Support For Government Surveillance Slips ñ Harris Poll

Support for expanded high-tech government surveillance gradually has diminished during the six months following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, new Harris Poll figures show.

While a majority of Americans continue to favor expanded surveillance by law agents in the war against terror, the poll shows that support has declined modestly. In one category – expanded government surveillance of cell phone and e-mail traffic – supporters now are in the minority, the poll indicates.

The poll is based on U.S. telephone surveys taken March 13-19, and includes responses from 1,017 adults. Results are weighted where necessary to reflect accurate U.S. demographics for age, sex, race and education, among other factors, pollsters said.

According to Harris Interactive, the biggest change is that fewer Americans now say they are "very confident" that U.S. law enforcement will use their expanded power with proper restraint.

Shortly after the terrorist attacks on the U.S. last year, 34 percent of Americans held that view, according to Harris pollsters. In mid-March, only 12 percent still hold that view.

Nonetheless, fully 73 percent of Americans were either "very confident" or "somewhat confident" that law officials will use appropriate discretion exercising their expanded powers, the Harris Poll shows.

Only 23 percent were either "not very confident" or "not at all confident" that the government will use its new surveillance powers properly, but that number jumped from just 12 percent shortly after Sept. 11.

Among other poll findings:

- Eighty-one percent of Americans favor digital face-recognition technologies to scan for suspected terrorists in public places. That is down from 86 percent support in September;

- Fifty-nine percent of U.S. residents favor a national ID system, down from 68 percent in September;

- Seventy-two percent of Americans believed in mid-March that there should be closer government monitoring of banking and credit-card transactions, down from 81 percent in September;

- Fifty-five percent agreed with increased government monitoring of chat rooms and other Internet forums, compared to the 63 who favored that in September.

However, most Americans no longer are in favor of expanded e-mail and cell-phone surveillance. That was favored by only 44 percent of Americans in mid-March, compared to the 54 percent who supported it in September 2001, according to the poll.

The survey questions were designed by privacy expert Alan Westin, according to a press release announcing the results.

"These results reflect the reality that there has been no second major terrorist attack since 9/11," Westin said in the press release. "The high-anxiety, very-high-approval rates for expanded law enforcement powers expressed in late September 2001 have moved, six months later, to a still-high but somewhat more cautious level, reflecting American concerns that liberty and due process intrusions be kept to the necessary minimum."

Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), told Newsbytes he agrees with Westin's assessment. "I think it is the case that since September 11th, there has been greater discussion about civil liberties."

Rotenberg said the Harris Poll numbers seem to reflect less erosion of support for certain surveillance techniques than other polls have indicated.

For instance, a Gartner Poll of 1,120 adults published in mid-March showed that only 26 percent of respondents favored a national ID card, compared to the 59 percent supporting a national ID initiative in today's Harris poll results.

Meanwhile, a Dec. 12, 2001, New York Times/CBS poll indicated that 65 percent of respondents opposed government monitoring of ordinary Americans' communications in the name of homeland security. In that same poll, 48 percent queried supported greater surveillance, while 44 percent feared heightened surveillance would violate their civil liberties.

Rotenberg's organization has been a staunch opponent to national ID card legislation, suing the Office of Homeland Security on Tuesday to force it to unveil its national ID plans. EPIC also opposed the so-called U.S.A. Patriot Act, passed last October, which reshaped much of the FBI role from crime solving to high-tech domestic intelligence gathering.

Despite gaps in the polling figures, Rotenberg said the Harris Poll results mirror a wider trend toward decreased support for government surveillance of individuals.

"There is greater public skepticism today," Rotenberg said. "The numbers of people who are somewhat confident as opposed to very confident have shifted dramatically since September, and I think that's an important shift."

The Harris Poll is at www.harrisinteractive.com.

EPIC has a Web page pulling together surveillance-related polling data from a number of sources at www.epic.org.