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06/30/2003 Entry: "Nuala: Tech Not a Complete Fix"

PRIVACY AND SECURITY: HotWired has an interesting interview with Nuala O'Connor Kelly, the chief privacy officer for the Department of Homeland Security. Kelly justifiably will have a difficult time balancing the interests of privacy with the department's focus on anti-terrorism activities.

WN: Some have suggested that your primary job is to provide good PR for homeland defense, not to make real changes in how the government handles private data. Your response to that?

O'Connor Kelly: I've heard that comment (I think I read it in Wired, in fact), and I have to confess to being quite baffled by it.

I have no background in PR, and I haven't been in Washington long enough to know how to "spin" things. People who know me know how hard I work now, and how hard I worked at DoubleClick to make good decisions internally for the organization. Perhaps I should have demanded more credit externally, but that part of the job never occurred to me.

I do think it's incredibly important to be transparent and accountable and accessible. We owe it our citizens, our customers, our clients, to explain what it is we're doing.

If that's PR, then I suppose it's part of the job. But I don't think of it as PR; I think of it as communicating accurately and responsibly to citizens so that they are aware of what their government is up to ... so that they can make informed judgments about those activities. Apparently, I've done a really poor job of PR on my own behalf, as I think that most of my work was internal to the organizations I've been a part of, and apparently those on the outside didn't know the scope of it.

Read on.