Privacy Is in the House 

For the third year in a row, a bipartisan congressional coalition is pushing a bill that would require all government agencies to study the privacy impact of new rules before they put them into effect.

The Defense of Privacy Act (PDF), which was approved by a House subcommittee on Tuesday, would complement the E-Government Act of 2001, which requires agencies to submit privacy impact assessments whenever they buy new technology.

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Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) introduced the bill. It is backed by three Republicans and a handful of Democrats, including Rick Boucher (D-Virginia), who many consider to be the Internet's best friend in Congress.

Former Republican Rep. Bob Barr, who now works with the ACLU, introduced a similar bill, known as the Federal Agency Protection of Privacy Act, in 2002. Barr's bill and a similar one introduced in 2003 passed the House of Representatives, but were never taken up by the Senate.

Privacy groups, ranging from the Free Congress Foundation to the Center for Democracy & Technology to the ACLU, hope the third bill will be the charm.

The original impetus for the privacy impact requirement stemmed from congressional efforts to kill controversial Treasury Department regulations that would have required banks to closely monitor their customers and report suspicious behavior to the federal law enforcement agencies.

Although those rules were withdrawn after public and congressional outcry, portions of those rules were later included in the Patriot Act.

At Tuesday's meeting of the House Judiciary's Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, Chabot argued that "privacy is not a partisan issue" and that civil liberties need not be sacrificed for counter-terrorism programs.

"I introduced the bill because a reasonable expectation of privacy is too often a regulatory afterthought, and we have seen attempt after attempt by government agencies to implement sometimes ominous regulations to allow the federal government to invade the privacy of American citizens," said Chabot.

James Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy & Technology, testified before the committee, calling the bill a good first step that would force government agencies to think of privacy when drafting rules, rather than scrambling later to address privacy.

"One of the best ways to protect privacy is to raise privacy concerns early in the development so those concerns can be addressed and mitigated in advance," Dempsey said. "We call this privacy by design, building in the privacy protections from the ground up, before a system is implemented and before it is too late."

Gregory Nojeim, the associate director of the ACLU's Washington office, called the bill a "very sensible and modest piece of legislation."

"The bill doesn't tell agencies they can't issue regulations that violate people's privacy rights," Nojeim said. "It simply tells them they must consider alternative, privacy-sensitive regulations. They don't have to adopt those, however."

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