[Nettime-bold] Fw: *ICN - Commentary: Don't make cyberspace into a police state

["Steve McAlexander" <mcalexander@veriomail.com>]

> http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2820861,00.html
>
>  Don't make cyberspace into a police state
>
>   By Rob Fixmer
>  Interactive Week
>  October 29, 2001 5:14 AM PT
>
>
>
>  COMMENTARY-- America's next civil war will be fought on the Internet, and
the fundamental values in question will be the right to privacy versus the
need for national security.
>
> Right now, that assertion might seem far-fetched. This is a time of flag
waving and patriotic fervor that ranges from genuine statesmanship to banal
jingoism. And that's as it should be. The war against terrorism is not one
of those morally ambiguous geopolitical games we came to associate with the
Cold War. The attacks of Sept. 11 were a manifest evil that threw our
civilization and the rule of law into a fight for survival. We win or we
perish.
>
> But as the war drags on, we're in for some sobering realizations. As
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned last week, the front line is our
front yard. For the first time in any American conflict, we can expect more
civilian casualties than military. As fear mounts, winning this war is going
to require adjustments to our social and cultural values that would have
seemed unimaginable just a few weeks ago, but now seem inevitable--most
important among them are our evolving expectations of privacy and individual
rights.
>
> The battle lines are forming rapidly.
>
> Within days of the Sept. 11 attacks, the FBI had hundreds of pages of
legislation ready for Congress--a cornucopia of surveillance tools and
investigative authority the bureau had been seeking for years and now saw an
opportunity to grab.
>
> Civil libertarians and conservatives alike resist. In Congress, concern
spans the political spectrum.
>
> Jim Harper is editor of Privacilla.org, an advocacy Web site that espouses
a libertarian view of privacy. "We are on the brink of a privacy 'Exxon
Valdez,' " Harper warned. "The damage done to Americans' privacy in the
coming weeks could take generations to clean up."
>
> Shari Steele is executive director of the civil liberties group Electronic
Frontier Foundation. "While it is obviously of vital national importance to
respond effectively to terrorism," she said, "these bills recall the
McCarthy era in the power they would give the government to scrutinize the
private lives of American citizens."
>
> Signs of the battle are everywhere: Surveillance technologies have been
incorporated into new antiterrorism legislation. Oracle's Larry Ellison has
suggested that a national ID is both desirable and inevitable. The FBI has
made moves to subpoena data from ISPs and to force manufacturers of routers
and switches to embed wire-tapping capabilities into their equipment.
>
> "These are worrisome times," said Charlotte Twight, a lawyer and professor
of economics at Boise State University whose writings are featured on the
Cato Institute's Web site, and whose book, Dependent on D.C.: The Rise of
Federal Control Over the Lives of Ordinary Americans, is due from St.
Martin's Press in January. She told me, "There are a lot of sweet-sounding
names, like 'antiterrorism,' being slapped on new legislation that hide
suspicious provisions. The political reality that citizens are willing to
draw the line at a certain point has changed dramatically since Sept. 11."
>
> Until now, Twight said, the process of working data surveillance into the
fabric of our lives has been incremental, almost invisible. In her book, for
example, she describes how the Social Security Act, part of Franklin
Roosevelt's New Deal, created an identification number that has slowly,
quietly evolved into a fulcrum for government data collection about
individuals. A simple retirement insurance scheme has been transformed into
a de facto national ID for all residents of the U.S.
>
> More recent legislation, ranging from the Immigration and Naturalization
Act to the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA),
have sealed that trend. Today, thanks in large part to the Internet, an
individual's Social Security Number is the common link among medical,
education, labor and financial databases, enabling government--and at times,
prying eyes in the private sector--to track, monitor and define us.
>
> This flies in the face of all the Internet was supposed to represent. Only
yesterday, it seems, the global network of networks was being portrayed as
the technology that unleashed the individual and leveled the playing field.
Instead, it is quickly becoming the technology that many now believe most
imperils our individual autonomy.
>
> This is not a direction we can afford to embrace blindly. We need to
protect our borders and our identities with equal vigilance. But if
Americans think they are being spied upon, by government or businesses, as
they make their way about the Net, as they send e-mail to grandma, watch
videos, buy personal gifts or build Web pages, we will have turned
cyberspace into a police state.
>
> In which case, we might well win a battle against terrorism only to lose
the war against tyranny.
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