When The Center for Democracy & Technology took on DoubleClick, the nation's largest Internet advertising placement firm, late last year, the small public-interest advocacy organization did what anyone with a good idea does these days: It built a Website. DoubleClick was about to merge its database of consumers' online surfing habits with one containing real-world personal records, such as addresses, Social Security numbers, and even credit card numbers.

By late February, CDT's Web project attracted 100,000 privacy-mad consumers, who flooded DoubleClick with letters and email. As CDT's Website spurred consumers into action against DoubleClick, CDT privacy lawyer Deirdre Mulligan advised several state attorneys general, helping them develop cases against the ad firm. Mulligan also filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. By March 2, the protests-and government scrutiny-had reached such a crescendo that DoubleClick scotched the plan, at least temporarily, and appointed an internal privacy panel.

In the wake of the DoubleClick melee, the FTC opened an investigation into the ways U.S. commercial Websites collect and use consumer information. CDT's organizing effort sent a strong signal: "It tells companies not to assume they can do anything they want with someone else's information," CDT founder Jerry Berman notes.

Now, Berman and his nonprofit advocacy firm are fighting for legislation to protect consumer privacy on the Internet. At the same time, they are rallying against an impending White House bill that would strengthen the FBI's infamously named "Carnivore" evidence-gathering program, which gives the agency the power to read citizens' email.

Privacy paranoia surges

Thanks in part to people like Berman, privacy as a political issue is quickly becoming the center of Washington discourse. Privacy advocates have historically had a difficult time creating a groundswell around the issue. Aside from the usual horror tales of telemarketing harassment, junk mail, and so-called identity theft, there's little tangible evidence that the corporate trade in names and numbers is harmful.

According to a study conducted last year by the nonprofit research group Privacy & American Business, only 11 percent of Americans are unwilling to part with their data under any circumstances. One man's junk mail, after all, is another's chance to win the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. But the Internet, as they say, changes everything. As Americans spend more of their time and money on the Net, leaving trails of ecommerce "cookie" crumbs, they are discovering just how easy it is for companies to sift and sell their personal data. As a result, Net users are more privacy-paranoid than the general public. A recent survey of Internet users conducted by Forrester Research found that 67 percent were either "very" or "extremely" concerned about privacy.

Berman and CDT are ready to marshal this new consumer anxiety. In the coming months, CDT will try to persuade Congress to pass a broad set of privacy rights for online consumers. Berman's suggestion: a law that forces companies to ask consumers whether they'd like to take part in corporate fact-gathering and tracking activities. He also believes government should require companies to inform consumers before they sell their personal data to other firms.

In typical CDT fashion, Mulligan explains that the new laws would be good for companies, too. "The notion that consumer privacy protection laws hurt business is just wrong," she says. "What makes markets work is trust, predictability, and stability."

Born to be an activist

CDT's headquarters occupy an entire floor of an office building in the heart of Washington's lobbying corridor, one block from the White House. The charcoal, metallic interior-more SoHo than K Street-offers plenty of room to house the group's 15 or so employees, all of whom are public-interest die-hards.

Berman is their ideological leader. An avuncular 60-year-old with a silvery Julius Caesar haircut and a warm, gap-toothed smile, Berman was destined for activism. His father was a lawyer who spent most of his professional life as a labor organizer in Hawaii, where the younger Berman was raised. His real awakening came at the University of California, Berkeley, where he spent most of the 1960s earning his bachelor's degree, a master's, then a law degree. He also became known as a free-speech firebrand.

In the early '70s, Berman moved east, taking a job at a regulatory lobbying firm. The Watergate scandal gave him new direction, as reports of President Richard Nixon's abuse of government investigative powers stirred up painful memories. Two decades earlier, Berman's father had been investigated in Hawaii as a suspected Communist. "My father thought his legal career was going to be ruined," says Berman. "It affected my whole family, my life at school, everything."

At the height of the Watergate era, Berman joined The American Civil Liberties Union's Washington policy group, where he lobbied to limit government's ability to spy on and gather information about citizens. In 1976, Berman co-authored a book titled The Lawless State: The Crimes of the U.S. Intelligence Agencies . Despite his work with the notoriously liberal ACLU, Berman insists, "I was always a moderate among radicals." Berman founded CDT in 1994 after a philosophical split with his former employer, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He had been head of the group's Washington office and was involved in negotiating new FBI wiretap standards with Congress. EFF board members felt betrayed by Berman's moderate stance and were generally disgusted with the dirty business of influencing public policy. Shortly thereafter, EFF decided to close its Washington office. Berman and a handful of former EFFers stayed in town and began raising money to form CDT.

