Post-9/11 tradeoff: Security vs. civil liberties
Google Group Manager
private citizens across the United States at the whim of an
unrestrained government. Whole neighborhoods are being stereo-typed
and the government is violating civil and constitutional rights at an
unprecedented pace. The police have become the so-called bad guys,
and the only justice is vigilante justice...
Just as the United States Government did when the FBI hunted down
people whom they thought had communist ties--people turned against
their neighbors--anyone was subject to be a fink for a buck, and
everybody had their ears glued to the wall to hear whispers of
conversations coming from their neighbors' home.. Armand Hammer, a
wealthy industrialist was hunted down by the FBI because they thought
he had communist ties. Civil Rights leaders, here in the United
States were relentlessly investigated, followed and
harrassed, ...thought to have communist ties.
....my question is this....now for America....Who is the communist?
Who's tracking down innocent people, who's turning neighbor against
neighbor? Who's putting pigeons in neighborhoods to unveil the
secrets of their neighbor. Who is engaging people's employers' and
places of worship to gleen any word spoken that may give a "clue" to
only who knows what.
The media reports on cybersecurity as if it is a crime that just
happens to businesses, or major corporations, totally overlooking the
cyber attacks on individuals in the privacy of their home....why?
because the police did it. It's okay if the police hack into
someone's computer, or tap into their cell phone or put tracking
devices on citizens cars, but let the Bank of America, the Federal
Reserve or DOD have their computer hacked into and then it's a crime.
An article by DAVID CRARY, Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) - In the early months after the 9/11 terror attacks,
America's visceral reaction was to gird for a relentless, whatever-it-
takes quest to punish those responsible and prevent any recurrences.
To a striking extent, those goals have been achieved. Yet over the
years, Americans have also learned about trade-offs, about decisions
and practices that placed national security on a higher plane than
civil liberties and, in the view of some, above the rule of law.
It's by no means the first time in U.S. history that security concerns
spawned tactics that, when brought to light, troubled Americans. But
the past decade has been notable, even in historical context, for the
scope and durability of boundary-pushing practices.
Abroad, there were secret prisons and renditions of terror suspects,
the use of waterboarding and other interrogation techniques that
critics denounced as torture, and the egregious abuse of detainees by
U.S. military personnel at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere.
At home, there has been widespread warrantless wiretapping authorized
by the National Security Agency and the issuance of more than 200,000
national security letters ordering an array of Americans - including
business owners and librarians - to turn over confidential records.
Now, in the very city that suffered most on 9/11, new information has
emerged about the New York Police Department's intelligence operations
- ramped up after the attacks in ways that critics say amount to
racial and ethnic profiling, though the department denies that charge.
Since August, an Associated Press investigation has revealed a vast
NYPD intelligence-collecting effort targeting the city's Muslims.
Police have conducted surveillance of entire Muslim neighborhoods,
monitoring where people eat, pray and get their hair cut. Dozens of
mosques and Muslim student groups were infiltrated. The CIA helped
develop some of the programs.
The FBI also has intelligence-gathering operations that target Muslim
and other ethnic communities. Both the bureau and the NYPD defend the
programs as conforming to guidelines on profiling, while critics brand
the tactics as unconstitutional and ineffective.
"Targeting entire communities for investigation based on erroneous
stereotypes produces flawed intelligence," says Michael German, a
former FBI agent who's now senior policy counsel for the American
Civil Liberties Union. "Law enforcement programs based on evidence and
facts are effective, and a system of bias and mass suspicion is not."
The FBI, which in 2003 was authorized to conduct racial and ethnic
profiling in national security investigations, says its community
assessments are legal and vital. "Certain terrorist and criminal
groups are comprised of persons primarily from a particular ethnic or
geographic community, which must be taken into account when trying to
determine if there are threats to the United States," the bureau said
in response to ACLU criticism.
But some feel the perpetual safety-vs.-civil-liberties balancing act
has been knocked askew since 9/11. In a recent assessment of national
security response to the terror attacks, the ACLU faulted policies it
said had undermined the Constitution.
"We lost our way when, instead of addressing the challenge of
terrorism consistent with our values, our government chose the path of
torture and targeted killing ... of warrantless government spying and
the entrenchment of a national surveillance state," its report said.
"That is not who we are, or who we want to be."
