Privacy advocates are increasingly concerned that the government is using the 9-11 tragedy to expand its powers of surveillance on U.S. citizens. The Bush Administration and the Congress deserve credit for providing law enforcement more tools to combat terrorism, but the USA Patriot Act carries risks as well. For all of its good parts, the Patriot Act also provided cover for pushing several dubious Clinton era anti-privacy proposals through Congress, some that had been debated and rejected previously.

Brad Jansen, a privacy expert at the Free Congress Foundation, says that prior to 9-11 "combating terrorism" had never before been used to justify these proposals, taken from a long-held "wish list" of Clinton Administration holdovers at the Justice Department and the FBI. The Act eliminates nearly all of the constitutional safeguards against FBI or CIA abuse of our right to privacy for telephone and computer usage. Some wonder if we are being asked to make these sacrifices as compensation for the worst U.S. intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor.

The laws that govern the conduct of U.S. intelligence activities forbid the CIA to conduct "electronic surveillance within the United States except for the purpose of training, testing, or conducting countermeasures to hostile electronic surveillance,". Nor is the Agency allowed to assemble and maintain files on U.S. citizens.

But recently a non-profit Texas group, Public Information Research, PIR, discovered by accident that the CIA was tagging Web surfers who visited the Agency’s online site with a "persistent cookie." Cookies are those pesky electronic mechanisms that allow companies or in this case, the CIA, to record your visit to their Web site and then monitor your online activities, which can be used to develop profiles for use in national marketing databases.

Now it looks like CIA has been using the same techniques to track U.S. citizens’ reading and web surfing habits, without their knowledge, and against regulations. If you have visited the CIA’s Electronic Reading Room before mid-March, then you probably made it into the CIA’s database. When Daniel Brandt, PIR’s President, called the agency on this practice, CIA officials professed to be "shocked" to learn that their site was tagging visitors. They blamed it on a former contractor and promised to remove the offending software and destroy any files that had been created.

Wayne Madsen of the Electronic Privacy Information Center suspects that the CIA was constructing profiles on visitors to its Web sites. He says that, with the passage of the Patriot Act, we will never know whether these new surveillance powers are being "potentially abused." Given the government’s track record on privacy in recent years that should give us all pause. But the Agency is satisfied that it is back in compliance with federal regulations and considers the matter closed. If so, we can thank Daniel Brandt, the founder of Public Information Research. The establishment media haven’t even bothered to report it.

Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@aim.org