Security vs. Individuals

Yes, we won't use it often. Yes the people implementing this are good Americans and all that. Still, this system sounds like something a third world petty dictatorship could take pride in. This is, dare I say it... unamerican. With this and Poindexter and the other stuff going down, it looks like Orwell was 20 years too soon in his title.
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In Terror War, 2nd Track for Suspects
Those Designated 'Combatants' Lose Legal Protections

By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 1, 2002; Page A01


The Bush administration is developing a parallel legal system in which terrorism suspects -- U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike -- may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and punished without legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary system, lawyers inside and outside the government say.

The elements of this new system are already familiar from President Bush's orders and his aides' policy statements and legal briefs: indefinite military detention for those designated "enemy combatants," liberal use of "material witness" warrants, counterintelligence-style wiretaps and searches led by law enforcement officials and, for noncitizens, trial by military commissions or deportation after strictly closed hearings.

Only now, however, is it becoming clear how these elements could ultimately interact.

For example, under authority it already has or is asserting in court cases, the administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen's home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base. Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it.

Administration officials, noting that they have chosen to prosecute suspected Taliban member John Walker Lindh, "shoe bomber" Richard Reid and alleged Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui in ordinary federal courts, say the parallel system is meant to be used selectively, as a complement to conventional processes, not as a substitute. But, they say, the parallel system is necessary because terrorism is a form of war as well as a form of crime, and it must not only be punished after incidents occur, but also prevented and disrupted through the gathering of timely intelligence.

"I wouldn't call it an alternative system," said an administration official who has helped devise the legal response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "But it is different than the criminal procedure system we all know and love. It's a separate track for people we catch in the war."

At least one American has been shifted from the ordinary legal system into the parallel one: alleged al Qaeda "dirty bomb" plotter Jose Padilla, who is being held at a Navy brig, without the right to communicate with a lawyer or anyone else. U.S. officials have told the courts that they can detain and interrogate him until the executive branch declares an end to the war against terrorism.

The final outlines of this parallel system will be known only after the courts, including probably the Supreme Court, have settled a variety of issues being litigated. But the prospect of such a system has triggered a fierce debate.

Civil libertarians accuse the Bush administration of an executive-branch power grab that will erode the rights and freedoms that terrorists are trying to destroy -- and that were enhanced only recently in response to abuses during the civil rights era, Vietnam and Watergate.

"They are trying to embed in law a vast expansion of executive authority with no judicial oversight in the name of national security," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a Washington-based nonprofit group that has challenged the administration approach in court. "This is more tied to statutory legal authority than J. Edgar Hoover's political spying, but that may make it more dangerous. You could have the law serving as a vehicle for all kinds of abuses."

Administration officials say that they are acting under ample legal authority derived from statutes, court decisions and wartime powers that the president possesses as commander in chief under the Constitution.

"When you have a long period of time when you're not engaged in a war, people tend to forget, or put in backs of their minds, the necessity for certain types of government action used when we are in danger, when we are facing eyeball to eyeball a serious threat," Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, who leads the administration's anti-terrorism legal team in the federal courts, said in an interview.

Broadly speaking, the debate between the administration and its critics is not so much about the methods the government seeks to employ as it is about who should act as a check against potential abuses.

Executive Decisions
Civil libertarians insist that the courts should searchingly review Bush's actions, so that he is always held accountable to an independent branch of government. Administration officials, however, imply that the main check on the president's performance in wartime is political -- that if the public perceives his approach to terrorism is excessive or ineffective, it will vote him out of office.

"At the end of the day in our constitutional system, someone will have to decide whether that [decision to designate someone an enemy combatant] is a right or just decision," Olson said. "Who will finally decide that? Will it be a judge, or will it be the president of the United States, elected by the people, specifically to perform that function, with the capacity to have the information at his disposal with the assistance of those who work for him?"

Probably the most hotly disputed element of the administration's approach is its contention that the president alone can designate individuals, including U.S. citizens, as enemy combatants, who can be detained with no access to lawyers or family members unless and until the president determines, in effect, that hostilities between the United States and that individual have ended.

Padilla was held as a material witness for a month after his May 8 arrest in Chicago before he was designated an enemy combatant. He is one of two U.S. citizens being held as enemy combatants at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. The other is Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Saudi Taliban fighter who was captured by American troops in Afghanistan and sent to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, until it was discovered that he was born in Louisiana.

