placed on the Union Calendar. The bill would also extend the responsibilities for confidentiality to all officers and employees of the Federal Government. H.R. 7762 is identical to a bill I introduced in the 92d Congress, and during the hearings which I chaired, it was shown time and time again by hundreds of concerned and sometimes irate citizens who communicated with us that they were anxious indeed about the preservation and protection of their personal privacy. But they were only a small sample of a much larger number of Americans who are similarly situated and similarly motivated. Recent surveys had demonstrated to the satisfaction of the subcommittee that an overwhelming number of U.S. citizens feared the regulation of their lives by computers and ancillary electronic hardware.

I believe that there is a profound need for all-encompassing review and recommendations for control of Federal prying and snooping into the private lives of American citizens. Recent abuses by Government prosecutors in the Ellsberg case are perhaps a classical case of the individual's personal rights being violated by an overzealous, all-powerful, and in this case, unlawful bureaucracy.

Mr. Speaker, the time has come for the Congress to legislate greater safeguards to protect the American's essential right to privacy. For, as perhaps the most astute of the framers of our Constitution, James Madison, warned us:

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."

Mr. HUNGATE. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be able to speak today on an issue which reaches to the very fibers of our democratic system-the right to privacy. This right is both one of the most important and most pervasive rights of the citizen, and it is a right very often easily overlooked by a government pursuing one mission or another. Custody of the individual's information resources now seems to be in the hands of unseen and unknown administrators, bureaucrats, and computer operators.

The issue of privacy has been in the forefront of governmental activity for almost three decades now. Concern for individual privacy has long existed in Missouri. In 1959, Senator Tom Hennings of Missouri held hearings on the encroachment of the Federal Government into the privacy of its citizens, which stated:

"Anybody who uses a telephone does so at his own risk and in effect, anyone who engages in conversation surrenders his right of privacy to anyone else who manages to overhear what he says... This probably is sound legal doctrine in any police state. . . but neither the United States nor any of the sovereign States have yet gone totalitarian."

In 1968, his successor in the Senate, Edward V. Long, commented:

"The right of privacy encompasses the freedom of the individual to share or withhold from others, according to his own selection, his thoughts, his beliefs, his emotions, his actions, and his past. It is an affirmative claim to human dignitya claim to an inviolate personality."

His successor, Senator Tom Eagleton, has a distinguished record on behalf of individual liberties, and protection of their necessary adjunct, a free press. Last year, 1973, he introduced the News Source Protection Act, which would assert "The privilege against compulsory disclosure of sources of confidential information is not so much a privilege for the press as it is a privilege for the public." In 1970, many people were referring to the U.S. Census as the "1970 inquisition." A concerned Missouri citizen wrote to Senator Ervin concerning the census: "In a true Republic such delving into private lives would not even be considered Our hope lies with a few men of common sense, such as yourself, and the overwhelming desire of the majority of the citizenry for a return to the precepts of our founding fathers."

It is high time legislation is enacted to begin to guarantee the right of privacy as it rightfully should be. When the next census is taken, for example, we should be interested in counting people and not toilets and televisions.

Recognizing the need of a government for information does not recognize a governmental right willfully and randomly to invade one's privacy and then treat such information as another computer file. On February 19, 1974, I was more than happy to cosponsor H.R. 13880, introduced by our distinguished colleague, Ed Koch. There has perhaps not been a better time in our history to begin to reassert our system's values and to once again guarantee protection for those "unalienable rights" we often treat as mere rhetoric.

Mr. BAUMAN. Mr. Speaker, much is said and written about privacy and the degree to which it is abridged in this day and age. But too little attention is given

to the root cause of the loss of so much of our individual privacy; the inexorable expansion of Federal agencies and bureaucracy.

From the Census Bureau to the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, in scores of Federal agencies and bureaus, the amount and type of personal, private information which is required of an individual by the government is enormous. Many of you will recall a controversy several years ago when the Census Bureau sent out forms to thousands of citizens across the country requiring them to inform the Federal Government, under penalty of law, about how many toilets they had in their homes, and whether they were indoor or outdoor. Many more serious disclosures of personal, private information are required of our citizens daily by Federal edict.

