Civil Liberties

WASHINGTON - President Bush highlighted his administration's homeland security efforts yesterday and asked Congress for more law enforcement powers to fight terrorists. "The best way to protect the American people is to stay on the offensive ... at home and to stay on the offensive overseas," he said. "And that is what this country is doing." In a speech at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., the president said law enforcement agencies need the same tools to combat terrorism they use to fight embezzlers or drug traffickers.

WASHINGTON - A new report by internal investigators at the Justice Department has identified dozens of recent cases in which department employees have been accused of serious civil rights and civil liberties violations involving enforcement of the sweeping anti-terrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act. The inspector general's report, which was presented to Congress last week and is awaiting public release, is likely to raise new concern among lawmakers...

THEY'VE shuttered the windows and slammed the doors. A growing number of cities and counties have told their public agencies to refuse aid to federal investigations that infringe on privacy and civil liberties - defying the USA Patriot Act. More than 95 municipalities have enacted resolutions protesting the erosion of citizens' rights since 9/11, according to the nonprofit Bill of Rights Defense Committee in Florence, Mass. Many towns, including York, Pa., have urged federal authorities to honor community values such as diversity, and to uphold citizens' constitutional rights.

John Ashcroft was once a very visible frontline soldier in the war against terrorism. Then he virtually disappeared. But the Ashcroft Justice Department continues to make news, disturbing people who already feared the appointment of perhaps the most ideologically conservative member of the Bush Cabinet as attorney general. Recently, Ashcroft insisted that local federal prosecutors seek the death penalty in several cases even after the prosecutors had decided to go for lesser sentences.

Conservatives are in power again. They control the White House, both houses of Congress and many state houses across the country. And one of their most popular targets, the American Civil Liberties Union, has never been more popular. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the 82-year-old nonprofit organization has seen its ranks of members and supporters increase by 15 percent, to an all-time high of almost 380,000. Many newcomers signed up because they're concerned about the Bush administration's anti-terrorism measures, which allow closed military trials, expanded profiling of immigrants and government monitoring of everyday electronic transactions.

WASHINGTON - Even its name, some say, is ominous and Orwellian, conjuring up visions of Big Brother tracking your video rentals, prescriptions or e-mail: "Total Information Awareness." To privacy advocates and civil libertarians, this government supercomputer project is nothing less than domestic spying, the chilling first step toward a surveillance society. The man leading it, former Iran-contra figure John M. Poindexter, only adds to what critics call the "spook factor." But to security specialists, the drive to develop a network of public and private databases could be crucial to identifying terrorists before they strike and to preventing another Sept.

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. - Nearly two dozen cities around the country have passed resolutions urging federal authorities to respect the civil rights of those cities' residents when fighting terrorism. Efforts to pass similar measures are under way in more than 60 other places. Although the resolutions are largely symbolic, many of them provide some legal justification for local authorities to resist cooperating in the federal war on terrorism when they deem civil liberties and constitutional rights are being compromised.

WASHINGTON - A handful of cases before the conservative Rehnquist Supreme Court could reshape the national landscape on issues of race and free speech, civil liberties and gay rights. When the court opened its term in October, it seemed that the biggest case would arise from the government's new war against terrorism. Instead, the cases on the high court's docket read like a greatest-hits list from a generation ago: affirmative action, sodomy, Miranda warnings, abortion protests, the death penalty and cross burning.

A few years ago, working as a top counter-terrorism adviser at the U.S. Department of Justice, I. Michael Greenberger spent months studying the potential impact of a major terrorist attack on America, its government and its laws. Now, from the University of Maryland law school in Baltimore, he is watching the effects of the real thing reverberate through the U.S. legal system. And he doesn't like what he is seeing. "There's no doubt that these are dangerous times that call for going right up to the border of what the Constitution allows," he says.

DENVER - Sister Antonia Anthony, 74, found herself in the files, characterized as a member of a "criminal extremist group." Great-grandmother Helen Henry, 82, was in there too, with the notation that her Toyota sedan bore a "Free Leonard Peltier" bumper sticker. Both had aroused the suspicions of the Denver Police Department, which maintained dossiers on about 3,200 individuals and 208 organizations that it believed bore watching. When the files were discovered this spring, the ensuing uproar, from the mayor on down, compelled the department to get rid of them.