Attorneys are challenging their detentions in federal court. While civil libertarians concede that the executive branch has well-established authority to name and confine members of enemy forces during wartime, they maintain that it is unconstitutional to subject U.S. citizens to indefinite confinement on little more than the president's declaration, especially given the inherently open-ended nature of an unconventional war against terrorism.

"The notion that the executive branch can decide by itself that an American citizen can be put in a military camp, incommunicado, is frightening," said Morton H. Halperin, director of the Washington office of the Open Society Institute. "They're entitled to hold him on the grounds that he is in fact at war with the U.S., but there has to be an opportunity for him to contest those facts."

However, the Bush administration, citing two World War II-era cases -- the Supreme Court's ruling upholding a military commission trial for a captured American-citizen Nazi saboteur, and a later federal appeals court decision upholding the imprisonment of an Italian American caught as a member of Italian forces in Europe -- says there is ample precedent for what it is doing.

Courts traditionally understand that they must defer to the executive's greater expertise and capability when it comes to looking at such facts and making such judgments in time of war, Bush officials said. At most, courts have only the power to review legal claims brought on behalf of detainees, such as whether there is indeed a state of conflict between the United States and the detainee.

In a recent legal brief, Olson argued that the detention of people such as Hamdi or Padilla as enemy combatants is "critical to gathering intelligence in connection with the overall war effort."

Nor is there any requirement that the executive branch spell out its criteria for determining who qualifies as an enemy combatant, Olson argues.

"There won't be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end this," Olson said in the interview. "There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations that have to be made by the executive that are probably going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances."

The federal courts have yet to deliver a definitive judgment on the question. A federal district judge in Virginia, Robert G. Doumar, was sharply critical of the administration, insisting that Hamdi be permitted to consult an attorney. But he was partially overruled by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, based in Richmond.

The 4th Circuit, however, said the administration's assertion that courts should have absolutely no role in examining the facts leading to an enemy combatant designation was "sweeping." A decision from that court is pending as to how much of a role a court could claim, if any. The matter could well have to be settled in the Supreme Court.

Secret Surveillance
The administration scored a victory recently when the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review ruled 3 to 0 that the USA Patriot Act, passed by Congress shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, gives the Justice Department authority to break down what had come to be known as "the wall" separating criminal investigations from investigations of foreign agents.

The ruling endorsed the administration's view that law enforcement goals should be allowed to drive Justice Department requests for special eavesdropping and search warrants that had been thought to be reserved for counterintelligence operations. But the court went further, agreeing with the administration that "the wall" itself had no real basis in pre-Patriot Act law. Instead, the court ruled, "the wall" was a product of internal Justice Department guidelines that were, in turn, based partly on erroneous interpretations of the law by some courts.

There is no clear line between intelligence and crime in any case, the court said, because any investigation of a spy ring could ultimately lead to charging U.S. citizens with crimes such as espionage.

The decision overruled an earlier one by the lower-level Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in which seven judges sharply criticized past Justice Department misstatements in applications for permission to do secret surveillance.

Administration officials say that the ruling permits what is only sensible -- greater sharing of information between federal prosecutors and federal counterintelligence officials.

Thanks to enforcement of "the wall" by FBI lawyers, they note, pre-Sept. 11 permission to search Moussaoui's computer was not sought, a crucial missed opportunity to prevent the attacks.

In practical terms, the ruling means that the attorney general would still have to convince the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that he has probable cause to believe that a given subject of a wiretap or search is an agent of a foreign terrorist group, a standard that is not dissimilar to the one required for warrants in ordinary criminal cases.

Yet civil libertarians say that targets of such investigations who end up being ordered out of the country or prosecuted would lose a crucial right that they would have in the ordinary criminal justice system -- the right to examine the government's evidence justifying the initial warrant.

"So the government starts off using secret surveillance information not to gather information upon which to make policy, but to imprison or deport an individual, and then it never gives the individual a fair chance to see if the surveillance was lawful," Martin said.

 

Related piece from the NYTimes.
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Administration Begins to Rewrite Decades-Old Spying Restrictions
By DAVID JOHNSTON


This article was reported by David Johnston, James Risen, Neil A. Lewis and written by Mr. Johnston.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 — The Bush administration, in its fight against terrorism, is slowly chipping away at the wall that has existed for nearly three decades between domestic law enforcement and international intelligence gathering in an effort that senior officials said was vital to waging war against Al Qaeda and other terror networks.

