WASHINGTON — After his first year of law school, Jim Harper was driving across the country with a friend when sirens suddenly started flashing in his rearview mirror.

Harper, who is now the director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, said in a mid-February interview that what ensued after he pulled over ultimately shaped his libertarian outlook on life.

The police officer, Harper recalled, told him he detected the scent of marijuana and not only brought out a drug-sniffing dog to search the car, but also a television show crew to document the process.

“I thought to myself, ‘If a police officer can invent a smell and take well-educated, well-spoken white guys out of the car and mess with them, imagine what it’s like for people who aren’t as well-educated or from minority communities,'” Harper said. “What do you suppose life is like for them?”

Such questions have formed the ideological basis of Harper’s career, which coincided with the Internet’s rise in the mid-1990s and early 2000s.

He served as a founding member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee in April 2005, providing input at the intersection of personal information and national defense. In his free time, he began laying the groundwork for his own consulting firm.

He joined Cato in September 2004, shuttering his private consulting firm, Policy Counsel.

Harper explained he lost his “team mentality” in transitioning from the Department of Homeland Security to the lobbying industry to the libertarian-leaning think tank.

“Once I left the Hill, I really abandoned the idea that one party is better than the other,” he said. “It’s all about policy — I work on what the right policy is.”

For libertarians, the right policy tends toward less government intervention in Americans’ day-to-day lives, Harper explained.

“It’s so important for individuals to protect themselves, rather than rely on the government to protect them,” he said.

Harper downplayed the notion that the country is at risk for another large-scale terrorist attack, saying that he is not concerned if someone in a foreign nation declares he or she is targeting the United States because it’s that person’s ability to actually carry out those intentions that matters.

“Terrorists have very little capability — happily so,” Harper said. “They got lucky on 9/11, but they won’t get lucky again.”

Instead, Harper suggested Americans should be more focused on little-known threats against their civil liberties on the home front. For example, he pointed to Internet monitoring as a real danger most Web users overlook.

He added it’s “very likely” that the National Security Agency, which operates under a confidential federal budget, has peeked at Americans’ Internet browsers on occasion.

“They might have everything that happens online — the surveillance possibilities are enormous,” Harper said. “And obviously the civil liberties consequences are enormous as well.”

His advice for privacy-minded citizens:

— Educate yourself about how both technology and government work.

–Know that every time you swipe your credit card or turn on your cell phone, your personal data is being recorded and stored somewhere.

Those pointers hark back to Harper’s first brush with libertarian principles as sirens flashed in his rearview mirror almost two decades ago.

“We need government for some things, but the power of government can be readily abused,” he said. “If I was a victim of a small abuse, the other people in my society could be living with huge abuses.”

Story by Patrick Svitek
Video by Ed Demaria, Rebecca Nelson and David Uberti