Journalist Jeffrey Toobin

DATE April 11, 2002 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Jeffrey Toobin discusses his profile of John Ashcroft
in the latest edition of The New Yorker
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Attorney General John Ashcroft got a big round of applause on the David
Letterman show earlier this week when he sat in with the band at the piano and
played The Beatles' "Can't Buy Me Love." His approval rating is pretty high,
yet, as my guest Jeffrey Toobin writes, Ashcroft is the most polarizing figure
in the Bush Cabinet, and the most socially conservative figure to become
attorney general in many years. Toobin profiles Ashcroft in the current
edition of The New Yorker. Toobin is a staff writer for the magazine and a
legal analyst for ABC News.

He writes about some of the controversial steps that Ashcroft has overseen in
the war on terrorism, including the detention of more than 1,000 people on
secret charges, the establishment of a new system for monitoring certain
attorney-client conversations and a plan to create military tribunals for
alleged war criminals. But Toobin thinks that over time Ashcroft's social
agenda will be more controversial than his anti-terrorist measures. I asked
why.

Mr. JEFFREY TOOBIN (Staff Writer, The New Yorker): I think it's a combination
of things. One is there is just such enormous support for anti-terrorism work
across the political spectrum that just no one wants to take him on on these
issues. And Democrats--you know, one of the things that I write about in this
story is, you know, the Democrats got all worked up bringing him before the
Senate Judiciary Committee and once he got there, and this is last December,
you know, they were meek as mice in front of him. This--politically, all the
advantage is on Ashcroft's side.

Second, you know, I think in fairness to Ashcroft, some of these proposals
have been somewhat distorted by their political adversaries and they've
moderated some of the proposals, particularly the military tribunals. When
that proposal was first made, there was the possibility of death sentences on
less-than-unanimous verdicts, there was no provision for an appeals process at
all. Now as the proposal has come out, those changes have been made so I
think there has been some responsiveness, not total responsiveness to the
concerns of civil libertarians.

GROSS: And so you think he's going to be most controversial for which issues?

Mr. TOOBIN: For social agenda, for, you know, the real fault lines of American
politics. John Ashcroft, and one of the very fascinating things about going
back over his long, long political career, is to see that no issue has been
more important to him than abortion. I mean, he is perhaps the most pro-life
prominent political person in the country. It has been the key issue to his
whole political career. The only case he argued in the United States Supreme
Court was his defense of a Missouri law that required all second trimester
abortions to be conducted in hospitals. He actually lost that, six-to-three.
But I think, you know, that is not an issue he's going to give up on. He's
worked around the fringes of it, but I think that's where the real controversy
is going to be. In addition, he has also been an extremely outspoken opponent
of all sorts of gun control and he's starting to bring that into the Justice
Department and I think there he may have some particular problems because it
runs up against his anti-terrorism proposals in certain areas.

GROSS: Well, in fact, didn't he refuse to let the FBI check to see if
terrorists had purchased guns?

Mr. TOOBIN: Well, that's the thing that really is so extraordinary and that I
write about in this story is that, you know, the Brady Bill, which President
Clinton signed in 1993, establishes what are called audit logs for almost all
gun purchases in the United States. And what the FBI did in light of
September 11th in these hundreds of arrests that they made, they started to
check those audit logs, see if any these potential terrorists bought guns.
Ashcroft shut that process down. He said, `You can't look at these records.'
According to my interpretation of the Brady Bill, which was explicitly
contrary to Janet Reno's interpretation, you cannot check those. Those
records have to be destroyed within 24 hours. They cannot be used for
investigatory purposes. I mean, here you have potential evidence of gun
purchases by people that Ashcroft believes are terrorists and he says, `No,
you can't look at them.' Again, that was a complete interpretation of the law
in line with what the National Rifle Association had been saying all along.
And Ashcroft, as a life member of the NRA, as a longtime believer in their
principles, even in the crucible of the terrorist investigation, said, `No,
you can't look at those records.' I think that's the kind of thing that will
be controversial in the future.

GROSS: I imagine that Ashcroft's fervent anti-abortion stand connects in some
way to his religion. What about his opposition to anti-gun laws and his
support of the NRA? Where does that fit into his constellation of beliefs?
What backs that kind of strong pro-NRA stand?

Mr. TOOBIN: Ashcroft is from Springfield, Missouri, which is in southern
Missouri. It's in the Ozarks. It's very rural. It's almost Southern in its
orientation more than Midwestern, like a lot of Missouri is. And Ashcroft, in
many respects, his political philosophy, comes out of the sort of Southern
postwar culturally conservative libertarian in certain respects, but certainly
not all respects, politics that has very much taken over the Republican Party.
The Republican Party is now a Southern and Western party where issues like gun
control and abortion are really at the center of what people believe and I
don't think there's any religious basis for his position on gun control. But
it is certainly strongly held and something that he's maintained for a long
time.

