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Private-Public Intelligence Partnerships in the War on Terror

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All the President's Spies: Private-Public Intelligence Partnerships in the War on Terror Jon D. Michaelst INTRODUCTION The "War on Terror" has dramatically increased the nation's need for intelligence, and the federal government is increasingly relying, as it does in so many other contexts, on private actors to deliver that information. While private-public collaboration in intelligence gathering is not new, what is novel today-and what drives this inquiry-is that some of these collaborations are orchestrated around handshakes rather than legal formalities, such as search warrants, and may be arranged this way to evade oversight and, at times, to defy the law. Unable to target or repel terrorists using conventional military tactics and munitions alone, the United States is acutely aware that today's pivotal battlefield is an informational one. Teams of U.S. intelligence agents, acting as eavesdroppers, infiltrators, interrogators, and data-miners, must race against the clock to anticipate terrorists' actions, frustrate their missions, and dismantle their infrastructure.' Because the U.S. government does not know the who, Copyright © 2008 California Law Review, Inc. California Law Review, Inc. (CLR) is a California nonprofit corporation. CLR and the authors are solely responsible for the content of their publications. t Acting Professor, UCLA School of Law. Law Clerk to the Hon. David H. Souter, U.S. Supreme Court, 2005-06. Law Clerk to the Hon. Guido Calabresi, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, 2004-05. J.D., Yale Law School, 2003. The author wishes to thank Bruce Ackerman, Guido Calabresi, Sewell Chan, Josh Civin, Patrick Curran, Nestor Davidson, Jack Goldsmith, Oona Hathaway, Robert Hockett, Orin Kerr, Allison Orr Larsen, Marty Lederman, Ronald Lee, Jerry Mashaw, Raj Nayak, Anne Joseph O'Connell, Susan Rose-Ackerman, Steven Schooner, Paul Schwartz, Nikhil Shanbhag, Reva Siegel, Alexander Slater, David Sklansky, Jeffrey Smith, Daniel Solove, Jake Sullivan, David Super, and Meredith Desautels and Marc Pilotin of the California Law Review. Special thanks, as always, to Toni Michaels. The views expressed herein are solely those of the author. 1. See PHILIP B. HEYMANN, TERRORISM, FREEDOM, AND SECURITY: WINNING WITHOUT WAR 61-65 (2003) (noting the importance of tactical and strategic intelligence, which "allow[s] prevention by incapacitating a critical group of the terrorists or denying them the resources or CALIFORNIA LA W REVIEW [Vol. 96:901 what, where, and when of the next terrorist strike, but recognizes that the plot might be hatched on domestic soil, its first step must be to cast a wide net to gather all sorts of data points, 2 any one of which might be the clue that leads intelligence agents to prevent another September 1 -like catastrophe. 3 In this regard, there is no better ally than the private sector. Its comparative advantage over the government in acquiring vast amounts of potentially useful data is a function both of industry's unparalleled access to the American public's intimate affairs-access given by all those who rely on businesses to facilitate their personal, social, and economic transactions-and of regulatory asymmetries insofar as private organizations can at times obtain and share more easily and under fewer legal restrictions than the government information 4 can when it collects similar information on its own. access their plan requires. That necessitates identifying a sufficient and critical set of participants and learning their plan"); PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE, CHATTER: DISPATCHES FROM THE SECRET WORLD OF GLOBAL EAVESDROPPING 228 (2005); RON SUSKIND, THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE: DEEP INSIDE AMERICA'S PURSUIT OF ITS ENEMIES SINCE 9/11, at 26, 63 (2006); NAT'L COMM'N ON TERRORIST ATTACKS UPON THE U.S., THE 9/1I COMMISSION REPORT (2004); U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, QUADRENNIAL DEFENSE REVIEW REPORT (2006); Jack M. Balkin & Sanford Levinson, The Process of Constitutional Change: From PartisanEntrenchment to the National Surveillance State, 75 FORDHAM L. REV. 489, 520-22 (2006); Seth F. Kreimer, Watching the Watchers: Surveillance, Transparency,and PoliticalFreedom in the War on Terror, 7 U. PA. J. CONST. L. 133, 133 (2004); see also Peter P. Swire, Privacy and Information Sharing in the War on Terrorism, 51 VILL. L. REV. 951, 955 (2006) ("[P]rogress in information technology offers the most effective response to the new [terrorist] threat."). 