IF BIG BROTHER HAS A NAME, IT'S BILL MCCOLLUM

Rep. Bill McCollum thinks it's his business to know yours. The
Altamonte Springs Republican has seen the enemy, and it is your
privacy, and he has devoted himself to eradicating it.

>From giving the FBI expanded wiretapping authority to trying to give
the agency a window into our encrypted data, McCollum has decided his
role in Congress is to make sure our telephone conversations and
e-mail are all within easy earshot and eye-shot of the government.

His dogged and extreme efforts to invade your privacy recently earned
him the less-than-coveted Orwell Award, given at the Computers,
Freedom and Privacy '99 Conference in Washington, D.C. The dishonor is
given to those who have done the most to promote Big Brotherism. The
trophy sports a head on its side with a boot on top, smashing the side
of the face.

"Out of all members of Congress in the last five years, McCollum has
been the most pro-active in introducing new surveillance technology,"
said David Banisar, Policy Director for the Electronic Privacy
Information Center. "He's by far the worst of the bunch."

Banisar points out that, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee's
crime subcommittee overseeing the FBI, the Drug Enforcement
Administration and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, McCollum has been a
"cheerleader," not a supervisor.

When, in 1998, FBI Director Louis Freeh was shopping around a wish
list of added powers for the agency that he wanted slipped quietly
into a large appropriations bill, McCollum stepped up to oblige. He
added roving wiretap authority -- which allows the FBI to wiretap
phones wherever a suspect goes without an additional court order -- as
an amendment to the huge Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal
Year 1999 while the bill was in conference committee.

Not only had roving wiretap authority not been in either the House or
Senate versions of that bill, Congress had rejected a narrower
formulation of roving wiretaps when it came up during the debate on
the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act. Members thought it gave too much power to
the FBI without sufficient judicial oversight. Nonetheless, it was
made part of the huge spending measure last year and is now federal
law.

Now McCollum has taken up the banner for another of Freeh's pet
projects: encryption.

In 1997 Freeh testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the
proliferation of strong encryption threatens "the public safety of our
citizens." His gripe with encryption is that it allows people to
communicate without the FBI and other law enforcement agencies being
able to eavesdrop. So, in the same way the FBI (with a big push from
McCollum), got Congress to force the telecommunications industry to
retrofit their phone system to accommodate wiretapping, Freeh called
on Congress to impose a "key recovery" scheme on all manufacturers of
computers and software with encryption capabilities. He wants Congress
to require them to hold a decryption key that would be available to
the government with a court order.

McCollum to the rescue.

In March, McCollum attempted to gut the pro-encryption Security and
Freedom through Encryption Act, or SAFE. The SAFE bill, which is
widely applauded in the computer and civil liberties community, would
remove current barriers to the export of strong encryption,
restrictions that are hurting our international competitiveness in
computer products. (Who overseas would want to buy American computers
if he knows the U.S. government can listen in?)

McCollum tried to amend the bill in the House Judiciary Committee to
require manufacturers to crack any encryption they wish to export,
either by building in a back door or by holding a decrypting formula.
Manufacturers would be responsible to provide law enforcement with a
decrypted transcript of any communications it had "lawful authority"
to seize. Although the amendment was ruled out of order, McCollum is
undaunted and will, according to committee staff, try to inject it
into the bill as it moves through different committees.

His idea would not only handicap U.S. computer makers vis-a-vis the
rest of the world, but would burden them with the secretarial function
of providing reams of transcripts to our government. McCollum's "keep
the genie in the bottle" approach to encryption is laughable, since
very strong encryption software is already freely available on the
Internet.

McCollum is also behind a push to make our Social Security card
tamper-proof and as secure against fraudulent use as a passport, which
probably means a picture, fingerprint or other biometric system would
have to be employed. His legislation would only hasten the
transformation of our Social Security card into a de facto national ID
card, which then could be useful for another McCollum legislative
initiative that would require a Social Security number to vote.

Apparently McCollum is not satisfied hacking away at privacy and the
Constitution from his lowly House seat; he has announced plans to run
for the Senate after Connie Mack retires. Since the man is a poster
child for government at its biggest, it's astounding that he is so
popular among Republicans. But it looks like he has a good shot at
winning the primary.

If "Senator Spook goes to Washington," there won't be an anti-privacy
award bad enough to do him justice.