WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 (UPI) -- The privacy and civil liberties office of the U.S. director of national intelligence is considering proposals to exempt counter-terrorism information from some of the restrictions the Privacy Act places on the government.
Civil Liberties Protection Officer Alexander Joel told United Press International his office was working on recommendations to President Bush about the rules for the new Information-Sharing Environment mandated by Congress as part of its massive intelligence reform in 2004.
"Our thinking is that we would recommend the establishment of a governance structure for privacy in the Information-Sharing Environment," he said, suggesting that at least some of the substantive decisions on the issue might be punted until such a structure was established.
"One of the early issues we expect to address through that mechanism is the Privacy Act and how to handle sharing in a way that is consistent with not only the letter, but the spirit of the Privacy Act, and how can you put in place protections even though you are sharing more information than you did before," he said.
The Information-Sharing Environment is envisaged as a kind of network of networks, allowing counter-terrorism specialists in different government agencies to collaborate and share information about suspected terrorists and their contacts -- including Americans -- in a frictionless, real-time fashion.
But that vision has come up against a reality of government agencies often bound by an accretion of regulations designed specifically to limit the ways they can share information about citizens in the interest of preventing the emergence of a "big brother" state.
Joel said there was a need to re-think the issue. "As you share more information, you also have to pay attention to privacy in that environment. How are you going to protect privacy as agencies provide terrorism information to each other? It is our view that you can do both and you have to do both."
He added some of the restrictions in the 1974 Privacy Act were effectively out of date, arguing that Congress had created exemptions for law enforcement information, but not for counter-terrorism information.
"One of the changes since Sept. 11 has been an awareness that we all have about the importance of sharing information to protect against a terrorist attack," he said, adding there was a need to "look at the Privacy Act, find a way to treat this category of information sharing (and it's actually fairly narrowly drawn focusing on the intelligence community) ... in a similar manner to how law enforcement information is treated."
He said there were "additional protections" -- known as the U.S. person rules -- for how information about individual Americans and legal permanent residents can be collected and analyzed by U.S. intelligence agencies.
The Intelligence Authorization Bill currently before the Senate contains language that would initiate a three-year "pilot program" during which U.S. intelligence agencies could access personal information about Americans covered by the Privacy Act if it is believed relevant to counter-terrorism or counter-proliferation.
Currently, the 1974 law broadly prohibits a federal government entity which has collected information about Americans from using it for any purpose other than the one or ones it was originally collected for. Information typically cannot be passed to other agencies or departments without the permission of the individual concerned.
These restrictions "could prevent the sharing of intelligence information within the executive branch," noted the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in a report accompanying the bill earlier this year.
Section 310 of the bill would exempt all U.S. intelligence agencies from data-sharing restrictions where the information "is relevant to a lawful and authorized foreign intelligence or counter-intelligence activity."
Under the provision, intelligence agencies could also ask for Privacy Act-covered records from non-intelligence government agencies -- and be entitled to get them -- if the information relates to international terrorism or proliferation, and if the receiving intelligence agency is "lawfully authorized to collect or analyze the information" under U.S. person rules.
But with the legislative calendar increasingly crowded, and the ever-present danger in the Senate that the bill might bog down in controversial amendments, observers say it is increasingly unlikely that the intelligence authorization legislation will pass.
Joel declined to comment on what would happen if the bill did not pass. "I don't want to second guess where the process might lead us," he said, calling the provision "one effort to think about how do we deal with this issue."
He said legislative proposals had the advantage "that it's a public process. It's obviously open to public debate."
