By James P. Pinkerton
More than ever before, Americans
are exercising their unalienable right to life, liberty and the
pursuit of capital gains. But what happens when liberty jeopardizes
life -- or the Dow Jones average? And what happens when the government
jeopardizes liberty?
Last Tuesday [that would be about
March 28, 2000, or so], Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., convened the Senate
Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism and Government
Information to make the case for new legislation to protect the
nation's "information infrastructure."
And so began a familiar Washington
ritual: Friendly lawmaker invites friendly bureaucrat to a hearing.
Both read statements and share some chummy chit-chat. Soon, a
new law emerges that gives political credit to the lawmaker and
a bigger budget to the bureaucrat. So it's a win-win for the two
of them, but if others aren't paying attention, their interests
are likely to get left out.
Kyl began the show with a declaration
that "denial of service" hacker attacks on companies
such as eBay, Yahoo and CNN should "serve as a wake-up call
about the need to protect our critical computer networks."
Getting down to the bottom line, Kyl added that "the attacks
contributed to a 258-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average
and halted a string of three days of consecutive record-high closes
of the technology-laden Nasdaq Composite Index."
To deal with this problem, Kyl and
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., have co-sponsored Senate Bill 2092,
which would, among its many provisions, modify the federal government's
"trap and trace" authority, so that law enforcers would
no longer need to obtain a search warrant in every jurisdiction
through which a cyber attack traveled.
The first "witness" was
FBI Director Louis Freeh. After praising Kyl and his legislation,
he reminded his audience of how much the FBI was already doing
to combat the scourge of cyber-crime. The FBI opened 1,154 "computer
intrusion" cases last year, he said, more than double the
number from 1998. Freeh then used the forum to outline the FBI's
entire cyber-agenda, covering everyone from virus-writers and
intellectual property thieves to the "Internet Black Tigers,"
a hitherto unknown group "reportedly affiliated with the
Tamil Tigers" of Sri Lanka. But in keeping with the Wall
Street-orientation of the session, he further noted that unchecked
Net-related stock fraud costs investors $1 million an hour.
Freeh ended with a call for more
budgetary, as well as legal, authority for his agency. And Kyl
was right there with him; the senator's first question was, "Is
this level of funding sufficient, or should Congress look to increase
it?"
Only two more witnesses came after
Freeh. One was Richard D. Pethia, who directs a federally funded
cyber-security center within the Software Engineering Institute
at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Not surprisingly,
Pethia was 100 percent behind the joint Kyl-Freeh effort. The
other witness was Harris N. Miller, president of the Information
Technology Association of America, a Washington-based trade association.
Miller was supportive but ambivalent; his worry seemed to be that
high-tech trade secrets would spill into -- and then out of --
Uncle Sam's databases.
But the real opposition to the senate
bill wasn't heard from because it wasn't invited to testify. One
likely opponent is the Electronic Privacy Information Center,
a Washington-based cyber-liberties group.
"This is very much a process
being driven by the law-enforcement community," lamented
Mark Rotenberg, the group's director, in an interview.
Another non-invitee was Solveig
Singleton, director of information studies at the Cato Institute,
a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C. "Law enforcement
views the Fourth Amendment as the problem," she said later.
That's the piece of the Bill of Rights that protects "persons,
papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures"
-- with no mention of e-mail. And so now, Singleton observed,
the FBI wants to force manufacturers to "build surveillance
into technology," all but eliminating the need for search
warrants.
How much power should the government
have to protect us? And how much power to snoop? The dangers that
Kyl and Freeh described are real, but so is the danger of a government's
habitually stomping on the privacy rights of everyone from Martin
Luther King Jr. to Kathleen Willey. History proves that basic
rights are unalienable only when those who might alienate them
are watched like hawks.
Pinkerton is a Newsday columnist and a member of its editorial board.
This article appeared in the April 2, 2000, edition of the Fayetteville Observer.