Federal agency actions
By Michael Fraase
Thursday, 02 September 1999 07:08PM CST
Section: 03 Federal agency actions
In 1982, the United States government maintained 3,530 million—that’s 3.5 billion, with a “b”—personal files—paper and electronic—on American citizens, an average of fifteen files for every person in the country. The plan is to eventually maintain every record in electronic form. A vast majority of this data—fully 75 percent of it—is held by five federal government agencies or departments:
- Health and Human Services
- Treasury
- Education
- Defense
- Commerce
By themselves, standing in isolation, each of these files is intrusive enough. But when the individual files are computerized and used collectively, the total information on each of us available to the federal government is extensive and getting even more complete.