|
Bush pushes plan to permit internet surveillance
By Haider Rizvi
New York, Jan. 21 (IPS) — The Bush administration is pushing
to ratify an international convention that civil libertarians say would
pose serious threats to privacy rights at home and abroad.
After delaying for about two years, US President George W. Bush recently
asked the US Senate to ratify the Council of Europe Cybercrime Convention,
a global agreement apparently created to help police worldwide cooperate
to fight internet crimes.
“It’s the only international treaty to address the problems
of computer-related crime and electronic evidence gathering,” Bush
said in his November letter asking the Senate to confirm US adherence
to the treaty.
“It promises to be an effective tool in the global effort to combat
computer-related crime,” added the president.
But independent legal experts and rights activists on both sides of
the Atlantic are skeptical about such claims.
“This is a bad treaty that not only threatens core liberties, but
will obligate the United States to use extraordinary powers to do the
dirty work of other nations,” says Barry Steinhardt of the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the oldest civil rights group in the country.
The treaty criminalizes acts such as hacking and the production, sale,
or distribution of hacking tools, and expands criminal liability for
intellectual property violations that nations must have on their books
as crimes.
“We are opposed to this treaty,” says Cedric Laurent, a senior
policy fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a
public interest research group based in Washington, DC that specializes
in issues of democracy and technology.
So far, only four countries — Albania, Estonia, Hungary and Croatia
— have ratified the treaty since it opened for signatures in 2001.
Thirty-two countries besides the United States have signed the convention;
it must be ratified by five nations before it enters into force.
The agreement also makes it mandatory for each participating nation
to grant new powers of search and seizure to its law enforcement authorities,
including the power to force an internet service provider (ISP) to preserve
a customer’s usage records and to monitor his or her online activities
as they occur.
If approved by the Senate, experts say, US police would be required
to cooperate in “mutual assistance requests” from police in
other nations “to the widest extent possible.”
“The cyber-crime signatories include nations of recent and untested
democratic vintage, such as Ukraine and Bulgaria,” says ACLU Legislative
Counsel Marv Johnson.
“Do we really want professional American law enforcement personnel
conducting surveillance on people who haven’t broken any US law
in order to help enforce the ‘law’ of some Party apparatchik
in China?” he added in a statement.
Rights groups are also worried about the possible use of new surveillance
devices like Carnivore, the “internet-tapping” system used
by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to intercept communications.
Unlike wiretaps, which are set up by a telephone company on behalf of
authorities, Carnivore allows law enforcement agents direct access to
entire ISP networks, far beyond the scope of powers those agents now
have.
When the US Congress passed the infamous PATRIOT Act to boost law-enforcement
in response to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, it authorized the
use of Carnivore for collecting information on Internet addresses and
traffic. But it stopped short of permitting the system to be used to
eavesdrop on actual content.
“The PATRIOT Act has given more powers to the law enforcement agencies.
That is right,” says Laurent in an interview. “But the ratification
of this convention would give even more powers to the authorities.”
“Unfortunately, the history of the FBI and other government agencies
on respecting privacy is not good,” says Steinhardt in an interview,
explaining that is why, “Carnivore has been opposed by organizations
from across the political spectrum.’’
The ACLU and other critics of the treaty also argue that it provides
too little protection for political activities. They point out that
the text fails to define “political offenses,” a fault they
call “a huge omission,” since an act considered political
in the United States might be a criminal matter in another country.
For example, the treaty section on real-time monitoring of internet
activity does not include an exemption to the mutual assistance requirement
for “political” offences, meaning, the experts say, the FBI
could be asked to order an ISP like AOL to spy on a political dissenter
in Ukraine or a union organizer in Latin America.
Steinhardt wonders why Bush decided to request ratification now. “We
are trying to understand why the US government did not do anything two
years ago,” he says. “They had abandoned this (treaty). I
think it’s all related to 9/11. But it’s a mystery to us.”
In his letter to the Senate, Bush wrote, “the treaty would help
deny ‘safe havens’ to criminals, including terrorists, who
can cause damage to US interests abroad using computer systems.”
Busted treasury drains Bush bravado
By Jim Lobe
Washington, DC, Jan. 21 (IPS) — US President George W. Bush, who
has made it his mission to avoid his father’s political mistakes,
appears poised to repeat them in spite of himself.
His surprisingly defensive State of the Union Address on Jan. 20, which
was long on determination and defiance but exceedingly short on program
detail and new initiatives, underlined how firmly his course has been
set and how little he can or is willing to do to change it.
Indeed, by announcing that the next four years will be very much like
the last three, Bush, like his father before him (president from 1989
to 1993), has become a fixed target for next November’s elections,
a point brought home by an uncharacteristically aggressive Democratic
Party response after the president finished his speech.
Bush’s father, who loved international diplomacy above all, failed
to understand that most voters in 1992 were more concerned about job
losses caused by corporate downsizing and overseas competition. He missed
the wisdom of Bill Clinton’s political adviser, James Carville,
who observed succinctly, “It’s the economy, stupid.’’
