Washington struggles with privacy vs. security

Conferences explore privacy issues inherent in high-tech security

But James Woolsey, a former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, said the security measures the U.S. government is currently taking are much less intrusive than actions taken by other war-time presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt put Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II, Woolsey noted.

"We are nowhere near, as far as I'm concerned, constitutional limitations in terms of what has been done so far in this war," he said. "We may have done some unwise things, that's a different question. We are going to have to make some other hard choices, as time goes on, about reconciling civil liberties and security, and realizing that, while we wish they didn't conflict in a war, they do."

He called the current war between Mideast terrorists and the United States World War IV -- with World War III being the Cold War -- and he predicted this war could last for decades. He pegged the start of World War IV at about 10 years ago, when Muslim fundamentalists began attacking U.S. targets.

As that war drags on, U.S. citizens may have to make some compromises between civil liberties and security, Woolsey noted, and technology such as data mining and airline passenger profiling can play a positive role. But Woolsey also warned that lawmakers and U.S. citizens need to keep an eye on privacy and other rights.

When security measures fail, "people get scared," he said. "When the country gets scared, even very good leaders can do some things we look back on in future generations and say, 'How in the world could they have done that?'"

Back at the noon luncheon, Jim Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, raised concerns over whether data-mining efforts like TIA will actually work. It's easy for Amazon.com to predict what books a customer will like, based on the preferences of millions of other customers, but terrorism databases wouldn't have millions of people to use to determine motives, he said.

"It's a very much harder problem trying to determine illegal activity," he said, compared to book preferences. "The very first question is a question of effectiveness."

Much of the webMethods conference ventured away from technology and into politics, with former U.S. Senator Gary Hart, a potential Democratic presidential candidate, accusing the George W. Bush administration of dragging its heels on taking security measures such as creating the Department of Homeland Security. Hart, co-chairman of the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century, said his group recommended such a department two years ago, before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S.

But others, including Mark Forman, chief information officer of the Bush administration, said the U.S. is making progress in the homeland security arena, particularly with technology security. Forman noted the administration's goal of having 80 percent of the federal government's technology assets certified or accredited by the end of 2003.