Cyberspace-led Terrorism and Personal Liberties

The difference between Star Trek and the real cyberworld is that Trekkies and their creator believe true evil is visible, easily identified and so susceptible to being destroyed by massive frontal attack. The real cyberworld is not like that. It is hidden, not easily identified and cannot be attacked and destroyed with massed military power. Cyber criminals seem to have three profiles. There are the traditional con men who lie to innocent or poorly protected Internet users in order to steal money. There are cyber spies who fish the Net for commercial secrets and patented technology and steal it in order to give their less inventive clients the illegally gained level commercial playing field they would not otherwise have. And there is the third type of cybercriminal. These are the terrorists, the jihadists, the radical islamists, the al-Qaida cells - call them what you choose - who want to destroy personal liberty and democratic government by terrorizing, killing, mass bombing, and brainwashing vulnerable youth to do their dirty work for them. As we might expect - and even demand - the US govenment is going after these terrorist cybercriminals, and has been for some time under the umbrella of the Patriot Act adopted after 9/11. But recent reports that first appeared in Britain's Guardian newspaper and The Washington Post indicate that the National Security Agency retrieves phone and email records, but not their actual content, from its secret warrants allowing it to collect data from major telecom companies. The program is aimed at detecting the calling patterns of terrorist suspects. A separate government program also collects massive amounts of data from at least nine Internet and electronic firms, retrieving everything from emails to photographs. Back in 2006, Vice President, Dick Cheney, was direct during a radio appearance, denying that the government was engaging in domestic surveillance. Cheney told radio host Hugh Hewitt that "what we're interested in are intercepting communications, one end of which are outside the United States and one end of which we have reason to believe is al-Qaida-related." Cheney's description of the program was accurate, even though several top Bush administration officials adamantly insisted that the government was not engaged in mass data-trawling as part of its secret NSA programs. Michael Hayden, the then CIA head of national intelligence, told a National Press Club audience in January 2006 that there was no effort to cast a wide net over communications data. "This is not about intercepting conversations between people in the United States. This is hot pursuit of communications entering or leaving America involving someone we believe is associated with al-Qaida." Bush's attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, also minimized the reach of the NSA data-gathering, telling a Senate Judiciary hearing in February 2006 that the surveillance "is narrowly focused and fully consistent with the traditional forms of enemy surveillance found to be necessary in all previous armed conflicts." But in May 2011, when the Patriot Act faced reauthorization, the NSA's secret programs began to receive carefully-couched attention from two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado. Constrained by requirements for speaking about classified secret programs, the two Senators offered only guarded warnings about how the government secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, saying that the American people would be "stunned and they will be angry" if they knew the facts. Wyden said during a floor speech in May 2011 : "Many members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch, because that interpretation is classified." But on Friday, President Barack Obama himself acknowledged the existence of such programs, giving the government's standard rationale to ease fears that Americans' privacy rights are being violated. Obama said that the electronic data-mining is not aimed at American citizens or inside the US. He said they sift through the metadata and they might "identify potential leads of people who might engage in terrorism,...Nobody is listening to your telephone calls," Obama assured the nation. What the government is doing, he said, is digesting phone numbers and the durations of calls, seeking links that might "identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism." If the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they've got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation." These programs are meant to make America safe, he said, but he offered no specifics about how the surveillance programs have done that. Some members of Obama's own Democrat Party are now attacking him for overreaching, and civil liberties groups are comparing him unfavorably to President George W. Bush. Obama said that the program was tightened under his administration but did not explain how. "In rooting out terror threats. understand that there are some trade-offs involved," Obama said. The President said that Americans cannot be 100% safe while maintaining 100% privacy. ~~~~~ Dear readers, we will surely return to this setious question - the trade-offs between security in the face of cyber-led terrorism and the fundamental human right to personal privacy. It is not an easy matter to balance the two. But that does not mean giving the government unmonitored carte blanche to play fast and loose with constitutional rights to personal liberty. Once again, citizens must be informed and involved before the government acts. Afterward, it will be too late to take back liberties given away because of fear generated by the heat of terrorist attacks.