A great deal of legislation has been introduced in the Congress which attempts to minimize the invasions of privacy which these Federal agency requirements produce. But while I would certainly endorse many of these efforts, I believe we should come to grips with the facts that they are a natural byproduct of the size and power of big government. As government has grown, and it has grown at a staggering rate, so too has governmental invasion of privacy.

One who knows well the insatiable appetite of the Federal bureaucracy for personal data is the former Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Howard Phillips. Mr. Phillips now directs a project known as Public Monitor at the American Conservative Union, and he has prepared the following brief commentary on the subject of government bureaucracy and the right to privacy. [The information follows:]

BUREAUCRACY A THREAT TO PRIVACY

(By Howard Phillips)

Intrusions on the privacy of each citizen increase as the size and power of government increase. For every "benefit" we receive, there is a corresponding surrender of independence.

A bureaucracy which delivers social services is in a position to insist that the recipients of such services entrust to the agents of bureaucracy even the most personal information about their medical histories and family lives. Students whose education is underwritten with Federal dollars must respond to questionnaires which spell out their inner values and aspirations. Beneficiaries of government-backed credit must fully disclose the records of their financial history. Further, when we rely on government, whether for food stamps or aspirin or legal services, how free can we be to challenge excessive intrusions? If the outreach worker helped us get a hospital bed when we needed it, might we not lose access to future help if we declined to acquiesce in a recommended sterilization procedure?

He who pays the piper calls the tune. Whatever government "gives" in services, it takes away from our opportunity to define the course of our private lives. The government which subsidizes defines the terms on which the subsidy may be provided.

Privacy increases as bureaucratic power declines.

Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the gentlemen from California (Mr. Goldwater and Mr. Edwards), the gentlemen from New York (Mr. Horton and Mr. Koch) and the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Moorhead) for bringing this critical issue before the Congress.

For it is up to us here in the peoples' branch of Government to act quickly to protect the people of this Nation from the already too numerous encroachments upon their personal privacy.

It is frightening enough for a public official to realize that he is not only under constant public scrutiny, but that many aspects of our private lives are being watched-often illegally-day and night. But when I read of the lists and prac tices of various means of keeping tabs on millions of our constituents, then I am indeed alarmed about the future of the individual in this Nation which was founded and dedicated to individualism.

Too often we hear the claims that notions of privacy are inconsistent with the needs of a huge, technocratic, bureaucratized society. Yet it is only because we have allowed this Nation to become so huge, so technology-oriented, so bureaucratized that these assaults on privacy have increased.

And so, while I strongly endorse the need for positive legislative action to restore individual privacy, I also warn that this action cannot come within a vacuum-and that we must analyze also what caused the loss of privacy and what

ethical and institutional changes must also be accomplished before we realize this important goal.

Mr. O'BRIEN. Mr. Speaker, one of the most basic rights a citizen has, the right to personal privacy, has fallen to a deplorable state. As Senator Long so succinctly stated:

"Modern Americans are so exposed, peered at, inquired about and spied upon as to be increasingly without privacy, members of a naked society."

This speech was delivered to the Association of Federal Investigators on February 25, 1965, more than 9 years ago.

Since then, private insurance and credit agencies and such governmental agencies as the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and social security have gathered together scraps of information until today, there are dossiers on more than 100 million Americans.

The widespread use of computers with their vast capacity for compiling, storing, and swiftly retrieving these records compounds the problem.

One aspect of the privacy question that has attracted high level attention is the maintenance of criminal history records.

Each year an estimated 50 million Americans are arrested for some violation of the law. In 20 to 30 percent of these cases, charges are dropped immediately. In addition, 2 million of the 8.7 million arrested for nontraffic violations are not convicted.

The arrest information is diligently filed with one or several local, State, or Federal computer data banks. However, the record rarely shows the actual disposition of the case.

This sort of inaccuracy can cost a person his reputation, job opportunities or a legitimate credit rating. Even when a file is sealed or destroyed at one data bank, there is no guarantee that the information is not available at another bank. The reason is that data banks pass information from one to another similar to the Biblical woman who spread rumors like feathers in the wind.

