A number of organizations have created documents to offer the Obama-Biden transition team guidance on priorities in the new administration. The issues are broad, including detainee rights, reproductive health, education, security, and privacy, among others. This is Part One of an unknown number of posts on such transition plans. I will post documents of interest as I find them. This post includes plans from the ACLU, EFF, and American Constitution Society.

I have been working on this at the ACLU, which has published a transition plan, “Actions for Restoring America.” The privacy issues include:

1. Warrantless spying.
Issue an executive order recognizing the president’s obligation to comply with FISA and other statutes, requiring the executive branch to do so, and prohibiting the NSA from collecting the communications, domestic or international, of U.S. citizens and residents. Issue an executive order prohibiting new FISA powers from being used to conduct suspicionless bulk collection. Re-examine the recent amendments to Executive Order 12333 to limit and regulate all intelligence community activities and to fully protect the privacy and civil liberties of U.S. citizens and residents. Repeal and make public any secret executive orders that limit or qualify that order. Order the attorney general to launch an investigation to determine if any laws were broken or to appoint a special counsel to do the same.

2. Watch lists.
Issue an executive order requiring watch lists to be completely reviewed within 3 months, with names limited to only those for whom there is credible evidence of terrorist ties or activities. Repeal Executive Order 13224, which creates mechanisms for designating individuals and groups as terrorist suspects and preventing US persons and companies from doing business with them - a power of such breadth that, the record shows, it inevitably leads to the designation of many innocent people and does more harm than good.

3. Freedom of Information - Ashcroft Doctrine.
Direct the attorney general to rescind the “Ashcroft Doctrine” regarding Freedom of Information Act compliance, which instructs agencies to withhold information whenever there is a “sound legal basis” for doing so, and return to the compliance standard under Attorney General Janet Reno, which promoted an “overall presumption of disclosure” of government information through the FOIA unless it was “reasonably foreseeable that disclosure would be harmful.” (more…)

BBC News reports:

Hand-held fingerprint scanners enabling on-the-spot identity checks are to be made available to all UK police forces.

The devices, about the size of a mobile phone, will be rolled out from 2010 under a scheme managed by the National Policing Improvement Agency. [...] 

The devices compare prints against the records of the 7.5m people on the police national biometric database.

The images are sent encrypted to the national computer using the same technology used to handle data in mobile phones.

Of course, there are valid questions about the effectiveness of the handheld scanner techonolgy. However, technology will only get better so we should not criticize such programs solely on the basis of technological failure. (more…)

The Washington Post has a story looking into the capabilities of spy satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as Predators.

Although the exploits of the Predator, the Global Hawk and other airborne collectors of information have been widely publicized, there are few authoritative descriptions of what they can see on the ground.

But some insights into the capabilities of the Predator and other aircraft can be drawn from a DARPA paper that describes the tasks of a contractor that will develop a method of indexing and rapidly finding video from archived aerial surveillance tapes collected over past years.

“The U.S. military and intelligence communities have an ever increasing need to monitor live video feeds and search large volumes of archived video data for activities of interest due to the rapid growth in development and fielding of motion video systems,” according to the DARPA paper, which was written in March but released last month. (more…)

A one-day Town Hall meeting to enable health care experts to share knowledge and experience of medical identity theft and how health IT can be utilized to prevent and detect medical identity theft.

Medical Identity Theft Town Hall
Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology

RSVP: MedIDTheftTownHall@hhs.gov and indicate that you are planning to attend in person or by webcast.

The Town Hall’s focus will consider how medical identity theft should be addressed in a health information technology (health IT) environment. Health care stakeholders from the public and private sectors will share their knowledge and experience and gain insights into trends and future developments.

As part of ONC’s mission to assure that electronic health information exchange is secure, this Town hall is designed to increase understanding of the medical identity theft landscape. Public discussion during the Town Hall will feed into and support potential recommendations for the prevention, detection, and remediation of this form of identity theft, leveraging health IT and best practices, and to foster ongoing collaboration and communication.

Date: October 15th, 2008
Location: Federal Trade Commission, Conference Center; 601 New Jersey Avenue, NW; Washington, DC
For more information: http://www.hhs.gov/healthit/privacy/identytheft.html#II

“Automated identification of terrorists through data mining (or any other known methodology) is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts,” says a report on data mining from the National Research Council. “[E]ven in well-managed programs such tools are likely to return significant rates of false positives, especially if the tools are highly automated.” 

The remarks are part of new report, “Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Program Assessment,” which was sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation. The authors held a panel discussion on the report’s findings. Speakers were: Committee co-chairman Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering; co-chairman and former defense secretary William Perry, and Indiana University professor Fred Cate. 

The report sets out a framework for evaluating data mining programs, which the committee hopes will be used for both classified and unclassified programs domestically and globally. (Read about a notorious data-mining program: Total Information Awareness.) Basically, evaluators must determine whether the program works, how invasive it is, and whether the benefits are worth the costs. The authors believe a new framework is necessary, because current laws are not adequate for protecting privacy in the digital age.

This is the essence of the information age — it provides us with convenience, choice, efficiency, knowledge, and entertainment; it supports education, health care, safety, and scientific discovery. Everyone leaves personal digital tracks in these systems whenever he or she makes a purchase, takes a trip, uses a bank account, makes a phone call, walks past a security camera, obtains a prescription, sends or receives a package, files income tax forms, applies for a loan, e‑mails a friend, sends a fax, rents a video, or engages in just about any other activity. The proliferation of security cameras and means of tagging and tracking people and objects increases the scope and nature of available data. Law-abiding citizens leave extensive digital tracks, and so do criminals and terrorists. (more…)

USA Today has an interesting story on new technology being developed by the Department of Homeland Security. It seeks to divine an individual’s criminal or benign intent from a bio scan.

The futuristic machinery works on the same theory as a polygraph, looking for sharp swings in body temperature, pulse and breathing that signal the kind of anxiety exuded by a would-be terrorist or criminal. Unlike a lie-detector test that wires subjects to sensors as they answer questions, the “Future Attribute Screening Technology” (FAST) scans people as they walk by a set of cameras.

USA Today notes that this isn’t the first time DHS has attempted to use so-called “behavior detection” programs.

The five-year project, in its second year, is the department’s latest effort to thwart terrorism by spotting suspicious people. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has trained more than 2,000 screeners to observe passengers as they walk through airports, questioning those who seem oddly agitated or nervous. (more…)