The civil liberties board is supposed to be the first contact for the president to talk about privacy and intelligence matters. We didn't know about the NSA piece when the intelligence-reform bill was put forward, but it would have been helpful to have the experts at the civil liberties board involved at the beginning.

Generally when we think about privacy and the government, we want to make sure that the government is transparent and does protect privacy over and above the rest of the Internet and the rest of the private and nonprofit sector,

It's too early to say whether an Internet privacy bill will be passed this year. It depends on other agenda issues like tax and campaign finance that need to be settled first. It's on the radar screen; some have even said it is the radar screen, but I don't think that's so.

The Bush administration, and the president chief among them, has said from the beginning of the term that it wants to keep more information secret, especially during the deliberative process. We've seen that happen already with Enron, ... And now there are concerns about terrorism. Some of that is legitimate, and some is an overreaction.

Privacy is a gray area when it comes to information access on the Internet, ... And the grayest areas often concern public records issues.

Privacy is a gray area when it comes to information access on the Internet. And the grayest areas often concern public records issues.

Seems as though it takes a violation of peoples' privacy to make people pay attention.

We think this bill raises some good issues,

While public records are generally available, the lines become blurred in cases like this where public records are tied to other information. It can move into a situation where it becomes a direct violation of someone's privacy.

P3P is the first consumer privacy standard that gives individuals more choices. That's what we really think is promising about it. For Web publishers, P3P offers the ability to instill trust in their users.