Database Nation (Paperback) The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century By Simson Garfinkel Softcover Edition January 2001 0-596-00105-3, Order Number: 1053 336 pages, $16.95

Chapter 9
Kooks and Terrorists

JULY 17, 1996--The Flight of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 started like many others: with a delay. It was a hot summer night, and the aircraft waited on the tarmac for more than 30 minutes before taking off. The Boeing 747 had 230 people aboard as it speedily departed from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York and climbed over Long Island Sound. Then, roughly 30 minutes into the flight, something went terribly wrong. Witnesses on the ground reported seeing a small explosion, two objects flying through the air, and a second, much larger explosion. The jetliner plummeted more than 10,000 feet into the waters below. Everyone on board was killed.

Almost immediately, agents from the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating the explosion, describing the pieces of aircraft found floating as a watery crime scene. Wreckage, debris, and personal effects were taken to a huge hangar on Long Island, where investigators began the painstakingly morbid task of reconstructing the carcass of Flight 800. Within a few days, divers began searching the bottom of the sea for more evidence. Meanwhile, theories about the flight's destruction were circulating at a fast and furious rate, both inside and outside the Bureau. Soon it was clear that there were only three possible explanations for the crash: mechanical failure, a bomb, or a surface-to-air missile.

An unprecedented evidence collection effort continued over the following months. Twisted bits of metal, bolts, even swatches of fabric were located, taken to the hangar, and analyzed. The investigation would ultimately cost more than $100 million. The FBI swung into action. Assuming that TWA Flight 800 had been downed by a bomb, the FBI worked with politicians and officials from the airline industry to tighten up security at airports. Many civil libertarians attacked the FBI's measures, saying that they represented sweeping attacks on the privacy and civil liberties of American citizens. But as more bodies were brought in from the waters, these protests rang hollow.

Two weeks after the crash of Flight 800, there was a second explosion. This time the target was the Summer Olympics in Atlanta: one person was killed, and more than a hundred people were injured.

For the first time ever, Americans were required to present photo ID cards before boarding flights, even flights within the United States. Next, the FBI lobbied for a nationwide passenger profiling system, so individuals thought to be predisposed to committing acts of terrorism could be proactively intercepted at airports and searched. (One result of these searches was the harassment, embarrassment, and, in some cases, detention of thousands of Arab-Americans.)

The U.S. Postal Service, meanwhile, instituted sweeping restrictions on the mails: no longer could packages or envelopes weighing more than one pound be dropped into mailboxes--after all, such a package might contain a bomb! Instead, heavy packages would have to be taken to a post office and handed to a clerk, so that a visual identification might be made. These restrictions and others continue to this day.

Over the past decade, measures resulting from the fear of domestic terrorism have had a significant impact on the lives of most Americans. This chapter asks a simple question: do these measures have any real effect? To understand this question, we need to understand more about terrorism itself.

The Democratization of Destructive Technology

The face of terrorism is changing. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, terrorism was a tool for political change. Terrorism was war fought by poor people. Terrorists had specific goals--an end to slavery, the demise of a particular regime, political recognition--and they used violence and fear to help achieve their ends.

Old-style terrorists often worked in large groups; sometimes they were even parts of legitimate political or quasi-political organizations. Invariably, the sheer numbers in these groups provided a kind of moderating influence on the terrorists' actions. Even if one wacko wanted nothing more than to kill as many innocent bystanders as possible, his compatriots would stop him, arguing that wanton violence would not strengthen their cause--if anything, mayhem would merely strengthen their opposition's resolve.

The terrorists of the 1980s and 1990s were a transitional breed. While they were often militants working with large organizations and even governments, they used terror as a weapon not of change but of revenge. The bombing of Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 was probably retaliation for the U.S. bombing of Tripoli earlier in that decade. Likewise, the Americans taken hostage in Lebanon during the 1980s were probably kidnapped in retaliation for the U.S. shelling of Beirut in 1984. Although the U.S. public saw these actions as terrorist attacks, they are more properly thought of as military actions.

The terrorist of tomorrow is the irrational terrorist. This new terrorist does not particularly want to change the enemy's mind. Instead, he "sees the sheer physical annihilation of the enemy as a productive result," says Louis Rene Beres, a professor of political science at Purdue University, who has spent decades studying the roots and prevention of terrorism. The new generation of terrorists work in small cells, in pairs, or even alone. These new terrorists frequently aren't interested in negotiation, don't rationally consider the long-term consequences of their actions, and frequently aren't even concerned with their own survival--in fact, they may actively work towards their own death. "An irrational terrorist might simply be an insane group that sees mass death as a desirable end from an ecological point of view," says Beres. "Or an irrational terrorist might see an act of terror and loss of life as causing some other political event."

"What we are dealing with is a [new] kind of pathology--a disease," said Professor Beres in a lecture at the University of Washington in the spring of 1997. And so far, the U.S. has been lucky--we have only seen a tiny amount of anti-American terror. But Beres thinks that our luck may soon run out.

The question we face, then, is a simple one: is it possible to prevent future incidents of terrorism by systematically monitoring all potential terrorists and imprisoning them before they can strike? And, if so, are such measures worth the cost?

The Dish of Death

A lot of packages move each day through the mailroom at the B'nai B'rith International Headquarters in Washington, D.C. This one was different. The 8 × 10 bubble-wrap envelope was torn, and a red, gelatinous substance was seeping out. And the package was addressed only to "B'nai B'rith," no name, no room number.

The mailroom clerk brought the package to Carmen Fontana, the Jewish organization's director of security. Fontana told me:

The package just didn't look right. Then I smelled it. It had an ammonia type odor. I was thinking "bomb" 100 percent. I immediately put it in a trash container and brought it outside. When I came back in, I told the guard who was on duty to call the police.

The bomb squad came and X-rayed the package. No bomb appeared to be inside. "So they opened it up," says Fontana. "And once they opened it up, inside the package was a petri dish with this red substance in it. And there were some numbers on the petri dish itself. They ran the numbers and it came back as anthrax.

What followed was an eight-hour siege. Washington, D.C. police immediately closed off a 20-block area around B'nai B'rith headquarters. The package was put in a decontamination box and sent to Bethesda Naval Hospital for analysis. But downtown, the police and fire departments needed to assume the worst. City streets, buildings, and parking lots were closed to the public, effectively preventing more than 10,000 people from going home. Still more people were trapped in the gridlock that was fast enveloping the nation's capital. Meanwhile, because of the risk of contamination, B'nai B'rith's 150 employees were told not to leave the building.

At 8:30 p.m., the Naval Hospital finished its preliminary testing. The red substance contained some bacteria, but it probably wasn't anthrax. Washington health commissioner Dr. Harvey Sloane announced that the Jewish organization's employees could go home. It was all a hoax.

The incident, which took place in April 1997, revealed just how completely unprepared the nation's capital was for a biological attack. Despite having been trained to handle these kinds of terrorist incidents as part of the planning for the 1996 Presidential Inauguration, 14 of the city emergency workers at the scene had inadvertently exposed themselves to the substance and had to be decontaminated. Meanwhile, the quarantine of 150 employees was ill advised, concluded Dr. Jonathan B. Tucker at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies. "A gelled biological agent poses no hazard except through direct contact. . . . Instead of keeping the employees quarantined inside the building for hours and possibly exposing them to a hazardous material, it would have made more sense to move them to another location and keep them under observation until the results of the sample analysis were known."

"It was the unpreparedness that totally blew my mind," says security director Fontana. "I'm not knocking the police department or the fire department--they did the best with what they had. But their training was very, very minimal, if they had any at all. The fire department did not have any of the proper equipment."

