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Technology Daily Special Report
Privacy Experts Urge Vigilance Against Surveillance
by Drew ClarkNEW YORK -- Because the government's electronic surveillance initiatives start small but inexorably expand, privacy groups must remain vigilant against even the slightest encroachment on Internet-based communications, three privacy advocates said on Wednesday.
In the past decade, said David Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Justice Department has taken the view that "you have given us an inch, we now need to take a foot, we now need to take a mile." He spoke as part of a panel discussion at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference here.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, added Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, "those most vulnerable and who face the greatest threat are the non-citizens who live and work in the U.S." Martin expressed alarm that legislation to limit the privacy rights of non-citizens soon might secure unanimous passage in the Senate.
"If the community doesn't come together on the privacy rights of non-citizens, if it can be split on the lines of citizens and non-citizens, we are going to lose" the broader battle for communications privacy, Martin said.
Sobel said the Justice Department under both President Bush and former President Clinton have adopted an expansive view of the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which enabled wiretaps on digital telephone networks but included language barring the law's application to the Internet.
Sobel said the FBI surveillance system popularly known as "Carnivore" disregarded CALEA's restrictions against Internet surveillance, and he cited a piece of draft legislation prepared by Justice Department officials would explicitly lower the standard for electronic surveillance of multi-function devices that receive both phone calls and e-mails.
"We have come far from the assurance that FBI gave Congress that the Internet and emerging Internet technologies were not going to be affected by CALEA," Sobel said.
Speaking on the same panel, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney Ann Beeson recounted the Kafkaesque experience of trying to take part in the secretive workings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review.
The court consists of three appeals-court judges picked by Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist. Both it and the lower Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were created under a law that set the statutory framework for electronic and other surveillance inside the United States that is aimed at collecting foreign intelligence information. In the first decision in its 25-year history, last November the review court overturned the lower court's decision limiting an expansive reading of an October 2001 anti-terrorism law known as the USA PATRIOT Act.
"We didn't even know who to call," Beeson recounted of the ACLU's fight in that court system. "When someone called out of the blue and said they were our contact with the secret FISA court, I felt like we were talking to 'Deep Throat.'"
ACLU and other groups were disappointed with that result and filed a motion seeking Supreme Court review of the decision. Last week, the high court rejected that motion.
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