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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