THE WHITE HOUSE

                     Office of the Press Secretary
________________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                                 September 12, 2000


                             PRESS BRIEFING
                                   BY
                     JAKE SIEWERT AND P.J. CROWLEY

                    The James S. Brady Briefing Room



1:15 P.M. EDT

     Q    Dick Armey says that the GAO report on web site security shows
that the adminstration has failed to live up to its own privacy
standards.  What do you say?

     MR. SIEWERT:  The report is seriously misleading on privacy.  What
it does is, we've actually made significant progress in this area.
There's a recent study, a separate GAO study that was released last week
surveyed 2,700 different points of entry in the government, and found
that 99.7 percent of those sites now have privacy policies.

     They're comparing it to a policy that was designed for commercial
web sites, which is very different; you have very different sets of
concern, and then seeing what doesn't meet up to those standards.  So I
think we're comparing apples and oranges here.  We take these concerns
seriously, we've actually made very clear we have a government-wide
policy on privacy and we've put forth an enforcement mechanism to make
sure that agencies comply with that policy.

                           END 1:45 P.M. EDT