Cato Daily Dispatch for October 12, 2001
Senate Approves Expanded Surveillance PowersThreat Of Bioterrorism Persists
Terrorism Bill Restricts Online Gambling
Senate Approves Expanded Surveillance Powers
The Washington Post reports today that with a minimum of debate, the Senate last night overwhelmingly approved a far-reaching anti-terrorism bill that would significantly enhance the power of law enforcement agencies to conduct searches, wiretaps and other forms of electronic surveillance. The House is slated to take up its version of the bill today.
Lawmakers have been under heavy pressure to pass the legislation in response to the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, and last night it showed: At the urging of Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), they repeatedly turned aside efforts by Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.) to amend the bill to address what he said were its failures to adequately protect civil liberties.
Congress is poised to expand law enforcement's surveillance powers, but the new Cato Briefing Paper, "Watching You: Systematic Federal Surveillance of Ordinary Americans" shows that current powers are already ominously extensive. In this study, Charlotte Twight focuses on data-collection programs that, linked by Social Security numbers, enable the federal government to obtain an astonishingly detailed portrait of every American citizen.
Threat Of Bioterrorism Persists
The third tabloid newspaper company employee infected with anthrax -- an administrative clerk who sometimes handled mail and express packages -- inhaled so few spores of the potentially fatal bacterium that she reported for work Thursday, according to The Washington Post.
The Post also reports that deadly microbes, including the bacterium that causes anthrax, are not especially difficult to obtain in today's global microbiological marketplace. Some can be ordered by phone, fax or e-mail and arrive in the mail a few days later -- although there are some hurdles to face.
We must also defend our country against the threat of biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, says Cato's Ivan Eland in "U.S. Ignores Bio-Threat at Its Peril."
In a Cato study written last year, Eric Taylor wrote that the lack of public awareness about nuclear, biological or chemical attacks undermines national plans for dealing with such terrorism. Without education, the government "will have two foes to combat during an attack: the [nuclear, biological or chemical] agent and rampant civil panic," he says. Read more in "Are We Prepared for Terrorism Using Weapons of Mass Destruction?"
Terrorism Bill Restricts Online Gambling
Osama bin Laden is not, according to news reports, a terribly big fan of Western vices.
Nor has there been any reliable confirmation that last month's suicide-hijackers, who completed the bloodiest terrorist attack in American history, were habitual gamblers.
But according to Wired News that didn't stop the House Financial Services committee from voting 62-1 on Thursday for an "anti-terrorism" bill that limits Internet gambling.
In the words of Rep. Marge Roukema (R-N.J.): "We've heard testimony from the FBI, the Department of Justice, and law enforcement that there is a clean nexus, a connection, between Internet gambling and money laundering of terrorism activities."
The measure has been dubbed the "Financial Anti-Terrorism Act," and it prohibits financial institutions from accepting credit cards, electronic transfers and checks used in online gambling. Another part of the 121-page bill gives the Customs Service more power to inspect packages sent through the mail.
Tom Bell writes in "Internet Gambling: Popular, Inexorable, and (Eventually) Legal" that gambling will inevitably be legalized. In "Don't Give Up the Right to Gamble," mathematician Guy Calvert shows that gambling is a natural human endeavor, entrenched in American history and that "any coercive effort by the government to eliminate or reduce gambling must compete against that most formidable opponent, human nature." Calvert is also the author of the "Gambling America: Balancing the Risks of Gambling and Its Regulation."
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