GROSS: As you point out, he's been accused of using his popularity from the
anti-terrorism campaign to push his agenda on social issues like his
opposition to gun control and his opposition to abortion. Did you come across
any evidence that he's actually using his popularity now to push that social
agenda?

Mr. TOOBIN: Well, I think the most dramatic example of that comes in Oregon.
Oregon passed what was called the Death With Dignity Act, which allowed--and
I'm simplifying--some kinds of assisted suicide. And that has been a key
tenet of the anti-abortion movement. At the moment, look, with Roe v. Wade on
the books, there are only certain things you--there's only a limited amount
that the pro-life movement can do on the issue of abortion. So they have
adopted other issues, one of which is euthanasia. Again, broadly defined.

Ashcroft, in November, really at the peak of the terrorist investigation,
reached out and said to Oregon, `I am not going to let you enforce this.'
Again, contradicting--or changing a policy of the Reno Justice Department
because he views it as contrary to federal law. That was an example of him
serving the pro-life, you know, constituency. Another example is, people may
remember that a Nebraska statute was struck down by the Supreme Court, I
believe two years ago, that banned what some people call partial-birth
abortion. The court said you couldn't ban partial-birth abortion. Well,
Ashcroft's Justice Department in Ohio went to court to say a slightly
different partial-birth abortion bill should be upheld in Ohio. You know,
these are all issues at the fringes because that's really all you can do with
Roe v. Wade around, but certainly he is going to fight for ways to advance
what he's believed in his whole life.

GROSS: You point out that Ashcroft's allies say that he's restoring the
Justice Department's reputation, a reputation that was tarnished by Janet
Reno. What do they think he's doing to restore the Justice Department's
reputation?

Mr. TOOBIN: Well, in thinking back, way, way back to the Clinton
administration, Janet Reno was caught up, literally for years, in basically
what was a single controversy, which was whether she should appoint an
independent counsel to investigate Clinton and his administration on campaign
finance reform. It sounds like it's from another century now, and it actually
was, but it was just an endless hot controversy where Reno would be hauled
before Congress, whether it was before Henry Hyde's committee or Orrin Hatch's
committee, and just beaten up on that issue, time after time. There is no
similar controversy now. Now I don't want to revisit the merits of that old
controversy, but certainly there is not the sustained political attack on
Ashcroft that there was on Reno. And I think Ashcroft is the beneficiary of
that.

GROSS: My guest is Jeffrey Toobin. He profiles John Ashcroft in this week's
edition of The New Yorker. We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Jeffrey Toobin is my guest; he's staff writer for The New Yorker and
legal analyst for ABC News. He has a profile of John Ashcroft in the current
edition of The New Yorker.

John Ashcroft is a very religious man and his religion seems to also inform
some of his political and social views. What church does he belong to?

Mr. TOOBIN: He belongs to the Assemblies of God, which is part of the
Pentecostal movement. It's actually--it's fascinating. It's best-known today
for a rather unfortunate connection. It was the church of Jimmy Swaggart. It
was the church of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. But it was actually--it was only
founded around the turn of the century when it was very much kind of a
grassroots movement. It was racially diverse. It's no longer. It gave
opportunities to women to be preachers in a way that many other denominations
didn't. Aimee Semple McPherson was a famous California minister, was part of
the Assemblies of God.

And Ashcroft literally grew up with that movement. His grandfather was an
itinerant minister who really didn't even have his own church, who traveled
around the country in a 1921 car preaching on street corners. Ashcroft's
father, Robert Ashcroft, was one of the people who brought the Assemblies to
God closer to the religious and cultural mainstream. He founded, or
participated in founding, three churches affiliated with the Assemblies of God
in Springfield, Missouri, where Ashcroft grew up. So Ashcroft's life has been
part of Assemblies of God remaining a little bit of a kind of outsider
movement. I mean, it is an evangelical movement where people speak in tongues
and things like that. But it has become much more mainstream, in part because
of the efforts of people like his father.

GROSS: Was John Ashcroft--the now Attorney General John Ashcroft, was he
always religious?

