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95–498 PDF 2005

PRIVACY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES IN THE HANDS

OF THE GOVERNMENT POST-SEPTEMBER 11,

2001: RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION AND THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY AND PRIVACY ADVISORY

COMMITTEE

JOINT HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON 

COMMERCIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE LAW

AND THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE CONSTITUTION

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

AUGUST 20, 2004

Serial No. 113

Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.house.gov/judiciary 

(II)

COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY 

F. JAMES SENSENBRENNER, JR., Wisconsin, Chairman 

HENRY J. HYDE, Illinois 

HOWARD COBLE, North Carolina 

LAMAR SMITH, Texas 

ELTON GALLEGLY, California 

BOB GOODLATTE, Virginia 

STEVE CHABOT, Ohio 

WILLIAM L. JENKINS, Tennessee 

CHRIS CANNON, Utah 

SPENCER BACHUS, Alabama 

JOHN N. HOSTETTLER, Indiana 

MARK GREEN, Wisconsin 

RIC KELLER, Florida 

MELISSA A. HART, Pennsylvania 

JEFF FLAKE, Arizona 

MIKE PENCE, Indiana 

J. RANDY FORBES, Virginia 

STEVE KING, Iowa 

JOHN R. CARTER, Texas 

TOM FEENEY, Florida 

MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee 

JOHN CONYERS, JR., Michigan 

HOWARD L. BERMAN, California 

RICK BOUCHER, Virginia 

JERROLD NADLER, New York 

ROBERT C. SCOTT, Virginia 

MELVIN L. WATT, North Carolina 

ZOE LOFGREN, California 

SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas 

MAXINE WATERS, California 

MARTIN T. MEEHAN, Massachusetts 

WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts 

ROBERT WEXLER, Florida 

TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin 

ANTHONY D. WEINER, New York 

ADAM B. SCHIFF, California 

LINDA T. SA ́ NCHEZ, California

PHILIP G. KIKO, Chief of Staff-General Counsel 

PERRY H. APELBAUM, Minority Chief Counsel 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON COMMERCIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE LAW

CHRIS CANNON, Utah Chairman

HOWARD COBLE, North Carolina 

JEFF FLAKE, Arizona 

JOHN R. CARTER, Texas 

MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee 

STEVE CHABOT, Ohio 

TOM FEENEY, Florida 

MELVIN L. WATT, North Carolina 

JERROLD NADLER, New York 

TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin 

WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts 

ANTHONY D. WEINER, New York

RAYMOND V. SMIETANKA, Chief Counsel 

SUSAN A. JENSEN, Counsel 

DIANE K. TAYLOR, Counsel 

JAMES DALEY, Full Committee Counsel 

STEPHANIE MOORE, Minority Counsel 

(III)

SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE CONSTITUTION

STEVE CHABOT, Ohio, Chairman

STEVE KING, Iowa 

WILLIAM L. JENKINS, Tennessee 

SPENCER BACHUS, Alabama 

JOHN N. HOSTETTLER, Indiana 

MELISSA A. HART, Pennsylvania 

TOM FEENEY, Florida 

J. RANDY FORBES, Virginia 

JERROLD NADLER, New York 

JOHN CONYERS, JR., Michigan 

ROBERT C. SCOTT, Virginia 

MELVIN L. WATT, North Carolina 

ADAM B. SCHIFF, California

PAUL B. TAYLOR, Chief Counsel 

E. STEWART JEFFRIES, Counsel 

HILARY FUNK, Counsel 

MINDY BARRY, Full Committee Counsel 

DAVID LACHMANN, Minority Professional Staff Member 

(V)

C O N T E N T S 

AUGUST 20, 2004

OPENING STATEMENT 

Page 

The Honorable Chris Cannon, a Representative in Congress From the State 

of Utah, and Chairman, Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative 

Law ........................................................................................................................ 1

The Honorable Melvin L. Watt, a Representative in Congress From the State 

of North Carolina, and Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Commercial 

and Administrative Law ...................................................................................... 3

The Honorable Steve Chabot, a Representative in Congress From the State 

of Ohio, and Chairman, Subcommittee on the Constitution ............................ 5

The Honorable Jerrold Nadler, a Representative in Congress From the State 

of New York, and Ranking Member, Subcommittee on the Constitution ....... 6

WITNESSES 

The Honorable Lee H. Hamilton, Vice Chair, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States 

Oral Testimony ..................................................................................................... 11

Prepared Statement ............................................................................................. 14

The Honorable Slade Gorton, Commission Member, National Commission 

on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States 

Oral Testimony ..................................................................................................... 12

Prepared Statement ............................................................................................. 14

The Honorable John O. Marsh, Jr., on behalf of the U.S. Department of 

Defense Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee 

Oral Testimony ..................................................................................................... 15

Prepared Statement ............................................................................................. 18

Ms. Nuala O’Connor Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer, U.S. Department of Homeland Security 

Oral Testimony ..................................................................................................... 49

Prepared Statement ............................................................................................. 51

APPENDIX 

Prepared Statement by the Honorable Chris Cannon, a Representative in 

Congress From the State of Utah and Chairman, Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, Commmittee on the Judiciary .................... 79

Prepared Statement by the Honorable Steve Chabot, a Representative in 

Congress From the State of Ohio, and Chairman, Subcommittee on the 

Constitution .......................................................................................................... 80

Prepared Statement by the Honorable Jerrold Nadler, a Representative in 

Congress From the State of New York, and Ranking Member, Subcommittee on the Constitution ............................................................................ 81

(1)

PRIVACY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES IN THE 

HANDS OF THE GOVERNMENT POST-SEPTEMBER 11, 2001: RECOMMENDATIONS OF 

THE 9/11 COMMISSION AND THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY AND 

PRIVACY ADVISORY COMMITTEE 

FRIDAY, AUGUST 20, 2004

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON COMMERCIAL

AND ADMINISTRATIVE LAW, 

COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY, 

Washington, DC.

The Subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:06 a.m., in Room 

2141, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Chris Cannon [Chairman of the Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law] 

presiding. 

Mr. CANNON. The Subcommittee will come to order. I want to 

thank you all for joining us, especially our panel. 

Today, before we formally start our proceedings, Chairman 

Chabot and I wanted to sincerely thank and recognize our colleagues on both Subcommittees and on both sides of the aisle for 

taking time out of their really busy schedules—for me, it was difficult, but I know that it was for everyone else—so as to attend the 

hearing this morning. 

As many of you know, August is typically when Members of Congress return to their districts to catch up on constituent matters 

and spend time with their families. Wait a minute, do you guys 

have families? It is a time when we call it our home district work 

period. We want to thank everyone for coming out. 

In these extraordinary times, we have to undertake extraordinary measures to deal with certain pressing issues. It also goes 

without saying that we express our sincere gratitude to our esteemed witnesses, each of whom reflects the greatest hallmarks of 

public service. We appreciate your contributions to our deliberations today. 

The title of today’s hearing, ‘‘Oversight Hearing on Privacy and 

Civil Liberties in the Hands of the Government Post-September 11, 

2001: Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission and the U.S. Department of Defense Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee’’, 

which we will refer to as ‘‘TAPAC’’, clearly explains why we are 

here. 

2

As many of you know, the 9/11 Commission filed its final report 

last month. What some of you may not know, however, is that the 

report includes several recommendations intended to protect our 

citizens’ privacy and civil liberties. In addition, it recommends that 

the Federal Government set standards for the issuance of birth certificates and sources of identification such as driver’s licenses to 

promote secure identification information. 

While most media headlines have emphasized the Commission’s 

antiterrorism proposals, I believe the privacy and civil liberties recommendations are among those most critical to our Nation’s future 

and which will form part of the focus of our hearing. 

Today’s proceedings will also focus on certain recommendations 

the TAPAC Committee made regarding safeguarding informational 

privacy. By way of background, TAPAC was established by Secretary Rumsfeld as an independent, bipartisan committee to examine the privacy ramifications presented by data mining activities by 

the Defense Department. I think we all agree that Secretary Rumsfeld is to be commended for taking this initiative and for ensuring 

that TAPAC’s membership included some of our Nation’s most respected experts in the fields of constitutional and privacy law. I am 

informed that among the many luminaries who testified before 

TAPAC was our colleague from New York, Mr. Nadler. Thank you. 

Advances in technology have increasingly facilitated the collection and dissemination of personally identifiable information, but 

have also correspondingly increased the potential for misuse of 

such information. As the recently renamed Government Accountability Office observed, these advances bring substantial Federal 

information benefits, as well as increasing responsibilities and concerns. 

Interestingly, TAPAC over the course of its deliberations determined that as the Defense Department was not alone in its conduct 

of data mining activities, it was necessary for it to address this 

issue through a series of Government-wide recommendations. The 

purpose of today’s hearing is to examine the validity of these recommendations and those of the 9/11 Commission that relate to privacy and civil liberties and to determine whether they warrant a 

legislative response. 

We would especially appreciate any guidance from our witnesses 

about how the Congress, in crafting such legislation, can best protect our citizens’ privacy without compromising legitimate law enforcement and terrorism detection efforts. 

As our witnesses know, it has been 30 years since the Privacy 

Commission was established as part of the Privacy Act of 1974. I 

would be interested in having our witnesses comment on whether 

now is the time to reestablish a privacy commission that would 

specifically focus on Government privacy issues, especially given all 

the technological developments that have occurred since the Commission filed its final report in 1977 and the current state of our 

Nation’s security concerns. 

I should also note that both my Subcommittee, the Subcommittee 

on Commercial and Administrative Law, and Chairman Chabot’s 

Subcommittee, the Constitution Subcommittee, have played a 

major role with respect to protecting personal privacy and civil liberties in this era of heightened security under the leadership and 

3

guidance of Mr. Sensenbrenner, the Chairman of the full Judiciary 

Committee. 

As both the 9/11 Commission Report and the TAPAC concluded, 

it is no easy task to balance the competing goals of keeping our Nation secure and protecting the privacy rights of our Nation’s citizens. I believe that our respective Subcommittees of the Judiciary 

Committee are uniquely and best suited to study and resolve these 

issues. 

Our accomplishments, to date, include the establishment of the 

first statutorily-created privacy office in a Federal agency, namely 

the Department of Homeland Security. We have also spearheaded 

the creation of a similar office in the Justice Department, which is 

contained in the legislation now pending in the Senate. In addition, 

both my Subcommittee and the Constitution Subcommittee have 

considered and supported legislation requiring a Federal agency to 

prepare a privacy impact analysis for proposed and final rules, and 

to include this analysis in the notice of public comment issued in 

conjunction with the publication of such rules. 

I will conclude my opening remarks with a quote from one of our 

Founding Fathers. As I think you will agree, Mr. Hamilton’s observations and warnings—and here we are dealing with the earlier 

Mr. Hamilton—are as meaningful today as they were when he 

wrote them more than 200 years ago. ‘‘Safety from external danger 

is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent 

love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual 

effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil 

and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing 

to run the risk of being less free.’’ I will now turn to my colleague, Mr. Watt, the distinguished 

Ranking Member of my Subcommittee and ask him if he has any 

opening remarks. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Cannon follows in the Appendix] 

Mr. WATT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank the Chairman of 

this Committee and the Chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee for deciding to have a hearing on the issues involved 

today and to do it jointly so that we do not end up duplicating efforts and pulling in different directions possibly. 

I would like to start really by expressing thanks to the witnesses 

for being here today. And by expressing a special thanks to Lee 

Hamilton and Slade Gordon, the members of the Commission, for 

the outstanding job that they did under some very, very, very difficult circumstances; and getting through the process without any 

appearance of partisanship, and being single-focused on the issue 

at hand, which was protecting American citizens and others from 

terrorism. 

Who knows where the recommendations of the Commission will 

go? And it is hard to even contemplate where they may go legislatively or administratively. But the thing that I think is most important is that before they go anywhere, we understand exactly what 

the recommendations are and have a better understanding of all of 

the implications of the recommendations. 

4

I sense that several Committees have headed off in the direction 

of dealing only with the security side of the balance that must be 

struck. And I think it is our obligation in this Committee not only 

to look at the security side, but to be ever cognizant of the privacy 

implications and the personal liberty implications of what is being 

done. And the only way we can do that is to really have hearings 

about what is being proposed and what we should be implementing. 

I am extremely encouraged that the Commission recognize this 

delicate balance itself in its recommendations, making three specific recommendations pertaining to the protection of civil liberties. 

First, the report calls for the President to ‘‘safeguard the privacy 

of individuals about whom information is shared among intelligence and investigation agencies.’’ Second, the report requires that in order to retain a particular 

governmental power, the executive first demonstrate that the 

‘‘power actually materially enhances security,’’ and that adequate 

oversight exist ‘‘to ensure protection of civil liberties.’’ so it is very 

apparent that the Commission is already wrestling with what the 

appropriate balance should be between safeguarding our citizens by 

protecting them from terrorism and, on the other hand, safeguarding our citizens by protecting them against overstepping by 

governmental agencies who say that they have our interests at 

heart. 

So that is a very delicate balance which I think this hearing can 

only enlighten the American public on and enlighten the Members 

of this Committee on as we move forward, and enlighten our colleagues in the broader House and Senate as we move forward. 

Finally, the report recommends the creation of a board within 

the executive branch to oversee adherence to the guidelines, and it 

recommends the commitment the Government makes to defend 

civil liberties. So that board is again supposed to walk that delicate 

balance between adhering to the guidelines and recommending a 

commitment to defend civil liberties. And I think that is absolutely 

critical as we move forward. 

So I am delighted that the Chairman has convened this hearing 

for the purpose of discussing, and I hope nobody takes this as any 

indication that we in this Committee are not as committed to the 

defense of our citizens from terrorism, rather that they take it as 

an equal commitment that we understand the historical imperative, the constitutional imperative of also safeguarding the security 

and individual rights and privacy of citizens as we authorize the 

Government to take the actions that are necessary to safeguard us 

against terrorism. 

That is going to be a very, very delicate balance to walk. And if 

we are going to do it, this is the place to start, right here in the 

Committee on the Judiciary, in the Constitution Subcommittee, in 

the Commerce and Administrative Law Subcommittee where it is 

our responsibility to look at these issues and make some very difficult choices. 

I thank the Chairman and the members of the Commission and 

our other witnesses for being here to enlighten us on where that 

delicate balance should be. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

5

Mr. CANNON. Thank you, Mr. Watt. 

Mr. CANNON. Mr. Watt and I have, on occasion, disagreed very 

sharply, and by ‘‘sharply,’’ meaning he has a very sharp mind and 

it is hard to disagree with him. 

On the other hand, there are many issues where we do not disagree at all and this is one of those areas where we have difficult 

issues and we may differ on some points, but we will come up with, 

I hope, some thoughtful resolutions. So I want to thank the minority Ranking Member. 

I would also like to thank Mr. Chabot for being here today and 

his Ranking Member, Mr. Nadler. 

Mr. Chabot, would you like to make a statement? 

Mr. CHABOT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I first of all want to 

thank you for holding this hearing, as well as Mr. Watt, Mr. Nadler, the Ranking Member on the Subcommittee that I have the 

good fortune to chair; and I want to thank all of my Committee 

Members who are in attendance today. And I want to offer a special welcome to all of the witnesses, but especially the Honorable 

Congressman Hamilton whose district in Indiana abutted mine in 

the southwest corner of Ohio, in the time that I have been in Congress, for a number of years. 

Lee was also the Chairman of the Committee on International 

Relations and served for many years with distinction. When my 

party took over in 1994, he was the Ranking Member for the time 

that I served here, but nonetheless he served with great distinction. He was really a role model for many of us, especially in the 

area of international affairs. So I want to thank him for his leadership in that respect. 

Also, Senator Gorton, who served the people of Washington for 

so many years so well. I want to thank all of the witnesses for 

being here today. 

I want to thank especially Senator Gorton and Senator Hamilton 

for the last 20 months that they have served on the 9/11 Commission. Our Nation owes you a great debt of gratitude for your work, 

and I am confident that we will all benefit from your expertise here 

this morning and in the future as we implement all or most of the 

recommendations that you have made. 

As we know far too well, September 11 changed our world. It 

changed the way in which we must deal with terrorism and the 

way in which we as a country must protect ourselves. Since that 

tragic day, Congress and the Administration have taken steps to 

help better protect our Nation at home and abroad. Through passage of the PATRIOT Act and the creation of the Department of 

Homeland Security, we have provided law enforcement with enhanced investigative tools and improved our ability to coordinate 

abilities designed to protect against the future threat of terrorism. 

And make no mistake, that threat continues to face our Nation. 

Through the heroic actions of the brave men and women serving 

in our Armed Forces, we have also pursued the terrorists and those 

who assist them in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet these actions are not enough to guarantee our Nation’s security or freedom. 

This can only be accomplished through continued vigilance and 

willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. We must continue to 

6

improve our intelligence capability, strengthen our defenses and always be a step ahead of our enemies. 

To help accomplish these critical goals, it is imperative that Congress provide a comprehensive and expeditious review of the 9/11 

Commission recommendations and then move forward with initiatives that will further improve our ability to combat terrorism and 

defend our citizens. 

As the Commission notes, we must also be mindful of the protections afforded by our Constitution and our need to guard those protections as we work to better protect our country. Ignoring important civil liberties will not only erode our freedoms, but will undermine efforts to increase our security. These challenges are not new, 

and our two Subcommittees have been extensively involved in 

these issues over the last couple of years. 

In the PATRIOT Act, for example, we worked to include protective measures such as a sunset provision to strengthen congressional oversight. When authorizing the Department of Homeland 

Security, a privacy officer position was established to examine the 

implications of the agency’s rules and regulations on privacy and 

to address any issues that may result. 

I look forward, as I know the other Members do, to discussing 

the Commission’s recommendations with our witnesses today in determining what Congress can do to better protect the privacy of our 

citizens. I particularly look forward to hearing from our panel their 

views on the Federal Agency Privacy Protection Act of 2004, which 

passed the House during the 107th Congress and was recently 

voted out of the full Judiciary Committee. It was back on, I believe, 

July 7. 

I believe that this, which was formerly known as the Defense of 

Privacy Act, would require Federal agencies to publish privacy impact analyses when promulgating rules and regulations. I believe 

it would be an effective step forward in our efforts to protect our 

country and our privacy rights. 

As we move forward, it is important to remember that having effective antiterrorism measures does not necessarily compromise the 

protections afforded by our Constitution, as one is not the enemy 

of the other. The enemy is terrorism. 

I yield back my time and thank the Chairman once again for 

holding this hearing. 

Mr. CANNON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank you for that 

opening statement. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Chabot follows in the Appendix] 

Mr. CANNON. Mr. Nadler, would you like to make an opening 

statement? 

Mr. NADLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, given 

the importance of this matter and the fact that nearly 3 years have 

elapsed since the attacks of September 11, I am pleased that we 

have returned to consider the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission now without waiting, as some have suggested, until next 

year. 

I want to welcome our former colleagues Representative Hamilton and Senator Gorton and to thank them for the important 

work they and their colleagues have done. 

7

I am also pleased that we have Secretary Marsh here today. The 

issues that gave rise to the Secretary’s Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee are also implicated in the Committee’s recommendation, so it is important that we have the benefit of our 

work. 

