intelligence

It was a late afternoon in April, and hot fog was creeping in from the coast. Lima?s colonial Plaza de Armas was relatively calm for a change: a din of grinding gears and hawker?s cries was in the air, as was a strong smell of diesel fumes and old cooking oil, but there were no jeering strikers, and there was no sting of tear gas. In front of the iron gates of the presidential palace, riot police stood listless ? striking coca cultivators would not arrive from the highlands for another ten days. A clutch of dirty shoeshine boys lolled on the steps of the cathedral. A dozen passersby gathered in a small arc around a newspaper kiosk, feeding on the shrill headlines of the latest political scandal. I was here to meet Enrique Zileri, the director of Caretas, Peru?s leading newsmagazine, and godfather to three generations of Lima?s top journalists. Caretas?s offices, an aging, thick-walled embodiment of Peru?s fourth estate, dominate one corner of the plaza. In recent days, the prime minister had referred to Peru?s press as the country?s most powerful sector, and one observer had told me offhandedly that the press here filled the space left by the absence of real political parties. As Zileri and I walked through the plaza to have a late lunch, he told me that Peru ?is a country of myths and the myths here are more important than reality.?

Zileri was trying to explain the fate of Peru?s president, Alejandro Toledo, who had risen from shoeshine boy to Stanford economist, from opposition leader to Peru?s first president of indigenous background. But since taking office three years ago after the collapse of Alberto Fujimori?s decade of authoritarian rule, Toledo?s myth had been pierced by a string of scandals that now threatened his government ? and perhaps Peru?s return to elected democracy.

I thought Zileri?s observation might also help explain the crisis that was gripping the Peruvian press. In September Caretas had published an article accusing a journalist ? Cecilia Valenzuela, Zileri?s prot駩 and the director one of Peru?s most respected investigative television programs ? of using wiretaps to further her investigations. The Caretas story turned out to be wrong: the young reporter who wrote it later confessed to inventing the key interview. She was fired, and the episode quickly became known as Peru?s Jayson Blair moment. But it had sent a bolt through Lima?s tight-knit group of top journalists, who during the 1990s had stood at the forefront of the fight against a repressive government while their colleagues and bosses were coerced and bought off. It provoked a debate ? argued in public forums and ethics boards, on editorial pages and over the airwaves ? that had left them divided, and, perhaps, burst another myth.

The essence of that debate was whether different standards should apply to journalists under a dictatorship and a democracy. Should hidden cameras, illicit recordings, stolen documents, and paid sources be outlawed now? Were journalists still attacking the government as if it were Fujimori?s dictatorship, as some thought, or had some reporters lost their critical attitude toward this government? Had investigative reporting been replaced by petty tabloidism, or was today?s corruption just more easily exposed? Should journalists be concerned if their reporting leads to a crisis of governability? Were those who helped expose an authoritarian regime now in danger of toppling a democratic one?

Surprisingly, Zileri, whose magazine aggressively opposed Fujimori?s regime, is one of the loudest critics of a new trend in journalism that has emerged with the return of democracy: denuncialogia ? an obsession with denunciations. ?It trivializes investigative journalism. It generates a frenzy of aggression,? Zileri said. ?It creates in the population a sense that the country is in chaos, that we can?t be governed by a democracy.?

How did Zileri explain this apparent collapse in serious but measured reporting, given Peru?s new democratic freedoms, a sweeping anti-corruption campaign, a new freedom of information law, and the proliferation of new independent media outlets? He conceded with a twisted smile that serious investigative reporting might in fact be harder under a democracy than under a dictatorship. ?It?s like an orchestra of voices now.? In the silence of authoritarianism, he says, ?it was much easier to hear the noise.?

During the 1990s, Peru witnessed the creation of one of the most extensive state-run networks of corruption in Latin American history, known here universally as the mafia. The don of that mafia was Fujimori?s Svengali-like national security adviser, Vladimiro Montesinos. When a corruption scandal forced Montesinos and Fujimori to flee the country in 2000, a trove of Montesinos?s secretly recorded videos surfaced and exposed the depth of his corruption. Montesinos was captured and returned to Peru to face trial, and those videos form the backbone of the legal case against him and over 1,300 others who have been connected to his crimes.

As the videos document, Montesinos maintained control through Peru?s intelligence apparatus, and reached deep into the courts, the military, the Congress, the police, and the private sector. But nowhere was that control more complete than in the media, which by the end of the decade had been swallowed whole by Peru?s national intelligence service, the SIN. The current crisis of the press is in large part the legacy of this deeply corrupted past. To get a sense of its scope, I caught a taxi to El Callao, where Montesinos is now standing trial. The trial is expected to run for another year.

The taxi sped south along Lima?s coastal freeway, sandwiched between the city?s high sandstone cliffs and a rocky, rubble-strewn beach. The smell of sewage and shellfish drifted through the window. We turned inland, crossed the dry Rimac River and entered the industrial neighborhood of El Callao, once a separate city but today just an extension of Lima?s eight million-person sprawl. Shantytowns thinned into farmland, and we came to the high cinderblock walls of El Callao Naval Base, home to the maximum-security military prison that Montesinos had ordered built a decade ago to hold the country?s terrorists. For three years it has held Montesinos, who spends his days in an isolation cell. He is charged with commanding death squads; corrupting Peru?s judicial, political, and financial institutions; rigging elections; selling guns to Colombian terrorists; protecting drug traffickers; and stealing as much as $1 billion of state money. He and forty co-defendants also are accused of systematically buying editorial control of the country?s television stations and popular press.

The charges stem from the late 1990s, when Fujimori was campaigning for a third five-year term and the obstacles to reelection were significant: the third term was constitutionally barred, a declining economy had left people restless, and a strident political opposition was increasingly vocal. Montesinos knew that control of the media would be crucial. He focused his efforts on two primary targets: television, which reached deep into the rural and uneducated populations; and the prensa chicha, the fourteen-cent tabloids whose headlines blared like banner advertising from kiosks across the country.

Montesinos already had substantial leverage over the country?s main television stations. Advertising had declined, leaving the stations deep in debt and the state as the country?s primary buyer of ad time. Tax reform had also left most television stations with huge debts to the government. Starting in 1999, Montesinos began to invite television executives into his office in the SIN for a talk. The negotiations were simple: You owe the state money, Montesinos said. I can either shut you down or I can forgive some debts, and even give you some operating money. In exchange, the owners were required to clear their coverage of Fujimori?s reelection campaign with Montesinos, and help ruin the credibility of opponents. One by one, the broadcasters took the deal.

One of Montesinos?s secret videos shows the owners of Channel 2 being offered $500,000 a month to ban appearances of the political opposition on their channel. Channel 4 owners got $1.5 million a month for similar cooperation. Another video shows Montesinos counting out $350,000 in cash to Channel 5?s proprietor. The owner of Channel 9 received $50,000 to cancel a bothersome investigative series called Uncensored, directed by Cecilia Valenzuela. By the end of 1999, Montesinos had editorial control over Channels 2, 4, 5, 9, and 13. Channel 7 was already state-owned. One of the country?s two cable channels, Channel 10, had been secretly purchased for the armed forces. That left just one independent station in Peru: Channel N, a twenty-four-hour cable news outlet that reaches barely 5 percent of the population.

The second major news source for Peru?s impoverished majority was the prensa chicha. Chicha refers to the popular culture of Lima?s millions of displaced Andean Indians, who fled their mountain villages during the Shining Path?s rural terror campaign of the 1980s and ?90s, which left 60,000 dead. Hundreds of thousands of migrants flooded Lima in those years, and there, among the second and third generations of urban migrants, the culture of chicha took root. Named for the corn and yucca beer typically made by Andean Indians, chicha has come to represent a vibrant popular culture of tinny cumbia music, doleful lyrics, bright neon colors, and a peculiar street jargon. To Lima?s elite, the word is synonymous with tacky.

