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Civil Liberties And The New Reality
Politically, America is an intensely polarized country, where discussion of issues quickly tends to bog down in notions of what is "left" or "right," thus ideologically pure, and consideration of a wide range of issues, from gun control and abortion to privacy and surveillance -- quickly freeze people into opposing camps characterized by rigidity, hostility and absence of communication. On the Net, people with particular interests increasingly often talk only to one another and consider only their own particular values and beliefs.
In fairness, let me declare my own warped perspective at the moment. I live just west of New York City, felt much affected by a visit to the attack site, and live in a town which has apparently lost somewhere between 30 and 40 people. Elsewhere in the country, life is beginning to move on, as it should, but in greater New York, it's still all death, all the time, on TV and in other media. As bits of bodies get pulled out of the wreckage, people give up hope of finding people from the wreckage, people give up hope of finding the people they love, and disruptions continue as the funerals and memorial services increase. People here remain numb and heavy-hearted.
It's easy to be suspicious of Attorney General John Ashcroft and of the FBI he heads when they say they need broader powers to wiretap, monitor the Net and conduct surveillance of Americans. Many people worry that once these powers are granted, they will never be given back. And some of these people don't have a comforting record of sensitivity when it comes to protecting privacy, free speech and individual civil liberties. But the terrorist attack has changed the entire context of these discussions, putting the issues far beyond knee-jerk reflexes.
But there is also something reflexively knee-jerk in the automatic "they-are-taking-our-freedoms-away" response from certain quarters online. The Justice Department isn't proposing dropping all restrictions or warrants or oversight regarding wiretapping and surveillance. They propose to ease some of them. This may or may not be a good idea. But it needs -- deserves -- to be rationally and openly considered.
First- and second-generation Internet dwellers value their freedoms, and have often had to defend them. Our government, sponsors of the CDA, Carnivore, and the DMCA -- it doesn't have a noble history here. Few people in government have ever made privacy and freedom online a political priority.
But the cataclysm at the World Trade Center is a historic event, and many people do, in fact, need to "get it." We will be living, thinking and behaving differently. Many of us -- if we and our families want to live safely -- will have to redefine our traditional politics, and consider new ways of defining certain rights.
The night of the attacks, reporters asked a New York City fire official why the city put out a desperate call for gas masks and vaccines that morning. "We thought one of the hijackers might possibly be carrying Anthrax -- there were some intelligence reports about that." The official stopped. "If they had been," he told reporters, "there might be 100,000 dead people, maybe more."
My own record of yowling about privacy and the First Amendment ad nauseum is clear enough, so I feel entitled to consider some other points of view, especially this week.
Certain rights -- equality, liberty -- are considered inviolate. But almost all rights are subject to a series of checks and balances, always subject to circumstance, never absolutes granted without reservation, in perpetuity, regardless of external circumstance. Yes, people online have the right to keep their communications private and people have the right -- I believe -- to move online and travel in the real world without their movements being monitored and recorded by governmental authorities. But people have the right to go to work without buildings falling on them, too.
This is how the WTC attacks have challenged our system of rights. The thousands of dead and millions of others who work in vulnerable office towers, or travel or study or live near airports (or schools, or ports, or national symbols) have rights too, and they have been grievously violated.
The government has an obligation to protect them.
These terrorists are technologically skilled, government authorities say. They use the Net to e-mail one another, and to send encrypted files, sometimes online, at other times via Zip disks or other media. They move money online, make plans there, thus avoiding possible interception by traditional intelligence monitors listening to phone and cell calls. Is it really totally unreasonable for authorities to seek broader powers to follow these conversations? Wiretap laws are not adequate for teaching these kinds of criminals. Existing wiretap laws require warrants for each telephone, even though criminals and terrorists might use dozens of phones or a variety of communications systems.
If terrorists are proven to be using encrypted files, aren't government agents entitled -- even obligated, on behalf of the thousands of innocent victims and many more future victims -- to get warrants to intercept them? Would we really rather that our water systems be poisoned, or our cities choked with gas, or planes flown into schools and City Halls? This would have seemed silly hyperbole to me a month ago, but all of these things are now plausible in the post-World Trade Center world.
