[Stu Baker was a member of the Markle task force: http://www.markletaskforce.org/ --Declan]
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: What's in the water at Cato? Date: Sun, 17 Oct 2004 19:29:04 -0400 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: 'Declan McCullagh' <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> CC: Albertazzie, Sally <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Declan,
Jim Harper seems to have slept through September 11. In the weeks before the attacks, we identified two of the hijackers as al-Qaeda killers, knew they were in the country, but couldn't find them -- even though they had drivers licenses, phones, etc., in their own names. And, until we have a method for rapidly checking private databases for suspects, we still won't be able to find them.
Evidently that's fine with Jim. He'd rather rely on three other techniques, which seem to be teaching Arab kids to read, huddling behind more and higher blast walls, and using something called "human intelligence" -- unaided by any technical advances made during Steve Jobs's lifetime.
Evidently recognizing that nobody else is likely to feel safer under the Harper Three-Point Plan, he also trashes the report by misstating its impact. His claim that dozens of laws will have to be amended is flat wrong. There is already plenty of legal authority for gathering information from private sources. The charts simply set forth existing law, without proposing to water down any of them. In fact, the safeguards recommended by the Markle task force actually add restraints to the government's current capabilities (a fact that gave me real pause when I was part of the task force).
At bottom, the task force recommends that the government use -- with safeguards -- capabilities that the private sector already uses with enthusiasm. If Sprint can already tell that Messrs Atta and al-Hazmi make a lot of phone calls to each other and to Afghanistan, and can use the information to offer them cheap long-distance, most of us would like our government to use the same information to keep our families alive.
Stewart Baker
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