The prensa chicha?s front pages follow a formula: a scandalous banner headline, a nearly naked woman, and close-ups of a bloody car crash or murder scene. Sex, death, horror. Montesinos saw in the prensa chicha an ideal vehicle to communicate with the country?s poor.

As the 2000 elections neared, he developed a strategy to co-opt the prensa chicha. To fund the operation, Montesinos siphoned millions of dollars from the intelligence budgets of the armed forces. He offered prensa chicha owners about $3,000 for every front-page headline. A small office in the Intelligence Services became a news factory: during morning meetings, Montesinos and his advisers would agree on the next day?s headlines. The ?news? was then sent out via encrypted fax to the owners, who laid out the front pages and sent a proof back to the SIN for final approval.

According to prosecutors, Augusto Bresani, Montesinos?s liaison with the prensa chicha, decided to open his own line of tabloids, with one innovation: realizing that their purpose was served by the headlines alone, Bresani stopped wasting money on content. His tabloids were reduced to full-page headlines followed inside by a three-line story wedged among three pages of ads. Soon, the number of chicha publications had exploded. El Chino, El Tio, El Men, La Chuchi, El Mananero, La Yuca, El Popular, Repudica, Diario Mas, El Chato ? all screaming in unison.

Ironically, it was the near total repression of the mainstream press that fostered some of Latin America?s best investigative reporting. I spoke with Gustavo Gorriti, one of Peru?s top investigative journalists, in his office in a sprawling colonial house in Lince, a wealthy neighborhood near downtown Lima. The house serves as the offices of Instituto de Defensa Legal, a Peruvian nongovernmental organization where Gorriti is now a journalist in residence. He is returning to journalism after serving as an adviser to Alejandro Toledo, whom he now refers to sarcastically as ?God?s gift to Peru.? Gorriti, who is in his mid-fifties, has never been one to mince words. ?The essential struggle of the 1990s can be construed as the struggle between spies and journalists, with information as the battleground,? Gorriti tells me. ?And the journalists won, again and again and again.?

Gorriti?s own career can be seen as a prolonged battle with Montesinos, whom Gorriti first exposed in an investigation for Caretas in 1983, when Montesinos was merely a well-connected drug lawyer. Throughout the 1980s Gorriti investigated the terror war that was consuming his country, publishing an authoritative book about the Shining Path in 1990. That same year, Montesinos became the adviser to Peru?s newly elected president, Fujimori. By April 1992, when Fujimori, at his adviser?s behest, ordered tanks into the streets, dissolved the Congress, and announced an ?autogolpe,? or ?self-coup,? as Peruvians called it, both Gorriti and Montesinos were in their prime.

That April night, as he sat finishing a dispatch on the coup for Spain?s El Pais, armed men climbed over Gorriti?s garden wall. He was held incommunicado in the basement of army intelligence headquarters, near an incinerator where investigators with Peru?s Truth and Reconciliation Commission later found human remains. After fifty hours of being officially ?disappeared,? he was released, thanks to an international outcry. He spent much of the next few years in exile in the U.S. and Panama, where he continued to uncover Montesinos?s crimes.

After the 1992 coup, the number of newspapers, magazines, and television stations that criticized the government shrank until only a handful of independent journalists were left. Still, they were able to uncover many of the regime?s crimes, and are today credited with playing an important role in its fall.

In late 1993, Cecilia Valenzuela, then a young Caretas reporter, published an investigation that linked Montesinos to a death-squad responsible for two recent massacres. The day after the piece ran, a box appeared in the elevator of the Caretas office with Valenzuela?s name on it. Inside was a chicken, slashed and bloody, wrapped in black tape with an enlarged photo of Valenzuela tied to it. A week later, on her birthday, flowers were delivered to Valenzuela?s desk by a messenger. The card inside read, ?You?re going to die, bitch.?

In July 1997, Channel 2 reported on Montesinos?s inflated income and, later, that intelligence services had been tapping the phones of 200 opposition politicians and journalists. The station?s Israeli-born owner, Baruch Ivcher, had his Peruvian citizenship revoked, and his right to own a television station along with it. Control of Channel 2 passed to minority shareholders, who quickly ended investigations.

In 1998 Angel Paez, an investigative reporter at the left-leaning daily La Republica, began publishing articles about suspicious arms acquisitions by the armed forces in which associates of Montesinos were skimming large commissions for faulty equipment. Soon after, Paez was accused of being a traitor to his country in a vicious campaign by the prensa chicha. In 1999 the opposition paper Liberacion published documents that showed Montesinos had $2.6 million stashed in Peruvian bank accounts. In March 2000, investigative reporters at the cautious El Comercio, the country?s oldest paper and last remaining broadsheet, revealed that Fujimori?s reelection campaign had forged over one million signatures to enroll in the coming elections.

Fujimori won the second round of elections uncontested when Toledo withdrew in protest, but the network of control that Fujimori and Montesinos had built was starting to unravel. In August 2000, the two announced the bust of an international arms trafficking ring that had sold 10,000 assault rifles to Colombia?s FARC guerrillas. The day after the press conference, Cecilia Valenzuela began publishing an investigation that named Montesinos as the mastermind of the deal. Three weeks later, a video ? the first of the Vladi-videos, as they would be called ? was broadcast simultaneously on Channel N and in Congress, showing Montesinos giving an opposition congressman $15,000 to change political parties. The game was up. Montesinos fled the country eight days later, and was eventually captured and extradited to Peru. Fujimori fled in November 2000, faxing his resignation from Japan, where he remains today, plotting his political comeback. ?They were investigations that completely shook up the political situation and put reality in a new light,? Gorriti told me. ?For me, that is what defines good investigative reporting.?

One of the legacies of Montesinos?s governance-by-espionage has been a society obsessed with surveillance.

?Now everyone records telephone conversations, everyone uses hidden cameras,? said Julia Maria Urrunaga, former investigative editor at El Comercio and now a director at the Institute for the Press and Society. On a daily basis, Lima editors receive a stream of clandestinely recorded conversations, documents, and photos of everything from petty love affairs to President Toledo?s private phone conversations. ?Everyone wants to be a little Montesinos,? Urrunaga said.

This, coupled with the government?s political bungling, has generated a seemingly endless supply of scandals from Toledo?s first days in office. First, it was the presidential salary, which Toledo raised from $3,000 to $18,000 a month. (A public outcry eventually forced him to lower it to $3,660.) Then it was his repeated refusal to recognize Zarai Toledo, whom the press had identified as his illegitimate daughter. (In 2002, after years of denials, Toledo recognized her.)

Over the past six months, denuncialogia has gripped the capital like a fever. The head of the cabinet quit in December after being accused in the press of homosexuality. In January the vice president resigned when the media published photos of him in an intimate embrace with his young girlfriend. (The girl?s father allegedly received a tax break.) The president?s personal attorney resigned the same day after a secretly recorded audio tape revealed his conversations with a member of the Fujimori regime. In March Peru?s intelligence agency was closed when its seventh president in two and a half years resigned after his implication in an alleged $7 million land sale fraud. (He had been on the job just two days, replacing the former president, who was forced to resign after documents were leaked suggesting he was plotting against the interior minister.) As I arrived in town, the First Lady was embroiled in a scandal about the mismanagement of public funds, Toledo?s approval rating hovered in the single digits, and his sixth cabinet in thirty-two months in office was in danger of collapse.

His supporters, and some journalists, are quick to blame the press.

Lima journalists are ?a bunch of monkeys with machine guns,? says Fernando Yovera, a veteran reporter who, like a number of other top journalists, left the profession to advise Toledo during the 2000 campaign. He now works for the Congress as a liaison between the press and the government. ?For ten years journalists were mute, now they can?t shut up: everyone is guilty of everything! They use headlines like firing squads.?

