The authorities deserve all the credit they’re getting for connecting the dots and lifting the fear. Chief Charles Moose and his team employed the latest technology: a national license-plate database; chemical scanners that can pick up molecules off evidence, and “ballistic fingerprinting,” which allowed the authorities in Maryland to compare shell casings and bullets to prove that the crimes were linked. Even more dots were available, but didn’t get connected until it was too late, like the records of the snipers’ traffic violations in the first days of the spree.
So if gathering as much as information as possible on databases and then sharing it among law-enforcement agencies is so effective, why don’t we see more of both? Part of the explanation is the usual bureaucratic inertia and squabbling, but there’s a deeper reason. Even after September 11, privacy concerns still carry plenty of clout in this country. Commonsense reforms–like printing visa-expiration dates on the driver’s licenses of immigrants–are still resisted by many civil-liberties groups. And because it’s always easier to stop a new idea than to implement one, the database approach to preventing terrorism is not moving as quickly as it should.
This is one of those cases where civil libertarians and the gun lobby are together on the wrong side. The civil libertarians resist cracking down on illegal immigration, and the NRA opposes a “ballistic fingerprinting” database (where manufacturers fire the weapon before sale and record the “signature”) on the theory that it represents a form of gun registration. Both sides are caught in the Slippery Slope Fallacy. To believe that sensible extensions of law enforcement will lead inevitably to tyranny is to distrust the same democracy they claim to be defending. A police state of perpetual ID checkpoints and gun confiscations is not going to happen in this country. The bigger danger is in the other direction–that we’ve still got our heads in the sand, even after September 11 and the sniper spree.
Last week an independent task force convened by the Council on Foreign Relations concluded that the United States is “dangerously unprepared” for the next terrorist attack. For all the noise out of Washington, the bipartisan task force, chaired by former senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart, found that 650,000 state and local police still have no access to the Feds’ terrorist watch list. And the radios of “first responders” still can’t talk to each other.
Federal agencies, meanwhile, are still too often at sea. An estimated 3 million foreigners have overstayed their visas, and more than 300,000 remain in the United States despite deportation orders.
And that’s just the INS. How about the FBI? Director Robert Mueller testified recently that it would take years, not months, to fully upgrade the bureau’s old-fashioned computers, a claim many computer experts say simply reflects lack of bureaucratic will. Mueller’s boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, is committed to improving national databases–but only if they don’t offend his puppetmasters in the NRA. After September 11, the FBI made a sensible request: to cross-reference the database of those who made Brady Law gun applications with a list of those being detained on suspicion of a connection to terrorism.
This was no small matter on the database front. In mid-2001, a group of Middle Eastern terrorists was convicted in Michigan of using the United States’ lax gun laws to buy weapons here and ship them to the region. Ashcroft testified that the law prevented him from employing the Brady database, even if it meant a chance to crack a terrorist plot. He forgot to mention that the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel advised last fall that such a cross-reference was perfectly legit.
Some Americans still don’t get it. “There’s an awful lot of wishful thinking and half-ignorant thinking” in the civil-liberties community, says noted First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams. “People act as if 9-11 was some kind of national storm that occurs once a century.” Rudman and Hart were shunned by the White House when they released their first bi-partisan report on vulnerability to terrorist attack in early 2001. We ignore their most recent jeremiad at our peril. “Database coordination.” It’s not much of a campaign slogan, but it might save your life.