Finally, I want to welcome back Ms. O’Connor Kelly. The 9/11 

Commission has recommended in somewhat general terms that we 

set up a civil liberties oversight board. The TAPAC commission has 

similarly recommended that the Secretary of Defense create a policy level privacy officer. Congress will have to work out the details. 

I hope that your experience as the privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security can shed some light on how we might 

ensure the independence and effectiveness of the offices created 

pursuant to these recommendations. 

The need to improve capabilities and coordination within the intelligence and law enforcement communities was all too well demonstrated on September 11. Thousands of innocent citizens who did 

nothing more than board an aircraft or go to work were 

barbarically slaughtered. We ignored our Nation’s peril, the lesson 

we can draw from the intelligence failures leading up to those 

crimes and from other recent intelligence fiascoes. 

At the same time, increased Government powers carry with them 

increased threats to the rights of all citizens. We expect our Government to keep it safe, but we are also a nation with a healthy 

mistrust of unfettered governmental power. 

Our whole system of Government combines limited powers with 

checks and balances that must maintained. Rights sacrificed at a 

time of emergency are often lost forever. Actions taken in the heat 

of the moment are often a source of shame and regret to later generations. So our job is to strike an appropriate and workable balance. 

That is not easy. As the members of the Commission have noted 

in their report, ‘‘While protecting our homeland, Americans should 

be mindful of threats to vital personal and civil liberties. This balancing is no easy task, but we must constantly strive to keep it 

right. This shift of power and authority to the Government calls for 

an enhanced systems of checks and balances to protect the precious 

liberties that are vital to our way of life.’’

A little further on the Commission notes, it talks in general 

terms about the provision of the PATRIOT Act and some of the 

beneficial provisions of the PATRIOT Act, and then it says, ‘‘Because of concerns regarding the shifting balance of power to the 

Government, we think that a full and informed debate on the PATRIOT Act would be healthy.’’ The Commission then makes three 

general recommendations for specific measures to balance civil liberties and national security. 

Mr. Justice Marshall in a noted decision of the Supreme Court 

200 years ago in Marbury v. Madison, a decision that has been 

somewhat criticized by one Member of this Committee, noted, and 

I am paraphrasing here because I do not have the exact quote before me, ‘‘It is emphatically the province of the judiciary to say 

what the law is.’’

And that is true. It is emphatically the province of the Judiciary 

Committee to begin the process of having Congress strike the propVerDate 0ct 09 2002 11:12 Jan 06, 2005 Jkt 089266 PO 00000 Frm 00013 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 G:\WORK\COMM\082004\95498.000 HJUD1 PsN: 95498
8

er balance between national security, homeland security, and protection of our civil liberties. That is our job. 

I appreciate the beginning guidance that the Commission has 

given us and recommended that we strike that balance, but we 

have to determine how to strike that balance. And I am glad and 

I appreciate the Chairman calling this hearing as a beginning of 

that process so we can carefully consider all of the things we have 

to consider to strike that balance, and with all deliberate speed, 

enact legislation to do that. 

So I am glad we are having this hearing and I thank you. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. CANNON. I thank the gentleman. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Nadler follows in the Appendix] 

Mr. CANNON. I would like to just point out to my co-Chair of this 

hearing, Mr. Chabot, Ranking Member Watt, and Ranking Member 

Nadler, we have worked together on issues not unlike this for some 

period of time, including the PATRIOT Act and other issues. And 

there is a genuine, I believe, feeling for doing the right thing here, 

and I hope that that will result in legislation in an area that is 

very, very difficult and improve that legislation. 

Without objection, the gentlemen’s entire statements will be 

placed in the record. Also, without objection, all Members may 

place their statements in the record at this point. Any objection? 

Hearing none, so ordered. 

Without objection, the Chair will be authorized to declare recesses of the hearing at any point. Hearing none, so ordered. 

I ask unanimous consent that Members have 5 legislative days 

to submit written statements for inclusion in today’s hearing 

record. Without objection, so ordered. 

Mr. CANNON. Now I am pleased to introduce our witnesses for today’s hearing. Our first witness is Lee Hamilton, who is Vice Chair 

of the 9/11 Commission. Former Congressman Hamilton currently 

is President and Director of the Woodrow Wilson International 

Center For Scholars. Before undertaking these responsibilities at 

the Center in 1999, Congressman Hamilton served for 34 years in 

the House, representing Indiana’s Ninth District. During his tenure, he served as Chairman and Ranking Member of the forerunner of the House Committee on International Relations and 

served on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the 

Select Committee To Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with 

Iran. 

After his tenure in Congress, he served on the Commission on 

National Security in the 21st Century, also known as the HartRudman Commission, and was co-Chair with former Senator Howard Baker of the Baker-Hamilton Commission to investigate certain security issues at Los Alamos. He is currently a member of the 

President’s Homeland Security Advisory Council. 

Mr. Hamilton is a graduate of DePauw University and Indiana 

University Law School, as well as the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and national awards for public service. And I hope 

I have said privately to Mr. Hamilton what I would like to say now 

and that is that when I came to Congress I looked around at the 

various Members of Congress to decide who I wanted to model, he 

was very clearly one of the people who I think did a remarkably 

9

good job in a complex institution; and he has been an explicit 

model in my life in my office. 

I welcome you back, Mr. Hamilton. 

Our second witness is former Senator Slade Gorton who also appears on behalf of the 9/11 Commission. Senator Gorton is currently of counsel at Preston, Gates & Ellis. Prior to joining the 

firm, he represented Washington State in the United States Senate 

for 18 years, from 1982 to 2000. While in the Senate, Mr. Gorton 

served on the Appropriations, Budget, Commerce, Science and 

Transportation, and Energy and Natural Resources Committees. 

He also chaired the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, and was 

a member of the Republican Leadership as Counsel to the Majority 

Leader. 

Senator Gorton began his political career in 1958 as a Washington State representative and then went on to serve as the State 

house majority leader. In 1968, he was elected Attorney General for 

the State of Washington where he argued 14 cases before the 

United States Supreme Court. Mr. Gorton also served on the President’s Consumer Advisory Council, as well as on many other Federal and State commissions. Most recently, Senator Gorton served 

on the National Commission on Federal Election Reform. 

Senator Gorton received his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College and his law degree from Columbia University. 

We welcome you back and appreciate your service in the Senate 

where we had some very pleasant interactions over a period of 

time. 

Our third witness is John Marsh, who appears today on behalf 

of TAPAC. Secretary Marsh, like his fellow witnesses, has served 

our Nation in a number of distinguished ways, I might just say a 

very different and a remarkable history of service, most prominently as Secretary of the Army and as the representative of Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District. After an exemplary period 

of service with the U.S. Army, Secretary Marsh received his law 

degree in 1951 from Washington and Lee University and began his 

practice of law in Strasburg, VA. Thereafter, he was elected to four 

terms of Congress from the Seventh District of Virginia and served 

on the House Appropriations Committee. 

After choosing not to seek a fifth term, Secretary Marsh resumed 

the practice of law. In 1973, however, he returned to Federal service as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs. The 

following year, he became the Assistant for National Security Affairs to Vice President Ford, and in August 1974 became Counselor, with Cabinet rank, to President Ford. He chaired the Presidential Committee for the Reorganization of the U.S. Intelligence 

Community from 1975 to 1976. 

Later sworn in as Secretary of the Army in 1981, Secretary 

Marsh served until 1989 achieving a tenure that was the longest 

of any Secretary of the Army or Secretary of War in American history. During 1988, he served concurrently as Assistant Secretary of 

Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. 

Secretary Marsh has been awarded numerous honors and decorations. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Law at George 

Mason University concentrating on cyberterrorism and national security law. He is also a member of the Special Congressional Panel 

10

on Terrorism to assess Federal, State and local response to weapons of mass destruction, known as the Gilmore Commission. 

Our final witness is Nuala O’Connor Kelly, the Chief Privacy Officer at the Department of Homeland Security. We welcome you 

back. 

As many of you know, Ms. O’Connor Kelly testified earlier this 

year as part of my Subcommittee’s continuing oversight of her office. Ms. O’Connor Kelly is especially commended for participating 

in today’s hearing as she is currently on maternity leave and having difficulty getting enough sleep. So we will send someone out for 

a coffee or a Coke if you need that at some point. 

As I previously noted in my remarks, my Subcommittee with the 

support of our Chairman, Mr. Sensenbrenner, played a major role 

in establishing Ms. O’Connor Kelly’s office at the Department of 

Homeland Security. The legislation creating her office not only 

mandated the appointment of a privacy officer, but specified the officer’s responsibilities. 

One of the principal responsibilities of the DHS privacy officer, 

as set out by statute, is the duty to assure that the use of technologies sustain and do not erode privacy protections relating to 

the use, collection and disclosure of personal information. In addition, the privacy officer must assure that personal information is 

handled in full compliance with the Privacy Act and assess privacy 

impacts with the Department’s proposed rules. 

Pursuant to this legislation, DHS Secretary Tom Ridge last year 

appointed Ms. O’Connor Kelly to serve as the Department’s Chief 

Privacy Officer. Since her appointment, Ms. O’Connor Kelly has 

played a key role in various terrorist detection initiatives undertaken by DHS. Prior to her current appointment, she served as the 

Chief Privacy Officer at the Commerce Department. 

Before entering public service, Ms. O’Connor Kelly was the Vice 

President for Data Protection and the Chief Privacy Officer for 

DoubleClick, an online media services company that made great 

headlines just prior to her taking that position. 

In that capacity, Ms. O’Connor Kelly established the company’s 

first data protection department responsible for instituting privacy 

protection policies and procedures for DoubleClick, its clients and 

partners. 

Ms. O’Connor Kelly received her undergraduate degree from 

Princeton University, a Master’s degree in Education from Harvard 

University and a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center. 

I extend my warm regards and appreciate your willingness to 

participate in today’s hearing. In light of the fact that your written 

statements will be included in the hearing record, I request that 

you limit your oral remarks to 5 minutes. Accordingly, please feel 

free to summarize or highlight the salient points of your testimony. 

You will note that we have a lighting system. I think you are all 

familiar with it. It starts at green; when 4 minutes have passed, 

it turns yellow, and then it turns red at 1 minute. We do not want 

to cut off your thinking. In fact, I would like to say this is undoubtedly the most prestigious panel I will ever—we have had two justices from the Supreme Court recently testifying on the Administrative Conference of the United States, Justices Scalia and Breyer. 

11

But there are only two of them and their history is fairly narrow 

compared with the experience we have with you. 

So if you would just recognize the 5-minute light, we would appreciate it if you would draw to a close. We will have people that 

will have the opportunity to ask questions and expand on issues. 

Everyone was here at the beginning of the hearing, so we will 

go by seniority. With Mr. Watts’ help, I will try to tap the gavel 

at 5 minutes so all Members have an opportunity to ask questions. 

If there is an interest, we may go to a second round of questions. 

Pursuant to the directive of the Chairman of the Committee on 

the Judiciary, I am going to ask the panel to stand and raise your 

right hand and take an oath. 

[Witnesses sworn.] 

Mr. CANNON. Congressman Hamilton, would you proceed with 

your testimony? 

TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE LEE H. HAMILTON, VICE 

CHAIR, NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TERRORIST ATTACKS 

UPON THE UNITED STATES 

Mr. HAMILTON. Thank you very much Chairman Cannon, Ranking Member Watt, Chairman Chabot, Ranking Member Nadler and 

the other distinguished Members of the two Subcommittees. We 

are very honored to appear before you today. 

I want to say that the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Tom 

Kean, was not able to be here today. He led the Commission with 

extraordinary skill and deserves much of the credit for the Commission’s success. 

I am very pleased to be here with Senator Gorton. He made extraordinary contributions as a Commission member. We turned to 

him again and again for advice, and it is a pleasure to be with him. 

We especially appreciate the fact that all the Members are here 

during August. I know that it is unprecedented, and we are very 

grateful to you for your interest in our work. 

I want to say that the statements made by the Chairman and 

Ranking Members of the two Subcommittees were extraordinarily 

good statements. I thank you for those. I also thank you for the 

personal sentiments that you expressed. 

Your Subcommittees, as well as your parent Committee, have a 

very long record of concern and leadership in these issues, so it is 

a very special pleasure for us to be with you. We simply point out 

that our Commission’s recommendations were unanimous. I think 

you know that. 

I think from the very beginning of the Commission’s work, about 

18 or more months ago, all of us have been very conscious of the 

need to make sure that in our zeal to fight terrorism, we do not 

compromise the very rights and liberties that make our system of 

Government and society worth defending. 

Concern about the civil liberties of American citizens was one of 

the number of reasons why the Commission rejected the idea of 

moving the domestic intelligence and counterterrorism responsibilities of the FBI out of that agency and placing them in an MI-5 

type agency. We feared that such a new agency, not steeped in respect for law and the Constitution that pervades the FBI and the 

Justice Department, and reporting to the National Intelligence DiVerDate 0ct 09 2002 11:12 Jan 06, 2005 Jkt 089266 PO 00000 Frm 00017 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 G:\WORK\COMM\082004\95498.000 HJUD1 PsN: 95498
12

rector, the Director of Central Intelligence rather than the Attorney 

General, would be more likely to trample on individual rights. 

The Commission made three major recommendations with respect to civil rights. The first dealt with the critical and complicated privacy issues that are at the heart of our new information 

society and at the heart of the necessary efforts to increase the 

amount of information gathered by our intelligence agencies and 

shared by them among themselves and with State and local law enforcement officials. 

We recommend improvements and enhancements in those information gathering abilities and in information sharing. But we also 

recognize that with the enhanced flow of information comes a need 

to establish guidelines and oversight to make sure that the privacy 

of our citizens and residents is respected and preserved. 

We did not conduct extensive investigation of our own on data 

mining and other privacy issues raised by information gathering 

and sharing. We relied very much on the Markle Task Force. I’m 

sure that work is familiar to you. We believe, along with the 

Markle Task Force, that we have the ability to gather and share 

information and protect privacy at the same time. This requires, 

however, leadership and coordination in the executive branch. 

No one agency can deal with this problem alone. We recommend 

that the President lead a Government-wide effort through OMB 

and the National Intelligence Director to set common standards for 

information use throughout the Intelligence Community. These 

standards would govern the acquisition, accessing, sharing and 

using of private data so as to protect individual rights. 

The same technology that facilitates the gathering and sharing 

of information can also protect us from the misuse of that information. And for the balance of the statement, I turn to Senator Gorton. 

TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE SLADE GORTON, COMMISSION MEMBER, NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TERRORIST ATTACKS UPON THE UNITED STATES 

Mr. GORTON. Our second major recommendation in this area relates to the USA PATRIOT Act, many of the provisions of which 

expire at the end of next year and will be the subject of hearings 

by the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. The only specific 

provisions of that act on which we expressed a view are those relating to information sharing. 

The elimination of the wall that had severely constrained the 

flow of information acquired through surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from the intelligence side of the 

FBI and to the criminal side of the Agency and to Federal prosecutors, and the broadening of the ability of the Justice Department 

to share grand jury information with other intelligence and law enforcement agencies. 

We endorse the extension of those provisions which, witnesses 

were virtually unanimous in telling us, were extremely helpful to 

law enforcement and intelligence investigations with little, if any, 

adverse impact on the rights of potential defendants. But we did 

propose a general test to be applied to consideration of the renewal 

of the other provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, and we believe 

13

that that principle should also be applied to other legislative and 

regulatory proposals designed to strengthen our security, but that 

may impinge on individual rights. 

The test is a simple but important one. The burden of proof 

should be on the proponents of the measure to establish that the 

power or authority being sought would, in fact, materially enhance 

national security, and that there will be adequate supervision of 

the exercise of that power or authority to ensure protection of civil 

liberties. If the power is granted, there must be adequate guidelines and oversight properly to confine its use. 

We think that the same spirit that informed our recommendation 

as to the burden of proof that should be applied to measures of this 

kind is also reflected in H.R. 338, recently reported out of this Subcommittee and the full Judiciary Committee. H.R. 338 requires 

Federal agencies that are proposing rules that will require the collection of personal information from individuals to conduct privacy 

impact assessments as part of their rule-making process to ensure 

that privacy interests of individuals receive attention and protection. 

The Commission, of course, takes no position on that bill. But we 

can observe that it proceeds from the same concerns that animate 

our recommendations. 

Our third recommendation flows from the first two. Individual 

rights and liberties must be adequately protected in the administration of the significant powers that Congress has granted to executive branch agencies to protect national security. There should be 

a central office or board that has the responsibility to oversee adherence guidelines that are built into these programs to safeguard 

these rights and liberties. 

We make no recommendation as to how this office or board 

should be composed or where in the executive branch it should be 

located. Some commissioners believe that it should be a permanent 

office located in the Justice Department and reporting to the Attorney General, but with oversight of the programs of the Department 

of Homeland Security and other agencies, as well as those of the 

Justice Department. Others envisage a Cabinet-level interagency 

board or committee reporting to the President. But we are all 

agreed that some entity of this kind should be created. 

And departing for just a moment from my written statement, 

both the Chairman and Mr. Watt referred to the importance of this 

vehicle. Yesterday, Mr. Lee Hamilton and I testified before the 

Senate Judiciary Committee. Thereafter, I made a contact I’d made 

previously with Senators McCain and Lieberman who are working 

on a bill to provide exactly this board. 

I went and spoke at length with the staff director of the Senate 

Commerce Committee, formerly a member of my staff, on such a 

draft. And it may well be that you would like to contact them, see 

the direction in which they are going and work together. It looked 

to me like a very constructive first draft. 

We close with an observation from our report. We must find 

ways of reconciling security with liberty since the success of one 

protects the other. The choice between security and liberty is a 

false choice as nothing is more likely to endanger America’s liberties than the success of a terrorist attack at home. Our history 

14

has shown us that insecurity threatens liberty. Yet, if our liberties 

are concerned, we lose the values that we are struggling to defend. 

We will be pleased to respond to your questions. 

Mr. CANNON. Thank you, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Gorton. 

[The prepared statement of Messrs. Hamilton and Gorton follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF LEE HAMILTON AND SLADE GORTON

Chairman Cannon, Ranking Member Watt, and other distinguished members of 

the Subcommittee: We are honored by the opportunity to appear before you today. 

We appreciate the opportunity to discuss with you the findings and recommendations of the Commission with respect to privacy and civil liberties. These Subcommittees, as well as your parent Committee, have a long record of concern with 

these issues, so it is a special pleasure to discuss with you the important question 

of how the measures we must take to protect our nation against the threat of terrorist attacks can be reconciled with the individual rights and liberties we hold so 

dear. 

We want to emphasize that the Commission’s views on these issues—as well as 

all others dealt with in our Report—were unanimous. We are five Republicans and 

five Democrats, but we are united in our commitment to make our country safer 

and more secure in the face of the novel threat posed by transnational terrorism. 

And we can report to you that from the very beginning of the Commission’s work 

some eighteen months ago, all of us have been conscious of the need to make sure 

that in our zeal to fight the scourge of terrorism we do not compromise the very 

rights and liberties that make our system of government and our society worth defending. 

