PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT -- February 2000
Are We Becoming a Society of Snoops?
Concerns have faded about a Y2K breakdown of government
computers, but Americans should be worried about how computer
efficiency gives the federal government extraordinary powers to
monitor the daily activities of law-abiding Americans. Unknown to
most people, government databases are storing all kinds of personal
information about every American.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has mandated that
all wireless providers by 2001 be able to pinpoint the location of
wireless phone calls. Cell phones are becoming homing devices for
the government to track our whereabouts.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) tried to impose a
regulation called Know Your Customer. It was a plan to require banks
to make a computer profile of all their customers' deposits and
withdrawals and report "inconsistent" transactions to a federal
database in Detroit called the Suspicious Activity Reporting System.
After the comment period produced more than 250,000 negative and
only 3,000 positive comments, the FDIC backed down and on March
23 abandoned its plan temporarily.
However, during congressional consideration of the big Financial
Modernization bill last year, we discovered that many banks are
already making customer profiles and selling them to telemarketers.
The banking lobby successfully blocked an amendment that would
have required banks to get the prior consent of customers before
selling private financial information.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has proposed a regulation
that would effectively give the government unlimited access to
everyone's personal travel records. The FAA gave $3.1 million to
Northwest Airlines to create software for a database of personal travel
records, plus $7.8 million to other airlines to assist in deploying it.
The 1996 Welfare Reform Act requires all employers to send the
name, address and Social Security number of every new worker, and
every employee who is promoted, to a new government database
called the Directory of New Hires. This is a massive database
tracking nearly every worker in America.
In 1999 Congress authorized the linkage of this database with the
Department of Education. Meanwhile, public schools are requiring
children to fill out nosy questionnaires revealing all sorts of
non-academic information about attitudes, behavior, health and family
privacy, which is then entered on databases.
The 1996 Kennedy-Kassebaum Act authorized the Department of
Health and Human Services (HHS) to assign a "unique health care
identifier" to every American so the government can enter and track
individual medical records on a government database. Public reaction
was so adverse that Congress put a moratorium on implementation.
The 1993 Comprehensive Childhood Immunization Act gave the
Department of Health and Human Services $400 million to induce
states to create databases of all children's vaccinations. By giving
"rewards" to the state of $50, $75 or $100 per fully vaccinated child,
states are financially motivated to make vaccines compulsory and to
produce the proof by storing the information on a state database.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is trying to link these state
databases into a federal database containing every child's medical
records. This will become a gatekeeper to deny admission to
daycare, kindergarten, school or college, or even access to medical
care for any child who has not had all government-mandated shots.
It will be easy to add all medical records to this database, which
would then become the key to the government's ability to dictate the
giving and rationing of health care. This would accomplish Bill
Clinton's original 1994 goal when he displayed his Health Security
Card to a national television audience.
Another plan to collect private information on a government database
involves sending "home visitors" into the homes of all first-time
parents in the project called Healthy Families America. Information is
entered on a nationwide computerized tracking system called the
Program Information Management System that can eventually be
combined with preschool and public school tracking systems.
The 1996 Immigration Act mandated that state driver's licenses
contain Social Security numbers as the unique numeric identifier so
the federal government could use driver's licenses (a state matter) as
a federal I.D. card. After public protest, this was repealed in 1999.
HHS is recruiting senior citizens to spy on their own physicians by
offering a reward of up to $1000 if they call the toll-free "Fraud
Hotline" and file a report that leads to a monetary "recovery" from
their doctor. The harassment potential is enormous when 39 million
seniors start trying to collect a bonus if the doctor's office enters the
wrong code number on a Medicare form.
This government monitoring is allegedly for the purpose of locating
terrorists, money launderers, drug kingpins, Medicare and welfare
cheats, student loan delinquents, and deadbeat dads. But law
enforcement must not be allowed to turn us into a society of snoops.
