first is criticism raised by certain members of the law enforcement sector-that the limits placed on the Secretary's right to obtain reports will inhibit important criminal investigation. I believe that the legal processes still open to any law enforcement officer under this Act are sufficient. This act simply guarantees that customers be notified and have an opportunity to respond to any attempt to gain access to their records except where the standard of probable cause has been met. Within the bounds of the fourth amendment rights, that is all that is constitutionally possible.

Others have objected to consideration of this act at this time on the grounds that airing of the issue may bias the upcoming decision of the Supreme Court to review the appeals case. It must be remembered, however, that legislative action will take precedence over court action in such a way as to render that appeal inoperative. If passed, this act answers all the charges filed in the original California suit.

I would like to include for the information of my colleagues an excerpt from a supporting statement by the California Bankers Association. On July 19, the Association wrote that:

We should make it clear that, although the Association places a high value on maintaining the financial confidentiality which bank customers have come to expect, it certainly does not wish to deny it any way the necessary prerequisites of effective law enforcement. The Association feels, however, that it owes its highest responsibility to the banking public who have entrusted some of their most personal records of private financial affairs to our care. The public expects these records to be held in the highest confidence and the California Bankers Association welcomes legislation which would safeguard their expectations.

Mr. FRASER. Mr. Speaker, privacy is a basic right. But the growing network of information-gathering activities is threatening our constitutional right to privacy and individual freedom.

The law offers the individual protection against physical surveillance, but virtually none against data surveillance.

Computers make the vast collection of data on individuals collected by Government and private sources a danger to all residents of our country. This private information often includes highly personal, unverified hearsay and gossip. Illegal or even legal access to this data and the exchange and selling of such information without the knowledge of the individual involved endangers the basic right to privacy.

A person who voluntarily fills out a form, takes a psychological test, or has a physical examination may not consider or anticipate that confidential information resulting from these acts may well wind up in a computer and follow him for the rest of his life, affecting the course of his life.

One of the more startling examples of Government invasion of privacy was the Executive order-now fortunately rescinded-which gave the Department of Agriculture the power to inspect Federal tax returns of farmers "needed for statistical purposes."

We are all affected by the indiscriminate use of data collected-through credit records that often contain misinformation or computer mistakes; through health record data banks used by life, health and accident insurance companies; through bank records, military records, school records, and juvenile records. There is even a Government controlled data bank of information on children of migrant farmworkers. Intelligence gathering operations are carried out by some 20 Federal agencies and by State, county, and city agencies. There are many more examples of data collecting mechanisms such as airline computers, television surreys, psychiatric reports, and polygraph tests.

Recordkeeping may appear harmless on the surface. But we must have safeguards that will protect against the dangers inherent in this massive collection system.

Data surveillance is a chilling specter, intimidating and demoralizing.

I am committed to legislation that will guard against unwarranted access to such data.

Mr. Moss. Mr. Speaker, we are frequently asked whose privacy is being invaded and how. What follows are a number of stark and freightening examples demonstrating how some law enforcement organizations and businesses have intimidated individual citizens. Hopefully these examples will serve to reenforce our commitment to the basic right of privacy for every American, for when one citizen's right is abused, all Americans suffer.

[The information follows:]

37-583-74-pt. 2-24

INDIVIDUALS VICTIMIZED BY INVASION OF PRIVACY

The $100,000 punitive damage suit of James C. Millstone against O'Hanion Reports, a New York-based retail credit reporting firm, goes to trial Feb. 19 in federal court in the eastern district of Missouri (72–C224-4). Millstone, assistand managing editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and, incidentally, a member of the White House enemies list, is a classic unfair credit reports victim. He was turned down for auto insurance in 1971 because O'Hanion reported that "a poll of four neighbors proved" Millstone had a “lack of judgment," undisciplined kids, a prior history of evictions and a bad "attitude." Millstone received insurance coverage elsewhere but under the current Fair Credit Reporting Act, could receive only a verbal account, not a copy of his credit reports from O'Hanion. He then had difficulty getting the firm to correct its report, which proved to contain inaccurate allegations from one disgruntled neighbor in Washington, D.C.

