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"A Panel of National Policy Experts Debated the Security and Privacy Impacts of New Information Technologies in the 'War On Terror' at the inaugural event of the Global Information Society Project's Program on Law Enforcement and National Security in the Information Age (PLENSIA)."

http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=38204

NEW YORK, Oct. 15, 2004 /U.S. Newswire/ - "Security and liberty are not dichotomous rivals to be traded one for the other in a zero sum game," said Kim Taipale, director of the Global Information Society Project, a collaborative research effort of the World Policy Institute and the Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy focused on information, communication and technology policy, "rather, they are dual obligations of civil society and each must be maximized to the extent possible consistent with maintaining the other." Reconciling these presumptively antagonistic obligations is a complex policy problem with many competing interests, he added.

Speaking on a panel at New School University yesterday as part of the Global Information Society Project's Program on Law Enforcement and National Security in the Information Age, Barry Steinhardt, Director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the ACLU, outlined the threat to civil liberties posed by new information technologies that enable increased information sharing and automated data analysis by government agencies.

"Privacy and liberty in the United States are at risk," Steinhardt said, "A combination of rapid technological innovation and the gradual erosion of privacy protections threatens to transform Big Brother from an oft-cited but remote threat into a very real part of American life. We are at risk of turning into a surveillance society - a less open and less just society."�In particular, he expressed concern over provisions in the recently passed "9-11 Recommendations Implementation Act" to standardize driver's licenses and incorporate biometrics. "We verge on the creation of a national system of identification - a national ID card," he said, "a system that adds little to security and poses significant risks to freedom."

Another speaker, Paul Rosenzweig, Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former federal prosecutor, agreed with Steinhardt about the potential harms but suggested that new threats to national security, such as that posed by terrorism, may require rethinking how we balance security and privacy. "Maybe we need to rethink our concept of balance in a world where the consequences of failing to preempt terrorists is potentially catastrophic," he said, "particularly if the privacy intrusion can be minimized and the potentials for abuse mitigated through technical means and legal due process procedures."

Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute went further, suggesting that opposition to technical innovation based on equating absolute secrecy with privacy was misplaced. "For two years now, left- and right-wing advocates have shot down nearly every proposal to use intelligence more effectively - to connect the dots - as an assault on 'privacy'," Mac Donald said, "The consequence has been devastating - just when the country should be unleashing its technological ingenuity to defend against future attacks, scientists stand irresolute, cowed into inaction."

Taipale, who moderated the session, noted that although there was an inherent tension between a better ability to 'connect the dots' in order to preempt possible catastrophic events and the need to prevent the government from easily 'connecting the dots' without adequate cause to suspect an individual of wrongdoing, simple opposition to technological development was unlikely to lead to either security or liberty. "Rather than simple opposition to technological innovation," he said, "civil libertarians need to be involved in technological development so that we can construct a society in which both security and privacy are enhanced.�We face one of two inevitable futures - one with liberty protecting features built into the technology itself, or one in which we rely solely on the brittle nature of legal mechanisms and sanctions to control technology after it has been developed without regard to privacy features."

For more information and full discussion, visit www.global-info-society.org.