Jesse Walker, writing in Reason, takes on the Patriot Act and the U.S. intelligence community:

So what have our intelligence agencies done since September11?

On one hand, they asked for, and received, a host of new powers in an anti-terror bill, including the right to engage in secret searches, warrantless Internet surveillance, warrantless access to phone records, and a requirement that retailers report ‘suspicious’ customer transactions to the Treasury.

Civil libertarians warned that powers like these could be abused — and, indeed, had been abused at many times in American history. Nonetheless, the USA Patriot Act passed overwhelmingly, with some legislators voting for it without even reading it. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) told Insight magazine that he was unable to get his hands on a copy of the bill before it passed. ‘Maybe a handful of staffers actually read it,’ he said, ‘but the bill definitely was not available to members before the vote.’

Meanwhile, has there been an overhaul of the intelligence system? We’re told that improvements have been made; and, hopefully, that’s true. But we haven’t even seen any heads roll: If anyone resigned or was fired over their inability to foresee and prevent the attacks, they did so far from the public eye. More to the point: We haven’t had a public investigation of what went wrong and how it could be fixed, by Congress or, better, an independent commission not beholden either to present officeholders or to their more partisan-minded critics.

[…] So instead of a radically revamped intelligence establishment, we get the same people in their same posts trying to connect the dots and prevent the next terrorist attack. Only now they’ll have a lot more dots to sort through — most of them irrelevent.

The atrocities of September 11 were not a surveillance failure. They were an analysis failure. Now that we understand that, can’t we reconsider the new incursions into our privacy that our leaders stampeded blindly into law? [my emphasis]

Well, I’m one of those people who doesn’t fear the slippery slope toward a jack-booted police state quite so much as do hard-core civil libertarians like Mr. Walker, but I certainly take the force of his points.

But consider Walker’s arguments in the light of my previous post on airline profiling: rather than targeting specific attributes common to the groups we are at war with, we instead insist on the more egalitarian process of “random” profiling — a process that yields a glut of information unrelated to the crisis we’re facing (Mrs. Googleman is 78 and lives in Vero Beach, Florida; her girdle is cream-colored). As Walker puts it, we end up with “a lot more dots to sort through — most of them irrelevant.”

The problem as I see it, then, is not necessarily that the government’s policing powers have been strengthened (this seems reasonable to me in a time of war), but rather that these powers are being squandered — slaves to structural inefficiency and political hamstringing.

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