Left Flank

The Watchers are watching everyone, and still they need help.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland is suing the Maryland State Police to get records it believes may show local authorities aided the federal government in spying on peace activists during several annual protests outside the National Security Agency.

Filed Thursday in Baltimore Circuit Court, the lawsuit alleges that state police have refused to disclose a record related to the surveillance despite public information requests.

Court papers state that a "Baltimore Intel Unit" had monitored many individual peace activists as they gathered at the American Friends Service Committee and prepared to protest in 2003 at the NSA, based at Fort Meade.

The monitoring of individuals and groups before protests, according to the lawsuit, went on for years, and was documented in part by state police. In August 2006, the groups, which include the American Friends Service Committee, Jonah House, Baltimore Pledge of Resistance and Baltimore Emergency Response Network, filed public information requests through the ACLU with federal, state and local organizations seeking the records.

I shouldn't talk about my former employer, and the agency charitable enough to hire my father, so disrespectfully. But, really, I preferred it when the Puzzle Palace was a secret no one knew existed, and didn't get its name in the papers.

Alexandra Marks at CSM treats to a potpourri of quotes, but generally favors private sector solutions to safeguarding privacy over.public ones.

Still, what can a concerned layperson do with the last quote:

«They pay a lot of attention to protecting that information, not because of consumer privacy, but because banks don't want to lose money: that's what's driving it, the big financial incentive,» says Avivah Litan, vice president of Gartner, a technology consulting firm in Stamford, Conn. «But with other information, like my passport file, what's the incentive to fix my privacy? There isn't one unless there's a consumer revolution and that doesn't look like [it's] coming.»

That is one of the things prompting the ACLU to continue to fight government efforts to collect even more data on individuals, including the REAL ID Act. That requires states to issue standard driver's licenses and give the federal government access to information about those licenses. Some government security experts want to combine those state files with the databases that DHS already keeps on Americans' international travel, the State Department's passport files, the Social Security's E-Verify database, and the FBI's criminal records. They argue that those combined files could then be mined to ferret out terrorists. But many privacy experts object, saying such information remains too vulnerable to attack.

«We believe the better way to ensure security is to do actual physical security checks, like screening all the bags that go in the belly of a plane and being sure weapons don't get on,» says Mr. Sparapani. «Instead we have all of these data sets that are being created and collected by the government and all of which are vulnerable to hacking and malicious attack and being stolen by identity thieves and terrorists.»

Other security experts note that mining such databases can be very helpful in identifying fraud or other patterns of criminal behavior. But they, too, are wary of the privacy implications.

«There really are good reasons for analysts to look at lots of phone records and call detail if you're putting it to the right use: You're not going to find needles in a haystack without a lot of data aggregation and data mining,» says Ms. Litan. «But we're always going to be behind the eight ball [on privacy], there's a ton of data on all of us out there and a lot of unauthorized abuse of it. I'm not really sure what the solution is.»

Hmmm...solution: take a side!