CIA Says It Canned Its Internet Cookies Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/175288.html CIA Web Site Cans Cookies After Report By Brian McWilliams, Newsbytes WASHINGTON, 18 March--A Web site operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) today discontinued marking visitors with a unique identification tag, or "cookie," after a non-profit group complained about the practice. The use of "persistent" cookies at the CIA's Electronic Reading Room (ERR) site, which provides online access to previously released CIA documents, violated federal privacy guidelines and the agency's own privacy policy, according to Public Information Research (PIR), a Texas-based non-profit which reported the practice to the agency Friday. Designed to remain on the visitor's computer until December 2010, the cookies contained the user's Internet protocol (IP) address as well as a unique identification number, Newsbytes confirmed this morning. According to a spokesperson, the CIA was not aware that the site, located at http://www.foia.ucia.gov , was placing the tracking files on visitors' computers. The representative said the technology was inadvertently added by a contractor during a redesign of the site that was completed Jan. 29. This afternoon, ERR site administrators disabled the software that was tagging visitors with a persistent cookie as well as with a temporary or "session" cookie that expired when the user's browser closed. In a June 2000 memorandum to all government agencies, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) advised operators of government sites and their contractors that "the presumption should be that 'cookies' will not be used at Federal Web sites." Before today, the privacy policy at the ERR stated that the site did not use persistent cookies and instead only used session cookies. The CIA has updated the privacy statement to reflect its current practice of setting no cookies on visitors' computers. The CIA's Web site, located at http://www.cia.gov , does not use cookies to gather or store information about visitors, according to the main site's privacy policy. A review of some federal sites today by Newsbytes revealed that several are placing session cookies on visitors' computers. Such sites include the FirstGov.gov portal, the FBI's jobs site, as well as the main sites operated by the Small Business Administration, the Department of Education and the Selective Service. According to the OMB memo, the use of cookies by federal sites is justified only when there is "a compelling need to gather the data on the site" as well as "appropriate and publicly disclosed privacy safeguards for handling of information derived from cookies." Most Web sites can log the Internet protocol (IP) address and activities of visitors without the use of cookies. But the persistent cookie at the CIA's ERR site enabled the agency to better track an individual visitor's search requests, according to Daniel Brandt, PIR's founder. "The key words you put in for searching on FOIA (freedom of information act) documents can reveal a lot about you. The CIA can use these cookies to reconstruct who is interested in what. Even if you browse from several different ISPs, they can use your cookie's unique ID to tie all your searches together," said Brandt. To eliminate any possibility of "improperly retained data," CIA officials said they intend to delete later today two sets of log files maintained for the ERR site since Jan. 29. Before changes to the site today, the HTML source code of the ERR site said it was designed by Olympus Group. Calls to the Virginia-based company's switchboard resulted in a recorded message stating that, "Olympus Group has closed its door and is no longer in operation." The site appears to be hosted on systems operated by Digex, a large Internet service provider in Maryland. The CIA Electronic Reading Room is at http://www.foia.ucia.gov . The Public Information Research report is at http://www.pir.org/ciascan.html The OMB's cookie memo is at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/memoranda/m00-13.html . Reported by Newsbytes, http://www.newsbytes.com . 21:49 CST (c) 2001 The Washington Post Company ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytmed-03.19.02-09:37:44-26036