Privacy groups rap DHS plan to limit access to clearance information
Proposal could make half of data gathered during background investigations off-limits to applicants, one opponent says.
Privacy advocates have voiced strong opposition to the Homeland Security Department's proposal to scale back the amount of information that security clearance applicants can access about government investigations of their background.
"It needs to be thoroughly revised," Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, said of DHS' proposed rule change. Members of the public have until Oct. 12 to submit comments on the draft regulation.
DHS argued in its proposal that more information that comes up during background checks -- central to employment in many positions at the department -- must be kept secret to avoid compromising national security or revealing that an individual is being investigated.
Dixon responded with a four-page letter, in which she argued that DHS' move to "commingle" systems of records that come up during investigations -- including those on terrorism-related inquiries and criminal investigations -- and then exempt them from the 1974 Privacy Act creates an overly broad category of documents that are unavailable to applicants. Provisions in the Privacy Act currently give applicants the right to view their materials.
"The commingling of the records in a single system will only result in confusion on the part of DHS staff and -- especially -- on the part of individuals who are subject of the records in the system," she wrote. "That confusion may result in the denial of rights that the Privacy Act … was intended to grant."
The result, Dixon said in an interview, could make as much as half of the information included in any clearance applicant's file exempt from the Privacy Act, and therefore unavailable to that person.
"They will have to undo this one," she said.
The World Privacy Forum is the only privacy advocacy group that has submitted comments thus far, but it is not the only one likely to oppose the proposed rule change.
"I was shocked," to see the proposed regulation, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Rotenberg said one staffer is working nearly full-time researching the regulation, though he would not say whether EPIC will file a formal comment in opposition.
The proposed regulation lists Hugo Teufel, DHS' chief privacy officer, as one of two contacts. When approached by a Government Executive reporter at a recent hearing of DHS' Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee, Teufel declined to comment on the issue. DHS also did not return repeated calls for comment.