Concern about the civil liberties of American citizens was one of a number of reasons why the Commission rejected the idea of moving the domestic intelligence and 

counterterrorism responsibilities of the FBI out of that agency and placing them in 

a new MI-5-type agency. We feared that such a new agency, not steeped in the respect for the law and the Constitution that pervades the FBI and the Justice Department, and reporting to the National Intelligence Director or the Director of Central Intelligence rather than to the Attorney General, would be more likely to trample on individual rights. 

The Commission made three major recommendations with respect to civil liberties. The first dealt with the critical and complicated privacy issues that are at 

the heart of our new ‘‘information society’’ and at the heart of the necessary efforts 

to increase the amount of information gathered by our intelligence agencies and 

shared by them among themselves and with state and local law enforcement officials. The Commission recommends improvements and enhancements in those information-gathering abilities and in information sharing. But we also recognize that 

with the enhanced flow of information comes a need to establish guidelines and 

oversight to make sure that the privacy of our citizens and residents is respected 

and preserved. 

We did not conduct extensive investigation of our own on data-mining and other 

privacy issues raised by information gathering and sharing. Instead, we relied on 

the excellent work done by the Markle Foundation Task Force, reflected in two reports, in 2002 and 2003. The insights of the Markle Task Force have been reinforced 

by the more recent investigation and report by the Technology and Privacy Advisory 

Committee established by Secretary Rumsfeld to advise him on the privacy implications of the Department’s Terrorism Information Awareness Program—a report that 

this Subcommittee is also focusing on today. 

We believe, along with the Markle Task Force, that we have the ability to gather 

and share information and protect privacy at the same time. But this requires leadership and co-ordination in the executive branch. No one agency can deal with this 

problem alone. Instead, we recommend that the President lead a government-wide 

effort, through OMB and the National Intelligence Director, to set common standards for information use throughout the intelligence community. These standards 

would govern the acquisition, accessing, sharing and using of private data so as to 

protect individual rights. The same technology that facilitates the gathering and 

sharing of information can also protect us from the misuse of that information. 

Our second major recommendation in this area relates to the USA PATRIOT Act, 

many of the provisions of which expire at the end of next year and will be the subject of hearings by the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. The only specific 

provisions of that Act on which we expressed a view are those relating to information-sharing: the elimination of the ‘‘wall’’ that had severely constrained the flow of 

15

information acquired through surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from the intelligence side of the FBI to the criminal side of the agency 

and to federal prosecutors, and the broadening of the ability of the Justice Department to share grand jury information with other intelligence and law enforcement 

agencies. We endorsed the extension of those provisions, which witnesses were virtually unanimous in telling us were extremely helpful to law enforcement and intelligence investigations with little if any adverse impact on the rights of potential defendants. 

But we did propose a general test to be applied to consideration of the renewal 

of other provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, and we believe that that principle 

should also be applied to other legislative and regulatory proposals that are designed to strengthen our security but that may impinge on individual rights. The 

test is a simple but important one: The burden of proof should be on the proponents 

of the measure to establish that the power or authority being sought would in fact 

materially enhance national security, and that there will be adequate supervision 

of the exercise of that power or authority top ensure protection of civil liberties. If 

the power is granted, there must be adequate guidelines and oversight to properly 

confine its use. 

We think the same spirit that informed our recommendation as to the burden of 

proof that should be applied to measures of this kind is also reflected in H.R. 338, 

recently reported out of this Subcommittee and the full Judiciary Committee. H.R. 

338 requires federal agencies that are proposing rules that will require the collection of personal information from individuals to conduct privacy impact assessments 

as part of their rulemaking process to ensure that privacy interests of individuals 

receive attention and protection. The Commission, of course, takes no position on 

that bill. But we can observe that it proceeds from the same concerns that animate 

our recommendations. 

Our third major recommendation flows from the first two. Individual rights and 

liberties must be adequately protected in the administration of the significant powers that Congress has granted to executive branch agencies to protect national security. There should be a central office or board that has the responsibility to oversee 

adherence to guidelines that are built into these programs to safeguard those rights 

and liberties. We make no recommendation as to how this office or board should be 

composed or where in the executive branch it should be located. Some Commissioners believe that it should be a permanent office located in the Justice Department and reporting to the Attorney General, but with oversight of programs in the 

Department of Homeland Security and other agencies as well as in the Justice Department. Others envision a Cabinet-level interagency board or committee, reporting to the President. But we are all agreed that some entity of this kind should be 

created. 

We close with an observation from our Report:

We must find ways of reconciling security with liberty, since the success of one 

protects the other. The choice between security and liberty is a false choice, as 

nothing is more likely to endanger America’s liberties than the success of a terrorist attack at home. Our history has shown us that insecurity threatens liberty. Yet, if our liberties are curtailed, we lose the values that we are struggling 

to defend.

We would be pleased to respond to your questions.

Mr. CANNON. Mr. Marsh. 

TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE JOHN O. MARSH, JR., MEMBER, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY AND 

PRIVACY ADVISORY COMMITTEE 

Mr. MARSH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee and leaders of the Committee. I thank you for calling this 

hearing. I would point out to you that I am here representing an 

advisory committee appointed by Secretary of Defense to the Department of Defense composed of members who gave their time to 

make this study. Therefore, I am not speaking for the Department 

of Defense of what action may or may not occur in reference to our 

recommendations, but I am very sanguine about that. 

I would also like to point out, as resource people for the committee, which I hope you will avail yourself of, the staff director of 

16

the Defense TAPAC Committee, Ms. Lisa Davis; an extraordinary 

writer, Fred Cate, who helped prepare all this testimony; a technologist and attorney, Lee Zeichner, who is here, and also the critical infrastructure protection capabilities of George Mason University where I teach and that assisted in this. 

Mr. Minow could not be here, but I can tell you he performed a 

yeoman’s task of guiding this committee, and his enormous prestige 

and ability I think is reflected in this work. 

A little history, if I might. This committee occurred because of 

what was discerned to be abuses, or concerns about abuses, largely 

outside of the Department of Defense on a common technique that 

is growing and needs to be addressed called ‘‘data mining.’’ Data 

mining is the result of massive volumes of information, either people in or out of Government or organizations, and the use of that 

data mining can be very, very helpful in the intelligence process. 

There is a dichotomy here because although the Defense Department got in trouble with the pursuit of this, nevertheless, the statute to the homeland security authorized and encouraged them to 

engage in data processing. The data processing that was occurring 

in the Pentagon was called TIA. Its original name was terrorism 

information awareness or total information awareness or terrorist 

information awareness, whichever one you want, but it raised very 

serious questions in the media and in the Congress of the United 

States. 

When that happened, Mr. Rumsfeld named this committee, and 

he gave them six questions that he wished to be answered as to 

the validity of that type of technology and whether it could be effective, and how do we protect individual liberty and privacy. 

Incidentally, I prefer the term ‘‘liberty.’’ It is a far stronger word 

than ‘‘privacy.’’ Privacy occurs because of liberty. Privacy is a subset of liberty. 

Now, these four questions were the questions to which we devoted our time and attention. And our first overtures were to TIA, 

which was being done under DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, that has done extraordinary work and is indeed the agency that developed the Internet. It became apparent 

to the committee that to address this one program, TIA, would be 

putting a finger in a dike where many, many fingers were going 

to be necessary. 

This is a widespread practice in the Federal Government and 

perhaps at State levels. A GAO survey indicated, as we were finishing up our work, that there were 88 departments and agencies 

engaged in data mining, or were planning to, that there were an 

additional 34 about to, and in all, there were 122 data mining programs ongoing in our national Government, not just in the Department of Defense. It became very apparent to us, as we began to examine people, that data mining was going on in other departments 

of Government. And there weren’t that many controls in my view 

and, I think, in the committee view as to how that should be handled. 

So what we sought to do—this report is seeking to provide some 

guidelines as to how to utilize data mining, which we think is essential only if it is used in a proper way, and we believe that it 

can be. It can use the FICE Accord. It can use technologies of miniVerDate 0ct 09 2002 11:12 Jan 06, 2005 Jkt 089266 PO 00000 Frm 00022 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 G:\WORK\COMM\082004\95498.000 HJUD1 PsN: 95498
17

mization where in order to achieve certain information you do not 

have to collect as much as you perceive that you have to collect. 

And also, there is the issue of anonymization. There are technologies today in seeking records, you can anonymize the records 

so that the people examining the records or capturing the information do not know—do not know at the time what that information 

is or they do not associate it with an individual. At a later date, 

under certain guidelines, you can unlock that and find that out. 

But one of the things, and it seems to me to be a rule, where 

U.S. persons are involved and you have a particularized area of interest in that U.S. person and you go into data mining, you use and 

resort to the FICE Accord. We place stress or emphasis on the role 

of the FICE Accord. 

Now, out of this would come—and I submit to the Committee 

that I will not go through it all; your staff has seen it—there came 

12 recommendations. Seven of those recommendations relate to the 

Department of Defense, because it was the Department of Defense 

that had asked for these inputs. Five of those relate to the Federal 

Government at large. 

I was very impressed with the legislation that’s proposed, H.R. 

338, that came out of this Committee, because as you read our report and read the proposed statute, you begin to see that there’s 

a synchronization or there’s a common theme through there. It may 

not be the answer yet, but it seems to me steps toward an answer. 

So we talk about here how you can establish a process for data 

mining inside the Department of Defense. And the idea was, you 

create a mechanism in the Department of Defense that has audit 

trails, that has overview, that has training, that has authorization 

for certain techniques, and then you extrapolate that and replicate 

those systems of protection into the general Federal Government. 

And this evolved because we got in, we saw we had a far, far greater problem. 

It is not simply the Department of Defense, but there are other 

departments and agencies of the Government, and indeed data 

mining is done by the States. The program called Matrix, which is 

a law enforcement program in the State of Florida, uses data mining; and Matrix, I think you will find, has significant Federal funding from certain other Federal agencies, not the Department of Defense. 

But we also place an emphasis on congressional oversight of 

what’s to be done. There needs to be a protocol or culture of privacy 

that we need to encourage and develop. So we commend those to 

you. 

I thank you for what you’re doing. The stakes are very, very 

high. As I commented to my assistant professor, Ms. Angie Chen 

of George Mason University, who is here today, ‘‘the law is going 

to have to address this.’’

In September of 1787, as Washington was submitting the draft 

Constitution to the convention, of the articles—to the Congress—

of the Confederation, it had a resolution in it. I commend to you 

that resolution because it read, and it was Washington’s dilemma, 

a resolution probably written by Madison. 

18

1 I gratefully acknowledge the assistance in the preparation of this statement of Fred H. Cate, 

a Distinguished Professor and director of the Indiana University Center for Applied 

Cybersecurity Research, who served as Reporter for the Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee. 

Washington fully concurred. The biggest problem, Washington 

said, was drafting a document that was able to reconcile the issue 

of liberty on one side and security on the other. 

That’s the problem that we have today. And we see our Nation’s 

capital, the people’s House is a citadel, with the Jersey walls and 

hydraulic gates and the limitation. Visitation here used to be about 

22,500. It is down now I understand to about 2,000. These are evidences of the oppression and intimidation that we are having to 

suffer because of the problems with terrorism. But we will address 

that and we will—and we will be stronger for it. 

I would say to you, I was teaching these issues before 9/11. We 

are feeling that we are being overwhelmed by rapid advances in 

technology, particularly in the information communication and information technology which gives the terrorists enormous weapons. 

Prior to 9/11, we would not sort out how we were going to handle 

that, and the law was falling behind that technology. And the Congress at the time was having trouble coming to grips with it in a 

jurisdictional sense because of its pervasive effort. Hopefully, 

through these types of efforts, we will, one, be able to establish jurisdiction, and, secondly, be able to achieve a very favorable and 

satisfactory result. 

I thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. CANNON. Thank you, Mr. Marsh. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Marsh follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF JOHN O. MARSH, JR.1

Chairmen Chabot and Cannon, Distinguished Members: 

I appreciate the opportunity to testify today about the work and final recommendations of the Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee appointed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and chaired by the Honorable Newton N. Minow, one 

of the nation’ most experienced and distinguished public servants. The Committee 

was created to examine the issues that are the subject of today’s hearing—the impact of the government’s use of personal information on privacy and civil liberties. 

Although our charge focused on the Department of Defense, we rapidly discovered 

that the issues, as well as the data mining activities that raise them, occur throughout the government and require attention. 

I applaud your leadership and that of your colleagues on the Committee in holding today’s hearing. As a former Member of Congress and Secretary of the Army, 

I know that few issues could be more important than the security of the Republic 

or the civil liberties of its citizens. Ensuring that both are rigorously protected is 

a critical obligation of all branches of Government—but especially of the Congress— and I congratulate you for embracing that responsibility in this hearing today. 

THE TENSION BETWEEN PRIVACY AND NATIONAL SECURITY

The final report of the 9/11 Commission report does a masterful job of describing 

the horrendous terrorist attacks that took place on the morning of September 11, 

2001, and of analyzing the factors that contributed to our nation’s vulnerability to 

those attacks. The report goes on to make a number of thoughtful recommendations, 

including the urgent need that we use all of the information at our collective disposal to protect against further attacks, but that we do so only in ways that are 

consistent with protecting personal privacy. 

The 9/11 Commission report does not suggest how we might exploit that information without invading privacy. The report identifies the goal, without providing any 

guidance as to the means. The Technology and Privacy Committee had spent the 

prior year addressing many of these issues about how we use information to protect 

national security without infringing on privacy. 

19

2When first announced, the program was entitled ‘‘Total Information Awareness.’’ The title 

was changed to ‘‘Terrorism Information Awareness’’ in May 2003. 

BACKGROUND OF TAPAC

The history of TAPAC is fully laid out in our final report, the executive summary 

from which I attach to my prepared testimony, so I will only briefly recite it here. 

In early 2002, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (‘‘DARPA’’) announced that it was developing advanced information technologies which could access personally identifiable information in the fight against terrorism. The project— called ‘‘Terrorism Information Awareness’’ (‘‘TIA’’) 2 soon prompted serious public 

and congressional criticism centered on the possible use by government of personal 

information on U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens. 

To address these and other concerns, in February 2003 Secretary Rumsfeld appointed the Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee, the members of which 

were private citizens, independent from the government and ‘‘selected on the basis 

of their preeminence in the fields of constitutional law and public policy relating to 

communication and information management.’’ Establishment of the Technology and 

Privacy Advisory Committee, 68 Fed. Reg. 11,384 (2003) (DOD, notice). He charged 

TAPAC with answering four questions:

1. Should the goal of developing technologies that may help identify terrorists 

before they act be pursued?

2. What safeguards should be developed to ensure that the application of this 

or any like technology developed within DOD is carried out in accordance 

with U.S. law and American values related to privacy?

3. Which public policy goals are implicated by TIA and what steps should be 

taken to ensure that TIA does not frustrate those goals?

4. How should the government ensure that the application of these technologies 

to global databases respects international and foreign domestic law and policy? U.S. Department of Defense, Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee Charter (2003).

In June 2004, TAPAC released its final report, containing its conclusions and 7 

and 5 12 recommendations addressing data mining within the Department of Defense and throughout the federal government. Before turning to those conclusions 

and recommendations, I want to stress two features of the Committee and its work. 

First, the panel was strictly bi-partisan, both in its membership and in the way 

it pursued its work. It was chaired by the Honorable Newton N. Minow, Senior 

Counsel to the law firm of Sidley Austin Brown & Wood, who served as chairman 

of the Federal Communications Commission under President Kennedy, and later 

served as chairman of the Carnegie Corporation, Public Broadcasting Service, and 

The RAND Corporation, and vice chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates. It would be hard to find a more impartial, skillful, or experienced public servant. 

The other Committee members with whom I was privileged to serve were:

Floyd Abrams, a partner in the New York law firm of Cahill Gordon & Reindel, 

the William J. Brennan, Jr. Visiting Professor of First Amendment Law at the 

Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and one of the nation’s leading experts on the First Amendment.

Zoe ̈ Baird, President of the Markle Foundation, and previously was senior vice 

president and general counsel of Aetna, Inc., and an attorney in White House 

and in the Justice Department.

Griffin Bell, formerly Managing Partner of King & Spalding, a judge on the U.S. 

Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and Attorney General of the United 

States.

Gerhard Casper, President Emeritus of Stanford University and the Peter and 

Helen Bing Professor in Undergraduate Education at Stanford.

William T. Coleman, Jr., Senior Partner and the Senior Counselor in O’Melveny 

and Myers; he served as Secretary of Transportation during the Ford Administration.

Lloyd N. Cutler, founding partner of the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering; he served as Counsel to Presidents Clinton and Carter.

The second feature is that Secretary Rumsfeld charged the Committee with considering not only laws applicable to privacy, but also ‘‘American values related to 

privacy.’’ This important addition to the Committee’s mandate obligated us to ask 

20

not only what the law concerning government use of personal information was, but 

what it should be. 

THE PREVALENCE OF GOVERNMENT DATA MINING AND THE LIMITS OF RELEVANT LAW

From the outset, the Committee was struck by two discoveries. The first was how 

widespread, not only in the Department of Defense, but throughout the federal government, data mining was. In fact, report by the General Accounting Office, released in May 2004 after the TAPAC finished its work, found 42 federal departments or agencies—including every cabinet-level agency that responded to the 

GAO’s survey—engaged in (88), or were planning to engage in (34), 122 data mining 

efforts involving personal information. Thirty-six of those involve accessing data 

from the private sector; 46 involve sharing data among federal agencies. U.S. General Accounting Office, Data Mining: Federal Efforts Cover a Wide Range of Uses

(GAO–04–548), May 2004, at 3, 27–64, tables 2–25. 

The Committee’s second discovery was how limited the federal law applicable to 

the government’s use of personal information really was. The law that does exist 

is often too narrow to ensure either that the government can access the data it really needs to protect national security and fight crime effectively or that individual 

privacy is protected in the process. In particular, that law depends significantly on 

whether the individual(s) involved are U.S. citizens, where the search takes place, 

whether the information has ever been disclosed to third parties, and the government’s motivation for the search. In the face of new terrorist threats posed within 

the territory of the United States and global information technologies this system 

has grown increasingly unworkable. 

So what the Committee found was widespread data mining, and little clarity in 

the law. 

TAPAC’S RECOMMENDATIONS

As a result, the Committee focused its deliberations, and ultimately its recommendations, on what the law should be to ensure that information is used to enhance national security without impinging on individual privacy or liberty. We 

unanimously agreed that the United States should use data mining to enhance national security; our recommendations then were focused on assuring that the privacy 

interests of U.S. persons are not compromised when it does so. Because those recommendations are included in the attached executive summary, I will not recite all 

of them here, but I would like to focus on six that are most relevant to today’s hearing. 

1. Privacy Tools 

First, we thought it imperative that government data mining programs take advantage of the technological and other tools available to protect privacy. So, for example, we recommended requiring:

a. Data minimization—the least data consistent with the purpose of the data 

mining should be accessed, disseminated, and retained.

b. Data anonymization—whenever practicable data mining should be performed on databases from which information by which specific individuals 

can be commonly identified (e.g., name, address, telephone number, SSN, 

unique title, etc.) has been removed, encrypted, or otherwise obscured. 