The same problems apply to school records and financial histories that also follow a person through life. In many cases, individuals do not even know these records are kept. Even when they do, the subjects of the files have difficulty gaining access to the file and cannot challenge the accuracy of information it contains. Ironically, anyone labeling himself a "potential employer" or "potential landlord" has easy access and can study these records at length.

Such insidious invasions of personal privacy shake the very foundation of our constitutional right "to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation and to be confronted with the witnesses against" us.

For these reasons, I introduced H.R. 11245 and cosponsored H.R. 9935, two pieces of legislation designed to correct at least some of the abuses of privacy. The first of these, entitled the Fair Information Practices Act, would: forbid the maintenance of secret personal data systems; provide a means for an individual to find out what information about him is contained in a record and how it is used; allow the subject to prevent information about him collected for one purpose to be used for another without his consent; and give the subject a means for correcting or amending records containing identifiable information about him. Furthermore, any organization creating, maintaining, using or disseminating records of identifiable personal data would have to assure the reliability of the data for its intended use and would have to take precautions against misuses of the data.

The second bill forbids inspection of income tax returns by any Federal agency except under a Presidential order expressly identifying the person who filed the return.

As my colleagues may remember, the Secretary of Agriculture was granted permission last year to authorize any departmental employee to inspect a farmer's tax returns to determine the size of his farming operation. Fortunately, President Nixon recently rescinded that permission.

This bill would reduce the possibility of such wholesale examination of tax returns in the future for purposes other than collecting taxes.

These measures would safeguard citizens against snooping practices that reduce life to a fishbowl existence. Therefore I urge your support for this legislation. Mr. BURGENER. Mr. Speaker, one of America's great champions of individual freedom and liberty is Senator Barry Goldwater, of Arizona. He is looked upon as a symbol of leadership and good judgment in Washington. Recently, he testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights on his concern over the right to privacy in America. It is an eloquent statement. This message should

be read by all, especially by those of us in the Congress empowered by the people to legislate protections of human liberty.

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to include Senator Goldwater's statement with my remarks:

[The statement follows:]

WHO WILL PROGRAM THE PROGRAMMERS?

(Testimony by Senator BARRY GOLDWATER before the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, March 6, 1974)

Mr. Chairman, it is a pleasure to join you today in your latest hearings on the subject of Computers and Privacy, a matter which I believe you investigated extensively in 1971. Though the primary focus of your current hearings is upon the use of criminal justice data banks, I know you are interested in the general subject of personal data bank systems and the ominous trend to national population numbering.

Mr. Chairman, I will devote my testimony to this broader subject because I have introduced legislation, S. 2810, which is now pending before this subcommittee, to establish safeguards for the individual regarding the keeping, use and accuracy of automated personal data systems of all types. The credit for having initiated the bill should honestly fall upon the shoulders of my son, Congressman Goldwater, Jr., who first introduced it in the House last September.

Mr. Chairman, we are not speaking about an alarmist's flight of fantasy. The computer era is already upon us. There are currently 150,000 computers in use in the United States, and some 350.000 remote data terminals. Conservative estimates indicate that there will be 250,000 computers and 800,000 terminals by 1975. Over 10% of all business expenditures on new plant and equipment in America is currently spent on the computer and its subsidiary systems.

Revolutionary changes in data storage have taken place or are imminent. Computer storage devices now exist which make it entirely practicable to record thousands of millions of characters of information, and to have the whole of this always avalable for insant retrieval. For example, the National Academy of Sciences reported in 1972 "that it is technologically possible today, especially with recent advances in mass storage memories, to build a computerized, on-line file containing the compacted equivalent of 20 pages of typed information about the personal history and selected activities of every man, woman, and child in the United States, arranging the system so that any single record could be retrieved in about 30 seconds."

On larger systems today, the basic unit of time measurement is the nanosecond-one billionth of a second. It is hard for us to conceive but one nanosecond is to one second what one second is to 33 years!

Distance is no obstacle. Communications circuits, telephone lines, radio waves, even laser beams, can be used to carry information in bulk at speeds which can match the computer's own. Cross-country, trans-Atlantic, and inter-stellar transmission between computer units is now feasible.