Unlike most consumer advocacy efforts, Berman's $1.25 million annual crusade receives regular cash infusions from some of the nation's leading telecommunications and technology companies-America Online, AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft-the same companies CDT sometimes attacks for consumer privacy violations.

Capitol Hill geek

Berman is Capitol Hill's version of the office geek, that godsend of a tech whiz who understands the complexities of technology and can translate technical details into ordinary language. The very model of an information-age lobbyist, Berman is a whirling dervish of social energy, prowling the halls of the Capitol, consulting with and cajoling members of Congress. Many of those representatives owe much of what they know about the Internet to Berman, who since 1997 has chaired the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus, a blue-chip collection of industry CEOs and luminaries that keep members of Congress informed about the latest ecommerce market trends and technologies.

Berman has made himself indispensable to Washington powerbrokers such as Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), and White House technology adviser David Byer. "He provides constructive advice in a totally nonpolitical way," says Sen. Leahy. "You can accept his advice as being more expert than partisan-very important, and too rare in this town."

As a proponent of free speech and privacy on the Internet, Berman is one of Washington's most influential players in communications policymaking. In 1996, he helped overturn the Communications Decency Act, Congress' attempt to outlaw pornography on the Internet.

For more than five years, Berman joined the chorus of voices pressuring the Clinton administration to end its export controls on data-scrambling encryption products. At the request of the FBI and the National Security Agency, the White House prevented high-tech firms from exporting advanced cryptography, arguing that the data-scrambling products would help the world's criminals. Berman and others made the case that those technologies would let consumers manage their privacy-and help U.S. high-tech companies remain global leaders in cryptography. The White House finally gave in late last year.

CDT also helped Congress and the White House draft the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which went into effect last April. The measure forces Websites to obtain parental approval before gathering personally identifiable information from children younger than 13. Berman's group isn't always government-friendly. Last year, CDT senior staff counsel James Dempsey uncovered the obscure details of a government cyber-security plan in the works. The scheme, known as FIDNET, sought to protect federal Websites from hackers, but it threatened the privacy of average citizens who visit those sites. Dempsey took the story to The New York Times and spurred closer congressional scrutiny of the plan. The upshot: The House appropriations committee zapped FIDNET's funding.

Then, last July, when the FBI unveiled the intrusive "Carnivore" program, CDT staff counsel Alan Davidson recommended to Congress that the FBI release the program's source code to allow "public scrutiny of its operation and design." The FBI isn't likely to go that far, but the agency consulted with CDT in early August and might allow the group to review the independent analysis of the program to be conducted by a university during the fourth quarter.

Advocates, not adversaries

Berman has pulled off a delicate balancing act with corporate interests. Industry leaders believe Berman and CDT are more sympathetic to their concerns than other privacy groups. Indeed, Berman has given vocal support to the notion of industry self-regulation and minimal government intervention on the Internet.

"They've challenged us on privacy violations," says George Vradenburg, AOL's senior vice president for global and strategic policy, "but unlike other advocacy groups, they always come up with good solutions. CDT is effective even though they're sometimes critical."

Last year, CDT generated bad PR for Intel when it filed a complaint with the FTC and publicized the company's plan to place a unique identifier in each of its new Pentium III processors. Intel would have been able to use the code to monitor consumers' travels across the Net. Amid a flurry of negative press, Intel changed course, offering consumers the choice to opt out of the scheme.

What might have generated hard feelings in any other industry ended up creating a bond. Intel recently donated a large sum to help fund one of CDT's Internet privacy research projects. The relationship is more than monetary. Says Doug Comer, Intel's director of legal affairs in Washington: "We often turn to Jerry as a referee between us and government."

That's exactly how Berman likes to be seen. "Basically, I'm a good listener," he says. "Someone balancing a variety of interests and trying to find the common good."

That balancing act has sometimes put CDT at odds with other activists, many of whom argue for more stringent measures and call for the government to give consumers personal ownership rights to their own data. Some of these activists claim Berman is too chummy with industry and government, at the expense of the consumers he's supposed to represent. "I have a huge problem with groups that are holding themselves out as consumer advocates that are basically lobbying for industry," says Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a competing civil liberties organization.

Berman counters that his critics don't understand how Washington works. "They've turned politics into religion. I guess they need more of that anger to run on than I do," says Berman. "Being an advocate doesn't always mean being an adversary."