Essay by Amelia Acker: “A series of exploratory case studies were conducted throughout the 1960s to research centralizing access to government data. In response, social and behavioral researchers—both within and outside the federal government—proposed what came to be known as the National Data Center. The proposal prompted several congressional hearings in the House and Senate throughout 1966. Led by Congressman Cornelius Gallagher and Senator Edward V. Long, respectively, the hearings addressed the possible invasion of privacy that would result from a data center using computer technology and automated recordkeeping to manage data gathered from the public. According to privacy scholar Priscilla Regan, “Congress’s first discussions concerning computerized record systems cast the issue in terms of the idea that individual privacy was threatened by technological change.” But, as the hearings continued and critiques in the press began to circulate, concerns shifted from focusing on the potential impacts of new computing technology on data processing to the sheer volume of information being collected about individuals—some three billion records, according to a Senate subcommittee report.
By the end of the year, the congressional inquiries exploded into a full-blown controversy, and as one observer wrote in 1967, the plan for the National Data Center “acquired the image of a design to establish a gargantuan centralized national data center calculated to bring Orwell’s 1984 at least as close as 1970.” These fears about files with personal information being aggregated into dossiers and made accessible through computers would shape data protections in the United States for decades to come…(More)”.
