A Key Sept. 11 Legacy: More Domestic Surveillance - LATimes

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A key Sept. 11 legacy: more domestic surveillance
By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times
August 29, 2011, 7:14 p.m.

Thanks to new laws and technologies, authorities track and eavesdrop on Americans as they never could before, hauling in billions of bank records, travel receipts and other information. In several cases, they have wiretapped conversations between lawyers and defendants, challenging the legal principle that attorney-client communication is inviolate.

Advocates say the expanded surveillance has helped eliminate vulnerabilities identified after the Sept. 11 attacks. Some critics, unconvinced, say the snooping undermines privacy and civil liberties and leads inevitably to abuse. They argue that the new systems have weakened security by burying investigators in irrelevant information.

We are caught in the middle of a perfect storm in which every thought we communicate, every step we take, every transaction we enter into is captured in digital data and is subject to government collection," said Fred H. Cate, a professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law who has written extensively on privacy and security. A robust debate on the intelligence gathering has been impossible, for the simple reason that most of the activity is officially secret. In lawsuits alleging improper eavesdropping, the Justice Department has invoked state secrecy to prevent disclosure of classified information and systems.

In May, two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee said that Americans would be disturbed if they knew about some of the government's data-gathering procedures. But Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) said they were prohibited from revealing the facts. "When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted" surveillance law, "they will be stunned and they will be angry," Wyden said.

More: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-911-homeland-security-surveillance-20110830,0,4844584,full.story

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