Where it is not practicable to use anonymized data, or access to identifying 

information is required, the agency should comply with Recommendation 2.4 

below.

c. Audit trail—data mining systems should be designed to create a permanent, 

tamper-resistant record of when data have been accessed and by whom.

d. Security and access—data mining systems should be secured against accidental or deliberate unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and 

access to such systems should be restricted to persons with a legitimate 

need and protected by appropriate access controls taking into account the 

sensitivity of the data.

e. Training—all persons engaged in developing or using data mining systems 

should be trained in their appropriate use and the laws and regulations applicable to their use. (Recommendation 2.2)

We also recommended special protection when data mining would involve the use 

of data from the private sector or other government agencies. (Recommendation 2.3) 

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2. Privacy Culture 

Second, we thought it was critical that concern for privacy and other civil liberties 

be instilled at every level within agencies that engage in data mining. We therefore 

proposed that agency personnel receive appropriate training (Recommendation 

2.2(e)), the creation of a policy-level privacy officer to help promote sensitivity to privacy throughout agencies (Recommendation 4), the appointment of external privacy 

advisors to help provide privacy-related input from outside of the agency (Recommendation 5), and that the agency head be charged specifically with creating 

‘‘culture of sensitivity to, and knowledge about, privacy issues’’ throughout the agency (Recommendation 7). 

3. Internal Accountability 

Third, we believed that accountability was absolutely critical to protecting privacy, to ensuring that data mining was conducted efficiently and effectively, and to 

building public confidence in the government’s data mining efforts. This objective 

undergirded many of our recommendations. We thought of accountability as occurring in two distinct settings: internal and external. 

Internal accountability would be enhanced, we believed, first by ensuring that no 

agency engage in data mining involving personal information without making a conscious, thoughtful decision to do so, or without fully appreciating the potential privacy ramifications of its actions. So, for example, we recommended that data mining 

require written authorization by the agency head. (Recommendation 2.1) That written finding would demonstrate that a senior government official had thought 

through:

a. the purposes for which the system may be used;

b. the need for the data to accomplish that purpose;

c. the specific uses to which the data will be put;

d. that the data are appropriate for that use, taking into account the purpose(s) for which the data were collected, their age, and the conditions 

under which they have been stored and protected;

e. that other equally effective but less intrusive means of achieving the same 

purpose are either not practically available or are already being used;

f. the effect(s) on individuals identified through the data mining (e.g., they will 

be the subject of further investigation for which a warrant will be sought, 

they will be subject to additional scrutiny before being allowed to board an 

aircraft, etc.)

g. that the system has been demonstrated to his or her satisfaction to be effective and appropriate for that purpose;

h. that the system complies with the other requirements of this recommendation as enacted by law, executive order, or other means;

i. that the system yields a rate of false positives that is acceptable in view of 

the purpose of the search, the severity of the effect of being identified, and 

the likelihood of further investigation; and

j. that there is a system in place for dealing with false positives (e.g., reporting false positives to developers to improve the system, correcting incorrect 

information if possible, remedying the effects of false positives as quickly as 

practicable, etc.), including identifying the frequency and effects of false 

positives. (Recommendation 2.1)

That written finding would also serve to ensure that a policy-level official (in almost every case an official whose appointment was subject to Senate confirmation), 

was involved in making the determination to go forward. 

We believed internal accountability would also be fostered through the creation 

of a senior policy-level privacy officer (Recommendation 5), by regular audits of all 

data mining programs (Recommendation 2.5), by seeking the advice of external privacy experts (Recommendation 5), and through renewed efforts by the agency head 

to ensure the ‘‘effective operation of meaningful oversight mechanisms’’ (Recommendation 6). 

4. External Accountability 

Fourth, while accountability within an agency is essential, it is no substitute for 

external accountability, and it was here that our strongest—and most controversial—recommendations were focused. I suspect it is the failure to provide for meaningful external accountability that has contributed to public unrest about programs 

such as TIA and CAPPS II. Our goal was to help diffuse some of that controversy 

in the future by providing for meaningful external oversight. 

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TAPAC recognized that programs to enhance national security and public safety 

will often involve classified information or require speedy action, and so traditional 

accountability measures (such as public notice and opportunity to comment, or judicial review) may not work. Nevertheless, we believed that significant tools are available and should be required when the government accesses personal information 

about its citizens or legal aliens.

a. Judicial Review

One critical external accountability measure we recommended is recourse to the 

courts before conducting data mining with personally identifiable information about 

U.S. persons. (Recommendation 2.4) We recommended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, to help provide for speedy and confidential review, but the particular court is not nearly as important as the concept of judicial review. The public 

understandably derives confidence from knowing that an independent, judicial authority is reviewing government data mining efforts. This is especially true when, 

because of secrecy concerns, the public may not have access to information about 

those efforts. 

We stressed that judicial review could be obtained for specific searches or for entire data mining programs (Recommendation 2.4(a)(v)), and we provided that, in exigent circumstances, the review could be obtained after-the-fact (Recommendation 

2.4(c)). Our goal in crafting these provisions was not merely to ensure that the process of judicial review not interfere with national security, but also to highlight that 

even the exigencies of the war on terrorism do not justify abandoning the vital principle of judicial review.

b. Congressional Oversight

The other essential component of external accountability is oversight by the Congress. You are the people’s elected representatives and it is your unique duty to ensure that the people’s business is carried out effectively, efficiently, and without 

compromising the people’s rights. TAPAC therefore recommended that each agency’s 

privacy officer have a direct reporting line to Congress, as you provided with regard 

to the Department of Homeland Security’s privacy officer—a position ably filled by 

Ms. Nuala O’Connor Kelly, who appeared before TAPAC. We went a step further, 

however, to recommend that the agency head appear as well, and that the privacy 

officer and agency head jointly brief you, at least annually, on

a. the agency’s compliance with applicable privacy laws;

b. the number and nature of data mining systems within the agency, the purposes for which they are used, and whether they are likely to contain individually identifiable information about U.S. persons;

c. the number and general scope of agency findings authorizing data mining;

d. the number and general scope of agency findings and court orders authorizing searches of individually identifiable information about U.S. persons; 

and

e. other efforts to protect privacy in the agency’s collection and use of U.S. person data. (Recommendation 11)

These are serious obligations; we meant them to be. Nothing less guarantees you 

the information and regular access to senior personnel necessary to provide the accountability that the public expects. 

To carry out these obligations, we made an equally bold recommendation that you 

take the steps necessary to streamline committee jurisdiction:

To facilitate this reporting process and consistent, knowledgeable oversight, 

each house of Congress should identify a single committee to receive all of the 

agencies’ reports. Other committees may have jurisdiction over specific agencies 

and therefore also receive reports from those agencies, but we believe it is important for a single committee in each house to maintain broad oversight over 

the full range of federal government data mining activities. To the extent the 

jurisdiction of congressional committees overlaps, we believe it is essential for 

Congress to clarify and clearly articulate the relative responsibilities of each 

committee, to avoid undermining either privacy protection or national security 

efforts. (Recommendation 11)

As a former Member of Congress, I am well aware of the uphill battle that such 

an effort involves, but we believed it is essential for meaningful oversight of both 

privacy and security. 

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5. Consistent Laws and Processes 

Fifth, TAPAC recommended that all of the actions outlined above be carried out 

across the government. This would include adopting a single framework of legal, 

technological, training, and oversight mechanisms necessary to guarantee the privacy of U.S. persons in the context of national security and law enforcement activities; the appointment of a privacy officer in every federal agency; and the creation 

of an inter-agency coordinating committee and the use of external advisors to help 

ensure the consistent application of privacy laws and principles. (Recommendations 

8–10) 

TAPAC recognized that privacy protections would not necessarily be the same in 

every setting, but we believed it essential that they be consistent, based on common 

principles, and subject to uniform oversight. 

The recent report of the 9/11 Commission only highlights the importance of these 

recommendations. It makes little sense to coordinate this nation’s intelligence and 

national security activities, without going one step further to coordinate the laws 

and processes that ensure those activities respect our privacy and civil liberties. 

6. Research 

Finally, TAPAC recognized the importance of research into technological and 

other tools for making data mining more precise and accurate and for protecting privacy, as well as into the development of policies and laws to facilitate both data 

mining and privacy. (Recommendations 7, 12) One unfortunate consequence of Congress blocking further development of TIA was to prohibit further research by 

DARPA into both data mining and privacy. 

This is regrettable; our nation desperately needs to understand better the technological, behavioral, and policy tools for using information effectively and appropriately, whether to fight terrorism, apprehend criminals, or otherwise serve the 

public. There are many private initiatives to expand our understanding—my own 

program at the George Mason School of Law is one example—but if we are serious 

about using information to fight terrorism and serious about protecting privacy 

while doing so, it is going to require the investment of public funds. 

THE LINK BETWEEN PRIVACY AND NATIONAL SECURITY

I began by describing the tension between privacy and national security; I would 

now like to highlight what TAPAC saw as the essential link between the two. Many 

of our recommendations that may have been motivated by a desire to protect privacy, also contribute to enhancing security as well. Data minimization, for example, 

is a key privacy tool, but it also helps protect intelligence agencies from being overwhelmed by irrelevant data. Tools for data correction are another example: data 

mining with inaccurate data certainly threatens privacy and civil liberties, but it 

also threatens security as well. Any system of data analysis that is not concerned 

with data quality and accuracy is likely to compromise both privacy and security. 

Privacy and national security are also inherently linked because American values 

will not accept the latter at the cost of the former. Recent protests over TIA, CAPPS 

II, and other programs have shown that the American public will not either. Inadequate, unclear, or uncertain privacy laws are slowing the development of new and 

promising data mining programs, they are undermining research into this important weapon in the war on terrorism, and they are hampering the very data sharing 

that the 9/11 Commission wisely recommended. Clearing up this mess is critical 

both to protecting our privacy and to protecting our security. 

THE ROLE OF THE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE

TAPAC took no position on which committee in Congress should take the lead on 

this vital effort, but I believe the Committee on the Judiciary is an ideal choice. The 

issues involve come within the jurisdiction of many committees—Armed Services, 

Intelligence, Commerce, Ways and Means, and others—but the foundational issue 

that cuts across all of these different settings is the constitutional and legal framework applicable to data mining. That is the fundamental question—the starting 

place for all other analysis. That is your turf. And I assume that is why you have 

called these important hearings today. 

CONCLUSION

Throughout Washington, throughout the nation, citizens are lining up to be 

searched before entering federal buildings or boarding aircraft. The mail is delayed 

so it can be scanned. Luggage is x-rayed and rummaged through. Roads are closed, 

entrances blocked with concrete barricades, access to public resources denied. Surveillance cameras and identity checks are replacing anonymity. The result is not 

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just inconvenience or annoyance, it is a vast toll on our economy and productivity 

and a profound intrusion on our privacy and most basic civil liberties. 

Think of the effect on government. The threat of terrorism has turned the People’s 

House into an armed citadel. The Capitol, the very heart of democratic government, 

is under siege, and with it our privacy, liberty, and most cherished values. 

Data mining—as both the 9/11 Commission and TAPAC noted—is a vital weapon 

in the war on terrorism. It poses grave risks to privacy, but there are numerous 

steps, many (but certainly not all) of which are outlined in the TAPAC report, that 

can reduce or eliminate those risks. Those steps may not only protect privacy, but 

also enhance security as well. More importantly, when pursued effectively and subject to appropriate safeguards, data mining may threaten privacy and civil liberties 

far less than the other tools on which we rely so heavily and so regrettably today. 

Thank you.

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Mr. CANNON. Ms. O’Connor Kelly. 

TESTIMONY OF NUALA O’CONNOR KELLY, CHIEF PRIVACY 

OFFICER, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY 

Ms. O’CONNOR KELLY. Chairman Cannon, Ranking Member 

Watt, Chairman Chabot, Ranking Member Nadler, Members of 

Subcommittees and distinguished colleagues on the panel, it is my 

great honor to be before you on behalf of the United States Department of Homeland Security’s Privacy Office, which I am privileged 

to lead as the Department’s first Chief Privacy Officer. 

I am pleased to offer my reflections on the findings and recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Report and also on the Report of the Department of Defense, TAPAC, particularly as they relate to the privacy of individuals. 

As the first statutorily-mandated Privacy Officer in the Federal 

Government in a role that provides both investigative oversight 

and policy advice, I am keenly aware of the challenges presented 

by the Commission’s role. In every respect, the 9/11 Commission 

has met those daunting challenges admirably, and I know I join 

every American in thanking them for their work. 

The Report teaches us that one of the reasons the United States 

failed to prevent the September 11 attacks was its failure to think 

creatively. 

As the Commission’s work points out, our future requires new 

and creative modes of thinking and demands that we institutionalize new and imaginative mindsets within the very culture 

and structure of our Federal Government. Most importantly, we 

must perform our tasks in a manner that respects the privacy, the 

dignity and the personal freedoms of each individual in the United 

States. 

Just as the Commission recommends institutionalizing imagination, we at the Department of Homeland Security have already 

begun operationalizing privacy awareness within the very culture 

of our organization. This has meant both responding to privacy 

complaints from within and outside the Department and actively 

raising privacy awareness across each of our directorates. 

We have crafted privacy training and privacy policies for many 

of our new programs, ensured that the statutorily-required privacy 

impact assessments and system of record notices are written and 

reviewed, and counseled DHS officials regarding the effective and 

responsible uses of new technologies. 

Outside of our organization, we have reached to advocacy groups, 

to our partners in the European Union and throughout the world 

and to the general public for input and guidance on our programs. 

We are vigorously pursuing our statutory mission of ensuring that 

the Department’s technologies and programs sustain, and do not 

erode, privacy protections relating to the collection, use and disclosure of personal information. 

No one has been a greater champion in these efforts than Secretary Tom Ridge, who from the very inception of our Department 

has recognized that privacy is a vital thread that runs through the 

fabric of the United States. Privacy is a value today that we seek 

to protect, as we protect both the tangible and intangible assets of 

our country through all of our endeavors at the Department. 

50

I wish to thank Secretary Ridge and also Deputy Secretary Loy 

and commend them for their leadership and active support of my 

role and for the efforts of the DHS Privacy Office, including our 

more than 430 Privacy and Freedom of Information Act specialists 

throughout the Department. 

The wisdom that Congress demonstrated when it mandated a 

Chief Privacy Officer and an integrated Privacy Office within the 

Department of Homeland Security represents precisely the kind of 

bold and creative thinking that will be demanded of our leaders 

and policymakers in the post-9/11 world. As the United States 

transforms its Federal intelligence and law enforcement communities, operationalizing privacy protections across the Federal Government, it is imperative that we sustain this dialogue among policymakers, technologists, intelligence professionals, law enforcement officials and also the private sector. 

The Commission’s recommendations raise a number of points 

that are crucial to bear in mind as we move ahead in this new 

process. The Commission points out that the choice between security and liberty is a false choice. We as a Nation must abandon the 

pessimistic and misguided notion that in order to be safe we must 

sacrifice the privacy of our personal information. The Department 

of Homeland Security’s Privacy Office has worked tirelessly to demonstrate that the dichotomy between liberty and security is a false 

one by working in partnership with program and policy personnel 

to embed privacy within successful security initiatives from the 

very beginning. 

As we seek to combine information in new and creative ways in 

the Federal Government, we must also establish and enforce concrete safeguards that prevent the Federal Government from exceeding its boundaries. As the Commission correctly points out, the 

burden should be on policymakers to prove that any new power 

granted to the Government is accompanied by adequate guidelines 

and oversight to properly confine its use. 

The Commission’s report findings heavily underscore the need to 

abandon the compartmentalized structure of our intelligence bureaucracy that existed before 9/11 and move to a more integrated 

system. Congress should permit agencies to share and disclose information collected for counterterrorism purposes if such sharing 

and disclosure is necessary and appropriate to achieve a security 

function. However, agencies should also demonstrate an adherence 

to privacy principles and fair information practices, including educating employees about the purposeful and responsible use of information. 

A final matter is the recommendation of the Commission that the 

President appoint a board within the executive branch to oversee 

adherence to these guidelines and recommend the commitment the 

Government makes to defend its civil liberties. 

We are keenly aware in our office of the benefit of having a central, coordinating privacy authority that is both knowledgeable 

about organizational structures and yet independent enough to act 

as an effective privacy advocate. It is one of the greatest challenges 

and opportunities of our office that we serve both outside and inside roles in the structure of our agency. The Chief Privacy Officer 

is appointed by the Secretary, but also is a position created by ConVerDate 0ct 09 2002 11:12 Jan 06, 2005 Jkt 089266 PO 00000 Frm 00056 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 G:\WORK\COMM\082004\95498.000 HJUD1 PsN: 95498
51

gress and reports to Congress. The dual aspects of this role have 

allowed our office to turn a critical eye on the most controversial 

and also mundane aspects of the Department’s operations, while offering a supporting hand to our key decisionmakers. 

Any privacy oversight body in a sense must also be both outside 

and inside the Federal Government. Any such body must combine 

real knowledge of ongoing activities with real authority to confront 

and prevent abuse. I look forward to sharing my own experiences 

and participating in the public dialogue on such a matter in the 

coming months. 

I extend my deepest gratitude to Chairman Cannon and to the 

Members of the Subcommittee for your oversight and interest in 

our office, and I thank you for your time and attention. 

Mr. CANNON. Thank you, and thank you to all the Members of 

the panel. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. O’Connor Kelly follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF NUALA O’CONNOR KELLY

Chairman Cannon, Ranking Member Watt, Members of the Subcommittee, and 

distinguished colleagues on this panel, it is an honor to testify before you today regarding the 9/11 Commission on behalf of the United States Department of Homeland Security’s Privacy Office, which I am privileged to lead as the first Chief Privacy Officer. 

I am pleased to offer my reflections on the findings and recommendations of the 

9/11 Commission’s report. That Commission was charged by Congress and our President with the important yet daunting task of investigating this tragic event in our 

history with an eye toward implementing future changes. As the first statutorilymandated Privacy Officer in the Federal Government, and as someone who provides 

both investigative oversight and policy advice, I am keenly aware of the challenges 

presented by the Commission’s role. It is a role that requires both tenacity and discretion, persistent determination and unyielding patience, meticulous attention to 

detail and perceptive understanding of the ‘‘bigger picture’’. In every respect, the 9/

11 Commission has met those daunting challenges admirably, and I know that I join 

every American when I commend and thank them for their fine work. 

We have heard from the Commission’s Report that among the many reasons for 

the United States government’s failure to prevent those dreadful attacks was a failure to think creatively about the challenges we faced and to act upon information 

we received. In the words of the Commission, we suffered a ‘‘failure of imagination’’. Looking forward, it is clear from the Commission’s work that the years ahead will 

require new and creative modes of thinking and will demand that we ‘‘institutionalize’’ new, imaginative mindsets within the very culture and structures of our 

government. Most importantly, we must perform these tasks in a manner that respects the privacy, dignity, and personal freedoms of every individual who lives in 

and visits the United States. Indeed, years from now, we will be said to have suffered yet another tragic ‘‘failure of imagination’’ if, while undertaking efforts to reform our intelligence community and protect our security, we fail to think and act 

creatively to protect privacy as well. 

