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Pastimes : Rarely is the question asked: "is our children learning" -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Sladek who wrote (1769)	1/9/2004 8:03:09 PM
From: John Sladek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2171

07Jan04-Paul Knox - Keep the spooks on a short leash By PAUL KNOX From Wednesday's Globe and Mail I guess the good thing about the latest anti-terrorism follies is this: If the record of the U.S. security apparatus is any guide, there's no way they'll be able to properly keep track of the fingerprints (ahem, biometric data) of 24 million foreign air passengers every year. Of course, that's the bad thing too. The more of this stuff you do, the more likely it is to go wrong. The more information a state collects on people, the greater the likelihood it will be misused. That's without even considering the dangers embodied in gun-toting sky marshals, which the United States is now demanding for certain international flights, or fighter jets tailing passenger airliners across the Atlantic. Armed passengers aloft are a menace, whether uniformed or anonymous, official or freelance. The interior of a fully laden jetliner is a sealed space packed with people. Gunfire within it, however well intentioned, carries a high risk of hitting innocents. A weapon carried inside a plane could easily be used against the wrong target, either by its owner or by another. Knowing that firearms are carried aboard, criminals will plot to gain control of them. Armed marshals, no matter how carefully screened and trained, will make mistakes. Despite the prevailing wisdom in George W. Bush's United States, the ability to use overwhelming force will not solve every security problem in the world. As for the two F-16s that followed a British Airways flight from London to New York on New Year's Eve, what exactly was their mission? I doubt very much it was to protect the plane from external attack. Should the BA plane have been seized by terrorists and directed toward a target on U.S. soil, did the fighter pilots have orders to limit the damage by destroying it? The recriminations would make the controversy over the failure to prevent Sept. 11, 2001, look like a schoolyard spat. Thankfully, it's a safe bet there won't be many F-16 escorts. The expense of operating an advanced military aircraft is too great. But it appears travellers are in for more dreary hours in security-gridlocked airports, and airline shareholders are in for another indifferent year. All of them should be asking two questions: Will the new homeland-security measures make the world safer for Americans, or anyone else? What will the collateral damage be? The first question is tough to answer. Unless you're inside the mind of Osama bin Laden, and all the other twisted creatures out there who think killing innocent bystanders is the way to fix what ails the world, you'll never know exactly what they're planning. Unless you're hiding behind a curtain in the Oval Office, you don't know what the allegedly heightened threats consist of. So you won't know — not for some time, anyway — whether the new measures are appropriate, much less whether they thwarted anything that had a snowball's chance of happening in the first place. The second question is a little easier. In the world of global airline travel and outside it, the climate is becoming vastly more hospitable for invasions of privacy. Canadians remain cool to the idea of identity cards. For many, such cards would be vivid reminders of the authoritarian systems they or their forebears fled. But how many of us think twice about giving our social insurance number, which — despite Ottawa's promise when it was introduced 40 years ago — is uncomfortably close to being the foundation of a national-identity system? For the moment, short-term Canadian visitors will be exempt from Washington's new fingerprint and photograph requirements. But some visa holders will not, and it may not be long before bio-scans are routine in airports around the world. Beyond air travel, biometrics is poised to revolutionize industrial and state security, offering increased protection against fraudulent access, theft of identity cards and a host of other ills. At the same time, law-enforcement agencies are pushing to install video cameras on street corners. Vast amounts of personal information are embedded in the Internet. U.S. legislators last year forced the Pentagon to halt its plans to prowl through credit-card and travel records looking for terrorists (and who knows what else). To a degree, the U.S. courts have reined in Attorney-General John Ashcroft's post-Sept. 11 legal power grab. But too many self-styled opponents of big government fall silent when the bigness is that of the security establishment. Visitors to the United States — including Canadians — must be told what will become of the personal images collected by immigration screeners. Insisting on safeguards, and keeping the spooks on a short leash, are as important to security as heightened alerts. The murkier the purported threat, the more important it is to ask whether the countermeasures are appropriate. globeandmail.com