NY Times: Civil Liberties Books

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Civil Liberties and the War on Terrorism

When I have computer trouble at the office, I call the systems support department on the fifth floor. It used to be that if we couldn't fix the problem over the phone, I would have to wait until a nice young technician came by. Sitting at my desk, he (or she) would plunge into program files that mean nothing to me and readjust my machine. Lately, the waiting has been eliminated. When phone advice fails, the technician doesn't move from his workstation. Instead, I sit back and from another floor he commandeers my computer, pushing my cursor around, opening and closing programs until the problem is solved.

It is remarkable to witness, and profoundly eerie. If you were to ask me whether I had privacy on my work computer, I would know to answer no. But it is one thing to understand in the abstract that nearly every word I have ever typed at The New York Times can be retrieved by my employer and quite another to watch my files being opened and closed by someone not touching my keyboard. If the nice New York Times technician can do it, after all, how hard would it be for the nice F.B.I. agent?

That question haunts a number of books that began appearing last year and are still coming out, lamenting the state of individual privacy and liberty, especially after Sept. 11, 2001. The books raise two sets of related concerns. Most of them focus on changes to laws and regulations made by the Bush administration and Congress in the name of stopping the next terrorist attack. The authors say the changes do little if anything to improve security and amount to a power grab by a paranoid, power-hungry government. These are serious and increasingly familiar charges, and it is helpful to have them spelled out in some detail and measured against history, as the best of these books do. Many of the steps taken by the administration are wrong, even abhorrent. A few others, however, seem to me less harmful than portrayed, and some of these books examine the difference.

The second set of issues goes beyond civil liberties to the essence of what we mean today by privacy. Every time we use a cell phone, strike a computer key or do business with a bank, we leave retrievable digital marks. Most of us rarely give it a second thought. This is partly because it happens so noiselessly but also, I suspect, because privacy itself has changed. Between the ubiquity of television and the Internet -- and the utterly uninhibited manner in which people speak on their cellphones in public -- we live in an era of unprecedented exhibitionism. Several of the authors under review can barely breathe, they are so outraged by the way we are allowing ourselves to be tracked. They are consumed by visions of Bentham's panopticon, a prison where inmates are under constant surveillance. And they argue, intelligently but to my mind unconvincingly, that by allowing companies and the state to capture and record us in this way, we are not only opening ourselves up to government snoops, we are permitting the corrosion of what it means to be human.

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Civil Liberties and the War on Terrorism


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