Dan Gillmor: Bill of Rights under a new assault

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Dan Gillmor: Bill of Rights under a new assault
By Dan Gillmor
Mercury News Technology Columnist

News and views, culled and edited from my online eJournal
(www.dangillmor.com):

PATRIOTISM PERVERTED: The Bush administration's hostility to our fundamental
liberties is unrelenting. Not content with ramming the contemptibly named
``USA Patriot Act'' through a sadly compliant Congress in the wake of the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the White House and its forces are lining up for
another whack at the Bill of Rights.

Draft legislation from Attorney General John Ashcroft's law-enforcement
gnomes is making the rounds. It's apparently being called the ``Domestic
Security Enhancement Act,'' but think of it as ``UnPatriot II.''

Read the draft on the Center for Public Integrity's Web site
(http://publicintegrity.org/dtaweb/home.asp). Then read the FindLaw Web
site's analysis (http://writ.findlaw.com/ramasastry/20030217.html) by Anita
Ramasastry, an assistant law professor at the University of Washington
School of Law and associate director of the Shidler Center for Law, Commerce
& Technology.

The legislation, Ramasastry warns, is ``a wholesale assault on privacy, free
speech and freedom of information.'' She does not exaggerate.

A week ago, members of a congressional conference committee agreed to stop,
at least for now, the Pentagon's ``Total Information Awareness'' program, a
privacy killer that aimed to scoop up and filter every bit of available
information about everyone in the hopes of finding a potential terrorist.

UnPatriot II would push ahead with this kind of Big Brother scheme. The
government would collect DNA from a widening circle of Americans. It would
add to government surveillance authority -- not that there's all that much
keeping the official snoops out of innocent people's lives at this point in
any event.

And, reviving an anti-privacy notion that Ashcroft himself once denounced --
that is, before he got a taste of the overweening state power he professed
to fear -- it would criminalize some uses of encryption, the scrambling of
digital information.

Government snoops, who have never, ever failed to misuse this kind of
authority, would know everything about you. This is a one-way mirror. The
Bush administration's fanatical devotion for secrecy, preventing citizens
from knowing what government is doing in their name and with their money,
would get a boost.

The most astonishing suggestion in this anti-freedom smorgasbord is what
Ramasastry calls a ``Citizenship Death Penalty.''

``Suppose you, as a citizen, attended a legal protest for which one of the
hosts, unbeknownst to you, is an organization the government has listed as
terrorist,'' she writes. Under this legislation, ``you may be deported and
deemed no longer an American citizen.''

Even more amazing, she says, ``if you are simply suspected of terrorist
activity, this can occur.''

We are not living under tyranny in the United States. A few more laws like
UnPatriot II, and we could be.

HONG KONG CLAMPS DOWN: Security trumping liberty is a worldwide trend. Hong
Kong's leadership, for example, seems poised to impose strict security
measures on its people.

The ``anti-subversion'' provisions moving through the rubber-stamp
legislature could have been worse. But they will go a long way toward
curbing political freedom in the former British colony, and furious,
principled opposition has had far too little effect.

Some observers in China's ``Special Administrative Region,'' which has been
operating semi-autonomously since the hand over in 1997, say the
government's original proposals were considerably more restrictive. But what
remains is bad enough, and according to one of the most keen observers,
former legislator Christine Loh, there are new worries -- including a
proposal for secret trials in some circumstances.

There's insufficient trust in the local government, she wrote in a recent
e-mail newsletter to people interested in the issue. (My own interest, apart
from a general desire that freedom prevail wherever possible, is that I've
been teaching each autumn in Hong Kong and have grown immensely fond of the
place.)

The influence of Beijing on this process is unmistakable. And unfortunate.

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