Nor did they have the proper training, it would seem. According to Fontana:

You really had to be here to see what they did. We had no decontamination tent, so what they did was pull two fire trucks alongside each other and drape a piece of canvas on top of them. Then they put a piece of plastic on the street. This was our decontamination tub. . . . When they were done spraying us down with this Clorox, the plastic--they just folded it up and shook it up in the street. That just blew my mind. I said, "Well, what happens if this Clorox didn't kill certain aspects of this anthrax? You just infected the whole city." There was just a lack of training. I can think back to when I was in the military 35 years ago; we had chemical and biological warfare practice, and it was nothing like the way these guys were performing.

B'nai B'rith issued a press release the next day, applauding the quick response and courageous work of the city's police and fire departments, but saying that it was "nonetheless gravely disturbed over their apparent lack of preparedness."

"It is inexcusable for police and fire personnel, in a city which is so vulnerable to terrorist incidents, to not have the highest level of training and appropriate resources for dealing with situations as potentially deadly as this. We call upon the city and federal officials to immediately launch an investigation to determine whether or not the city is properly prepared for these types of incidents," said B'nai B'rith executive vice president Dr. Sidney M. Clearfield in a press release distributed the next day.

In fact, if a terrorist had wanted to launch an attack on B'nai B'rith's headquarters, it could have been done with far less fanfare and far more deadly results. Instead of mailing a petri dish with spoof anthrax, a terrorist could have sent a sealed mailing tube containing a poster and the dust of real anthrax spores. For an extremely low-tech attack, a terrorist could simply find the names of B'nai B'rith's favorite catering firm and arrange for poisoned food to be delivered to the organization's next fundraiser.

With targets so vulnerable, civil authorities so unprepared, and toxins so readily available, does it make sense to institute a worldwide dragnet to track and stop suspected terrorists before they strike? Increasingly, the U.S. government is insisting that the answer to this question is yes.

The Changing Face of Terrorism

Despite the fact that it took place almost a year after the downing of TWA Flight 800, the attack on the B'nai B'rith headquarters in April 1997 shows how ineffectual the FBI's antiterrorism guidelines are against the new breed of terrorists. Searching aircraft passengers has no effect when the targets are buildings. Prohibiting packages that are heavier than a pound from being sent through the mails doesn't do any good when a test tube can hold enough bacteria to kill a city.

Vivid Baggage Scanner

Vivid Technologies, headquartered in Woburn, Massachusetts, makes sophisticated baggage screening systems for airports and office buildings. The screening system uses X-rays and artificial intelligence to locate guns, explosives, and drugs that are concealed in baggage. Unlike conventional X-ray scanners, which look only at the outlines, the Vivid system examines the energies of back-scattered X-ray emissions to detect the atoms and molecules that are characteristic of explosives and controlled substances. To date, Vivid's primary sales have been outside the United States, since the Federal Aviation Administration prohibits airports from competing with each other on the basis of safety. [Photo courtesy Vivid Technologies]

The world has always had its crazies. What's changing the stakes is the increasing democratization of destructive technology. With a two-barreled shotgun, a criminally insane office worker can kill at most three or four coworkers. With an assault rifle, that same person can kill a dozen people. But with a vial of anthrax, smashed on the floor of an elevator, a crazy person can kill everybody in an entire office building. The danger, as we move forward, is that an ever more sophisticated array of destructive technology is available for angry, irrational individuals to use against society as a whole. Thus, even if the number of kooks and terrorists remains roughly constant, we should expect the number of people killed each year in massacres, bombings, and large-scale attacks to grow gradually over time, as increasingly lethal technology becomes more widely available.

Unfortunately, the number of kooks and terrorists is not remaining constant: it is increasing. As the population grows and society becomes more complex, more individuals are being pushed past the brink and into action. Increased mobility and improved communications are only accelerating the number of dangerous nutcases, because violence, like any other disease, is contagious. A lone crazy can commit, at most, one suicidal operation. But a crazy who travels and teaches can sow the seeds for dozens of incidents.

Terrorists are also emboldened by the action and inaction of the world's nations. During the 1980s, the world stood by while Iraq used chemical weapons, first in the Iran-Iraq war, and later on its own Kurdish citizens. "Iraq was allowed to get away with chemical murder for five years," says Leonard A. Cole, who studies chemical and biological weapons and teaches at Rutgers University. "At the time, we were pleased to see Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini keeping themselves busy," Cole says. But by failing to condemn the use of these weapons, the world community legitimized them.

Nowhere has the combination of charisma and criminality been more apparent in recent years than in the March 1995 chemical attack on the Tokyo subway system by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo ("Supreme Truth"). Despite a long history of dealing with terrorist organizations, Japan was completely unprepared for the attack. The Aum attack killed a dozen people and injured more than 5,000 more. Of those injured, 135 were members of the Tokyo fire and police departments who had rushed into the subways without proper protection.

The terrorist cult had detailed plans of the Tokyo subway system and had placed its lethal canisters in the correct locations. The cult had no demands and the attack came without warning. Aum's sole purpose was to kill as many people as possible, and in so doing, hasten the coming of Armageddon. Indeed, Aum's ultimate plans called for the destruction of the entire human race. "It was apparent that they had enough base chemical to make enough sarin gas to kill half the population of the world," says James D. Kallstrom, who headed the FBI's New York Office and oversaw the investigation of TWA Flight 800. In the months of revelations that followed the Tokyo attack, Kallstrom says, the FBI learned that the cult had also developed a biological weapons program that was working on agents such as anthrax and botulism toxin.

So why didn't more people die in the Aum attacks? Because the human race was lucky. Or perhaps because of systematic failures in the Japanese education system. In their race to plan the end of the world, Aum's leaders had recruited scientists, not engineers. The scientists knew the chemistry of the weapons they were making--but they didn't know how to disperse the agents.

Like many experts in the field, Cole believes that there are two simultaneous strategies that must be pursued to prevent chemical, biological, and nuclear terrorism. The first is for the nations of the world to agree that such weapons are intolerable and to ban their use. The second is to dedicate the necessary resources to monitoring the supplies necessary to create such terror weapons, as well as monitoring the potential terrorists.

Home-Grown Terrorism

Monitoring terrorists has become a top priority at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has repeatedly said that the job of defending America against terrorism is being complicated by new technologies. In the early 1990s, the FBI floated several technical proposals to make the job easier. Among these proposals were the development of new wiretapping technologies, restrictions on cryptography, and the prescreening of airline passengers. One of the leading voices for these programs inside the FBI was James D. Kallstrom, who was the FBI's chief of engineering in Quantico, Virginia, before he became director of the FBI's New York office.

In 1997, I met with Kallstrom to talk about the problems of terrorism and the potential impacts on freedom and privacy. The meeting happened during the middle of the TWA Flight 800 investigation, and it was clear that the ongoing investigation had taken a toll on Kallstrom. A year later, he left the FBI to take a job as a vice president at a major financial institution.

Kallstrom told me that monitoring terrorists is very difficult:

When I came to the FBI, the challenge of the day was organized crime. That was really child's play compared to the challenge of the groups that we deal with today. They don't have a definitive hierarchical structure. They don't have disciplined rules of engagement. They don't have a clearinghouse of authorities. They don't have central control. They don't have all those things that allow you, if you get the foot in the door of that organization, [to] pretty much know what the organization is doing.

Today we just have people who stand up and profess what is wrong with any segment of our society and incite the audience with rhetoric and passion. You don't know which group of two or three nuts takes that rhetoric and moves that rhetoric into action--unless you are right there with those two people or three people.

More than most countries, the United States has had a long history of problems by violent individuals acting alone. One reason for this violence is the easy availability of guns in the United States.