ONE YEAR ONWARD: PROTECTING PRIVACY WITHIN DHS

My firm belief, which has been affirmed by my experiences during the past year, 

is that protecting both privacy and security is well within the grasp of our collective 

imagination. In fact, during my first year as the Chief Privacy Officer of our Department, I have operated under that very premise, and have worked to ensure that privacy and security go hand-in-hand as we carry out our protective mission. In much 

the same way that the 9/11 Commission recommends ‘‘institutionalizing imagination’’, we at the Department of Homeland Security have begun instituting and 

operationalizing privacy awareness within the very culture of our organization. We 

have done so by working side-by-side with senior leadership and by ensuring that 

as programs move forward to implementation, they have been carefully and thoroughly analyzed for their impact on personal privacy. This has meant responding 

to privacy complaints from inside and outside the Department and actively raising 

awareness of privacy across all of our directorates. We have crafted privacy training 

and privacy policies for many of our programs, ensured that statutorily-required PriVerDate 0ct 09 2002 11:12 Jan 06, 2005 Jkt 089266 PO 00000 Frm 00057 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6621 G:\WORK\COMM\082004\95498.000 HJUD1 PsN: 95498
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vacy Impact Assessments and System of Records Notices are written and reviewed, 

and counseled DHS officials regarding the effective and responsible use of technology. Beyond our organization, we have reached out to advocacy groups and the 

general public for input and guidance. Moreover, on the international level, we have 

reached important agreements with our partners in the EU and elsewhere, and 

have participated in fruitful discussions with organizations like the International 

Association of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners. In short, my office is vigorously pursuing its statutory missions, including ensuring that DHS technologies 

‘‘sustain, and do not erode, privacy protections relating to the use, collection, and 

disclosure of personal information.’’ It is not an accident that DHS in its very first year began linking the values of 

homeland security and privacy protection as being compatible rather than opposing 

goals. It was a well thought out legislative design, firmly embedded in Section 222 

of the Homeland Security Act, to reflect fundamental American values. No one has 

been a greater champion of this pairing of values than Secretary Tom Ridge, who 

from the very beginning has set the direction ‘‘from the top’’ that privacy, matters 

of individual dignity, and civil liberties define the fabric of America that we seek 

to protect in all of our endeavors at DHS. Today, I wish to thank Secretary Ridge 

publicly and commend him for his leadership and active support for the role and 

efforts of the Privacy Office at DHS and the entire Privacy team, which includes 

more than 430 Privacy Act and Freedom of Information specialists who work 

throughout the Department. 

LOOKING FORWARD: PRIVACY ACROSS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

The wisdom Congress demonstrated when it mandated a Privacy Officer within 

DHS represents precisely the kind of bold and creative thinking that will be demanded of our leaders and policy-makers in a post 9/11 world. As the United States 

transforms its federal intelligence and law enforcement communities, 

operationalizing privacy protections across all of government will be more imperative, and more challenging, than ever. It will require, first and foremost, sustained 

dialogue among policy makers, technologists, intelligence professionals, law enforcement officials, and the private sector. The Commission’s Report has provided an excellent starting point for that dialogue. Their recommendations raise a number of 

points that are crucial to bear in mind as we move ahead in this process. 

First, as the Commission quite correctly points out, ‘‘the choice between security 

and liberty is a false choice’’. We as a nation must abandon, once and for all, the 

notion that in order to be safe, we must give up our right to keep our personal information private. As the recent TAPAC Report concluded, ‘‘The stakes on both sides—

guarding against attacks and protecting privacy—could not be higher. We must not 

sacrifice one for the other....’’ Within DHS, the Privacy Office has worked tirelessly to prove this point, and to demonstrate that the sometimes perceived dichotomy between liberty and security is a false one. As I have said on numerous occasions, the protection of privacy is neither an adjunct, nor the antithesis to, the mission of the Department of Homeland Security. Rather, privacy protection is, in fact, 

at the core of that mission. Likewise, privacy protection must also be at the core 

of our national mission as we devise ways to reform and improve our intelligence 

and anti-terrorist efforts. 

One way that we as a nation can put to rest the perceived dichotomy between 

liberty and security is by unleashing the vast potential of our technology. Too often, 

advances in technology are met with concern and trepidation. Yet, just as our technology can be misused to suppress privacy, so too can it be used to enhance and 

protect it. During my time as Chief Privacy Officer, I have observed first-hand how 

technology solutions can greatly enhance the privacy of individuals. Technical features such as encryption, audit trails, one-way hash functions, and tiered access control modules, among others, make it possible to analyze information in a way that 

protects people’s safety while limiting access to personal information and preserving 

the integrity of data. Moreover, as technologists know quite well, information security is paramount to protecting privacy. Therefore, the key to ensuring that technologies used by our government sustain and do not erode privacy will be to harness 

the creative energy of those who design and implement our technical infrastructures, challenging them to devise new solutions that secure and protect our personal 

information. 

OVERSIGHT AND GUIDELINES

Technology and privacy awareness, while important, will not be enough to address 

our current challenges. As we move forward, we will also need to establish and enforce concrete safeguards that prevent government from exceeding its proper 

53

bounds. As the Commission correctly points out, the burden should be on policymakers to prove that any new power granted to government is accompanied by ‘‘adequate guidelines and oversight to properly confine its use.’’ The idea here is an important one—privacy protections must be put in place at the front-end of our governmental processes when programs are in their infancy, rather than later, after 

privacy abuses and mistakes have already taken place. 

The United States has a firm foundation upon which to build additional privacy 

protections. Existing laws such as the Privacy Act of 1974, the Freedom of Information Act, and the E-Government Act all seek to embed ‘‘fair information practices’’ and a general respect for privacy into the daily operations of our government. Coupled with our Constitutional provisions, these statutes form an essential part of a 

privacy culture that will only become more relevant in the years to come. As we 

build upon this legacy of privacy protection, we must find ways to embed these values within the new statutory frameworks that will govern the collection, use, sharing, and retention of intelligence and other personal information. 

Much of the 9/11 Commission Report’s comments in this area address the need 

to integrate and coordinate the data that are collected for our antiterrorism efforts 

more effectively. The Report’s findings underscore the need to abandon the compartmentalized structure of our intelligence bureaucracy that existed before 9/11 and 

move to a more integrated system. It is my view that Congress should permit agencies to establish clear parameters for sharing information to protect privacy. As 

some have said, we must move from a ‘‘need to know’’ to a ‘‘need to share’’. Establishing reasonable limits on access and embedding fair use principles will be important, not only because it will protect individuals, but also because it will engender 

the kind of trust in government that is necessary to achieve the cooperation of both 

the public and private sectors. In failing to abide by these principles, we risk replacing the problem of ‘‘stove-pipes’’, in which disparate pieces of information are never 

adequately integrated, with one of ‘‘leaky pipes’’, in which personal information is 

exposed for all to see. 

CREATING AN OVERSIGHT BODY FOR PRIVACY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES

I would like to address, as a final matter, the recommendation of the Commission 

that the President appoint ‘‘a board within the executive branch to oversee adherence to the guidelines we recommend and the commitment the government makes 

to defend our civil liberties.’’

I am keenly aware of the benefits of having a central, coordinating privacy authority that is both knowledgeable enough about organizational structures to obtain 

information and yet independent enough to act as an effective privacy advocate. It 

has been one of the greatest advantages of my position at DHS that I serve concomitant roles both inside and outside the structures of our agency. The Chief Privacy 

officer is appointed by the Secretary, but is a position created by statute and required to report to Congress. The dual aspects of this role have allowed me to turn 

a critical eye on the most controversial and the most ordinary aspects of the Department’s operations, while also offering a supportive hand to key decision-makers. I 

do not see my office as the enemy of the missions of the Department. Rather, I see 

it as crucial to achieving that mission successfully. 

Implementing such an oversight position for the entire federal government is admittedly a different task, one that would require attention to matters of a completely different nature and scale. Since the government’s response to the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations is still being formulated, it is too early to say precisely 

what type of body will best address the privacy needs of our Federal Government. 

While the challenges and responsibilities faced by the person or persons who undertake this responsibility will be distinct from those faced by the Chief Privacy Officer 

at DHS, I look forward to sharing my own experiences and participating in the public dialogue on this matter in the coming months. 

CONCLUSION

Each and every one of the issues raised by the 9/11 Commission regarding the 

upholding of personal privacy presents a unique but highly important challenge to 

our nation. Facing these challenges will require extraordinary imagination. The exercise of that imagination and the implementation of the resulting changes certainly 

will not be easy. And yet as Thomas Jefferson wisely noted, ‘‘It is part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate; to surmount every difficulty with 

resolution....’’ If there is any over-arching lesson to be learned from the fine work 

of the 9/11 Commission, it is precisely that. Three years after the 9/11 attacks on 

New York and Washington, and in the memory of those who passed in the fields 

of Pennsylvania, our nation is united in its desire to learn from the past by re-orgaVerDate 0ct 09 2002 11:12 Jan 06, 2005 Jkt 089266 PO 00000 Frm 00059 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6621 G:\WORK\COMM\082004\95498.000 HJUD1 PsN: 95498
54

nizing and reforming antiterrorism efforts. At the same time, we seek to renew our 

foundational commitment to respecting the privacy of each individual, as a matter 

of law and policy. As the DHS Privacy Officer, I work daily to ensure that this sacred commitment—our unwavering determination to secure both our liberty and our 

land—is a guiding force behind every decision at the Department of Homeland Security. Thanks to the fine work of this Subcommittee, I am quite confident that our 

commitment to the protection of individual privacy will continue to guide anti-terrorism efforts not only within DHS, but across our entire Federal Government. 

I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to you, Chairman Cannon and to the 

Members of the Subcommittee for your tireless work and enduring contribution to 

our nation. Thank you today for your time and attention. I would be happy to respond to your questions.

Mr. CANNON. I think we are going to proceed by seniority on each 

side of the dais, beginning with the co-Chairman of this panel, Mr. 

Chabot. 

Mr. CHABOT. I did mention in my opening statement that I have 

a particular interest in H.R. 338, the Federal Agency Protection of 

Privacy Act, formerly known as the Defense of Privacy Act, it is basically the same bill, and I think, Senator Gorton and Secretary 

Marsh, you have both mentioned that in your testimony. 

A number of us were very concerned and have been for years 

that too often when regulations or rules were promulgated by various agencies that privacy protections of the American people too 

often were kind of an afterthought and were not necessarily taken 

into consideration, and they should be up front. 

In essence, what this Act requires is—we all know about environmental impact statements—is basically a privacy impact statement. What it amounts to is to determine whether or not the agency has taken into consideration privacy issues and maybe there 

was an alternative way to be less intrusive on those privacy rights, 

just to make sure we are looking at these things ahead of time. 

I actually introduced this back in the 106th Congress; and our 

colleague, Congressman Bob Barr, took it up in the 107th. We reintroduced it; and I want to thank my Ranking Member, Mr. Nadler from New York, for cosponsoring this and also Chairman Cannon for cosponsoring this as well. But it passed in the Judiciary 

Committee back on July 7, so it will be moving hopefully to the 

floor in the near future. 

But I would be interested to hear from the panel members as to 

how they think—and I know, Senator, I think you stated you cannot necessarily recommend for or against legislation, but how do 

you think this could potentially impact the issues that we are talking about here relative to the 9/11 Commission? 

Mr. GORTON. We in the 9/11 Commission took sort of a self-denying ordinance, you know, in not going beyond the recommendations 

that we made. We were perhaps as surprised as we were delighted 

that we were able to come out unanimously, and that required a 

degree of self-restraint. So we cannot take a particular position on 

your bill. But we can say it is quite consistent. It certainly seems 

to proceed from the same philosophy that guided us in asking for 

the creation of this board to see to the protection of the civil liberties from any new powers granted in the war against terrorism. 

Mr. CHABOT. Thank you. 

Secretary Marsh, I didn’t know if you wanted to add anything. 

Mr. MARSH. I believe that it would be helpful to give it more of 

a defense or national security flavor for those portions that involve 

55

the Department of Defense or the Intelligence Community, and 

they have to be singled out because they are going to have to be 

treated differently. But I think it is a step in the right direction. 

If you look at the recommendations of the Committee Report, 

they are very elaborate recommendations on establishing a regime 

or protocol of how to do this, and it involves the President of the 

United States. We are suggesting also overview, not because they 

are not going to do a good job but simply to emphasize the importance of what is being done by the legislation. 

I think the legislation is a very good starting point, Congressman; and I welcome it. It is responsive to one of our problems. 

Mr. CHABOT. Thank you very much. 

I am probably not going to be able to get into a lot, I have 1 

minute left, but one of the other areas that I wanted to delve into, 

maybe some of my colleagues will, is one of the recommendations 

of the 9/11 Commission Report that stated, ‘‘At this time of increased and consolidated Government authority, there should be a 

board within the executive branch to oversee adherence to the 

guidelines we recommend and the commitment the Government 

makes to defend our civil liberties.’’

I think prior to deciding the structure of an organization there 

must be a clear understanding of that organization’s mission. So 

there are a number of questions that I think at some point it would 

be very helpful to get into, such as does the 9/11 Commission view 

the board recommended in the report as being limited to examining 

privacy, or should it weigh in on all things related to the nexus between civil liberties and Government action, and would the board 

be charged with evaluating security against privacy protections and 

would it be a watchdog or a facilitator. 

There are many aspects that I think we would be interested to 

get into, but my time has already wound up here, so I will yield 

back my time at this point. 

Mr. CANNON. The gentleman yields back. 

Mr. Nadler, would you like to take the next 5 minutes? 

Mr. NADLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Congressman Hamilton, Senator Gorton, in your statement, in 

your joint statement, you said that the test, referring to the PATRIOT Act and some other things, the test is a simple but important one. The burden of proof should be on the proponents of the 

measure to establish that the power or authority being sought 

would in fact materially enhance national security and that there 

will be adequate supervision of the exercise of that power or authority to ensure protection of civil liberties. It is sort of a but-for 

test: but for this power, would we be less safe? 

This Committee has repeatedly asked the Attorney General that 

question with respect—or at least some Members of this Committee 

have repeatedly asked the Attorney General that question with respect to various provisions of the PATRIOT Act, and we have been 

unable to get any specific responses. 

In other words, if this power which the PATRIOT Act grants had 

existed pre-9/11, would—if that power had existed pre-9/11, would 

it have made a difference in preventing 9/11, for example, in your 

opinion? We have been unable to get any answers on that. 

56

So my question is, in light of that experience, with respect to the 

privacy board or privacy officers you are proposing, what steps do 

you think that we need to take to ensure that these officials, one, 

are independent; two, are able to get the information that they 

need to get in order to do their work—information, as I said, this 

Committee can often not get; and, three, that they have the clout 

needed to have an impact? 

Mr. HAMILTON. Well, Mr. Nadler, those are difficult questions to 

answer because they really go to the power of the Congress to conduct effective oversight. And my view, I guess not the Commission’s 

view—I shouldn’t try to speak for the Commission at this point—

but I am very concerned about the lack of robustness, if you would, 

or aggressiveness, in congressional oversight today. 

We did not try to get into the specifics of the PATRIOT Act, except with regard to the one provision on the wall of separation, but 

we did suggest this test for any official, and that is as deeply as 

we went into it. 

When the executive does not respond to the Congress—and, incidentally, we hear that complaint often in our appearing before different Committees. It appears to me that the problem is quite pervasive in the executive-congressional relationship. It is not anything that is new. It goes back for a good many years. 

I think there is a lot of timidity in the Congress with regard to 

its exercise of oversight and, at the end of the day, they are only 

going to pay attention to you if you have budget authority with 

them. 

Mr. NADLER. That brings up the real question I am asking, 

which is not simply—I think that this Congress has been very 

timid in exercising oversight, too, but that is really a separate 

issue. 

My point was that we have been unable to get the information, 

and in light of that experience, if we are to establish this privacy 

board, these privacy officers that you are recommending, what do 

we have to do to make sure that they can get the information that 

we have not been able to get, that they can get information that 

they need once we have established that they are independent and 

that they have the clout? What powers do we have to give them, 

what authority do we have to give them to make sure they can do 

the job that you are outlining for us? 

Mr. HAMILTON. Mr. Nadler, we simply did not try to get into the 

details of the powers that the board would have. 

You mentioned I think a moment ago that Congress has to fill 

in the details, and this is a major detail that you would have to 

fill in. My own personal view is the board should have quite robust 

powers. But the important thing here to recognize is that what we 

have recommended calls for a great deal of Government intervention and strengthening of Government powers over individual lives. 

That is just inherent in counterterrorism policy. You are greatly expanding the role of Government when you are fighting terrorists, 

and we think it is necessary because of the threat. 

Mr. NADLER. Could I have 1 additional minute? 

Mr. CANNON. Without objection. 

Mr. HAMILTON. You have to have some check on that expansion. 

57

Mr. NADLER. Which brings me to the other question I wanted to 

ask, and that is an internal board cannot take the place, in my 

opinion, of meaningful court oversight, so to what extent do you 

think—so Secretary Marsh is probably the better person to ask this 

question to—to what extent should there be court judicial review 

of the actions or lack of actions of this board or these privacy officers? 

Mr. MARSH. Well, we recommend that there be oversight internally and that the oversight will be in the courts. We feel that 

court review at various junctures of this is a very, very powerful 

method of protecting——

Mr. NADLER. So it shouldn’t be an arbitrary and capricious 

standard. You should have better access? 

Mr. MARSH. We insist on access to the FISA courts wherever you 

are dealing with a U.S. person. 

Mr. CANNON. The gentleman’s time has expired. 

Mr. NADLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. CANNON. Do you want another minute or two? 

Mr. NADLER. I would. 

Mr. CANNON. Without objection, the gentleman is recommended 

for an additional 2 minutes. 

Mr. NADLER. Senator Gorton seems to be interested in answering 

this, too. The question I would like you to address is, the courts 

should have oversight, but very often, in fact, even usually, the 

courts’ oversight of administrative agencies is limited to an arbitrary and capricious standard, which means that what the agency 

does generally goes, unless their conduct is really egregious. Should 

we establish some other standard for reviews and give the courts 

more power, in effect, to second-guess what this board or these privacy officers might do or not do? 

Mr. GORTON. Mr. Nadler, I have three points in answer to your 

very good question. 

First, in the two areas, really both relating to the wall and on 

which we did express an opinion, that portion of the PATRIOT Act 

met the tests that we had set out. That was number one. 

Number two, you all, in your wisdom, of course, passed the PATRIOT Act with an expiration date. 

Mr. NADLER. Part of it has an expiration date. 

Mr. GORTON. At least as far as that part is concerned, you have 

the ultimate power. The Justice Department, obviously, is going to 

have to answer your questions, or you are going to have to lie down 

and ignore a failure to do so. But that is probably the greatest single power that you reserved to yourself, to see to it that you as the 

Congress get——

Mr. NADLER. But the privacy officers and this board are not 

going to have to the power to do this. What do we give them? 

Mr. GORTON. We recommended the creation of a board that could 

protect these rights. As Lee said, we have not gone into all of the 

details as to where it should be. Some the Members thought it 

ought to be in the Department of Justice. I think, given your questions, you are probably inclined to believe that it ought to be an 

independent agency or board. 