We should prohibit the federal government from building, or assisting
the states or private corporations to build, databases of personal
information on American citizens that is none of the government's
business. Only totalitarian regimes monitor the private actions of
law-abiding citizens.
Banking Confidential? Don't Bank on It!
During consideration of the Financial Modernization bill passed by
Congress last year (Public Law 106-102), we were all shocked to
discover that, without any authorization from customer or
government, many banks have been selling personal customer
financial information to telemarketers who use it to peddle insurance,
travel clubs, health plans, and a host of other consumer products. In
return for this valuable information, some banks receive commissions
on sales made by the telemarketers.
Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) flushed this issue out into the open
by urging that strong consumer privacy protections be added to the
bill, but the big banks immediately staged such a massive lobbying
effort against this provision that it was not included. Banks just don't
want to give up the profits they've been making by secretly selling
customers' personal financial information. Banks don't want to have
to ask customers for permission because they doubt that customers
will give it, and that's probably correct. Some bankers shamelessly
admit that they profile their customers so the bank can tell
telemarketers which products a customer might like.
But why should banks be able to make secret profits off of
customers' personal information such as deposits, checks, phone
numbers or credit card numbers? The checks you write and receive,
the invoices you pay, and the investments you make reveal as much
about you as a personal diary.
One of the incidents that brought this secret banking practice to
public attention is the case of Albert Newman, age 79, of Washington
State who suddenly started getting mailings from an insurance
company. It turned out that Mr. Newman was a cryptographer during
World War II, and he deciphered the numbers on the mailing labels
and traced them to his local bank.
Another problem involving banks was caused by a new federal law
designed to catch parents who fail to pay child support. Financial
institutions are now required to help locate so-called deadbeat
parents by searching their customer databases every three months
for matches against state-provided lists of child-support delinquents.
If matches are found, the banks must turn over the names, account
balances and all other information to the state, which can then seize
the assets. But small banks and credit unions that can't afford the
technology or manpower to comply are using a provision in the law
that lets them simply hand over all confidential information on all their
customers, thus forcing the state to conduct the search for matches.
One of the worst aspects of all this snooping is that Congress has
prohibited financial institutions from telling their customers that the
bank spied on them and reported their transactions to the
government.
In order to catch crooks and money launderers, the Bank Secrecy
Act of 1970 requires banks to send a Currency Transaction Report to
the government for every transaction involving more than $10,000
cash. The inefficiency of the process is shown by the fact that,
between 1987 and 1995, the snoopers sent 77 million Currency
Transaction Reports to the government but the bureaucrats failed to
catch the $50,000 transmissions made by the Communists to CIA
spy Aldrich Ames.
Collections of Information
The Collections of Information Antipiracy Act, H.R. 354, is a
dangerous bill pending in the current Congress that would grant a
new federal right to corporations that build databases. It would
protect corporations' control of these databases by threatening to
prosecute anyone who interferes with this new right.
These new federal crimes carry penalties of a $250,000 fine and five
years in jail for the first infringement, and twice that for the second.
H.R. 354 would subject the mere copying of a part of a corporation's
database to the jurisdiction of federal judges with the power to seize
assets without a finding of guilt, and impose huge fines and prison
sentences.
Congress should not make "collections of information" a new federal
right enforced by the police and judicial power of the federal
government! The Supreme Court correctly ruled in Feist v. Rural
Telephone Service (1991) that, under the U.S. Constitution, copyright
protection is granted only to authors who create new works, not to
corporations that merely collect data. For example, telephone
companies do not own their listings of phone numbers just because
they spent money collecting them. The Collections of Information bill
is deviously designed to finesse the Feist decision by creating a new
federal right called "collections of information" (with a special
exclusion for telephone listings). It will create new rights not
constitutionally available under copyright laws.
Databases are a tremendous financial asset because they can be
used for so many commercial purposes such as targeted marketing
and health insurance underwriting. Since the database markets are
already growing by billions of dollars a year, corporations already
have ample incentives to build databases and make big money off of
them, and they don't need Congress to legislate any new incentives.
