Balancing security & privacy during wartime

"The 9/11 Commission hearings have focused public attention again on the intelligence failures leading up to the September attacks.

"Yet since 9/11, virtually every proposal to use intelligence more effectively — to connect the dots — has been shot down by left- and right-wing libertarians as an assault on ‘privacy,’" Heather MacDonald writes in the Wall Street Journal.

"The consequence has been devastating: Just when the country should be unleashing its technological ingenuity to defend against future attacks, scientists stand irresolute, cowed into inaction." An alliance of liberal and libertarian groups, she writes, has "killed enough different programs that their operating principle can only be formulated as this: No use of computer data or technology anywhere at any time for national defense, if there’s the slightest possibility that a rogue use of that technology will offend someone’s sense of privacy. They are pushing intelligence agencies back to a pre-9/11 mentality, when the mere potential for a privacy or civil liberties controversy trumped security concerns."

America needs a good public debate about these issues, and how to balance security and privacy during wartime. What ruins the debate – and thusly a sound security policy – is the deliberate mischaracterization of certain security programs. We will need technology to protect us preemptively against further terrorist attacks. Today, we need an open and dispassionate discussion about how to do it.