[FYI] Everyone is a suspect in the age of the superspies

[Horns@t-online.de (Axel H. Horns)]

http://jya.com/spy-hawk.htm

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16 January 1999. Thanks to Anonymous. 



The Times [London], 16 January 1999 

[Section: World News Features] 

Everyone is a suspect in the age of the superspies 

By Roger Boyes 

BONN -- A young lawyer stumbles upon a political scandal and finds
himself pursued through America by crooked intelligence officers
deploying the full battery of modern surveillance techniques. This is
Hollywood's "Enemy of the State," the lawyer is the actor Will Smith,
and the problem is solved in a gunfight between Mafia chieftains and
National Security Agency chiefs. 

Standard fare, yet the film has tapped a nerve. It coincides with an
energetic debate in the foreign policy community about Catastrophe
Terrorism - the ability of small groups to threaten society with
weapons of mass destruction. There is no proper apparatus to guard
against such a threat, government advisers say, and the West should
move quickly towards setting up new agencies, new laws and new
databases to sift out suspects. And, of course, we are all suspects. 

This is not exclusively an American debate. The German Constitutional
Court has been questioning experts on the legality of extensive
electronic monitoring by the country's main spy agency, the Federal
Intelligence Service. 

[...]

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