ILW.COM - immigration news: Homeland Security

[Congressional Record: November 18, 2002 (Senate)] [Page S11247-S11284] From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:cr18no02-28] [ ... ] [[Page S11276]] [ ... ] Homeland Security Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I rise to say a few words about the issue of homeland security. I will not talk at the moment about the bill itself, which we will vote on tomorrow, but a couple of issues dealing with homeland security that are very important, that have been raised in recent days and need to be discussed. One issue deals with something that is happening in the Defense Department. My colleague Senator Nelson from Florida spoke of it earlier today. That is the creation of an Information Awareness Office and the prospect of having an agency that would amass your most personal information--credit card purchases, travels, medical information, and so on--and put it into a single database. That concerns me greatly. I will speak about that in a moment. But first I will speak about another issue relating to homeland security. This is an issue that was recently highlighted by a task force headed by former Senator Warren Rudman and former Senator Gary Hart. That task force included former Secretaries of State Warren Christopher and George Shultz, retired Admiral William Crowe, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others. There is a very significant blue ribbon task force. They issued a report that was sponsored by the Council of Foreign Relations. The report was titled ``America Still Unprepared, America Still In Danger.'' [[Page S11277]] The task force found that 1 year after the September 11 attacks, America remains--according to them--dangerously unprepared for another terrorist attack. At the top of the list of concerns in this task force was this: 650,000 local and State police officials continue to operate in a virtual intelligence vacuum without access to terrorist watch lists that are provided by the United States Department of State to immigration consular officials. Why is this important? Well, consider that 36 hours before the September 11 attack, one of the hijackers who piloted the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, named Ziad Jarrah, a 26-year-old Lebanese national, was actually pulled over by the Maryland State Police for driving 90 miles an hour on Interstate 95. If this fellow's name had been on the State Department terrorist watch list--and it happens that it was not--there would have been no way for that Maryland State trooper to know it. That Maryland State trooper can type a name into the system and go to the NCIC where they have the database of convicted felons, but that trooper has no access to the watch list that the Immigration Service has courtesy of the State Department. You have all of these people around the country--law enforcement officials--who are actually the first line of defense and the first responders in the event something happens. And they are out there stopping people with traffic stops and stopping suspicious people who are driving automobiles without license tags, and so on. They don't have any idea whether someone they have just stopped is a known terrorist on a watch list prepared by the State Department and given to the Immigration Service and given to the consular offices. Why? Because they currently have no mechanism to access it. Right now, a county sheriff somewhere in a northern county in North Dakota is patrolling a road. If down that road for some reason would come a terrorist who crossed over a remote section on the border between the United States and Canada and a county sheriff stops that known terrorist who is on the watch list for driving 90 miles an hour on Highway 22, there isn't any way that county sheriff is going to be able to access that watch list and know that he or she has pulled over a known terrorist. That is wrong. Let me read an excerpt from the Hart-Rudman report, discussing what they regard as a top concern: With just 56 field offices around the nation, the burden of identifying and intercepting terrorists in our midst is a task well beyond the scope of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This burden can and should be shared with 650,000 local county and State law enforcement officers. But they clearly cannot lend a hand in the counterterrorism information void that now exists. When it comes to combating terrorism, the police officers on the beat are effectively operating deaf, dumb and blind. That is from the report. Again, quoting from the report: Terrorist watch lists provided by the United States Department of State to immigration and consular officials are still out of bounds for State and local police. In the interim period, as information sharing issues get worked out, known terrorists will be free to move about to plan and execute their attacks without any bother from local law enforcement officials because they can't know their names and they can't access the list. My staff has been in contact with this task force. We have also been in contact with the State Department and the White House, asking when something is going to be done to connect the dots here. Since we made these contacts, the administration is apparently looking for ways to integrate that terrorist watch list--called the Tipoff database--with the National Crime Information Center which is accessible by State and local law enforcement officers. I call on the administration to expedite, as much as is possible, the effort to make this happen. We can't waste another day in this regard, as all of us know. The head of the CIA said the other day that we are in as much risk from a terrorist act as we were the day before September 11. If that is the case, then we ought to expect that all law enforcement officials around this country would have access to that terrorist watch list. Let me go now to the second issue. I just spoke of the need for law enforcement to have access to a list of known terrorists and those who associate with known terrorists for purposes of protecting this country. Well, one can certainly go to the other extreme in gathering information in the name of homeland security. And a good example of that is a project that is being developed in the Department of Defense, by the Information Awareness Office. The Information Awareness Office is developing a long-term plan for what is called data mining. A master plan would be developed by which all of the information that moves around electronically in our country--every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy, every medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit, every e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you ever received, every bank deposit you made, every trip you book - would go into a massive database. And the Federal Government would use the database to identify suspicious behavior. That is not what we ought to be doing in this country. We ought to have a war on terrorism. But we ought not, in our zeal to engage in this war on terrorism, in any way break down the basic civil liberties that exist in our Constitution. The right to privacy is one of the most basic rights in America--the right to expect there is not a Big Brother with a massive computer system gathering all the information about everything everyone is doing in this country and evaluating it, perusing it, and moving it back and forth to try to determine who might or might not be doing something maybe suspicious. That is not, in my judgment, in concert with the basic civil liberties that we expect in this country and that are guaranteed to the citizens in this country. We must stop this before it starts. I understand that a change in law--specifically a change in the 1974 Privacy Act--would be required to implement this data mining program. That, in my judgment, is not going to happen in the Congress. I would not support such a change, and I think most of my colleagues would oppose a change of that type.

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