To be sure, Americans have been spied on before by their law
enforcement and security agencies, usually in periods of national
anxiety.
During the Red Scare of 1919-20, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer
responded to labor unrest and bombings - including an attack on his
own house - by overseeing mass roundups of thousands of suspected
anarchists and communists, hundreds of whom were deported. In the
aftermath of the raids, he was assailed by eminent legal experts for
allowing raids without warrants and for denying detainees legal
representation.
In the 1950s, the FBI under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover abetted
Sen. Joe McCarthy and other zealous anti-communists with various
domestic spying tactics, including opening of mail and unauthorized
wiretaps. The bureau also kept civil rights leaders under surveillance
during the late '50s and 1960s, again claiming in some cases that
unproven communist ties represented a security threat.
Many of these covert FBI activities took place under the aegis of its
covert Counter Intelligence Program, known as COINTELPRO. Its targets
included the Nation of Islam, Students for a Democratic Society and
various groups opposed to the Vietnam War.
A Senate committee headed by Frank Church, D-Idaho, investigated
COINTELPRO in 1975-76 and denounced it as a "sophisticated vigilante
operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment
rights of speech and association."
To civil libertarians, the upsurge of post-9/11 intelligence-gathering
is distinctive from these previous endeavors in some key respects. To
a large extent, it has the imprimatur of Congress, in the form of the
Patriot Act and other legislation, and it makes use of astounding
technical advances that have vastly broadened surveillance
capabilities.
"What we've seen is an unprecedented perfect storm of a sense of
national vulnerability, coupled with technological developments that
have made specter of 1984 look kind of hokey," said Donna Lieberman,
executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "We don't
know what the lasting effect will be ... We don't know how permanent
the 'new normal' is."
Nationally, civil liberties advocates have taken numerous legal steps,
including lawsuits, to challenge some of the federal surveillance
practices or find out more about their scope. In New York, some
elected officials are calling for federal and state investigations of
the NYPD spying on Muslim neighborhoods.
Yet top politicians - including President Barack Obama and New York
Mayor Michael Bloomberg - are generally reluctant to criticize
homeland security operations.
"I believe we should do what we have to do to keep us safe. And we
have to be consistent with the Constitution and with people's rights,"
Bloomberg said ahead of the 10th anniversary commemorations of 9/11.
"We live in a dangerous world," he added, "and we have to be very
proactive in making sure that we prevent terrorism."
Many Americans seem to agree. According to a poll in September by The
Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, two-thirds
of Americans say it's fitting to sacrifice some privacy and freedoms
in the fight against terrorism.
The bottom line, say those who support the post-9/11 tactics, is the
government's success in thwarting new terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.
James Jay Carafano, a security expert with the conservative Heritage
Foundation, credits aggressive surveillance for helping uncover
roughly 40 terror plots since 2001.
"Do we live with more surveillance than we used to? You could make a
case for that," he said. "But it's very difficult to make a serious
case we've migrated to a state where civil liberties have been
impinged because of the war on terror."
Peter Chase tries to make precisely that case. Longtime director of
the public library in Plainville, Conn., he was one of four
Connecticut librarians who sued the federal government after they
received a national security letter demanding some library patrons'
computer records without a court order.
More than 200,000 of those FBI directives, which place their
recipients under gag orders, have been issued since 2003. Chase and
his colleagues are among a tiny handful who have fought back in court
and gained the right to speak out about their case.
"When people come in to public libraries, they expect that what
they're going to borrow is confidential," said Chase, 61. "Letting
others know what they're reading is like spying on the voting booth,
it's like spying on what they are thinking."
Tim Lynch, head of the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute's Project on
Criminal Justice and an expert on civil liberties, says most Americans
are unaware of the extent to which basic liberties are being
undermined by new, security-motivated legal precedents.
"The average person only comes face-to-face with some of these
policies at the airport," he said. "They feel, 'Oh, it hasn't been
that bad.'
"But those of us trained in the law are alarmed," Lynch said.
"Lawmakers are too willing to pass laws that would give more power to
the FBI and the executive branch."
Such a law, critics say, was the sweeping Patriot Act, which was
swiftly drafted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and signed into law
on Oct. 26th of that year. Among its provisions, it allows government
agents to conduct broad searches for records in national security
investigations without court warrants.