Mr. TOOBIN: Always religious. But interestingly, his father had one foot in
the secular world. Robert Ashcroft, the attorney general's father, tried to
become a chaplain during World War II. And he was rejected because the Army
had a requirement that you had to have a college degree. The Assemblies of
God operated, though, independently of educational institutions in those early
days and he said, `Look, that's got to change. We've got to bring the
Assemblies of God into the mainstream. We've got to go to--have colleges that
have serious academic requirements. We've got to, you know, preserve our
religious affiliation, but also become part of the mainstream of American
life,' and he brought that philosophy to his son. Robert Ashcroft said,
`Look, I'm going to have a very religious household,' and they did, but John
Ashcroft, the attorney general, he always went to public schools, and he won a
scholarship to Yale. And his father, even though Yale was a million miles
away, socially, politically, culturally, from the Ashcroft world in
Springfield, Missouri, he said, `You go. You've got to be able to keep a foot
in both worlds.' And I think John Ashcroft's career has very much been in
both worlds. He is a serious cultural conservative, but he's also a very
accomplished politician.

GROSS: After John Ashcroft graduated from Yale he got a scholarship to
Chicago Law School, then he returned home to Springfield, Missouri, set up a
law practice. How did he enter politics?

Mr. TOOBIN: Well, he was a summer intern for his local congressman when he
was at Yale. And the congressman retired soon after Ashcroft graduated from
law school. And it's interesting, it's very much a replication of his
father's career. His father brought the Assemblies of God to the educational
world when they--the Assemblies of God had actually sort of shunned formal
education. Ashcroft, in the early '70s, didn't know a single politician who
was a member of the Assemblies of God. There was also a kind of shunning of
that process. But he said, `Look, we should join the political world as
well.' And he decided to run for Congress. He ran in a Republican primary in
1972. And he lost. But then in a weird, weird pattern that has held true for
Ashcroft's entire career, his loss for Congress turned into a terrific victory
for him because instead of being a congressman, he was appointed state auditor
of Missouri by then-Governor Kit Bond. And so he became the fourth-ranking
elected official in the whole state.

GROSS: What was John Ashcroft's record as the governor of Missouri?

Mr. TOOBIN: He had a record of considerable popularity. It was pretty good
times in Missouri during that era, mostly in the '80s. And he, I think, was
somewhat frustrated because his real issues that he's always cared about were
the social issues like abortion and there was only a limited amount he could
do on those and he was caught up in budgets and the kind of things that
governors usually deal with, and I think he was very anxious to move on to
different things after two terms as governor.

GROSS: And he moved on to senator, US senator.

Mr. TOOBIN: Well, there was another defeat in between. After his second term
as governor he ran for chairman of the Republican National Committee and lost.
Had he won, who knows what would have happened, but because he lost, he was
again at loose ends, and in 1994 John Danforth unexpectedly resigned from the
Senate, opening up that seat. So for the third time in Ashcroft's career,
when he lost for Congress, when he lost for state auditor, then when he lost
for RNC chair, a defeat turned out to be a victory.

GROSS: Ashcroft opposes gun control. He's a lifelong member of the NRA. How
much backing over the years has he gotten from the NRA?

Mr. TOOBIN: A lot. During the 2000 Senate campaign, which was really an
epic of modern politics where he ran against Mel Carnahan, who was then the
incumbent governor, the NRA contributed, I believe, $35,000 directly to his
campaign, but also spent more than $300,000 on independent expenditures for
Ashcroft. So he has been a strong favorite of the NRA, and he's repaid them
in kind.

Of course, this is the Senate race that ended in this extraordinary way. Mel
Carnahan, the governor, was killed three weeks before Election Day in a plane
crash, and Ashcroft then lost the election by 50,000 votes to--Mel Carnahan's
name was on the ballot, though the then-governor said he was going to appoint
Jean Carnahan, his widow, to the Senate, which he did.

GROSS: This is another example of Ashcroft winning by losing.

Mr. TOOBIN: Well, I mean, and that was the fourth: Congress, auditor, RNC
chair and then senator. And it's interesting. You know, when I asked him
about these losses turning into victories, he kind of laughed about it and
said, you know, `My brother says about me "You're so lucky if you fell into
the sewer, you'd come out eating a ham sandwich."' Well, I mean, that's
pretty funny, but when he describes this experience to religious publications,
as he has many times, he says over and over again the same thing. He says,
`You know, these defeats, they were crucifixions. And the victories, they
were resurrections.'

Now there are not many people in public life who would describe their own
experiences as crucifixions and resurrections, but that is how John Ashcroft
thinks. That's how he talks. And I think it's an interesting insight into
his character.

GROSS: What did you learn about his wishes for his political future and other
people's plans for his political future?

Mr. TOOBIN: Well, he told me that he was retired from politics. I asked him
very explicitly, `Are you going to run for president in 2008?'

He said, `Oh, I'll be 66. I'll be too old.'

I said, `Come on. Ronald Reagan was older than that when he ran.'

And he looked at me and he said, `I knew Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was a
friend of mine. I'm no Ronald Reagan.'

