SEC vows hands off e-mail, chat rooms

By Maria Trombly

April 6, 2000 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - In response to concern about the agency's plans to monitor the Internet for illegal activities, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has promised that the commission won't snoop on electronic conversations and e-mail.
However, privacy activists called for safeguards for government surveillance of Internet activity.
The SEC recently issued a request for proposals, asking vendors to submit bids to develop an automated search system that could scan the Web for possible security law violations — including exaggerated claims of return by investment officers, impersonation of public companies or their officers, fictitious press releases or news reports and disclosures of nonpublic information.
Specifically, the agency called for "continuous, comprehensive crawling of the World Wide Web, newsgroups and Listservs."
But this doesn't mean that the SEC will be spying on private conversations, said commission Chairman Arthur Levitt in a statement Wednesday.
"I want to make clear that the SEC has never had any intention of intercepting or monitoring private transmissions, including conversations taking place in chat rooms or on e-mail," he said.
Instead, the SEC simply plans to automate the process of searching public sites that are already accessible to the public through commercial search engines, he said.
"This is no different . . . than finding a newspaper article with the aid of a tool that helps you do so more quickly and exactly," Levitt said.
But just because a statement has been made public, that doesn't mean the government should track it, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group in Washington.
Rotenberg said he wants the SEC to be subject to judicial review, annual reporting and independent oversight.
"I don't think this particular program should go forward until these safeguards are put into place," he said.

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