The barrier between domestic and overseas intelligence gathering was erected when the Central Intelligence Agency was created in 1947. It was significantly hardened in the 1970's in response to Congressional investigations that produced revelations of widespread abuses by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the intelligence agency.

But since the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Bush administration has waged a different kind of war, mostly under the existing rules. Now, senior government officials have concluded that the changes made so far have not addressed the fundamental flaws of the old rules, leaving the United State still vulnerable to terrorists.

The changes are coming about in part because of Congressional criticism of the performances of the F.B.I. and C.I.A. before the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The two agencies will also be under the scrutiny of an independent commission created this week to examine their activities before the attacks.

The administration and Congress had already been reviewing ideas to overhaul intelligence and law enforcement that have been considered untouchable for a generation.

One is the creation of a domestic espionage agency; another is the use of the military in United States law enforcement. There is no agreement yet on new structures or whether the basic mandates and core operations of the central agencies will be changed.

The biggest change to date came on Monday when President Bush signed a law creating a Department of Homeland Security with its own intelligence unit. The unit is designed to start operations as a small, analytical office, but it has the potential to grow in significance, especially if the Homeland Security Department evolves into a powerful agency.

Another sign of change came earlier this month, when a federal appeals court issued a ruling that erased restrictions on the Justice Department's authority to spy on terrorism suspects in the United States.

More quietly, officials say the administration is in the midst of revising broad intelligence priorities laid out in a directive issued by President Bill Clinton, a document known as PDD 35. That process could eventually bring more changes.

For now, proposals to create a new domestic intelligence agency are on the back burner, senior government officials say. And Pentagon officials emphasize that they are not yet ready to abandon the longstanding legal doctrine barring the military's involvement in law enforcement activities in the United States.

But less radical changes that have already been made or are now under consideration by the administration, Congress and the judiciary seem very likely to blur the once bright lines separating intelligence gathering, law enforcement and the military.

"The old structure worked pretty well through the cold war," one senior government official said. "But with 9/11 there was a sense that this is a new game and there is a new threat and there must be a new approach."

Although there is broad agreement that change is inevitable, the possibility that the new rules could erode civil liberties has already prompted critics to complain that some suggestions, like a domestic security agency with sweeping powers to spy on people in the United States, could bring about the same abuses that the old rules were devised to eliminate.

The old restrictions placed the F.B.I. in charge of domestic intelligence and barred other agencies — including the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on communications overseas — from operating in the United States. The F.B.I.'s powers were restricted. It could not spy on political or religious groups without evidence that the group was involved in a crime. It could not monitor terror or espionage suspects without a warrant from a special court based on evidence that "primary purpose" of the surveillance was intelligence gathering, not criminal investigation.

The C.I.A. was authorized to operate only overseas under rules that were not as strict as the F.B.I. limits, but that still curtailed the agency's involvement in covert operations and banned outright the assassination of foreign leaders.

Tom Ridge, named by President Bush this week as the secretary of homeland security, has been outspoken in opposing an additional domestic intelligence agency. Mr. Ridge argued that the task should remain at the F.B.I. Like other administration officials, he contends constitutional barriers would prevent the creation of an American equivalent to Britain's domestic spy agency, known as MI5.

"I don't think you're going to see a similar organization developed in this country," Mr. Ridge said recently.

What administration officials have left unsaid is that Mr. Ridge's own new department could eventually take on a major new role in domestic intelligence. The law creating the department establishes an "intelligence sharing and infrastructure protection" division that will be responsible for gathering and acting on information from other agencies about terrorist threats on United States soil.

The idea, White House officials have said, is to create an agency that will function as a clearinghouse for all intelligence information on domestic terrorist threats. Administration officials have said the new intelligence unit will apparently be directed by John Gannon, a career professional from the C.I.A. who has worked for Mr. Ridge on intelligence matters at the White House.

The administration has insisted that homeland security will be primarily a "consumer" of information from the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency. But several agencies that collect intelligence on their own — the Secret Service, the Customs Service, the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard — are all being thrown together inside the Department of Homeland Security. While there is no plan to do so now, those agencies could someday form the basis for a large homeland security intelligence collection unit.