Emerging out of this flood of denunciations ? or perhaps the force behind it ? is a new form of journalism: the wildly popular hybrid of the prensa chicha and serious papers epitomized by Lima?s three-year-old leading tabloid daily, Correo. ?I like to call it serious sensationalism,? said Juan Carlos Tafur, the director of Correo. I met Tafur on a Saturday morning at his home in the leafy coastal suburb of Barranco to talk about the changes in the newspaper industry that had made Correo, almost overnight, the most-read paper in the country.

Lima?s newsstands have been dominated by two types of newspapers: the forty-five-cent ?serious? papers, which sold as many as 100,000 copies a day in the 1980s, and the fourteen-cent prensa chicha. But in the 1980s and 1990s, the flood of poor Indian migrants coupled with a series of economic and educational crises transformed Lima?s population, giving rise to a new readership. A growing class of the educated but poor ? students, retired people, government workers ? were left without a paper that spoke to their reality and met their budget. Readership of the serious papers went into free fall.

Correo emerged in November 2000 amid the political turmoil that followed the collapse of Fujimori?s government. Suddenly there was a tabloid that looked chicha and cost fourteen cents, but covered politics and social issues aggressively. Within months of Toledo?s taking office, Correo was one of the few papers openly critical of his government. The paper?s coverage reflected its hybrid origins: articles were short and to the point; big photos and info boxes summarized the facts quickly. Sprinkled throughout was a difficult-to-distinguish mix of serious investigation and uncorroborated attack.

It sold fantastically. To the surprise of many in the industry, Correo had tapped into a population of readers utterly frustrated with Toledo that other papers had either missed or ignored. Soon Correo?s circulation, driven by banner headlines and daily scandals, surpassed even the staid El Comercio, the longtime leader of Peru?s serious press. A wave of imitations flooded the newsstands, led by Peru21, published by El Comercio?s owners and a direct knock-off of Correo?s format. Like Correo, these other ?serious tabloids? were harshly critical of Toledo?s government. Today, in a niche that did not exist three years ago, there are seven ?serious tabloids,? with new ones appearing regularly.

Correo?s success ? and the tabloid phenomenon it has spawned ? were met with criticism almost immediately. At first the attacks were personal, directed toward Tafur and the paper?s owners, whom critics called ?sashimi-eaters? or ?kimono-wearers,? references to their connections to Fujimori?s regime. As Correo matured and improved, its critics focused more on the paper?s style of journalism, accusing it of sloppy sensationalism disguised as investigative reporting.

?Sensational? It?s true; I treat every piece of news as a scandal. Our headlines scream at you,? Tafur admits. ?Imprecise? Sure, we?ve committed errors. When you turn up the volume, you get some distortion.? But he?s not convinced that the investigative journalism of the ?90s was any better. ?What exactly did they expose?? Tafur asked. ?More than great investigative journalism, I think it was the content of the denunciations that was different. There was an authoritarian government, a major terror campaign, and vast corruption. That?s why they think it was so great. But basically they were accusations, just like today.?

And Tafur doesn?t buy into the notion that the rules have changed now that Peru is under a democracy. ?The only difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is a change in shells. Inside, nothing has really changed, and the press shouldn?t anesthetize itself.?

Even those who disagree with Tafur?s type of journalism envy his bottom line. At a time when most serious papers are running a net loss, Correo has proved remarkably profitable. ?The expensive papers are pachyderms,? he says. ?I think Correo and Peru21 are the future of the press here.?

If there is a television equivalent of the Correo phenomenon, it would be Cecilia Valenzuela?s weekly program, La Ventana Indiscreta. I visited her at the Channel 2 studio on a Sunday night to watch a live broadcast. In the center of a large sound studio bathed in orange light, Valenzuela sits at a glass table, where she interviews the week?s newsmakers. Seated in a semi-circle around her is her team of six young investigative reporters, whose quick, edgy video reports form the main segments of the ninety-minute show. In the background is a comical bust of Toledo.

The ?indiscrete window,? the show?s name, refers to the window of the presidential palace; the program offers its viewers a glimpse into the world behind that window. But at times, Valenzuela?s critics say, the show can be as indiscrete as its subject matter. Like the ?serious tabloids,? La Ventana Indiscreta reaches out to a mass audience by mixing humor, irony, sarcasm, and scandal with serious investigative reporting and political coverage. Valenzuela?s commentaries between segments are often opinionated and scathing, at times going beyond the facts. The show?s reports are filmed with small, handheld digital video cameras that give it a hidden camera feel. Techno music drives many of the segments to a conclusion that, more often than not, exposes some corruption, big or small, in the political class. While highly regarded for her attacks on Montesinos and Fujimori during the 1990s, Valenzuela has drawn criticism from her peers now for her harsh criticism of Toledo?s government, and the form those attacks take. The criticism, Valenzuela feels, comes from those who believe Peru has changed fundamentally from the days of the Fujimori regime. In her view, it hasn?t. ?The majority of journalists, and Peruvians in general, thought that with the shift from dictatorship to democracy, things would change from night to day. They thought the city would suddenly smell differently. But it still smells like shit,? Valenzuela tells me. ?Those who have power in my country always abuse it. Corruption in Peru is endemic: it wasn?t just the dictatorship of Fujimori, it has to do with the political class in this country.?

Like Correo?s Tafur, Valenzuela is in her early forties, a younger member of Lima?s journalism elite, which is dominated by men in their late fifties and sixties, and she largely dismisses what her older colleagues see as a decline in the quality of Peruvian journalism. Revealing corruption in Toledo?s government simply doesn?t require profound investigation, she argues. ?Under Fujimori, there was incredible corruption, but the corrupt people were very efficient. This government is inhabited by the most incapable, inept group of people we?ve seen in years. Every time you scratch the surface, a terrifying smell of putrefaction comes out.?

The crisis in the press is merely a reflection of the larger crisis in Peruvian society, she claims. ?Now nobody believes in anything: in politicians, in journalists, in priests. That doubt is healthy. For now, we have the right to feel our pain, to live our sorrow, to expiate our faults. I don?t know how long that will last. After the doubt, confidence will come back, and we?ll have to see who demonstrates credibility. I think this is a very healthy thing for the press. It will only make us better.?

On my last day in Lima, striking coca cultivators descended on the city to demand the president?s resignation, and once again, the sting of tear gas mixed with the smell of diesel fuel and cooking oil in Lima?s Plaza de Armas. The papers again were filled with scandal, calling for the head of the interior minister. Congress had gathered the signatures necessary for his censure, and by the end of the day the most popular member of Toledo?s beleaguered cabinet was forced to resign.

?There should be a coup,? my taxi driver told me on the way to the airport. ?We need a strong hand in power. Peru is like a tree that is growing crooked: someone has to straighten it out.? Earlier in the week, a major United Nations study showed that 54 percent of Latin Americans said they would prefer an authoritarian government if it improved their economic situation. Another poll found that Fujimori would place first if elections were held tomorrow. Toledo?s approval rating threatened to sink below the 8 percent it had clung to in recent weeks.

My taxi driver?s comments made me think of something Gustavo Gorriti told me as I was leaving his office, a warning not to underestimate the ?mafia?: ?People eventually feel a nostalgia for the whip, the saddle, and the spurs,? Gorriti said. ?They want to be ridden. It?s the perverse inheritance of the caudillos [Latin American feudal lords]. It?s the democracy that never had the chance to sink its roots in. Thanks to the idiot we have in the palace, thanks to the embarrassment of the Congress we have, but thanks also to the bad journalism being done, we run the risk that after ten years of struggle, we?ll have to fight again, bleed again, start all over again.

?People should realize that if the mafia once again governs Peru ? they have high hopes of doing so, and it is very possible ? they will make sure this time they don?t make the mistakes of last time, allowing the independent journalists to operate as we did.?

