Cyber-Sleuths
Want to Hack Bill of Rights
JAMES
P. PINKERTON, Newsday
MORE THAN ever before, Americans are
exercising their unalienable right to life, liberty and
the pursuit of capital gains. But what happens when
liberty jeopardizes life -- or the Dow Jones average?
And what happens when the government jeopardizes
liberty?
On Tuesday, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.,
convened the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on
Technology, Terrorism and Government Information to make
the case for new legislation to protect the nation's
``information infrastructure.''
And so began a familiar Washington
ritual: Friendly lawmaker invites friendly bureaucrat to
a hearing. Soon, a new law emerges that gives political
credit to the lawmaker and a bigger budget to the
bureaucrat. Kyl began the show with a declaration that
``denial of service'' hacker attacks on companies such
as eBay, Yahoo and CNN should ``serve as a wake-up call
about the need to protect our critical computer
networks.'' Kyl added that ``the attacks contributed to
a 258-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and
halted a string of three days of consecutive record-
high closes of the technology-laden Nasdaq Composite
Index.''
To deal with this problem, Kyl and
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., have co-sponsored S. 2092,
which would modify the federal government's ``trap and
trace'' authority, so that law enforcers would no longer
need to obtain a search warrant in every jurisdiction
through which a cyber- attack traveled.
The first ``witness'' was FBI Director
Louis Freeh. After praising Kyl and his legislation, he
reminded his audience of how much the FBI was already
doing to combat the scourge of cyber-crime. Freeh then
used the forum to outline the FBI's entire cyber-agenda,
covering everyone from virus-writers and intellectual
property thieves to the ``Internet Black Tigers,'' a
group ``reportedly affiliated with the Tamil Tigers'' of
Sri Lanka. He further noted that unchecked Net-related
stock fraud costs investors $1 million an hour.
Only two more witnesses came after
Freeh. One was Richard D. Pethia, who directs a
federally funded cyber-security center within the
Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh. Not surprisingly, Pethia was
100 percent behind the joint Kyl-Freeh effort. The other
witness was Harris N. Miller, president of the
Information Technology Association of America, a
Washington-based trade association. Miller was
supportive but ambivalent; his worry seemed to be that
high-tech trade secrets would spill into -- and then out
of -- Uncle Sam's databases.
But the real opposition to the Senate
bill wasn't heard from because it wasn't invited to
testify.
One likely opponent is the Electronic
Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based
cyber-liberties group. ``This is very much a process
being driven by the law-enforcement community,''
lamented Mark Rotenberg, the group's director.
Another non-invitee was Solveig
Singleton, director of information studies at the Cato
Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington. ``Law
enforcement views the Fourth Amendment as the problem,''
she said. That's the piece of the Bill of Rights that
protects ``persons, houses, papers and effects against
unreasonable searches and seizures'' -- with no mention
of e-mail. And so now, Singleton observed, the FBI wants
to force manufacturers to ``build surveillance into
technology,'' all but eliminating the need for search
warrants.
The dangers that Kyl and Freeh
described are real, but so is the danger of a
government's habitually stomping on privacy rights.
History proves that basic rights are unalienable only
when those who might alienate them are watched like
hawks.
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