the new technologies of wireless telephones and electronic payments, among
others, offer greater access and flexibility to the blind and those with
disabilities.  they are now the basis of an unprecedented snooping operation
by the bush Administration that has been taken out of the reach of congress.
Read on below for the really gory details that have just become public in
the last few days.

Kelly


    How Big Brother Is Watching, Listening and Misusing Information About
You

    From Capitol Hill Blue

    What Price Freedom?

How Big Brother Is Watching, Listening and Misusing Information About You

By TERESA HAMPTON & DOUG THOMPSON

Jun 8, 2004

    You're on your way to work in the morning and place a call on your
wireless phone. As your call is relayed by the wireless tower, it is also
relayed by another series of towers to a microwave antenna on top of Mount
Weather between Leesburg and Winchester, Virginia and then beamed to
another antenna on top of an office building in Arlington where it is
recorded on a computer hard drive.

    The computer also records you phone digital serial number, which is
used to identify you through your wireless company phone bill that the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency already has on record as part of
your permanent file.

    A series of sophisticated computer programs listens to your phone
conversation and looks for "keywords" that suggest suspicious activity. If
it picks up those words, an investigative file is opened and sent to the
Department of Homeland Security.

    Congratulations. Big Brother has just identified you as a potential
threat to the security of the United States because you might have used
words like "take out" (as in taking someone out when you were in fact
talking about ordering takeout for lunch) or "D-Day" (as in deadline for
some nefarious activity when you were talking about going to the new World
War II Memorial to recognize the 60th anniversary of D-Day).

    If you are lucky, an investigator at DHS will look at the entire
conversation in context and delete the file. Or he or she may keep the
file open even if they realize the use of words was innocent. Or they may
decide you are, indeed, a threat and set up more investigation, including
a wiretap on your home and office phones, around-the-clock surveillance
and much closer looks at your life.

    Welcome to America, 2004, where the actions of more than 150 million
citizens are monitored 24/7 by the TIA, the Terrorist Information
Awareness (originally called Total Information Awareness) program of
DARPA, DHS and the Department of Justice.

    Although Congress cut off funding for TIA last year, the Bush
Administration ordered the program moved into the Pentagon's "black bag"
budget, which is neither authorized nor reviewed by the Hill. DARPA also
increased the use of private contractors to get around privacy laws that
would restrict activities by federal employees.

    Six months of interviews with security consultants, former DARPA
employees, privacy experts and contractors who worked on the TIA facility
at 3701 Fairfax Drive in Arlington reveal a massive snooping operation
that is capable of gathering - in real time - vast amounts of information
on the day to day activities of ordinary Americans.

    Going on a trip? TIA knows where you are going because your train,
plane or hotel reservations are forwarded automatically to the DARPA
computers. Driving? Every time you use a credit card to purchase gas, a
record of that transaction is sent to TIA which can track your movements
across town or across the country.

    Use a computerized transmitter to pay tolls? TIA is notified every
time that transmitter passes through a toll booth. Likewise, that lunch
you paid for with your VISA becomes part of your permanent file, along
with your credit report, medical records, driving record and even your TV
viewing habits.

    Subscribers to the DirecTV satellite TV service should know - but
probably don't - that every pay-per-view movie they order is reported to
TIA as is any program they record using a TIVO recording system. If they
order an adult film from any of DirecTV's three SpiceTV channels, that
information goes to TIA and is, as a matter of policy, forwarded to the
Department of Justice's special task force on pornography.

    "We have a police state far beyond anything George Orwell imagined in
his book 1984," says privacy expert Susan Morrissey. "The everyday lives
of virtually every American are under scrutiny 24-hours-a-day by the
government."

    Paul Hawken, owner of the data information mining company Groxis,
agrees, saying the government is spending more time watching ordinary
Americans than chasing terrorists and the bad news is that they aren't
very good at it.

    "It's the Three Stooges go to data mining school," says Hawken. "Even
worse, DARPA is depending on second-rate companies to provide them with
the technology, which only increases the chances for errors."

    One such company is Torch Concepts. DARPA provided the company with
flight information on five million passengers who flew Jet Blue Airlines
in 2002 and 2003. Torch then matched that information with social security
numbers, credit and other personal information in the TIA databases to
build a prototype passenger profiling system.

    Jet Blue executives were livid when they learned how their passenger
information, which they must provide the government under the USA Patriot
Act, was used and when it was presented at a technology conference with
the title: Homeland Security - Airline Passenger Risk Assessment.

    Privacy Expert Bill Scannell didn't buy Jet Blue's anger.

    "JetBlue has assaulted the privacy of 5 million of its customers,"
said Scannell. "Anyone who flew should be aware and very scared that there
is a dossier on them."

    But information from TIA will be used the DHS as a major part of the
proposed CAPSII airline passenger monitoring system. That system, when
fully in place, will determine whether or not any American is allowed to
get on an airplane for a flight.

    JetBlue requested the report be destroyed and the passenger data be
purged from the TIA computers but TIA refuses to disclose the status of
either the report or the data.

    Although exact statistics are classified, security experts say the
U.S. Government has paid out millions of dollars in out-of-court
settlements to Americans who have been wrongly accused, illegally detained
or harassed because of mistakes made by TIA. Those who accept settlements
also have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and won't discuss their
cases.

    Hawken refused to do business with DARPA, saying TIA was both
unethical and illegal.

    "We got a lot of e-mails from companies - even conservative ones -
saying, 'Thank you. Finally someone won't do something for money,'" he
adds.

    Those who refuse to work with TIA include specialists from the
super-secret National Security Agency in Fort Meade, MD. TIA uses NSA's
technology to listen in on wireless phone calls as well as the agency's
list of key words and phrases to identify potential terrorist activity.

    "I know NSA employees who have quit rather than cooperate with DARPA,"
Hawken says. "NSA's mandate is to track the activities of foreign enemies
of this nation, not Americans."

    © Copyright 2004 Capitol Hill Blue


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