2. See HEYMANN, supra note 1, at 62; RICHARD A. POSNER, PREVENTING SURPRISE ATTACKS: INTELLIGENCE REFORM IN THE WAKE OF 9/I I, at 99 (2005) [hereinafter POSNER, PREVENTING]; Anne Joseph O'Connell, The Architecture of Smart Intelligence: Structuring and Overseeing Agencies in the Post-9/11 World, 94 CALIF. L. REV. 1662-63, 1665 (2006); TODD MASSE, CONG. RESEARCH SERV., HOMELAND SECURITY INTELLIGENCE: PERCEPTIONS, STATUTORY DEFINITIONS, AND APPROACHES (2006), available at http://www.fas.org/ sgp/crs/intel/RL33616.pdf; JEFFREY W. SEIFERT, CONG. RESEARCH SERV., DATA MINING AND HOMELAND SECURITY: AN OVERVIEW (2007), available at http://www.fas.org/ sgp/crs/intel/RL31798.pdf; see also Jeffrey Rosen, The Naked Crowd: Balancing Privacy and Security in an Age of Terror, 46 ARIZ. L. REV. 607, 610 (2004) (describing data mining as the "consolidat[ion] and analy[sis of] public and private data in the hope of unearthing unusual patterns that might predict suspicious activity"). 3. William C. Banks, And the Wall Came Tumbling Down: Secret Surveillance After the Terror, 57 U. MIAMI L. REV. 1147, 1151 (2003) ("A major component of our counterterrorism strategy is interdiction - taking efforts to stop the terrorists before they strike. An effective capability to conduct secret intelligence collection is of critical importance in combating terrorism."); Peter P. Swire, The System of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Law, 72 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 1306, 1343 (2004) [hereinafter Swire, System] ("In a world of asymmetrical warfare, greater surveillance can detect and respond to newly emerging threats."). 4. See DANIEL J. SOLOVE, THE DIGITAL PERSON: TECHNOLOGY AND PRIVACY IN THE INFORMATION AGE 166 (2004) [hereinafter SOLOVE, DIGITAL PERSON] ("Personal information [mined from business databases] can help the government detect fraud, espionage, fugitives, drug distribution rings, and terrorist cells. Information about a person's financial transactions, purchases, and religious and political beliefs can assist the investigation of uspected criminals and can be used to profile people for more thorough searches at airports."); JAY STANLEY, AM. CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION, THE SURVEILLANCE-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: HOW THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT IS CONSCRIPTING BUSINESSES AND INDIVIDUALS IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF A 2008] PRIVA TE-PUBLIC INTELLIGENCE PARTNERSHIPS Seeking to bridge the private sector's data-gathering capabilities and the nation's need for homeland security is an Executive with a voracious appetite for intelligence and correspondingly little patience for anything that might interfere with its efforts to neutralize the terrorist threat. The Executive is institutionally predisposed to act decisively and unilaterally during times of national crisis, even if it means bypassing legal restrictions, skirting congressional and judicial oversight, and encroaching on civil liberties.5 As Justice Souter remarked in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld: deciding . on what is a reasonable degree of guaranteed liberty whether in peace or war (or some condition in between) is not well entrusted to the Executive Branch of Government, whose particular responsibility is to maintain security. For reasons of inescapable human nature, the branch of the Government asked to counter a serious threat is not the branch on which to rest the Nation's entire reliance in striking the balance between the will to win and the cost in liberty on the way to victory; the responsibility for security6 will naturally amplify the claim that security legitimately raises. Unilateral executive policymaking of this sort has figured prominently in post-September 11 national-security policies and is reflected in the United States' approach to military detainees, interrogation tactics, battlefield contractors, and, of course, intelligence operations.7 SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY 1 (2004), available at http://www.aclu.org/FilesPDFs/ surveillancejreport.pdf ("The ongoing revolution in communications, computers, databases, cameras and sensors means that the technological obstacles to the creation of a truly nightmarish 'surveillance society' have now been overcome."); Susan Freiwald, Online Surveillance: Remembering the Lessons of the Wiretap Act, 56 ALA. L. REV. 9, 11-12 (2004) (noting that extensive personal data is available via the Internet); Daniel J. Solove & Chris Jay Hoofnagle, A Model Regime of Privacy Protection, 2006 U. ILL. L. REV. 357, 359 (indicating that private companies often have fewer legal restrictions placed upon them vis-A-vis accessing other people's personal information than the government does); Orin S. Kerr, Internet Surveillance Law After the USA PATRIOT Act: The Big Brother That lsn't, 97 Nw. U. L. REV. 607, 610 (2003) [hereinafter Kerr, Internet Surveillance]; James X. Dempsey & Lara M. Flint, CommercialData and National Security, 72 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 1459 (2004) [hereinafter Dempsey & Flint, Commercial Data]. 5. See, e.g., David Golove & Stephen Holmes, Terrorism & Accountability: Why Checks and Balances Apply Even in "The War on Terrorism," N.Y.U. REV. L. & SECURITY, Apr. 2004, at 2, 2 ("Executive power, by its very nature, seeks
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