Many of us have already happily and willingly surrendered some privacy to Napster, Amazon, gaming sites, EZ-Pass toll systems, online retailers and other Web tracking services which have lists of our shopping, reading, entertainment habits and preferences. Corporations have abolished many conventional notions of privacy, while most Americans shrug it off as a new convenience. Is it really our position that Wal-Mart can own the details of our lives, but that government agents tracking those people who murdered 5,000 of our fellow citizens can't?
Nobody in his right mind would support a blank check for government authorities. Any new laws to fight this new kind of war ought to be temporary, and self-expiring, perhaps subject to annual review. There ought to be clear civil and criminal penalties for wanton violations of privacy and excessive monitoring.
But when something like the World Trade Center attacks occur, the challenge, it seems to me, isn't to retreat into our knee-jerk positions, but to pause and carefully consider the new reality. Any government's primary obligation is to protect and defend its citizens. The failure to do that last week occurred primarily, many terrorism experts say, because our existing intelligence institutions don't have the human resources, the technology or the laws to keep up with a sophisticated, well-funded, technologically-savvy network of murderous enemies. We might want to ponder what rights we owe the living and owed the dead -- the right to live, to be and have parents, to work or fly without being torn to bits or crushed in a collapsing inferno.
Every measure restricting freedom taken to ferret out mid-eastern terrorist will create MIDDLE AMERICAN terrorists. Don't be a fool. It would be easier for an American to get a weapon of mass destruction or hijack a plane over American airspace than a foreigner.
This was true in the Civil War, certainly. It was also true in World War I and World War II.
I have no objections to temporary measures designed to prosecute this war against medieval extremism.
What I fear, and I think what most people fear, is "mission creep." The "temporary changes" made during the war would become permanent.
We saw that in the aftermath of WWII. No one objected to the measures of that time (although there was, later, guilt over what happened to Japanese-Americans). But the attitudes of us vs. them, of absolute war, were carried over for political reasons into the horror we now call McCarthyism.
Any suspension of any of our rights, then, must be a war-time measure, part of the government's war-time efforts, aimed solely at prosecuting this war the President has declared. (Personally I'd like a Congresssionally-approved declaration, but they're having difficult defining the enemy.)
I have no objections to measures enacted with the aim of winning this war. I do object, strongly, and will lay down my life, against their being made permanent.
These new rules WILL NOT prevent future disasters. These rules will not only be used to spied on suspected terrorists (read every group that disagrees with our government or those in power.) We need to get out from under this rock that GW has put our country. We need to participate in the world, we need to cooperate with foriegn countries and work together to stop this stuff. We need to stop pretending that the USA is the end all and be all of the world and that we can go it alone. I will not give upmy freedoms because some a-holes decide they are going to blow stuff up.
How far behind are ID cards and strip searches to get in the mall. Screw that, I say we actually enforce the laws we already have and cooperate with other countries. That is the best way, not trampling the rights of everyone.
Friendly
They would rather restrict certain rights (because they aren't terrorists, so they have nothing to fear).
What's wrong with this idea is that in countries where there are armed guards in airports, malls, etc., the people do not consider that to be infringing on their rights, or to be evidence of a police state.
Most of the people I've talked with would definately give up their liberties (privacy, etc.) for a sense of security (not having armed guards). I guess WE, collectively, deserve neither.
P.S. One woman in my PhD program is a former judge, she was one of the people I've spoken with who see this propblem, so, hopefully, the cheques and balances may actually prevent this.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
But it's important that we think about each liberty, each law that goes through Congress, instead of writing a blank check for the gov't to cash. Some things make sense; wiretap procedure could be cleaned up slightly. On the other hand, there are issues like the potential ban on strong (un-backdoored) crypto. How does a single country banning this tech hurt the terrorists, and is it anything more than a knee-jerk reaction?
I'm not worried about compromising on a few areas, especially when they make sense. I am concerned that we're going to give the green light to every sort of incursion on our freedoms, even if it does little to stop terrorism.
J Edgar Hoover ran the FBI for 48 years, and became the most powerful man in US history (including all the presidents) by spying on it's citizens and using that information.
I think this shows that the dangers are very real and that the government can not be trusted to only use spying powers for good. They'll use it however they please.
Of course, spying technology has advanced immensly since then.
I think it's worth noting that we (on an individual level) freely and willingly give our personal information to Wal-Mart etc as part of an exchange of data for services. This differs from decreasing checks on the Justice Department by a large and frightened majority, thus agreeing FOR US to make our personal information available to them.
