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…)

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

The Baltimore Sun has an interesting story chronicling problems with crime labs processing forensic evidence, including DNA or biometrics. I previously blogged about questions surrounding the accuracy and reliability of DNA evidence in the US, UK and Australia.

Forensic evidence - DNA on a victim, gunshot residue on a hand, fingerprints on a weapon - holds a special place in courtrooms, often treated as irrefutable proof that police have nabbed the bad guy. But the labs processing that prized evidence can sometimes become the suspects.

Last month, the Baltimore Police Department disclosed that its lab employees were leaving their own DNA on crime scene evidence. Lab director Edgar Koch lost his job because of the contamination, which had gone unidentified for years because the lab didn’t take the basic step of cataloging employee DNA in a database. (more…)

The latest issue of Scientific American magazine is all about technology and privacy. Included in the issue:

• Katherine Albrecht, How RFID Tags Could Be Used to Track Unsuspecting People
• Steven Ashley, Digital Surveillance: Tools of the Spy Trade
• Peter Brown, Privacy in an Age of Terabytes and Terror
• Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau, Internet Eavesdropping: A Brave New World of Wiretapping
• Esther Dyson, How Loss of Privacy May Mean Loss of Security
• Simson L. Garfinkel, Data Fusion: The Ups and Downs of All-Encompassing Digital Profiles
• Anil K. Jain and Sharath Pankanti, Beyond Fingerprinting: Is Biometrics the Best Bet for Fighting Identity Theft?
• Anna Lysyanskaya, Cryptography: How to Keep Your Secrets Safe
• Mark A. Rothstein, Tougher Laws Needed to Protect Your Genetic Privacy
• Dan Solove, Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?

Vietnam News has an interesting story on proposed DNA identification cards.

People suffering from hereditary diseases may benefit from a DNA-testing programme that Viet Nam plans to introduce by 2010.

The programme, implemented by the Ha Noi-based Centre for Genetic Analysis and Technologies, would include ‘DNA cards’ that help in early detection of 10 of the most common hereditary diseases, said Le Dinh Luong, the centre founder and president of the Viet Nam Genetics Society. [...]

The cards could even be used for three-month-old children in the womb. Obstetric experts said at this early period, doctors could take necessary intervention measures for disease treatment. (more…)

The Department of Homeland Security recently released a transcript of Secretary Michael Chertoff’s speech at the University of Southern California National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events. Interestingly, Chertoff spends a lot of time detailing how identification interacts with economics — especially focusing on problems arising from identity theft. Now, identity theft is a huge problem, but it’s not a problem in the domain of Homeland Security. Read the passage below and try to figure out why Homeland Security is focusing on this, rather than the Federal Trade Commission or the departments of Commerce and Treasury.

So when you think about it, identity lies at the heart of the issue of employment which touches virtually every American. Identity, more and more particularly with the use of the Internet for purposes of transacting business, lies at the heart of our entire financial and market system. If we don’t know who you are, if we don’t know whether you are accurately representing your assets and your intentions over the Internet or even transacting business face to face, we introduce an element of risk into that business model.

The Department of Homeland Security and Secretary Chertoff have spent a lot of time pushing the REAL ID national identification system as a savior for false identification problems. The REAL ID Act of 2005 mandates that state driver’s licenses and ID cards follow federal technical standards and verification procedures issued by the Department of Homeland Security, standards that even the federal government cannot meet. (more…)