Bob Barr

Misplaced paranoia
When it comes to privacy, Americans can't see the forest for the trees
as published in Creative Loafing

Schools afraid to post the names of honor roll students. Churches afraid to include names of prayer request recipients in church bulletins. Doctors' offices issuing numbers for patients in waiting rooms. Lawyers drafting privacy policies for toddlers at day care centers.

Where will these idiotic concerns about privacy lead us? Will election results list candidates by pseudonyms so second- and third-place winners won't have their feelings hurt? Will drivers' licenses be issued with no names, only bar codes (decipherable by the authorities, of course, but not by other, prying eyes)? Will newspapers list the winners (and losers) of golf tournaments by their initials just so the losers won't feel bad?

While Americans fiddle around with inconsequential privacy issues in a way that threatens to undermine the most basic notions of common sense, government-sanctioned snooping burns out of control. The USA PATRIOT Act, the snoops' most recent weapon of choice, allows the government to find out which books you've been reading, which websites you've been surfing, which firearms you've been purchasing, and which medicines you've been taking -- without even probable cause to suspect you've done anything wrong. And the subpoena recipients, who are forced to turn over your private records, can't even tell you or anyone else what they have been forced to do -- or else they'll wind up in jail.

Millions of surveillance cameras owned or paid for by the government monitor -- and record -- where we travel in our cars, where we walk on public streets, when we visit our kids at school, even when we seek solace at a marble monument in our nation's capital. Your family banker is forced to tell the feds when you open a bank account or make a deposit. Big Brother is indeed watching.

Perhaps the most ominous signal that we've allowed government snooping to go too far recently came to light: Now the military is getting into the surveillance and gathering of information on law-abiding citizens -- in a big way. Despite a 126-year-old federal law that seems to prohibit military involvement in such matters as gathering evidence on citizens and others within our borders, the Pentagon is involved in a wide variety of domestic snooping operations.

Did you know the Navy is now assembling information on American companies and individuals? Perhaps the Defense Intelligence Agency -- which used to limit its activities to gathering and analyzing military-related intelligence from overseas -- now sharing information with your local law enforcement agency has escaped your attention. Maybe you hadn't noticed employees from the Pentagon's counterintelligence office, or from the Army's primary intelligence organization, sitting in on conferences at universities and then demanding access to videotapes of the conferences so they could find out more about suspicious people they saw there.

The Posse Comitatus Law, enacted in 1878 in the wake of rampant abuses by federal officials during Reconstruction, was designed to prevent such activities. The little-known statute was meant to maintain that bright demarcation between domestic law enforcement and military activities, which was one of the reasons, after all, that so much American blood was shed to win freedom from the Redcoats. Yet today, in a post-9-11 world driven by abject fear of terrorist attacks, an obscure but important law with a quaint Latin name is as endangered as the infamous snail darter -- only there is no public outcry or Endangered Species Act to save it from extinction.

Even as a profound change in our society is taking place -- an upheaval that threatens to eviscerate the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and to erase the historic dividing line between civilian and military power -- Americans are patting themselves on the back because trivial bits of information, such as who has an appointment with a doctor, or which student made the honor roll this quarter are being protected against public disclosure. Just as Nero fiddled while Rome burned, so are Americans twiddling while the Constitution goes up in smoke.

Government officials from both major political parties continue to gleefully seek even more power to gather and manipulate information on American citizens. Even the CIA isn't immune from this infatuation. Though created in the late 1940s as a purely foreign intelligence-gathering agency, one expressly prohibited from engaging in domestic activities, the White House is actively seeking to change that important limitation and involve the agency in reviewing records of U.S. citizens.

It is a classic tactic of government to start small fires to divert the attention of civilian watchdog groups, even as it robs us blind elsewhere. This is precisely what's happening on the privacy front. While the government is keeping our attention focused on the front door, selling us wonderfully packaged but trivial bits of privacy protection, its agents are leaving through the back door with all our worldly possessions, including the Bill of Rights.