DRUG CZAR: RETURN `COOKIES'

WASHINGTON--The White House drug policy director wants to turn his
office's Internet "cookie" machine back on to find out what kids are
looking at.

But Barry McCaffrey was told Tuesday that continuing controversies
over White House drug office snooping on Internet users and paying
Hollywood scriptwriters to put anti-drug messages in TV sitcoms are
undermining public confidence in the government's $1 billion,
five-year anti-drug campaign.

"We can't afford to have kids thinking that every anti-drug message
portrayed on TV was planted by the government," said Rep. John Mica
(R-Fla.), chairman of the House Government Reform criminal justice
subcommittee.

McCaffrey pleaded with Congress to give him two years more to show
that his anti-drug efforts can curb youthful drug use.

Mica questioned the effectiveness of the program. He noted that the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's annual drug survey shows
teenage drug use increased over the last decade.

McCaffrey said after the committee hearing that he's planning to
expand the use of financial incentives for TV networks and
scriptwriters who broadcast anti-drug themes to include Hollywood movies.

McCaffrey said the program has been altered this year, and he will no
longer review scripts in advance or pay writers to insert anti-drug
themes in scripts. Instead, payments will reward writers and producers
who send the anti-drug message only after the movies or TV shows are
released.

McCaffrey also said he wants to overturn a directive issued by White
House chief of staff John Podesta last month, ordering him to turn off
computer-tracking cookies that White House computers were dropping in
the personal computers of visitors to anti-drug Internet sites
operated by McCaffrey's office.

Cookies are software programs used primarily by advertising firms to
track users as they visit Internet sites. Cookies used by the White
House drug office were connected to the New York advertising firm
Doubleclick, which admits that it is compiling databases on the
Internet habits of 40 million Americans. When used with other database
programs, cookies can be used to identify people by name.

McCaffrey said the monitoring project has been "temporarily put on
hold" and the sites have stopped using cookies. "This is a real
concern," McCaffrey said, explaining he wants to turn them back on so
he can monitor what kids are doing on the anti-drug sites.

"No personal information at all is collected," he said.