58

Those are decisions for you all to make, as are the decisions as 

to the degree of the review for it or the right of an individual to 

sue outside of the system with respect to the law. 

Mr. NADLER. I am less concerned where we put it than what 

powers they have, how independent it is, and how we can enforce 

the executive branch to comply with the decisions it makes. 

Mr. GORTON. It should be independent, and it should be powerful 

enough so that it gets listened to. 

Mr. NADLER. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. CANNON. The gentleman yields back. 

I hope the panel and also the Members of the two Committees 

will consider that, in dealing with these details, we may not have 

enough information. We may need to be considering a commission 

that will help us think through some of the details, because I share 

the concerns of the gentleman from New York on how we go about 

this. 

The gentleman from Arizona, Mr. Flake, is recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. FLAKE. I thank the Chairmen, both Mr. Chabot and Mr. 

Cannon, for organizing this hearing and the witnesses for coming. 

I want to thank the 9/11 Commission for its particular focus on 

secure sources of identification. That has been something that I 

have been concerned about for a couple of years. I introduced legislation last year, H.R. 3461, to require States, if they want their 

State driver’s license used as a form of Federal identification, or 

identification for Federal purposes, that there have to be some kind 

of standards there. Because, as it stands, if a State like California 

doesn’t use the same kind of standards or uses lax standards, it 

doesn’t affect just the citizens of California, it affects all of us, because it is used increasingly as the closest form of a national ID 

as we have. When it is used for air travel and other things, there 

is certainly a Federal nexus there. 

We also have created more of a Federal nexus when we allow, 

with the Help America Vote Act, an individual State to allow them 

to use a driver’s license as a form of identification to register to 

vote. So there is a Federal nexus here, and I am pleased with the 

Commission’s focus on this. 

I would just like to get your thoughts on it and how quickly we 

ought to move to that. My bill specifically says if a State wants its 

drivers’ licenses used as a form of Federal ID, it has to have some 

kind of standard. 

You have also talked about standards for birth certificates, because those are the sort of breeder documents that are then used 

to secure these forms of ID. Can you give some elaboration on those 

things? Mr. Hamilton? 

Mr. HAMILTON. Mr. Flake, thank you for the question. 

I think we do suggest in our recommendations that there be Federal standards applied to these identification documents, birth certificates, driver’s licenses and a lot of other things. That has to be 

seen in a broader context, and the context is that we need, we believe, a modern border immigration system. You have to look at all 

the ways that people get into the United States, and you need to 

stress biometric exit and entry systems. You have got to give these 

officials that check people coming into the country, whether it is by 

59

land, sea or air, access to information with regard to visitors and 

immigrants. 

You have to have in your Intelligence Community the ability to 

look at the indicators of terrorist travel. Terrorists have to travel 

a lot. You have to develop an exchange of information with other 

countries so that you can make, for example, a real-time 

verification of passports, and you are going to have to involve a lot 

more local and State officials. 

Now, all of those things go together with what you are talking 

about; and the secure identification of U.S. citizens becomes very, 

very important in letting the right people in and keeping the bad 

people out. 

Mr. FLAKE. What I found was quite striking as well. In Arizona, 

my 16-year-old son just went and got his driver’s license. His driver’s license is good, I think, until he is age 65. He can get a driver’s 

license theoretically, and he did, for 44 years. 

Now, somebody entering the country, for other States to do this—

gratefully, Arizona does this right. It doesn’t anymore offer a driver’s license for a period longer than the expiration of a visa. But 

only 11 States operate that way. 

In other States that offer—and I don’t know how many will allow 

you to get a 44-year license, but if you come on a student visa for 

6 months or a year or 2 years, you can get a license for up to 20 

or 30 or perhaps even 44 years, and there is your de facto ID. And 

we know that two of the terrorists on 9/11 had overstayed, yet they 

had licenses from States that existed for longer than their visa. 

Senator Gorton, do you feel that is an important part as well, to 

ensure that a driver’s license, because it is used as a form of Federal ID, if you will, not be issued for a longer period than the stay 

of the visa? 

Mr. GORTON. Well, again, the Commission didn’t judge that specific idea. We did speak, as Lee has said, to birth certificates and 

driver’s licenses, because driver’s licenses are the most common 

form of identification and our concentration was on having uniform 

standards for them. You are talking about a form of uniform standards, at least. 

We are concerned not so much about their length, though that 

is an important consideration, as their validity, as really identifying who a person is. That is where our concentration lies. 

Mr. FLAKE. Thank you. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. CANNON. The gentleman yields back. 

I am quite certain the gentleman from Iowa, when he has the opportunity to speak, is going to be concerned about that issue, as I 

think many of the members of this panel are. 

Mr. Scott, would you like to take 5 minutes? 

Before you do so, let me just point out that the Ranking Member 

has graciously agreed to defer in the event that others have to 

leave. So we have not skipped over Mr. Watt, but he has been gracious in letting others go first. 

Mr. Scott. 

Mr. SCOTT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. Hamilton, with the extra powers for information gathering, 

wiretapping, data mining and whatnot, did the Commission limit 

60

these extra powers to terrorism-related investigations? The PATRIOT Act was not limited to terrorism, and some of us had some 

concerns about that. Had it been confined to terrorism, it might not 

have been as controversial. These extra powers may be extended to 

any kind of criminal investigation. 

Mr. HAMILTON. Well, Mr. Scott, our focus was on terrorism, and 

when we recommended, as we do in several places, an expansion 

of Government power, we were limiting it to terrorism. 

Mr. SCOTT. Do I understand that you did not recommend a national ID card? 

Mr. HAMILTON. We did not. 

Mr. SCOTT. The no-fly lists have obviously been over-inclusive 

from time to time, as the recent situation with Senator Kennedy 

is just one of the most recent examples. How many false positives 

should we be tolerating before we—I guess the more people you 

stop and keep off the plane, the more likely it is that one of them 

might actually be a terrorist. What kind of tolerance should we 

have for these false positives? 

Mr. GORTON. Well, you know, our goal should be no false 

positives. But one of the reasons that we were so interested in this 

subject is that on 9/11 the FAA’s no-fly list had 16 or 18 names on 

it. That is all. Part of our reason for a National Intelligence Director and a National Counterterrorism Center, was at the same time 

the State Department had a list of several thousand people that it 

suspected to be terrorists and the FAA didn’t even know that the 

list existed. They learned about it at one of our hearings earlier 

this year. 

So we do think that there should be an integration of valid terrorist information about the methods that these terrorists used to 

attack the United States. But it is obviously wrong to, you know, 

confuse one name for another. Just because there is one bad guy 

named Edward Kennedy doesn’t mean Senator Kennedy should be 

kept off. We have got to be very careful, it seems to me, to see to 

it that the lists are real lists that identify real people and don’t 

have a significant number of false positives. 

Mr. SCOTT. Thank you. 

Secretary Marsh, a lot of the data mining information went to 

the level of personalization of the lists and the information but 

didn’t really go to the kind of information that we are talking 

about. What kind of information can be obtained in this data mining? Are we talking about, I guess, library records, travel records, 

credit, medical? Exactly what are we talking about? 

Mr. MARSH. The databases actually can cover a very broad range 

of different subjects. They could cover travel, they could cover finance, they can cover possibly health records, if you get an exception. 

The data mining is an accepted and very effective process. It is 

not new. We did data mining with fingerprints and law records 

years ago, but it is now so sophisticated because of computerization 

and it can reach so far and it reaches across boundaries and it can 

be international. 

What we need are methodologies, and I think a number are 

being developed, whereby we can confine those lists very quickly 

61

and minimize what we have to have, and then anonymize, so there 

is no disclosure of who you are looking at until you reach the point. 

Mr. SCOTT. One of the things we had—I am not sure what the 

status of it is now—the FBI guidelines used to be that you wouldn’t 

gather information unless you were actually investigating a specific 

crime or had some specific investigation. You just wouldn’t gather 

information. 

Mr. MARSH. I believe that was in law enforcement, wasn’t it? 

Mr. SCOTT. Well, are we mining this data just for generalized——

Mr. MARSH. That which is done—defense criteria on data mining 

is different than law enforcement. But in defense that is done toward a specific objective, and inside the NSA you will find that 

they are very specifically oriented. I think there are 650 million 

intercepts a day that are filtered through. But they are very specific; and they are looking at a suspicious, threatening person and 

using a general pattern search to try and find that person. 

Mr. CANNON. Does the gentleman desire additional time? 

Mr. SCOTT. Could I follow through on that, Mr. Chairman? 

Mr. CANNON. Without objection, the gentleman is recognized for 

an additional 2 minutes. 

Mr. SCOTT. Thank you. 

Well, are we looking after a specific person to track him down 

in terms of travel and who he is contacting? Still, you are looking 

at one specific person, not just going into a database and seeing 

what pops out. 

Mr. MARSH. Right. Correct. 

Mr. SCOTT. So you mentioned in law enforcement we are relegated to waiting until you are actually investigating a crime. In 

this case, are you just gathering information? 

Mr. MARSH. For intelligence purposes, yes. 

Mr. SCOTT. Is this United States citizens? 

Mr. MARSH. A United States citizen comes under a court order. 

Mr. SCOTT. So you have to have particularized suspicion. 

Mr. MARSH. That is right. 

Mr. SCOTT. And probable cause. 

Mr. MARSH. All the rules change when you have a U.S. person, 

which is a United States citizen, a permanent foreign resident or 

a U.S. Corporation that is not foreign controlled. 

Mr. SCOTT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. CANNON. The gentleman yields back. 

I guess we are at Mr. Forbes. Would you like to be recognized 

for 5 minutes? 

Mr. FORBES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. Chairman, I would like to echo what you said earlier about 

the privilege that we have to be with such a distinguished panel 

and also to appreciate the comments of the Ranking Member today. 

We have had a number of hearings in different Committees, and 

there have been some individuals who have run out to press conferences or made comments in the Committees about why we 

weren’t just enacting all the recommendations without hearings. I 

think the comment that said that before we go anywhere we need 

to understand what the recommendations are and the ramifications 

62

of those recommendations is so true, and I thank you all for being 

here today and your patience in helping us do just that. 

Let me go to my fellow Virginian for a question. Mr. Marsh, I 

would like to follow up on what Congressman Scott was saying. 

The first question I would have is so many people today are telling 

us that the only way we can have an adequate defense is to do 

some sort of risk assessment, some sort of risk assessment where 

we are concentrating our defenses, because we just have so many 

vulnerable areas, so it would be impossible to cover them all. Can 

we be effective in that risk assessment if we are not doing an effective job with data mining? 

Mr. MARSH. The panel concluded that data mining is an absolutely essential tool for a counterterrorist program but that data 

mining program must be formalized, it must be established, it 

must be controlled, it must have procedures, it must be audited, 

and, if you are dealing with U.S. citizens, you must use the FISA 

court. 

Mr. FORBES. Recently, we had a private citizen—that it was determined through the use of open-source information that a U.S. 

National Guardsman was plotting terrorist activities on his fellow 

soldiers. This was, obviously, a very ingenious way to find a terrorist before they could commit a terrorist act. Could you tell us if 

the TAPAC recommendations limit data mining for open source information? 

Mr. MARSH. No. Not completely, no. 

Mr. FORBES. They wouldn’t. 

One final thing. Do we have any idea what foreign countries are 

doing right now with data mining and how they are utilizing it? I 

am sure you studied that and analyzed that. 

Mr. MARSH. There are significant private efforts offshore. Some 

of their programs are more strict and stern than ours. I believe the 

oldest is—I may be mistaken here, somebody help me—is Sweden. 

What you have touched on, Mr. Congressman, a concern that exists in this community with this technology is that we have a lead, 

and we must maintain that lead, and there are abilities possibly 

by others to overtake us in that technological lead, and staying— staying in that lead is absolutely essential. 

One of the recommendations of our panel is research on data 

mining that does not necessarily mean go do data mining but do 

the research to find what you can do, what are the capabilities you 

can achieve by doing it, simply in order to maintain a supremacy 

and lead, which we think in this struggle is absolutely essential. 

Mr. FORBES. We found the same concern, as you know, with biological weapons. Because we had stopped a lot of our research on 

creating some of those weapons, so the counter to that was we also 

had stopped our research on the defense of those weapons. As you 

mentioned, this is a technological edge that we could lose in a matter of months if we are not careful in how we are handling that. 

Mr. MARSH. It is my recollection that this very fine report talks 

in terms of addressing these research programs to achieve some of 

these ends, if I am not mistaken. 

Mr. HAMILTON. Yes, we address that in very general terms. 

Mr. FORBES. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. Thank you. 

Mr. CANNON. The gentleman yields back. 

63

I think that Mr. King is next in line. The Vice Chairman of the 

Committee is going to be penultimate or next to penultimate. But, 

Mr. King, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. KING. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Again, I thank you for 

holding these hearings today and also Chairman Chabot. 

I appreciate the testimony of the panelists. I know you put a lot 

of hours and days into this endeavor and this interesting report 

that brings some solid recommendations out, and I have some 

questions about a number of those. 

I reflect back, though, across some of the other questions and testimony, and Congressman Flake made mention of the Help America Vote Act. I would just point out there is not a requirement for 

a picture identification to be presented at this point. So there is an 

allowance there for a poll worker to request identification, but not 

a requirement. So when it comes to voting, we don’t have any more 

credibility there than we have sometimes getting into the United 

States. Both of those things are important. 

With the passport exception for the Western Hemisphere, one 

can come into the United States from any Nation in the Western 

Hemisphere, other than Cuba, alleging to be a United States citizen, simply by making, and I believe the language, statutory language, is a credible allegation of citizenship. If it were not for that, 

I might still be in Jamaica, by the way, and that is how I know 

that law. That might not be so bad. And I hear your recommendations on tightening that up. 

With regard to Congressman Flake’s questions, I would also add 

this point that I would associate myself with the remarks of Congressman Hamilton with regard to the security. I direct my first 

question to you, Congressman Hamilton—would you consider a biometric Social Security card to be a national ID card? 

Mr. HAMILTON. I don’t think we tried to make those kind of judgments. We on the Commission were no experts on this whole 

field—and it is a difficult one—of biometric measures, and we did 

not address that. 

Mr. KING. Thank you. I wanted to make just a few remarks on 

the security of our borders and how we might tighten that up. But 

I really would focus my interests instead, because I think we have 

a gap in our focus here, on where these recommendations of the 

Commission might go. Some of the statements that were made and 

some of the language causes my curiosity to be piqued. 

The failure to think creatively I recognize that, and I agree with 

that. But we have a Commission recommendation to bring this all 

under one leadership, one voice, and you looked at MI-5 and 

stepped away from that because it was a higher probability of violating privacy and individual liberty. So the soaring rhetoric of— let me see, what was that word I was looking for—the institutionalization of imagination, it captures my imagination. 

I would like to be able to institutionalize imagination. I would 

like to be able to inspire that in all the people that can think outside the box and think creatively, and I would like to find a way 

to root out some of the linear thinkers within our intelligence departments and replace them with creative thinkers. And yet, if I 

were going to form an organization that would be shaping groupthink, I would want to have one person at the top, all information 

64

underneath there. I would want to have control of the budget and 

the hiring and firing process, and I would just about bet you if you 

put me at the top of that, I could create group-think within that 

organization. I might even do it without wanting to do so. 

So my concern is that we end up creating an organization that 

does exactly what we are trying to avoid, and I direct my question 

or request for a response for that remark to Ms. O’Connor Kelly 

first. 

Ms. O’CONNOR KELLY. Well, I would have to defer to the experts 

on the 9/11 Commission, as I am not the expert on the Intelligence 

Community. 

Mr. KING. You are the institutionalization of imagination though, 

and I that is why I went to you. 

Ms. O’CONNOR KELLY. Sure. Absolutely. And I think we were 

quoting language from the report. I think there are so many different ways we can create privacy oversight and privacy values in 

the Federal Government. We can look not only at our experience 

with the Department of Homeland Security and having a Privacy 

Office within the ministry or the Department, we can look internationally at the creation of privacy czars, privacy commissioners, 

data protection officials throughout the world, many of which sit as 

part of the Federal service but outside of any Federal agency. We 

can certainly look at our own history with privacy commissions in 

previous decades. 

So I think that point is an excellent one. You can’t legislate creativity. That is precisely a very good point. But you can create bodies that will be both self-analyzing and also create oversight structures within and outside the Federal Government that could hope 

to create the kind of value structure that you are all talking about 

today in protecting privacy and respecting individuality, while also 

achieving the security mission. 

Mr. KING. Mr. Marsh, would you comment? 

Mr. MARSH. Congressman, I think the real danger in your bill, 

in our recommendations, is that they will go through some sort of 

baptism of bureaucracy and they will become very, very bureaucratic, and instead of doing the innovative, creative things that 

they need to do. I think we need to avoid the creation of a bureaucracy there, and that is going to depend on the leadership. Because 

the nature of these types of programs are regulatory, and my experience has been with regulatory things you get into, actually, a 

very helpful and useful bureaucracy, but I am not sure that is the 

goal you are driving for here. 

Mr. KING. Mr. Chairman, could I ask unanimous consent for an 

extra additional minute? 

Mr. CANNON. Without objection, so ordered. 

Mr. KING. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

I would just direct my question to Senator Gorton then. Did you 

examine the successes, the historical successes of intelligence, as 

you put these recommendations together? 

Mr. GORTON. The answer to that question is, yes, of course we 

have had successes in our intelligence during the course of a 45-

year Cold War. But I think I would really like to answer your previous question, if I may. 

65

We have had a decentralized system. We have had an FBI that 

didn’t talk to the CIA, and a CIA that didn’t talk to the Department of Defense intelligence agencies. Decentralization’s ultimate 

reward was 9/11. What we are trying to do is to cure 9/11. And this 

is not to say that there wasn’t imagination. I think there was a 

great deal of imagination on the part of the FBI agents in Arizona. 

I think there was imagination on the part of those who arrested 

Moussaoui. I think similar things have taken place in the CIA. 

But, in many cases, they didn’t even get to the top of their own 

agencies, much less anyone in authority, say, in the White House, 

who could get the benefit of that imagination. 

Our recommendations for a National Counterterrorism Center 

and for the National Intelligence Director are so that there is a 

focal point, someone who is entitled to get all of the information, 

say, on counterterrorism that comes up from each of these agencies, put that work together, task them to do things to fill in gaps 

or to fill in holes, and have it there before the National Security 

Council, before the policy centers so they can act on it. 

If you read our report through, I think you will join me in saying 

we had a couple of presidents who had to be frustrated. They just 

weren’t getting the information that they needed from this current 

stovepipe system where people were hugging onto bits of information they got, rather than using them and sharing them. 

Mr. KING. Did any agency get it right? 

Mr. CANNON. Would the gentleman like an additional 2 minutes? 

Mr. KING. One would be plenty, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. CANNON. Without objection, so ordered. 

Mr. KING. Did any agency get it right? 

Mr. GORTON. Well, if you say did any agency get it right in a way 

that prevented 9/11, of course, the answer to that question is an 

obvious no. 

Did the FBI get it right when it prosecuted those who perpetrated the first World Trade Center, yes, they did, treating it as 

a law enforcement matter. But then there was this wall. They 

couldn’t talk to one another with their intelligence people, and that 

clearly contributed to 9/11. 

