Security and Freedom Not Opposing Concepts, Napolitano Says

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano made a confession this morning: She doesn't like the concept of balancing security and freedom.

"I will confess that I don’t like the word ‘balance,’ because I think we have to cast aside the notion that our liberty and our security are...values that are on the opposite sides of a see-saw—that when one is up, the other necessarily must be down. The plain fact of the matter is that you cannot live free if you live in fear," she said Wednesday during a speech on transatlantic counterterrorism cooperation at the Georgetown University Law Center.

The event's participants, who included two representatives from Germany, discussed how the United States and Germany, if not Europe as a whole, can partner together to provide security to its citizens without sacrificing ideals such as freedom and privacy.

Germany's Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said that one of government's primary responsibilities is to protect its citizens without sacrificing a constitutional democracy's commitment to liberty. Nowadays, that means states must take preventative action based on intelligence to combat suicidal terrorism. But this requires multilateral information-sharing and intelligence cooperation, because jihadism is a transnational threat that does not distinguish between national borders, he said.

Germany and the United States have a good intelligence relationship that has disrupted terrorist plots in the past, according to De Maizière. In 2007, the CIA helped Germany crack an imminent terrorism attack that involved two German converts to radical Islam. Known as Operation Alberich, the bilateral mission was "conducted from both Berlin and Washington, with a joint CIA and German task force set up in Berlin," Germany's Der Spiegel reported in 2007.

De Maizière agreed with Napolitano that the botched Christmas Day terrorism attack underscored the necessity of stronger transatlantic cooperation. The 23-year-old jihadist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to detonate powdered explosives stashed in his underwear on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, could have just as likely boarded a connecting flight at Frankfurt Airport as Schiphol Airport, said de Maizière.

But Germany and the United States don't see eye-to-eye on all the details, however, with the primary disagreement involving data protection and privacy. Unlike the United States, De Maizière said Germans believe in "informational self-determination," which means they have the right to decide who holds information about them. This differs from America, where people have the right to be left alone, he said, using the words of Supreme Court Justice Lewis Brandeis. Due to these differing views, European public officials generally resist  transatlantic information-sharing efforts that would target terrorist financing and threats against aviation.

(For more on international public-private agreements on data security, see "Global Security Cooperation Grows," from this month's Security Management.)

And while Secretary Napolitano may not like the word "balance," her two German counterparts used it liberally Wednesday. Judge Andreas Vosskuhle, president of Germany's Federal Constitutional Court, said that the tension between security and liberty is the foundation of the modern state. This presents the modern state with a democratic conundrum, he said: it can only maintain its legitimacy with its citizens by both protecting them from threats while at the same time assuring them that they are protected from the state. Differing from Napolitano slightly, Vosskuhle said security and liberty are "interdependent but not in harmony," yet "they can be reconciled."

All three participants recognized that the United States and Germany have similar goals, regardless of the different ways each nation goes about achieving them.

“We cannot let ourselves lose sight of this in favor of an attempt to merge two distinct legal traditions with two distinct histories and two ways of working," Napolitano stressed. "Instead we need to more easily and more meaningfully aim for the same goals." De Maizière agreed, stating that while Germany, and Europe in general, sees the issue of security and liberty differently than the United States, the two regions are stalwart allies. "Europe is old and slow, but it's always democratic and reliable," he said.

Neither the United States nor Germany should try and twist the other's arm into dealing with privacy the same way, Napolitano added. "While we share common privacy principles, we should not try to insist that other countries implement or oversee privacy protections exactly like we do.”

Secretary Napolitano hopes she can reach the same type of consensus on data protection and privacy that she did on aviation security. Ten nations plus the United States, she said, have already increased aviation security and the rapid deployment of full body scanners in response to the botched Christmas day attack.

 ♦ Photo by oedipusphinx/Flickr