Administration Promises Legal Study of FBI Surveillance Net.

The Clinton administration has promised to conduct a legal review of the privacy implications of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's plan to build a computer surveillance and intrusion detection network. When privacy group the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) got hold of a draft of the FBI plan, it published the paper on its web site, prompting an uproar among civil liberties activists. They fear that the Federal Intrusion Detection Network (FIDNET) will be unleashed on private sector computer networks as well as on government systems, and that the data collected through it will be passed to the military.

Now the government appears to be hedging. Director of the Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office John Tritak told Reuters that President Clinton has not yet approved the FIDNET plan. "The legal review is still underway," he told a hearing of the Senate's Special Committee on the Year 2000; "it's very likely, or should I say possible, that the implementation of any of the features in that program will be shaped and determined by those reviews."