By vesting all these new rights in companies that build databases,
H.R. 354 will make it difficult, expensive or impossible for individual
Americans to access or restrict usage of their own information. We
don't want the federal government to create new federal rights or
incentives to encourage corporations to collect, manipulate, control,
or market databases. H.R. 354 is so dangerous to our liberties that
128 prominent corporations and organizations, including such diverse
groups as Harvard University and the United States Catholic
Conference, are expressly opposed to it.
Asking Nosy Questions
Meanwhile, a regulation to force 9,000 home health care agencies to
collect and report sensitive information about all their patients was
issued last year by the powerful federal agency called HCFA (Health
Care Financing Administration). OASIS (Outcome and Assessment
Information Set) was the cutesy name for this latest venture into Big
Brotherism, but there was such opposition to it that the plan was put
temporarily on hold.
OASIS was designed for home health providers to interrogate all their
patients, not merely those whose bills are being paid by the
government through Medicare or Medicaid, exempting only children
under age 18 and pre- and post-natal mothers. The government is
thus reaching out to grab the medical records of patients whose
medical bills are paid by private sources, i.e., not paid by the
government.
The 12-page fine-print form that home health care providers were
ordered to fill out on each patient was extraordinarily detailed and
offensively privacy-invading to the patient. The questionnaire wasn't
just about medical history, treatment and medications. Questions
were asked about race, ethnicity, family, whether you own or rent
your residence, whom you live with, your finances, and your
psychological attitude and behavior, all tied into your Social Security
number.
Government Experiments on Humans?
It isn't often that federal bureaucrats admit to embarrassment, but the
New York Times reported on October 23 that it was "highly
embarrassing to federal health officials" to have to admit the "causal
association" between the RotaShield rotavirus vaccine and the
life-threatening condition called intussusception. The embarrassment
was aggravated "in part because the vaccine [for diarrhea] was 23
years in development and much of the work was done at the National
Institutes of Health."
Health officials should be expressing deep and sorrowful regret for the
terrible damage they have done to infants. Intussusception is a bowel
obstruction caused by one portion of the bowel sliding inward, like a
telescope, into another part of the bowel, causing a previously
healthy infant to scream in terrible pain, and often requiring surgery to
repair.
The government's formal position until October 22 had been that all
infants in the United States should receive three doses of the
vaccine, at 2, 4 and 6 months of age, although caution was
expressed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on July 15 and
the manufacturer withdrew the vaccine from the market on October
15.
CDC immunization spokesman Dr. John Livengood said that the
health officials' decision to withdraw the vaccine recommendation
reflected a stepped-up review of scientific evidence, which showed
that the rotavirus vaccine appeared to cause intussusception in about
1 in 5,000 recipients, and that vaccinated babies were 25 times as
likely to develop intussusception three to seven days after the first
dose as those who did not receive it. What is so shocking about this
admission is that the high rate of intussusception was known before
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in August 1998. The
raw data were kept secret and the CDC went ahead with its
recommendation.
Another disturbing piece of news is that, of the federal health advisory
panel's 12 members, only 4 voted, all for the recommendation to
withdraw use of the vaccine. We are told that the others were absent
"because of emergencies or abstained because of ties to the
manufacturer or other conflicts of interest."
It is unacceptable that members of the advisory panel are permitted
to have conflicts of interests, and it's no answer to say they merely
don't vote on the decisions where their conflict of interest is
immediate. Panel members should represent the public, not be
beholden to the pharmaceutical companies or the CDC.
All the raw data supporting any vaccine recommendation should be
made public so they can be reviewed by disinterested parties. Many
infants would have been saved from the intussusception tragedy if the
raw data about the rotavirus tests had been available to the public.
We are long overdue for a Congressional investigation to educate the
public about the current process of mandating vaccines, the secrecy
about raw data, the failure to do risk and cost-benefit analysis, and
the role of the pharmaceutical corporations in lobbying for mandates.
