14 November 2000. Thanks to Willis Ware.

November 9, 2000

The following item will be posted on the mailing list of CPSR which, however, does not overlap your readership.  The subject matter may not be appropriate for Cryptome but here it is anyway for your call to do as you wish.

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At the turn of the 1970s, Secretary Elliot L. Richardson, who directed the Department of Health Education and Welfare [now - DHHS], became concerned about the risk of government misuse of all the personal information that agencies within HEW held -- including the SSA.  Moreover, Congress had been discussing the possibility of using the SSN as a universal personal identifier.

Accordingly, the Secretary convened a committee to examine the whole issue and to provide him with recommendations and policy positions. I wound up chairing the committee which was my first real experience with a  highly political situation, and which also was well balanced in all imaginable dimensions -- gender, age, professional training, job position, stature, etc.

In July 1973 the Committee presented its report:

Records, Computers, and the Rights of Citizens

to the Secretary, who by then had  become Caspar Weinberger. Its cover was a blue dot to circumscribe the title set on a red background. The MIT Press republished the report several years later but with a more traditional white cover.

The report is undoubtedly best known for its conception of a "Code of Fair Information Practices" and the principles that it incorporates; but it is also a quite detailed and broadly based description of the government agency use of personal information at that time.  The substantive content of the report subsequently provided the foundation for the Federal Privacy Act of 1974, signed by President Gerald Ford and also creating the subsequent Privacy Protection Study Commission.

Through the efforts of John Fanning (who helped in the HEW effort) and his colleagues in DHHS, the landmark report is now online and available in HTML format. It is complete except for some appendices.

The site address is:

http://aspe.os.dhhs.gov/datacncl/privcmte.htm

It is maintained by the DHHS working group on confidentiality of health records [as required by the Kennedy-Kassenbaum law of several years ago]. This site has a great deal of privacy-related information and links, especially in regard to health-records matters.

The direct URL to the front material of the report is:

http://aspe.os.dhhs.gov/datacncl/1973privacy/tocprefacemembers.htm

For anyone especially interested in the issue of the SSN and its uses, see chapters VII and VIII for a detailed examination of the situation as it existed in the early 1970s and was projected to become in later years.

Willis H. Ware
RAND
Santa Monica, CA

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