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. "
from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/op...partner=GOOGLE
nytimes.com requires registration so I just copied all
the text.
later
hifi
incognito
Linear Mode
