Gorton urges privacy, security balance

WASHINGTON – As they formulate a plan to fight terrorism, Congress and the president should take care to protect individual privacy and the civil liberties of all Americans, two members of the Sept. 11 commission say.

While there is an inherent tension between liberty and security, there’s no reason one must be sacrificed for the other – even in an age of terrorism, panel members Slade Gorton and Lee Hamilton said.

Gorton, a former Republican senator from Washington, said he was troubled that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was misidentified on a terrorism watch list when he tried to board airliners between Washington, D.C., and Boston. The well-known Massachusetts Democrat said he was stopped five times because a name similar to his appeared on a watch list of people considered dangers to fly.

“Just because there’s one bad guy named Edward Kennedy doesn’t mean Senator Kennedy should be kept off” an airplane, Gorton said. “We have to be real careful.”

At a hearing Friday before a House subcommittee, Gorton and Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said reconciling security and liberty is difficult but crucial.

“In our zeal to fight the scourge of terrorism,” they said in a statement to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, officials must ensure their actions “do not compromise the very rights and liberties that make our system of government and our society worth defending.”

The pair backed creation of a new oversight board that would be responsible for ensuring that government programs to combat terrorism safeguard privacy rights and civil liberties.

The 9/11 panel made no specific recommendations about how the privacy office should be developed or where it should be located, but members unanimously agreed that some type of oversight board should be created, Gorton and Hamilton said. “It should be independent, and it should be powerful enough that it is listened to,” Gorton said, adding that specific details were up to Congress.

The two former lawmakers said Congress faces an immediate test on privacy, as it debates renewal of the USA Patriot Act. The anti-terrorism law, enacted in the weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, gave the government stronger powers to conduct investigations and detain people.