Ardimas Sasdi – Like a body blow to many people who are longing for peace and order after a great dearth of positive news, the government has announced a controversial plan to expand the authority and reach of the National Intelligence Agency (BIN) within the country.

State Minister for Administrative Reforms Feisal Tamin said recently that President Megawati Soekarnoputri had signed a presidential decree on a plan to open BIN offices in all provinces, regencies and municipalities throughout the country.

However, on the following day chief security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said the plan, expected to have far-reaching implications on the life of many people, still needed approval from the Cabinet. Rarely does a presidential decree require approval from the Cabinet.

It was not clear who was right or wrong as each version has its own explanation.

Feisal, logically, would not issue a sloppy statement taking into account his meritorious experience as a former government spokesman, while Susilo would not dare contradict his Cabinet colleague if he did not have strong grounds to do so.

However, one thing is for sure: The government plans to build an extensive network of BIN all over the country. BIN's expansion, if the plan is carried out, could be very risky as history has shown that the ruling government tends to exploit the intelligence agency inside the country to achieve one goal or another by harassing and detaining political opponents or those perceived to be.

Many Indonesians still remember all too well the experiences during the era of former president Soeharto, who often used the intelligent apparatus as a tool to monitor, torture and arrest government critics. This bitter experience is so oppressive in the minds of the victims, their relatives and society that many, many people are ultra-sensitive toward anything which smacks of more power to the domestic intelligence community. For Indonesians, BIN and its predecessor – the National Coordinating Intelligence Agency (BAKIN) – are the same "ghost".

So bad was the reputation of BAKIN that the government of former President Abdurrahman Wahid completely overhauled the agency in 2000, and changed its name to BIN after curtailing much of its authority.

But in October 2002, the same month as the Bali bombings, which killed 202 people, Megawati's administration reinstated the authority of BIN as a coordinator of intelligence agencies. Besides BIN there are intelligence bodies under the Indonesian Military, the police force and Attorney General's Office.

Politicians, experts and activists from non-governmental organizations (NGO) agreed with the government on a need for an effective and efficient intelligence agency to curb terror attacks, but they criticized a plan to expand BIN, saying that this policy would have wide-ranging ramifications on the nation's economy, society and politics.

Speaker of the House of Representatives Akbar Tandjung said the government's plan to strengthen BIN was understandable as an intelligence agency should have a network at every level of the government, but he still queried the plan as a means to institutionalize the agency at the district level.

Political analyst Indria Samego of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) said the plan to open intelligence offices in regencies was excessive and prone to abuse, while his colleague at LIPI Hermawan Sulistiyo said that BIN should instead improve its coordination capabilities and quality of its agents.

The most serious threat behind the plan to expand BIN, according to lawyer Munir from the NGO Imparsial, is that this plan could turn Indonesia back into a police state, where almost all activities and movements of people would be monitored by intelligence agents. Also in southeast Asia, strict monitoring of people's activities is known to happen in Myanmar, where violations of people's basic civil rights are common.

In short, the questions being raised by opponents of the BIN plan are:

First, is the planned expansion of BIN the best answer to curb terrorism? This question arose amid the relative success of the police in arresting many of the suspects in the Bali and Marriott attacks. This achievement is spectacular by any standard in the world.

Second, how long will the fight against terrorism last? If the answer is uncertain or as long as there is terrorism threat, the question is do people have to live with fear during the whole of this period, and tolerate their civil rights being trampled on by BIN agents? And who will bear the financial burden of the operations of so many BIN offices?.

Third, is there a guarantee that BIN's expansion, which will also entail employment of hundreds or even thousands of agents, will not lead to abuse of civil liberties.

In a developing country like Indonesia, where checks and balances are not yet in place, the potential for violations of civil rights of the people by an agency such as BIN is great. Indonesia must learn from the black history of Myanmar, where a small number of military elite in conjunction with a strong spy agency can maintain their power. In Myanmar, activities of the people are strictly monitored, letters and Internet messages are screened by military agents and a gathering of more than four people is illegal.

So the danger behind this controversial plan lies in the simplification of a fight against terrorism as if terror will be solved once BIN is expanded, and that this logic also does not take into account possible infringement of people's civil rights. If this happens, the ongoing democratization process, including some press freedoms, will suffer.

[The writer is a scholar at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.]