Privacy advocates call security board skewed

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Privacy advocates say a committee set up recently to advise the Homeland Security Department on privacy issues amounts to little more than a fox guarding a chicken coop.

One member works for a conglomerate whose subsidiary turned over personal records of airline passengers to a government contractor.

Another works for a defense contractor from which thieves stole personal information on thousands of employees, making them vulnerable to identity theft.

Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security, a Mountain View, Calif., computer security company, and author of “Beyond Fear,” said he looked at the list of 20 people on the panel and laughed.

“It’s just plain weird,” Mr. Schneier said Thursday. “Where are all the privacy people?”

Nuala O’Connor Kelly, Homeland Security chief privacy officer, said the committee represents a cross section of viewpoints, including people who have criticized the department.

“We picked the best board from the people who applied,” Miss Kelly said.

Privacy is a sensitive issue for the Homeland Security Department as it embarks on ambitious plans to look into the backgrounds of everyone who boards a plane, enters the country or works in the transportation industry.

But privacy advocates say Homeland Security’s privacy board is skewed too heavily toward corporations, including Intel Corp., Computer Associates, IBM Corp. and Oracle Corp.

Some members have had their own problems with information privacy and security. They include:

• Samuel Wright, senior vice president of Cendant Corp. Cendant owns Galileo, a computer reservation system that turned passenger records over to a government contractor without their permission or knowledge, according to testimony last year by Transportation Security Administration chief David Stone.

• Joseph Leo, vice president of Science Applications International Corp. Thieves stole computers containing personal information on tens of thousands of employees of SAIC, a defense contractor involved in some of the U.S. government’s most sensitive work.

• D. Reed Freeman, chief privacy officer for Claria Corp. In February 2003, Claria, then known as Gator, settled a suit brought by the New York Times, The Washington Post and other media companies for installing unauthorized pop-up ads on their Web sites.

Mr. Freeman, who worked in privacy enforcement at the Federal Trade Commission, went to Claria after the company got into trouble for its practices, Miss Kelly said.

“All three are trying to work through the hard issues that industry is trying to work through on data,” she said. “I, of all people, am not going to rule out people who have gone to companies that have had challenges and tried to fix them.”

But privacy advocates say the list doesn’t include what they call the “usual suspects” from their own ranks.

“The strong privacy advocacy community seems underrepresented on this list,” said Daniel Solove, a George Washington University Law School professor and author of a book on privacy.

“The chickens have quite a number of foxes in there,” said Bill Scannell, who manages the privacy Web site UnSecureFlight.com.

Miss Kelly, though, pointed to several privacy advocates on the board: Tara Lemmey, former executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy rights group; Lance Hoffman, a George Washington University professor; and James Harper, editor of Privacilla.org and a self-described critic of government surveillance.