Digital privacy feared as next casualty

By Staff and reports

SAN FRANCISCO -- Privacy advocates warned against the dangers of heightened Internet surveillance by law enforcement in the wake of Tuesday's hijacked plane attacks.

The worry is that authorities will undermine digital civil liberties in their efforts to track the perpetrators who may have killed thousands at the Pentagon and World Trade Center terror strikes.

Officials are already discussing the need to tighten measures to protect national security and to plan retaliation for the attacks, to the dismay of civil liberties watchdogs.

'Control mania'

In a mass email distributed on Tuesday, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) co-founder John Perry Barlow told readers to hold tight to their freedoms by writing to public officials, joining the American Civil Liberties Union or the EFF, "to prevent the control mania from destroying the dreams that far more have died for over the last 225 years than dies this morning."

Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law professor at the University of Southern California Law School in Los Angeles, told Reuters: "I heard former President (George H. W.) Bush saying we've got to prepare to give up our civil liberties."

"All of that sentiment is very dangerous at this point in time."

Internet service providers America Online, EarthLink, and Microsoft confirmed that they are cooperating with the investigations into the attacks.

The FBI was heavily criticized when it was revealed last year that it had been installing at Internet service provider servers the controversial Carnivore spy system to monitor electronic communication.

Microsoft and EarthLink said they have not installed the system, but are cooperating with the FBI, nonetheless.

Carnivore not only records all the communications of the target, but of other subscriber customers of the Internet service provider, as well, according to privacy rights activists.

It is easy for authorities to get search warrants to use the monitoring technology, allowing them to conduct investigations as needed, experts said.

But that might not stop officials from seeking broader powers to prevent America's enemies from using the Internet to coordinate future attacks.

David Sobel, legal counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., said U.S. lawmakers and government officials typically call for increased surveillance authority after terrorist-related disasters.

"Unfortunately, there sometimes is a tendency to capitalize on these situations to increase investigative power," Sobel said.

"If past incidents are any guide we are likely to see such proposals."

U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy said policy makers need to consider whether surveillance capabilities should be strengthened, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

That reassessment should be "consistent with constitutional freedoms at the core of our national ideals," Leahy said.

Reuters contributed to this report.