ANTI-DRUG WEB SITE TRACKS VISITORS

News that the White House drug control office is secretly placing digital
bugs on the computers of people who visit one of its Web sites caused an
uproar yesterday, prompting White House Chief of Staff John D. Podesta to
order the practice stopped.

Podesta also demanded an explanation from Barry R. McCaffrey, director of
the National Drug Control Policy Office, for how the practice of monitoring
traffic through dropping electronic "cookies" on the hard drives of Web
visitors began, White House officials said.

The surreptitious tracking by one of its own agencies was especially
embarrassing to the White House, because it contradicts privacy policies
that the Clinton administration is advocating for the private sector.

The Scripps-Howard News Service reported that cookies--a fairly simple
computer code--were being slipped without notice on computers to monitor
the effectiveness of an online anti-drug campaign.

The ad campaign worked in much the same way as other advertising that is
linked to Web search engines. When Web users typed in certain key words
relating to drugs, a banner ad would pop up on the screen inviting them to
click on www.freevibe.com, an anti-drug site run by the drug control
office. If people clicked on the site, a cookie was dropped onto their hard
drives. The cookie's code allows the advertiser to see how the user entered
the site, and what pages were entered once there.

The use of cookies without notice or permission is a controversial, though
commonplace, practice in the private sector. The Federal Trade Commission
has sought greater authority to set and enforce privacy standards, and Vice
President Gore recently has made privacy an increasingly prominent campaign
theme.

In a statement, White House press secretary Joe Lockhart said the drug
control office had not tracked visitors by name or otherwise identified
them. But he emphasized that West Wing officials "learned for the first
time" yesterday about the office's use of cookies, and pledged, "We will
take all steps necessary to halt these practices now."

Don Maple, who helps run the media campaign for the drug control office,
said that officials there had believed the use of cookies was defensible.
The office's advertising is placed by Ogilvy & Mather, which in turn
contracted with DoubleClick Inc., the leading Internet advertising company.
DoubleClick placed the cookies and reported the data back to Ogilvy &
Mather, he said.

"The idea was that our advertising buyers wanted and needed a tool to
decide where to place their banner ads," Maple said, adding that only
"anonymous gross-number data" about Web visits were collected in what the
drug control office believed was a way of determining whether it was
spending its money wisely.

"We discovered we had underestimated the sensitivity of the White House to
this practice," Maple said. He pledged that the contractors "would destroy
whatever data" have been collected.

McCaffrey's operation stirred objections from civil libertarians a year
after reports that the drug control office allowed TV networks to fulfill
their obligation for public service advertising if they agreed to run
programs with a government-approved anti-drug message. This time, he will
also face questions from Congress. Rep. W.J. "Billy" Tauzin (R-La.) is
sending a letter voicing strong opposition to the use of cookies and
demanding an explanation of how they came to be used, his spokesman Ken
Johnson said yesterday.

While the drug control office knew about the cookies used on freevibe.com,
Maple said the office learned only this week after news inquiries that
cookies were also being dropped by the Web server for another site run by
the office, this one aimed at parents and called theantidrug.com. That
practice too is being halted, he said.

The drug control office's use of cookies was discovered by privacy advocate
Richard M. Smith, who said he found it earlier this year while doing
research on the privacy practices of health-related Web sites.

DoubleClick has become one of the most reviled companies in the online
world among privacy advocates, who have attacked its use of Internet
cookies and more advanced technologies to monitor consumer behavior. The
firm says the practice allows Web ads to be more tailored for advertisers
and consumers alike, and that information is not shared. "It is totally
anonymous. It is not used for profiling. It is the property of that site
and it is not shared with anyone else," said Josh Isay, director of public
policy and government affairs for DoubleClick.

Smith said that none of his research proves that DoubleClick or the drug
policy office has been spying on Americans, only that the technology would
allow either to do so. "The problem is . . . DoubleClick is gathering all
this information about us that's really none of their business . . .
they're creating databases that could be interesting to law enforcement
down the road."