Now that was a pretty funny line. You know, I give him credit for that. It
was also a less-than-categorical denial of political interest. And, you know,
as I talk to people in Washington, I think there is a growing sentiment that
if Dick Cheney is unable to run for re-election for health purposes, Ashcroft
would be a real possibility as his replacement. And I think if he were to get
that, he would become, of course, the presumptive front-runner in 2008. And,
you know, I am far from the only person that has occurred to.

GROSS: What's his popularity level now in the American public?

Mr. TOOBIN: Well, it's really just extraordinary, Terry, when you think
about it. I mean, here's a guy a year and a half ago who lost to a dead man.
A little more than a year ago he was confirmed as attorney general with 42
votes against him, the most ever against an attorney general candidate. And
here he is today with a 76 percent approval rating. You know, he's on "David
Letterman." He's speaking all over the country. No one's booing him. No
one is--when he appears in front of Congress he gets very gentle treatment.
It's been a remarkable political resurrection, to use his term.

GROSS: You interviewed Ashcroft for your profile of him in The New Yorker.
Is there anything that particularly surprised you about talking to him in
person?

Mr. TOOBIN: Yes, actually. You know, he presents a very forbidding presence
in public when he's testifying or speaking, but in private he's much
lower-key. He's very self-deprecating. He actually has a very pleasant
manner, which did surprise me. I mean, and he's, you know, very homey. You
know, I remember he said to me at one point, `You know, there are only two
things you need in life: duct tape and WD-40. You need WD-40 for things that
are stuck together that need to come apart and duct tape for things that are
apart that need to come together.'

Now I'm not exactly sure what that means, but it was kind of appealing, you
know?

GROSS: He had to hang out at hardware stores a lot to get that, right?

Mr. TOOBIN: Exactly. Yeah. No, it's showing that Missouri thing. I
remember there was an appearance he did not too long ago with Ed McMahon, who
was sponsoring some Neighborhood Watch commercials. And Ed McMahon introduced
him, of course, when you think about it, as `Here's Johnny,' which is not
exactly what you think about with John Ashcroft.

And then Ashcroft said, `Gosh, we used to watch you every night at 10:30.'

And I thought to myself, gosh, he's such a Midwesterner, you know. Those of
us on the East Coast always thought of Johnny Carson on at 11:30. But, by
golly, he was on at 10:30 in St. Louis, and that's what John Ashcroft was
going to say.

GROSS: Well, Jeffrey Toobin, thank you so much for talking with us.

Mr. TOOBIN: Always a pleasure.

GROSS: Jeffrey Toobin's profile of John Ashcroft is published in this week's
edition of The New Yorker.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR. Here's Ashcroft with his former group
the Singing Senators.

(Soundbite of music)

SINGING SENATORS: (Singing) My baby is American made, born and bred in
the USA. From her silky long hair to her sexy long legs, my baby is American
made.

Unidentified Man #1: Seems everything I buy today has got a foreign name,
from the kind of car I drive to my video games.

Unidentified Man #2: I got a Nikon camera, a Sony color TV, but the one I
love is from the USA.

SINGING SENATORS: And standing next to me.

My baby is American made. She's born and bred in the USA. From her silky
long hair to her sexy long legs, my baby is American made.

Unidentified Man #3: She looks good in her tight blue jeans...

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Coming up, how the CIA is funding high-tech companies to develop new
technologies that would identify and track terrorists, and why civil
libertarians are concerned. We talk with Jeffrey Rosen, whose article Silicon
Valley's War Game will be published in The Sunday New York Times Magazine.

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Jeffrey Rosen discusses the CIA's efforts to partner
with Silicon Valley to develop new anti-terrorist technologies
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

The Silicon Valley is reinventing itself as the new headquarters for the
military-technological complex, according to journalist Jeffrey Rosen. His
article The Silicon Valley's Spy Game(ph) will be published in this Sunday's
New York Times Magazine. He writes about new technologies and database
systems that are being developed to identify and track terrorists, how the CIA
is funding some of these efforts, and why civil libertarians are concerned.
Rosen is an associate professor at George Washington University Law School,
legal affairs editor of The New Republic and author of "The Unwanted Gaze:
The Destruction of Privacy in America."

Let's start with an overview of the investment the CIA has now in the Silicon
Valley.

Professor JEFFREY ROSEN (George Washington University): The CIA has started
this very interesting venture capital firm called In-Q-Tel, and the Q stands
for the character from James Bond. It was the idea of George Tenet, the CIA
director, and the idea is to invest about $30 million a year in Internet
start-ups and young companies on the theory that technologies that were useful
before September 11th for profiling, monitoring and recording customers on
Amazon might now be useful for profiling, monitoring and recording and
identifying potential terrorists.