Two months before my visit, television cameras covering the opening of Montesinos?s trial for media corruption had by chance captured a chilling moment that drove home Gorriti?s warning. Surrounded by prosecutors, judges, guards, and the media, Montesinos scribbled a note on a pad of paper and casually tilted it toward a co-defendant, the owner of a popular tabloid sitting next to him. Captured from behind by a camera, the note read: ?Tomorrow raise the drug issue.? The next morning the tabloid carried a banner headline, the latest dispatch from a mafia intent on making a comeback: NEW VIDEOS DOCUMENT TOLEDO'S DRUG ABUSE!

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Jason Felch is a fellow at the Center for Investigative Reporting. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and Legal Affairs.

In No Place to Hide, award-winning Washington Post reporter Robert O'Harrow, Jr., lays out in unnerving detail the post-9/11 marriage of private data and technology companies and government anti-terror initiatives to create something entirely new: a security-industrial complex. Drawing on his years of investigation, O'Harrow shows how the government now depends on burgeoning private reservoirs of information about almost every aspect of our lives to promote homeland security and fight the war on terror.

Consider the following: When you use your cell phone, the phone company knows where you are and when. If you use a discount card, your grocery and prescription purchases are recorded, profiled, and analyzed. Many new cars have built-in devices that enable companies to track from afar details about your movements. Software and information companies can even generate graphical link-analysis charts illustrating exactly how each person in a room is related to every other -- through jobs, roommates, family, and the like. Almost anyone can buy a dossier on you, including almost everything it takes to commit identity theft, for less than fifty dollars.

It may sound like science fiction, but it's the routine activity of the nation's fast-growing information industry and, more and more, its new partner the U.S. government.

With unrivaled access, O'Harrow tells the inside stories of key players in this new world, from software inventors to counterintelligence officials. He reveals how the government is creating a national intelligence infrastructure with the help of private companies. And he examines the impact of this new security system on our traditional notions of civil liberties, autonomy, and privacy, and the ways it threatens to undermine some of our society's most cherished values, even while offering us a sense of security. This eye-opening examination takes readers behind the walls of secrecy and shows how we are rushing toward a surveillance society with few rules to guide and protect us. In this new world of high-tech domestic intelligence, there is literally no place to hide.

This unique multimedia investigation uncovers in unnerving detail the post-9/11 marriage of private data services and government anti-terror initiatives. Led by Robert O’Harrow, Jr., award-winning reporter for The Washington Post and an associate of CIR, “No Place to Hide” shows how the government now depends on burgeoning private reservoirs of information about almost every aspect of our lives to protect homeland security and fight the war on terror.

With unrivaled access, “No Place to Hide” tells the inside stories of key players in this new world – from software inventors to counterintelligence officials – and examines the impact of the new security system on our traditional notions of civil liberties, autonomy and privacy. This eye-opening examination takes readers, viewers and listeners behind the walls of secrecy to show how we are rushing towards a surveillance society with few rules to guide and protect us. In this new world of high-tech domestic intelligence, there is literally no place to hide.

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READ No Place to Hide, by Robert O’Harrow, Jr., published by Free Press (division of Simon & Schuster). Available now in paperback.

LISTEN to “No Place to Hide,” produced by John Biewen and Robert O’Harrow for American RadioWorks. Begins airing on public radio stations Wednesday, Jan. 12th.

WATCH "Peter Jennings Reporting: No Place to Hide," produced by Peter Bull for PJ Productions. Airs on ABC at 10 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 20th. Buy a copy of the documentary.

VISIT the “No Place to Hide” web site to:

• Learn more about each of the multimedia components.


• Read a book excerpt.


• Listen to the radio documentary, buy the book, and read more of O'Harrow's reporting for the Washington Post.


• Read interviews from the radio and television documentaries.


• Join us for upcoming No Place to Hide screenings and events in New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.

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This project was made possible in part by support to the Center for Investigative Reporting from the Ford Foundation, Deer Creek Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

This page 1 story, part of the "No Place to Hide" project, explains how a company collecting and selling person information about millions of Americans is transforming itself into a private intelligence service for the government.

In the 1990s, the data industry mushroomed. Vast computer systems quietly gathered staggering amounts of personal information about virtually every American adult, mostly for business and marketing purposes. After the 9/11 attacks, national security officials reached out to data companies for help in finding potential terrorists. Now, there may be No Place to Hide.

Peter Jennings examines the government's effort to harness technology in the name of security and the price we might pay if we fail to balance security and freedom in the digital age.

FRONTLINE, the weekly PBS television series, investigates the new front in the war on terror: Europe. Now home to 18 million Muslims — which some call "Eurabia" — the continent is a challenge to intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic, exacerbated by political divisions over the Iraq War. In this joint multimedia project between the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's documentary program "the fifth estate", The New York Times and FRONTLINE, Lowell Bergman examines the alarming threat radical Salafist jihadists pose to Western Europe and its allies including the United States.

The Center for Investigative Reporting provided support to reporter Marlena Telvick for her contributions to the program's companion website at PBS.org. Telvick edited and produced the online project along with FRONTLINE's web editors and authored two stories, "Al Qaeda Today: The New Face of the Global Jihad," and a second, a look at why some Muslims are becoming radicalized in Europe.

Reporting for "Al Qaeda's New Front" was done as a project of the Investigative Journalism for Print and Television Seminar at the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, taught by Lowell Bergman and Rob Gunnison. Reporting by students helped inform the on-camera interviews, and more extensive articles by them are featured on the FRONTLINE Web site.

Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh took his seat in La Colline restaurant on Capitol Hill and signaled for a cup of coffee. It was one of those standard Washington breakfasts, where politicos mix schmoozing and big ideas to start their days.

An intense foot soldier for Attorney General John Ashcroft, Dinh had been in his job for only a few months. He wanted to make a good impression on others at the session and craved the caffeine to keep his edge. As he sipped his fourth cup and listened to the patter of White House and Hill staffers, a young man darted up to the table. "A plane has crashed," he said. "It hit the World Trade Center."

Dinh and the rest of the voluble group went silent. Then their beepers began chirping in unison. At another time, it might have seemed funny. A Type-A Washington moment. Now they looked at one another and rushed out of the restaurant.

It was about 9:30 on September 11, 2001.

Dinh hurried back to the Justice Department, where the building was being evacuated. Like countless other Americans, he was already consumed with a desire to strike back. Unlike most, however, he had an inkling of how: by doing whatever was necessary to strengthen the government's legal hand against terrorists.

Jim Dempsey was sifting through e-mails at his office at the Center for Democracy and Technology on Farragut Square when his boss, Jerry Berman, rushed in.

"Turn on the TV," Berman urged. Dempsey reached for the zapper, and images came rushing at him. Crisp sunshine. Lower Manhattan glinting in the brilliance. A jetliner cutting through the scene.

Dempsey is a lanky and slow-speaking former Hill staffer who combines a meticulous attention to detail with an aw-shucks demeanor. Since the early 1990s, he has been one of the leading watchdogs of FBI surveillance initiatives, a reasoned and respected civil liberties advocate routinely summoned to the Hill by both political parties to advise lawmakers about technology and privacy issues.

As he watched the smoke and flames engulf the World Trade Center, he knew it was the work of terrorists, and the FBI was foremost in his mind. "They have screwed up so bad," he said to himself. "With all the powers and resources that they have, they should have caught these guys."

At the same moment, it dawned on him that his work--and the work of many civil liberties activists over the years to check the increasingly aggressive use of technology by law enforcement officials--was about to be undone. "We all knew well enough what it meant," Dempsey says now.

The car arrived at Sen. Patrick Leahy's house in Northern Virginia shortly after 9 a.m. The Vermont Dem-ocrat took his place in the front seat and, as the car coursed toward the Potomac, he read through some notes about the pending nomination of a new drug czar and thought about a meeting that morning at the Supreme Court.

