---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 09:05:00 -0600
From: David Davies <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: NYT: Everyone, including you, is a Suspect
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html
>
>Everyone, including you, is a Suspect
>
>By WILLIAM SAFIRE
>NEW YORK TIMES
>November 14, 2002
>
> 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 your 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, ... rose to national security adviser under President Ronald
>Reagan. * * * 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.
>
>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'sassault 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 *** 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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