But because it's a regular venture capital firm, the technologies have to be
commercially viable. And, indeed, the companies negotiate the sale of their
technologies for national intelligence purposes, but the main idea is to have
them useful in the commercial sphere as well.

GROSS: So who is the head of this new company, In-Q-Tel?

Prof. ROSEN: He's a very interesting character called Gilman Louie, who is
one of the most successful games manufacturers of all times. This is the man
whose first big success was Falcon, which is the air simulation game which was
so popular not only with teen-age boys but with the Air Force that it used it
to teach fighter pilots how to fly real jets. But then his big success was a
couple of years ago when he imported Tetris from the Soviet Union. And
Tetris, of course, was the most popular computer game of all times. It sold
70 to 80 million copies, and he told me that Hillary Clinton loved playing
Tetris on the Game Boy. So that was very exciting to him.

And Gilman Louie was marketing Hasbro's computer game site a couple of years
ago, in 1998, when he was approached with a very unusual offer and George
Tenet, the CIA director, asked him to head this interesting company called
In-Q-Tel and to go swimming in the valley to try to persuade the Internet
entrepreneurs to play ball with the CIA.

GROSS: Why do you think somebody whose speciality is computer games was asked
to head up In-Q-Tel?

Prof. ROSEN: Well, he said very frankly--he said that `the CIA actually
thought that my computer game background was a valuable asset, because I look
at the world as one big system, one big game.' I actually hadn't seen these
things, but he described to me Falcon, which is an extraordinarily complicated
and realistic effort to simulate not only gunfights and dogfights but also
geopolitical strategies; there are all sorts of other political and simulation
choices to be made. So in a sense he thought that what the CIA is doing now
in the real world is very similar to what he had done as a game developer.

He also has a knack for fighter technology himself. He's an amateur fighter
pilot and, I think, met the CIA recruiter in a dogfight that was sponsored by
a computer magazine to see who was the top dog among business executives. So
it's the combination of the military background and the idea of seeing the
world as one big system that was very appealing to the CIA.

GROSS: Now you say that the CIA wants the Silicon Valley to develop
technologies that have been used already for identifying, profiling and
tracking potential customers, and to use these technologies to identify and
track potential terrorists. Give us a sense of how that might apply, how that
might work.

Prof. ROSEN: One of the most promising examples is the use of technologies
that had been deployed to detect credit card fraud and to use that to create
profiles of potential terrorists. So, for example, people who study these
things tell you that credit card fraud often fits a consistent pattern.
People who steal credit cards will use them at self-service stations to test
that they're OK, and then go out to try to buy clothes at the mall. So if you
fit that pattern, you're likely to get a call from the credit card company.

Not long ago, the Federal Aviation Authority announced that it had started up
a partnership with two companies called Accenture and HNC to use this same
technology to create profiles of potential terrorists. And, indeed, Brett
Ogilvie of Accenture told BusinessWeek that their system will ask if you've
made international phone calls to Afghanistan, taken flying lessons or
purchased a thousand pounds of fertilizer.

And based on this information, personally identifiable phone calls and credit
card information, the system will try to create a profile of potential
terrorists to see whether you look like the terrorists of September 11th. And
if you do, for example, if you're a retired businessman who took flight
lessons in Florida, you might set off an alert. There'll be yellow alerts for
intermediate questioning, red alerts for more intrusive questioning, and based
on this technology, the FAA hopes to be able to nip terrorism in the bud.

GROSS: In order for this technology to work, there's a lot of databases that
would have to be interconnected, you know, so that the FAA could tap into all
of these and get the information they were seeking about potential terrorists.
What would it take to connect those databases?

Prof. ROSEN: Well, this is absolutely right. The first thing it would take
is a relaxation of our privacy laws because, indeed, several federal laws
restrict the amount of personally identifiable phone information and credit
card information that can be released to the government except as part of a
specific investigation.

It's hard to tell from this system exactly what information the government
proposes to include in the database, and indeed, when I called up Accenture
and asked them, they said that national security prevented them from divulging
what the factors are. I tried to explain that I wasn't interested in what the
profiling algorithm was, which would allow perhaps a potential terrorist to
beat the system, but only wanted to know if they were proposing to include in
the database information that's currently restricted by law. But they stuck
to their script and refused to say.

GROSS: Is there any division among civil liberties activists about whether
this kind of tradeoff is worth it to help stop terrorism or about whether this
type of centralized database is going too far in infringing on civil
liberties?