A Princeton University faculty member, Galen L. Cranz, has filed a similar suit, wtih the aid of the ACLU of New Jersey, in federal court in Trenton (CA 1858-73). She was denied auto insurance on the basis of a Retail Credit Co. of Georgia report that mentioned that she was living with a man to whom she was not married. A Minneapolis woman suffered the same fate ("immoral behavior" according to the Safeco Insurance Co. and Service Review Inc.) but the state insurance commissioner may reverse the insurance cancellation as arbitrary. A young couple were returning home to San Francisco one evening a year ago when they were stopped by Santa Clara County sheriff's deputies, eventually handcuffed, held at gunpoint and locked up overnight on charges of auto theft. The arresting officer had queried the San Francisco city and county criminal justice data bank and learned that the couple's Falcon had been reported stolen a year earlier. Police had failed to enter into the computer the "pink slip" record that the car had been recovered by its rightful owners. Eighteen hours after arrest, the pregnant woman and her husband were released. They have filed a $250,000 suit against Bay Area law enforcement agencies. "Not an isolated instance," according to their attorney, Bruce Krell of San Francisco.

It is in California where a San Francisco police cadet was fired for stopping a polygraph test about his sexual preferences and activities.

Arrest Records.--When Brad Shipp was named to the Fairfax County Board of Education in Virginia, it seemed like a great triumph for a 17-year-old high school senior. But the distinction turned promptly into a possible nightmare when members of the Board of Supervisors insisted upon seeing Shipp's arrest record after he revealed two arrests for the possession of marijuana. Virginia law forbids dissemination of juvenile records without the permission of the juvenile or the court. Shipp was saved when the Board deadlocked 4-4 and failed to reach the necessary majority to pass a motion asking Juvenile Court for Shipp's records. He is now serving as a member of the school board.

Arrest Records.-After Charles A. Tosh, an organizer for the Retail Clerk's Union, and others were arrested at a labor demonstration at a Buddies Supermarket in Fort Worth, the security director for the market tried to get the arrest records and mug shots of those arrested. First he tried asking his brother, the Dallas police chief, but was turned down. Then he called a buddy on the Fort Worth police force. This time he was successful, and the Buddies Supermarket displayed mug shots and "rap sheets" of the union organizers so that employees would be discouraged from voting for union representation.

When Tosh saw the anti-union posters, he hit the roof. The company was displaying the photo and arrest record of Charles Tosch, no relation to Tosh the organizer. Tosch was a convicted felon; Tosh had been arrested on minor charges and released.

The Fifth Circuit of Appeals (72-3017, June 22, 1973) held that the Fort Worth policeman's release of arrest records did not constitute "state action" and that Tosh's right to privacy was not violated by the company or the police. Tosh's lawsuit did succeed in showing that the Fort Worth policemen, like others around the country, make any of their 40,000 arrest records available to private security officers, as well as to other law enforcement agencies.

Arrest Records.-An enthusiastic 17-year-old youth was arrested at a rock concert in Columbia, Md., last fall and accused by a private security guard of throwing a rock. He denied the charge. The guard later disappeared, and so the charge was dropped and the youth's criminal file destroyed. However, the reference card to the charge remains in Howard County juvenile files and the young man is attempting to have it purged. "This could plague him the rest of his life," said his father.

Purging.-Among the 16 counts on which Baltimore State's Attorney Samuel A. Green was found guilty this month was a charge of accepting a $750 bribe to expunge the record of a Maryland man obsessed with the idea of having an arrest record (a 1971 gambling charge that was dropped because the man had no knowledge of the operation).

A U.S. District Court in San Diego last November refused damages for a woman ordered to undergo a strip search by border guards who noticed Chicano activist literature in her car. Nothing illegal was found. A $13 million suit has been filed against Macy's by seven employees who claim the firm illegally tapped their phones in the San Francisco store for seven months.

Mr. BADILLO. Mr. Speaker, I am peased to join my colleagues in this special order to signal a congressional commitment to privacy.

The age of technology has brought with it a flood of data banks, credit reference bureaus, computer lists, and government records with personal information on virtually every living American including allegations and rumors about spending habits, job histories, driving records, relationships with neighbors and fellow workers, academic performance, and even personality quirks. These and a host of other specifics are gleaned both from records filled out by the subject and from clandestine interviews with informants who are not necessarily well-informed about the subject but eager to volunteer what they know anyway.

The American people are entitled to be concerned about the big brother aspects of having the details of their private lives available on computer printouts for whoever has statutory authority or perhaps just the right connections to scan them. Evidence is available to us right now concerning unwarranted intrusion into the individual's constitutional right to privacy, and we in the Congress will have to take a stronger role in regulating, or even eliminating, some of the uncontrolled reporting and recordkeeping practices both among private entrepreneurs and agencies at all levels of government.

