Security trumps privacy, online and off

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.