Data Vampire

Edgy, spirited and serious is the debate currently under way in Washington before the subcommittee investigating the invasion of privacy and threats to individual liberty posed by the U.S. Budget Bureau's proposed National Data Center. This computerized fact vampire, as House Subcommittee Chairman Cornelius Gallagher and some others view it, would thirstily suck up data about millions of Americans from some 20 separate Government bureaus ranging, from the Social Security Administration and the Federal Reserve Board to the Census and Internal Revenue Bureaus, which already possess vast information stockpiles of their own.

No Second Chance. What would be included? Virtually everything, from a man's school records to his employment history, from his traffic violations to his religious affiliations, from his military service to his credit rating. Those who resent this computer snoopery decry it as "a great, expensive, electronic garbage pail" that defiles every American's right to keep his private life private. Representative Gallagher goes so far as to predict that private homes will have to take the same precautions that embassies are forced to take now: "The essential ingredients of life will be carried on in soundproof, peep-proof, prefabricated rooms where, hopefully, no one will be able to spy, but where life won't be worth living."

This is a lot of emotional nonsense, argue the proponents of the centralized data bank. Testified the Budget Bureau's Raymond Bowman: "This is a way to improve storage of and access to information for statistical uses. It would not have an interest in building up dossiers on individuals." A vigorous opponent of the data center, Vance Packard (The Hidden Persuaders), cited a case in which a department store refused to hire a man because his computerized record showed that at the age of 13 he had stolen $2 worth of fishing line. Argued Packard: "The Christian notion of the possibility of redemption is incomprehensible to the computer." Seconded Charles A: Reich, Yale professor of constitutional law: "We are establishing a doctrine of no second chance, no forgiveness, one life, one chance only."

Neither Packard nor Reich apparently fully realizes the versatility of a computer. In its own way it can even be programmed for Christian redemption, taught to forget in any desired period of time. But until Congress is convinced that adequate safeguards for protecting the individual's privacy are in force, the Budget Bureau is likely to make little headway. "We are all concerned about the dropout of today," said Gallagher. "But I'm interested in the computer reject of tomorrow."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.