Give Police Better Tools

The attack of Sept. 11, 2001 has prompted a reassessment of the ways in which America’s law enforcement community works to prevent terrorism. Attorney General John Ashcroft has approached Congress with a number of proposals to expand police powers, some of which are clearly appropriate, others more questionable. But it is clear that steps must be taken—and soon—to protect Americans from harm.

One absolutely necessary measure is better information and resource sharing among federal agencies as well as state and local authorities. Since the attack, it has been discovered that two of the suspected hijackers had been identified in August as associates of Osama bin Laden’s organization. However, in part because of slow communications between the Central Intelligence Agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the men were not apprehended in time. In response, Ashcroft has sensibly called for the creation of an anti-terrorism coordination authority with powers similar to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, whose director is known as the “Drug Czar.” A central anti-terrorism office could serve as a crucial clearinghouse of information in order to gather timely intelligence about future terrorist attacks.

Congress and the States should also promptly increase the penalties for terrorists and the people who harbor them. As our law is currently written, the state penalties for harboring, assisting or hiding terrorists are comparatively light. Adjusting the magnitude of the penalty to the magnitude of the act is the only just thing to do. Congress and the states should also remove all statutes of limitations that apply to serious acts of terrorism so that the United States may prosecute terrorists wherever and whenever they are found.

However, other proposals to combat terrorism should not be accepted so quickly. The courts have already eroded the functioning of the justice system in immigration cases by allowing prosecutors to present secret evidence that is not revealed to the defendant or defense counsel. Some supporters of secret evidence say that classified evidence can be so sensitive that no one, not even the judge, should be able to see it in full. By denying the defense any meaningful opportunity to refute the evidence, this practice—even when restricted to immigration decisions—goes against the most basic principles of an adversarial legal system. Efforts to expand the use of such evidence to fight terrorism should be blocked.

Additionally, Congress should consider carefully Justice department requests to loosen the rules on wiretapping phones and computers. Currently, law enforcement must obtain a court order for each phone or computer tapped. The Justice Department argues, and we agree, that it makes much more sense to obtain a single court order to tap all of the phones and computers of a specific person. The danger is, of course, that the government will listen to other communications on a phone that a criminal may have used only once. The law must allow for quick judicial review of the wiretaps so as to ensure that the privacy of innocent Americans is not breached as a result of these looser restrictions.

These decisions will be complicated by the development of new surveillance technologies, which can increase the power of law enforcement but run the risk of treading on civil liberties. For instance, new systems of security cameras have been developed to include face-recognition technology. Though currently imperfect, these cameras could be used to scan a crowd and match each face to a name in a database by recognizing bone structure and other distinguishing features. Such technology could have been used to intercept the known associates of bin Laden as soon as they walked into the airports. In order to safeguard the nation against similar attack, such cameras should become a standard part of airport security in the U.S., as well as in allied countries and in airports that have direct flights to the United States. These systems, which should be limited to use in identifying terrorists or those known to be associated with terrorist cells, should also be made available to private businesses that choose to install them and used in areas particularly vulnerable to terrorist attack, such as stadiums, high-profile skyscrapers, and government installations. The use of other technologies that offer the possibility of quickly identifying and neutralizing terrorists should also be investigated.

These technologies may go beyond the bounds in which law enforcement has traditionally operated, but they are not drastic or radical departures from the principles that have guided the American justice system since our founding. Nothing that threatens our civil liberties and basic freedoms can be considered to protect a free society. But new law enforcement techniques and technologies do exist which can serve the dual goals of ensuring American security and preserving the American way of life.