Prof. ROSEN: There is, indeed. There's a very lively and interesting
debate. The first question that's raised by these profiling technologies is
the simple one of whether or not they work, and there seems to be a consensus
among the civil liberties community, at least, that this particular profiling
technology is unlikely to identify potential terrorists, mostly because the
sample of known terrorists is so small. We're really talking about profiling
19 terrorists of September 11th out of 300 million people. You're looking for
a needle in a haystack, one civil libertarian described to me, but the shape
and color of the needle keep changing. And, indeed, statistically, when
you've got a very small sample that you're trying to profile, it appears very
difficult to create a reliable algorithm. So the first objective of civil
libertarians is skepticism about whether or not this particular technology is
likely to be effective.

A more substantive concern has to do with the dangers of centralizing
information in a single database to begin with. And, indeed, this was the
galvanizing cry of civil libertarians during the last great debate over
privacy in the 1970s, and when President Nixon did propose to survey Vietnam
protesters, and when the government in the late-1960s proposed a single
national database that would unite information from the CIA and from the Labor
Department and from a whole series of federal departments. Vance Packard, the
great sociologist, wrote a celebrated article for The New York Times Magazine
which became his great book the "Naked Society," in which he warned of the
dangers of a centralized database which would give great power to the
government to track, classify and discriminate among American citizens.

So it was really a fear of that centralization that led to the passage of the
Privacy Act of 1974 that forbids government from lightly sharing information
without good reason, and it's partly for that reason that information is
shared in a lot of different places. So civil libertarians are concerned
about the danger of centralization.

GROSS: My guest is Jeffrey Rosen. His article Silicon Valley's Spy Game will
be published in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Jeffrey Rosen is my guest. His book "The Unwanted Gaze: The
Destruction of Privacy in America" has just come out in paperback. Rosen has
an article in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine called Silicon Valley's
War Game, and it's about new technologies being invented by Silicon Valley
companies to help the government find and track potential terrorists.

Let's look more at what's being done to create new data banks and to
centralize data banks in the hopes that it would help find and track
terrorists. Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, wants to consolidate state and
federal databases into a single database, and apparently that's, I guess, what
Oracle does, is create databases, or at least one of the things that Oracle
does.

Prof. ROSEN: They do, indeed. They're the world's largest database
manufacturer. As Ellison described to me, your profiles on Amazon are kept in
an Oracle database. Your Yahoo! profile is in an Oracle database. Your
airline tickets and all sorts of information about you is stored in Oracle
databases.

And Oracle itself learned about the virtues of centralizing databases about
seven years ago, in 1995, when Ellison said that he realized that his company
was suffering great inefficiencies because different information was stored in
different databases, so the German office couldn't talk to the French office,
and prices varied across the globe. Ellison says that by centralizing
Oracle's own databases on the Internet and making them accessible in one
place, the company saved a billion dollars a year and found it easier to track
and monitor and discriminate among its customers. And he says that the US
government would enjoy similar efficiencies if it centralized all of its
disparate databases in one place.

He complains that the problem after September 11th was that there were too
many databases sprinkled out over different places. So the authorities at the
INS didn't know that Mohamed Atta had a warrant out for his arrest in Florida.
Ellison has offered to donate the software for a single, integrated database
to the government for free of charge, although he says that upgrades and
maintenance wouldn't be free, and he stresses that this would make it easier
for the government to share information about terrorist and would also create
more reliable profiles.

He's suggested the adoption of a digital identification card which would be
optional for citizens but mandatory for aliens, and he wants to collect a
biometric, a fingerprint or an iris scan, and store it in a centralized
database which would be linked to the card, and this would make it possible
both to make sure that people really are who they say they are at important
checkpoints like airports and the border, and also to run background checks to
find out whether there's something seriously wrong in their past so we could
find out whether there are outstanding warrants for their arrests, if someone
is a deadbeat dad. They might be stopped at the airport, and Ellison says
that this would be a very effective use of technology for fighting terrorism.

GROSS: Do civil libertarians have any specific concerns about that biological
identification, either scanning the iris or using a fingerprint?

Prof. ROSEN: They do, indeed. Civil libertarians recognize that different
designs for biometric technology pose different threats to privacy. So Larry
Lessig of Stanford explained to me that the most intrusive architecture for an
identification system would be the centralized storage of a fingerprint
because this would make it possible for the government to do what's called
one-to-many matches. In other words, you could go to a protest scene, for
example, dust for fingerprints, plug the fingerprints into the central,
nationalized database and figure out everyone who was at the scene. Or you
could do the same if you were in a restaurant, dust on a glass and see if
someone is having an adulterous affair.

Civil libertarians say that it's possible to design an identification system
that would be less intrusive. If the fingerprint is stored on the card
itself, for example, this would make possible a one-to-one match, confirming
that I am who I say I am rather than showing that I'm actually Jeff Rosen.
And this would make it more difficult to engage in the kind of identification
of strangers that civil libertarians are concerned about.

