Security trumps privacy

Big Brother may be watching us, but since Sept. 11, most Americans are happy to have him around.

Take Virginia Beach City Council member Rosemary Wilson. In July, she worried that a police department plan to scan beachgoers' faces with recognition cameras would intrude on their privacy.

But a few weeks after the World Trade Center attack, Ms. Wilson joined fellow city council members who passed the plan 10 to 1. "We're living in a different world now," she says.

Governments at all levels are hoping to thwart future terrorist attacks with new technologies that listen, watch, and track people's movements. And the public is suddenly embracing technologies it found chillingly invasive only months ago.

Two-thirds of Americans surveyed in September said they'd favor government use of face-recognition or national ID cards. And last month, 60 percent said they'd be willing to give up anonymity on the Web to battle terrorists.

Manufacturers promise those devices will offer both heightened safety and greater convenience, allowing people to move quickly through airport security lines or avoid intrusive searches on public streets. But civil libertarians worry that the nation will sacrifice privacy in exchange for a false sense of security. "We the people have enabled our lawmakers to increase their surveillance powers over all of us to the point of no return," says Beth Givens of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego.

Since the attacks, Congress and the president have agreed on anti-terror laws that make it easier for the government to eavesdrop on e-mail and to monitor financial transactions.

Airports are ordering iris and thumbprint readers to identify employees, as well as facial-scanning software that compares the faces of passengers with a database of undesirables.

But it's not just airports that have turned to such high-tech surveillance equipment. Authorities at last year's Super Bowl in Tampa scanned faces in the crowd electronically. Six months ago, Tampa also became the first US city to deploy facial-recognition cameras in the streets of its downtown Ybor City entertainment district. And nationwide, some 4 million closed-circuit television cameras film people in supermarkets, dressing rooms, and public spaces.

Virginia Beach, population 425,000, already deploys closed-circuit cameras along its boardwalk. Yet politicians and citizens reacted coolly when the police chief first proposed adding biometric scanning last summer.

Unlike Social Security cards or passports, biometric identification uses the human body itself as the basis for checking a person's identity. And unlike video cameras, which simply act as a record police can review, biometric software identifies people instantaneously.

Mayor Meyera E. Oberndorf questioned whether a city that boasts of being the safest its size in America needed to put its citizens through such a "trauma."

That skepticism vanished after investigators determined that at least two hijackers who flew planes into the World Trade Center stayed in local motels and cashed checks at local banks.

Yet not everyone is convinced. "We're overreacting to what happened on Sept. 11," says Reba McClennan, the lone dissenting Virginia Beach City Council member. "You can't be too careful, but you have to go back and look and see if this would work."

So far, studies have found biometric scanners, which read dozens of features on each person's face, can be fooled by eyeglasses, hats, facial hair, or even exaggerated smiles. The failure rate may be even higher in streets where authorities can't control the lighting, ask people to remove their glasses, or stay within 10 feet of the camera.

Defining who is included in the database presents tricky challenges for local law-enforcement agencies, says criminology professor Susan Brinkley at the University of Tampa.

If a target has never been subject to investigation, there won't be any record in the database to flag authorities. That was the case with many of the World Trade Center hijackers who had no criminal record.

And even when a terrorist is known, federal law-enforcement agencies, reluctant to spread their classified intelligence, haven't been open to sharing information with local police departments since Sept. 11, says Prof. James Wayman, director of San Jose University's Biometrics Identification Research Group.

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