Nonprofit Groups Should Lead Debate on Rights, Safety

The effect of the war against terrorism on civil liberties presents one of the most important challenges facing nonprofit leaders.

On issues ranging from profiling at airports to the use of national identity cards to new limits on Internet privacy, difficult choices await a thoughtful resolution. Rather than approach the issue from the extreme edges of the policy spectrum, nonprofit officials should call for a national discussion about where a middle ground might be found that could guide the nation’s political leaders.

In numerous areas, the tensions between civil libertarians and those seeking to maximize national security are great. Consider the serious questions over the level of pressure that U.S. law-enforcement officials should be allowed to apply during the interrogation of terrorism suspects, including the use of truth serums on people who refuse to cooperate but who are believed to hold important information.

In Internet communication, too, critics are challenging the unlimited use of encryption technology and other methods to make patterns of online communication unintelligible to law-enforcement officials. And the Justice Department continues to review the rules and boundaries surrounding domestic wiretaps and surveillance of cellular communication by police.

Amid these and other controversies, an important debate is beginning to form about how we can preserve important privacy rights while also protecting national security and personal safety, especially when future terrorist attacks could involve the use of weapons of mass destruction. If the past is any guide, some parts of the nonprofit advocacy world will make the case for the dogged and uncompromising protection of civil liberties, while others will simultaneously argue for significant changes driven by national-security needs. Each side will paint, in vivid colors, slippery slopes and dire security scenarios.

Defining and arguing for positions on both sides of issues is one of the things that the vast universe of advocacy organizations has long done well. The theory behind this process is simple enough. While defending positions that sometimes tend toward the extreme, advocacy groups in different fields operate under the assumption that it is unlikely that their full policy agendas will be adopted. Rather, they hope that a meaningful compromise position eventually will emerge from the political process.

In such cases, advocacy groups, like any good negotiators, often ask for more than they believe they can get, hoping that decision makers sympathetic to their views will make wise and politically necessary concessions.

The current times call into question the appropriateness of those standard assumptions and make one wish for a different kind of advocacy work, one informed by the ambiguities of the post-September 11 world and the need for selective sacrifices.

Rather than waiting for creative compromises to emerge slowly from the cacophony of shrill voices, leaders from all across the nonprofit spectrum could contribute significantly by framing a nuanced conversation about when and why the nation might need to ask citizens to compromise some of their rights and make sacrifices designed to improve security.

To be sure, the task of asking for sacrifices and compromises for the sake of the public good should ideally rest in the political sphere. However, independent voices can and should help this conversation begin to take shape.

One possible model for how this might happen was the decision, after last year’s presidential election, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology to study ways to change the mechanics of recording and counting votes.

While it would be helpful if the White House Office of Homeland Security brought together a similar group to think through ways to reconcile the needs for privacy and security, such an effort need not start with government.

If nonprofit groups could do the difficult work of clarifying both the critical points of tension and the opportunities for reconciliation between rights and safety, they could lead the nation toward a politics built around sensible compromises, rather than unbending absolutes. At a time of crisis, fighting for and supporting the ideological center is one of the most important ways the nonprofit world could contribute to the common good.

Peter Frumkin is the author of On Being Nonprofit, which will be published by Harvard University Press next spring.