The expanded role of the military in domestic security has reopened an old debate about the proper role of the armed forces. President Bush has ordered lawyers in the Defense and Justice Departments to review the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law enacted in Reconstruction to discourage the military from involvement in domestic law enforcement operations.

The review follows the decision last year not to assign regular military personnel to the job of providing airport security after the Sept. 11 attacks because administration lawyers believed it would violate the Posse Comitatus Act. Instead, the soldiers stationed at airports came from national guard units called up by governors who had been asked to do so by President Bush.

Paul Schott Stevens, a legal adviser to the National Security Council in the Reagan administration, said that there has been an evolution in thinking about the law, and that most authorities now accept that it does not restrict the military as much as once believed.

"I think people are realizing that there are certain unique capabilities the armed forces have that others do not," Mr. Stevens said.

The creation of a new military command to defend the American homeland has made the debate over the posse comitatus law more urgent. The United States Northern Command, based in Colorado Springs, is in charge of the armed services' still evolving role in homeland security, and will serve as a response agency to terrorist attacks by using its resources in cleaning up after a chemical or biological attack.

Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, now in charge of the Northern Command, said in an interview earlier this year that he would welcome a review of existing restrictions in order to protect the nation against terrorists.

The way in which the Pentagon and the C.I.A. will coordinate with the new Homeland Security Department and other agencies dealing with domestic intelligence is still being worked out. Both the Pentagon and the C.I.A. have created new senior management positions to coordinate their relationships with Homeland Security as well as state and local law enforcement agencies.

But civil liberties advocates worry about broad new intelligence-gathering initiatives. They say their voices have been largely drowned out by the Bush administration, and by the administration's repeated warnings that without new intelligence powers and surveillance authority, the country will remain vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

"It's truly astonishing," said Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way. "It seems that we're forgetting everything we learned in the 1970's."

Mr. Neas noted that the new Homeland Security Department had been exempted, at the administration's insistence, from much of the oversight required for other government agencies.

"There is a significant threat that this new department will abuse civil rights and infringe on civil liberties," Mr. Neas said.

Before Sept. 11, the American military had devoted little time or resources to thinking about how to fight a war with special forces in Afghanistan. The C.I.A. had never fired missiles at terrorists from a pilotless Predator. And the White House had not considered setting up what amounts to terrorist internment camps overseas. Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were top concerns, but oddly, gathering intelligence on Afghanistan was not.

Officials say the list of intelligence priorities spelled out in PDD 35, the Clinton-era directive, had not been kept updated, and so once obscure issues like Afghanistan had received little attention.

The administration is now trying to develop a way to keep the presidential list of intelligence collection priorities current, with more input from senior policy makers, so that intelligence agencies move more rapidly to focus on newly emerging threats.

One leading proponent for a broad restructuring of intelligence gathering is Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who expressed frustration last year that the military had to let the C.I.A. take the lead in the early days in Afghanistan.

In a move widely viewed as an effort by Mr. Rumsfeld to consolidate his control over the military's vast and unwieldy intelligence bureaucracy, he has just won Congressional approval to establish a new position, the under secretary of defense for intelligence.

Inside the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld has also been prodding Special Operations units to become more aggressive players in the global war on terrorism, and to work more closely with the C.I.A. in covert operations in countries where the United States is not at open war and, in some cases, where the local government is not informed of their presence.

But as Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides try to move more aggressively against the war on terrorism, at least two of their intelligence initiatives have provoked public criticism.

Within the operations of the under secretary of defense for policy, a small group of intelligence experts searched for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists that the nation's spy agencies may have overlooked.

The team's efforts, some officials said, reflected frustration on the part of several senior Defense Department policy makers that they were not receiving undiluted information on the capacities of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and his suspected ties to terrorist organizations.

Another Pentagon agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is creating a vast computer database, a program known as Total Information Awareness, to spy on terror suspects. The program has drawn controversy, in part because its manager is John M. Poindexter, the former national security adviser, whose felony conviction in the Iran-contra affair was overturned by a federal appeals court.

 

Taking Liberties With Our Freedom By Lauren Weinstein
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56600,00.html

02:00 AM Dec. 02, 2002 PT

"The fix is in." So said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) of the mammoth new Homeland Security Act, which was signed into law last week.

