A nation founded upon such noble ideas as individual liberty and respect for privacy must never allow those sacred principles to be tarnished by the prying eyes and empire-building efforts of bureaucrats.
Reports surfaced this week that the U.S. government has been collecting personal information about travelers entering the country, without their knowledge, and assigning them terrorist ratings. Travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments. The information, which can be shared with all levels of government, including state and local, is retained for 40 years. Existence of the program was only recently confirmed after its details were leaked.
How many terrorists this program has identified is not disclosed. How many law-abiding individuals have had their privacy invaded without their knowledge can probably be counted in the millions. (more…)
Terrorist threat ratings for law abiding travelers that can’t be challenged are reminiscent of totalitarian tactics which the United States so long fought.
Neville Hobson, a respected blogger and innovator in the changing field of social media raises some important points on the terrorist rating system to which travelers to the US are being subjected. “Can’t be rescinded, not even questioned,” as the line goes from the movie Casablanca, seems an apt description. There is no provision for amending an inaccurate terrorist rating. You can’t even see it. In a world war against fascism and a very long cold war against communism, America fought the encroachment of a big brother who kept track of everyone and accorded civil rights to no one. What has happened to this once gleaming pillar of civil rights so long an inspiration to freedom loving people? What has become of the spirit of Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King?
I have been following Mr. Hobson’s reports faithfully for several years. They are a model of British restraint and proportionality. They also have a significant following around the globe. He is clearly not alone in questioning the principles and management behind such a program. The troubling fact is that the misdirected thinking and policy miscues that brought America to its current calamitous course in Iraq also seem to be manifesting themselves at home in the government’s dealings with its own citizens and those of its allies.
I have written at Finlay On Governance recently here and here about the direction of the United States, a country where I have lived, more than occasionally work and have many family members. I believe America is only now awakening to how misguided its course in the world has become. It is apparent that the assault launched by the U.S. government on the privacy and civil liberties of its own citizens, as well as those of its supporters and allies like Mr. Hobson, is far greater than any outside enemy could ever inflict.
No right thinking member of the civilized world wishes to see America, or any other country for that matter, vulnerable to attack at the hands of terrorists. But the war on terror must not be permitted to become a war on the privacy of law abiding people, otherwise the terrorists have won a victory of a kind they never could have dreamed.
Perhaps the current soul-searching in America about its ever more costly missteps involving the Middle East, and the change of political landscape that occurred in November, will begin to prompt a larger rethinking about the need to preserve those values of liberty and civil rights for which America has been a beacon to the world, but the light of which has sadly grown more dim in recent years.
