A bit of bad news

When the Department for the Security of the Fatherland was set up, there was a lot of ballyhooing about how no one could have any concern about their privacy rights because, gol dang it, there's a "privacy officer" to keep tabs on all that stuff to make sure there are no abuses.

Sounds great. Is bull. As Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com's Washington, DC correspondent noted early last week,

[t]he Department of Homeland Security's privacy officer can't do her job. You can thank Congress for that strange state of affairs.

When politicians were concocting the massive bureaucracy a few years ago, they handed the privacy officer impressive-sounding tasks such as "assuring" that new technologies do not erode privacy and "evaluating" the impact of new government programs.

But Congress also neglected to give the job holder the power to twist arms and actually investigate privacy violations.

Nuala O'Connor Kelly, currently in the post, is required by law to investigate complaints about violations of privacy - but she has no subpoena power, so no way to actually get the answers she's required to seek. Internal DHS documents have shown cases where she was flat-out stonewalled by her own department, with no recourse.

The Department of Homeland Security's privacy officer doesn't even have the clear ability to report abuses to Congress directly. Because the law is ambiguous, Kelly provided her last annual privacy report to then-Secretary Tom Ridge for his office to review before it became public.

Besides the obvious changes to the law (grant subpoena power and have reports go directly to Congress without agency review), McCullagh has an interesting suggestion:

[R]eward the privacy officer for blowing the whistle on official malfeasance. If Kelly or her successors expose privacy violations and the program were terminated, the offending departmental agency would see its budget shrink, while the privacy office's budget would increase proportionately.

Given the natural bureaucratic tendency to seek maximum budgets, that would seem to give both investigator and investigated incentives to do their jobs properly. Some nice competition going there. So the Shrub team should be all over his idea - isn't competition what they say is the source of all good things?