Posted on Wed, Feb. 19, 2003

Bill of Rights under a new assault

By Dan Gillmor

Mercury News Technology Columnist

News and views, culled and edited from my online eJournal (www.dangillmor.com):

Patriotism perverted: The Bush administration's hostility to our fundamental liberties is unrelenting. Not content with ramming the contemptibly named ``USA Patriot Act'' through a sadly compliant Congress in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the White House and its forces are lining up for another whack at the Bill of Rights.

Draft legislation from Attorney General John Ashcroft's law-enforcement gnomes is making the rounds. It's apparently being called the ``Domestic Security Enhancement Act,'' but think of it as ``UnPatriot II.''

Read the draft on the Center for Public Integrity's Web site (http://publicintegrity .org/dtaweb/home.asp). Then read the FindLaw Web site's analysis (http://writ .findlaw.com/ramasastry/ 20030217.html) by Anita Ramasastry, an assistant law professor at the University of Washington School of Law and associate director of the Shidler Center for Law, Commerce & Technology.

The legislation, Ramasastry warns, is ``a wholesale assault on privacy, free speech and freedom of information.'' She does not exaggerate.

A week ago, members of a congressional conference committee agreed to stop, at least for now, the Pentagon's ``Total Information Awareness'' program, a privacy killer that aimed to scoop up and filter every bit of available information about everyone in the hopes of finding a potential terrorist.

UnPatriot II would push ahead with this kind of Big Brother scheme. The government would collect DNA from a widening circle of Americans. It would add to government surveillance authority -- not that there's all that much keeping the official snoops out of innocent people's lives at this point in any event.

And, reviving an anti-privacy notion that Ashcroft himself once denounced -- that is, before he got a taste of the overweening state power he professed to fear -- it would criminalize some uses of encryption, the scrambling of digital information.

Government snoops, who have never, ever failed to misuse this kind of authority, would know everything about you. This is a one-way mirror. The Bush administration's fanatical devotion for secrecy, preventing citizens from knowing what government is doing in their name and with their money, would get a boost.

The most astonishing suggestion in this anti-freedom smorgasbord is what Ramasastry calls a ``Citizenship Death Penalty.''

``Suppose you, as a citizen, attended a legal protest for which one of the hosts, unbeknownst to you, is an organization the government has listed as terrorist,'' she writes. Under this legislation, ``you may be deported and deemed no longer an American citizen.''

Even more amazing, she says, ``if you are simply suspected of terrorist activity, this can occur.''

We are not living under tyranny in the United States. A few more laws like UnPatriot II, and we could be. ...." (The rest of his column was on other topics)