Terrorizing Ourselves

Civil libertarians expect renewed calls for a national identification card. The cards could have photographs and hard-to-falsify identifying information like handprint or retina data that could be read by scanners at, say, airline counters. If cards were required for many common transactions--renting a car, buying an airline ticket--they would be useful for keeping track of criminals and terrorists. Or you. Eva Jefferson Paterson, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee on Civil Rights Under Law in San Francisco, predicts that innocent citizens would be challenged constantly to produce their cards. "You could be stopped by the police to prove you can walk down the street," she says. "Poor people and people of color would be stopped the most."

There could also be stepped-up public surveillance. At last year's Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla., law-enforcement officials secretly scanned spectators' faces with surveillance cameras and instantly matched their faceprints against photographs of suspected terrorists and known criminals in computerized databases. Facial-recognition technology might help, says Bruce Hoffman, vice president for external affairs at the Rand Corp. and a former adviser to the National Commission on Terrorism, but mostly after the fact, during an investigation. And that means storing all the face data collected, something civil libertarians fear will allow the government to track any individual. If systems were set up all over a city, you could be "checkpointed" by camera when you board a train, stop at a cash machine and enter a store or the place where you work. "We are vulnerable," says Hoffman, "and there's a certain level of risk that we have to accept and live with. To me, the cure can be far worse than the disease."

Says Morton Halperin, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations: "If you take both security and civil liberties seriously, you can find solutions that respect individual rights and privacy and still give the intelligence and law-enforcement agencies the scope that they need. We had worked that out in terms of airports. Nobody thinks you have the civil liberty to take knives on airplanes. I don't know who made the decision to let people bring knives on anyway, but it was certainly not civil libertarians."

--Reported by Andrew Goldstein/Washington, Chris Taylor/San Francisco and Elizabeth L. Bland/New York