Half-listening to the radio, Leahy heard something about an explosion and the World Trade Center. He asked the driver to turn it up, then called some friends in New York. They told him what they were seeing on television. It sounded ominous. The car continued toward the Supreme Court and a conference he was to attend with Chief Justice William Rehnquist and circuit court judges from around the country.

Leahy headed to the court's conference room, with its thickly carpeted floors and oak-paneled walls lined with portraits of the first eight chief justices. When Rehnquist arrived, Leahy leaned toward him and whispered, "Bill, before we start, I believe we have a terrorist attack."

As if on cue, a muffled boom echoed through the room. Smoke began rising across the Potomac.

Leahy's country was under attack. And soon enough, the five-term senator realized, he would be as well.

Leahy chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, putting him at the center of an inevitable debate about how to fight back--a struggle that would subject him to some of the most intense political pressures of his career.

Leahy was more than a Senate leader; he was one of Congress's most liberal members, a longtime proponent of civil liberties who had always worked to keep the government from trampling individual rights. But Leahy was also a former prosecutor, a pragmatist who understood what investigators were up against in trying to identify and bring down terrorists.

He knew that conservatives were going to press him relentlessly for more police powers while civil libertarians would look to him as their standardbearer. Everyone would be watching him: party leaders, Senate colleagues, White House officials, editorial writers and cable commentators, his Vermont constituents.

Leahy wanted to strike the right balance. But after watching an F-16 roar over the Mall that afternoon, he also resolved to do whatever he could, as a patriot and a Democrat, to give law enforcement officials more tools to stop future attacks. "I was just thinking how angry I was," he recalls.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon didn't just set off a national wave of mourning and ire. They reignited and reshaped a smoldering debate over the proper use of government power to peer into the lives of ordinary people.

The argument boiled down to this: In an age of high-tech terror, what is the proper balance between national security and the privacy of millions of Americans, whose personal information is already more widely available than ever before? Telephone records, e-mails, oceans of detail about individuals' lives--the government wanted access to all of it to hunt down terrorists before they struck.

For six weeks last fall, behind a veneer of national solidarity and bipartisanship, Washington leaders engaged in pitched, closed-door arguments over how much new power the government should have in the name of national security. They were grappling not only with the specter of more terrorist attacks but also with the chilling memories of Cold War redbaiting, J. Edgar Hoover's smear campaigns, and Watergate-era wiretaps.

At the core of the dispute was a body of little-known laws and rules that, over the last half a century, defined and limited the government's ability to snoop:

Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act governed electronic eavesdropping. The "pen register, trap and trace" rules covered the use of devices to track the origin and destination of telephone calls. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, regulated the power to spy domestically when seeking foreign intelligence information.

The White House, the Justice Department and their allies in Congress wanted to ease those restraints, and they wanted to do it as quickly as possible. Though put into place to protect individuals and political groups from past abuses by the FBI, CIA and others, the restrictions were partly to blame for the intelligence gaps on September 11, the government said.

The administration also wanted new authority to secretly detain individuals suspected of terrorism and to enlist banks and other financial services companies in the search for terrorist financing. What's more, law enforcement sought broad access to business databases filled with information about the lives of ordinary citizens. All this detail could help investigators search for links among plotters.

Dempsey and other civil libertarians agreed that the existing laws were outdated, but for precisely the opposite reason--because they already gave the government access to mountains of information unavailable a decade ago. Handing investigators even more power, they warned, would lead to privacy invasions and abuses.

By the time the debate ended--one year ago, with overwhelming approval of the USA Patriot Act by Congress, and its signing on October 26 by President Bush--the government had powers that went far beyond what even the most ardent law enforcement supporters had considered politically possible before the attacks.

How this happened--through backroom negotiations, political maneuvering and public pressure by Bush administration officials--is a largely untold tale with consequences that will reverberate for years to come.

They stared at a television in the bright sunroom of Dinh's Chevy Chase home, a handful of policy specialists from the Justice Department who wondered what to do next.

Only hours before, they had fled their offices, cringing as fighter jets patrolled Washington's skies. Now, as news programs replayed the destruction, they talked about their friend Barbara Olson, conservative commentator and wife of U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson. She was aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon.

Dinh couldn't believe Barbara was gone. He'd just had dinner at the Olsons' house two nights before, and she had been in rare form. Her humor was irrepressible. Dinh passed around a book of photography she had signed and given to him and the other dinner guests, Washington, D.C.: Then and Now.

It was hard to process so much death amid so much sunshine. Dinh and his colleagues tried to focus on the work head. They agreed they faced a monumental, even historic task: a long overdue reworking of anti-terrorism laws to prevent something like this from happening again on American soil.

Their marching orders came the next morning, as they reconvened in a conference room in Dinh's suite of offices on the fourth floor of Justice. Ashcroft wasn't there--he was in hiding along with other senior government officials. Just before the meeting, Dinh had spoken to Adam Ciongoli, Ashcroft's counselor, who conveyed the attorney general's desires.

"Beginning immediately," Dinh told the half a dozen policy advisers and lawyers, "we will work on a package of authorities"--sweeping, dramatic and based on practical recommendations from FBI agents and Justice Department lawyers in the field. "The charge [from Ashcroft] was very, very clear: 'all that is necessary for law enforcement, within the bounds of the Constitution, to discharge the obligation to fight this war against terror,' " he said.

Dinh's enthusiasm for the task was evident. At 34, he seems perpetually jazzed up, smiles often and speaks quickly, as though his words, inflected with the accent of his native Vietnam, can't quite keep up with his ideas. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he learned his way around Washington as an associate special counsel to the Senate Whitewater committee, and as a special counsel to Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) during the Clinton impeachment trial.

"What are the problems?" Dinh asked the group around the table.

For the next several hours--indeed, over the next several days--Dinh's colleagues catalogued gripes about the legal restraints on detective and intelligence work. Some of the complaints had been bouncing around the FBI and Justice Department for years.

Because of the law's peculiarities, it was unclear if investigators were allowed to track the destination and origin of e-mail the same way they could phone calls. They could obtain search warrants more easily for a telephone tape machine than for commercial voice mail services. And the amount of information that intelligence agents and criminal investigators were permitted to share was limited, making it much harder to target and jail terrorists.

All of this, the lawyers agreed, had to change. Now.

Dempsey was swamped. Reporters, other activists, congressional staffers--everyone wanted his take on how far the Justice Department and Congress would go in reaction to the attacks. "We were getting 50 calls a day," he recalls.

Like many attuned to the rhythms of Washington, Dempsey knew Congress would not have the will to resist granting dramatic new powers to law enforcement immediately. It was a classic dynamic. Something terrible happens. Legislators rush to respond. They don't have time to investigate the policy implications thoroughly, so they reach for what's available and push it through.

That was a nightmare for Dempsey. Looking for signs of hope that the legislative process could be slowed, even if it could not be stopped, he made his own calls around town.

He didn't find much support, even among longtime allies. "If you could get their attention," Dempsey says, "some members of the House and Senate were, 'Don't bother me with the details.' "

"A crisis mentality emerges, and there was clearly a crisis . . . The push for action, the appearance of action, becomes so great."

Within days of the attack, a handful of lawmakers took to the Senate floor with legislation that had been proposed and shot down in recent years because of civil liberties concerns. Many of the proposals had originally had nothing to do with terrorism.

One bill, called the Combating Terrorism Act, proposed expanding the government's authority to trace telephone calls to include e-mail. It was a legacy of FBI efforts to expand surveillance powers during the Clinton administration, which had supported a variety of technology-oriented proposals opposed by civil libertarians. Now it was hauled out and

approved in minutes.

One of the few voices advocating calm deliberation, Dempsey says, was Leahy. But it was not clear what he would be able to do in such a highly charged atmosphere.

Across the city and across the country, other civil libertarians braced themselves for the fallout from the attacks.