GROSS: I want to ask you about another database security system that Oracle
is working on, and this is a system designed to identify early on outbreaks of
suspicious diseases and to provide early warning signals for biological
warfare attacks. Would you describe this system that Oracle's developing?

Prof. ROSEN: It's a very interesting system. It's called the Lightweight
Epidemiology Advanced Detection and Emergency Response System, which stands
for LEADERS, and this is designed to collect health care information from
emergency rooms across the country and to look for suspicious patterns. So at
9:20 AM on September 11th, the Oracle head of the health care consulting unit
got a call from the Center for Disease Control, which feared that the attack
on the towers might be followed by a biological attack.

He worked for 10 hours, and they input all of the information about hospital
beds in New York state into this system. He pulled up a screen which could be
pulled up in Atlanta which has mapped every underground pipe, sewer and water
line in the city with 7,500 digital photographs. It's an extremely detailed
architectural map. And using this system, this allows hospitals to report
incidents of suspicious diseases like anthrax and Ebola in advance. They can
send out e-mail alerts to law enforcement authorities, or voice mail can go
out automatically. And by collecting this data and engaging in syndromic
surveillance, as it's called--it's an effort to look for unusual
syndromes--Oracle hopes to be able to find early evidence of a biological
attack and to get some help.

GROSS: Is this system in use already?

Prof. ROSEN: My sense is that at the twin towers, it was not, because by the
time the system was up and running, they found, to their distress, that there
were almost no casualties. It was all fatalities. So--and thankfully there
was no biological attack. But the system is, indeed, at use in large public
events such as presidential inaugurations, and I think, also, at the Super
Bowl. So it has been deployed in several circumstances already, and they're
hoping to expand its use so that, as Oracle said, every hospital, every
clinic, every lab in the country is going to have to participate. This will
be a bioterrorism shield.

GROSS: Any civil liberties questions about this database?

Prof. ROSEN: Well, there could be, of course, if the information were
personally identifiable. We can easily imagine the dangers of a centralized
genetic database in which the government could get personally identifiable
information about our genetic predispositions and use that either to deny us
insurance or to make other sorts of predictions. I should stress that the
Oracle database is designed not to be personally identifiable. This is
syndromic. It doesn't have my name on it. And I think, as best as I
understand the architecture, the fear that this information might be linked
back to individual patients right now is unfounded.

But there obviously could be dangers, and this distinction between a broad
syndromic surveillance in which patterns are detected in ways they're not
personally identifiable and, by contrast, personally identifiable surveillance
in which information can be linked to particular individuals is the main
distinction that civil libertarians insist on when they evaluate these
consolidated systems. It's much less distressing to look for large patterns
of behavior than it is to try to pin behavior on individual people.

Another example of syndromic surveillance that Oracle is experimenting with is
the use of similar technology to detect patterns of crime in the city of
Chicago. It turns out that there's some logic to crime outbreaks, that on
certain days with certain weather patterns and certain sporting events, you
can predict with relative precision that there will be outbreaks of crime in
particular aspects of the city. So using this Oracle technology, the city of
Chicago has dispatched more police officers to particular parts of the city
when the technology suggests that there are likely to be outbreaks.

And like the LEADERS epidemiology technology, this is not personally
identifiable. It's not like they're predicting that a particular person is
going to commit a particular crime. And the City of Chicago Police Department
says they've been happy with the results of this system.

GROSS: My guest is Jeffrey Rosen. His article about new technologies being
developed to track terrorists will be published in this Sunday's New York
Times Magazine.

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Jeffrey Rosen. His article about new technologies and
databases being developed to help identify terrorists, how the CIA is funding
some of these efforts and why civil libertarians are concerned will be
published in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

Now we started our conversation talking about how the CIA started a venture
capital company to invest in Silicon Valley companies that might help create
technologies to help identify terrorists. Has that CIA-backed venture capital
company, In-Q-Tel, invested in any of the database projects that we've been
talking about?

Prof. ROSEN: The CIA has invested in a series of companies that engage in
profiling that is similar to the technologies we've been talking about. And I
can tell you about some of them because I talked to them, as well.

One of them, for example, is a company called Intelliseek, which has what
might be described as a search engine on steroids. It's a kind of Google that
can even get more than Google can do because it engages in searches of the
invisible Web, information which is not archived. But this technology instead
goes to the individual search engines themselves and engages in a deeper kind
of search.

Intelliseek, with the help of In-Q-Tel, is hoping to dispatch its technology
at airports so that when you check in, you'd be essentially Googled or
Intelliseeked and you'd plug in your name and both the chat that you might
have engaged in and also any other references to you on the Web would come up.

