The Idea of a National Data Center and the Issue of Personal Privacy

Abstract

During the time that this was under review by the Administration it became caught up in a substantial public controversy over the alleged threat to personal privacy embodied in its recommendations. The and the Administration's intentions were made the object of hearings before the subcommittees of Senator Long of Missouri in the Senate and Congressman Gallagher of New Jersey in the House. Through extensive comment in the public press, the acquired the image of a design to establish a gargantuan centralized national data center calculated to bring Orwell's 1984 at least as close as 1970. It is the theme of this paper that the image embodied in the purple phrases that characterized the public reports do not reflect either the realities of the proposals or the balance that Congressman Gallagher and Senator Long attempted to bring to this issue in the hearings. The author wishes to take this means of correcting certain obvious misinterpretations and set forth more explicitly some views on the very important issue of personal privacy. The topic will be presented in two progressions: from the particular to the general and from the short run to the long-run. We must start with the particular: the author's to the Bureau of the Budget and then move to a more general perspective of the issue. Because of the overriding importance of realistic time dimensions in the evaluation of this problem we also need to make a distinction between the short-run and the long-run and we shall progress, in our treatment, along this time path. (It will help to bear in mind that the author's concept of the short-run implies something like ten to fifteen years.) The treatment of this issue in the press and in public hearings has coilfused the particular and the general and the short-run and the long-run. We will begin by reviewing briefly what the Dunn report does and does not say. First, contrary to reports, it does not constitute a formal plan in any sense. It is primarily an informal review of certain problems and prospects associated with the management and organization of statistical inforrnation generated by public, general-purpose statistical programs within the federal government. It was a preliminary review carried out with limited time and resources. The conclusions of this review were circulated within various administrative agencies as a basis for discussion and taken for evaluation by the administration. The did state that certain obstacles to effective use of federal statistical files might require some centralization of function. It did not at any point recommend what changes should be made or what agencies or files should be involved. It contented itself with a generalized treatment of the problem and some indication of the general direction in which the solutions might lie. It was not presented as a final program design.