[Think] FWD: You Are a Suspect By WILLIAM SAFIRE

[Fen Labalme]

The following is an article from the NY Times - November, 14, 2002. Its 
author, William Safire, is no radical, not even what I would call a 
"liberal" (read his other columns and you will see what I mean) and he is 
sending out a very strong warning about what the Bush administration is 
doing to liberty in the US, and the kind of folks it is hiring to do it.

The original article is on the NYTimes website (free registration) at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html


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.

                               ===============

For more, see this article ("US gov's 'ultimate database' run by a felon")
from the Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/28107.html

And while you're at it, check out what happened to these other high-profile
criminals:
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/summpros.htm

Finally, get to work! and write your congresscritters now!  Here's help:
http://action.eff.org/action/index.asp?step=2&item=1723



Peace,
Fen
===

Fen Labalme                 GPG/PGP key: <http://www.fen.net/pgpkeys.shtml>
http://www.OpenPrivacy.org
Choose my closing .sig quote from <http://www.fen.net/quotes/freedom.shtml>