John Wilkes Booth was an outspoken supporter of slavery who organized a band of men to kill Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, but ultimately it was Booth himself who pulled the trigger and shot Lincoln on April 14, 1865. Charles J. Guiteau shot President James Garfield on July 2, 1881. The anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley on September 6, 1901 at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. John W. Hinckley, Jr. shot and seriously wounded President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981. Attempts on the President's life have continued to this day: during Bill Clinton's first term, one person was arrested for firing shots from an assault weapon at the White House. Another person died flying a small plane into the White House lawn, just underneath President Clinton's bedroom window.

But while the FBI remains concerned about lone gunmen, the real action these days is with mass-murder terrorist actions. And once again, a contributing factor is the ready availability of destructive technology. In just the past decade, terrorists set off a car bomb in the World Trade Center in New York City, killing six people, injuring thousands, and causing $500 million in damage. Timothy McVeigh blew up a car bomb outside the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and killed hundreds.

Kallstrom believes that it's entirely possible that a single terrorist attack will kill more than 10,000 people sometime within the next 30 years. "I am not going to predict it, but I think that it would be naive to say it isn't possible," he says. And if it happens, he says, there will be a tremendous backlash on the part of lawmakers and the public to pass draconian laws and institute a virtual police state to make sure that such an attack never happens again.

"Legislators and lawmakers generally don't react to things without a body count and the prediction of a body count--they don't want to hear about it. They want to see the body count. It is not good enough to feel the door and feel that it is warm; you have to have smoke coming from under the door. . . . As we move to this new millenium, the risk of this mentality is terrible." Instead of waiting for the body count and a resulting Congressional attack on civil liberties, says Kallstrom, the United States needs to start preparing now for the unthinkable.

Loose Nukes

Nuclear terrorism seems like an awesome threat to world security. How concerned do we really need to be?

At first glance, many people think that nuclear bombs would make an ideal terrorist weapon. Nuclear bombs can be made as small as a large suitcase and can instantly vaporize a large chunk of a big city. Bombs can be easily transported to most cities in the world by a boat, truck, or small plane. Skyscrapers can be used to provide low-cost air bursts, maximizing the kill radius. What's more, nuclear devices can be set off by remote control, and booby-trapped so attempts to disarm them will result in detonation.

But, in fact, nuclear bombs will probably not become trendy tools of garden-variety terrorists. Nuclear weapons are tremendously complicated to build, and they require significant amounts of highly radioactive bomb-grade nuclear weapons material, such as uranium-235 or plutonium-239. Only the most sophisticated nation-states have constructed and tested their own devices. Therefore, it seems unlikely that a terrorist organization would attempt to build its own nuclear weapons.

Instead of building a weapon, a terrorist organization would more likely attempt to steal a nuclear device, obtain it from a state sponsor, or purchase it on the black market. Fortunately, as far as we know, nuclear weapons are still guarded with the highest level of security. Furthermore, many bombs are equipped with computerized interlocks that prevent their detonation without proper authorization. Atomic weapons are so obviously important to control that it seems doubtful that they will escape into terrorist hands.

While popular culture has focused on the risks posed by nuclear explosive devices, a far more likely terrorist threat is the intentional scattering of radioactive material. Compared with nuclear weapons, there is surprisingly little control over radioactive nuclear material. This material is available from numerous sources--radioactive waste, laboratory and medical supplies, even industrial radiation generators--and many of these sources are poorly guarded. And this material can be a powerful terrorist weapon all by itself, virtually guaranteeing cancer for anyone who is properly exposed.

Using plutonium as a radiological terror weapon has many advantages over using that same plutonium in a bomb. A terrorist can blow up a nuclear bomb only once, but that same terrorist can divide a pile of plutonium into many little pieces, each of which can be used separately. A terrorist organization might have a hard time convincing political leaders and the media that it really has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City, and that it is not simply bluffing. On the other hand, that same terrorist organization could easily shave off a few milligrams of plutonium, seal it in a piece of plastic, and send it to ABC News for analysis.

Another problem with nuclear bomb terrorism is that the devices simply kill too many people over too wide an area. Who would capitulate to a terrorist organization that blew up Hartford, Connecticut? On the other hand, a terrorist organization that released small bits of radioactive plutonium at key subway stations week after week might eventually get somebody to take its demands seriously. For all of these reasons, radiological terrorism is sure to be a more serious threat than nuclear bomb terrorism in the coming years. Fortunately, even this threat can be managed.

While the terrorists might be willing to die for their cause, the suppliers of the materials might be wary of being poisoned. Furthermore, the radiation itself can act as a beacon for the authorities, bringing them to the terrorists' lair. The Sandia National Laboratories has developed a series of portable neutron- and gamma-radiation detectors designed to be used by the Department of Energy's Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST). A terrorist who threatened to disperse a few grams of plutonium might soon find himself surrounded.

Current disarmament policy ignores the risk of radiological terrorism by failing to provide for the safe disposal of nuclear materials after they are removed from Russian warheads. Says political scientist Beres:

We may have been reducing the risk of international war and increasing the risk of nuclear terrorism by not paying for the safekeeping or disposal of the resulting material. Nuclear scientists desperate for cash are selling [nuclear] material. . . . The security of humankind is dependent on some poor scientists in Russia not having money to buy a refrigerator. It would be cheaper to buy him a refrigerator.

In many parts of the world, including the United States, terrorists don't even need to obtain nuclear materials in order to engage in nuclear terrorism--all they need to do is bomb a nuclear power plant. Most nuclear power plants were built at a time when conventional weapons could not pierce a typical reactor's five- to ten-foot-thick reinforced concrete containment vessels. As a result, reactors were defended against nuclear attacks and internal sabotage, but not against the high-powered, armor-piercing, mobile conventional weapons developed in recent years. In his book Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: An Unrecognized Military Peril, Bennett Ramberg notes that a 2,000 pound conventional bomb can penetrate more than 11 feet of concrete and up to 15 inches of steel. "Heavy, shaped charges are even more effective," he notes. Destroyed with conventional weapons, a typical nuclear power plant could contaminate 10,000 square kilometers.

The nature of the nuclear threat is such that a global antiterrorism monitoring effort will prove to be far more effective if we monitor potential sources of radioactive materials rather than potential terrorists. After all, we know where the nuclear material is; we don't know who the terrorists may be. Monitoring the material is cheaper and presents fewer civil liberties issues.

Chemical-Biological Terrorism

On September 17, 1984, the Wasco-Sherman Public Health Department in Oregon starting receiving reports of people sick with fever, chills, headache, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, and bloody stools. All of the people had eaten at one of two restaurants in The Dalles, Oregon. Doctors who performed stool cultures determined that the patients were suffering an outbreak of Salmonella Typhimurium. The outbreak eventually affected more than 38 restaurants and sickened 751 people--45 of whom had to be hospitalized.

Investigators were unable to explain the cause of the poisonings. There seemed to be no apparent correlation between the cases, other than the fact that many people had eaten from salad bars. At one restaurant, everybody who had used the blue cheese dressing got sick; at another restaurant, it was the ranch dressing. One of the poisoned restaurants had prepared two private banquets--both with salad bars--and nobody at these functions had come down with the disease. Other people with Salmonella had consumed only the coffee.

Laboratory analyses of the cultured stool samples were stranger still. All of the bacteria shared a set of exceedingly rare characteristics. For example, the strain in the samples did not ferment the sugar alcohol dulcitol, even though 98% of the Salmonella responsible for traditional Salmonella poisonings do ferment dulcitol. Even more confusing, all of the Salmonella collected from the victims had identical plasmids and antibiogram structure; however, in a national survey conducted between 1979 and 1980 of 233 strains of Salmonella Typhimurium, no other bacteria had a profile that matched.

