Friday July 21, 2000
LONDON (Reuters) - Electronic surveillance may eat away your
privacy in the digital era, but you'll get used to it. You
have no choice.
Top lawyers told an Anglo-American law conference this week
that governments had no other way to fight organized crime
effectively in a digital age.
``I am convinced that covert surveillance is likely to prove
the only effective answer to increasingly sophisticated
crime,'' said Lord Justice Murray Stuart-Smith, the former
overseer of MI5 and MI6, Britain's security and intelligence
agencies.
``Increasingly, the protection of the well-being of the many
may require infringement of the rights of the nefarious few.''
Britain is pushing a highly controversial law through parliament
forcing companies to install equipment so authorities can
intercept and decode any e-mail messages.
No other Western country has such sweeping powers -- though
the United States runs Echelon, a spy system of satellites
and listening posts which can intercept millions of telephone,
fax and e-mail messages.
William Webster, a U.S. judge who used to head the Central
Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation,
said tough measures might seem alarming today but people
would get used to them.
``Privacy must yield in some areas to the rights of others
to be protected,'' he told the American Bar Association at
a session in London Thursday.
``Unless (law enforcement) is given the tools, they won't
succeed in getting there before the bomb goes off.''
He said other laws restricting police behavior also seemed
unnecessary in retrospect -- such as one that limited
undercover FBI agents to drinking milk on duty while the
tough gangs they were trying to infiltrate were on the whisky.
Jeffrey Hunker of the U.S. National Security Council said
no one authority could police cyberspace and that states
and private-sector companies would all have to work together.
Only a fraction of organizations targeted in cyber-attacks
even know they have been infiltrated, surveys show.
The Internet has given international crime gangs an advantage
that law enforcers are keen to match, but they are meeting
stiff resistance from civil liberties groups.
Criminals can use the Web to launder money across porous
borders, hack into official databases and coordinate their
activities, or message each other using powerful encryption
that thwarts traditional police eavesdropping methods.
Britain's Stuart-Smith said physically following suspects
and opening their letters were now ineffective ways to fight
crime, and sending agents undercover remained as dangerous as
ever.
Hunker said the military thinking of some nations included
computer attacks on U.S. banking, the power grid and other
vital infrastructure elements -- strikes well within the
ability now of well-financed terrorist and organized crime
groups as well.
``Recent Internet disruptions show how unprepared we are
to deal with even relatively unsophisticated attacks,''
he said.
``Both the private sector and much of the federal government
are certainly unprepared to defend against the possibility of
a sophisticated nation-state or terrorist attack.''
Digital Surveillance? You'll Get Used to It
By Richard Meares
Fighting Crime: Drinking Milk Is Not Enough
He recalled that in the 1970s, airport security checks were
challenged in the courts, but were now an accepted part of life.