Fortress DC: Too Much Surveillance Means Too Little Freedom, Feb. 19, 2002 WASHINGTON: Early in American history, when faced with a potential rebellion of unpaid officers, one U.S. leader employed an uncharacteristic emotional trick - pretending to be going blind - to appeal to the infuriated military not to march on the capital. He soon had them in tears and in hand. In another time, another leader risked all by turning the capital's defense over to the man most opposed to his political aims, gambling that he could later overcome the nation's gratitude to a man on horseback. In contemporary times, after the Pentagon was hit, the White House targeted and the Capitol anthraxed, Washington again saw itself besieged. But now, in terror of an external threat, U.S. leaders are protecting the capital at the cost of every American's personal freedom. Surveillance is in the saddle. Responding to the latest Justice Department terror alert, Washington police opened the Joint Operation Command Center of the Synchronized Operations Command Complex (SOCC). In it, 50 officials monitor a wall of 40 video screens showing images of travelers, drivers, residents and pedestrians. These used to be the Great Unwatched, free people conducting their private lives; now they are under close surveillance by hundreds of hidden cameras. A zoom lens enables the watchers to focus on the face of a tourist walking toward the Washington Monument or Lincoln Memorial. The monitoring system is already linked to 200 cameras in public schools. The watchers plan to expand soon into an equal number in the subways and parks. A private firm profits by photographing cars running red lights; those images will also join the surveillance network. Private cameras in banks and the lobbies and elevators of apartment buildings and hotels will join the system, and residents of nursing homes and hospitals can look forward to an electronic eye in every room. A commercial camera atop a department store in Georgetown catches the faces of shoppers entering malls, to be plugged into omnipresent SOCC. Digital images of the captured faces can be flashed around the world in an instant on the Internet. Married to facial recognition technology and tied in to public and private agencies around the world, an electronic library of hundreds of millions of faces will be created. Terrorists and criminals - as well as unhappy spouses, runaway teens, hermits and other law-abiding people who want to drop out of society for a while - will have no way to get a fresh start. Is this the kind of world Americans want? The promise is greater safety; the trade-off is government control of individual lives. Personal security may or may not be enhanced by this all-seeing eye and ear, but personal freedom will surely be sharply curtailed. To be watched at all times, especially when doing nothing seriously wrong, is to be afflicted with a creepy feeling. That is what is felt by a convict in an always-lighted cell. It is the pervasive, inescapable feeling of being unfree. As the law now stands, there is no privacy in public places; that's why sports stadiums are called "Snooper Bowls." A whisper to your spouse on your front porch is the public's business, say the courts; and on that intrusive analogy, long-range microphones may soon be allowed to pick up voice vibrations on windowpanes. When your government, employer, landlord, merchant, banker and local sports team gang up to picture, digitize and permanently record your every activity, you are placed under unprecedented control. This is not some alarmist Orwellian scenario; it is here, now, financed by $20 billion last year and $15 billion more this year of federal money appropriated out of sheer fear. By creating the means to monitor 300 million visits to the United States yearly, this administration and a supine opposition are building a system capable of identifying, tracking and spying on 300 million Americans. So far, the reaction has been a most un- American docility. This Monday was Presidents' Day. To save the capital and thus the nation, the leader who manipulated his rebellious officers with an emotional pretense of incipient blindness was George Washington, and the one who risked creating a Caesar out of a necessary general was Abraham Lincoln. Neither would sacrifice America's freedom to protect his monument. Threat of National ID, Dec. 24, 2001 WASHINGTON -- A device is now available to help pet owners find lost animals. It's a little chip implanted under the skin in the back of the neck; any animal shelter can quickly scan lost dogs or cats and pick up the address of the worried owner. That's a good side of identification technology. There's a bad side: fear of terrorism has placed Americans in danger of trading our "right to be let alone" for the false sense of security of a national identification card. All of us are willing to give up some of our personal privacy in return for greater safety. That's why we gladly suffer the pat-downs and "wanding" at airports, and show a local photo ID before boarding. Such precautions contribute to our peace of mind. However, the fear of terror attack is being exploited by law enforcement sweeping for suspects as well as by commercial marketers seeking prospects. It has emboldened the zealots of intrusion to press for the holy grail of snoopery - a mandatory national ID. Police unconcerned with the sanctity of an individual's home have already developed heat sensors to let them look inside people's houses. The federal "Carnivore" surveillance system feeds on your meatiest e- mail. Think you can encrypt your way to privacy? The Justice Department is proud of its new "Magic Lantern": all attempts by computer owners to encode their messages can now be overwhelmed by an electronic bug the F.B.I. can plant on your keyboard to read every stroke. But in the dreams of Big Brother and his cousin, Big Marketing, nothing can compare to forcing every person in the United States - under penalty of law - to carry what the totalitarians used to call "papers." The plastic card would not merely show a photograph, signature and address, as driver's licenses do. That's only the beginning. In time, and with exquisite refinements, the card would contain not only a fingerprint, description of DNA and the details of your eye's iris, but a host of other information about you. Hospitals would say: How about a chip providing a complete medical history in case of emergencies? Merchants would add a chip for