Among them was Morton Halperin, former head of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union and a former national security official in three administrations. Halperin, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is personally familiar with government surveillance.

While working as a National Security Council staffer in the Nixon administration, Halperin was suspected of leaking information about the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia. To this day, Halperin has not addressed the allegations, but his house was wiretapped by the FBI, and the taps continued for months after he left the government.

Now, 24 hours after the attacks, he read an e-mail from a member of an online group that had been formed to fight a Clinton administration plan to make publishing classified materials a crime. The writer warned the plan would now be reprised.

Halperin had been anticipating this moment for years. More than a decade ago, he wrote an essay predicting that terrorism would replace communism as the main justification for domestic surveillance. "I sat and stared at that e-mail for a few minutes and decided that I could not do my regular job, that I had to deal with this," he says.

Halperin banged out a call to arms on his computer. "There can be no doubt that we will hear calls in the next few days for congress to enact sweeping legislation to deal with terrorism," he wrote in the e-mail to more than two dozen civil libertarians on September 12. "This will include not only the secrecy provision, but also broad authority to conduct electronic and other surveillance and to investigate political groups . . . We should not wait."

Within hours, Dempsey, Marc Rotenberg from the Electronic Privacy Information Center and others had offered their support. Their plan: to build on Halperin's call for legislative restraint, while striking a sympathetic note about the victims of the attacks. They started putting together a meeting to sign off on a civil liberties manifesto: "In Defense of Freedom at a Time of Crisis."

Underlying the discussion about how to respond to the terror attacks was the mid-1970s investigation, led by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), into the government's sordid history of domestic spying. Through hundreds of interviews and the examination of tens of thousands of documents, the Church committee found that the FBI, CIA and other government agencies had engaged in pervasive surveillance of politicians, religious organizations, women's rights advocates, antiwar groups and civil liberties activists.

At FBI headquarters in Washington, for example, agents had developed more than half a million domestic intelligence files in the previous two decades. The CIA had secretly opened and photographed almost a quarter-million letters in the United States from 1953 to 1973.

One of the most egregious intelligence abuses was an FBI counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO. It was, the Church report said, "designed to 'disrupt' groups and 'neutralize' individuals deemed to be threats to domestic security." Among other things, COINTELPRO operations included undermining the jobs of political activists, sending anonymous letters to "spouses of intelligence targets for the purposes of destroying their marriages," and a systematic campaign to undermine the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights efforts through leaked information about his personal life.

"Too many people have been spied upon by too many government agencies and too much information has been collected" through secret informants, wiretaps, bugs, surreptitious mail-opening and break-ins, the Church report warned.

Congress responded with a series of laws aimed at curbing government abuses. One was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which gave broad powers for counterintelligence officials to monitor the agents of foreign countries.

Under FISA, authorities had to demonstrate, to the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, that the principal purpose for their surveillance was foreign intelligence. But the law also restricted the use of those powers for domestic criminal investigations and prosecutions.

For all the secrecy surrounding FISA--and despite the fact the FISA court has never denied an application for electronic surveillance--civil libertarians consider the law one of the key safeguards against domestic spying.

But some conservatives have long contended that the law created unnecessary, even absurd, barriers between criminal and intelligence investigators. The Bush administration believed those barriers were getting in the way of uncovering terrorist cells operating here and abroad.

Law enforcement authorities also chafed at internal guidelines imposed by the Justice Department in response to the Church committee revelations. Agents weren't allowed to monitor religious services without evidence of a crime, for instance, which made it hard to investigate mosques that might be harboring terrorists. Ashcroft claimed that the rules even prohibited investigators from surfing the Web for information about suspects.

When Dinh and his team began taking stock of needed legal changes, the legacy of the Church committee loomed large. They saw a chance to turn back the clock. Standing in their way were people like Dempsey and Halperin.

Scores of people streamed into the ACLU's white stucco townhouse on Capitol Hill on the Friday after the attacks, responding to Halperin's e-mail and calls from ACLU lobbyists.

As with so many privacy battles, there were some strikingly strange bedfellows in attendance: Liberal immigration rights groups. Libertarians from the conservative Free Congress Foundation and Eagle Forum. Technology-savvy activists from the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Democracy and Technology.

They filled the main conference room downstairs, overflowing through French doors into a garden, and up the stairway to the ACLU's offices. The ACLU's headquarters, recently relocated downtown, has been the site of countless strategy meetings over the years on abortion rights, civil rights, freedom of speech and religious freedom.

Even so, "I had never seen that kind of turnout in 25 years," says Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU's national office. "I mean, people were worried. They just knew this was a recipe for government overreaching."

They also grasped the difficulty of their position. Here they were, trying to persuade Americans to hold fast to concerns about individual freedom and privacy, while the vast majority of people were terrified. Polls later showed that most people were more than willing to trade off civil liberties and privacy protections for more security.

Murphy and others also had reached out to Congress in an effort to head off any instant legislation. They found that normally privacy-minded lawmakers, including Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), had no intention of questioning efforts to push a bill through quickly.

Even Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.), a conservative and dedicated privacy advocate, couldn't offer much hope. Barr and Murphy had worked closely together in recent years, though they come from different ends of the political spectrum. When she called him after the attacks, he confessed there was probably little he could do to temper the anti-terrorism fervor gripping Washington.

"You could sort of hear the clutch in his voice: 'I don't know how we're going to do this,' " she recalls.

Murphy stood at the front of the room with Halperin, trying to win consensus from those assembled on language they would use to voice their concerns. Dempsey, who arrived late, was off to one side, a sinking feeling in his stomach. For all the numbers, the normally raucous group was subdued. Some in attendance owned up to their own fears about new attacks. Everyone "was a little overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task," Dempsey says.

After debate over how to express clear sympathy for the victims of the attack, the group worked out a 10-point statement. "We must have faith in our democratic system and our Constitution, and in our ability to protect at the same time both the freedom and the security of all Americans," read point No. 10.

The document was signed by representatives of more than 150 groups, including religious organizations, gun owners, police and conservative activists. A few days later, they released it at a press conference and posted it on a Web site.

What kind of impact did it have? Apparently not much. A year later, several key officials from the White House and Justice Department say they have never even heard of the appeal.

To say it was a trying time for Leahy is an understatement. He would later describe those days as among the most challenging and emotional of his 28 years in the Senate: "What made this the most intense were not just the issues, but the great sorrows I felt."

The senator was saddled with the responsibility of crafting the Senate proposal for anti-terrorism legislation. He didn't want to ram a bad law through Congress, but he also didn't want to be seen as an obstructionist. So he offered to negotiate a bill directly with the White House, avoiding the time-consuming committee-approval process. Now he had to come up with a way of maintaining meaningful privacy protections while expanding the government's surveillance powers.

As he worked to reconcile those competing interests, he took long walks around the Capitol and down to the Mall. Everywhere he went the mood was grim. "I saw the same faces as I did when I was a law school student [in the District] and President Kennedy had been killed," Leahy says. "I saw the same shock, and I wanted to make sure our shock didn't turn into panic."

It was crucial, Leahy thought, to take enough time with the legislation to get it right. Or as he put it to senior aide Beryl Howell, a former federal prosecutor: "Let's not do a knee-jerk reaction."

Leahy thought he could serve as a bridge between privacy advocates and the government. He was trusted by civil libertarians, but had a cordial enough relationship with Ashcroft, who was a former Senate colleague. Though Ashcroft was an ardent conservative loathed by many liberals, the two had worked together in Congress on encryption legislation. Even after Leahy voted against Ashcroft's confirmation as attorney general, he called Ashcroft afterward to pledge his cooperation. Since then they'd gotten along fine. In the weeks before September 11, they'd been consulting frequently on a major overhaul of the FBI, which was under fire for bungling a series of high-profile cases.

