ALAWON: American Library Association Washington Office Newsline Volume 11, Number 93 November 20, 2002 In This Issue: [1] Homeland Security Act Passes Senate [2] TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS PROGRAM - T.I.A. [1] Homeland Security Act Passes Senate Late on November 19, 2002, the Senate passed HR 5005 (Engrossed Amendment as Agreed to by Senate), the Homeland Security Act of 2002,in a 90 to 9 vote. The same bill (with a few technical differences) was passed by the House of Representatives on November 13th. A similar bill was passed by the House last summer in a 385 to 3 vote. There are not enough differences between the House and Senate versions that there will be a need to be a conference the bill between the two sides of Congress before President Bush signs it into law. The legislation raises many troubling questions as well as confusion and curiosity over how the new department will be created and the act implemented. One of several troubling aspects of this legislation creates an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for critical information infrastructure (CII) voluntarily submitted by industry. The end result of the CII provisions in the final version would: * allow industry to decide and designate - including orally - what constitutes "critical infrastructure information" that will be kept secret; * impose a financial and/or criminal penalty on any official at the new department who discloses the voluntarily submitted materials (giving industry-designated information more protection than most information classified by the government); * empower the federal government to trump any state's own FOIA protections; * provide legal immunity prohibiting the government (federal, state or local) or anyone else from taking any action against an information provider based on the materials it submits. ALA worked closely with a coalition of public access and accountability groups, environmental organizations, and reporters and other news groups to fight these provisions. The bill passed by the Senate did not contain the Daschle-Lieberman amendment, which had been voted down by senators earlier in the day. If the Daschle-Lieberman amendment had passed it would have stripped out of the revised bill (that easily passed the House last week) disputed provisions including lawsuit protections for makers of vaccines and for airport security companies, and an erased ban on the new Homeland Security Department's awarding contracts to U.S. corporations that have moved their headquarters abroad. The Daschle-Lieberman amendment would also have restored some accountability by requiring that advisory committees created in the new department come under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires that the meetings of such groups be announced in the Federal Register and be open unless advance notice and reason is given for closing them. ALA joined with other organizations in a letter asking for support of the amendment. The full text of the letter can be found on our website at: http://www.ala.org/washoff. Other provisions of the legislation to be scrutinized by ALA as we conduct a review of the final version of the legislation include: * Internet provisions that ease the way for online service providers to supply additional information about subscribers without court orders; * Increased criminal penalties for hackers that "cause or attempt to cause deaths;" * New authority for law enforcement to trace emails without first having to get a court order when there is "an immediate threat to national security;" * Overall impact on access to government information from the 22 agencies being wrapped into the new department of homeland security; * Dramatic changes to FOIA policies and whistleblower protections. Additionally we will review three positive provisions in the House bill promoted by Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX) including a) rejection of a national identification card, b) a ban on the Terrorist Information Prevention System, or Operation TIPS, a scuttled Justice Department plan for citizen informers; and c) the creation of a privacy officer for the proposed Homeland Security Department. In addition to ensuring compliance with the 1974 Privacy Act, the officer would be responsible for assessing the privacy impact of proposed departmental rules and uses of technology. We will provide subsequent reports on this and other end-of-Congress legislation in future ALAWONs and on our web pages. Stay tuned for more on this and related issues. [2] TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS PROGRAM - T.I.A. ALA has joined with other groups including the Electronic Privacy and Information Center (EPIC), the Eagle Forum and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to protest the establishment of a new Pentagon program, the Total Information Awareness project (T.I.A.) headed by retired Admiral John Poindexter, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). While this is not part of the Homeland Security legislation, there has been considerable attention focused on this attempt to essentially conduct electronic "surveillance of the world." According to its proponents, T.I.A. will collect and data-mine huge amounts of information about the American public ranging from telephone records to medical and educational records. It would also link to massive amounts of biometric identification information. The coalition letter denouncing the T.I.A. project read in part: There are no systems of oversight or accountability contemplated in the T.I.A. project. DARPA itself has resisted lawful requests for information about the program pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act. Newspapers across the country have blasted the Department of Defense surveillance system. The New York Times said ...that "Congress should shut down the program pending a thorough investigation." Earlier the Washington Post wrote, "the defense secretary should appoint an outside committee to oversee it before it proceeds." We urge you to act immediately to stop the development of this unconstitutional system of public surveillance. The full text of the letter is at: http://www.ala.org/washoff. ****** ALAWON (ISSN 1069-7799) is a free, irregular publication of the American Library Association Washington Office. All materials subject to copyright by the American Library Association may be reprinted or redistributed for noncommercial purposes with appropriate credits. To subscribe to ALAWON, send the message: subscribe ala-wo [your_firstname] [your_lastname] to listproc@ala.org or go to http://www.ala.org/washoff/alawon. To unsubscribe to ALAWON, send the message: unsubscribe ala-wo to listproc@ala.org. ALAWON archives at http://www.ala.org/washoff/alawon. ALA Washington Office, 1301 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Suite 403, Washington, D.C. 20004-1701; phone: 202.628.8410 or 800.941.8478 toll-free; fax: 202.628.8419; e-mail: alawash@alawash.org; Web site: http://www.ala.org/washoff. Executive Director: Emily Sheketoff. Office of Government Relations: Lynne Bradley, Director; Camille Bowman, Mary Costabile, Don Essex, Patrice McDermott and Miriam Nisbet. Office for Information Technology Policy: Rick Weingarten, Director; Jennifer Hendrix, Carrie Russell, Claudette Tennant. ALAWON Editor: Bernadette Murphy.