Welcome Home, Big-Brother

By Robert Scheer

Big Brother is back big-time and Americans are welcoming him warmly. Not surprisingly, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, personal privacy and civil liberties – including those involving the Internet – are on the brink of being eviscerated. In their antiterrorist fervor, the public and the government are enthusiastically embracing any new legislation that gives the appearance of making us safer – whether it actually does so or not.

Suddenly it is fashionable to bypass the guarantees of the Fourth Amendment, assuring the privacy of our homes and effects. Suddenly it is all right to propose – as Congress has with its far-reaching omnibus antiterrorism legislation – that we sweep aside centuries of privacy protections. These protections, it’s worth remembering, were added to the Constitution by the Founding Fathers after a divisive and terror-filled war in which one-third of their compatriots supported the King of England and another third stayed neutral. They had a lot more potential subversion to worry about than we do, but they considered individual liberties an absolute requirement.

So should we. We are now the strongest nation the world has ever known, and yet we seem all too willing to cast aside the very freedoms that define this nation and its strength.

At press time, bills had passed both the House and the Senate that would make online monitoring as legal as a Texas execution. If Attorney General John Ashcroft has his way, by the time this column is printed this will be the law of the land. The government’s argument for this is that the Internet represents a vital link among terrorist organizers for gathering and dispersing information, and that expanded power to monitor e-mail and other electronic traffic is required. This legislation would extend the power the Feds already have with telephone wiretaps to include the broad swath of Internet communication.

Currently, it’s relatively simple for a law enforcement agent to get phone company records of the numbers dialed from and to a given telephone. The burden of proof required to get judicial permission is low – merely that the information is “relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation,” even if the person whose records are at issue is not the target of a particular investigation.

This new legislation would extend that same broad sweep of power to all Internet communication. But this data would be far more revealing than phone records. Government investigators would be privy to logs of all the Web sites a person had visited, a power akin to being able to subpoena all the books a visitor had perused in a public library along with his medical records, bill payments, financial transactions, and insurance information.

Even without the new legislation, all e-mail traffic is already fair game for government snoopers, as long as they can allege a foreign intelligence connection. After September 11, the FBI became much more aggressive in pressing ISPs to install the DCS1000 monitoring system (which used to be called Carnivore) on their servers. Carnivore can check selected messages (those transmitted from a particular account, or to a particular account) for keywords that might indicate subversive activity.

The basic issue is that we are granting the government a power to control our lives that has not been demonstrated to be effective at stopping terrorism. Despite the considerable electronic surveillance that was in place before September 11 and the subsequent massive increase of electronic snooping, we still have relatively few clues as to the trail of the hijackers.

What we do have is an FBI eager to come calling when they see language in an e-mail that they consider suspicious. In the case of one acquaintance of mine, a university functionary who deals with international student travel, the use of the phrase “the Russians are coming” in an e-mailed reference to a pending visit of students was sufficient to prompt an FBI inquiry.

Only uneducated fools – and unfortunately the hijackers were anything but uneducated fools – would fail to conceal their electronic communications more adroitly. No one planning a hijacking, bombing, or assassination is likely to use those words in e-mail communications, and yet, because electronic traffic is so vast, its monitoring is usually reduced to the laughably simplistic.

It is clear that the intelligence breakdown occurred not on the electronic snooping side, but rather in the old-fashioned spying on, and infiltration of, potential terrorist organizations.

James Bond’s superiors provided him with all kinds of high-tech gadgets, but what he learned about the enemy was usually from sleeping with the right sources and other on-the-ground tricks of conventional spies. Hunting for information in the tents and caves of rural Afghanistan may not be glamorous, but that is where the information is – spoken in moments of indiscretion by real people. You’re simply not going to find it in virtual dialogue online, for a variety of reasons, both technically arcane and blindingly obvious.

The fact is, ordinary citizens will be affected far more by the Internet-oriented parts of this legislation than will terrorists. Not to mention the irony that this shameless attempt to curtail the liberty of the American public is being done in the name of patriotism. Congratulations, senators and congressmen, you just did bin Laden’s job for him.