credit rating, bank accounts and product preferences, while divorced spouses would lobby for a rundown of net assets and yearly expenditures. Politicians would like to know voting records and political affiliation. Cops, of course, would insist on a record of arrests, speeding tickets, E-Z pass auto movements and links to suspicious Web sites and associates. All this information and more is being collected already. With a national ID system, however, it can all be centered in a single dossier, even pressed on a single card - with a copy of that card in a national databank, supposedly confidential but available to any imaginative hacker. What about us libertarian misfits who take the trouble to try to "opt out"? We will not be able to travel, or buy on credit, or participate in tomorrow's normal life. Soon enough, police as well as employers will consider those who resist full disclosure of their financial, academic, medical, religious, social and political affiliations to be suspect. The universal use and likely abuse of the national ID - a discredit card - will trigger questions like: When did you begin subscribing to these publications and why were you visiting that spicy or seditious Web site? Why are you afraid to show us your papers on demand? Why are you paying cash? What do you have to hide? Today's diatribe will be scorned as alarmist by the same security-mongers who shrugged off our attorney general's attempt to abolish habeas corpus (which libertarian protests and the Bush administration's sober second thoughts seem to be aborting). But the lust to take advantage of the public's fear of terrorist penetration by penetrating everyone's private lives - this time including the lives of U.S. citizens protected by the Fourth Amendment - is gaining popularity. Beware: It is not just an efficient little card to speed you though lines faster or to buy you sure-fire protection from suicide bombers. A national ID card would be a ticket to the loss of much of your personal freedom. Its size could then be reduced for implantation under the skin in the back of your neck. Kangaroo Courts with Injustice in Their Pockets, Nov. 27, 2001 WASHINGTON - As soon as German U-boats put eight saboteurs on U.S. shores during World War II, one of the eight called the FBI to betray the mission but was brushed off as a crackpot. Days later, he called again and managed to persuade the FBI he was an authentic saboteur. Partly to keep this embarrassment of bungled enforcement from becoming known, the eight were secretly tried by a military court inside the FBI headquarters. Unexpectedly, a U.S. Army lawyer assigned to the Germans mounted a spirited defense. Col. Kenneth Royall, citing the landmark 1866 Supreme Court decision of Ex Parte Milligan - holding that martial law could not be applied where federal civil courts were in business - challenged the secret tribunal's legality. FDR told his attorney general, according to Francis Biddle's memoirs, that he would resist any Supreme Court decision to give the accused saboteurs a regular court trial: "I won't hand them over to any United States marshal armed with a writ of habeas corpus." Confrontation was averted when a cowed Supreme Court unanimously acknowledged the extra-judicial power of a president armed with a congressional declaration of war. Six of the eight captives went to the electric chair; J. Edgar Hoover was awarded a medal of honor. Now President Bush, with no such congressional declaration, is using that Roosevelt mistake as precedent for his own dismaying departure from due process. Bush's latest self-justification is his claim to be protecting jurors (by doing away with juries). Worse, his gung-ho advisers have convinced him - as well as some gullible commentators - that the Star Chamber tribunals he has ordered are "implementations" of the lawful Uniform Code of Military Justice. Military attorneys are silently seething because they know that to be untrue. The UCMJ demands a public trial, proof beyond reasonable doubt, an accused's voice in the selection of juries and right to choose counsel, unanimity in death sentencing and above all appellate review by civilians confirmed by the Senate. Not one of those fundamental rights can be found in Bush's military order setting up kangaroo courts for people he designates before "trial" to be terrorists. Bush's fiat turns back the clock on all advances in military justice, through three wars, in the past half-century. His advisers assured him that a fearful majority would cheer his assumption of dictatorial power to ignore our courts. They failed to warn him, however, that his denial of traditional American human rights to non-citizens would backfire and in practice actually weaken the war on terror. Spain, which caught and charged eight men for complicity in the Sept. 11 attacks, last week balked at turning over the suspects to a U.S. tribunal ordered to ignore rights normally accorded alien defendants. Other members of the European Union holding suspects that might help us break al-Qaida may also refuse extradition. Presumably Secretary of State Colin Powell was left out of the Ashcroft try- 'em-and-fry-'em loop. Thus has coalition-minded Bush undermined the anti-terrorist coalition, ceding to nations overseas the high moral and legal ground long held by U.S. justice. And on what leg does the U.S now stand when China sentences an American to death after a military trial devoid of counsel chosen by the defendant? We in the tiny minority of editorialists on left and right who dare to point out such constitutional, moral and practical anti-terrorist considerations are derided as "professional hysterics" akin to "antebellum Southern belles suffering the vapors." Buncha weepy sissies, we are. (Frankly, Scarlett, I don't give a damn - I've always been pro-bellum.) The possibility of being accused, however, of showing insufficient outrage at those suspected of a connection to terrorists shuts up most politicians. And a need to display patriotic fervor turns Bush's liberal critics into exemplars of evenhandedism. Careers can be wrecked by taking an unpopular stand. But not always. Forty years ago, my political mentor introduced me to his senior partner, Ken Royall, who after World War II had been appointed by President Truman to be the last secretary of war. Royall, then head of a great New York law firm, considered the high point of his career his losing fight to get a group of reviled Nazi terrorists a fair American trial.