Schneier on Security

Carlo Graziani • January 2, 2007 9:24 AM

The trouble is, no privacy mandate whose source is within TSA -- or even DHS -- has any real chance of having an impact.

The reason is that the main priority at DHS, the one that dominates the agenda, is security. The same goes for the other law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. Their job, as they construe it, is to stop threats -- terrorists, criminals, hostile states, etc. Privacy, civil rights, etc. are not part of their core mandate, do not inform their institutional values, and are easily pushed off the agenda or trumped by security-based arguments. Expecting them to care is like expecting the Agriculture Department to care about air quality.

This is perhaps as it should be. In principle, the drive for protection of civil liberties, including privacy, should come from above the securocracy. It is the responsibility of their political masters to *balance* security and civil rights.

It is the President's job, as chief custodian of the Constitution, to reject (or at least moderate) efforts by the intelligence/law-enforcement complex to circumvent civil liberties in the name of security. It should be the White House that vetos illegal phone monitoring, that questions the necessity of building dossiers on all citizens who travel, that declines demands to inter un-prosecutable suspects in para-legal prisons "for the duration of the war".

Which is to say, it won't happen any time soon. If we have to wait for a President with both the values and the spine to stand up to the political and institutional pressure that the securocracy can bring to bear, it may possibly never happen.

Carlo Graziani • January 2, 2007 9:52 PM

@Buried News:

It is unclear to me how influential the DHS Privacy Office is within DHS. There is certainly evidence (as Bruce points out) that DHS officials would like to see this report quietly fade into the document noise of Government. My own view -- informed more by cynicism than by direct knowledge -- is that the PO is itself bolted on to DHS a posteriori for political reasons, and that its counsels are for public consumption, rather than for internal guidance.

The thing is, the tone is set at the top -- Chertoff, the NSC, the White House Staff, the President. None of them have at any time shown evidence of a nuanced view of the balance between security and liberty. It is completely clear that any request for authority or budget by the security establishment is evaluated (at best) purely on the basis of intrinsic effectiveness. No weight whatever is given to impact on civil liberty. Such considerations are simply not taken seriously at the highest levels of our government.

The bureaucracy has very sensitively tuned antennae. The reception for these signals from the top is loud and clear. TSA officials who ignore (or re-interpret, or feign compliance with) this report know that they will suffer no adverse consequences to their careers or to the budgets under their control.

So I'll bet an ASCII dollar-sign that this report in fact vanishes into the noise, and that its impact on Secure Flight will be null. I could be wrong, but expecting this crowd of commissars to finally get religion about civil liberty strikes me as optimistic, to put it mildly.