PRIVACY HOW TO PROTECT WHAT'S LEFT OF IT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-01208R000100230037-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 8
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 22, 2011
• Sequence Number: 37
• Publication Date: January 1, 1979
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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Contents
Introduction ix
PART 1 Traditional Privacy Protections
1 Background 3
PART u Informational Privacy
2 Bank Records 15
3 Criminal Records 29
4 Consumer Credit Bureaus 43
5 Consumer Investigations 55
6 Employment Records 70
7 Federal Government Files 84
A WORD ABOUT THE CENSUS 99
A WORD ABOUT CANADA 102
8 Insurance Records 105
9 Mailing Lists 120
10 Medical Records 132
11 Privileges 145
12 School Records 152
13 Social Security Numbers 165
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Notes
Index
330
333
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Contents
14 State Government Files 175
A WORD ABOUT ADOPTION RECORDS
A WORD ABOUT JURORS 187
15 Tax Records 189
16 Telephone Privacy 198
184
PART III The New Technology and Your Rights
17 Computers 209
18 Electronic Surveillance 229
19 Fingerprinting 245
20 "Lie Detection" 250
21 Surveillance Devices 264
22 Voice Comparison 271
PART rv Physical Privacy
23 Sexual Privacy 275
24 In the Mails 291
25 In the Workplace 299
26 In the Community 304
A WORD ABOUT SEARCH AND SEIZURE 309
A WORD ABOUT DOOR-TO-DOOR SALES 312
A WORD ABOUT A WOMAN'S NAME 312
A WORD ABOUT THE PRESS 313
27 In the Home 315
A WORD ABOUT NOISE 319
PART v Psychological Aspects of Privacy
28 In Mind and Body 323
 i
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200 Informational Privacy
that it routinely discloses Southern California unlisted tele-
phone numbers to more than one hundred federal, state,
county, and city agencies, without ever informing subscribers.
The company said that it will confirm to a subscriber that the
number had been disclosed but will not volunteer the informa-
tion. Among the agencies that regularly received unlisted num-
bers on request are the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Cen-
tral Intelligence Agency, Border Patrol, Forest Service, Food
and Drug Administration, county probation offices, local police
and fire departments, Internal Revenue Service, county health
departments, county and city welfare departments, military
services, and volunteer "crisis" and suicide prevention centers.
Pacific Telephone provides about one hundred unlisted num-
bers a day to these agencies. New York Telephone Co. admit-
ted doing the same thing, even to a cop on the beat in a
nonemergency. Telephone companies in all parts of the coun-
try have much the same policies.
Another instance of generosity on the part of telephone com-
panies is their co-operation with government snoopers who ask
for a list of toll calls made from a particular telephone number.
Telephone companies provide these "telephone logs" freely to
the government without notifying the customer. The most no-
torious incident occurred in 1971, when the Chesapeake & Po-
tomac Telephone Co., in Washington, D.C., gave to the gov-
ernment a list of toll calls made by news columnist Jack
Anderson, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Knight News-
papers. In 1974 the C. & P. Co. co-operated again, giving long-
distance records from the New York Times Washington bu-
reau for the preceding seven months to the Internal Revenue
Service. The IRS thus had a list of 2,400 calls made by Times
reporters, to see whether an IRS agent might have talked to a
Times staff member. The telephone company also turned over
a similar log on the home telephone of a Times reporter.
These logs are useful investigative tools. They don't reveal
the contents of a conversation, but they can help identify con-
tacts and associates of a caller and lead investigators to sources
of information.
Since 1974 the Bell Telephone System says it has been re-
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230 The New Technology and Your Rights
ton, wiretaps with the consent of one of the parties to a conver-
sation are legal. Anybody may wire his or her own telephone
with a recording device and record his
phones or her own conversations
oniirethattheirtelephownone, without violating the law. The police may
w
, dial your number, and record the call. A
regular beep tone to alert you is no longer necessary.
The law clearly allows telephone companies to monitor any
telephone calls they wish, in order to check the working order
of equipment. The telephone employee rarely cares about the
content of the conversation or knows the identity of the callers.
The telephone companies also use this authority to detect peo-
ple who are defrauding telephone companies by using devices
that avoid toll charges.
The consent concept in the federal law has been extended to
authorize users of telephone equipment to monitor their own
lines, even though each individual employee has not provided
consent, or even knows about the eavesdropping. Federal law
says that this monitoring is legal, without a warrant or individ-
ual consent, to check on "the rendition of ... service." "Serv-
ice monitoring" is discussed in Chapter 16. Eavesdropping to
detect employee dishonesty has been regarded as legal under
this provision of the law. However, it is not valid for one
member of a household to consent to electronic eavesdropping
in behalf of the other members of the household.
The best-known category of wiretaps includes those installed
by law enforcement officers, with a warrant, approved by a
judge in advance under federal or state law 41 The warrant
must be specific as to the targets and the location of the surveil-
lance. The judge may order the wiretap if satisfied that there is
probable cause for belief that an individual is committing, has
committed, or is about to commit a particular crime-
espionage, sabotage, murder, kidnapping, extortion, bribery,
gambling, jury tampering, obstructing justice, theft from inter-
state shipments, counterfeiting, drug dealing, bankruptcy fraud,
illegal union activities, conspiracy, or other violent felonies.
There must also be probable cause to believe that electronic
surveillance will provide good evidence. The judge must certify
that other investigatory techniques have been tried unsuccess.