The American people have a right to know exactly how and why the
CDC disregarded the danger signals in the test data and
recommended the rotavirus vaccine anyway.
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons has urged
Congress to investigate the process by which vaccines are approved
and recommended. The public is entitled to know if government
approval is a political rather than a scientific decision, as well as the
fact that government mandates are what make vaccines so
commercially profitable.
Parents are beginning to fear that the real clinical tests may be
post-mandate instead of pre-mandate. When the CDC can conceal
the raw data about the pre-tests and reveal only summary statistics,
it's easy to distort the results, recommend a vaccine for all infants,
and make the universal use of the vaccine the real test. This process
amounts to experimentation on humans without telling the recipients
or their parents that the vaccine is experimental.
President Clinton added to our worries about vaccine scandals when
he issued Executive Order 13139 requiring military personnel to
receive experimental vaccines that don't even have FDA approval for
the intended use. It appears that EO 13139 is an attempt to finesse
Pentagon responsibility for administering the controversial anthrax
vaccine to all military personnel. The Defense Department has been
inoculating for inhalational anthrax even though the only FDA
approval, issued nearly 30 years ago, was only for cutaneous anthrax
(contact through touch).
Hundreds of servicemen (including dozens of pilots) have resigned
rather than submit to the anthrax vaccine because they have
observed or heard about adverse reactions in many of their peers.
Dozens of military personnel have been prosecuted and punished for
refusing to be inoculated, and more than 1,000 are now awaiting trial.
Infants and military personnel are two groups of Americans subject to
medical decisions made by others. Is our government using those
two groups for human experimentation with inadequately tested
drugs?
Government Should Do No Harm
In the televised presidential debates, Alan Keyes kept reminding us
that moral and cultural issues are paramount, and he challenges the
media and his opponents to address them. While most would
concede that Columbine and other recent unhappy events indicate
that America has a big moral problem, what is the government's role
in morality and culture?
We don't expect our president to be our preacher or our Big Brother
or our nanny or our morality policeman. But we should insist that the
federal government do no harm. Yet, so many federal programs, even
when designed to do good, have followed the law of unintended
consequences and been downright harmful.
The liberal welfare program, whose enormous expansion dates from
Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, is widely acknowledged to be a
disaster, which is why welfare reform was one of the few Republican
bills that Bill Clinton signed (after two vetoes). Unfortunately, the
welfare program was not merely a failure. It was a major contributor
to the social problem of illegitimacy because it made fathers
irrelevant by routing its cash and other benefits exclusively through
mothers.
It's generally admitted that our nation has lost the war on drugs or at
least is in big-time retreat. It's possible that the billions of federal tax
dollars spent on drug education is another counterproductive
program. Since more kids are now using illegal drugs, is government
drug education a failed program, or has it encouraged more children
to experiment with illegal drugs? Some people think the latter
because most drug-education courses teach children to make their
own decisions about drugs instead of explicitly warning them that
drugs are wrong and illegal.
Planned Parenthood-style sex education has been taught in the
public schools for the last 25 years. It certainly hasn't achieved its
purpose of preventing teenage sex, and some now say it has
exacerbated the problem by inviting children to cast aside their
natural modesty and assume that pre-marital teen sex is normal.
The government is to blame for the fact that more than 40 million
Americans lack health insurance. Federal laws have rigged the
system so that, unless you work for a company that can afford a
health plan, it is difficult or impossible for an individual to get
insurance. So many mothers, who would rather be fulltime
homemakers or take only part-time employment, are the victims of
"job lock": they don't dare quit and lose their health insurance. Before
the government starts imposing new regulations, it should remedy its
own mistakes and fix the system so that employees can own their
own health insurance just as they own their own automobile
insurance.
It wouldn't be so bad if waste were the only bad result of big
government. We should address the moral and cultural problems by
first remedying the harm done by federal spending and wrong-headed
policies.
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