[Vision2020] The Other Side of the Story

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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June 14, 2013
The Other Side of the Story By GAIL
COLLINS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/gailcollins/index.html>

The deck is always stacked when we debate keeping the nation safe.

Recently, we discovered that the National Security Agency is keeping an
enormous file of our phone calls. In the N.S.A.’s defense, its chief, Gen.
Keith Alexander, said “dozens” of potential terrorist attacks had been
thwarted by that kind of effort. The director of the F.B.I., Robert
Mueller, suggested it might prevent “the next Boston.”

How do you argue with that? True, the N.S.A. program had been up and
running for years without being able to prevent the first Boston. And
Alexander declined to identify the thwarted attacks, arguing that might aid
potential terrorists.

But most Americans were sold. The words “terrorist attack” conjured up
terrible, vivid pictures. On the other side was just a humongous computer
bank full of numbers. If you didn’t do anything wrong, what was the
problem?

Today, let’s try putting a face on it in the form of Brandon Mayfield.

A Kansas native, Mayfield went to college and law school, served in the
Army, married, had three children and moved to Portland, Ore., to practice
law.

His story begins with — yes! — an enormous federal database, in this case
the one that collected fingerprints of Americans who served in the
military.

In 2004, after terrorists bombed commuter trains in Madrid, Spanish
officials found a suspicious fingerprint on a plastic bag at the scene. The
F.B.I. ran it through its files and decided, erroneously, that it matched
Mayfield’s. Further investigation revealed that Mayfield had married an
Egyptian immigrant and converted to Islam — information the authorities
apparently found far more compelling than the fact that he had never been
to Spain.

Peculiar things then began to happen in the Mayfield house. His wife, Mona,
returned home to find unlocked doors mysteriously bolted. Their daughter,
Sharia, then 12, noticed that someone had been fooling around with her
computer. “I had a desktop monitor, and it looked like some of the screws
had been taken out and not put back in all the way,” she said in a phone
interview. “And the hard drive was sticking out.”

Later, the family would learn that agents had broken into their home and
Mayfield’s law office repeatedly, taking DNA swabs from the bathroom, nail
clippings and cigarette butts, along with images of all the computer hard
drives.

“I became very paranoid that someone was going into my room,” said Sharia.

The snoopers had warrants from the court set up by the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act. FISA courts are supposed to keep investigators within the
law while they’re secretly searching for terrorists. We have been hearing a
lot about this recently, since the Obama administration keeps pointing out
that the N.S.A.’s phone records project had the blessing of FISA judges.
Last year, the feds made 1,856 requests to FISA judges and got 1,856
thumbs-up.

So there we are: Search of huge database produces a (wrong) name.
Investigators get permission to search an American family’s house without
their knowledge, from a secret court that does not seem to be superhard to
convince.

One day, F.B.I. agents walked into Mayfield’s office, handcuffed him and
took him away. When Sharia left school, her brother met her and told her
that their father had been arrested. She assumed it was a joke.

“I said something like, ‘Oh — good one, bro.’ Then my brother started to
cry.”

For the next two weeks, Mayfield remained in jail, imagining a possible
death penalty. His daughter recalls the family’s isolation, coupled with
omnipresent radio and television reports about the alleged Madrid bomber.
“School was a refuge in some ways from the reality of home, which was
hell,” Sharia said.

Spain saved the day. The Spanish investigators were dubious from the
beginning that the fingerprints at the bombing site were Mayfield’s; they
had been hoping, perhaps, for a person who had set foot in Europe within
the last decade. They found and arrested someone whose finger was a real
match.

Mayfield was released. The government eventually paid him $2 million in
damages and, in a rare act of contrition, issued a formal apology to him
and his family. A federal judge in Oregon also found that the Patriot Act’s
authorization of secret searches against American citizens was
unconstitutional — a ruling that was reversed on a technicality by a higher
court.

That was nearly a decade ago. “But you never quite get over these things,”
Mayfield said. “It was a harrowing ordeal. It was terrifying.” He and his
daughter are working on a book about what happened. Sharia is also going to
law school. “I want to do civil liberties,” she said.

So there we are. It’s just one story. But I suspect the national
willingness to give government a blank check on national security matters
comes to a screeching halt at about the point where the agents tiptoe into
the daughter’s bedroom.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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