Eric Auchard
NEW YORK: The Statue of Liberty stands gracefully alone in New York Harbor,
averting her gaze like many New Yorkers from the ghastly site of what was once
the World Trade Center.
The statue, a symbol of America's open society, is closed to visitors for
now, a victim of the trade-off between personal freedoms and domestic security
-- a trade-off that has far-reaching implications for the technology industry.
Some firms have seized on Sept. 11 to tout a range of surveillance
technologies, from national ID cards, to facial and fingerprint recognition
systems, and database systems capable of culling through millions of records at
high speed.
And many people seem resigned to monitoring of their Internet use in the same
way that they accept curtailed freedoms in everyday life.
Around New York, police stop-and-search line-ups for automobiles traveling
via bridges or tunnels are familiar, if not completely reassuring. Fall's most
popular fashion accessory in midtown Manhattan is the company identification
cards office workers must sport to enter their buildings.
Across the country, not just airport baggage check-in counters but entrances
to skyscrapers, libraries and government agencies have taken the air of
frontline security zones following the September attacks and the war in
Afghanistan.
"There's no probable cause for these stop-and-search missions, but few
are complaining," Guylyn Cummins, a San Diego-based constitutional law
attorney with Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich, said of the sudden focus on
physical security.
"Given the gravity of what happened, in some ways I think this is a
different era," Cummins said. "You have unknown terrorists rather than
a normal war or some other sort of crisis," she said.
Security concerns overwhelm privacy protections
"Everything has changed" also has become the mantra among politicians
and media pundits seeking to explain the change of climate after Sept. 11 and
demanding actions to address free-floating security phobias many citizens say
they feel.
Privacy obsessions have gone into a hasty hibernation. Some issues, like the
furor over cookies that allow Web surfing habits to be monitored, seem very
small when viewed through the lens of Sept. 11.
"The new type of privacy issues are actually turning out to the same old
concerns against unreasonable search-and-seizure by the government," said
Ari Schwartz, associate director for Washington, D.C.-based Center for Democracy
and Technology, a civil liberties advocacy group focused on Internet issues.
For much of the past ten years, US privacy advocates had focused on winning
greater protections in the commercial privacy sphere, believing many issues of
government intrusion had been put to rest during privacy battles of the 1960s,
70s and 80s.
But with the Age of Vigilance becoming a fact of life in the United States,
the old issues are hot again.
Larry Ellison of Oracle Corp. was the first to renew the push for national ID
cards, suggesting his company's database software should be used. Sun
Microsystems Inc's Scott McNealy soon followed. Last Wednesday, Siebel Systems
Inc. announced "Homeland Security" software.
"There are proposals for national ID cards which no politician was
willing to discuss publicly before Sept. 11," said Robert Ellis Smith, a
lawyer, author, publisher of Privacy Journal and privacy advocate active since
the 1970s.
"Any privacy objections to video surveillance have been muted.
Face-recognition technology has become more popular," Smith said of calls
for use of such technology in airports, government agencies and company
workplaces.
Be careful what you wish for, critics chide
Such surveillance takes a page from British experience, where hundreds of
thousands of closed-circuit televisions have been installed over the years to
probe for speeding traffic offenders, petty criminals, even possible terror
bombers.
President George W. Bush signed the USA Patriot Act on Oct. 26, designed to
give US police the powers to track down possible terrorists and prevent future
attacks. The law allows authorities to browse educational, library and medical
data as well as travel, credit and immigration records.
Civil liberties critics howl that the act strips authority from judicial
authorities at a time of crisis, and harks back to The Alien and Sedition Acts
of 1798, criminal restrictions on speech during World War I and Cold War
domestic spying.
The act expands use of wiretapping and Internet monitoring, giving the
government access to personal data records and allowing for secret searches.
Some laws expire after four years, unless renewed, others remain in force unless
amended.
The law shifts the legal balance in favor of police powers that may help
thwart further attacks on US institutions and civilians, but could also weaken
rights protecting racial minorities, immigrants, prisoners and students, critics
say.
"Debate on these issues is more alive outside of the US than in the US
-- that's unusual in one sense, since Americans are usually more conscious of
their rights in the face of government power than most other people," said
Tim Dixon, chairman of the Australia Privacy Commission.
Meanwhile, the European Commission says provisions within European Union laws
already allow governments to bypass normal privacy laws when national security
is at stake. But in the wake of Sept. 11, EU leaders have hastened a range of
legislative measures to combat terrorism, including a common definition of
terrorism and terrorist acts, tougher rules on money laundering and an EU-wide
search and arrest warrant.
British politicians have called for Internet service providers to store up to
six months of traffic data on each Net user in case the police come calling for
it during a criminal probe. Other European politicians are pushing similar
plans.
Civil libertarians and human rights workers worry that the actions being
taken in the US and other Western countries will give a green light to more
authoritarian regimes around the world to step up repression of their own
populations.
"Now the US and other Western countries are trying to catch up to the
security policies of countries that have authoritarian regimes," cautioned
Jagdish Parikh, a New York-based online researcher for Human Rights Watch.
"Whatever debate takes place, and whatever the outcome, the impact on
other countries, where the rule of law and open access and freedom of speech are
less strong, must be calculated," Parikh said. In New York, the Statue of
Liberty, a little more than a mile across the water from "ground
zero," is closed to the public until unspecified security issues can be
ironed out.
(C) Reuters Limited.