Bush Senior’s defeat that year by Bill Clinton was also made easier
by his self-confessed lack of “the vision thing’’ —
something that would offer his fellow-citizens a sense of national purpose,
beyond safely “managing’’ world affairs and promoting
volunteering in community charities.
In addressing these deficiencies, the elder Bush was hobbled not only
by his own preppy aloofness — a problem the younger Bush does not
suffer — but also by the fact that the yawning fiscal deficits
of the Reagan era had emptied the Treasury.
To the fury of his Republican Party’s increasingly powerful right
wing, Bush Sr. was forced to raise taxes and had nothing new to offer
because the cupboard was bare.
Unlike his father, the younger Bush inherited a huge surplus that, as
a result of tax cuts and the enormous increase in defense and other
spending related to the “war on terror,’’ has been transformed
once again into a deficit, a shortfall that now seriously threatens
the country’s fiscal health.
So depleted are the nations coffers that, “It is actually a cruel
hoax to pretend that Washington can afford to do anything new,”
noted the New York Times on Wednesday. Thus, like his father, Bush has
no choice but to run on his record.
“Extraordinarily backward-looking,’’ noted Andrew Sullivan,
a conservative commentator for The New Republic weekly about the lack
of new proposals in Bush’s speech.
“It struck me as a speech that comes out of a political cocoon,
from a president who doesn’t grasp that he is in fact politically
vulnerable, and who intends to run not on what he plans for the future
but on what he has done in the past,’’ wrote Sullivan, who
praised the foreign-policy sections of the address. “That’s
a high-risk strategy.’’
Bush’s speech was also notable for its extraordinary stress on
foreign policy, which took up the entire first half and constituted
mainly a defense of his war on terror and the US-led attack on Iraq.
The president even insisted, despite the total lack of evidence uncovered
to date, that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s “programs’’
for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) constituted a “serious and
mounting threat to our country.’’
Bush said his aggressive pursuit of war against Iraq was responsible
for Libya’s recent decision to voluntarily dismantle its own WMD
programs and for ongoing, although uncertain, negotiations involving
North Korea and Iran.
“America is committed to keeping the world’s most dangerous
weapons out of the hands of the world’s most dangerous regimes,’’
he declared.
Although he cited the contribution by 34 other countries of troops to
the US-led occupation in Iraq as evidence that Washington had not isolated
itself internationally as Democrats have charged, his biggest applause
line was red meat for unilateralists, “America will never seek
a permission slip to defend the security of our people.’’
Bush also insisted that the world was safer as a result of US actions,
but also warned against complacency and called for extension of the
controversial USA PATRIOT Act, which is opposed by many libertarians
in his own party. Citing terrorist attacks from Casablanca to Jakarta,
he noted that “the terrorists continue to plot against America
and the civilized world.’’
The president ended the foreign-policy section of the speech with the
kind of ‘’vision’’ statement — “America
is a nation with a mission... Our aim is a democratic peace’’
— that his father failed to articulate, although his only concrete
new proposal was to double funding — to 70 million dollars —
to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a small agency that provides
money and expertise to civil-society and business groups abroad.
On domestic issues, Bush asked to enshrine tax cuts made in 2002; called
for enactment of his guest-worker program for otherwise illegal immigrants,
proposed private savings accounts for Social Security, offered modest
packages for education, and suggested he might support a constitutional
amendment outlawing gay marriages.
The latter move brought praise from leaders of his core constituency,
the Christian Right, but is also certain to fuel the anger of many Republican
libertarians, who believe that Bush has unduly increased the power of
government to police private activity.
Remarkably, according to the Los Angeles Times, the president appears
to be narrowing, rather than expanding, his base as the campaign gets
underway.
But the speech was also notable for what it omitted. Bush made no mention,
for example, of the ambitious Moon and Mars exploration program he introduced
with much fanfare one week ago, a proposal that clearly bombed with
a public that is increasingly anxious about the mounting deficit.
He also failed to address the environment, global AIDS, and, despite
the focus on Iraq and the war on terrorism, the roiling Israeli-Palestinian
conflict or the elusive leader of the al-Qaida terrorist group, Osama
bin Laden.
Indeed, what modest new programs he cited prompted hand wringing even
among some of his strongest supporters.
Victor Davis Hanson, a prominent neo-conservative and frequent dinner
guest of Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, worried that Bush’s
existing projects for tax cuts, war, Middle East reconstruction, and
drug entitlements “do not add up, but result in rates of deficit
spending that are unsustainable.’’
That assessment is increasingly shared by Republican lawmakers, who
have expressed growing anxiety about the huge costs being incurred in
Iraq, and a growing consensus that a very expensive but overstretched
army needs to be expanded by at least two divisions.
The latter would boost annual defense spending past 500 billion dollars,
at a time when eight million people are without jobs.
In that connection, The New Republic’s Sullivan said he was “amazed
[at Bush’s] lack of any recognition that job growth is lagging
[behind economic growth].’’
‘’There was no statement of concern for those struggling in
the economy, no rhetoric of empathy. That surprised me. It leaves a
huge opening for the Democrats, who will argue that the president is
out of touch.’’
Just like Bush Senior.
|
