US citizens willing to give up freedom to avert terror attacks
By Anwar Iqbal
WASHINGTON, May 14: Opinion polls, conducted since the revelation that US spy agencies have monitored billions of telephone calls since 9/11, show that not just America but Americans also have changed considerably since the terrorist attacks five years ago.
A nation which forced a president to step down after learning that he eavesdropped on an opposition meeting, now says it is OK to monitor millions of US citizens to avert a possible terrorist attack.
The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll suggests that most Americans don’t consider telephone tapping a huge privacy threat.
And nearly two-thirds, or 65 per cent, said it’s more important to investigate potential terrorism threats, even if it intrudes on their privacy.
Other recent polls report that a majority of the American public would accept the use of torture to extract information from terrorist suspects, even though such information would almost certainly be unreliable. Last week, USA Today reported that America’s most secretive intelligence gathering outfit — National Security Agency — had amassed a vast database of billions of calls inside the United States and that the White House allowed the NSA to do so.
The report revealed that more than 200 million US telephone accounts and more than a trillion telephone calls made since late 2001 are included in the database. The US phone system is anchored by four companies: AT&T, Verizon Communications, BellSouth and Qwest Communications. BellSouth covers the south-east and is being acquired by AT&T, which has territories from Texas to Michigan, California and Nevada.
The report also said that it’s the norm for phone companies and mobile phone operators to provide information to authorities if there is a proper subpoena but the NSA acted without judicial oversight.
Another report revealed that America spends more than $40 billion a year on intelligence. The New York Times reported earlier that the NSA had eavesdropped on thousands of phone calls between people in the US and foreign countries without first obtaining warrants.
Commenting on the impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on US citizens, the Newsweek magazine said that had President sent a bill up to Capitol Hill giving the NSA broad powers to wiretap and eavesdrop inside the United States, “in all likelihood, the lawmakers would have shouted it through.”
Legally, the NSA is not authorized to spy on US citizens and Bush administration officials have always insisted that any eavesdropping or “data collection” had been narrowly focused on Al Qaeda terror suspects. But media reports speak of widespread monitoring of telephone lines and the Internet.
Some reports suggest that law enforcement agencies even asked popular restaurants to provide information about their clients while libraries have been asked to divulge information about their members’ reading habits.
In San Francisco, a privacy group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit based in part on the testimony of Mark Klein, an AT&T technician for 22 years who claims he witnessed the construction of a “secret room” for the NSA at AT&T’s San Francisco headquarters in early 2003.
On Sunday, The New York Times reported that Vice-President Dick Cheney is the administration’s top advocate for intercepting purely domestic telephone calls and e-mails, without warrants, as part of the war on terror.
The report quotes two senior intelligence officials as saying Cheney and his legal adviser took an aggressive view of the president’s ability to take security measures that raised concerns by others about civil liberties.
In his weekly radio address on Saturday, President Bush defended his decision to allow spy agencies to eavesdrop on US citizens by saying that the domestic phone programme is “lawful” and “has helped prevent possible terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad, and it remains essential to the security of America.”
“This terrorist surveillance programme makes it more likely that killers like the hijackers [in the Sept. 11 attacks] will be identified and located in time,” Mr Bush said. The controversy will come into sharp focus this week when the Senate Intelligence Committee opens an expectedly emotional debate over privacy in confirmation hearings over a new CIA director, Air Force Gen.
Michael Hayden who oversaw the domestic phone programme while running the NSA from 1999 until April 2005. Democrats and civil libertarians are already protesting his nomination.
“We have reached a privacy crisis,” said Rep. Ed Markey, ranking Democrat on the House Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee. Lisa Graves, the American Civil Liberties Union’s senior lobbyist on national security issues, called the monitoring “unequivocally illegal” - an “unprecedented gathering of records on tens of millions of ... absolutely innocent Americans.”
“This is another example of the president breaking the laws that he faithfully promised to execute,” she said. “Every American should be concerned that any president of any party would claim a right to secretly violate our laws.”