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26o The New Technology and Your Rights
not. Drugstore clerks take polygraph tests; store managers do
not.
Even though the polygraph, which measures three bodily
changes, has not gained scientific acceptance, we have moved
into the second generation of "lie detection" with devices that
measure only one bodily change. The voice analyzer records
changes in the vibrations of the human voice, on the theory
that when a person is under stress these vibrations change. A
similar device, called the psychological stress evaluator, meas-
ures changes in the inaudible frequency modulation of the
human voice. These devices have been with us only since 1970,
but business managers desperate for a short cut to truth have
shown interest in them because they can be used without the
knowledge of the subject. The machine fits into a briefcase. No
obtrusive rubber hose around the stomach, no cuff around the
arm here-a hidden microphone will do. Some users claim that
the machines work on telephone or tape-recorded voices. They
have even used the technique on the voices of persons long
since dead to tell us who really killed President Kennedy.
Clearly these devices are less reliable than even the polygraph
because they measure only one bodily change. A study for the
U. S. Army Land Warfare Laboratory in 1974 reported that
the machines were not nearly as reliable as not only the poly-
graph but also the tried-and-true method of simply observing a
subject's behavior. Accuracy rates in this test of voice analysis
for the Army, the most recent pertinent research, ranged from
19 to 33 per cent. The technique is less successful, in fact, than
mere chance. The Department of Defense and the Central In-
telligence Agency, whose pursuit of new investigative toys is
well known, have both found voice analyzers and psychological
stress evaluators wanting. Neither agency relies on them.
They are thought to be rarely used. Throughout the federal
government there were fewer than a dozen machines in 1974,
and the companies that make them are far from candidates for
Fortune's Top co 5(or 5,00o) companies. But because they can
be used behind the back of an individual-or long after the
subject has uttered words-who can say where or when they are
used? An entrepreneur in the northwest United States has re-
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In the Mails 293
Consulate of Chile in San Diego. Assorted others read mail out
of idle curiosity.
The latest word from the Department of Justice is that read-
ing mail requires a warrant. (The U.S. attorney in the southern
district of New York claimed that the restriction applied only
to sealed mail and that the Customs had already unsealed the
mail and therefore the restriction wasn't applicable.)
A Customs Bureau official told Congress in 2977 that other
federal investigating agencies laughed at Customs when told
they couldn't read mail that was opened. From 1953 to 1973, in
violation of federal statutes and the Constitution, the Central
Intelligence Agency conducted an extensive program of open-
ing and reading first-class mail passing in and out of the coun-
try through Hawaii, San Francisco, New Orleans, and New
York City. The Federal Bureau of Investigation got to take a
look as well. Mail to and from the Soviet Union was automat-
ically suspect.
Under this institutionalized nosiness (code-named HTLIN-
GUAL and SRPOINTER), the CIA copied at least 225,000
letters and distributed them to other federal agencies for lei-
sure-time reading. The CIA took down the names of every per-
son mentioned in the correspondence-2.5 million persons in
all-and stored them in its computer data bank in McLean,
Virginia. Among those whose mail was read and photocopied
were John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath; Jane
Fonda, film actress and political dissident in the early 1970s;
Senator Frank Church of Idaho, whose mother wrote to him
from Moscow; a sociology professor at Amherst College who
notified two colleagues at Moscow State University about an
academic conference; an American exchange student in Mos-
cow writing back home to his father; and an American woman
who wrote to a Soviet dissident whom she had met on a trip to
Russia. Can the United States adequately crusade for the free-
dom of dissidents in the Soviet Union if American agents
themselves are reading the mail of the Soviet citizens?
The CIA claims to be able to read mail without even open-
ing the envelope. It uses a chemical to decipher the writing in-
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294 Physical Privacy
side, according to secret testimony in 1975 by William E.
Colby, then director of the CIA. But as long as postal authori-
ties allowed the CIA to read mail in the States, there was no
need to use the special potion in the United States.
The CIA's routine reading of mail within the United States
was said to have stopped in 1973, and the Postal Service said in
1975 that it no longer permits CIA agents to get a look at the
mail. The FBI somehow does get hold of mail, most of it from
overseas, and reads it. Until 1977 it even had a special office
behind the Capitol in Washington, D.C., for translating when
necessary. Most of this mail is personal correspondence be-
tween American families and friends in Russia or China.
The extent to which federal agents open and read domestic
mail is not known. About two hundred times a year, court or-
ders allow federal authorities to do so. Federal agents are not
supposed to do so without warrants.
The FBI makes use of the Postal Service's change-of-address
records. FBI documents about a friend of mine showed that
the Denver Field Office reported to headquarters the new ad-
dress to which my friend had asked the Post Office to forward
his mail. (The FBI also received the co-operation of a Denver
moving company to find out where my friend was shipping his
furniture.)
In addition to opening and reading mail, federal agents also
use "mail covers," the interception of mail to a particular ad-
dress to copy down all information on the outside of the enve-
lope. About three hundred postal inspectors conduct the moni-
toring. Return addresses and the date of the postmark are
copied and forwarded to the agency that requested the cover.
Sometimes a fugitive will disclose his or her whereabouts by
placing a return address on correspondence to the family. A
mail cover on a company suspected of mail fraud may turn up
the addresses of victims who could provide evidence for prose-
cution. The Postal Service takes the position that such surveil-
lance does not violate the Fourth Amendment and requires no
warrant, because the mail is not opened. The service will moni-
tor mail only for law enforcement agencies and only to protect