But the terrorist attacks quickly strained their amicable relations. Within days, Ashcroft held a press conference and called on Congress to approve the Justice Department's legislative plan in a week's time. Leahy was surprised--and irritated. The implication, Leahy says, was "we were going to have another attack if we did not agree to this immediately."

But if he balked, Leahy risked getting hammered as soft on terrorism--or so he and other Democrats feared. Leahy, backed by other Democrats, had begun working on his own anti-terrorism bill, a 165-page tome called the Uniting and Strengthening America Act.

On September 19, congressional, White House and Justice leaders gathered in an ornate room in the Capitol to exchange proposals.

Along with Leahy, Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and others were there from the Senate. House Majority Leader Richard Armey (R-Tex.), John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and others represented the House. From the White House came counsel Alberto Gonzales. Ashcroft, Dinh and their entourage arrived from Justice.

As the meeting got started, Dinh made a beeline for a seat near the head of the conference table. Leahy and his colleagues raised their eyebrows and shook their heads. Only members of Congress were supposed to sit at the table, one of the senators told Dinh, asking him to sit with the rest of the staff.

Dinh wasn't too troubled by his faux pas. He and his staff were too focused on the 40-page proposal they'd brought with them, the fruit of several all-nighters at Justice. During the crash drafting effort, Dinh had slept on a black leather couch, beneath an American flag, not far from a worn paperback copy of the Federalist Papers.

He handed out copies of his proposal. Leahy did the same with his draft, stressing that he thought the group should move forward deliberately.

It turned out the proposals were similar in some key respects. Both bills called for updates to the pen register and trap and trace laws, clarifying how they applied to e-mail and the Internet. Both included provisions bolstering money-laundering and wiretap laws. They also proposed making it easier for authorities to get approval for wiretaps in spying and counterintelligence cases.

The administration proposal, however, went much farther. It called for indefinite detention of any noncitizen the attorney general "has reason to believe may further or facilitate acts of terrorism," as well as the unrestricted sharing of grand jury and eavesdropping data throughout the government. It permitted Internet service providers or employers to voluntarily allow the FBI to tap e-mail. And it made a small but important modification to the FISA law, changing the legal language so foreign intelligence had to be only "a" purpose of an investigation, rather than "the" purpose, to secure surveillance authority.

Leahy and some of the other lawmakers murmured about those last provisions. Giving criminal investigators unchecked access to FISA powers could break down constitutional safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures, leading to abuses against U.S. citizens.

Armey, one of the most conservative members in Congress, also expressed concern. It was Armey, in fact, who was already discussing a "sunset" provision to the new law, placing time limits on how long parts of it would remain in effect. A sunset provision would guarantee that some of the most troubling new powers would be revisited by Congress, giving lawmakers an important check on executive authority.

"There were a lot of people in the room, both Republican and Democrat," Leahy says, "who were not about to give the unfettered power the attorney general wanted."

Armey also warned that it might take a few weeks to adopt a bill. In effect, he was urging Ashcroft to back away from his public pressure to approve a law in the next few days.

When the group emerged from the meeting, Ashcroft changed his tone slightly, telling reporters that he wanted to pass a bill as quickly as possible. Leahy likewise struck a conciliatory note.

"We're trying to find a middle ground, and I think we can," he said that day. "We probably agree on more than we disagree on."

But Leahy also made it clear he would not be rushed into approving a bill. "We do not want the terrorists to win by having basic protections taken away from us," he said. It was a boilerplate rendering of a quotation from Benjamin Franklin that Leahy invoked repeatedly: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

The truce between Leahy and Ashcroft didn't last long. Despite Ashcroft's shift in tone, the pressure to move quickly on legislation intensified. For Dempsey, it was depressing.

One afternoon in late September, he was invited by Howell, Leahy's adviser, to a legislative briefing. Howell wanted Justice Department officials and civil libertarians to describe to Senate staffers their thoughts about expanding law enforcement authority. The point was to give everyone involved more ideas.

Dempsey was eager to attend. "My hope was there could actually be some sort of debate," he says.

Then the Justice Department folks arrived. Howell hadn't told them they would be discussing their proposals with civil libertarians. "They were livid," Dempsey says. "They explicitly said, 'We don't think outsiders should be here, and we won't talk unless they leave the room.' "

Howell quickly brokered a deal. Dempsey and the other civil liberties advocates could stay to hear Justice's presentation, but there would be no back-and-forth discussion. As soon as the Justice delegation finished speaking about their proposals, "they got up and left," Dempsey says. "I was just in despair. I just thought we are never going to be able to work this out."

At the end of September, Leahy's staff and administration officials spent hours together thrashing out questions about civil liberties, the new police and intelligence powers, and oversight by courts and Congress.

In a push to come to some agreement on the bill's wording, Howell met with White House Deputy Counsel Timothy Flanigan in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room. Flanigan was representing the president as well as the attorney general in the negotiations.

Howell and he tangled over whether the law would allow American prosecutors to use evidence from abroad that was obtained through methods illegal in the United States. They also differed over whether a court should serve as a check on the sharing of grand jury, wiretap and other criminal investigative information.

Eventually, Flanigan made some concessions. He agreed that the government would not use evidence about U.S. citizens obtained abroad in an illegal manner under U.S. law, and that a court would review information before it could be shared among intelligence and law enforcement agencies within the United States.

On October 1, Leahy thought he had a final agreement in hand. He was so confident that he stopped by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office to assure him: "We have it all worked out."

Leahy left the Capitol that evening feeling satisfied. He'd done what he could to protect civil liberties by providing oversight for surveillance and domestic intelligence. But he had also moved quickly to bolster law enforcement and counterintelligence operations. No one could accuse the Democrats of coddling terrorists.

The next morning Leahy sat in his office across a polished wood conference table from Ashcroft, Hatch, Michael Chertoff, chief of the Justice Depart-ment's criminal division, and Gonzales, the White House counsel. They'd come together to sign off on the deal. But Ashcroft was having second thoughts about some of Flanigan's concessions. The agreement, he told Leahy, no longer held.

Leahy felt blindsided. He'd invested his prestige in these negotiations, and now it looked like he didn't count. "I said, 'John, when I make an agreement, I make an agreement. I can't believe you're going back on your commitment.'"

Ashcroft's support was critical to the bill's approval. The Senate and Bush administration had agreed to deliver a proposal together, and the process could not go forward without Ashcroft's imprimatur.

Flanigan downplays the dispute, saying it was only one of many disagreements in a tough series of talks that ebbed and flowed.

"There were several points in the negotiations at which they recognized that they had given up too much, and there were other times that we realized we hadn't asked for enough," Flanigan says. "It's understandable. It's the pace of the negotiations.

"You know, there'd be groans around the table and nobody was pleased to see an issue reopened. But I think it all was conducted in a spirit [of] we're all trying to get to a result here."

In any case, there was no hiding the growing animosity between Leahy and the administration. Ashcroft didn't even try. Not long after leaving Leahy's office, Ashcroft held a press conference with Hatch at his side.

"I think it is time for us to be productive on behalf of the American people," said the attorney general. "Talk won't prevent terrorism," Ashcroft said, adding that he was "deeply concerned about the rather slow pace" of the legislation.

"It's a very dangerous thing," Hatch agreed. "It's time to get off our duffs and do what's right."

Leahy was deeply distressed by the collapse of the deal. He felt the administration was intent on steamrolling over him. But there was frustratingly little he could do about it. He didn't even have the political leverage in the Senate to push for the same sunset provision being championed by Armey in the Republican-controlled House. Leahy knew he would have to rely on the House to fight that battle with the administration. He would have to do the same on securing court oversight of the government's new surveillance powers.

Court oversight would be especially important in light of a critical but unheralded portion of the new legislation: Section 215.

For many years, FISA gave investigators access to the commercial records of people under investigation in national security cases, but only from a small range of businesses, including hotels, storage facilities and car rental companies.

