Opening more Social Security files to police draws questions

WASHINGTON -- A request to make highly personal Social Security files more easily available to law enforcement is testing how much privacy may be sacrificed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The debate has divided officials within the agency that oversees the nation's retirement income program.

Currently, the Social Security Administration can share confidential information with law enforcement only in life-threatening circumstances. In those cases, wage and earnings data can go to federal police agencies; Social Security numbers and other information can go to all law enforcement organizations.

The agency's internal investigator, the inspector general, is pressing to lessen that threshold. He argued the FBI was improperly delayed from getting Social Security numbers, tax information and other data about the hijackers on Sept. 11 because of the prohibitions.

Inspector General James G. Huse said the standards for getting the information released "required an expenditure of effort and hours that delayed investigative efforts."

His boss, acting Social Security Commissioner Larry Massanari, doesn't want the long-established privacy safeguards to be changed -- at least until the matter is thoroughly studied. He said legal requirements to safeguard privacy were quickly met for the Sept. 11 inquiry.

Defining the mission

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Social Security, has intervened in the dispute. He is asking officials to find middle ground.

"This isn't the time for bureaucratic turf battles," Grassley said. "This is the time for agencies to come together to fight terrorism."

Grassley said he's concerned that "The Social Security Administration never saw as its mission the responsibility to track criminal misuse of Social Security numbers."

Similar arguments have raged as Congress has passed the most widespread changes to wiretap and electronic surveillance laws in a generation to aid the terrorism investigation.

Frustrated defense lawyers are battling the secrecy covering court proceedings of more than 1,000 people who have been detained since Sept. 11.

Once the Social Security inspector general's office was permitted to help the FBI, it cross-checked numbers used by the hijackers with federal records, searched the numbers of possible associates, retrieved addresses and provided wage and earnings figures.

The IRS considered the tax information so sensitive that it authorized disclosures for only 30 days, a period extended for a second month because an "imminent danger" persisted.