Mr. KING. Thank you very much. 

Mr. HAMILTON. Mr. King, some agencies got it more right than 

others. The CIA understood the threat of terrorism as well as anybody. They spoke about it; and in 1998 the Director of the CIA 

said, we have got a war going on here. The only problem is, nobody 

paid any attention to him. Nobody even within the CIA paid any 

attention to him, and the other intelligence agencies didn’t pay any 

attention to him. 

If you want a competition of ideas, which your question suggests, 

you have got to have a free flow of information, and that is what 

we didn’t have. If you want group-think, it is the status quo that 

developed group-think. And what we are suggesting, I believe, is 

more vitality, more information in the system, which I think will 

bring about more competitive analysis. 

Everybody wants more competitive analysis in theory; not everybody wants it in practice. But if you increase the flow of information from foreign intelligence and defense intelligence and homeland security intelligence and if you increase the flow of informaVerDate 0ct 09 2002 11:12 Jan 06, 2005 Jkt 089266 PO 00000 Frm 00071 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 G:\WORK\COMM\082004\95498.000 HJUD1 PsN: 95498
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tion from the CIA and the NSA and the NGA and the NRO and 

all of these other agencies that you have that now collect intelligence but keep it to themselves, or at least they did prior to 9/

11, I think improvements have been made since 9/11, but what we 

are trying to do is, to pick up one your words, is to institutionalize 

all of this, to get more information flowing through the system. 

We are certainly not trying to put all of the power in the National Intelligence Director so that that director controls what becomes the intelligence product. 

Mr. KING. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. MARSH. Mr. King, in reference to your earlier question—— Mr. CANNON. Mr. Marsh, we have had a note from the C-SPAN 

people. Many of you are not speaking closely enough into the 

mikes. I think, Mr. Hamilton, you have been doing that, so I didn’t 

interrupt. If you would pull that mike closer to you. 

That is much better. 

Mr. MARSH. In order to make those sorts of regulatory efforts effective, you need to place a burden on the most senior officials of 

the Department—I am talking about the Secretary—and you need 

to establish a role for the President to have a responsibility, and 

then you need to have your senior people come in here and respond 

to your Committee as a form of oversight and as a form of legislative audit. Then I think you will see the system will function much 

better. 

Mr. KING. Thank you. 

Mr. CANNON. The gentleman yields back. 

The gentleman from Florida, Mr. Feeney, is recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. FEENEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for these hearings. 

Mr. Marsh, along those lines, I have read the TAPAC report. It 

is very well done. But the first seven of your 12 recommendations 

rely totally on the good will of the Secretary, and it is only the executive branch and congressional oversight that is addressed in 

your last five recommendations that will make sure future secretaries in not just this but other agencies will not just be dependent 

on goodwill. I would like to get back to that in a minute. 

But the other report that is fascinating is the 9/11 Report, and 

I really commend the entire Commission represented here today by 

Senator Gorton and Congressman Hamilton. It is not just the detail and the breadth and the extraordinary way that you have addressed a host of wide-ranging issues, but it also I think puts you 

at a new standard of literary work for Government reports. It really is an animated way to deal with the technological and historical 

issues that led up to 9/11 and the terror we experienced on that 

day. 

I have to tell you that I might be the only Member here that in 

the midst of a hurricane had a flashlight out because I couldn’t put 

down the book. It is not Hemingway or Shakespeare, but I think 

Arthur Conan Doyle would be proud of what you have done. 

Mr. HAMILTON. Put it right up there with Harry Potter. 

Mr. FEENEY. Yes, and, unfortunately, I don’t think you will receive any of the commissions for that. 

But, having said that, Congressman Scott talked about some 

very interesting issues earlier, and he sort of drew the line between 

67

citizens and noncitizens and the right to access, to courts, et cetera. 

But it seems to me one of the things your report touches on is the 

huge difference in kind, not degree, but difference in kind between 

fighting crime and fighting actual intelligence threats. 

What we do with respect to bank robbers is put 99 percent of our 

resources into capturing, prosecuting and then punishing the bank 

robber. That model doesn’t work when the next plane could be full 

of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. I think that is something Americans have to understand. We are dealing with a difference, not in degree, but of kind, in the way that we fight these 

things. 

Much has been made of the stovepipes, and Congressman Hamilton just talked about the critical nature of the free flow of information internationally and then across Federal agency lines. I 

don’t find much in your report on the recommendations, and I 

heard very little emphasis on the free flow of information to State 

and localities. 

The last time the continental U.S. was attacked by a serious foreign threat was 1812 when the British burned down our Capitol. 

We now have for the first time since 1812 State law enforcement, 

we have got sheriffs, we have got police chiefs, we have got fire departments, we have the private sector, people that run flight 

schools in Florida, for example, that have got to be part of the information flow, both from the local level up, because they are really 

your largest set of eyes and ears about imminent threats. 

Then, of course, the other way, you have to be able to share information. Along those lines, a lot of States have privacy protections that are, for example, in Florida, built into our Constitution. 

We have an explicit privacy clause. 

So I would like, Mr. Marsh, as you talk about data mining, and 

also the Senator and the Congressman, to tell us what, if anything, 

as we decide whether or not to set up a privacy office in every single agency or every single sub-agency, whether we decide to put it 

at one major level of the Federal Government, whether that is inside the White House or whether that is independent—those debates are obviously ongoing. But I would like to have you tell us 

what we ought to focus on as we use the 280 million sets of eyes 

and ears around the country in sharing information up and down 

and how privacy can be adversely impacted if we are not careful 

in that flow of information stream as well. 

Mr. HAMILTON. Mr. Feeney, I will try a cut at it, and I am sure 

others will want to contribute. 

The first point I want to make is with regard to the link you suggest between intelligence and law enforcement. That is a very important link, and that is one of the reasons we didn’t go to an MI5, incidentally. 

The fellow who is out here investigating a crime with the idea 

of prosecution in court will often pick up information that is very 

valuable to the intelligence side of the FBI, and vice versa. The 

person doing intelligence, looking at terrorist activity, often will 

pick up information that is very vital to the law enforcement side. 

So we think there is a natural synergy or link, if you would, between the two sides of the FBI. 

68

The second point, we really did address quite frequently the need 

to push information down to the State and local officials. My recollection is somewhere in the report we say 18,000 local officials, police officials and others, are enormously important assets for us in 

terms of counterterrorism activity. And we did find, as I think 

maybe your question suggested, that that flow of information was 

not nearly as good as it ought to be. I think here, too, there have 

been improvements, incidentally, but there is a long way to go. 

I believe I am correct in saying that a major concern of Director 

Mueller—I certainly don’t want to try to speak for him—is to try 

to improve that flow of information to agents in the field; and in 

some cases, like New York City, I believe the relationship between 

the FBI and the New York City police is being worked out quite 

well. 

But it is a huge advantage for us in counterterrorism to be able 

to take advantage of the local law enforcement people, and they 

simply must be brought into the information pool to a much greater extent than has been true in the past. 

Now, the third point I am not sure I caught with regard to privacy. You wanted to know how it was adversely impacted by all of 

this? 

Mr. FEENEY. Well, we have talked a lot about international privacy protections, sharing amongst Federal agencies. But as we go 

up and down from local, State and Federal and the other way, 

what do we need to think about in terms of protecting people’s privacy there, too? 

Mr. HAMILTON. It is a pervasive problem, because if you must, 

as we believe on the Commission, increase the flow of information, 

that means the privacy concerns are greater, and that is why we 

think there has to be some overall direction on it within the executive branch and a lot of review, as some of the other Members of 

the Committee have suggested, by courts and the Congress. 

Mr. GORTON. Mr. Chairman, may I comment on Mr. Feeney’s 

question? 

Mr. CANNON. Absolutely. I think you will note I am fairly strict 

on the time frame for asking questions but try to allow some extension of that time, whereas we have not interrupted the answers 

which we find and I think the rest of the Committee finds fascinating. So, please, Mr. Gorton, go ahead. 

Mr. GORTON. Mr. Feeney, I think you did have two separate 

questions. There has been a traditional and very legitimate objection on the part of local law enforcement officials all across the 

country that communications are one way, that the FBI wanted to 

get information from them, and rarely if ever shared it with them. 

Director Mueller has made significant attempts in this connection. 

The creation of a Joint Terrorism Task Force in every major FBI 

office in the country has done so. 

Two weeks ago, I visited with the mayor of Seattle, the chief of 

police, and the fire chief and found that my city had done an excellent job in setting up and following some of our recommendations 

on emergency response, setting up the single command structure 

and the like, and asked him just that question. And the answer to 

that question was, yes, it is better, but it still has a long way to 

69

go. We are not getting all of the information down that we need, 

but progress has been made. 

With respect to your other question on privacy, I think I might 

refer you to another report. I am a member of the Markle Foundation’s study. In fact, with the permission of the Chairman, I am 

going to leave here in about 30 minutes. I am due at its meeting 

in Colorado this evening. 

It has spent a tremendous amount of very constructive time on 

data mining, the questions that Mr. Scott asked, on what can be 

shared and how it ought to be shared and, very specifically on this 

sharing, how will we bring these thousands of local law enforcement agencies into this field with a very strong protection of 

human rights. It has now had two reports. Its second came out 

about 6 or 8 months ago. We referred to it in our opening testimony here, and I think it will be of great value to you in answering 

that question. 

Mr. MARSH. Mr. Feeney, on the classification, you should be 

aware there are two systems to the classification in our country 

that involve national security and law enforcement. The national 

security is Confidential, Secret, Top Secret, Codeword. That is generally the result of an executive order over on the defense side. 

Clearance for those are extremely expensive, very hard to obtain. 

There is inability in our Government to transfer those from Department to Department, which is a major problem. 

The second relates to the law enforcement type of issues that 

Senator Gorton spoke about. I served for 41⁄2 years on the Gilmore 

Commission, which looked at local responders. The single most frequent complaint that we received from first responders from across 

the Nation was the failure to get sensitive or classified information 

to them that they needed for their security purposes. That has improved somewhat by a recent order of the Department of Homeland 

Security but not anywhere near where it needs to be. 

This is another area, where some information comes down, and 

it is marked ‘‘law enforcement sensitive.’’ Now, it is a form of classification. Very frequently, law officers with law enforcement sensitive information do not transfer that to other people who need to 

know it inside the community. You have broached a matter that is 

a major, major problem that is really administrative but has enormous impacts in other ways of operation. 

Ms. O’CONNOR KELLY. Mr. Feeney, as the operational Privacy Officer on the panel, I note that a major focus of our work this past 

year has been addressing exactly the issue you have raised of information sharing both across the Federal Government but also with 

the State and local partners. 

Obviously with the major homeland security efforts being undertaken at the State level, we are being forced to share—and we 

should be sharing—information with our State and local homeland 

security directors. I see it as sort of a four-tiered issue. 

First of all, Homeland Security is made up of 22 different, separate parts of agencies. So we had to first construct a structure that 

allows information sharing within the Department, which was actually a major undertaking given the privacy act systems that existed in those agencies. 

70

Then to share with other agencies—our partner agencies at both 

Defense and Justice and other parts of the Federal service to make 

those agencies more efficient in the use of information—then to 

share with our State and local partners. And finally to share with 

the private sector. With over 85 percent of our critical infrastructures in the hands of the private sector in this country, we have 

a need to share and a need to know information about their efforts. 

And, of course, as has been pointed out, with the new rules 

under critical infrastructure sharing and sensitive homeland security information, we have hopefully heightened the ability to share, 

but also created good rules around the sharing that allows our employees to know what should be shared and what should not be 

shared, particularly when it pertains to individuals. 

Mr. FEENEY. Thank you. 

Mr. CANNON. I would like to thank the very thoughtful Vice 

Chairman of the Subcommittee for that thought-provoking inquiry. 

And now the Chair recognizes the very patient Ranking Member 

of this Subcommittee for his opportunity to question for 5 minutes. 

Mr. Watt. 

Mr. WATT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

And I think I will use my 5 minutes to follow up on some lines 

of questioning that other people have already opened before I go to 

one final overarching question that I would like to pose. First, Mr. 

Nadler raised an interesting question about if Congress can’t get 

information from executive agencies, how we could set up a board 

or commission oversight board, and how they would get information to do the necessary job that we would give them. 

It occurred to me that Ms. Kelly might be in a good position to 

respond to that. She is inside the Government, inside the executive 

branch. 

How would we structure, you think, a board, oversight board, to 

do the kinds of things that the 9/11 Commission report has suggested, and give them the kind of authority and mechanisms to get 

the information that they need when we appear to be having trouble getting that kind of information ourselves? Can you share any 

light on that, either now or subsequent to the hearing? 

If you have got some thoughts now, I would love to hear them. 

Ms. O’CONNOR KELLY. Yes. 

Mr. WATT. If you have follow-up thoughts I would love to hear 

them, too. 

Ms. O’CONNOR KELLY. Well, I have certainly been thinking about 

this issue for many years, and people wiser than me have been 

thinking about it for many decades. 

So I think there are a number of ways—and I don’t want to preempt people in the Administration who may have thoughts on this 

themselves—but I think you hit on the exact point that the information on—perhaps it is human nature for people to not want to 

air their dirty laundry in public. 

And so to have a privacy office within the Federal agency, although it is looked upon somewhat quizzically elsewhere in the 

world, has actually been a very effective structure because we are 

seen as a helpmate in the mission of the Department, but also 

someone who has criticized from within in advance of programs 

being launched. And perhaps that idea is being enacted. 

71

But we also do rest heavily on our external role. And we have 

issued some critical reports of the Department, which we will be 

sharing with you in our annual report to Congress, which should 

be printed and finalized, hopefully, within a matter of weeks. 

Mr. WATT. I take it that what the Commission has recommended 

goes beyond privacy officers or bodies within agencies. 

Ms. O’CONNOR KELLY. Right. 

Mr. WATT. You may be suggesting that each agency that is dealing in this arena needs a privacy officer. But what the Commission, 

I think, is suggesting is something that—that is—— Ms. O’CONNOR KELLY. Overseeing. 

Mr. WATT.—kind of overseeing all of this. And it may be a more 

difficult problem to get agencies to give up the information to that 

external body than even to an internal body. 

Ms. O’CONNOR KELLY. That may certainly be the case. And I 

think for that question, we should look to the experience of countries which already have operationalized independent data protection authorities. And there is ample evidence of their success, both 

in the European Union and also elsewhere in the world. It certainly might be worth even actually talking to some of those officials who lead those bodies. 

There is an International Association of Data Protection individuals, which we participate in and represent the United States to 

the extent that we are welcomed in that body. They have met with 

greater and lesser success in their own countries in doing exactly 

what you have suggested, getting Federal agencies to share information about their operations, particularly when it might be damaging or embarrassing to the agency—but perhaps a very necessary 

process. 

Mr. HAMILTON. Mr. Watt. 

Mr. WATT. What I might suggest is ask—well. 

Mr. HAMILTON. Mr. Watt, the key requirement——

Mr. WATT. I would just say one other thing that Ms. Kelly suggested, she maybe follow up with—— Ms. O’CONNOR KELLY. I would be happy to. Okay. 

Mr. WATT.—some written suggestions in response to this, because I am going to run out of time. That is what I am worried 

about. 

Mr. HAMILTON. Well, the key requirement is that Government 

agencies must be required to respond to the board. Now, the experience of the 9/11 Commission is that we had to have the subpoena 

power. We didn’t use it very frequently. But if we had not had it, 

our job would have been much, much more difficult. And if this 

board is not able to require agencies to respond in detail to your 

questions, it will be ineffective. 

Mr. WATT. Okay. 

Mr. WATT. Mr. Chairman, I guess I am going to have to ask 

unanimous consent for a couple of extra minutes to get to the next 

two questions that I have. 

Mr. CANNON. Without objection, so ordered. 

Mr. WATT. Let me go. We used the whole 5 minutes on that one 

question. 

I wanted to follow up on this national ID question that several 

people have kind of skirted around. The Commission’s Report 

72

says—and I am quoting, I think—secure identification should begin 

in the United States. The Federal Government should set standards for the issuance of birth certificates and sources of identification such as driver’s licenses. And then it goes on and says some 

other things. 

Now, Representative Hamilton did a great job of telling us what 

he is not suggesting, which is a national ID. What I am a little unclear about, and what other people have raised a number of questions about, is what, short of a national ID, is the Commission suggesting here? Because it sounds like the only way you can get to 

where you are talking about is to have some kind of national identification system. 

Mr. CANNON. If the gentleman would yield. 

Could I just add to that, if you have Federal standards and a 

free-flow information system between the States and the Federal 

Government and law enforcement agencies and the Federal agencies, what is the difference between standards and a national ID? 

Mr. GORTON. Very simply, everyone in the United States, or almost everyone in the United States, is comfortable with the idea 

that you have to have a driver’s license in order to drive. Fifty 

states and all of the other jurisdictions issue driver’s licenses. And 

they do so so that people can be identified, you know, when they 

are driving and when they are arrested. 

What we are saying is that it is very important in the fight for 

the struggle for national security that people be able to be identified. We now have 50 or 54, whatever it is, different systems for 

that. And we are simply saying, take something that everyone accepts now and have it standardized in a way that it really identifies the people who are holding onto it. And we have also incidentally—and we have mentioned it in passing—that we ought to sort 

of have—it would be a great idea to have a standard form of birth 

certificates; because as one of the Members up here said, almost everything stems from that, you know, for Americans, all kinds of 

things you have to get a copy of your birth certificate for. And it 

ought to be something that is valid, that people can rely on. 

We would like them to rely on driver’s licenses. You don’t have 

to get a driver’s license if you don’t want one. But if you want to 

drive, you do. Let’s make it into—let’s make it into something that 

really does say, when I pulled my driver’s license out, you could be 

confident that this is really me and not somebody else. 

Mr. CANNON. Would the gentleman yield? 

Mr. WATT. Yes. 

Mr. CANNON. What I hear you saying, Senator Gorton, is that 

you want a national ID, you want to get that through the back door 

by using something that everybody already accepts. But that is, I 

think you stated very clearly, that you want or you think the Commission wants the national ability to identify people and using an 

already accepted purpose. So if you want, if you want to drive in 

America, you have to be part of a federalized system of identification? 

Mr. GORTON. I think there is a great deal of difference, Mr. 

Chairman, between something that you voluntarily go out and get 

and something that is mandated. 

73

Mr. WATT. Well, you might—you might be—this might be a semantic discussion. And, I mean, I think the discussion about a national ID has been going back and forth for a number of years. But 

it does seem to me that if you are suggesting a standardized birth 

certificate, that is not optional. So for newly born individuals, that 

is a national ID; for people who obtain a driver’s license, that is 

a national ID. 

So you have left out people who have come into the United 

States who weren’t born here and who don’t get a birth certificate, 

or people who have opted not to get a driver’s license. But you are 

not very far have having a requirement that you have some kind 

of national identification for those people, too, I would think. 

Mr. HAMILTON. Well, I would——

Mr. GORTON. Mr. Watt, you have already got a national ID You 

have one or the other. You just don’t know whether it is any good. 

Mr. HAMILTON. Mr. Watt, just to let you know our concern here, 

all of these hijackers, except one, had U.S. Identification. And what 

we are saying is that secure identification is very, very important 

in terms of counterterrorism. 