We have been given clear evidence that the credit ratings which affect a person's very reputation are often compiled on the flimsiest of information, sometimes exaggerated or falsified because of the financial premiums for investigators who submit unfavorable reports on individuals. Anyone who has ever been questioned about an acquaintance by Federal Government investigators is aware of the opportunity for malicious reporting and the deposit of unverified raw data into Government files that may remain observable by certain authorities for the duration of the subject's lifetime.

Because of the potential for abuse, and in fact because of increasing reports of actual abuses in the gathering and recording of private data on individuals, I am pleased that the Congress appears ready to move toward protecting the personal rights of the American people.

Mr. Speaker, I have cosponsored bills to require Government agencies to advise citizens what records are kept concerning them, to limit the sale or distribution of mailing lists by Federal agencies, to restrict the authority of Federal agencies to inspect individual income tax returns, and to guard personal privacy by regulating automatically processed files.

One of the greatest risks to our civil liberties now and in the future is the invasion of our personal lives through computerized data banks, wiretapping, and interception of correspondence. In anticipating the threat and acting quickly, we can put permanent limits on the snooping and secret information-gathering whose results accumulate in private and Government dossiers.

The pirvacy of the individual is one of our most cherished tenets. We have the opportunity to shore up and give real meaning to that important freedom. The legislation introduced by the Members participating in this special order should be among our highest priorities for the remainder of the 93d Congress.

Mr. ROSENTHAL. Mr. Speaker, the promise that each individual will be free from governmental surveillance of his or her political beliefs and activities is perhaps the most fundamental guarantee in the Bill of Rights, yet we find that his guarantee is increasingly being abused.

In the last decade there has been a vast increase in the maintenance and dissemination of all kinds of personal records by governments. These records contain personal information about virtually every aspect of the private lives of American citizens-from political dossiers to bank and credit records.

The dimensions of the dossier problem are already staggering and are steadily growing. For example, there are approximately 2,500 credit bureaus in the country with records on more than 131 million persons, all of which are regularly sold and disseminated. The Defense Department and the FBI compiled between 1968 and 1972 in the area of political surveillance a computerized index of more than 25 million names of persons who had taken part in civil rights or antiwar activities and were regarded as potential civil disturbance risks.

The profound danger of these files is that the individual may be totally unaware of the existence of these records and totally. unaware of the contents. The impact and the existence of them may only become known in extraordinary circumstances. Yet the effect of the contents of the file may be earth shaking upon disclosure to employers, creditors, banks, or other agencies.

Often these dossiers create assumptions about people on the basis of anecdotal information about their past, and then condition the future of their lives on those frequently false assumptions. The individual seeking employment may suddenly find that a dossier has been compiled, containing false or erroneous information, that may eliminate him from contention for a job. For instance, the Federal Civil Service Commission has files on 1.5 million persons suspected of "subversive activities" and therefore, blacklisted for employment.

The subject of privacy has been studied extensively by congressional committees and subcommittes and by prestigious governmental and private agencies. It is now time for substantive legislative and administrative action to be taken to protect the right to privacy.

Several steps must now be taken to curb the antidemocratic tendencies of dossier-building. First of all, control must be established over data collection and computerized data banks maintained both by private and government agencies. Prohibitions must be established against the gathering and storing of information relating to the lawful political activities of individuals. Perhaps most importantly, every person about whom personal data is stored should be notified of that fact and given access to his dossier to check its accuracy and propriety.

I wish to direct your attention to an article "Your Past Maybe a Prison" by John H. F. Shattuck which dramatically highlights the importance and th eneed for legislation in this area. Only strong and prompt action to safeguard the right of privacy will convince the nation's citizens of the sincerity of their legislators and leaders in protecting individual privacy.

[Mr. Shattuck's article follows:]

[From the National Council of Jewish Women, October 1973]

YOUR PAST MAY BE A PRISON

(By John H. F. Shattuck)

About two years ago Robert Meisner received a letter informing him that his car insurance was being canceled because of an adverse credit report prepared by a nationwide commercial credit reporting agency. Never having had credit problems before, Mr. Meisner managed to find out, after a series of angry letters and telephone calls to his insurance company, that the report indicated his son was "a long-haired hippie suspected of drug use." The source of the report was never disclosed to Mr. Meisner. Since his son had no police record of any kind and was characterized as a model student by his high school principal, the insurance company eventually reinstated the Meisners' insurance in order to minimize the bad publicity resulting from Mr. Meisner's tenacity. Retail Credit Company, which had prepared the report, however, refused to expunge the erroneous and damaging information in the Meisner dossier-one of more than 50 million in its files-and it could not be compelled to do so under any existing law.

