Tri-Valley Herald

Specter of McCarthy in FBI watch list?
By Sean Holstege
STAFF WRITER

Tuesday, February 18, 2003 - It takes about three minutes to find a classified FBI terrorist watch list on the Internet using a common search engine.

At least half a dozen such lists are posted and on many, but not all, names appear with birthdates, Social Security numbers, telephone numbers and home addresses -- for the world to see.

The FBI created the lists, some stamped "law enforcement sensitive," soon after the Sept. 11 attacks. The lists were to help find and interrogate anyone the FBI suspected might know something about the plot that killed almost 3,000 people.

Although the FBI says the lists are insignificant and outdated, some people question whether the public's access shows the bureau has lost control of sensitive information. Bay Area civil libertarians say that similar efforts in the McCarthy era didn't threaten individuals' privacy as much, even though the Cold War paranoia landed hundreds of people in jail.

Law enforcement and other sources confirm the terror lists are authentic.

Among the 617 mostly Arabic names appearing on one list, some are familiar, such as wanted al-Qaida mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and dead 9/11 ringleader Mohamad Atta.

A more detailed list, replete with addresses and passport numbers, shows 51 California entries, including a Newport Beach sky diving firm, a Yuba City man whose phone is now disconnected and a Monterey man who could not be reached for comment.

In its quest to find these individuals, the government sent the lists to banks in Italy and Finland, a Venezuelan security agency and utility companies from Florida to the Bay Area. Some of these institutions posted them on the Internet.

A Bay Area peace activist uncovered one list and posted it on the Web site antiwar.com.

"They can't keep this stuff secret. Nothing is secret anymore," said Justin Raimondo, who justified his act by saying it will stop the government from covering up its probes.

Some of the online rosters list only names, unintentionally casting suspicion on likely innocent Americans who coincidentally share names with FBI targets.

Swept up by the net are a Tracy turnip farmer and the manager of a Richmond check-cashing company, who changed his name when he converted to Islam.

No hardship reported

Ten such Bay Area men expressed shock when they learned of the lists from a reporter's telephone call. None reported any hardship.

Mohammed Saleh, for one, knows firsthand about government oppression. Saleh left war-torn northern Afghanistan 20 years ago when the Taliban burned down his home. For the last six years he's grown turnips in Tracy.

About the FBI's list, he said simply: "I'm a farmer. I'm not scared. I'm never scared."

Most of the men reported more distress over the fact that the list is on the Internet than that their names have raised eyebrows at the FBI.

"If this is sitting on somebody's computer, that's one thing. But this is somebody putting it on the Web. What's the intent behind that? Anyone would be alarmed," said Livermore computer programmer Mohammad Rahman, when he learned his name was on the FBI list.

"Investigating is fine, but to mark somebody's name, without proving anything, is not."

Hearkening back to McCarthy

For those Bay Area residents who lived under the shadow of McCarthy-era blacklists, the modern-day terrorist watchlists serve as a chilling reminder of that time.

They are particularly disturbed by the widespread release of names.

Ann Fagan Ginger, a Berkeley attorney, won a case before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of a client who was brought before Ohio's Un-American Activities Commission, one of the myriad state panels like Sen. Joseph McCarthy's and its more famous counterpart the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC.

"This is much worse. It's similar, but this is much more extensive," Ginger said. "People won't get jobs, but we won't hear about that. They won't get medical care, and we won't hear about that either. They won't get a lot of things, but they won't know why."

She and retired UC Berkeley professor Leon Wofsy, 81, recalled the similar origins of blacklists amid government anxiety about communists and socialists.

Suspected organizations were tracked, and the Internal Security Act of 1950, better known as the McCarran Act, was passed.

The attorney general created suspect lists that swelled when those called to testify before HUAC named names. Many who refused were jailed or fined.

"Lots of people were targeted for no rhyme or reason," Wofsy recalled, noting he was tracked in the 1930s after he joined the Labor Youth League. "The net was cast extremely wide."

"I noticed right away, everybody was being visited by the FBI. I remember taking my oldest child to school when she was 5. I bent down to kiss her goodbye and two FBI agents stopped me and said, 'You like your family. You want to keep them, don't you?'" Wofsy recalled.

"The sweep now is much, much broader. It's worldwide," Wofsy said. "The Internet makes privacy a thing of the past. It can be used to brand you."

Privacy v. Security

Old distinctions between privacy and security need to be redefined because technology and the capabilities of terrorists have evolved, said John Parachini, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corp.

"It's no longer either-or," he said.

"There is an appropriate place to assemble a list when looking for people at the borders or for people of interest, particularly when those people are agents of a foreign power or terrorist group running a crusade against America in an asymmetric war," Parachini said.

He downplayed the privacy risk of the list or the extent of possible government intrusion.

"The information you're describing is very easy to get and is sold by online brokers. I'm not as startled by it," Parachini said. "Every time I hear about Big Brother building a supercomputer to spy on civilians I snicker, because by the time they get around to building it, it will be out-of-date."

The Department of Homeland Security, according to one counterterrorism official, is "nearing the process of putting together a virtual watchlist," which would be a pivotal tool in a new Terrorist Threat Integration Center announced by President Bush during his State of the Union speech.

