Decrying what he calls "a sweeping epidemic of lost privacy," Republican Presidential candidate Steve Forbes promised to make privacy protection a major theme of a Forbes Administration - including calls for allowing encryption software and for software letting you keep Web sites from tracking your e-mail without your permission.
"We don't want to live in a society where every innocent American is effectively monitored by a high-tech 'ankle bracelet' like a criminal, watching every move we make," he said a speech Thursday to the conservative Free Congress Foundation. "We must think wisely about how to protect our privacy in this high-tech era, how to balance our right to privacy with our passion for free enterprise, as well as with our government's need to protect us and enforce the law."
Privacy, said Forbes, has received "no attention on the campaign trail. Yet it's a subject we dare not ignore, particularly at the dawn of a new century, and a new Information Age economy. Too much is at stake."
Forbes even outlined a ten-step plan for privacy protection if he were to win the White House, starting with a call for a "Privacy Impact Assessment" of every piece of legislation before it becomes law. The critical parts include allowing strong encryption software for personal and commercial computers and ending the IRS, the latter a longtime favorite Forbes target.
"We will…encourage the development and widespread use of new software allowing Internet users to block Web site operators from reading, tagging, and tracking their e-mail address - just as you can now block your telephone number from caller ID systems," Forbes said - a jab at the Clinton Administration's wavering on the issue. Encryption supporters believe the software can protect the privacy of computer users' online habits and preferences, including adult Web sites.
He also calls for blocking national health identification cards; shutting down federal medical databases which include information Washington "has no constitutional right to have; reducing the Census to a single page form which addressed the Constitution's "enumeration" requirement and nothing more; ending the IRS and simplifying the tax code (a longtime Forbes theme, anyway); blocking creation of a national ID card and a government-run worker database; and, he swore to veto any bill which he felt threatened privacy rights.
Forbes lashed out at government using "terrorists, criminals, illegal aliens, welfare cheats, deadbeat dads, and students" and other issues as "ecuses to impose oppressive government surveillance over our private lives," calling that a "typical tactic of those attempting to preserve their power to target law-abiding citizens rather than just the law-violators."
Forbes thus put himself on the record as the first Presidential contender in the pack to deliver a point-by-point position on privacy issues. He blasted Vice President Gore for acting other than he preached in a 1998 commencement speech where he supported privacy rights - well before Gore became a candidate for the White House himself - in supporting Clinton Administration plans for "a battery of regulations" being developed by the Department of Health and Human Services "that would legalize access to your medical records without your consent" - a massive, centralized health care database, Forbes says, that would put "a unique health identifier" on every American.
"This is the same Administration…found in possession of more than 900 FBI files on their political opponents…How could we ever be sure such sensitive medical information wouldn't be hacked into or accidentally posted on the Internet to be viewed by anybody at all?"
But Forbes says that's only symptomatic of a "larger disease" - such as private companies tracking down and then selling unlisted phone numbers, Social Security numbers, driving records, cell phone numbers, stock and bond portfolios, and other personal matters.
He suggested government's use of the "explosive" Information Age and the advent of the Internet has made what he calls this Transparent Society possible.
"Technology is making it increasingly easy for government and private companies to track down and monitor every detail of our personal and financial lives - what we buy, what we eat, how often we use an ATM, where we live, the names of our children," the publisher said in his speech. "Sure, in many ways this technology makes it easier to do good - for law enforcement to track down terrorists and criminals, for example, or for us to track down long lost friends and family members. But it also makes it easier for stalkers, scam artists, child abusers and kidnappers to do evil."
Forbes also said the IRS's "promise to install new and better privacy protections" after the 1995 outcry over IRS agents caught snooping tax records had failed, since two years later more IRS workers were caught snooping likewise. "IRS agents need to get counseling to learn that it's not only illegal but unethical and immoral to violate a person's privacy and read their most personal and confidential tax and financial records? It's an outrage. But that's what passes for tax reform in Washington these days."
Forbes also attacked the census process for overstepping its Constitutional bounds toward privacy invasion. "Where in the Constitution do we read about every American being required by law to fill out page after page of personal information about themselves, their homes, their finances and so forth. What business is it of government to know all this, or require people to disclose it? It's none of their business. It's another violation of our privacy and it's time for someone to say so."