The Meisner case is symptomatic of the problems of a dossier society. Governmental and private activity to counter perceived threats of crime and subversion is a growth industry. The heart of this activity is record keeping. In the last decade there has been a vast increase in the maintenance and dissemination of all kinds of personal records computerized records of arrests not resulting in convictions, political dossiers on private citizens who exercise their rights of free speech and assembly, medical and welfare records of persons who qualify for government assistance, bank records of private depositors in federally insured banks, credit records like the one that caused trouble for Robert Meisner, and a seemingy endless variety of other kinds of personal information about virtually every aspect of the private lives of American citizens.

These data collection and dissemination practices tend to trap those who get caught by them in a "record prison." It is difficult for a person to escape the effects of his increasingly bulky "record" because allegations of past misdeeds and judgments about him follow him whenever he seeks a job, a license, credit, housing, admission to school, or a host of other social benefits.

One ACLU client, for example, a former Post Office employee, was forced to resign when he was placed under investigation for mailing obscene letters. He was subsequently cleared of the charge but the Post Office refused to reinstate him and agreed only to make a notation in his federal Civil Service file that he had been cleared. Several years later, the man was disqualified for state employment by the Utah Civil Service Commission, on the basis of a file check which turned up evidence of prior "immoral conduct." Apparently the clearance notation had not been computerized with the rest of the man's employment record.

The major evils of these anecdotal records are their persistence and increasingly wide exchange. Bank records, for example, provide a detailed account of a person's political contributions and membership in private clubs or other organizations. By federal statute enacted in 1970 the Secretary of the Treasury is now empowered to require banks to microfilm and maintain for periods up to five years all checking transactions, and to make reports about such transactions to the Secretary, who, in turn, can make them available to other government agencies. All these financial records, therefore, are available to the government without any notice to the depositors, whose privacy and rights to political anonymity are quietly subverted.

In terms of the sheer quantity of available data of private persons, the dimensions of the dossier problem are staggering. There are, for example, approximately 2,500 credit bureaus in the country with records on more than 131 million persons, all of which are regularly sold and disseminated. Of the more than 7.5 million arrests which are recorded each year, 3.5 million do not result in convictions but continue to be recorded and widely disseminated for a variety of purposes, including employment screening. A 1967 study of employment agencies in the New York area indicated that 75 percent would not accept for referral an applicant with an arrest record and no conviction.

A similar study by the U.S. Employment Service in Washington revealed that only about 15 percent of job applicants with records of convictions or arrests could be placed. In the area of political surveillance, the Defense Department and the FBI between 1968 and 1972 compiled a computerized index of more than 25 million names of persons who had taken part in civil rights or antiwar activities and were regarded as potential civil disturbance risks. The federal Civil Service Commission has files on 1.5 million persons suspected of "subversive activities" and therefore blacklisted for employment. Moreover, those examples are only the tip of the iceberg.

Some of the least dramatic records can have the most profound impact, but are never known to their subjects. or only become known in extraordinary circumstances. Mark Isaacs is a professor at Temple University. Three years ago his eight-year-old son David was killed in a highway accident, and during the course of litigation, David's school records were obtained by the lawyers. When Mark Isaacs read these records his outrage at what they contained prompted him to write an article. "The Secret File of David Isaacs, Age 8," which was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer. One anonymous comment in the file stated, "Refuses to use left hand. Dislikes being reminded to try." David's father pointed out, "Of course he refused; of course he disliked nagging. He had an orthopedic problem on his left side . . ." In another part of the article Mark Isaacs indicated that "two months before he was killed, David was given a standard psychological test. . . . The comments appended by the school psychologist fascinate me. This time the comments are signed. 'Subject boy had bad associates,' the psychologist declared. "The bad associates were his parents. . . . David's feelings of superiority, if they do exist, are bolstered through parent attitudes.'

David Isaacs' school record represents all that is wrong with the dossier society. Data gathering and dissemination frequently work the way a tracking system works in a school; they create assumptions about people on the basis of anecdotal information about their past, and then conditions the future of their lives on those assumptions. For this reason these practices are often antithetical to a free and open society which allows people the opportunity to improve their lives. Several things should be done to curb the antidemocratic tendencies of dossierbuilding. First, there should be a flat prohibition against gathering and storing information relating to the lawful political activities of individuals. Second. legislation outlawing the storage or dissemination of hearsay or anonymous derogatory information should be enacted. Third, procedures should be devised for expunging or preventing the dissemination of records of arrests which do not result in convictions. Fourth, we must evolve a procedure analogous to the eco