The center would fuse FBI, State Department and immigration lists and be overseen by the White House and CIA.

"Any new data mining techniques or programs to enhance information sharing and collecting must and will respect the civil liberties guaranteed to the American people under the Constitution," Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkasse says, noting that a privacy officer position was created.

Guilt by association

But legal scholars also draw parallels to McCarthyism and its guilt-by-association blacklists that cost thousands of people their jobs and landed hundreds in jail.

"We have had before the notion that we have a list of dangerous people. This will have the effect of that again. It's very troubling," said Boalt Law School Professor Robert Post.

"There need to be mechanisms to review the accuracy of these lists," Post said. "What you're doing is penalizing association. You can't prosecute people for having a business association with Osama bin Laden, but you might not want them working in a nuclear plant."

Protecting vital facilities was the FBI's reason for sharing the terrorist watchlist with those outside of law enforcement circles.

"That list of names was provided to a lot of companies in different industries, and for the most part, let's just say that it was very effective, and most people didn't have a problem with it," FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said, without elaborating.

The list filtered down to Bay Area utilities after the FBI consulted with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which released it to the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA).

Employees checked

Bay Area utilities and public agencies said they received an FBI list just over a year ago, but there has been no update.

Some said they used it to double-check their employees. No matches were reported.

"At the time we were receiving daily notices and advisories from AMWA," said Steve Dennis, security chief at the Alameda County Water District. "There were no specific requests for action, just a list of names. We didn't act on it."

Others did. The Zone 7 Water Agency in Pleasanton checked the list against its employee roster, and then forgot about it.

Elected Zone 7 board member John Marchand, who is also a chemist for the Alameda County Water District, had no idea such a list had been circulated.

"It's a good idea in concept, but by losing control of the list, the FBI has done more of a disservice," Marchand said, adding the Internet's role could lead to "some really ugly vigilantism. You could just add somebody's name to the list if you don't like them."

Water agencies formed groups to share information, including one that Dennis chairs. He said the FBI lists went to all the water utilities in the Bay Area.

A spokesman for the largest water district, East Bay Municipal Utility District, refused to discuss the matter. An official at Pacific Gas & Electric Co. also declined comment.

More forthcoming was a Florida company that conducts background checks and certifies fingerprints of airline industry employees. The firm boasts on its Web site that it uses the FBI terrorist watchlist.

Ron Saunders, managing director of the firm, National Air Transportation Association Com-

pliance Services, said the lists had little practical value beyond a quick cross-reference. He discontinued the practice early last year, he said.

"We were given the original watchlist and then the rules started changing and we were not a party to the updated lists. We did not feel it was appropriate to charge a client for that information," Saunders said.

More than 1 million employees at 529 public airports have been checked and every airline got the list, he said.

"Since then there have been a lot of security enhancements that make the list pretty much worthless," Saunders said. "You would have a false sense of security because a terrorist on that list will try to lay low."

But use of the watchlist did not end a year ago. It evolved.

Last February the FBI sent an updated "FBI Suspect List" to an Italian industrial association, which forwarded it to 32 banks and factories.

By September, FBI agents in New York had raided a Brooklyn chicken restaurant and told one newspaper that al-Qaida operatives were using it as a front for a heroin laundering ring. The restaurant appears on the FBI list that was circulated in Italy.

In April 2002, the FBI's information sharing chief, Bob Jordan, told a Senate committee that the bureau had compiled a new watchlist. He added that FBI Director Robert Mueller had called for a "permanent terrorism watchlist," composed of suspects and anyone identified by spies and friendly foreign governments.

Information sharing

Laws passed in the aftermath of 9/11 allow that information to spread.

The USA Patriot Act allows banks to use "lists of known or suspected terrorists or terrorist organizations" provided by the government "to determine whether a person seeking to open an account appears on any such list."

The Homeland Security Act authorizes the government to share any information that "relates to" the threat of terrorist activity -- even if it's classified -- with state and local officials, public health officials, emergency responders and "employees of private-sector entities that affect critical infrastructure, cyber, economic, or public health security."

Currently, the Pentagon is researching a program dubbed Total Information Awareness that could allow analysts to sift through a network of databases to keep tabs on every electronic transaction in the world -- everything from online credit card purchases to video rentals and medical records. Analysts would use sophisticated data-mining techniques to ferret out patterns of suspicious terrorist activity to stop an attack before it happens.

When the Clinton administration proposed using encryption technology to track and decode electronic transactions, then-U.S. Sen. John Ashcroft wrote in a 1997 article, "This proposed policy raises obvious concerns about Americans' pri-vacy."

"We do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps. Why, then, should we grant government the Orwellian capability to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?" Ashcroft wrote.

Activists such as Ann Fagan Ginger say the shoe is on the other foot, now that Ashcroft is attorney general.

Staff writers Michele R. Marcucci and Josh Richman contributed to this report.

"We have in office an attorney general, a secretary of defense, a president and vice president who are ignorant of the Bill of Rights or don't care about it. Everything in the Homeland Security Act is designed to turn the president into a king, and that did not happen during the McCarthy era."