[Infowarrior] - DNI Civil Liberties Protection Officer Appointed

[Richard Forno]

New U.S. Post Aims to Guard Public's Privacy
By ANNE MARIE SQUEO
April 20, 2006; Page B1
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB114549771456130732-fNMKc3AWRNO7
Kt58oXWNzzR_pms_20060519.html

As the son of a U.S. aid worker stationed in Guatemala during the 1970s
civil war, Alex Joel recalls being unable to tell the good guys from the bad
as both armed soldiers and civilians alike would order his family out of
their car to search it.

Those first-hand brushes with totalitarianism, says Mr. Joel, have led him
to take the rights of individuals very seriously. Given that he was recently
named as the first civil-liberties protection officer for the U.S. Office of
the Director of National Intelligence, such talk is reassuring to privacy
advocates.

Mr. Joel's appointment to his new role, in fact, is one of several steps the
Bush administration is taking to soothe concerns about civil liberties.
Under siege for compromising privacy rights, most recently because of a
National Security Agency program to monitor communications between people in
the U.S. and overseas terrorist suspects, the administration is creating
several privacy-related posts at government agencies.

In February, the Justice Department named Jane Horvath its first chief
privacy and civil-liberties officer, making her responsible for developing
and ensuring compliance with privacy and civil-liberties policies,
specifically as they relate to counterterrorism and law-enforcement efforts.
The Department of Homeland Security splits the job between a chief privacy
officer and an officer for civil rights and civil liberties. Mr. Joel's role
is even broader because numerous intelligence agencies report up to the
director of National Intelligence.

While even critics of the administration applaud the effort, they question
what authority these officials have. Unlike inspectors general at federal
agencies, these privacy officers lack the subpoena power necessary to
conduct investigations and don't report to Congress.

"We've been supportive of this concept, but the administration has got to
give these people more leeway to play the role that's been pitched," says
Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington office of the American
Civil Liberties Union. "I don't think they can do that under the
circumstances."

Mr. Joel's immediate supervisor, Director of National Intelligence John
Negroponte, says his privacy chief's role is vital to the process. "We are
fully committed to protecting Americans' privacy and civil liberties while
defending our national security," says Mr. Negroponte.

Mr. Joel has a multinational heritage. His father, who worked for the U.S.
Agency for International Development, is a German Jew who escaped the Nazis.
His mother is an émigré from Korea. A 41-year-old graduate of Princeton
University and the University of Michigan's law school, he spent four years
as an officer in the Army's Judge Advocate General's Corps, working as both
a prosecutor and a defense attorney. He later worked in the Central
Intelligence Agency's general counsel's office and as a privacy attorney at
Marriott International Inc.

When the NSA wiretapping program began, Mr. Joel wasn't working for the
intelligence office, but he says he has reviewed it and finds no problems.
The classified nature of the agency's surveillance work makes it difficult
to discuss, but he suggests that fears about what the government might be
doing are overblown.

"Although you might have concerns about what might potentially be going on,
those potentials are not actually being realized and if you could see what
was going on, you would be reassured just like everyone else," he says.

And therein lies the problem he faces: how to provide enough insight into
government intelligence efforts to ease concerns about privacy invasions
while protecting the usefulness of secret programs.

In the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, intelligence and law-enforcement
agencies were pilloried for having failed to piece together clues of the
attacks. Critics cited their use of antiquated computer technologies and
lack of information sharing as chief problems. The alternative, though, has
raised the hackles of civil-liberties groups and private citizens who fear
the misuse of personal information by a government without proper oversight.

Mr. Joel's mission, like those of the other privacy cops, appears aimed more
at policy than policing. While there might be occasion to look into
complaints, he says most of his work is focused on creating a dialogue with
government officials, intelligence operatives and others so they're thinking
about privacy and civil liberties and ways to tailor a program to ensure
rights aren't compromised. He says that if he thought a program went too far
and those responsible weren't responding to his concerns, he would be able
to have Mr. Negroponte and other agency heads help make his case more
forceful.

His office is also looking at technologies that promote "anonymization," or
the ability to allow computer systems to share and match critical
information without revealing personal details to humans. The technology
works by allowing personal data to be anonymous and shared -- say to compare
an airline passenger list and a terrorist-watch list -- with the government
getting only data on the exact matches. This allows airlines, for example,
to avoid having to turn over passenger data wholesale to the government.

"One of the things I've tried to champion is finding ways to draw the circle
around the secret a little more tightly," says Mr. Joel. By doing that, he
says, there are things related to a program that can be discussed to
ameliorate concerns without giving up its essence.

There is institutional backlash to such a notion: Intelligence and
law-enforcement officials contend that making public any element of secret
efforts jeopardizes success. Changing their minds, Mr. Joel concedes, won't
be easy. "There is no silver-bullet answer," he says of balancing privacy
and national security. "There are actually a lot of silver BBs and if you
put enough of those together in a coherent way, wrap it with good policy,
procedures and training, then you can have the same impact as a silver
bullet."

Write to Anne Marie Squeo at annemarie.squeo at wsj.com1
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