Law enforcement officials immediately suspected that the outbreak was intentional. But they couldn't figure out who did it or why--there was no apparent motive. A prime suspect was the community of followers of the Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh, who had established a town called Rajneeshpuram on the outskirts of The Dalles and had been at odds with the town's original inhabitants ever since. Indeed, the Rajneeshpuram charter was being challenged in court, and the county commissioners had denied the group building permits. In retaliation, followers were running their own candidates for the county commission in the November 1984 election. Numerous election irregularities had been noted.

As the investigation proceeded, an important piece of evidence emerged tying the Rajneeshpuram group to the poisonings: the commune's medical laboratory had ordered a vial of Salmonella Typhimurium from the American Type Culture Collection in Rockville, Maryland, a biomedical supply firm. In 1985, Oregon state and FBI investigators raided the clinic laboratory at Rajneeshpuram. There they found an open vial of Salmonella Typhimurium. Laboratory tests on the bacteria inside the vial found that it was indistinguishable from the strains involved in the outbreak. Apparently, the community's medical laboratory had cultured large quantities of the bacteria. Group members had then taken the cultures to restaurants and poured them into salad bar dressings and coffee creamers when nobody was looking.

Bioterrorism Attack in Oregon

This graph tracks the single largest act of biological terrorism on U.S. soil. Between September 9 and October 20, 1984, more than 750 people infected with the Salmonella bacteria presented themselves at clinics and hospitals in The Dalles, Oregon. These people were intentionally infected by a religious community that was attempting to calibrate a biological weapon. The community planned to use its weapon on the eve of an upcoming election. Group members, who would avoid exposure, would then be able to influence the outcome of the voting. [Artist's drawing courtesy Chris Reilley, Reilley Design]

Finally, an informant helped piece together the story. According to the informant, the poisonings in September were a test run for the group's election eve plans. The group's goal was to make so many people sick on the day of the election that the group's own candidates could win. The attack in September had been a test to determine the correct amount of bacteria to use. A previous test run in August had been unsuccessful.

On the strength of the evidence and the testimony, two community members were indicted on March 19, 1986, for product tampering. The defendants pled guilty in April 1986 and were sentenced to four and a half years in prison each. One was Rajneesh's chief of staff, Ma Anand Sheela, who was released and deported to Europe after serving two and a half years.

The poisoning of more than 700 Americans by a religious community should have been a newsworthy event. However, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) investigators decided not to publicize the event further for fear that it might inspire copycat poisonings similar to the copycat Tylenol-cyanide poisonings that took place in 1982. "A report of the findings of the CDC investigation was distributed to state and territorial public health officials, but not submitted for publication," reads an article published in the August 6, 1997 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The incident received only scant attention in the national press. The authors only decided to publicize the poisonings after the 1995 Japanese nerve gas attacks. "It is hoped that wider dissemination today of the epidemiologic findings from The Dalles outbreak will lead to greater awareness of the possibility of other incidents and earlier recognition, when or if a similar incident occurs," the article's authors said.

The scientists at Rajneeshpuram aren't the only people who have bought potentially deadly organisms through the mail. On May 5, 1995, a laboratory technician in Ohio named Larry Harris ordered samples of bubonic plague from the same American Type Culture Collection. The company didn't know that Harris was actually a member of a white supremacist organization who had written the request on fake letterhead; they only thought to check his credit card number, not his scientific credentials. The vial probably would have been sent out if Harris hadn't been so impatient: four days after he placed his order, he called up to find out what was taking so long. Suddenly suspicious, the company contacted federal authorities. Harris pled guilty to mail fraud in November 1995.

The Harris incident gained national attention. The following year, Congress added provisions to the 1996 Antiterrorism Law requiring the Centers for Disease Control to closely monitor the shipments of infectious agents. In other words, the CDC would start keeping an eye on the American Type Culture Collection. But the scientists who reported on their handling of the Salmonella outbreak in Oregon don't think that this sort of legislation will ultimately be very effective at stopping acts of biological terrorism:

Can another outbreak like the one that occurred in The Dalles be prevented? It seems unlikely that any regulation of commercially available pathogens could have prevented this outbreak. It would not be necessary to purchase them because this type of culture could be easily obtained from clinical isolates or from raw foods of animal origin available in grocery stores. Production of large quantities of bacteria is inexpensive and involves simple equipment and skills. Standard practices for maintaining salad bars may be inadequate to prevent similar outbreaks in the future with salmonellae or other pathogens. As in many areas of our open society, current practices are inadequate to prevent deliberate contamination of food items by customers.

Biological agents carry fundamental dangers for society, writes Leonard A. Cole in the December 1996 issue of Scientific American: "Chemical agents are inanimate, but bacteria, viruses and other live agents may be contagious and reproductive. If they become established in the environment, they may multiply. Unlike any other weapon, they can become more dangerous over time." And contamination can last a long time, he notes: "Gruinard Island, off the coast of Scotland, remained infected with anthrax spores for 40 years after biological warfare tests were carried out there in the 1940s."

In the science fiction thriller Twelve Monkeys (Universal Pictures, 1996), director Terry Gilliam tells the story of an environmental terrorist who steals a deadly virus from a genetic engineering laboratory in Philadelphia, then releases it in strategic cities throughout the world. The result: 90% of the human race dies. Those who remain "live underground like animals," says Cole (Bruce Willis), the film's protagonist. Sent back from the year 2020 to the pre-plague Earth, his mission is to get a sample of the original plague organism so that a cure can be found.

Aside from the fantasy of time travel, the premise of Twelve Monkeys is basically sound. A single disease could sweep across the planet, killing the people and leaving the vegetation and the animals alone. There is even historical precedent.

In 1633, smallpox swept through Native American settlements in New England. In the book Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen persuasively argues that somewhere between 10 and 20 million people lived in the Americas at the time Columbus arrived; more than 95% of them were killed by disease. Arguably, some of these deaths were intentional, the result of the colonists giving the Indians blankets and other goods that had been used by people infected with smallpox. "Whole towns were depopulated," reads an account from 1829 that cited an earlier, unnamed authority. "The living were not able to bury the dead; and their bodies were found lying above ground many years after. The Massachusetts Indians are said to have been reduced from 30,000 to 300 fighting men."

As we've seen here, it's all but impossible to prevent future biological attacks on U.S. soil: there are simply too many ways to obtain and disburse biological agents. The fact that we haven't had more biowarfare or bioterrorist attacks in this country, or elsewhere in the world, could very well mean that the threats of such attacks are overstated. Nevertheless, the impact would be so dramatic that we must prepare for them.

Information Warfare

Back at the FBI's New York Headquarters, what really had James Kallstrom worried wasn't the threat of biological or nuclear terrorism--it was the threat of attacks launched through computer networks, designed to create havoc with computers belonging to banks, hospitals, transportation systems, and other pillars of our society. Says Kallstrom:

We are using the efficiencies of technology and the Information Age to control everyday things like traffic lights, 911 systems, the environment of buildings, the communications network, and the power grid. We even control the water supply with computers. We are doing more and more things like that. In the old days. . . . Fort Knox was the symbol of how we protected things of great value: we put them in buildings with thick walls and concrete. We put armed guards at the doors, with sophisticated multiple locks and locking bars. We could even build a moat and fill it with alligators. . . . Today [with] things of that same value, you wonder if some teenager is going to go in on the phone lines and steal it all. We are not equipped to deal with those issues both in the government and private industry.

Computers pose a fundamentally different kind of security problem because unlike other machines, computers are general purpose. Change the program, and the computer's behavior changes. The atoms that make up the concrete walls of Fort Knox can't be magically rearranged into poison gas that would kill the soldiers inside the compound, but a computer that's controlling a chemical manufacturing plant can be programmed or reprogrammed to open the wrong valves and blow it up. Computer malfunctions have already caused such explosions. As far as we know, they have been accidents.

