No rights for the poor.

• Position: Additional requirements for welfare recipients criticized - Column

People who rely on government assistance have always been particularly vulnerable to intrusions on their privacy. In exchange for food stamps, cash assistance, and medical care, the government requires that poor people provide all kinds of personal information about themselves that other citizens do not have to divulge. Living arrangements, school attendance, work schedules, even showing up for doctors' appointments are conditions of aid.

It's all part of what President Clinton and other welfare reformers are fond of calling the "social contract" between welfare recipients and the state.

But under the new federal welfare law, the government has withdrawn the guarantee that it will provide assistance to poor families, while at the same time expanding the power of the state to monitor and regulate the behavior of the poor.

This growing authoritarianism should worry all of us.

To enforce a five-year lifetime limit on welfare benefits as required by the new law, the federal government is developing a nationwide database that could include unlimited personal and financial information on welfare recipients.

Many states have already set up "deadbeat-dad" databases, working with the Internal Revenue Service and state motor-vehicles departments to chase parents who fail to pay child support.

"Integrating entire databases, merely because of the misdeeds of a few, is an unreasonable search in violation of the Fourth Amendment, because it presumes guilt rather than innocence," says Carole Droeppers, who directs the Privacy Project of the ACLU of Wisconsin.

Private firms are competing for government contracts to gather data on welfare recipients, which raises further privacy concerns. There is precious little security to protect the information stored in such databases...