The Land of the Free May Become Less So

Pedestrians in central London are captured on closed circuit television about every 10 paces. French citizens must carry national identity cards and present them to police on demand. Spanish authorities may hold terrorism suspects incommunicado for up to five days before formally charging them.

Israel, which has coped with attacks on its citizens since it was founded, regularly puts security before freedom of movement. Shoppers are ordered to open handbags for inspection before entering a supermarket. Drivers are questioned by guards, and their cars are searched before they park in an underground lot.

Such measures may sound farfetched for the United States. But many security experts believe they will be on the table, along with other restrictions on privacy and due process, as the country grapples with a terrorist threat on its own soil and drafts new legislation to confront it.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft insists he will not trample on civil liberties in the pursuit of those responsible for last week’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. “We will conduct this effort to investigate and to prosecute with strict regard for every safeguard of the United States Constitution,” he told a news conference Wednesday.

Still, U.S. citizens will certainly be expected to tolerate inconveniences for security and may be asked to forgo some rights they take for granted.

Many Americans who travel abroad may already have felt uncomfortable relinquishing their passports when checking in to a hotel. This is done because local authorities are being apprised of their movements.

“The fundamental dilemma for the United States right now is to ensure civil liberties and free speech while finding effective mechanisms to counter terror groups,” said Magnus Ranstorp, an expert on international terrorism at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

The State Department says armed groups committed significant acts of terror in 29 countries last year. In many of those countries, security precautions are part of daily life after decades-long deadly conflicts, including sectarian warfare over the British province of Northern Ireland, a Basque separatist movement in Spain and an Islamic insurgency in Algeria that has spilled over into France.

As a result of such conflicts, average citizens in Europe are accustomed to traffic-snarling police roadblocks and sudden evacuations of subways, train stations and other buildings. Their public areas may be patrolled by police toting machine guns, and their car alarms may be automatically deactivated to prevent detonation of a bomb.

Europeans have developed a second sense for suspicious packages and frequently report them to police. They must often do without public trash bins, luggage lockers and other conveniences while accepting heavy airport security that may include frisking and examination of all electronic equipment.

In Colombia, the government is at war with both leftist guerrillas and powerful drug barons. To carry a cellular phone--favored by both groups--Colombians agree to be fingerprinted and to carry a photo ID proving ownership. More draconian measures are taken by the Turkish state, which has long cited its war against Kurdish separatists and Islamic radicals as justification for assuming wide-ranging powers that infringe on its citizens’ personal lives. Phone tapping of politicians, journalists and businesspeople suspected of having contact with these groups is commonplace. Houses are raided without search warrants for the purposes of intelligence gathering.

In the Philippines, where a small group of Muslim separatists is fighting the government, travelers are routinely frisked at the Manila airport and hotel guests must leave their baggage at the door for inspection before it can be taken into rooms.

Other means of forestalling terrorism in Europe recall George Orwell’s Big Brother. France, Belgium and the Netherlands are among the European countries that require their citizens to carry national ID cards. In Britain, even some liberals have dropped their opposition to such a system.

“I am more afraid now of the possible actions of a small number of my fellow citizens than I am of the abuse of power by an overweening British state,” columnist David Aaronovitch wrote in the Evening Standard newspaper after the attacks on the United States.

Germany and Austria not only issue internal passports but, safeguarding against unwanted immigrants, require all residents to register with local police--an essential step toward obtaining a telephone line or bank account.

In Germany, where at least three of the 19 suspected hijackers in last week’s attacks had been living legally as students, some in the Cabinet have begun moving to tighten laws regulating freedom of movement and religion.

Interior Minister Otto Schily, who once served as defense counsel for accused terrorists of the leftist Red Army Faction, has called for including fingerprints in passports as a means of confirming the identity of the holder.

He also is pushing for the revision of constitutional protections that prevent the government from banning any group that describes itself as faith-based.

In Britain, an estimated 1.5 million closed-circuit TV cameras are installed on street corners and in airports, train and subway stations, pubs, nightclubs, buses and many other public places, according to Simon Davies, professor of information systems at the London School of Economics and a rights activist.

One London borough, Newham, has adopted the kind of face-recognition technology that Tampa, Fla., used during this year’s Super Bowl to pick 19 people with pending arrest warrants out of a stadium crowd of 100,000. Cameras installed in commercial districts take pictures that are run through a databank of people convicted of crimes in Newham in the previous 12 weeks.

Closed-circuit cameras have been key in crime solving, particularly in tracking down a 24-year-old white supremacist who set off three nail bombs in black, Asian and gay areas of London in 1999, killing three people and injuring 129. David Copeland was convicted of murder last year.

But Davies argues that the cameras have not aided in crime prevention and that there have been many cases of abuse, with disproportionate monitoring of minorities, gays and youths for “voyeurism or hatred.” The cameras’ use is virtually unregulated, he said.

Nonetheless, there is widespread acceptance of closed-circuit TV.

“I fear there will be a point in the United States, as there has been in England and Spain, where people will forget to defend their freedom,” Davies said.

The human rights group Amnesty International has criticized a British anti-terrorism law that went into effect last year under which 21 international groups were banned, including Al Qaeda, the organization headed by the chief suspect in the U.S. attacks, Osama bin Laden.

The law broadly defines terrorism to include attacks on property and electronic systems as well as on people. It goes further than U.S. legislation banning terrorist organizations by making it a crime to be a member of any of the listed groups, or to raise money, organize or support them in any way. Amnesty says this could violate rights of freedom of expression and association.

The new law enshrines much of the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 1974, which was passed as emergency legislation to fight the Irish Republican Army and renewed each succeeding year, resulting in many human rights abuses, activists say. It allows police to detain terrorist suspects without a warrant in some cases and to hold them without charging them for seven days--longer with judicial approval. A suspect may be denied access to a lawyer for 48 hours, and even then police may listen to and observe a consultation.

The French also have given police broad powers to combat terrorism. As in Britain, suspects may be interrogated before a lawyer arrives and held for days without charge. Moreover, an anti-terror law passed during an Iranian-sponsored campaign in the 1980s linked France’s domestic intelligence service directly with special magistrates to dispatch terror cases quickly, and it allows judges considerable flexibility to order searches purely for intelligence gathering.

U.S. safeguards “may be better for individual liberty,” said Alain Marsaud, a former anti-terrorism magistrate who helped draft the legislation. “But in this case, we had an urgent necessity. The intelligence service was integrated directly into the judicial culture.”

When it comes to a culture of security, Israel may be the paradigm for U.S. airports.

Human rights activists say Arabs and single women are singled out for the harshest interrogation and searches, including scrutiny of documents, diaries and notes they are carrying. Some activists have admonished the United States against undertaking similar “profiling” in beefing up security.

But Israeli Transportation Minister Ephraim Sneh dismissed their warnings. “The fact of the matter is that not many people who look like Swedes have tried to hijack airplanes,” he said. “Either the United States will improve its security or it will engage in academic discussions.”

The question for civil libertarians is: Improved security at what cost?

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Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Mary Curtius in Jerusalem; T. Christian Miller in Bogota, Colombia; Richard C. Paddock in Jakarta, Indonesia; Sebastian Rotella in Paris; Alissa J. Rubin in Vienna; Carol J. Williams in Berlin; and special correspondent Amberin Zaman in Ankara, Turkey.