One participant at the 1997 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in Burlingame, California, put it this way: "I reasonably believe that if I buy a vacuum cleaner it is not going to suck money out of my wallet and send it to the vacuum cleaner's vendor. But with a computer, there is no way to assure that [a program I download from the Internet] won't take money out of my Microsoft Money application" and send it over the wire to somebody else. Compounding this problem is the push among businesses and computer users for new features and increased connectivity with the outside world--even if those features and connectivity can be exploited by a knowledgeable attacker.

Most business leaders, Kallstrom said, seem completely unequipped to even understand the problem. Kallstrom believes that American companies have created a two-tier system, with upper management that is "generally technically illiterate" and young employees who are very knowledgeable about technology but not very knowledgeable about the company itself, its goals, its history, or its responsibilities. As a result, "you have a whole hierarchy of people who do not know what is going on, who are delegating tremendous amounts of power and responsibility to people with no experience, to people who are more in it for the 'I' than the 'us'."

Newspapers and television stories often celebrate teenagers who can break into important banking, medical, or military computers with relative ease. Even when the press is less than favorable, the threat of punishment is rarely a deterrent.

In April 1996, Attorney General Janet Reno announced that the FBI had conducted the first Internet wiretap. An attacker had infiltrated computers at Harvard University and used them to break into systems at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and Naval Research Labs--then used those facilities to launch attacks against other machines. Ultimately, the attacker broke into military and commercial systems from California to South Korea to Hawaii. The wiretap was eventually traced back to Argentina, and a high-school student named Julio Cesar Ardita. The investigation ended there, because Argentina would not extradite the young offender, as his actions were not a crime in his native land. (In December 1997, Ardita waived extradition and pleaded guilty; he was fined $5,000 and received three years probation.)

In another case, a mentally troubled youth, who operated under the handle "Phantom Dialer," relentlessly broke into computers at universities, major corporations, banks, government agencies, and even top-secret nuclear weapons research facilities. Although he was eventually apprehended by the FBI, authorities decided not to press charges because they thought that no jury would convict.

The next time the United States is engaged in an unpopular war, could six graduate students at the University of Washington who disagree with the war's aims plug in to the Internet and bring U.S. military forces to a halt? Or could a teenager whose mother gets fired from a bank decide to take revenge into his own hands, and erase the information stored in the bank's computers? The new technology has put a tremendous amount of power into the hands of people who may not be capable of using it judiciously. The effect is inherently destabilizing.

Thought Crime

For years, civil libertarian groups have been arguing against the FBI's attempts to expand its power, saying that the FBI has an institutional history that proves it cannot be trusted to honor people's constitutional rights.

Statements that the FBI is building lists of hostile persons and infiltrating groups cause great concern for many civil libertarians, given the long history of institutional abuse by the FBI and the U.S. government of people who hold unpopular political viewpoints or belong to ethnic minorities. Often these abuses have been carried out under the pretext of national security during times of war. At these times, the citizens of the country, legislators, the executive branch, and even the U.S. court system have conspired to create an atmosphere of fear, hate, and intolerance. To understand people's fears for the future, it is only necessary to look briefly into the past.

The history of the modern surveillance state dates to World War I. Prior to the war, low-level attacks on civil liberties were widespread and tolerated, writes historian Paul Murphy, author of World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties. But the attacks were never organized on a national scale.

At the outset of World War I, the U.S. Bureau of Investigation (the forerunner of the FBI) had only a hundred agents. There was no way the Bureau could staff up in time for wartime activities. Fearful of sabotage and subversion within the U.S., Albert M. Briggs, a Chicago advertising executive, created the American Protective League to help out:

By the middle of June 1917, the league had branches in almost 600 cities and towns and a membership of nearly 100,000. At its height the membership reached 250,000. Members paid $1.00 to get a badge which first said "Secret Service Division" and later (after the Treasury Department protested about possible confusion with its Secret Service) "Auxiliary to the U.S. Department of Justice." From its Washington, D.C. headquarters, the American Protective League used Justice Department stationery and operated as if its members were formal deputies of that body. The result was appalling to many. Having no formal statutory authority to make arrests, operatives of the league engaged in a variety of investigations probing the loyalty of citizens, the actions of the draft exemption board, the actual status of conscientious objectors, and the monitoring, in thousands of cases, of suspicious activities reported by people throughout the country in response to appeals for vigilance in detecting spies and persons guilty of sabotage. So vigorous did its members become in their crusade against disloyalty that the Justice Department eventually sought to restrain league agents.

The American Protective League was just one of many quasi-official organizations that sprung up during the war. Others were the Home Defense League, the Boy Spies of America, the Sedition Slammers, and the Terrible Threateners. Originally, these organizations found and punished Americans who spoke out against the war. But soon they started going after people who spoke out against any part of American life.

As the war continued, the U.S. government began using the war as a pretext to attack the country's burgeoning labor movement. The most vicious attacks were those against the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the Wobblies:

In response to mounting local hysteria regarding Wobblies, [Attorney General] Gregory condoned the mass prosecution of the leaders of the organization. Local IWW headquarters were raided, frequently without search warrants, and fishing expeditions were conducted by Bureau of Investigation agents into its books, accounts, letters, and papers. Gregory seldom sought to discriminate between people who subscribed to the IWW's theories and ideology and members who had committed crimes punishable under federal law. (Justice Department officials also warned individuals who might be inclined to support the IWW or call for fair trials against contributing to "so-called 'civil liberties' . . . 'popular council,' 'legal advice,' or anti-war organizations," hinting that these groups were federated in a disloyal conspiracy to impede the prosecution of the war.

The United States postmaster general, A. S. Burleson, had a special vendetta against the IWW. Burleson refused to deliver the IWW's mail, saying that it was subversive. When the Milwaukee Leader, a socialist publication, published an advertisement attempting to raise funds for the IWW's defense, the Post Office Department denied the Leader its second-class mailing privileges. The Leader sued the postmaster. Ultimately, the case was decided in the Supreme Court, which upheld Burleson's censorship policies in Milwaukee Publishing Co. v. Burleson.

The U.S. government's efforts to sell the war to the American people were in part responsible for the hysteria. The government's Committee on Public Information, set up by an emergency presidential order, distributed propaganda to schools and colleges that explained why America was at war:

These booklets included "proof" of extensive disloyalty in the United States and "proof" that Germans regularly committed unspeakable atrocities. . . . Other pamphlets were deliberately anti-Germany, frequently filled with exaggerated charges about the decadence of German culture, German values, and German behavior. Allegedly, German agents were behind most strikes in the United States, German money was used to finance pacifist newspapers, and German agents were out to impose the worst attributes of Prussianism upon the American people. These documents fed the notion that German-Americans were disloyal and that pacifists were pro-German, and by so impugning their loyalty, they opened both up to hostility and harassment from a variety of individuals and groups.

The dangers of wartime are often used to justify action on long-standing prejudices. The United States interned more than 100,000 Japanese at the start of World War II, including 79,000 people who were native-born. Detailed lists of Japanese-American names and addresses were provided to the War Department by the Census Bureau without court order, despite the fact that census records are required by law to be confidential for 99 years. But this wasn't the start of anti-Japanese sentiment in American culture, only a high point. U.S. law had institutionalized discrimination against the Japanese for more than a hundred years. These laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in the 1922 case of Ozawa v. United States that Japanese and other Asians were ineligible for naturalization by reason of their race. Likewise, the Supreme Court upheld the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II, even though the vast majority of them had committed no crime.

In the 1950s, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI unleashed its investigatory powers against suspected Communists and homosexuals in positions of power throughout the United States. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Bureau infiltrated student organizations on college campuses. The FBI has investigated and infiltrated women's groups, black groups, environmental groups, and gay groups. All of these actions have been taken for the alleged purpose of protecting the safety of Americans and fighting domestic terrorism.