It's also important to note that, last I checked, Wal-Mart lacked the power to lock me away for 50 years.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Yes John, when the government proposes compromising freedom for security, i do have a knee jerk response. See, it's because the government is, in essence, asking me to trust it to use such legislation for the purposes that it was intended. Well, as the old saying goes, trust is earned.
When I see federal anti-crack-house legislation being used to prosecute the organizer of a music festival, I shudder to think what they will be able to do with anti-terrorism laws (that's right, they're attempting to send a man from new orleans to jail for the rest of his life because he organized an event where there was likely to be drug use despite the large security presence looking for drugs!).
I do not advocate drug use...in fact I belive that it is one of the scourges of our society. But I fail to see how drug sniffing dogs walking around an airport will increase the safety of air travel (This was the case in many American airports this past week). I can see the headline now..."The terrorists had no guns, knives or weapons of any kind. They were able to quickly gain control of the airplane thanks to the two kilos of uncut heroin that they managed to sneak on board."
It's not that I don't advocate security measures. They are necessary. But there's more than one knee-jerk reaction happening here. The government reacts by passing any peice of legislation that "could have helped prevent this tragedy." We need to have a healthy debate about every security measure that we enact. We can't let the emotions of this past week cloud our judgement, resulting in the complete freedom of the justice dep't to do whatever they want.
</$0.02>
...computer science taught me that two wrongs don't make a right, but two rights make a wrong...
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Think about this - the FBI rushed Carnivore into service at the "freemail" providers like yahoo, when there was no evidence that the terrorists even knew freemail existed - why would they? the internet is banned for the afgan people; the phone service barely exists there, never mind ISPs. If any communications took place outside of the original mission briefing, they were almost certainly by way of "innocent sounding" telephone conversations and/or letters with hidden text. consider the following conversation:
- Hi John! have you booked your tickets yet?
- Yes, I am flying out of boston at 8am; Hoping to meet up with Clive at the WTC around 9
- I am sure you two will make an impression there; I would come too, but I have to attend a meeting at the government place about that time..
Ok, a little contrived - but you see my point. there is *no* way someone, even suspious of one or more of the parties involved, could have guessed at their real plans from that conversation - and they would have to monitor *every* phone call in america, no matter how innocent, to pick it up at all.Similar statements could be made about almost any of the measures proposed - for each one you should be asking yourself "what will this achieve? will the cost of giving this up be matched by a equal gain in the protection I will get from my government? In this case, the answer is no. it is an attempt to exploit the grief and suffering of the american people to push though "reforms" that the american courts and people have been rejecting for years now. Would you really want the US to be the only country in the world where online banking is insecure, because you have to make sure the police can decode it, and almost any private eye can bribe his way into a couple of juicy keys?
-=DaveHowe=-
The argument "we allow companies do it, why not feds" does not fly for one very simple reason - there's no "voting with your feet", or wallet, or whatever, when it comes to government - we are all its customers, regardless of our desire (or lack thereof). If you don't like people at RadioShack nosing at your phone number - don't shop there. But what do you do if you don't like Carnivore, or national ID? Tough. Besides, no government measure advertised as "temporary" or "emergency" has ever been such. Who remembers now that 1942 payroll tax witholding directive was sold as war necessity (can you imagine the repercussions on the current tax system if everybody received what they earned, and then had to cut an actual check to IRS every three month)?
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
"The government will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures...The number of cases in which an internal necessity exists for having recourse to such a law is in itself a limited one,"
On September 11, 2001, the Reichstag Burned.
Those who give up Liberty for safety, deserve neither.
Farewell, land of the free, home of the brave. Looks like terror will win in the end.
Handing over all your liberties won't stop terrorism (so don't hand over mine, thank you). I'm sad to read not one /. comment asking the question "what causes terrorism", "what kinds of conditions breed a fundamentalism that would lead someone to commit suicide in the course of such an act" (don't blame is on islam - a fundy christian might believe that by bringing about Armegeddon he is doing God's will...) - Instead I read about the rush to concede liberties - "it's all the rage they say so we have to go along with it" - bunk. The $40 billion that Congress just gave Bush to wage war would produce better results if spent on waging peace - alleviating the conditions that breed terrorism. But US Bloodlust must be appeased!