Markle Foundation Web site

The Markle Foundation, a nonprofit group with strong ties to national security and health care policy-makers, has changed the terms of the national security debate and how people think about information sharing and data privacy. Markle's friends and critics agree on that achievement.

Markle's defenders praise the foundation for putting effective information sharing and privacy protection at the center of homeland security discussions. But critics say the foundation's emphasis on national security ignores privacy and civil liberties, despite Markle's well-publicized stance on protecting those values.

Most observers, however, agree that the foundation works hard to give information technology a central role in public policy. Markle often leads major policy debates because it does its homework better than anyone, said David Brailer, vice chairman of the American Health Information Community and former national health IT coordinator at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Markle's reputation for reviewing laws, infrastructure and best practices before setting attainable goals is impressive, said Thomas Marsden, assistant vice president of Dun and Bradstreet's Government Solutions.

Zoë Baird, Markle's president and chief policy maven, described the foundation's philosophy and purpose. It exists to bring private-sector-style business transformation to the public sector by accelerating the use of IT for critical public needs, she said.

Loved or loathed, the foundation's task forces on national security and health IT have hit their stride in the past two years, said Timothy Sparapani, legislative counsel on privacy for the American Civil Liberties Union. For example, Markle's health IT task force worked on legislation that the House has approved. The foundation held well-attended meetings in the past two years to discuss the development of a national health IT network.

The Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age influenced the drafting of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, Sparapani said. The same task force issued a report in July on creating a trusted information-sharing environment to improve how federal, state and local homeland security partners share counterterrorism information.

Markle "brings the focus of serious people to bear on pressing problems," Sparapani said. "They continuously champion a pro-technology approach to virtually every problem they perceive."

A shift in focus
The 2001 terrorist attacks changed many U.S. institutions, including Markle, Baird said. After initially focusing on bridging the global digital divide, she said, Markle has focused almost exclusively on national security and health IT issues for the past four years.

The foundation brings together a diverse group of open-minded leaders from industry, nonprofit organizations and government to collaborate in a nonpartisan forum, Baird said. It gathers people together who might not otherwise have met to exchange ideas and set attainable goals.

Markle gets policy and technology experts to work together on a problem, Baird said. "We bring together people with a constructive attitude."

The participants identify business processes and technical tools they think are necessary to solve the problem.

Markle's working groups and task forces develop ideas and an implementation road map for the government to achieve those goals, Baird said. Markle has deep connections in the federal government and IT community, particularly among technological innovators and venture capital investors, she said. The foundation views itself as uniquely constituted to help the federal government.

Markle's task forces generate solutions that are acceptable to many people because their members ask many questions and deliberate at great length, said Linda Millis, director of Markle's National Security Program. Because Markle doesn't have a political agenda, she added, the foundation offers a neutral ground where participants from different backgrounds can meet to focus on ideas and implementation.

Markle's values
Protecting civil liberties and the privacy of Americans' personal data is a hallmark of the foundation's activities and publications. Federal IT systems must include privacy and civil liberty protections before the government collects information to ensure that it is gathering enough of the right data to strengthen national security, Baird said.

In a final report in a series it published on national security, a Markle task force " predominantly composed of national security professionals " criticizes the Bush administration for its failure to implement the task force's earlier recommendations for technology and policy changes, said Jim Dempsey, policy director of the Global Internet Policy Initiative at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Dempsey is also a member of the steering committee for Markle's national security task force.

The government's policies on information sharing and data collection in the past four years have degraded intergovernmental and public trust in federal operations, Dempsey said. The task force concluded that the government must regain that trust to protect national security and civil liberties.

Among its recommendations, the task force's report advocates using authentication and audit technologies and proposes creating new standards for the authorized use of data. Markle supports the public debate and scrutiny of national security information-sharing systems. It opposes using personally identifiable information when anonymous but still relevant data will suffice, Dempsey said.

A surveillance/industrial complex
Markle has critics, however, who say its task forces are not fully committed to data privacy protections. For example, Sparapani said, Markle's national security task force doesn't put any of its considerable intellectual resources into recommending specific policies and technologies to protect civil liberties and privacy. "They say all the right stuff, but there's no "˜there' there," he said.

Sparapani said a report that Markle's national security task force published in July advocates data mining without safeguards. Instead of looking only for a specific needle in a specific haystack, he said, Markle supports the presumption that it is all right to search for multiple, as-yet-unknown needles in a barnful of hay.

Markle has other critics. "They've been wonderfully self-congratulatory," said Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Markle task force members assumed that the information-sharing problem was huge and crafted a proposed solution that supports their wish to use a lot of IT to fix it, Harper said. Markle should focus instead on assessing the bureaucratic inertia, self-interest and other flaws that contributed to the 2001 terrorist attacks, he said.

Harper said the industry members of Markle's national security task force have duped the government and academic members into promoting an agenda of the surveillance/industrial complex. The task force is paving the way for industry to profit from large government contracts, he added.

Those are harsh words, but even some of Markle's friends say the foundation could probably do more to safeguard data privacy. "They have been quite behind the ball on the privacy debate," particularly data privacy related to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, said David Kendall, senior fellow for health policy at the Public Policy Initiative. Markle has tried to put data privacy on the agenda but not as aggressively as it should, he added.

Shooting the messenger