To track terrorists, government snoops will have to track you, too
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Cover Image: Privacy in an Age of Terror
Table: Privacy: What Americans Think
No Place to Hide
When Right and Left See Eye-to-Eye
Commentary: National IDs Won't Work
Commentary: Yes, They Certainly Will
Table: What the Government Might Require on a National ID...
You Want Security? They've Got Security
Commentary: Should the U.S. Follow Europe's Lead?
Online Extra: Commentary: Harsh History Lessons from Latin America
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Khalid Al-Midhar came to the attention of federal law enforcers about a year and a half ago. As the Saudi Arabian strolled into a meeting with some of Osama bin Laden's lieutenants at a hotel in Kuala Lumpur in December, 1999, he was videotaped by a Malaysian surveillance team. The tape was turned over to U.S. intelligence officials and, after several months, Al-Midhar's name was put on the Immigration & Naturalization Service's "watch list" of potential terrorists. When the INS discovered in August that Al-Midhar was already in the U.S., the FBI assigned agents to track him down.
By the time the FBI figured out where Al-Midhar was, downtown Manhattan was in flames, part of the Pentagon had been destroyed, and more than 5,000 people were dead. Racing to reconstruct the disaster, agents pulled the manifest of hijacked American Airlines Flight 77--and discovered that Al-Midhar had bought a ticket for the flight using his real name.
As politicians, businesspeople, and terrorism experts try to prevent the horror of September 11 from ever being repeated, they are taking a closer look at the story of Khalid Al-Midhar. Could the tiny shred of information about him--his name and his image--have been used to thwart the attack? The answer may be yes. Technology exists that, had it been far more aggressively deployed, might have tracked down Al-Midhar before he stepped on board the plane. The FBI's list of potential terrorists, for instance, could have been linked to commercial databases so that he might have been apprehended when he used his Visa card days before the attack.
The videotape of Al-Midhar also could have been helpful. Using biometric profiling, it would have been possible to make a precise digital map of his face. This data could have been hooked up to airport surveillance cameras. When the cameras captured Al-Midhar, an alarm would have sounded, allowing cops to take him into custody.
The aim of these technologies is simple: to make it harder for terrorists to hide. That's top priority now--and it's likely to drive a broad expansion of the use of intrusive security measures. Polls taken since September 11 show that 86% of Americans are in favor of wider use of facial-recognition systems; 81% want closer monitoring of banking and credit-card transactions; and 68% support a national ID card. But the quest for safety is also going to come at an incalculable cost to personal privacy. Any tool that is powerful enough to strip away the anonymity of Khalid Al-Midhar--one dangerous traveler among millions of innocents--will do the same thing to ordinary citizens. Their faces will have to be scanned by the same cameras, their spending habits studied by the same computers.
The war on terrorism is still in its early days, but one thing is already clear: In the future, information about what you do, where you go, who you talk to, and how you spend your money is going to be far more available to government, and perhaps business as well. "September 11 changed things," says former Federal Trade Commissioner Robert Pitofsky, one of the most forceful privacy advocates in recent decades. "Terrorists swim in a society in which their privacy is protected. If some invasions of privacy are necessary to bring them out into the open, most people are going to say, `O.K., go ahead."' Full Story: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_45/b3756001.htm
===== Kevin Dean Buffalo, NY ICQ: 8616001 http://www.yaysoft.com
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