The only Senate vote against the act was cast by Wisconsin Democrat
Russ Feingold, who lost his seat in 2010. This fall, in the forward to
a report by a Muslim-American legal advocacy group, Feingold blasted
the Patriot Act as "a blatant power-grab that gave unprecedented,
unchecked power to the government to arrest, detain and spy on our
nation's citizens."
A few current senators have called for the act to be reined in, but
Congress this year reauthorized some of its most controversial
provisions - such as roving wiretaps to monitor multiple communication
devices. A Senate committee also rejected an effort by Sens. Ron
Wyden, D-Oregon, and Mark Udall, D-Colo., to obtain more information
from top security officials about what they describe as secret
interpretations of domestic surveillance law.
Some of the post-9/11 intelligence operations potentially affect
almost all Americans, such as so-called data-mining systems capable of
sifting through vast quantities of personal records.
"Fusion centers" have been set up in every state since 9/11 for the
purpose of sharing tips, crime reports and other information among
federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. In some cases, the
military and private companies have participated.
The centers' purpose is to spot potentially dangerous individuals or
patterns that might otherwise have been overlooked, and thus avoid a
repeat of missed opportunities before the 9/11 attacks. However, civil
liberties advocates have voiced fears that the centers could be used
to spy on Americans who have no link to suspected terrorism, and some
missteps have been documented.
In 2009, Missouri's fusion center asserted that some supporters of GOP
Rep. Ron Paul of Texas posed a security threat. In Tennessee, the ACLU
affiliate sent a letter to public schools warning them not to
celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday; the state fusion center
put the communication on a map of "terrorism events and other
suspicious activity."
Overall, however, it is the Muslim-American community that considers
itself the prime target of heightened surveillance efforts.
The concerns are summarized in an impassioned report titled "Losing
Liberty," released last month by Muslim Advocates, a San Francisco-
based legal advocacy group.
"The Patriot Act opened the floodgates to a plethora of discriminatory
and invasive laws, policies, and practices in the name of national
security of which Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim have borne
the brunt," says the report. "It is difficult to find a Muslim today
who has not been contacted by law enforcement or affected by these
policies."
The executive director of Muslim Advocates, Farhana Khera, hopes
Congress will hold hearings on a bill recently introduced by Sen. Ben
Cardin, D-Md., that would prohibit racial, ethnic and religious
profiling at the federal and state level.
"Much of what the FBI has been doing has been shrouded in secrecy, and
the American people have a right to know how these unprecedented
powers are being used," Khera said. "We have something pretty special
in our country and its founding principles, and we need to return to
them."
Targets of the NYPD surveillance range from obscure Moroccan
immigrants in hard-scrabble New York neighborhoods to Reda Shata, a
New York-area imam. Shata eagerly cooperated with the police and FBI,
invited officers to his mosque for breakfast, even dined with Mayor
Bloomberg - yet according to NYPD files examined by the AP, he was
under police surveillance at the time.
"You were loving people very much, and then all of a sudden you get
shocked," Shata said last month after learning he was monitored. "It's
a bitter feeling."
The NYPD has defended its surveillance efforts as vital to the city's
security, while insisting its actions are lawful and respectful.
"The value we place on privacy rights and other constitutional
protections is part of what motivates the work of counterterrorism,"
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told city councilors recently. "It
would be counterproductive in the extreme if we violated those
freedoms in the course of our work to defend New York."
Among the prominent Muslims affected by intensified post-9/11 security
is Jawad Khaki, who for 20 years was a globe-trotting executive with
Microsoft Corp. before leaving in 2009 to found a nonprofit community
group.
Starting in 2007, Khaki says he was subjected to intensive airport
interrogations and searches each time he returned to the U.S. from
abroad, including inspections of data on his smartphone. One customs
agent advised him to cut back on his travels if he didn't like the
hassles, he says.
Against the advice of his attorney, Khaki decided to go public with
his dismay.
"It's not just about my individual rights - it's about everybody's
rights," said Khaki, a native of Tanzania who moved to the U.S. in
1985 and lives in the Seattle suburb of Sammamish.
"I chose to become an American citizen," he said. "One of my patriotic
duties is to uphold the constitution, and the constitution is about
justice and liberty for all."