Analysis & Commentary:

WHAT PRICE PRIVACY? SURVEILLANCE & SECURITY IN TIME OF WAR
by Alan Beck, editor-in-chief

In the wake of September 11th's terrorist abominations, Americans actively involved with issues of information technology have split along predictable lines. Those affiliated with organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, Anonymizer.com, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center have been quick to condemn increased governmental scrutiny of electronic communications as dangerously intrusive and corrosive of our basic freedoms. On the other hand, our President, Attorney General, and governmental officials specifically -- and Constitutionally -- charged with ferreting out those who threaten us and their support infrastructure as well, see stepped-up surveillance as a vital route toward obtaining key intelligence about the enemy.

It is an ironic truth that we, who live in the freest and most tolerant society on earth, can be most effectively attacked by aggressors who cynically and skillfully employ this very openness against us. Thus, our greatest treasure also constitutes the principal source of our greatest vulnerability. History teaches us, too, that no nation can fight a war until and unless its citizens are willing to make meaningful sacrifices. Wars cannot be pursued through the mild exigencies of peace or via token efforts.

Over half a century has elapsed since our American homeland was last threatened, and subsequent generations have grown up comfortably ensconced with a panoply of rights and freedoms that were bought -- and bought repeatedly across the centuries -- with buckets of blood, sweat, and tears. Now, to our chagrin, the pendulum has swung back: on September 11 we again awoke to find that our freedoms are no longer free.

Just as our military must put themselves directly in harm's way to defeat the evil that looms before us at frightening proximity, so must we who are civilians offer up a measure of our enormous privilege and privacy to those most responsible for doing battle on our behalf. We are at war. And war is an extraordinary event that cannot be carried on within the protected boundaries we have grown fond of in peacetime civil society. Standing this reasoning on its head -- portraying those at the vanguard of our defense as ill-motivated while turning a blind eye toward the capabilities of our foe -- is truly a grotesque exercise in perversity.

Those who would seek the comfort and reassurances of peace while their nation engages an implacable and utterly ruthless enemy are not one whit more intelligent than the proverbial ostrich hiding its head in the sand. Selfishly, short-sightedly, and ignorantly working for the protection and safety they covet above all, such misguided citizens are, in reality, laboring only for their own destruction and the annihilation of the civilization they claim to hold dear.