to run its computer as it sees fit...

...victed, indicted, or even charged...

...0 The new, so-called “Bank Secrecy Act” requires banks to microfilm the front and back of each check written by every customer and to store the records for five years in case government investigators want to look at them...

...The probability of a black urban male being arrested at least once during his lifetime has been estimated to be as high as 90 per cent...

...Gesell also warned that the “overwhelming power of the federal government to expose must be held in check...

...I don’t see how we can separate the two [U...

...suspects in shoplifting cases...

...The businesses pay $5 per inquiry to have the state inspect data on their employees...

...S. government demonstrations in the United States or overseas...

...The report didn’t sit well with either the FBI or Mitchell...

...Furthering the Anarchy control...

...The Lenexa, Kansas, police department has used its computer terminals for the benefit of local apartment owners wanting to check on prospective tenants, and in Cincinnati, Ohio, an $%million computer center will house not only police and court records, but also the amount of each citizen’s water bill...

...The entire network has been set up through a remarkable series of Alphonse and Gaston acts between the various states and the FBI apparatus...

...parolees...

...The only security precautions are vague plans to keep “unauthorized” persons from receiving proscribed information...

...No such information will be stored there...

...LEAA’s spiraling budget continued to fund the project, but now the FBI was calling the shots...

...Back came a memo from Hoover saying that yes, indeed, the FBI was serious...

...An estimated 50 million Americans now have arrest records of some sort...

...The first step LEAA took was to fund project SEARCH (an acronym for System for Electronic Analysis and Retrieval of Criminal Histories), which developed pilot computer programs in six cities, and eventually spread into 20 states...

...I regret the apparent misunderstanding,” Mitchell told him...

...to private persons...

...0 There are the massive Internal Revenue Service computer files, which are supposed to be confidential...

...This was nothing more than the original proposal SEARCH had recommended, but which the FBI had never adopted...

...Under the FBI’s system, every ‘time an individual has any contact with the law, his name and the details of the incident will be placed into the computer...

...Instant Crime Control “Instant crime control in your town,” is the way J. Edgar Hoover billed the FBI system-then in its infancy-in 1966...

...Take the al was actually charged or found guilty...

...J. Edgar Hoover supported that idea, but the states generally opposed it, largely 00 economic grounds...

...0 The system would not include intelligence data, such as surveillance of political dissidents or unsubstantiated reports from informers...

...At FBI official told a House subcommittee that 19, Menard was held for two days on the Bureau’s arrest files show only that a “suspicion of burglary,” but was never con- person was picked up by a police agency...

...Kansas City, for example, is feeding its computer the names of area dignitaries such as councilmen, judges, and other municipal leaders...

...Anyone who wants it ought to be able to get it,” declares Terry Swanson, director of the Iowa computer...

...The appropriations act financial institutions, or to any business, expired in July, and it is not known whether professional, or labor organization that is Congress will continue to permit the FBI to “fulfilling a vital public need,” or protecting hand its files over to those outside the “other vital public interests...

...In June, Roderick says, he called a meeting of state officials to find out how many were following the FBI directive...

...The IRS also is expanding to monitor the computers of 1,000 business firms...

...But if it were possible, I would say that experience has shown greater danger from the so-called domestic variety...

...Five years later, however, the legislature adopted a law requiring the fingerprinting of all employees of the securities industry...

...The network will function through separate computer centers set up by each state, where all criminal records will be stored and also transmitted to the FBI for a filing in the National Crime Information Center (NCIC...

...Iowa is proceeding with plans to house criminal intelligence files in the state’s main computers-the same computers also hold tax return forms...

...The result is the worst of both worlds-the anarchy of the state system, where each locality decides how much and what kind of information to feed in, plus the power of a centralized one, where all the information, regardless of its validity or legality, is pumped into Washington...

...The NCIC will have no other purpose than to bring criminals to justice-persons who have violated federal statutes or against whom there is a felony warrant outstanding, and whom the state is willing to extradite...