New privacy threat index mimics terrorism alert levels

SAN FRANCISCO—The Electronic Privacy Information Center today unveiled a new Privacy Threat Index to track what it sees as a growing menace to privacy from the government’s expanding surveillance efforts.EPIC officials at the RSA 2003 Security Conference said the Washington center’s index would ape the five-level color code established for the Homeland Security Advisory System by the Homeland Security Department. The rankings are green for low, blue for guarded, yellow for elevated, orange for high and red for severe. Based on developments during the past year, EPIC placed the current level at yellow.It will become increasingly important to compare surveillance activity over time, EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg said. "We will use the Privacy Threat Index to assess developments in the United States and to compare activities in countries around the world,” he said.Jim Bidzos, chairman of the Bedford, Mass., company’s conferences, said yesterday that he had suggested the color-coded index. Bidzos is a member of the EPIC advisory board.The index is the result of concern over government’s new powers to investigate and eavesdrop on citizens since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Rotenberg said.Chief among the concerns are two items: the USA Patriot Act, passed in the immediate wake of the attacks, and a Patriot II follow-on legislative proposal being developed by the Justice Department.In an alert about the index, EPIC cited five other factors that led to the index’s creation:Though these factors are discouraging, EPIC’s alert also noted three positive signs:The Privacy Threat Index can be found on EPIC’s Web site, at .Bidzos, meanwhile, presented his own index, rating the insecurity level of the Internet.Based on the growing number of vulnerabilties and attacks, the complexity of software and the government's failure to improve security at many agencies, he set the level at 6.5 on a 10-point scale, with one being best and 10 worst.But Bidzos praised industry efforts such as Microsoft Corp.'s trusted computing initiative and said the company's focus on developing secure code is a model for all software makers.