[iwar] [fc:Terrorizing.Ourselves]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-23 16:17:14
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001 16:17:14 -0700 (PDT)
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Terrorizing Ourselves

From now on, tighter security is the rule.  But how much of our freedom
will we sacrifice? BY RICHARD LACAYO

Two days after the attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
Virginia Sloan realized that if the terrorists wanted to attack American
freedoms, they had got somewhere.  "I was valet parking for dinner, and
I had my hood and trunk and the inside of my car searched," says Sloan,
executive director of the Constitution Project, a legal-issues
organization in Washington.  "Can we as Americans tolerate that? I think
not."

Maybe we can.  Americans are generally unfriendly to security measures
that intrude too much on their privacy.  But that was before last week,
before they saw the crematoriums in New York City and Washington and
started to wonder if the next dive-bombing airliner could be aimed at
them.  If ever there was a time when they might be receptive to trimming
their accustomed freedoms, that time is now. 

And whether they are receptive or not, the changes have already begun. 
Long waits to cross the Canadian and Mexican borders were the rule last
week, as vehicles and travelers were finecombed by border police.  Civil
libertarians are bracing for an upsurge of "racial profiling" at
airports targeting Arab Americans, or for an FBI investigation of the
attacks that sucks in many innocent members of that group, or simply for
a wave of hate crimes against them. 

Emergencies have always been a time when the niceties of law have been
most vulnerable to the demands of national security or national
hysteria.  As Senate minority leader Trent Lott said last week, "When
you're in this type of conflict, when you're at war, civil liberties are
treated differently." World War II produced the internment camps for
Japanese Americans, a development upheld in 1944 by the Supreme Court
but later repudiated.  After the bombing at the federal building in
Oklahoma City, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was authorized
to establish a new court to consider the deportation of suspected alien
terrorists, in which cases would be heard without the usual obligation
to inform the accused of the evidence against them. 

Now the Bush Administration is considering the establishment of special
military tribunals.  Suspected terrorists could be tried without the
ordinary legal constraints of American justice.  During World War II,
German saboteurs were tried secretly that way in Washington, and those
convicted were hanged 30 days later. 

Just one day after last week's attacks, the Senate also approved a
provision expanding the circumstances under which law-enforcement
agencies can force Internet service providers to hand over information
about subscriber e-mails.  If the Federal Government were to monitor
more e-mails, a key question would be whether it would hold on to them
for some time or dispose of them almost at once, as it now does with the
information obtained from instant background checks mandated by federal
law for gun purchases.  Americans may be willing to let their e-mails
pass one time through a sort of national filter that would screen for
hints of terrorist activity.  They will be far more reluctant to allow
the government to collect a national e-mail database. 

Civil libertarians expect renewed calls for a national identification
card.  The cards could have photographs and hard-to-falsify identifying
information like handprint or retina data that could be read by scanners
at, say, airline counters.  If cards were required for many common
transactions‹renting a car, buying an airline ticket‹they would be
useful for keeping track of criminals and terrorists.  Or you.  Eva
Jefferson Paterson, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee on
Civil Rights Under Law in San Francisco, predicts that innocent citizens
would be challenged constantly to produce their cards.  "You could be
stopped by the police to prove you can walk down the street," she says. 
"Poor people and people of color would be stopped the most."

There could also be stepped-up public surveillance.  At last year's
Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla., law-enforcement officials secretly scanned
spectators' faces with surveillance cameras and instantly matched their
faceprints against photographs of suspected terrorists and known
criminals in computerized databases.  Facial-recognition technology
might help, says Bruce Hoffman, vice president for external affairs at
the Rand Corp.  and a former adviser to the National Commission on
Terrorism, but mostly after the fact, during an investigation.  And that
means storing all the face data collected, something civil libertarians
fear will allow the government to track any individual.  If systems were
set up all over a city, you could be "checkpointed" by camera when you
board a train, stop at a cash machine and enter a store or the place
where you work.  "We are vulnerable," says Hoffman, "and there's a
certain level of risk that we have to accept and live with.  To me, the
cure can be far worse than the disease."

Says Morton Halperin, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations:
"If you take both security and civil liberties seriously, you can find
solutions that respect individual rights and privacy and still give the
intelligence and law-enforcement agencies the scope that they need.  We
had worked that out in terms of airports.  Nobody thinks you have the
civil liberty to take knives on airplanes.  I don't know who made the
decision to let people bring knives on anyway, but it was certainly not
civil libertarians."

Reported by Andrew Goldstein/Washington, Chris Taylor/San Francisco and
Elizabeth L.  Bland/New York

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