The problem, then, isn't that the FBI and other organizations don't legitimately need new powers to fight new threats. The problem is that the FBI, and the country at large, have shown a willingness to get caught up in the issues of the day and unfairly target, prosecute, and imprison individuals for what they say and believe, rather than for what they actually do. This makes it very difficult to respect the FBI's claims that aggressive new technologies and mandates are required for tracking and stopping terrorists and murderers. What possible assurance can the Bureau give that such power won't be abused in the future as it has been abused in the past?

Interception

One of the most powerful tools in the fight against crime, subversion, and rebellion is the power to intercept written or spoken communications. It is also the one power that the FBI has fought the hardest to maintain.

Interception goes back a long way in American history. In 1624, Governor Bradford of the fledgling Plymouth Colony followed a supply ship bound for England out to sea, boarded her, and opened the letters that the colony's first minister had written to his associates back in England. He returned with the letters and confronted the Reverend Mr. Lyford before a town meeting. Lyford remained silent, but his accomplice Oldham tried to incite a rebellion, saying that Bradford was unfit to govern because he had opened private letters. But Bradford argued that he was justified in opening letters "to prevent the mischief and ruin that this conspiracy and plots of theirs, would bring on this poor Colony."

Writes David Flaherty in his Ph.D. thesis on privacy in precolonial America:

This episode highlights the colonial attitude toward opening the letters of other individuals. During the precarious early years of settlement, and at a time of crisis, the governor of a colony felt obliged to explain why he had opened another's letters. He believed that security outranked privacy as a value under such circumstances. That a seventeenth-century New England governor felt even an element of uncertainty about the correctness of his action suggests an obvious assumption by the populace that the mails should be private.

The ability to open the mails in secret is a seductive one--so seductive that it quickly encourages abuse. According to Flaherty, England's Post Office Act of 1710 forbade opening someone's mail "except by an express Warrant in Writing under the Hand of one of the Principal Secretaries of State for every such opening." With this limited license to search the mail, England created "the Secret Office" with employees so skilled that they could easily open the mail without leaving any indication that it had been tampered with. But by 1735, members of Parliament were complaining that their mail was being routinely opened. In fact, they said in a parliamentary debate, the Secret Office opened so many letters that nobody who had anything to hide would use the postal service. Thus, "the Liberty given to break open letters at the post-office could now serve no purpose, but to enable the little clerks about that office to pry into the private affairs of every merchant, and of every gentleman in the kingdom."

Interception has been a part of electronic communications from the start. Shortly after Samuel F. B. Morse introduced the telegraph in 1845, people were worrying about the confidentiality of the messages transmitted with the device. During the Civil War, both Union and Confederate troops intercepted electronic messages behind enemy lines, thereby gaining intelligence on troop movements and strengths. After the war, many states experimented with wiretapping. The federal government passed its first wiretap law in 1918, allowing the technique to be used for counterespionage tools. Wiretapping proved so effective, however, that law enforcement continued to use it after the war to fight bootleggers and crack down on the rampant crime spawned during Prohibition.

In the years that followed, the federal government continued to use wiretaps and other forms of electronic surveillance. In the 1950s, FBI agents used "spike mikes" to wiretap homes, offices, and apartments without the knowledge of the occupants--and without court orders. The U.S. Supreme Court approved the practice in the 1954 case Irvine v. California, ruling that since conversations were not tangible property, and since the federal agents had not actually trespassed into the suspect's office, no law was broken.

The Court reversed itself in 1961, ruling in the case of Silverman v. United States that information obtained from a spike mike was inadmissible. In 1967, the Court ruled in the case of Katz v. United States that public telephone booths could not be tapped without a warrant. The Court's reasoning: despite the fact that public phones are in public places, people using the phones have a reasonable expectation of privacy. After the ruling, Congress passed the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control Act, officially authorizing the use of wiretaps when particular procedures were followed.

In the years since, the electronic interception of spoken conversations has become one of the most powerful crime-fighting tools at the disposal of law enforcement agencies. Interception plays many key roles:

• Intercepts provide evidence of past crimes that have been committed.
• Intercepts provide the names of accomplices.
• Intercepts provide details on, and plans for, future illegal activities.

In many ways, wiretaps and electronic bugs provide law enforcement with windows directly into the criminal mind. Once an arrest is made, the recordings of interceptions can provide invaluable evidence in the courtroom. This is why police regard wiretaps and electronic listening devices as their ultimate weapon in the fight against crime.

Despite their awesome power, wiretaps are used with surprising reticence in day-to-day law enforcement. In 1998, for example, only 1,329 wiretap applications were approved in the United States by federal and state judges, according to the 1999 Wiretap Report, published by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. There were also an unreported number of wiretaps within the U.S. for national security purposes.

Wiretaps do make a difference. In 1998, a total of 3,450 persons were arrested as a result of electronic surveillance; in one case, a single wiretap for a narcotics investigation in the Northern District of Ohio resulted in the arrest and conviction of 54 persons. In Florida, a cellular telephone wiretap that was placed in conjunction with a narcotics investigation resulted in ten arrests and three convictions. In Schenectady, New York, "a 30-day wiretap that was part of a gambling investigation resulted in the arrest of eight persons, five of whom were convicted." The Wiretap Report goes on to note, "When the targets heard their own voices on the taps, the impact (was) obvious."

As the following table makes clear, the overwhelming number of wiretaps are in conjunction with drug trafficking investigations. The Wiretap Report quotes an official who was involved in a North Carolina investigation, which ultimately led to 21 arrests and 16 convictions:

Without the authorized interception, the investigators would not have learned that the drug trafficking activities of the defendants were related to a multi-state drug trafficking organization which was responsible for the importation and distribution of hundreds of kilograms of cocaine and cocaine base.

In yet another case, a New York wiretap led to six convictions and the forfeiture of $1 million from a targeted business. But drugs aren't the only target: in 1996, a wiretap was successfully used to crack a Nigerian credit card ring that "used telephones to commit fraud and to sell illegally obtained credit card information around the world.

Offense Under Investigation	Number of Wiretap Orders	Percent of Total Intercepts
Bribery	9	1%
Gambling	93	7%
Homicide and assault	53	4%
Kidnapping	5	0%
Larceny and theft	19	1%
Loansharking, usury, and extortion	12	1%
Narcotics	955	72%
Racketeering	153	12%
Other	30	2%
TOTAL	1329	100%

The average wiretap lasts just 28 days; if an investigator wishes to run a wiretap for more than 30 days, explicit permission must be given by the court. The longest wiretap in U.S. history lasted 2,073 days--more than five years--and was extended 146 times. The wiretap was for an organized crime investigation in New York. The second longest wiretap in U.S. history ran 600 days; it was for a narcotics investigation in Los Angeles.

Ironically, the relatively small number of wiretaps performed each year is largely responsible for their continued effectiveness. Unlike the Parliament members who sent letters in eighteenth-century England, few criminals in twentieth-century America imagine that their phones are actually being wiretapped. If wiretaps were generally employed in criminal investigations, criminals would be more careful about what they said over the telephone.

For the most part, wiretaps were seen as a slightly arcane and seedy aspect of law enforcement until the early 1990s, when the FBI started having problems getting new wiretap orders placed in major metropolitan areas. The problem wasn't a lack of funds or manpower, but one of technology. For the first 60 years of telephony, putting a wiretap on somebody's telephone was no more difficult than clipping a pair of alligator clips to the wires. But as the telephone system started going digital in the 1980s, law enforcement discovered that its ability to intercept conversations was being shut out by the new technology. The problem was particularly acute with the New York City cellular telephone system. Although unencrypted analog cellular telephone conversations could easily be picked up by a hand-held scanner, zeroing in on a particular cellular telephone conversation was much more difficult. The only practical place to do the tap was at the cellular telephone switch through a special technical port. One of the cellular systems installed in New York City, an AT&T Autoplex 1000 that could handle 150,000 subscribers, had just seven technical ports. Police often had to wait for months to get their cellular wiretap orders enacted.

