-Caveat Lector-
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html?ex=10378
54800&en=3778829e1bec3dc2&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
November 14, 2002
You Are a Suspect
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
WASHINGTON — If the Homeland Security Act is not amended
before passage, here is what will happen to you:
Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine
subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web
site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade
you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and
every event you attend — all these transactions and
communications will go into what the Defense Department
describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."
To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial
sources, add every piece of information that government has about
you — passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records,
judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the
F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera
surveillance — and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total
Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.
This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to
your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter
gets the unprecedented power he seeks.
Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval
Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national
security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this
brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for
hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in
Nicaragua.
A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of
misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals
court overturned the verdict because Congress had given him
immunity for his testimony. He famously asserted, "The buck stops
here," arguing that the White House staff, and not the president,
was responsible for fateful decisions that might prove embarrassing.
This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even
more scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information
Awareness Office" in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet and stealth
aircraft technology. Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream:
getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private
act of every American.
Even the hastily passed U.S.A. Patriot Act, which widened the scope
of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and weakened 15
privacy laws, raised requirements for the government to report
secret eavesdropping to Congress and the courts. But Poindexter's
assault on individual privacy rides roughshod over such oversight.
He is determined to break down the wall between commercial
snooping and secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral
dismisses such necessary differentiation as bureaucratic
"stovepiping." And he has been given a $200 million budget to
create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans.
When George W. Bush was running for president, he stood
foursquare in defense of each person's medical, financial and
communications privacy. But Poindexter, whose contempt for the
restraints of oversight drew the Reagan administration into its most
serious blunder, is still operating on the presumption that on such a
sweeping theft of privacy rights, the buck ends with him and not with
the president.
This time, however, he has been seizing power in the open. In the
past week John Markoff of The Times, followed by Robert O'Harrow
of The Washington Post, have revealed the extent of Poindexter's
operation, but editorialists have not grasped its undermining of the
Freedom of Information Act.
Political awareness can overcome "Total Information Awareness,"
the combined force of commercial and government snooping. In a
similar overreach, Attorney General Ashcroft tried his Terrorism
Information and Prevention System (TIPS), but public outrage at the
use of gossips and postal workers as snoops caused the House to
shoot it down. The Senate should now do the same to this other
exploitation of fear.
The Latin motto over Poindexter"s new Pentagon office reads
"Scientia Est Potentia" — "knowledge is power." Exactly: the
government's infinite knowledge about you is its power over you.
"We're just as concerned as the next person with protecting
privacy," this brilliant mind blandly assured The Post. A jury found he
spoke falsely before.
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A nation of well informed men who have been taught to
know and prize the rights which God has given them
cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance
that tyranny begins. ~~ Benjamin Franklin
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