McCain was upset about an array of goodies that were tacked onto the bill at the last minute by the House of Representatives. These included broad liability protections for makers of vaccines, and an array of other extremely valuable giveaways.

In the end, the overwhelming majority of the Senate, including most Democrats, chose the politically expedient course of supporting the vast legislation.

That said, McCain and other critics were right to be concerned. While it has some positive aspects, the Homeland Security Act is also full of worrisome surprises for U.S. citizens concerned about their freedoms, particularly when combined with last year's USA PATRIOT Act.

Since the events of 9/11, a range of legislation detrimental to fundamental freedoms and privacy rights has been rammed into law, without any assurance that our safety will improve as a result.

Law enforcement interests pushed through a variety of surveillance measures, including some unrelated to terrorism, that had long been rejected as inappropriate in a free society.

Important protections related to monitoring and intelligence gathering, established after serious past abuses, were swept away with the assurance that this time the government won't abuse its powers.

Among various alarming provisions, the law opens up enormous avenues for monitoring Internet communications, without even after-the-fact notifications. Virtually any government agency at any level can initiate surveillance on flimsy grounds. No subpoenas or court oversight are required.

Not to be left off the gravy train, big business also pushed through its own grab bag of perks in the new legislation.

One of the most egregious and potentially dangerous of these travesties is the Homeland Security Act's creation of new and very broad exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act.

Businesses now have a new way to evade liability for safety violations, hazards to consumers and other abuses. They need merely report the information about their behavior -- even totally unclassified activities -- to the federal government, and claim it's related to homeland security. In the parlance of the Homeland Security Act, they declare the data to be "CII," or Critical Infrastructure Information.

Instantly, the company filing drops that information into a black hole of secrecy, hidden from public view. If a government employee releases any such data without the permission of the company that submitted it, regardless of its importance to the public, they could be subject to jail time.

That's potentially a major blow to the government's regulation of corporate misdeeds, since it's often not until such abuses become publicly known that officials take steps to deal with them properly. As long as there's cover, the urge to let sleeping dogs lie is strong indeed.

Ironically, the existing statute, the Freedom of Information Act, already had exceptions for information that truly needed to be kept private. The new homeland security law goes much farther, creating a magic rubber stamp that can make a host of problems disappear from the public radar.

The dangers of the new restrictions extend beyond obvious infrastructure risks related to power, water, manufacturing, pollution and the like. They could also strike to the heart of the computer industry and Internet as well.

By invoking the exemptions of the Homeland Security Act, software and computer hardware companies could hide the existence of critical security flaws or other bugs, claiming (with a familiar refrain) that letting anyone know about them was just too big a risk.

These kinds of cover-ups rarely succeed in the long run. When the bad guys ultimately find ways to exploit the flaws, the ordinary folks who are at risk will be the last to know what's going on.

In a similar vein, ISPs and telecommunications firms may now avoid taking responsibility for security flaws in their systems. Just sweep the problems under the homeland security rug and, with luck, nobody on the outside will be the wiser.

It's been hard enough in the best of times to get companies and government agencies to admit their mistakes and abuses. Now, thanks to the Homeland Security Act, we may have more of a reason to fear those very actions than we do the terrorist threats that the new law is supposed to address.

 

Grounded
A federal agency confirms that it maintains an air-travel blacklist of 1,000 people. Peace activists and civil libertarians fear they're on it.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Dave Lindorff, Salon

Nov. 15, 2002 | Barbara Olshansky was at a Newark International Airport departure gate last May when an airline agent at the counter checking her boarding pass called airport security. Olshansky was subjected to a close search and then, though she was in view of other travelers, was ordered to pull her pants down. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks may have created a new era in airport security, but even so, she was embarrassed and annoyed.

Perhaps one such incident might've been forgotten, but Olshansky, the assistant legal director for the left-leaning Center for Constitutional Rights, was pulled out of line for special attention the next time she flew. And the next time. And the next time. On one flight this past September from Newark to Washington, six members of the center's staff, including Olshansky, were stopped and subjected to intense scrutiny, even though they had purchased their tickets independently and had not checked in as a group. On that occasion, Olshansky got angry and demanded to know why she had been singled out.

"The computer spit you out," she recalls the agent saying. "I don't know why, and I don't have time to talk to you about it."