Section 215 of the bill would greatly expand that, allowing investigators to obtain records from Internet service providers, grocery stores, libraries, bookstores--just about any business. More importantly, it would remove the requirement that the target of the records search be "an agent of a foreign power."

Those changes were significant because of the data-collection revolution of the 1990s. Cheaper computing power and an ever-expanding Internet have enabled businesses to watch what was once unwatchable and glean meaning and profit from the ephemera of daily life. Never before has so much information been collected and parsed about so many of us--often in the name of giving us conven-iences, discounts and other benefits.

Someone is likely monitoring us at work, recording what we buy, noting our whereabouts while we use our cell phones, scrutinizing our drug prescriptions. Marketers know our names, addresses, estimated incomes, the size of a family's house, the type of car we drive, the magazines we read, the beer we drink.

Libraries use computers to keep track of what we read. Hotels keep electronic records of when we come and go. Bookstores know what we buy. Many toll roads can say precisely when we have driven by.

The implications of giving the government access to so much personal information unnerved Dempsey and other civil libertarians, who were disappointed that Leahy and his allies couldn't do more to stand up to the administration. While Dempsey understood the political pressures on the senators, he worried that they didn't completely understand some of the compromises they were making.

Leahy was also rueful about the outcome. His bill, introduced in the Senate two days after his acrimonious meeting with Ashcroft, gave Justice much more power than he had originally intended. But he was prepared to swallow hard and support it. To do anything else was politically impossible.

Late on October 11, the Senate assembled to vote. Leahy and Daschle knew every Republican would support the bill. They wanted Democrats to do the same. But Sen. Russell Feingold was refusing to go along.

A liberal who routinely bucks pressure from his own party, the Wisconsin Dem-ocrat had deep reservations about the bill hurtling through the Senate. He considered the provisions "some of the most radical changes to law enforcement in a generation" and was particularly worried that Section 215 gave the government way too much power to sift through people's lives. He wanted the Senate to vote on a series of amendments that would do more to protect privacy.

Feingold's stance annoyed Daschle, who cornered him in the back of the Senate floor shortly before the vote. "The bill will only get worse if we open it up to debate," he told Feingold.

Leahy also chimed in, telling Feingold that while he agreed with almost everything Feingold was proposing, the votes simply weren't there. Leahy warned that if Feingold offered amendments, their conservative colleagues would try to give investigators even more extensive powers.

Feingold wouldn't budge.

"There is no doubt," he declared on the Senate floor that evening, "that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country where the police were allowed to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country where the government was entitled to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your e-mail communications . . . the government would probably discover and arrest more terrorists, or would-be terrorists . . . But that would not be a country in which we would want to live."

Feingold offered his amendments, and they were rejected. One month after the attacks, the bill passed the Senate, 96-1.

Lawmakers and legislative aides were lining up for nasal swabs and Cipro. Yellow police tape encircled the Hart Senate Office Building. The House had shut down for the first time in memory.

On October 17, the capital was confronting a new threat: anthrax. It was contained in a letter mailed to Daschle, and no one knew how many people might have been exposed. Were there more letters? Were anthrax spores floating through the Capitol's ventilation system? Suddenly, it became more urgent than ever to get the Patriot Act to the president's desk.

Amid the panic, Leahy, Daschle, Flanigan, Dinh and others gathered in House Speaker Dennis Hastert's office to smooth out the differences between the Senate and House versions of the bill. The House bill, which passed in the early morning hours of October 12, included sunset and court-oversight provisions Leahy had been unable to get in the Senate.

There was no longer any question that the Patriot Act would include some court oversight, though not as much as Leahy and Armey wanted. The key issue remaining for those in Hastert's office was how long the new law should be in effect. Leahy and Armey pressed for a four-year "sunset," which would force the White House to win congressional approval of the most controversial provisions of the law all over again in 2005. The administration wanted no time limit on its effect.

"We're feeling very strongly about the sunsetting," Flanigan told the lawmakers. "This is not a war of a fixed duration. And it will not change the culture of law enforcement and national security if we basically make this a short-term fix."

Daschle, who knew how badly Bush wanted to avoid any delay in signing the legislation, turned to the lawyer and smiled. "Mr. Flanigan, does this mean the president will veto the bill?" he asked.

"And then of course," Flanigan acknowledges now, "I had to say no."

They agreed on four years.

In the year since the Patriot Act was approved, the government has moved quickly to take full advantage of new and existing powers.

More than a thousand noncitizens were detained without being charged last fall, and their identities were kept secret. Hundreds of Muslim men--citizens and noncitizens--were placed under surveillance by federal investigators across the country. Their movements, telephone calls, e-mail, Internet use and credit-card charges are being scrutinized around the clock--a campaign that has resulted in criminal charges against 18 suspected al Qaeda operatives near Seattle, Detroit, Buffalo, N.Y., and Portland, Ore.

"We've neutralized a suspected terrorist cell within our borders," Ashcroft announced earlier this month at press conference about the indictments of six in Portland charged with conspiring to aid al Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. He called the indictments "a defining day in America's war against terrorism."

And it's clear that the war is just getting underway. The FBI is still building a data-mining system that will draw in huge amounts of commercial and governmen-tal information and parse it for signs of terrorism. The Transportation Security Administration has begun work on a passenger-profiling system that some officials say would be the largest domestic surveillance system in the nation's history.

All of this makes Viet Dinh smile as he eats curry at a restaurant across from the Justice Department. The Patriot Act, he declares proudly, is making Americans safer, just as intended.

He dismisses criticism that Justice is using a heavy hand in its investigations, and that civil liberties are being compromised. While the government can peer into the lives of Americans as never before, he says, the Constitution is always there as a safeguard.

"It was very clear that we did not tell the American people just simply, trust us, trust law enforcement not to overstep their bounds. Rather we say, trust the law," Dinh says. "The attorney general said very clearly, 'Think outside the box, but not outside the Constitution.' "

Yet at least one federal judge, Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, has already accused the government of overstepping its constitutional bounds by refusing to name more than 1,200 people detained since September 11. In response to a lawsuit by civil libertarians, Kessler ordered the Justice Department to release the names, saying that without the information it was impossible to know whether the government is "operating within the bounds of the law."

Kessler's ruling is being appealed by the government, which argues that the secrecy is necessary to avoid compromising its investigation into September 11 and future terror plots. The Justice Department is also challenging an extraordinary decision by the FISA court not to grant criminal investigators the authority to use FISA primarily for criminal prosecutions. The FISA court said earlier this year that, long before September 11, the government had misused the law and misled the court dozens of times in its requests for search warrants and wiretaps. Those warrants and wiretaps might not have been granted in criminal courts, which, unlike FISA, require evidence of probable cause. And if the FISA court won't let criminal investigators make wide use of FISA powers, the Patriot Act won't provide as much investigative muscle as the administration wants.

That would be just fine with Dempsey, who argues that the government already had all the power and information it needed to thwart terrorist attacks before September 11 and failed to make effective use of them.

Now, he says, "we are facing the risk of a fundamental redefinition of the role of government and the freedom of individuals . . . Look at this ocean of information that's available."

In his downtown office, he clacks away at the computer, drafting a legal brief in support of the FISA court's position on limiting the flow of information between intelligence and criminal investigators. The federal courts are the next battleground, Dempsey and other civil libertarians believe, in the clash between national security and privacy rights.

For Leahy, however, the battleground remains the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he and other panel members will be responsible for monitoring how the Justice Department uses its new powers. That won't be easy, given the secrecy involved in terrorism investigations and the administration's reluctance to share sensitive information with Congress. Even so, Leahy and his allies in the House and Senate have no intention of giving Justice a free ride on the Patriot Act. The potential for abuse is too great, they say, and the need for congressional oversight and scrutiny too strong. They'll be watching.

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© 2002 The Washington Post Company