Electronic Engineering Times December 1, 2003
OPINION/LETTERS: Necessary harm
By Loring Wirbel
Two years after passage of the USA Patriot Act, it's nice to see critics ranging from IEEE president Michael Adler to Yale professor of international law Harold Hongju Koh coming down hard on the Bush administration for its anti-information, antirights policies. The issue is not just the greater latitude for investigation and intimidation allowed under the act, but the apparent attitude among federal agencies that the public should not have the right to question policies invoked in the name of security.
In the IEEE's fight over allowing members from "proscribed" nations to publish papers, many IEEE members have urged the organization simply to violate the law, but Adler will have none of that. And while it's admirable when library districts say they will not provide their patron lists to the FBI, such acts of tacit disobedience will need to achieve a far greater scope before they have any impact on the Justice Department.
Perhaps the place to draw the line is when the government admits that no laws have been broken but insists nonetheless that individuals should refrain from publicly disseminating information that might "harm the nation." John Young of the Cryptome site (cryptome.org) got a reminder to that effect last month when he was visited by two FBI special agents.
The Cryptome site publishes information about cryptography, defense electronics, intelligence agencies and the like, with a bow to material of interest to programmers and engineers. Granted, Cryptome's commercial-image-based "citizen spying" campaign goes overboard when it moves beyond publishing classified defense facilities to show pictures of the homes of White House officials. Such actions smack of the outcry that ensued in 2002 when John Poindexter was appointed head the Information Awareness Office: Even then, the problem was less the individual than the policy of the defense agency he worked for. Nevertheless, the Federation of American Scientists and GlobalSecurity.org make similar use of commercial imagery to drive home arguments in favor of our freedom of speech.
If the executive branch wants to say information "harms the nation," perhaps it's time to step back and consider that when a nation is on an empire-building, information-restricting kick, the interests of the nation should indeed be harmed by its most loyal citizens.
© Copyright 2003, CMP Media LLC
