No Place to Hide - Softcover

O'harrow Jr., Robert

 
9780743287050: No Place to Hide
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0743287053 ISBN 13: 9780743287050
Verlag: Free Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

In No Place to Hide, award-winning Washington Post reporter Robert O'Harrow, Jr., pulls back the curtain on an unsettling trend: the emergence of a data-driven surveillance society intent on giving us the conveniences and services we crave, like ce

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert O’Harrow Jr. is an award-winning reporter on the investigative unit at The Washington Post. O’Harrow is the author of No Place to Hide, Zero Day: The Threat in Cyberspace, and The Quartermaster, a biography of Montgomery C. Meigs. He was a contributor to the 2016 biography, Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power. He lives with his wife and son in Arlington, Virginia.

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Chapter 1: Six Weeks in Autumn

Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh took his seat in La Colline restaurant on Capitol Hill and signaled for a cup of coffee. It was one of those standard Washington breakfasts, where politicos mix schmoozing and big ideas to start their days.

An intense foot soldier for Attorney General Ashcroft, Dinh had been in his job for only a few months. He wanted to make a good impression on others at the session and craved the caffeine to keep his edge. As he sipped his fourth cup and listened to the patter of White House and Hill staffers, a young man darted up to the table. "A plane has crashed," he said. "It hit the World Trade Center."

Dinh and the rest of the voluble group went silent. Then their beepers began chirping in unison. At another time, it might have seemed funny, a Type-A Washington moment. Now they looked at one another and rushed out of the restaurant. It was about 9:30 A.M. on September 11, 2001.

Dinh hurried back to the Justice Department, where the building was being evacuated. Like countless other Americans, he was already consumed with a desire to strike back. Unlike most, however, he had an inkling of how: by doing whatever was necessary to strengthen the government's legal hand against terrorists.

Jim Dempsey was sifting through emails at his office at the Center for Democracy and Technology on Farragut Square when his boss, Jerry Berman, rushed in. "Turn on the TV," Berman said. Dempsey reached for the remote, and images came rushing at him. Crisp sunshine. Lower Manhattan glinting in the brilliance. A jetliner cutting through the scene.

Dempsey was a lanky and slow-speaking former Hill staffer who combined a meticulous attention to detail with an aw-shucks demeanor. Since the early 1990s, he has been one of the leading watchdogs of FBI surveillance initiatives, a reasoned and respected civil liberties advocate routinely summoned to the Hill by both political parties to advise lawmakers about technology and privacy issues.

As he watched the smoke and flames engulf the World Trade Center, he knew it was the work of terrorists, and the FBI was foremost in his mind. "They have screwed up so bad," he said to himself. "With all the powers and resources that they have, they should have caught these guys."

At the same moment, it dawned on him that his work -- and the work of many civil liberties activists over the years to check the increasingly aggressive use of technology by law enforcement officials -- was about to be undone.

The car arrived at Senator Patrick Leahy's house in northern Virginia shortly after 9 am. The Vermont Democrat took his place in the front seat and, as the car coursed toward the Potomac, he read through some notes about the pending nomination of a new drug czar and thought about a meeting that morning at the Supreme Court.

Half-listening to the radio, Leahy heard something about an explosion and the World Trade Center. He asked the driver to turn it up, then called some friends in New York. They told him what they were seeing on television. It sounded ominous. The car continued toward the Supreme Court and the conference he was to attend with Chief Justice William Rehnquist and circuit court judges from around the country. Leahy headed to the Court's conference room, with its thickly carpeted floors and oak-paneled walls lined with portraits of the first eight chief justices. When Rehnquist arrived, Leahy leaned toward him and whispered, "Bill, before we start, I believe we have a terrorist attack."

As if on cue, a muffled boom echoed through the room. Smoke began rising across the Potomac from the Pentagon.

Leahy chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, putting him at the center of an inevitable debate about how to fight back. Leahy was one of Congress's most liberal members, a longtime proponent of civil liberties who had always worked to keep the government from trampling individual rights. But Leahy was also a former prosecutor, a pragmatist who understood what investigators were up against in trying to identify and bring down terrorists.

He knew that conservatives were going to press him for more police powers while civil libertarians would look to him as their standard-bearer. Leahy wanted to strike the right balance. But after watching an F-16 roar over the Mall that afternoon, he resolved to do whatever he could, as a patriot and a Democrat, to give law enforcement officials more tools to stop future attacks.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon didn't just set off a national wave of mourning and ire. They reignited and reshaped a smoldering debate over the proper use of government power to peer into the lives of ordinary people.

The argument boiled down to this: In an age of high-tech terror, what is the proper balance between national security and the privacy of millions of Americans, whose personal information is already more widely available than ever before? Telephone records, emails, oceans of detail about individuals' lives -- the government wanted access to all of it to hunt down terrorists before they struck.

For six weeks that fall, behind a veneer of national solidarity and bipartisanship, Washington leaders engaged in pitched, closed-door arguments over how much new power the government should have in the name of national security. They were grappling not only with the specter of more terrorist attacks but also with the chilling memories of Cold War Red-baiting, J. Edgar Hoover's smear campaigns, and Watergate-era wiretaps.

At the core of the dispute was a body of little known laws and rules that, over the last half century, defined and limited the government's ability to snoop: Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act governed electronic eavesdropping. The "pen register, trap and trace" rules covered the use of devices to track the origin and destination of telephone calls. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, regulated the power to spy domestically when seeking foreign intelligence information.

The White House, the Justice Department, and their allies in Congress now wanted to ease those restraints, and they wanted to do it as quickly as possible. Though put into place to protect individuals and political groups from past abuses by the FBI, CIA, and others, the restrictions were partly to blame for the intelligence gaps on September 11, the government said. Implicit in that wish list was the desire to tap into the data revolution. In the previous decade, the world had watched the power of computers increase at an extraordinary pace. At the same time, the price of data storage plummeted, while new software tools enabled analysts to tap into giant reservoirs of names, addresses, purchases, and other details, and make sense of it all. It was a kind of surveillance that didn't rely only on cameras and eavesdropping. This was the age of behavioral profiling and at the front were the marketers who wanted you to open your wallet. Now the government wanted their help.

The administration also wanted new authority to secretly detain individuals suspected of terrorism and to enlist banks and other financial services companies in the search for terrorist financing. Law enforcement sought broad access to business databases filled with information about the lives of ordinary citizens. All this detail could help investigators search for links among plotters.

Jim Dempsey and other civil libertarians agreed that the existing laws were outdated, but for precisely the opposite reason -- because they already gave the government access to immense amounts of information unavailable a decade ago. Handing investigators even more power, they warned, would lead to privacy invasions and abuses.

They stared at a television in the bright sunroom of Dinh's Chevy Chase home, a handful...

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Verlag
Free Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0743287053
ISBN 13 
9780743287050
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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