More mundane technologies were causing problems for the FBI as well. Most wiretaps require the insertion of a special recording device across the wires of a suspect's telephone line. With call forwarding, a suspect could have calls automatically redirected to another telephone number--across town, across the country, or across the world, simultaneously bypassing the wiretap and possibly changing jurisdiction. Digital ISDN telephones presented further problems still: to tap ISDN lines requires special equipment, but when ISDN was first deployed, such equipment was not available to law enforcement agencies. Anybody using a digital phone was all but guaranteed an untappable line.

First, the FBI tried working quietly with various telephone company providers to get them to build new eavesdropping provisions into their systems. But according to documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the FBI went overboard. Instead of just trying to maintain the status quo, the FBI wanted new equipment to be built with provisions for remote monitoring, so that FBI officials could set up the monitoring of telephones without the phone company's knowledge or cooperation. Further, the FBI wanted the telecommunication networks designed so users would be unable to tell if monitoring was taking place. And, finally, they wanted the monitoring capacity greatly expanded over what was presently available.

When the FBI failed in its quiet efforts, the Bureau drafted legislation that would force telephone companies and equipment manufacturers to comply with its demands. Originally called the Digital Telephony Act, the law was renamed the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, and was passed, over the objections of civil libertarians, in October 1994. According to various estimates, the cost of the wiretap upgrade for the nation's telephone system is somewhere between $300 million and $1 billion.

Advanced wiretapping is just one way the FBI hopes to exploit new communications technology for law enforcement purposes. Wireless telephone systems, for example, need to track the location of every hand-held phone so the phone can be made to ring if someone should call it. To provide Enhanced 911 service to cell phones, the wireless providers must install equipment that can pinpoint the location of 60% of all phones to within 100 meters. The FBI would like to have access to these systems so they could track criminals who are carrying the phones. Already, similar systems in Europe have been used to solve many crimes.

Looking into the future, it's not hard to see how advanced recognition technologies could be combined with tracking technologies to build a truly impressive domestic intelligence gathering machine. Today, the FBI can place a wiretap on a specific telephone line. In the future, the FBI might wiretap specific people--and have the telephone system automatically recognize their voices and record their phone conversations, wherever they're calling from. One of the key pieces of evidence in the Oklahoma City bombing trial was a videotape of the Ryder rental truck as it approached its target. In the future, the FBI could construct a network of all of the surveillance cameras in a city to automatically locate and track suspected terrorists. The FBI might even conduct routine searches of purchasing records throughout the United States to see if any person or group is systematically buying all of the components necessary to create a bomb or biological weapon.

Individually, any of these interception techniques might sound like a good idea. But if such invasive measures are adopted, they will not come cheap. And if the FBI fails to turn up new terrorists engaged in nuclear, biological, or chemical attacks, the Bureau will be increasingly pressured by the lawmakers footing the bill to use its newfound capabilities for traditional crime-fighting.

Brain Wiretapping

Ultimately, wiretapping cannot stop all acts of terror, because lone terrorists are unlikely to discuss their plans with others. Catching these people will require an even more invasive monitoring technique: brain wiretapping.

Stories of mind reading go back thousands of years, although most accounts appear to be apocryphal at best. But what if mind reading could be reliably perfected, and performed at will? Allegedly, many programs were conducted by the U.S. military in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s to find ways to turn myth into reality. One program, called Star Gate, focused on remote viewing, and was contracted to SRI International. According to numerous reports, the SRI team discovered at least seven people who could reliably describe the actions, scenes, and thoughts of people at a great distance. But the project was terminated in 1995 after it was ridiculed by a Congressional investigation.

Imagine how simple law enforcement would be if police could simply look into the minds of suspects. Forget about the subjective vagaries of judges and juries: police could instantly know who was guilty and who innocent. They could easily track down and arrest the co-conspirators.

Police departments have been fascinated with lie detectors, or polygraph machines, since they were introduced in 1924. The lie detector records a person's galvanic skin response, pulse rate, and respiration as the person is asked questions. When a person feels stress from lying or other strong emotions, these quantities change--sometimes dramatically.

The problem with lie detectors is that, while some people do experience these reactions, others don't. Some people, in fact, experience these involuntary reactions when they tell the truth! According to Doug Williams, a licensed polygrapher and six-year veteran of the Oklahoma City Police Department's Internal Affairs Division, people who take a lie detector test and tell the truth "have only a 50% chance of passing." On the other hand, just as many people can pass the test while lying. Williams now teaches people how to fake positive tests and has even written a book, How to Sting the Lie Detector Test.

Yet another form of brain wiretapping involves drugs that reduce voluntary inhibition. Spy movies frequently feature "truth serums" which, when properly administered, cause the captured operative to spill the beans. Many drugs seem to have truth serum-like effects, including chloral hydrate, some barbiturates, sodium amytal, sodium amybarbital, and even recreational drugs like LSD, methylenedioxymethamphetamine (Ecstasy) and ordinary alcohol. But unlike spies who operate beyond the law, police are generally barred from using drugs. Even if they weren't, these drugs are unpredictable, often producing fantasy instead of the truth.

True brain wiretapping won't come from mystics, physiological measurements, or drugs. It will come from attempts to map the human brain. Two systems currently being used for this purpose are functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET). The fMRI system is tuned to look for blood. The theory is that when brain cells are doing work, they need more oxygen, so the blood vessels around the brain cells expand slightly. By taking several full-brain MRI scans in rapid succession, the expansion of the blood vessels can be detected. PET uses radioactive glucose to see which parts of the brain are consuming the most energy.

The mapping task is dramatically complicated by how brains are made. Unlike mass-produced computers, brains grow organically. The position of every neuron isn't preprogrammed. Instead, the growing brain learns how to learn. The result is that everybody's brain is a little different.

In 1993, I volunteered for a series of fMRI experiments at Massachusetts General Hospital. The purpose of the experiments was to identify regions of the human brain involved with language acquisition. For the experiment, I lay on my back on a plastic gurney. Sandbags were wedged around my head so it couldn't move. I was then rolled into the machine. A small plastic screen was placed in front of my eyes.

During the experiment, words and images were displayed on the screen. While I looked at them, the fMRI took images from the inside of my brain. A year after I participated in the study, the group published a paper showing how specific areas of the brain were linked with specific aspects of language. Since then, there have been many studies, using both fMRI and PET, which continue to map out different parts of the brain.

Brain mapping is increasingly vital for brain surgery. When a patient undergoes surgery for cancer, it's important that the doctor not damage key areas of the brain--like those having to do with speech or motion or memory--on the way in. The same sort of precision is needed when planning high-dose radiation therapy.

The University of Washington (UW) Medical Center is experimenting with another kind of brain mapping used in conjunction with brain surgery. With this form of mapping, the patient's skin is cut, the skull is sawed open, and part of it is removed to expose the surface of the brain. Different spots are then stimulated with an electrical current while the neurosurgeon asks the patient what he or she is experiencing. As each brain function center is identified, a small numbered tag roughly half an inch in diameter is put on the brain's surface, like a little 3M Post-It note. The little stickers tell the physician where not to cut. The doctors at UW hope they can eventually use a noninvasive technique such as fMRI, but right now it isn't accurate enough. The UW group is headed by Dr. George A. Ojemann; similar work is being done at Johns Hopkins University by Dr. Barry Gordon.

As we move forward, approaches such as these, which look crude today, will only improve. One driving factor will be the so-called man-to-machine interfaces, or MTM, that researchers are creating with the hope of letting quadriplegic accident victims use computers to regain control over their lives. If these systems could be perfected, they might be able to eliminate the need for typing among able-bodied individuals as well. Eventually, systems might be able to decode conscious thoughts or even stored memories.

