Old Barriers to Fighting Terror

John Ashcroft received a rare public rebuke from his own boss last week when the White House revealed that President Bush told the 9/11 commission he was "disappointed" in him for ambushing Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, a former Justice Department official. Ashcroft not only attempted to blame her for setting up barriers to intelligence and law-enforcement information-sharing in his testimony to the panel earlier this month, using a just-declassified memo she'd written in 1995; he then furthered the attack by putting yet more documents on his Website the day before Bush's interview with the commission.

Most experts say those barriers had been firmly in place since the mid-1980s. But if blame for insufficient terror-fighting tools is being doled out, maybe Ashcroft is in for a bit too. When Janet Reno's Justice Department protested efforts in the 1990s to make it easier for Silicon Valley to export encryption technology overseas, then-Senator Ashcroft seemed unconcerned with her contention that terrorists were turning to Internet encryption to communicate. One example she, FBI head Louis Freeh and others in law enforcement cited: Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 WTC bombing, used encryption to hide details of his plot to blow up 11 U.S. airliners over the Pacific. But Ashcroft, in a 1997 piece in USIA Electronic Journal, wrote that while coded messages and maps might be used to facilitate crimes, the Administration's "police state policy on encryption" was at odds with the Bill of Rights — an argument that foes of the Patriot Act might be surprised to hear from him now. President Clinton, he said, "is attempting to foist his rigid policy on the exceptionally fluid and fast-paced computer industry."

Former Clinton Commerce Department officials say pressure from Capitol Hill played a large role in their eventual decision to lift export controls on encryption technology. "They had us against the wall," says one. Ashcroft at the time said he was "pleased" that "the Administration finally has listened to those of us in Congress who long have urged export decontrol." That was in 1999, a year after the U.S. indicted Wadih El Hage in the plot to bomb two American embassies in East Africa. According to the indictment, El Hage sent encrypted e-mails to associates in al-Qaeda. Since becoming Attorney General, Ashcroft has not pushed to change the policy.