Newsday Washington - While former President George Bush said yesterday that American intelligence agencies should be given more freedom to search out enemies, some experts cautioned that the terror attacks this week on U.S. soil should not be used as an excuse to erode civil liberties here or mount ill-considered operations abroad.
September 14, 2001
Attacks Raise New Privacy Issues;
By Earl Lane
Calls for closer scrutiny in U.S."We've got to free up the intelligence system from some of its constraints," Bush said during a televised speech to energy executives in Boston. "You've got to always respect the privacy and right of an American citizen, but they ought to take a hard look now at whether they've gone too far in denying people that run the intelligence community access to human intelligence." Bush is a former CIA director. Others also called for giving the Central Intelligence Agency a looser hand in recruiting unsavory informants abroad who may have information on terrorist groups, including those linked to Saudi exile Osama bin Laden.
"At some point you have to give the head of CIA operations the ability to say this is somebody we need to have," said Tad Oelstrom, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who directs the national security program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Steven Aftergood, a policy analyst at the nonprofit Federation of American Scientists, questioned whether the CIA has been hampered in recruitment of spies abroad. He said that in 1995 guidelines were put in place "to make sure that U.S. intelligence is not somehow made complicit in human rights violations by indiscriminately putting criminals on its payroll." Since the terror attacks were launched from American soil, some analysts said there inevitably will be calls for closer scrutiny of suspect groups and individuals at home. Whether that will mean giving the FBI or police agencies additional authority to monitor electronic communications in the United States remains to be seen, specialists said.
James Bamford, author of "Body of Secrets," a book about the ultra-secret National Security Agency, said intelligence agencies already have ample authority to eavesdrop on communications within the United States if terrorism or espionage is suspected.
"Assuming they had any basis to target some individuals, it would be a very simple matter to get a court authorization under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," said David Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Even before the terror attacks, an FBI program for tapping the Internet and e-mail messages called Carnivore had been criticized by Sobel's group and others because it can give access to online consumer information, creating the possibility for criminal activity. Ruth Wedgwood, a professor of international law at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said the Carnivore program should go forward with proper safeguards. As terrorist groups learn to stay off cell phones and rely on other means of communication, including e-mail, she said, "you need to have access to other information."
Bamford urged against any hasty attempts to beef up domestic surveillance. "We need to have a little bit of breathing space," he said, to sort out the implications of the terror attacks. Sobel said he had not seen evidence yet that "there was anything legal or technological that impeded law enforcement efforts" prior to the terror attacks. Jon Alterman of the nonpartisan U.S. Institute of Peace, said there may well be a push for more domestic surveillance. But he said, "There's a long history of people being afraid of excessive U.S. government power, and that goes back more than 200 years in this country. I don't think it would be consistent with our history or our creed to have unchecked power regardless of the threat."
Copyright 2001 Newsday, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
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