January 30, 2005 | Reviewing the Review - A Closer Look at a Hatchet Job

Heather Mac Donald, the City Journal's resident apologist for racial profiling and abusive interrogation techniques, published a review of Robert O'Harrow Jr.'s book, No Place To Hide, in the January 25 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

Mac Donald is perhaps best known for her full-throated defense of the Patriot Act from any and all criticism, including this essay, which was reprinted in full (scroll down) on the Justice Department's website defending the legislation.

Here Mac Donald offers a snarky review of O'Harrow's book, a broadside written in bad faith that dismisses the book simply based on the premise that no one should even question the implications of surveillance, government use of massive corporate collections of data, or law enforcement powers.

Here's two examples of her inability to engage the book fairly:

One:

Mr. O'Harrow presents every horror story he can find about a data system gone awry. Florida authorities bar an eligible voter from voting in the 2000 presidential election in Florida after computers falsely identify him as a felon. [...]

Such misfirings are regrettable, and every measure should be taken to avoid them. [...] The cost to democratic legitimacy of election fraud outweighs the minimal risk that antifraud technology will disenfranchise eligible voters. Virtually every modern discovery that improves life -- from vaccines to automobiles -- carries risks; balancing those risks against the technology's benefits is a skill that privacy advocates seem to lack.

Mac Donald's dismisses the DBT/Florida debacle as the case of one eligible voter being disenfranchised, calling it the price of modern anti-fraud technology.

But it wasn't just one voter. The list included three percent of all African American voters in Florida. And while we will never know for certain whether inaccurate purges changed the 2000 election results, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights estimates 8,000 voters were inaccurately flagged by the faulty list. President Bush's margin of victory was 447 votes.

Findings

The state of Florida’s statutorily mandated purge list, compiled by a private firm, was provided to county supervisors of elections with names that were inexact matches. The data provided demonstrated that this list had at least a 14.1 percent error rate.

African Americans had a significantly greater chance of being listed on Florida’s mandated purge list. The probability of names of African Americans appearing on the list in error was significantly greater than the likelihood of the names of whites being erroneously included on the purge list.

The state of Florida’s use of this purge list, combined with the state law that places the burden on voters to remove themselves from the list, resulted in denying countless African Americans the right to vote.

Two:

In fact, people give away personal information even when they don't have to. In 1998, hundreds of thousands of magazine readers filled out an eight-page, 700-item questionnaire about themselves just because Condé Nast was curious about its subscribers' most intimate medical problems and life-style choices. Americans clearly have a far more relaxed view of privacy than the activists who claim to speak on their behalf.

What Mac Donald conveniently leaves out of this account is that the survey pretended it was anonymous, while in fact, the survey's designer surreptitiously placed a tracking code on the envelope that identified the reader the survey had been mailed. While Americans may like to fill out surveys, we don't like being misled or lied to by omission.

Of course, that portion of the story doesn't fit with Mac Donald's thesis, so she conveniently neglects to mention it.

And finally, Mac Donald tries to defend the Total Information Awareness project by arguing that O'Harrow neglects to look into all the effort being put into "anonymization technologies," which, though she declines to cite a single example, Mac Donald insists are being pursued as thoroughly as the technologies to surveill Americans. (Of course, in her view, this would have happened regardless of people concerned about privacy and surveillance).

Let's take for example the Total Information Awareness system that DARPA was working on. Once developed and deployed (by some agency other than DARPA, which is purely a research group), the system would search through almost any database imaginable, including law enforcement, medical, associational, financial, phone, media and Internet records to search for patterns of activities that look like terrorist plans. The goal was to find plots before the deed was done.

Regardless of the immensity of the difficulty of distinguishing between legitimate activities and terrorist plots, as well as the enormous potential for false positives, even if the system could work, there's a not-so-minor question of the Fourth Amendment. The system would have placed almost the entirety of Americans' lives under constant surveillance.

The program's directors directed a minuscule amount of their funding to a "privacy appliance." That system would sit between the databases and the central supercomputer algorithms, and would try to add-on privacy by anonymizing citizen's identities. So the appliance sitting on a credit card database would send on "234fgxc45f bought a Casio watch" and the one sitting on AT&T's server would send on "234fgxc45f called 457.763.3452" and the Joint Terrorism Task Force database would send on the info that "457.763.3452 that is the workplace of a suspected terrorist." Then an analyst would take that info to a judge or simply to their supervisor and get permission to change 234fgxc45f to a real name.

That's nice, so far as it goes, and does do something to prevent the creation of a thoroughly indexed central database on Americans, but it ignores one crucial thing: the system is still surveilling every move of American citizens, a blatant violation of the spirit, if not the instrument, of the Fourth Amendment.

Here's a analogy.

Suppose law enforcement agents had the keys to all Americans' houses and every day, opened the door and let a dog go in. The officer has no idea what your name is. The dog goes in and sniffs all through the house. If the dog smells drugs or something it thinks might be drugs, it barks. Once the dog barks, the officer calls down to the central station and gets permission to find out who you are and do further searches.

From where I stand, that's an un-American America, just as I think, a society in which a computerized version of a drug-detecting dog is sniffing my every purchase, email and phone call is un-American and would have a chilling effect on citizens' participation in politics.

Mac Donald may think that's a fine world to live in, where a law enforcement agents unleash a computerized sniffer on your every move.

Of course, in Mac Donald's world, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

But try telling that to the 3,000 or so Denver activists who were spied upon by the Denver police and Joint Terrorism Task Force. O'Harrow chronicles the experience of Quakers who were labeled "criminal extremists," but somehow that story fails to make it into Mac Donald's hit piece.

At one point in her review, Mac Donald also castigates O'Harrow for not doing any reporting on the effects of surveillance. It's the kind of line that will make anyone who has read the book spit out their coffee in comic disbelief. If anything, O'Harrow spends too much time reporting, as the level of detail supporting his narrative is almost overwhelming (and amazingly, though I cover much of the same territory, O'Harrow does, I found not a single error in fact in the book).

Moreover, despite Mac Donald's castigation of O'Harrow's book as a "Jeremiad", O'Harrow is eminently fair and far from pretending to have all the answers. In fact, its clear he wants a fuller debate over the use of personal information, the legitimate uses of surveillance and whether new laws are needed to keep up with the power of new technology.

It would be nice to have that debate, but with writers like Heather Mac Donald being tolerated by the Wall Street Journal, it seems increasingly unlikely that any real, informed debate will happen anytime soon.

That's a shame, and both Mac Donald and the editors who let her purported review go into print owe the country better.

Posted by Ryan Singel at January 30, 2005 10:40 PM

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Heather Mac Donald, the City Journal 's resident apologist for racial profiling and abusive interrogation techniques, published a review of Robert O'Harrow Jr.'s book, No Place To Hide , in the January 25 edition of the Wall Street Journal . [Read More]

Tracked on January 31, 2005 05:29 PM