What Color Is Your Privacy Today?

WASHINGTON -- No matter what flavor you like your privacy, the Electronic Privacy Information Center says right now you're getting lemon.

The nonprofit advocacy group recently unveiled its Privacy Threat Index, a color-coded takeoff on the Homeland Security Department's terrorist alert system. The organization invites other Web sites to use its graphic to alert people about attacks on personal privacy.

The EPIC system made its debut at the yellow or "elevated" rung, just as Homeland Security lowered its alert to the same level from orange. The group uses the same colors, in the same ascending order, as the U.S. government's alert system: green, blue, yellow, orange, and red.

"Red is when Big Brother is in charge, and green is when James Madison is in charge," says Mark Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC, referring to the author of the Bill of Rights.

Moving Target

Rotenberg's organization studies civil liberties issues and has closely monitored government surveillance activities since the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington. He says the group's privacy-threat level is "elevated" but not "high" only because the federal government has not yet enacted certain proposals the group considers intrusive, including increased airline passenger profiling and monitoring ordinary citizens' online financial transactions.

Lee Tien, senior counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, another privacy watchdog group, says he'd heat the privacy-threat level to orange.

"It's like dry grass with hot weather in the summer," he says. "It's going to stay at high risk for a long time."

David Bianco, who reviews books about information security, says he uses EPIC's new Privacy Threat Index graphic on his site, InfosecBooks, to provide a "ballpark reference" for privacy issues.

"Most people probably aren't really aware of what goes on with their personal information or how it can be used against you, intentionally or unintentionally," Bianco says. "I'm all for taking the way to get to the most amount of people in the least time."

Bianco says he hopes the concept catches the attention of mainstream Internet users and not only Internet security professionals.

Tougher Stance Urged

If anything, the color scheme may be too subtle to raise the degree of alarm the privacy groups want to provoke--just like the Homeland Security Department's color-coded alerts, critics say.

Tien says the privacy alert graphic's simplicity may not adequately convey the underlying issues, although he notes they "may be a way of catching the attention of people who hadn't really focused on it before, to draw them into it. It can't hurt."

Computer scientist Barbara Simons, a judge for Privacy International's annual Stupid Security Contest, calls the federal color alerts "a joke." She says they unnecessarily cause panic about invisible, unverifiable dangers.

But Simons defends the electronic privacy group's color-coded privacy alert system as educational and beneficial to activists.

"Reducing civil liberties is a risk to all of us, and I think one has to fight it in whatever way we can," she says.

Different Threats

Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, whose agency lowered the terrorism threat level from orange to yellow on Wednesday, recently defended the government's system.

"The color is merely the trigger for the kinds of action we want people to take," Ridge said.

Rotenberg says EPIC might later recommend specific duct-tape type responses to the privacy color codes. The organization might suggest privacy-wary computer users take actions like encrypting their e-mail or being careful not to disclose personal information online, he says.

Some people believe terrorist strikes are unavoidable, Rotenberg notes. "We're not prepared to condone that the loss of privacy is inevitable," he says.