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Americans are rethinking privacy in response to deadly terrosim
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In his 1995 novel The Truth Machine, science-fiction writer James L. Halperin proposes a foolproof, high-tech lie detector that gains ubiquitous use after an outbreak of terrorism.
Perhaps it is an idea whose time has come. “There is only one way to reduce the danger of terrorism, and that is for people everywhere to willingly sacrifice a portion of their privacy,” Halperin said last week.
Americans are rethinking privacy in response to deadly terrorism. “In the short term, people are much more concerned about security,” said John McCarthy, a privacy analyst at the market research firm Forrester Research Inc.
And David Kairys, a constitutional-rights lawyer and professor at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law, quipped: “You can give blood, you can give money, and you can give your civil liberties.”
It is not yet clear whether privacy rights would be compromised significantly in the long term by the expanded wiretaps authorized in new federal legislation, or increasing use of video surveillance, or even – as Halperin proposes – comprehensive e-mail archives that could be subject to government searches.
But privacy advocates are wary of the sudden shift in public opinion toward trading privacy for a sense of security.
“It makes me very nervous,” said James Warren, founder of the annual Computers for Freedom and Privacy conference. “One of my biggest concerns is that once (governments) increase their authority and freedom to surveil, and to conduct covert surveillance and covert intrusion, then they will use it for whatever purposes they can figure out … not just against terrorists.?
For the time being, however, the American public is showing an increased tolerance for giving up some privacy and civil rights if that helps to stop and to catch terrorists.
Halperin, for example, said he gladly submitted to being frisked before boarding a plane last week. He also said he thought that surveillance cameras could efficiently reduce crime as well as help track terrorists and that it would be a good idea if “every e-mail that has ever been sent” was available to investigators with a legal warrant.
In a survey taken since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a Harris Poll found that large majorities of Americans favored such measures as monitoring Internet chat rooms, e-mail and cell-phone calls; expanding camera surveillance; and using facial-recognition technology to scan crowds for suspects.
“It is blindingly obvious that these numbers would have been very different before” the attacks, Humphrey Taylor, chairman of the Harris Poll, said.
He said it was also “a reasonable assumption that many people don’t think that they will themselves be affected in any way” by privacy intrusions.
And the public would again become protective of privacy if terrorist threats declined over, say, a year’s time, Taylor said.
In another survey, the Pew Research Center said 55 percent of Americans said they would give up some civil liberties to prevent future attacks, compared with 29 percent who expressed willingness three years ago to sacrifice civil liberties to fight terrorism.
In the Pew study, 70 percent of people said they favored a national identification card to fight terrorism. However, 70 percent said they would oppose monitoring of e-mail and phone calls.
“People say yes, (giving up some privacy) probably will be necessary,” said Carroll Doherty, director of the Pew Research Center. “And yes, there are some things they are willing to do, but also there are some things they’re very unwilling to do.”
Further questioning of the Harris survey respondents showed that, depending on the security measure being discussed, 68 percent to 79 percent of the public had at least a moderate concern that authorities might abuse new investigative powers.
“If those things are legal, then people do start to get concerned that the police or the FBI might in fact abuse them for something other than watching, and catching, and listening to terrorists,” Taylor said.
Temple’s Kairys said people should continue to be alarmed by technology such as the FBI’s so-called Carnivore software for capturing Internet traffic for later review by investigators.
“The FBI has been wanting to listen in on the Internet for some time,” he said. “But if the American public understood it, I don’t think the appeals to patriotism would quite win the day.”
Citing abuses of investigative powers going back to Watergate, Kairys continued: “We really have to take seriously that this information is in the hands of the government, and can be used – has been used – to really harm innocent people.”
And when it comes to privacy, the government itself may be an avid consumer. Lance Cottrell, president and founder of Anonymizer.com, a service that shields personal identities online, said business had been brisk since the Sept. 11 attacks, in part as some government investigators had enlisted the service to hide their identities when they visited the Web sites of radical groups.
“No one has ever, at any time, suggested that we shouldn’t be doing what we are doing,” Cottrell said.
But Halperin, the author, said Americans needed to get used to losing privacy, even if increased surveillance seems “creepy.”Privacy is a pretty new phenomenon,” he said. “One hundred years ago, everybody lived in a neighborhood or a small town, where everybody knew everybody else’s business. Technology may bring us back to our roots in that sense."
Reid Kanaley, Knight Ridder Newspapers
