Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh lobbied Congress yesterday to expand the federal role in the battle against Internet crime. The Clinton administration is asking for an additional $37 million to bolster its hacker-tracking "cyberforce," among other initiatives. President Clinton this week tried to reassure Internet executives that Big Brother was not coming to the Internet. But have efforts to police cyberspace already gone too far?

There's no question that as Internet use increases, Internet use by criminals increases. Some of the dangers have been well-chronicled:

• Electronic information lures thieves. Stolen "identities" allow crooks to run up credit-card bills, pass bad checks, and destroy credit histories. A well-publicized hacker has recently elevated this gambit to a new level, blackmailing an online retailer from which he stole thousands of credit card numbers.
  
• Anonymity emboldens perverts. Purveyors of pornography -- legal and illegal- have found the Internet good for business. And sexual predators use the seemingly benign settings of chat rooms to identify and lure potential victims.
• A global network multiples opportunities for economic crime. Auction sites like eBay not only facilitate honest transactions; they invite dishonest individuals to rip off trusting counterparties. Steven Kamensky, a Long Island high school student, and his father, Ira, were arrested last fall and charged with collecting more than $50,000 by allegedly defrauding eBay customers.
  

In another alleged racket, Alfred Flores was indicted and accused of purchasing shares of a bankrupt chain of used car dealerships. According to Securities and Exchange Commission charges, he circulated information to online traders that the company had purchased a research firm developing a cure for AIDS. He allegedly made $500,000 on the resulting increase in stock values.

Slowly, even some ardent defenders of the Internet's libertarian culture are turning to government for protection. And therein lies a hidden threat posed by Internet crime. Government agencies, struggling to combat new types of criminals, may tread upon individual rights. And the public, whipped into a frenzy by stories of Internet mayhem, may accept these intrusions too easily.

Consider Echelon, a spying network jointly operated by the national intelligence agencies of several Western countries, led by the U.S. National Security Agency. Echelon combats international terrorism by scanning millions of international communications (including e-mail) for suspicious words like revolution, manifesto and Waco. When Echelon's existence was revealed last year, its scope surprised even the most vocal alarmists. It has aroused opposition from diverse quarters, from Rep. Bob Barr (R., Ga.) to the American Civil Liberties Union.

On the domestic scene, several federal law-enforcement agencies have increased their attention to Internet crime. As part of its Operation Innocent Images, the FBI tracks adults with a suspicious interest in children. Agent Allison Mourad is one of several who spend their days "disguised" as 13-year-olds in Internet chat rooms, trying to lure pedophiles. The Securities and Exchange Commission has created a "cyberforce" to troll the Internet for scam artist, as have the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration, which is on the lookout for pharmaceutical sellers who do not require prescriptions.

President Clinton's Working Group on Unlawful Conduct on the Internet has proposed a Federal Intrusion Detection Network, or FIDNet, within the FBI that would monitor flows of electronic data to help track down the hackers of the future. This would create an unprecedented opportunity for the FBI to perform surveillance of all domestic communications. The proposal has drawn a flurry of objections from privacy advocates. The FBI has also proposed rules that would permit tracking of physical locations by cellular phone use and monitoring of Internet traffic under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. (The rules are being challenged in court.) Another administration plan is LawNet," which would coordinate enforcement and prosecutorial activities around the world.

Gradual Erosion

Any of these developments may be defensible on its own. But the gradual erosion of individual rights is clear, if unintended. Each step is made palatable by the steady stream of near-hysterical reports of Internet crime. The FBI's rules that would mandate electronic backdoors to make every home computer more "eavesdropper friendly," for example, have received minimal attention or protest outside the civil liberties community.

We must guard against giving away our freedom over a panic based on hyperbolic horror stories. As Justice Louis Brandeis observed: "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning, but without understanding."