Time sharing is normal. The time sharing systems with which we are familiar today are adequate for up to 200 users who are working at the same time. But we are now hearing of a system whereby it is feasible for there to be several thousands of simultaneous users of terminals.

An international body of experts who surveyed this subject in 1971 concluded that it is likely that, within the next 20 years, most of the recorded information in the world will be on computers and more than half the telephone calls will be communications to and from computers.

What does all this mean to you and me? How are we personally involved or associated with these developments? All we have to do is think of our daily lives. Details of our health, our education, our employment, our taxes, our telephone calls, our insurance, our banking and financial transactions, pension contributions, our books borrowed, our airline and hotel reservations, our professional societies, our family relationships, all are being handled by computers right now.

As to strictly governmental records, it was calculated in 1967 that there were over 3.1 billion records on individual Americans stored in at least 1,755 different types of Federal agency files. Need I remind anyone that unless these computers, both government and private, are specifically programmed to erase unwanted history, these details from our past can at any time be reassembled to confront us?

Also, I might mention census data, which most of us think as being sacrosanct. Even census statistics, forbidden by law from disclosure in identifiable form, can be quite revealing.

The Census Bureau operates a popular line of business selling statistical summaries broken down into census tracts covering urban neighborhoods as small as a thousand families each. Any person or any organization can purchase this information which, while not containing specific names, does give a detailed outline of a small sector of the population, with size and type of housing, the way people travel to work, their type of work, their ages and sexes, all in a given neighborhood.

This information could be very valuable to those who would manipulate or influence social conduct. Matching other lists which already exist, relatively simple computing equipment can enable anyone wanting to know to determine the location of all persons in a small category. Thus, we can lose our anonymity without knowing it. Without our awareness, we become vulnerable to the possibility that this information can be put to use by administrative planners or policy makers for purposes of our social manipulation or conditioning.

If this were not enough, I might remind my colleagues that in 1966, the then Bureau of the Budget brought before Congress a comprehensive proposal to create a vast computerized national data center which would serve at least 20 different federal agencies. The people who proposed and evaluated this recommendation for the government, testified at House hearings on the matter that there was no way to avoid keeping records about specific individuals and individual attributes in this data center. Each of the government witnesses admitted that the records that would be included in the central data bank would leave a trail back to particular individuals.

Although this idea was put aside for the moment, after being exposed in the glare of Congressional scrutiny, the time to think about the future is now. We must design the safeguards, and set the standards, of personal privacy now while a national numbering system is still only a mental concept. We must program the programmers while there is still some personal liberty left.

The question we must face was posed by Malcolm Warner and Michael Stone, a behavioral scientists and a computer scientist, who ask in their book, The Data Bank Society:

"If one central source has all the data concerning our life history, and is bent upon regulating our behavior to conform to the prescribed goals of society, how can this be opposed? Only by the society demanding that sufficient thought be taken before the threat becomes a fait accompli.

What these writers recognize is that a welfare-statism society, in order to control its members, needs information. Total control requires total information. On the basis of this information, conclusions can be drawn, plans can be made, for directing us.

Other writers reach the same conclusion. Paul Muller and H. Kulhmann, writing in the International Social Science Journal, conclude that:

"Integrated information-back systems, at least looked at from the aspect of privacy, might bring with them the imminent danger of a one-sided alternation of the relationship between institutions and individuals, with the possibility of the individual's becoming open to scrutiny by the institutions, while the institutions themselves remained as complex and 'inscrutible' as before.

...

Mr. Chairman, what we must alert to is that the computer society could come about almost by accident, as computers proliferate and integrate.

We did not start to build a nationwide telegraph network in the 1840's only independent telegraph links. But it was not long before we had an integrated national network.

We did not start to build a nationwide telephone system in the 1890's. Yet, today we have a highly integrated telephone network.

Automated information systems have the same qualities as communications systems. It is cheaper to share information by tying together independent systems than by building a great number of duplicative systems.

Thus, we are building today the bits and pieces of separate automated information systems in the private and government sectors that closely follow the pattern to the present integrated communication structure. The direction of growth is clear. Increasingly, data stored in computer memory banks is being shared by several users. Independent credit systems built to cover small areas find it economical to cross-connect. Airline systems swap information back and forth to get reservation information on individuals.