FC: Clinton administration report on bankruptcy & privacy, from P.Swire

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[Peter Swire was the White House's chief counselor for privacy under 
President Clinton. --Declan]

********

Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2001 10:34:38 -0800 (PST)
From: peter swire <peterswire () yahoo com>
Subject: New study on privacy, bankruptcy, public records
To: declan () well com
Cc: swire.1 () osu edu

Declan:

Here is an item that may be of interest for your list.

Today, OMB, Treasury, and the Justice Department
released a study on bankruptcy and privacy.  The press
release is available at
www.treasury.gov/press/releases/ps1136.htm.  (I'm not
sure if the full report is posted yet.)

This study may turn out to be important to the
developing debate about how access to public records
should be treated as court and other records
increasingly go on-line.  An example of the problem
comes from the fact that active bank account numbers
are now often revealed in public bankruptcy records.
This sort of sensitive financial information would
generally not be available to the general public, much
less for free over the Internet.

No sensible person wants to shut down citizen access
to  most public records.  But sensible persons may
also believe that certain specific categories of
information, such as bank account numbers and Social
Security numbers, might no longer be appropriate to be
released.  The challenge will be how to construct new
systems that meet both the legitimate accountability
and privacy goals.

Peter

P.S.  My best email is now swire.1 () osu edu.



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