LATEST WAR SPARKS AN ECLECTIC PROTEST MOVEMENT

Issues Of Privacy, Civil Liberties Lie At Heart Of Criticisms From Right
And Left

WASHINGTON -- When the Bush administration asked Congress for quick passage
of expanded police powers in the war against terrorism, a motley chorus of
critics rose up. You could call it the war's first protest movement.

Only it's not a peace movement. It's an eclectic rights movement, embracing
tastes that run from right to left to other: pro-family, pro-choice,
pro-gun, pro-consumer, pro-Bush, pro-Gore, humanist, Baptist.

So far, the coalition has more than 130 members. Their interests range from
property rights to disarmament.

"You've got the ACLU plus Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum. That's truly
extraordinary," says Sam Walker, a civil liberties historian who calls the
diversity of these dissenters "absolutely without precedent during wartime."

The debate over the Bush administration's law enforcement plan offers a
window into the ways of Washington, how alliances of situational friends
and foes come and go, issue by issue.

But even more than that, it's a testament to the power of privacy and civil
liberties as organizing causes that cross traditional lines, especially
among those who feel vulnerable to an intrusive government.

"Times of war have been the worst period for civil liberties, and it's
because there's this tendency to automatically defer to the government,"
says Walker, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska at
Omaha.

"All of us know what the historical precedents are for these things," says
Brad Jansen, of the conservative Free Congress Foundation.

History is rich with what are widely regarded as constitutional breaches --
of the First Amendment right to free speech, of the Fourth Amendment
protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, of the 14th
Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law.

There were the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, used to persecute political
opponents of the government. There was Abraham Lincoln's suspension during
the Civil War of habeas corpus, the protection against illegal detentions.
There was what Walker calls the "massive suppression of dissent" during
World War I, which spawned the American Civil Liberties Union. There were
the Japanese internment camps of World War II and the Cold War excesses of
the McCarthy era.

'Foe one day, friend the next'

Few have equated the Justice Department's anti-terrorism package with those
episodes. Many of its provisions are unopposed. Many are quite technical.
Other parts have been scaled back already because of objections on Capitol
Hill. The biggest arguments are over detention of immigrants, use of
foreign intelligence against U.S. citizens, secret searches and the sharing
of surveillance reports throughout the government.

Even some of the bill's critics say federal agents need new "tools" to
track terrorists who use cellphones, computers and hidden financial
transactions.

But they contend that the plan removes protections for individuals and
restraints on law enforcement. They also worry about steps that could come
later, from anti-encryption laws to national ID cards to mass video
surveillance.

Privacy, free speech and police powers have long been concerns of the civil
liberties left and the libertarian right, which preaches minimal
government. But more and more traditional conservatives have joined them,
alarmed by the scrutiny of anti-government groups after the Oklahoma City
bombing, the earlier incidents at Waco and Ruby Ridge, political
correctness on campus, gun control laws, even the Iran-contra prosecutions
during the Reagan years.

"There's the old saying that a conservative is a liberal who got mugged.
The follow-up is, a civil libertarian is a member of the Reagan
administration who got indicted," Walker says. "I think one of the things
that happened really in the '80s and '90s is a lot of conservative groups
discovered civil liberties."

In fact, some members of this unlikely alliance have been at it for years.
Georgia's Bob Barr, a well-known House conservative, has worked with the
American Civil Liberties Union on a variety of privacy and surveillance issues.

"We are often with strange bedfellows," says ACLU President Nadine
Strossen, who was invited to speak against the anti-terrorism bill recently
by radio host Oliver North.

"Foe one day, friend the next," says Lori Cole, of the "pro-family" group
Eagle Forum.

"You have to build coalitions," says Ralph Neas, president of the liberal
People for the American Way. "Now the rule is more temporary, ad hoc
coalitions."

In the recent past, activists on the left and right have fought the
government's power to seize private assets in criminal investigations. They
defended religious liberties. They lobbied against the anti-terrorism
measures enacted under President Clinton after Oklahoma City. Led by the
Free Congress Foundation, they helped defeat "know your customer" rules for
tracking bank customers and odd transactions. Jansen, the group's
technology expert, calls it "bank spying," though others have stepped up
calls for the measure to follow the terrorists' money trail.

Jansen says conservatives who object to the Bush plan don't necessarily
mistrust Attorney General John Ashcroft.

"We know that we have to be happy with whatever rules we put in place for
when Ted Kennedy is the attorney general," he says.

unifying Fear of 'intrusiveness'

That dictum may help explain why so many groups with vastly different
agendas perceive a common interest regarding the government's police power.

"People who have strong ideological beliefs at either end of the spectrum
are more familiar with the dangers and inhibitions that come with extremely
expanded law enforcement powers," says Senate Democrat Russ Feingold of
Wisconsin, another critic of Ashcroft's proposals.

When the package reached the House Judiciary Committee, it was the panel's
most conservative and liberal members who complained the loudest.
California Democrat Maxine Waters agreed with Bob Barr and could scarcely
believe it.

These incongruities are even starker among the interest groups involved.
The coalition that opposes the bill has a Web site (indefenseoffreedom.org)
that lists its members.

One of them is the Americans for Democratic Action, which calls itself the
"nation's oldest independent liberal organization." Another is the American
Conservative Union, which calls itself the "nation's oldest conservative
lobbying organization."

Ranging farther afield, there are groups dedicated to medical privacy,
Internet privacy, open government and liberalized drug laws. There are
groups devoted to free enterprise, lower taxes and gun rights. There are
scientific rationalists, Catholics and Quakers. There's a group for gay,
lesbian and transgendered Muslims.

There are civil rights groups and pro-immigration groups and ethnic
associations, many of them worried about racial profiling.

There are groups that favored Ashcroft's nomination and groups that opposed it.

There are groups that disagree deeply over social policy, taxes, health
care, campaign reform and missile defense.

But in this case, it seems, liberty and privacy are concepts versatile
enough to accommodate their differences.

"People see different things in privacy," Neas says. "For some, it's
reproductive rights. For others, it's (about) big government or big
business. One thing they all have in common is intrusiveness into home,
into what is personal, and that seems to be a grand unifying factor."