WAR ON TERROR BLURS LINES BETWEEN STATE AND FEDERAL, MILITARY AND CIVILIAN

ROBERT STEWART, chief of the State Law Enforcement Division, dropped by the
other day to make the case for letting his agency listen in on telephone
conversations -- with appropriate warrants.

It's not something he would have asked for a few years ago. "I don't like
the sound of 'wiretap' myself," he said. "I call it 'court-authorized
electronic surveillance."" But recent developments in both technology and
the nature of crime caused him to start changing assumptions even before
Sept. 11.

Another set of assumptions has undergone a transformation that makes
wiretaps in South Carolina look fairly minor.

Until recently, there were clearly defined boundaries between the various
entities that are charged with enforcing laws and keeping Americans safe.

Sheriffs and local police enforced local ordinances, as state agencies did
state laws. The FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and other federal law enforcement agencies
upheld federal statutes. The CIA collected intelligence abroad and was
barred from spying on Americans. The military was there to protect us from
foreign militaries, and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibited it from
performing civilian police functions.

There were breaches of those functions over the years, but they were
generally the exception rather than the rule until Ronald Reagan started
using the military to help fight the drug war.

Chief Stewart points out that there have been National Guard troops
stationed at SLED headquarters for 10 years to assist in antidrug
operations -- although they are not allowed to make arrests.

But since Sept. 11, the lines between military and civilian, foreign and
domestic, state and federal, CIA and FBI have blurred to the point that
they are often invisible or nonexistent.

The feds have started working together to an unprecedented degree. In The
New York Times Jan. 20, Tim Weiner summarized one of the more dramatic changes:

"The charter of the Central Intelligence Agency expressly denies the spies
any domestic police powers. President Harry S. Truman was vigilant in
wanting no secret police. Nor did he want J. Edgar Hoover's FBI cloaked in
the cover that espionage demands. The spies and the G-men had two distinct
roles, two distinct sets of rules.

"So the boundaries were drawn at the dawn of the cold war. The CIA would
find out what was going on outside the United States -- and so prevent a
second Pearl Harbor. The FBI would work inside the United States to catch
criminals and foreign agents. That once bright line has blurred since Sept.
11."

That's happened largely because neither the CIA nor the FBI nor the
military nor anyone else managed to prevent the "second Pearl Harbor."

While civil libertarians can and probably should dispute whether Congress
should have granted the CIA new powers to snoop on people in the United
States (civil libertarians play an important role in our society, even when
they're wrong), there's little doubt that some of the barriers between
federal institutions needed to fall. As Chief Stewart noted, "We quit
counting at 148 separate federal agencies that are supposed to protect us,"
and yet the various "federal intelligence computers don't geehaw, don't fit
together."

Next week in Washington, Chief Stewart will attend a meeting intended to
foster police and national security cooperation on an unprecedented scale.
The "Summit on Criminal Intelligence Sharing: Overcoming Barriers to
Enhance Domestic Security," will seek to "design a process to promote
intelligence-led policing, concentrating on successful development, sharing
and use of intelligence information, construction of a common intelligence
language, and creation of a structure for information exchange."

Joining sheriffs, police chiefs and state law enforcement officials from
across the country will be such luminaries as Attorney General John
Ashcroft, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, FBI Director Robert
Mueller, CIA Director George Tenet, ATF chief Bradley Buckles and Secret
Service Director Brian Stafford.

Also on hand will be top officials from the DEA, the Federal Aviation
Administration, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, the Army's Counterdrug Office and others that
most of us have never heard of. INTERPOL, the U.N. Security and Safety
Services and Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service will be
represented as well.

Depending on whether you're a law-and-order type or one who worries about
black helicopters, this gathering constitutes either a dream team or a
nightmare.

But whatever you think of it, it's one of the most dramatic illustrations
yet of the most overused of post-9/11 cliches: Everything has changed.