Book Reviews

In the early sixties a tentative proposal was advanced to form a national data bank by linking together some six hundred separate federal repositories of personal data. The proposal envisioned a statistical data bank to beused primarily for research. That many of us were uneasy, to say the least, in the face of such a suggestion was amply demonstrated in the course of subsequent congressional committee hearings; hearings that resulted in the proposal never being formally offered. A decade later many of the objections raised in these hearings were to be vividly underscored by the revelations of the Watergate investigations. Personal data banks can be abused and diverted to purposes far from the original intentions of lawmakers and system designers.