May 03, 2003

Gilmore raises privacy concerns

By MICHAEL MARTZ
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER

Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore says the effort to broaden intelligence gathering within the United States to combat terrorism "sets off alarm bells" for the national commission he leads on domestic security.

Gilmore said yesterday that an array of initiatives to reorganize the federal government to improve national security against terrorism could compromise individual privacy and civil liberties.

"At what point does our desire to organize to obtain security begin to diminish our civil freedoms in America?" he said in a telephone interview from his law office in Washington.

The former governor made his comments in reaction to two days of closed-door briefings before his panel this week by top officials for intelligence gathering in the Bush administration.

Those officials included FBI Director Robert Mueller; John O. Brennan, a CIA veteran who is leading the new Terrorism Threat Information Center; and Adm. John M. Poindexter, a former Reagan administration national security adviser who has become a lightning rod for concerns about the Pentagon's fledgling effort to develop technology that could harvest vast amounts of private information about people in the United States.

Congress limited the reach of the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program through a budget amendment earlier this year and warned against using the technology to spy on people within the country.

Gilmore did not discuss details of Poindexter's testimony before the Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction. The panel, created in 1999, met Wednesday and Thursday at the Rand Corp. headquarters in Arlington County.

"We listened to Admiral Poindexter. He insisted they are not trying to create a database on all Americans," the former governor said.

Gilmore said the Total Information Awareness program, part of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is trying to create a system that captures information about potential terrorists living in the United States.

However, he added, "In order to do that, you have to have . . . data on people who are not terrorists."

Poindexter's initiative took on a new dimension for some commission members this week, when the Senate Intelligence Committee blocked a Bush administration proposal that would have given the CIA and military the ability to demand detailed information about people from their banks, Internet service providers, credit card companies, and libraries. Currently, the FBI has that authority.

"That is a phenomenal civil liberties concern," said George W. Foresman, deputy assistant to Gov. Mark Warner for commonwealth preparedness and a member of the Gilmore panel. "I think the key issue is how they're going to use" the system and the information it gathers.

Contact Michael Martz at (804) 649-6964 or mmartz@timesdispatch.com

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