And we—we did not endorse a national ID. We think there is a 

distinction, as Senator Gorton has said, between Federal standards 

and having a national ID. But do not be deceived here with regard 

to the importance of identification. Keep in mind that these hijackers were extremely skillful in being able to find the gaps in our system. And we are trying to protect against that as best we can. 

Mr. WATT. And do let me be clear that I am not either supporting or condemning a national identification system. All I am 

trying to do is figure out what—what those options are and be 

clear on what the Commission is suggesting. Because for us to 

move from the onset that you have expressed to the reality of what 

you have expressed requires our understanding what you had in 

mind. And that is all I am trying to do. 

Let me do one other thing, Mr. Chairman. And I don’t really 

think this question may be—well, anybody will want to answer—

but I think I have got to ask it because there is, it appears to me, 

to be a real rush politically to act on the 9/11 Commission’s Report 

and a real rush to—for security purposes to act on. 

And I guess the thing that I am wrestling with here in light of 

all of the questions that have been raised in this hearing is how 

we can proceed responsibly to get to a real good product without 

giving the public the perception that we are somehow dragging our 

feet and being picky and not paying attention to details. 

Did the Commission have any ideas about the timetable? I mean, 

obviously, we are 3 years beyond 9/11. Did the Commission have 

any ideas about the timetable for the implementation or passage of 

whatever legislative initiatives are required to implement the 9/11 

Commission’s recommendations? 

Mr. GORTON. Most of the attention so far to our recommendations has been to those two, or several that have to do with the 

structure of our intelligence system, the national intelligence director, the national counterterrorism center. The former of those has 

been recommended by probably a dozen commissions over years. 

I have got—one of our people yesterday had—no, no, meeting 

over in the Senate yesterday—he showed me a list of 48 commisVerDate 0ct 09 2002 11:12 Jan 06, 2005 Jkt 089266 PO 00000 Frm 00079 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 G:\WORK\COMM\082004\95498.000 HJUD1 PsN: 95498
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sions since 1947 that have talked about restructuring our intelligence agencies none of which was successful. 

It came from here, you know. The joint—the Joint Intelligence 

Committees of the House and the Senate 2 years ago made a recommendation that is at least similar to that. Speaking for myself, 

I am inclined to hope that you do do something before the election 

in that respect. 

Mr. WATT. Can we do something on that front without doing 

something on the fronts that we have been discussing here today? 

Mr. GORTON. Well, certainly you can. 

Mr. WATT. I mean, is it advisable? I know the answer is we can. 

The question is, would it be advisable to do something on that 

front without—without setting up these security measures for individual liberties and privacy that we all know need to be in place 

at the same time that the protections need to be in place. 

Mr. GORTON. We believe that the recommendations that relate to 

the Committee, the subject of this Committee, are very, very important, Mr. Watt. We wouldn’t have included them if we didn’t. And 

we thought about them a great deal and dealt with them advisedly. 

I guess the other side of that coin is simply this. We know those 

terrorist organizations are still out there. We know they have declared war against the United States of America. We know that, 

while either through good preparation or good fortune, in the almost 3 years since 9/11 no other terrorist attack has taken place 

in the United States. We also know that lots of them have taken 

place other places in the world. 

So figuratively we have, if not literally, out there in the streets 

somewhere, is a bomb with a fuse and the fuse is lit. And we have 

no idea whether that fuse goes off in 5 days, 5 weeks, 5 months 

or 5 years. But it is going to be awfully hard to stop the blame 

game if it goes off when we have done nothing. 

Mr. WATT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You have been very generous with your time. And I yield back. 

Mr. CANNON. Thank you. I want to thank the Ranking Member 

for some very insightful questions. 

I was not clear when we came into this hearing how clear you 

are from the Commission on the need for a national ID or a system 

of national identification. I think that has become very, very clear 

here. 

In addition, I think the question about coming up with a good 

product versus looking like we are dragging our feet is a very insightful question. And my reaction to that is we need to do some 

things. I am appreciative of the Administration. I am thankful 

daily that we haven’t had in America another serious terrorist activity. 

Although I was doing a cottage meeting last night and had a 

very conservative person there who expressed, at some length and 

with some eloquence, appreciation for that, but recognized that we 

have terrorist groups in America that aren’t associated with al 

Qaeda, groups that are doing things that by any definition are terrorist—and that includes some of our gang members, some of our 

ethnic gang members. We have some very serious problems to deal 

with. We have been very, very blessed. Al Qaeda or violent Islam 

is not our only problem. It is internal problems. 

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I just feel like we need to point out here—generally speaking, I 

almost never preach from the podium here, but often use this to 

ask questions. I was thinking about George Washington, since his 

name came up a couple of times. He was asked at one point what 

the purpose of the other body was. And he had cup of very hot coffee. And he took the cup and poured some in the saucer, swirled 

it around and then drank from the saucer. And he said, the People’s House, Congress, the House of Representatives, is like a turbulent boiling, scalding cup of coffee. And the Senate, by the way 

this is before the 17th amendment—I am not sure it still holds—

but the Senate is the area where we cool it down and sip. 

I feel like we have barely sniffed the coffee, let alone gotten 

ready to cool it down or taste it here. So we have a very long way 

to go, but some things are really remarkable in our time. 

In the first place, I look at Ms. O’Connor Kelly. We have had a 

long and very productive discussion. I think she has done a remarkably good job at what she has done. She represents private industry bringing the most current state-of-the-art understanding of 

technology into the Government. And Government is much better 

because of that. 

And so as you are looking at the questions, Representative from 

Ohio—or Iowa, pardon me. As I am trying to go through these complex issues, my dear friend Mr. King suggested bureaucratization 

sets in. But Government is radically improved by the interface between free enterprise and new technology and our bureaucratic 

process. 

But at the same time we are getting these little inputs that 

make DHS a much more successful agency, we are federalizing 

more and more issues. And we are doing it because it is easier to 

deal with many of the issues that face us today at a Federal level. 

And some of those are absolutely important to be federalized. 

The State of Utah just recently passed a spyware bill. So my IT 

companies are thrilled with that bill. And I have to admit, the 

other day when I was talking to one of them, I said that I asked 

the governor to veto it. And the reason I asked her to veto it—obviously not very successfully—is because this is truly a Federal issue. 

You have to deal with that issue federally. And if you don’t do it 

that way, you have chaos in our system. So we have this period of 

time where we are truly challenged. But the other side, we are responding to those challenges, sometimes appropriately, sometimes 

inappropriately with federalization of issues. 

And I am just deeply concerned that in a time of conflict, that 

men of zeal without understanding, or people with zeal without understanding, are going to assert that we need to do things federally 

for which there is no alternative. There is theoretically another 

way to deal with that. 

And, Mr. Marsh, you spoke twice about anonymizers. Now I 

think the original Web site that anonymized for people is actually 

in my district. Very cool. This goes way back—by the way—we are 

not claiming all the benefits of modern technology. But we have 

great opportunities with—with technology. And if we go down a 

path of federalization too quickly, we will end up with remarkable 

problems. 

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I cannot drive through my major city, Provo, Utah, my most central city, without being keenly aware that every stoplight has a 

camera. I am no computer wonk, but I know the process to be able 

to focus, with some artificial intelligence, the camera on the driver 

and get a picture of the driver, and on the license plate and get 

a picture of the license plate of every car that goes through every 

intersection that has a stoplight and a camera in that city. 

That gives me the willies, and I think it gives Americans a bit 

of pause. On the one hand, a young woman who was kidnapped 

and the kidnapper was captured very quickly, in part by using 

some of this technology. We do want to stop kidnappers. We do 

want to stop terrorists. 

But I just feel like here in this Subcommittee and in the Constitution Subcommittee as well, we need to be looking at these 

issues very carefully and drinking from that saucer and not scalding our tonsils as we chug the coffee immediately. 

I also just feel the need to point out that what happened on 9/

11 was tragic, and a great cost, but it was not entirely unanticipated. I think perhaps the magnitude of it was unanticipated. But 

when we set up the CIA and the FBI there was a debate, and that 

debate centered on the core principles that we have used to build 

all of our institutions in America, and that is separation of powers. 

And while, you know, as we look at that today, we need to be 

thinking in terms of the values incorporated and what was a system that didn’t work very well and what we can do with technology 

today, which allows us to bridge the gap and still maintain separate centers of power, division of power. 

If you read one of the most remarkable Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, he spoke over and over and over again about taking 

power from the highest level of Government and shifting or keeping everything down at the lowest level. And if you fly over America today and you see the big squares; that is, the particular application of Thomas Jefferson’s vision of how to organize society. 

We did square townships so that towns could grow up in a context, and those townships could have smaller units all the way 

down to what we called wards, which were 100 families. And his 

idea of Government was that you govern at the 100-family level. 

And I believe the idea behind the concept of the well-organized militia for the second amendment, was that people in that 100-family 

unit would be able to assert police authority within that group. 

Now, that is a concept that is embedded in our very geography 

in America, but which is not being considered, I don’t think, today 

as we are looking at global attacks. And yet as I said earlier, all 

the attacks aren’t global. Many of the attacks we have are home 

grown, homemade. They are not even foreign or different 

ethnicities from the bulk of the Northern Europeans who settled 

America. They are among us today, not appealing their sentences, 

because of the possibility of a death penalty if they get a new trial, 

or if he gets a new trial. So I am just—I am just deeply concerned 

about those things. 

I wanted to touch on another couple of points that you made, Mr. 

Marsh. 

You talked about a protocol or a culture of privacy. I remember 

thinking as a kid, no one, no employee of the IRS would ever give 

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anyone information that the IRS collected. And then we had two 

Presidents, one of each party, who appear to have made even FBI 

raw data files available to people in the press. With that culture 

destroyed fundamentally—and that is not many people, if they 

have faith that their files are going to be kept private—we have to 

rebuild that culture somehow. Rebuilding that culture means going 

to people with technology at the lowest level where they can be protected and anonymizers are great possibilities. But you have other 

issues, like a certified identification, which hasn’t been mentioned 

I don’t think in any of these processes, which today is not used for 

anything but to avoid that little pop-up on your screen that says 

you are not a secure user. And you apparently can now pay $49 

to get that pop-up eliminated. But it doesn’t do anything for the 

issue of identification that we have been talking about here today. 

And then finally, I just want to point out that there is a lot of 

vagueness in most Americans’ thinking about what they want out 

of privacy. And so I would like to just pause at one of the problems, 

or weigh how to think about that. 

If you saw the movie ‘‘Enemy of the State’’ with Will Smith, you 

have an innocent citizen who has something stashed in a bag that 

that then makes him the target of the vast bureaucracies of the 

CIA. And the appalling thing is the technology is all there. It was 

a very cool movie from that point of view. 

The likelihood of any of us being the subject of a hunt by the CIA 

is almost nonexistent. But the premise of the film, if you will recall, 

is a Congressman of integrity who wouldn’t vote in a certain way 

and therefore was murdered. 

Now, I would like to think that all of my colleagues were men 

of, A, integrity and, B, they have never done anything they could 

be blackmailed with or that could be used to encourage them to 

vote a different way. But in most issues in America today, votes at 

the congressional level and the House of Representatives and the 

other body, or in city council, tend to be fairly narrow because we 

have hard choices. And the ability of evil men to get information 

on decisionmakers at any level of Government and thereby pervert 

decisions, that is what we are trying to avoid here. 

And so while driving, I am not worried when my license plate is 

captured, my face is captured by a camera at an intersection. But 

cumulatively in America, we need to be concerned about that. Because if you can prove that a city councilman was at an intersection near the house of a woman he was purported to be having an 

affair with, there is something wrong with that. It’s important to 

the large process of how we govern ourselves and how we get good 

men and women to perform public functions without the threat of 

embarrassment when an issue comes up that they need to exercise 

their judgment on. 

Those are the areas at all levels of Government and in the judiciary as well, where I think the issues we are dealing with here are 

important and are worthy of being dealt with thoughtfully and 

carefully over time. 

And I suspect that this Subcommittee, perhaps, the Constitution 

Subcommittee in addition, is going to have a lot to say about how 

we at least approach that problem. And I think that means a commission with people who are very thoughtful, who have significant 

78

background, and who are people who are willing to say we don’t 

necessarily need to Federalize this process. And if we do Federalize 

this process, it shouldn’t just be the damn Feds sucking information out of the local folks. It ought to be the local folks who get 

something back. And to do that you ought to have some kind of 

protection, maybe an anonymizer. It may be a culture that existed 

at one time in the Federal Government, I am not sure what it is. 

It is vital to America and it is, I think, the cornerstone of what our 

grandchildren are going to enjoy or suffer in the future. 

So with that, are there any comments by anyone else on the 

panel or additional comments that you on the panel would like to 

make? 

Thank you. I apologize for preaching, but we are adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 12:35 p.m., the Subcommittees were adjourned.] 

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A P P E N D I X 

MATERIAL SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING RECORD

PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE CHRIS CANNON, A REPRESENTATIVE IN

CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF UTAH, AND CHAIRMAN, SUBCOMMITTEE ON COM- MERCIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE LAW

The Subcommittees will please come to order. 

Before we formally start today’s proceedings, Chairman Chabot and I want to sincerely thank and recognize our colleagues on both Subcommittees and on both sides 

of the aisle for taking time out of their busy schedules to attend this important 

hearing. As many of you know, August is typically when Members of Congress return to their districts to catch up on constituent matters and spend time with their 

families. Unfortunately, in these extraordinary times, however, we must undertake 

extraordinary measures to deal with certain pressing issues. 

It also goes without saying that we express our sincere gratitude to our esteemed 

witnesses, each of whom reflect the greatest hallmarks of public service. We appreciate your contributions to our deliberations today. 

The title of today’s hearing—Oversight Hearing on Privacy and Civil Liberties in 

the Hands of the Government Post-September 11, 2001: Recommendations of the 9/

11 Commission and the U.S. Department of Defense Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee (which we’ll refer to as ‘‘TAPAC’’)—clearly explains why we’re here. 

As many of you know, the 9/11 Commission filed its final report last month. As 

some of you may not know, however, is that the report includes several recommendations intended to protect our citizens’ privacy and civil liberties. In addition, it recommends that the federal government set standards for the issuance of 

birth certificates and sources of identification, such as drivers’ licenses, to promote 

secure identification information. While most media headlines have emphasized the 

Commission’s anti-terrorism proposals, I believe the privacy and civil liberties recommendations are among those most critical to our nation’s future and which will 

form part of the focus of our hearing. 

Today’s proceedings will also focus on certain recommendations that the TAPAC 

Committee made regarding safeguarding informational privacy. By way of background, TAPAC was established by Secretary Rumsfeld as an independent, bipartisan committee to examine the privacy ramifications presented by data mining activities by the Defense Department. I think we all agree that Secretary Rumsfeld 

is to be commended for taking this initiative and for ensuring that TAPAC’s mem- bership included some of our nation’s most respected experts in the fields of constitutional and privacy law. I am informed that among the many luminaries who 

testified before TAPAC was our colleague from New York (Mr. Nadler). 

Advances in technology have increasingly facilitated the collection and dissemination of personally identifiable information, but have also correspondingly increased 

the potential for misuse of such information. As the recently renamed Government 

Accountability Office observed, ‘‘These advances bring substantial federal information benefits as well as increasing responsibilities and concerns.’’ Interestingly, 

TAPAC, over the course of its deliberations, determined that as the Defense Department was not alone in its conduct of data mining activities, it was necessary for it 

to address this issue through a series of Government-wide recommendations. 

The purpose of today’s hearing is to examine the validity of these recommendations and those of the 9/11 Commission that relate to privacy and civil liberties and 

to determine whether they warrant a legislative response. We would especially appreciate any guidance from our witnesses about how the Congress, in crafting legislation, can best protect our citizens’ privacy without compromising legitimate law 

enforcement and terrorism detection efforts. And, as our witnesses know, it has 

been 30 years since a privacy commission was established as part of the Privacy Act 

of 1974. I would be interested in having our witnesses comment on whether now 

80

is the time to re-establish a privacy commission that would specifically focus on government privacy issues, especially given all the technological developments that 

have occurred since the commission filed its final report in 1977 and the current 

state of our nation’s security concerns. 

I should also note that both my Subcommittee—the Subcommittee on Commercial 

and Administrative Law—and Chairman Chabot’s Subcommittee—the Constitution 

Subcommittee—have played a major role in with respect to protecting personal privacy and civil liberties in this era of heightened security under the leadership and 

guidance of Jim Sensenbrenner, the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. As both 

the 9/11 Commission Report and TAPAC Report concluded, it is no easy task to balance the competing goals of keeping our nation secure and protecting the privacy 

rights of our nation’s citizens. I believe that our respective Subcommittees and the 

Judiciary Committee are uniquely and best suited to study and resolve these issues. 

Our accomplishments to date include the establishment of the first statutorily created privacy office in a federal agency, namely the Department of Homeland Security. We have also spearheaded the creation of a similar office in the Justice Department, which is contained in legislation now pending in the Senate. In addition, both 

my Subcommittee and the Constitution Subcommittee have considered and supported legislation requiring a federal agency to prepare a privacy impact analysis 

for proposed and final rules and to include this analysis in the notice for public comment issued in conjunction with the publication of such rules. 

I will conclude my opening remarks with a quote from one of our founding fathers. 

As I think you’ll agree, Mr. Hamilton’s observations and warnings are as meaningful today as they were when he wrote them more than two hundred years ago: 

‘‘Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. 

Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm 

attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to 

liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing 

to run the risk of being less free.’’

PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE STEVE CHABOT, A REPRESENTATIVE IN

CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF OHIO, AND CHAIRMAN, SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE

CONSTITUTION

I’d like to thank Chairman Cannon for holding this important hearing today. 

September 11, 2001, changed our world. It changed the way in which we view terrorism and the way in which we, as a country, must protect ourselves. 

Since that tragic day, Congress acted quickly to protect the country from future 

terrorist attacks. For example, through the Patriot Act, we provided our law enforcement officials with enhanced investigative tools to prevent the planning of future 

attacks, and we authorized the creation of the Department of Homeland Security 

to better coordinate activities within our country to protect against the future threat 

of terrorism. 

In taking action, we have been mindful of the protections afforded by our Constitution and our need to protect them as we protect our country. In the Patriot Act, 

we included protective measures, such as the sunset provisions. When authorizing 

the Department of Homeland Security, we ensured that a privacy officer position 

was established to examine the implications of the agency’s rules and regulations 

on privacy and to address any issues that may result. 

Over the last 20 months, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the 

United States (9/11 Commission) has investigated the circumstances and events 

leading up to and on September 11. 

In their report, the 9/11 Commission identified deficiencies within the federal government and made recommendations, including recommendations to safeguard privacy, to better protect the American public. While we must move expeditiously to 

make our country safer, we take care to do so in a thoughtful and Constitutional 

manner. 

I look forward to discussing the Commission’s recommendations with our witnesses today and determining what Congress can do to better protect the privacy 

of our citizens. 

As we move forward, it is important to remember that having effective anti-terrorism measures does not necessarily comprise the protections afforded by our Constitution, as one is not the enemy of the other. The enemy is terrorism.

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