January 6, 1970

Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr.
Senate Building
Washington, D. C. 20510

Dear Senator Ervin,

T am deeply gratified to have the occasion once again to
congratulate you for your strong position on a question of personal
privacy and fundamental constitutional rights. I refer now to your
representations to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare
with respect to his department's administration of personnel security
procedures. I would merely be ecchoing your own concerns to express
my personal reactions to such intrusions and to procedures which deny
the right of an accused the possibility of confrontation and answer.

I am writing now to invite your attention to and interest in
another problem in this area which may have the most severe impact
on personal liberties on a large part of the population over the next
two or three decades. I refer to the problem of maintaining the
confidentiality of medical, particularly psychiatric, information
furnished to selective service boards én behalf of prospective in-
ductees. Many men have obtained deferments on the basis of physical
or psychological disabilities regarded as sufficient cause either by
the local board or in accordance with the standards established by
the services. I need hardly paint in detail the worrisowe picture
of the possibility that such personal information might be leaked
from these files at some future time in a way that would violate the
most elementary principles of human decencies.

I am aware that such information is now labeled as strictly
confidential by selective service regulations. However, these
regulations have little 1f any teeth in them and I would urge upon
you the importance of making the confidentiality of such material
a subject of statutory law with clearcut criminal penalties. The
purpose of such an act would be not only to increase the odds of
deterring an inappropriate release of such information but to leave
no doubt that this is a criminal act deserving of no condonation
whatever from the community.

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Senator Irvin Jr. 1/6/70 -

I am not suggesting that representations made in these
appeals be kept beyond the recourse of actions for fraud or
other misrepresentations but such exceptions to the strict
confidence of medical and psychiatric information about registrants
should be clearly spelled out in the law and appropriate procedures
set up for dealing with them,

The act should also provide for a well defined procedure for
the safe-keeping or regulated destruction of such records in order
to avoid the confusion of responsibility that attended the dts-
graceful leak of District Attorney Garrison's records. This one
example should be enough to illustrate the potentiality for abuse
that is connected with the deposit of this kind of information.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

Enclosure
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