Guarding the Home Front

Will civil liberties be a casualty in the War on Terrorism?

From the December 2001 issue

(Page 3 of 6)

Jim Harper

Goaded by leftist privacy advocates, Congress has been toying with the idea of regulating the private sector in the name of privacy. As we now see, governments themselves are the most powerful, constantly lurking threats. The War on Terrorism will strike hard at the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

In the shelter of this already-too-weak freedom, Americans protect what remains of their privacy from government. Because no one yet knows what national security lapses allowed the heinous September 11 attacks to occur, laws expanding warrantless wiretapping amount to a ritual wartime shedding of civil liberties. The charge of opportunism sticks to some proposals, which came forward while fires still burned at the Pentagon and World Trade Center. They involve powers law enforcement could not win from a rational, deliberative Congress.

The laws balancing surveillance and privacy could be updated -- rationally and in light of new technology, our tradition of privacy from government, and the Fourth Amendment. But when the last terrorist has died or renounced violence, the privacy protections taken hastily from American citizens in the coming days are not likely to be restored. This truly just war against terrorism may take a generation. Mopping up the carnage to privacy may take many decades longer than that.

Jim Harper is editor of Privacilla.org, a Web-based privacy-policy think tank.

Losing the Fourth and First

Nat Hentoff

We may lose the need for a magistrate to give police a warrant for any kind of search. Also, federal law enforcement officials want to allow an investigator to search a suspect's home without immediately notifying the target of the search. In J. Edgar Hoover's day, that was called a "black bag job." It is totally unconstitutional, and it should be criminally illegal.

Then there's the First Amendment. In the Gulf War, the government managed to tie the hands of the press totally. In other words, practically no information came out except from the government. By contrast, in the much more dangerous Vietnam War, there was a great deal of free reporting and as a result of that, people began to understand what was going on and there were political changes. As Justice Hugo Black said in the Pentagon Papers case, it's especially when you're in a war situation and people are going to die that the press has to tell people what's going on.

And that's just a few freedoms under attack. Most Americans have only a rudimentary understanding of their own rights, because those rights are taught so badly in the schools. Therefore, they don't care much what other people's rights are. Because of the terror of the attacks, about 70 percent of the public is willing to give away their rights in the interests of security. All in all, it's a very bleak picture.

Nat Hentoff is a syndicated columnist and author of numerous books on civil liberties.

Every Step We Take

Robert Higgs

The American people may well be witnessing the death of their right to privacy, not with their usual whimper but with their ill-considered, too-hasty approval after the New York and Pentagon bangs.

The government has declared war on "terrorism," but because terrorists assume many guises and operate in many places, the only way to ensure that no terrorist escapes notice is to watch everyone, everywhere. Lacking the patience and the wit to focus its surveillance on only the most likely suspects, the government will regard all of us as potential terrorists or as their potential providers, unwitting perhaps, of aid and comfort. Our communications by ordinary mail, telephone, fax, and e-mail will be scrutinized or at constant risk of scrutiny; our homes and places of business will be searched or at constant risk of search; our personal contacts, financial affairs, and travel by airliner, train, and ship will be closely monitored and restricted. To borrow the lyrics of a once-popular song: Every step we take, every move we make, they'll be watching us.