Other kinds of search technologies that Intelliseek has invested in involve
the use of geographic maps. There's a company called MetaCarta, started up by
an MIT graduate student, which, again, can do a kind of Google search that is
linked to a three-dimensional map of the area. So I can put in Terry Gross
and find on a map of the United States any Web pages that might be associated
with Terry Gross in a particular area. A final series of technologies
involves not only data mining but also knowledge management.

And the goal of these technologies is to solve what In-Q-Tel and the
technologists called the Tower of Babel problem, how is it possible that we
have all of this open source information available on the Web but it's very
difficult to make head or tails of it or to organize it into ways that can be
useful for intelligence.

So, for example, technologies that had been used to organize resumes so that
companies didn't have to read through all of them by hand are now being
deployed to organize information on the Web in scores of different languages
and to monitor chat rooms, to see whether an Osama bin Laden chat room has
unusual updates. Mohomine and other companies like it are able to scan chat
rooms in many languages and to find out what people are saying about the
United States government and use this to create usable intelligence. So all
of these are different applications of business intelligence technologies in
the national intelligence sphere designed to solve the Tower of Babel problem.

And based on the CIA's increasing conviction that the most useful intelligence
is open source intelligence--you don't always need spies; you can just go on
to the Net--but the problem is that there's so much information on the Net
that we need technologies to organize it and make it intelligible.

GROSS: So, Jeffrey, who will decide what the limitations are on access to
data in these databases? You've got the people working on the technology who
want to connect databases; you've got the government who seems to want to
connect databases, too, and a lot of civil libertarians who object to it. How
will this be resolved?

Prof. ROSEN: This is a very troubling question, because when I asked it to
the technologists, they would say repeatedly, `We just build the machines.
It's up to other people, the customers or the politicians, to decide how they
should be used.' They said, `Go talk to the politicians.'

Then when I went to talk to the politicians--I talked to Maria Cantwell, who's
the most technologically savvy member of the Senate. She complains that she
can use her spittoon on the Senate floor but she can't use a BlackBerry
wireless communicator. And she was concerned about the fact that the
politicians feel that the technology is so unfamiliar that they are reluctant
to regulate it. And she said they really are not very technologically savvy.
She explains to them, `You're going to be able to go into your car and say,
"Take me to the nearest Starbucks,"' and they say, `Well, that's great.' And
then she says, `Well, but there'll be a record where you were at 2 in the
morning in a database,' and they become more recalcitrant.

So I'm concerned, as she was concerned, that the technologists are not eager
to regulate themselves; that the politicians are too afraid of the technology
to regulate it, which leaves the courts. And Lawrence Lessig of Stanford was
pessimistic on this score. He said, `There's no court that will stand up for
heightened review for privacy. We almost need some kind of privacy commission
similar to the Environmental Protection Commission,' said Lessig, `that would
evaluate the effect of a particular database on privacy.' But given our
current legal strictures, he feared that that would not be done by judges.

So all this suggests that there's a big challenge ahead, which is to try to
re-create in this new age of databases the checks and balances that we took
for granted under our 18th- and 19th- and 20th-century Constitution. And it's
going to be important that each of these groups--the technologists, the
politicians and the courts--do their part in reconstructing these checks and
balances.

GROSS: You visited several of the companies that are developing this software
to help track terrorists. What was the security like at the companies that
you visited? Since they specialize in security, they must have pretty good
security in their companies.

Prof. ROSEN: Well, it's a wonderful question. Actually, Intelliseek, it was
pretty low-tech. It's a building across the way in Roseland, Virginia, and
there was a nice security guard downstairs who asked me for an ID. And I
actually didn't have one, so I showed my plastic GEM card and just went right
up. It was one of these pro forma things. But once you get up to their
office, there's a very cool "Star Wars" process where you type in your name
and get a name badge with a bar code. And you have to turn it in when you
leave. That was impressively high-tech.

The best one of all was at Oracle Corporation, which has a very elaborate ID
card which can track where you are in the buildings at all times. But even at
Oracle, you know, human discretion will always trump--it's impossible to get a
parking space at Oracle. You have to look around for about 30 minutes. And
even though the company is the leader in tracking and predicting consumer
behavior, it can't quite find enough parking spaces for its employees. But I
went in and talked to the nice security guard, and he said, `OK, I know you.
No problem.' I could have the illegal spot. And there was a lot of that sort
of informal interaction, whereas people who were actually known and had
forgotten their ID cards were waved through. So this goal of completely
technological tracking may be a little bit overstated.

GROSS: Well, Jeffrey Rosen, thank you so much for talking with us.

Prof. ROSEN: Oh, thanks very much for having me.

GROSS: Jeffrey Rosen's article The Silicon Valley's Spy Game will be
published in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Rosen is an associate
professor at George Washington University Law School. His book "The Unwanted
Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America" has just been published in
paperback.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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