The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy has taken its anti-drug message to the Internet, and it is secretly tracking those who find it in the process. Oh, but only for marketing purposes, you understand.Searches for terms such as ‘growing pot’ or ‘getting smacked up’ on some Internet sites produce an ad banner from the US drug office. So now you know. Visiting the site behind that banner may result in you getting cookied and tracked by the US government. ‘It’s sort of spooky,’ says Internet consultant Richard Smith, a privacy advocate and former software engineer. Smith said he inadvertently discovered the U.S. government cookies being dropped into his computer while doing Internet research for pharmaceutical companies. White House drug office says there’s nothing surreptitious going on - the computer cookies are simply tracking its anti-drug media campaign. Eric Sterling, former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, who worked with the panel in 1988 when it drafted the law creating the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy to coordinate the government’s anti-drug-use policies, disagrees. ‘This is nothing like what was envisioned by members of Congress,’ he says. ‘This is what is fairly called a case of Big Brother, as in ‘1984’ where the government is clandestinely tracking you.’ Civil liberties lawyers comment that the government tracking of Internet users might raise constitutional questions involving issues of searches without a warrant, and ask why the government should be monitoring citizen’s Internet activities at all. White House ads offering information on marijuana appear when Internet users search for certain words connected to drugs on engines like AltaVista and Lycos. The banner ads steer users to the anti-drug site Freevibe.com, which is operated by the White House drug office. It is here that a cookie is inserted into the user’s machine. Donald Maple, senior policy analyst with the White House drug office, admits that one of the anti-drug sites operated by the White House office and visited by 240,000 parents a month seeking information on drug abuse is inserting cookies into the computers of visitors, but said the drug office did not know this until a reporter pointed it out. Maple says the cookie programs are part of the banner advertising campaign run through the New York advertising firm Ogilvie and Mather, and that the government is not getting personal information on visitors to the site. ‘I can’t see anything wrong with it at all,’ he comments. ‘We have a specific agreement with Ogilvie and Mather that they will not provide personal identification.’ Maple claims that the advertising company merely uses the data to determine which banner ads are effective, and to tailor the ads to attract more visitors. Yet despite such remonstrations, the drugs office has ordered contractors to disable the program. ‘We didn’t know it was there,’ Maple explained. ‘And it won’t be shortly.’