Sunday, May 18, 2008
Editorial: Giving up privacy for security -- or not
Americans have far less privacy than they did prior to 9/11. But court prosecutions don't indicate much security resulted from the sacrifice.
After the terror attacks on 9/11, there was a lot of debate over how to balance security and civil liberties. The question now is whether U.S. citizens gave up liberties without an increase in security.
According to a recent report in the Los Angeles Times, although the government is spying on an increasing number of Americans, using authority granted after 9/11, the number of terrorism prosecutions that make it to court is declining.
The FBI is asking for more warrants to search or eavesdrop on suspected terrorists and issuing more national security letters to compel banks, Internet providers and others to turn over personal records.
But all the surveillance is resulting in fewer actual terror prosecutions. According to one study, the number of prosecutions dropped 50 percent between 2002 and 2007.
Admittedly, the number of prosecutions may not be the best gauge of anti-terror activity, but with a secrecy-obsessed Bush administration, it's one of the few the public can actually measure.
"The fact that the prosecutions are down doesn't mean that the utility of these investigations is down. It suggests that these investigations may be leading to other forms of prevention and protection," Thomas Newcomb, a former Bush White House national security aide, told the Times.
Perhaps. But Michael Woods, former head of the FBI national security law unit, also had a point when he told the Times, "A lot more information is going to pass through government hands, and most of that is going to be about people who turn out to be innocent or irrelevant."
Even when the government brings terror cases, its record of securing convictions is not good.
Federal prosecutors are making their third attempt at prosecuting a group of religious oddballs (their faith mixes tenets of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Taoism and Freemasonry) said to have been plotting to fell the Sears Tower in Chicago -- though the only weapons of mass destruction they could apparently obtain were paintball guns.
In the meantime, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report showing the FBI has done a very poor job preparing itself to perform anti-terror functions.
Intelligence analysts aren't well trained. Agents don't have basic Internet access at their desks. More than 20 percent of the supervisory positions in the unit covering al-Qaida-related cases are vacant.
Many have argued Americans need to sacrifice some liberty to bolster their security.
Under the current system, however, it seems clear that neither liberty nor security is being served.
