As I See It: A Government Without Newspapers

by Victor Rozek

"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Readers who attended school during a time when such things were still being taught, will recognize this as Thomas Jefferson's celebrated oath. It is simple and unqualified. There are no caveats suggesting he would allow minor tyrannies during times of national crisis.

Jefferson, however, would have liked the Internet, and unlike the current keepers of the Justice Department, would not seek to silence the dissenting voices that exercise their constitutional freedoms there. It is worth remembering what Jefferson wrote in a letter to Colonel Edward Carrington: "...were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

But given the Orwellian we'll-decide-how-much-freedom-is-good-for-you mentality so rampant among policy makers these days, an Internet without government intervention is a civil libertarian's fading dream.

In truth, the government began its Internet snooping long before September 11. The FBI already had the means to intercept email and track Internet usage through its Carnivore system. Carnivore, however, had some limitations. It had to be installed at the ISP level, and its use was prescribed by warrants and limited to judicially approved targets. That has changed.

With the recent passage of the illusively named USA Patriot Act, the feds can petition a special surveillance-friendly court and receive permission to bug, search, and intercept the email correspondence of individuals or organizations without any proof of a direct link to a terrorist organization.

For the FBI, intercepting email traffic was only half the challenge. Carnivore could snag it, but the system couldn't always read it. Modern encryption methods are becoming so complex that encrypted emails are almost impossible to crack. Even the National Security Agency, which measures its computing power in acres, finds the task daunting.

With the urgency born of September 11, Carnivore is being displaced by a new program called Magic Lantern. The "magic," I suspect, refers to its viral qualities: Like any effective Internet virus, the program surreptitiously installs itself on target computers without the need for physical access to the system or the collusion of an ISP. The word "lantern" probably refers to the light the program sheds on a user's activities by capturing keystrokes and sending them back to the FBI. Of particular interest to federal authorities is gaining access to the passwords used to unlock de-encryption keys, thus rendering encryption useless. E-mail, financial records, purchases, diaries, rants written and deleted, Web sites accessed--all of it will be transparent.

If the Justice Department is none too concerned with our freedoms, neither are the software companies that stand to profit from government contracts. Microsoft, Oracle, and others are lining up to provide the government with surveillance and identification systems. Wayne Madsen, writing for CorpWatch, reports that the chairman of Oracle offered to provide the government "the database software required to establish an interactive national ID card system." The government is also seeking the cooperation of virus detection providers to ensure government viruses are not detected, while software manufacturers are being pressured to make their products surveillance-friendly.

Keystroke logging is not new. Hackers have developed similar tools. What is new and disturbing is government's discretionary use of sophisticated surveillance technology coupled with its historically over-inclusive view of who it regards as an enemy. While people are certainly supportive of the government spying on terrorists, the problem lies in the definition. These days one gets the sense, from the somber warnings issued by government spokesmen, that anyone who disagrees with the administration's policies is somehow a supporter of terrorists. Further, we can be certain that the products of today's trade-freedom-for-security frenzy will be in use long after the present threat has abated.

History shows that "terrorists" are quite often simply people who hold unpopular beliefs or stand against the status quo. During the McCarthy era, communist sympathizers were the terrorists of their day. Perfectly innocent people were investigated by the FBI and careers and lives were ruined by the mere accusation of communist leanings. Likewise, people in the peace and civil-rights movements were thought to be subversives. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act disclose that the FBI labored diligently to discredit anti-Vietnam war activists and subvert civil rights leaders. The agency spied on such legendary threats to national security as Dr. Benjamin Spock and Martin Luther King.

Civil disobedience has been a formative part of this nation since the Boston Tea Party, and has been a necessary part of all great social justice movements. The social and economic gains we now take for granted--labor laws, civil rights, women's rights--were won by people loudly condemned in their own time, and frequently denigrated and assailed by their own government. Bearing the punishment for disobedience remains the price of raising social consciousness.

Laws, as we know, are often designed to protect the interests of the people who pay for them. Thus, cutting down the nation's last Sequoias is not a crime but sitting in a tree to protect them is.

But the Bill of Rights was designed to safeguard us well beyond the narrow confines of any era's status quo. It defines basic and enduring freedoms that are indeed worth defending and, if necessary, worth dying for.

Who will inherit the "terrorist" label after bin Laden and al Qaeda have been vanquished? Environmentalists? Human-rights defenders? Anti-globalization advocates? Whose computers will the government find it necessary to tap? And who will even know? The temptation, when we don't agree with the more radical elements in our society, is to turn our back on government excess. But these things have a way of snowballing. "Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist."

Nineteenth century French dramatist Octave Mirabeau observed, "The greatest danger of bombs is in the explosion of stupidity that they provoke." As I watch our freedoms swept aside under the guise of security, I fear the fallout has reached our shores.