Olshansky and her colleagues are, apparently, not alone. For months, rumors and anecdotes have circulated among left-wing and other activist groups about people who have been barred from flying or delayed at security gates because they are "on a list."

But now, for the first time, a spokesman for the new Transportation Security Administration has acknowledged that the government has a list of about 1,000 people who are deemed "threats to aviation" and not allowed on airplanes under any circumstances. And in an interview with Salon, the official suggested that Olshansky and other political activists may be on a separate list that subjects them to strict scrutiny but allows them to fly.

 

Be afraid, be very afraid, of spying by U.S. Army

Thursday, December 5, 2002
By CHRISTOPHER H. PYLE The Hartford Courant

The Pentagon is planning to use computers to investigate hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Americans. Why? On the odd chance one might be a terrorist.

The person in charge of this new dragnet? John M. Poindexter, the former national security adviser who secretly sold weapons to Middle Eastern terrorists in the 1980s and, as a result, was convicted of defrauding the U.S. government, lying to Congress and destroying evidence.

That law enforcement agencies would search for terrorists makes sense. Terrorists are criminals. But why the Army? It is a criminal offense for Army personnel to become directly involved in civilian law enforcement. Are they seeking to identify anti-war demonstrators, whom they harassed in the 1960s? Are they getting ready to round up more civilians for detention without trial, as they did to Japanese Americans during World War II? Is counterterrorism becoming the sort of investigative obsession that anti-Communism was in the 1950s and 1960s, with all the bureaucratic excesses and abuses that entailed?


This isn’t the first time that the military has slipped the bounds of law to spy on civilians. In the late 1960s, it secretly collected personal information on more than a million law-abiding Americans in a misguided effort to quell anti-war demonstrations, predict riots and discredit protesters. I know because in 1970, as a former captain in Army intelligence, I disclosed the existence of that program.

Back then, the Army employed more than 1,500 plainclothes agents, coast to coast, to watch every demonstration of 20 people or more.

The chances that any one of those protests would grow into a riot so large that regular Army troops would be needed to restore order were remote in the extreme, but Army intelligence wasn’t taking any chances. Its plainclothes agents infiltrated civil rights protests, misdirected busloads of anti-war demonstrators, set up phony news organizations and engaged in a paranoid effort to prove that communists were stirring up opposition to racial segregation and the war in Vietnam.


After I testified against the surveillance in 1971, Sen. Sam J. Ervin’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights hired me to write two book-length reports on the Army’s spying. To do this, I had to read the contents of six Army computers containing spy reports. What struck me most was not the harm that any one of those (often inaccurate) reports could do by itself, but the harm that could be done if the government ever gained untraceable access to the financial records and private communications of its critics.

In 1975, while working for Sen. Frank Church’s Select Committee on Intelligence, I became exquisitely aware of just how nasty domestic intelligence agencies can become. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was the worst. It not only engaged in thousands of illegal wiretaps, mail openings and burglaries, it also blackmailed members of Congress, defamed government critics and even tried to drive the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to suicide by threatening to disclose embarrassing tape recordings of his extramarital affairs.

Army intelligence was nowhere near as bad as the FBI, but it responded to my criticisms by putting me on Nixon’s “enemies list,” which meant a punitive tax audit. It also tried to monitor my mail and prevent me from testifying before Congress by spreading false stories that I had fathered illegitimate children. I often wondered what the intelligence community could do to people like me if it really became efficient.

We may be about to find out. Under Poindexter’s plan, the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, headquartered at Fort Belvoir, Va., will use high-powered computers to secretly search the e-mail messages, credit-card purchases, phone records and bank statements of hundreds of thousands of people on the chance that they might be associated with, or sympathetic to, terrorists.

Much of INSCOM’S information will be sent to the Army’s new Northern Command, which is supposed to provide perimeter security, crowd control and technical assistance to civilian agencies in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. Nothing in the Northern Command’s mission requires it to keep dossiers on anti-war demonstrators or Muslim Americans, but the Northern Command expects to receive so many reports on individual terrorists and their sympathizers that it is planning to employ 150 people just to read them.

The scale of this operation suggests that the Army is not just preparing to clear streets, defuse bombs and provide emergency services. It’s too early to tell how far the Army will actually go with its plans, but it is not too early to start asking questions.

Christopher H. Pyle teaches constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke

College in South Hadley, Mass.