The Moral Duty to Torture

So here is the root of the conflict: new technologies are creating tremendous new opportunities for violent groups to inflict death and destruction on society as a whole. At the same time, new technologies are also giving law enforcement agencies the ability to conduct universal surveillance of the citizenry in ways that have never before been imaginable. Should law enforcement organizations engage in widespread, pervasive surveillance to deal with the rising risk of megaterrorists?

Charles Black, one of the great civil rights lawyers of the 1950s and 1960s, used to pose a question to his first year class on constitutional law at Yale University: "Suppose you are a policeman in New York City and you have a guy you know has planted an atomic bomb with a timer that is set to go off the next day. Are you justified in torturing him under the Constitution? Are you justified at all?"

Michael Froomkin, a law professor at the University of Miami and one of Black's former students, remembers this problem well. "The first thing is that torture is clearly prohibited under the Constitution," explains Froomkin. Nevertheless, Froomkin says that if he were the officer, he might feel that he had a "moral duty" to torture the criminal, have the bomb disabled, and then resign from the force and face the consequences. "You are talking about desperate circumstances justifying desperate acts. A lot of this goes down to your level of moral intuition."

Torture is a good standard to use, says Froomkin: if torture is morally justified, then certainly wiretapping, video surveillance, fingerprint identification, and other modern crime-fighting technologies are justified as well. And, indeed, some countries have legitimized torture as a means of fighting terrorism. Israel, for example, has used physical force against suspected terrorists to learn the details of planned terrorist events. But many people, governments, and the United Nations objected to Israel's use of state-sponsored torture. The argument is simple: torture destroys the moral credibility of those who employ it. Recently, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that torture is not acceptable under Israeli law, possibly ending the practice of torture in Israel.

Back at Purdue University, Professor Louis Rene Beres believes that the U.S. government may need the right to engage in warrantless arrests, pervasive monitoring, and even assassinations to prevent specific cases of nuclear attacks by terrorists--especially in cases where the intelligence is good and time is short. "If you know that a particular group has secreted a device, and the only way to prevent its use would be an extralegal execution, would you sanction that?" asks Purdue's Beres.

For Beres, the answer to this question is a simple, unqualified "yes." It would be better, argues Beres, to temporarily suspend the protections of the Constitution than to allow millions of people to die. For those who disagree with him, he says, "If you feel that the danger of a warrantless arrest is greater than the danger of nuclear annihilation, then that is your decision. . . . Thomas Jefferson did not live in the Nuclear Age. He could not contemplate the destructive forces."

A Better Solution

Unfortunately, while massive, all-encompassing surveillance might work against chemical and nuclear terrorism, this technique is ultimately useless against terrorists who employ biological agents. That's because dangerous bacteria, viruses, and fungi occur naturally in the environment. "Anthrax is found all over the American Southwest," says Kathleen C. Bailey, a former assistant director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. "It's called Sheep Shearer's Disease, because anthrax spores get in the sheep wool. . . . Every year we have 10, 15, or 20 cases."

Bacteria that produce botulism toxins are a constant risk for people who home-can meat and vegetables. Working alone, a potential terrorist who took just one or two college extension courses in microbiology could build a major biological weapons arsenal. All that person would require, Bailey says, is $10,000 worth of equipment and a basement room 15 feet square.

"If somebody wants to do it, you can't stop them," says Dr. Bailey. "If it is a terrorist group, you may be able to infiltrate them. But if it is a single individual, it is going to be extraordinarily hard to know in advance what that individual is doing in their garage, closet, or basement. . . . There are no emissions. With current technology, we have no way of sniffing out who is making anthrax in their basement."

Even if Congress burned the Constitution and turned the U.S. into a police state, says Bailey, it could not eliminate the bioterrorism threat. "Do you really think that you could catch the individual who wants to terrorize the population by making biological weapons? How are you going to know? You won't know which house to go to. Are you going to have one police officer for every individual on Earth, so they all can check up on each other? Even if you do that, you are going to have somebody make a mistake somewhere."

Instead, says Bailey, we should prepare for an attack by researching vaccines and treatments. "I recommend that we have good treatments and stay on top of what kinds of pathogens might be used by terrorists. And I think that it is important for the law enforcement authorities to make sure they know what is going on in terrorist groups."

We should likewise be monitoring the world around us for the first signs of a biological attack, says the Center for Nonproliferation Studies' Dr. Jonathan Tucker. Anthrax poisoning is treatable with antibiotics if the patient is treated within three days of exposure to the deadly spores. The problem is that the symptoms of anthrax poisoning usually don't occur until the third or fourth day. If we wait for people to present themselves to a hospital emergency room, they will surely die.

Instead, Tucker suggests placing low-cost air monitoring equipment in subways, large buildings, airports, and other areas that would make attractive targets for a biological attack. "In the subway you would have air samplers that would collect samples on a continuous basis. If they picked up some unusual aerosol an alarm would go off. Someone would actually come and analyze the sample on the filter." If the aerosol turned out to be anthrax, the public would be alerted.

Likewise, says Tucker, public safety officials need training, as well as money to buy equipment to handle the threat. In 1997, the Pentagon set aside $42 million to train local law enforcement in the handling of biological and chemical terrorist activities. But the money doesn't pay to purchase equipment, and the training is only for officials in the nation's 24 largest cities.

Similar monitoring and training could also control the threat of nuclear and chemical terrorism. Terrorism could also be fought by carefully monitoring existing nuclear and chemical stockpiles: that's provided for in the nuclear nonproliferation treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention. We could certainly go beyond what is called for by these treaties by further improving the security around nuclear, chemical, and biological facilities.

But many civil libertarians believe that law enforcement organizations are using the threat of terrorism as a justification for power grabs and budget expansions, much as the threat of sabotage was used during the First and Second World Wars to justify attacks on civil liberties.

Harvey Silverglate, a criminal defense lawyer in Boston who specializes in civil liberties issues, puts it this way:

I believe the threat of this kind of terrorism that you are talking about is grossly overstated. . . . I believe that it is intentionally overstated by law enforcement agencies intent on increasing their powers. Let me put it this way: I can't think offhand of any event in history of enormous destruction of life and property that was carried out by private individuals or groups rather than governments. Individuals, groups, gangs--the damage that they have done pales in significance when compared to the damage done by governments out of control. There is no example of a privately caused Holocaust in history.

Indeed, says Silverglate, all of the potential weapons of mass destruction discussed in this chapter were developed and perfected by governments. "Therefore," he says, "I would prefer to live in a world where governments were more circumscribed, rather than give governments enormous, unlimited powers to keep private terrorism circumscribed. I would rather live with a certain amount of private terrorism than with government totalitarianism."

Even if Silverglate is wrong, it's clear that the democratization of destructive technology, combined with the ever-shrinking size of the terrorist cell, is going to make pervasive monitoring of potential kooks and terrorists a losing proposition. It's tempting to think that all we need to do is to give up our civil liberties, specifically, our right to privacy, and we will be protected evermore against terrorist attacks. But such a choice is likely a fool's bargain, since no such assurances could ever be made.

Instead of tracking people, we're far better off tracking radioactive material and restricting accessibility to chemical poisons and their precursors. Instead of stamping out privacy, we would do far better by stepping up our commitment to public health, stockpiling antibiotics, and aggressively monitoring for the first signs of a biowarfare outbreak. Monitoring for new germs, after all, will protect us against both germs that are man-made and those that are introduced by nature.

Finally, we need to concentrate on building a society that's more resilient to the destruction of an urban center, for one day the worst will almost certainly happen. Specifically, we need to start planning for what to do after we lose New York City.

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