[Peace-discuss] Fwd: The Perils of Homeland Security

[manni at snafu.de]

Forwarded Message:
> To: portside at yahoogroups.com
> From: portsideMod at netscape.net
> Subject: The Perils of Homeland Security: Two Articles
> Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 19:33:05 -0500
> -----
> You Are 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 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.
> ------------------------------------
> Copyright The New York Times Company
> 
> 
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html?pagewanted=pri
nt&position=top