Privacy vital to democracy

How do you find a voice to describe the unspeakable? How do you gather words into orderly form, as the world twists out of shape into something strange and demented?

Like millions around the globe, I sat in shock before the television screen on September 11th. Like millions of others, I sat in that odd human position indicating speechlessness - huddled forward with one hand held across the mouth or two hands together, steeple-like, over nose and mouth. Who could possibly comprehend real-life images that redefined the unreal?

Out in California, visiting family, I awoke just after 7 a.m. to a rapidly unfolding horror. We were holidaying in the Sierra Nevada mountains, above the shimmering beauty of Lake Tahoe. My mother turned on the TV for the morning news, as she always does. She thought she was watching a disaster film. In confusion, she called us to look at a single, burning World Trade tower where two had stood - did we think it was real?

Three planes had by now struck their targets, and the north tower was gone. We gasped as the south tower collapsed a short time later. All those trapped people, all those lives. Adding to the horror was the fact that all the hijacked planes had been heading for Los Angeles and San Francisco. So easily, it could have been any of us.

For most people in the United States, whatever concerns one was burdened with on Monday seemed petty and irrelevant by Tuesday.

Wednesday morning, I awoke in the way one does after bereavement or loss - to a brief moment of restfulness, then awful remembrance. But by this day, something else was emerging - a sense of national community. An awe at the heroism of the New York firefighters and police, who were selflessly risking their lives in a determined effort to sift the rubble for survivors and bodies. Pride at the many voices, colours and faces of America and its immigrants, brought close by the tragedy. But concern, too, for the many Arab-Americans who might now be targeted by the ignorant and angry.

Many argue that the world has been changed irrevocably. In some ways, I don't believe this is true. We have heard this claim after so many singular catastrophes - world wars, assassinations of President John F Kennedy and Rev Martin Luther King, the Enniskillen and Omagh bombings. Such events seem part of larger historical shifts for which they become markers rather than instigators.

On the other hand, such large-scale acts of violence as were perpetrated last week redefine terrorism. Before, we witnessed much smaller acts against groups or individuals. More monumental attacks were perhaps in the backs of the minds of governments and security agencies but seemed Hollywood nonsense to the rest of us.

Even public acts of terrorism and threats of hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s did not scare in the same way, or suggest a new world order defined by unpredictable horror in the way this attack has. One has to go back to the 1950s and early 1960s, to undercurrents of cold war fear, to resurrect the widespread unease and worry for the future that I think we feel now.

Unfortunately, those fears can also become the basis for many wrong decisions. In the US, we are hearing calls for increased powers of surveillance from the Attorney-General, Mr John Ashcroft, from the FBI and CIA, and from the National Security Agency (NSA).

Within hours of the Tuesday attacks, security officials were bemoaning laws that restricted their ability to place wire taps on phones, eavesdrop on e-mails and fund new surveillance initiatives.

The subject of surveillance has been central to the issue of privacy in an electronic world. The US and British governments in particular have argued for the right to create a regime whereby they can decode e-mail messages sent in encrypted (encoded) form over the internet.

As even the European Commission recognises, following investigations and a draft report issued at the start of the summer, the two governments already have a secretive electronic eavesdropping system code-named Echelon, which can scan millions of phone calls and e-mails for keywords.

Both governments have sought such systems along with increased surveillance rights in order to curb terrorism. Yet such systems as now exist were ineffectual in catching a hint of Tuesday's disaster, and the internet, often vilified as the potential home of lawlessness, didn't even figure.

Indeed, the US and other governments had failed to track these terrorists even though all involved seemed to have been living openly in the US and abroad for years.

They used their own names, under which they applied for drivers' licences, took flying lessons, rented flats and bought plane tickets. They communicated by mobile phone, making transmissions which even a child could intercept using a scanning device.

Of course, many were unknowns, but several were on the FBI's watch list and had known terrorist associations. No one noticed a pattern of behaviours emerging that might point towards a terrorist strike involving planes.

Keep this in mind as calls go out for new surveillance powers. Any new funding for security organisations should surely go towards creating techniques that bolster the ability to analyse existing, legal sources of information. But we definitely should not concede the freedoms that allow a democratic society to function as a democracy, even - or especially - when that society comes under threat.

Privacy, including the right to encrypt e-mail communications, is necessary in a democratic society and crucial to commerce. If we surrender such basic rights and allow our lives to be policed in ways so clearly open to abuse, the terrorists have surely won.

klillington@irish-times.ie