Don't trample on rights

San Jose Mercury News: In the weeks after 9/11, a sobered and purposeful administration pledged to make intelligence and law enforcement information available to any agency that needed it. That implied tearing down the information silos that had been built by the FBI, CIA, local agencies and others. That has turned out to be a hollow promise.
Instead, the government has repeatedly asked for sweeping new surveillance powers, while shrugging off concerns about civil liberties. In addition, a bureaucratic, Cold War mind-set that has thwarted information sharing persists.
As a result, civil liberties advocates and the public at large have grown increasingly suspicious of government surveillance, while security objectives have not been achieved.
That's the alarming conclusion of a new report by the Markle Foundation. The foundation lays out a more constructive vision -- one that would make effective and responsible use of information technology to spot new terrorist threats. It should be required reading for government security officials and policymakers.
It calls on President Bush to authorize the creation of a sweeping intelligence network accessible by every law enforcement agency that needs it, along with clear government-wide guidelines that describe how the government can collect and use data to safeguard the privacy and civil liberties of its citizens.
Blue chip figures
The recommendations were put together by a task force of blue chip figures from the tech industry, government and academia. They include Markle president Zoe Baird, former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale, Eric Benhamou, the chairman of 3Com, Gilman Louie, CEO of CIA venture fund In-Q-Tel, and Wesley Clark, among others.
The report comes in the wake of a series of secret projects to mine vast reams of private-sector data in search of suspicious patterns. The most infamous, the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program, caused such an uproar when it was exposed that Congress quickly pulled the plug on it.
Yet when a law enforcement official in one state can't do something as simple as check a driver's license record from another state -- let alone access real intelligence information -- it's clear that government has a long way to go before it can effectively protect the homeland.