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Actually under the proposal of the IAO, it does not require companies to submit to squat; it mandates open systems to warrantless government intrusions without court authorization. In other words, you have to open your systems up with a back door to allow goons to sneak in and out at their desire. As an IT consultant (in the past) also, I can see what they want. Why spend billions on a "database" when you can mandate during "a time of war" that all systems be available to the fedgov without a warrant? They are only going to selectively create a database on the "undesirables" or "suspects". Also they will probably change the data storage requirements on private companies so watch for another tick up on your credit card interest rate. It's brilliant. And damned evil.

Actually under the proposal of the IAO, it does not require companies to submit to squat; it mandates open systems to warrantless government intrusions without court authorization.

Do you have the pertinent langauge on this? Plus, financial systems are screwed down pretty tight - it would take months, if not years, to create these backdoors.

In other words, you have to open your systems up with a back door to allow goons to sneak in and out at their desire. As an IT consultant (in the past) also, I can see what they want. Why spend billions on a "database" when you can mandate during "a time of war" that all systems be available to the fedgov without a warrant?

What's interesting is that this places the feds in violation of their own privacy laws. I'll look at this angle more.

They are only going to selectively create a database on the "undesirables" or "suspects".

Even that would be worthless, as they couldn't even figure out how to run a SQL query on the sniper database to figure out that a certain Caprice should be checked out.

Also they will probably change the data storage requirements on private companies so watch for another tick up on your credit card interest rate.

Actually, storage isn't that expensive any more. And I think corporations would raise an alarm on some of these matters.

It's brilliant. And damned evil.

Considering that they have already had to extend implementation of what seemed like a rather simple provision of the Patriot Act, I tend to count partially on government ineptitude as a protection here. But we also need to be vigilant. IMO Safire was partially off-base here, and DARPA is not what folks think, mainly because of inherent limitations of large databases. The real need is to go after warrantless searches of ANY kind, whether it is of someone's car or someone's credit card transactions at FDR.

In other words, you have to open your systems up with a back door to allow goons to sneak in and out at their desire.

Let's say for a moment that the fedgov did obtain this power. OK, they're in the back door of my company. What do they do?

Oops, the data they need is at ten different vendors. Gotta go there too. Oops, need a login. And a password. Is it running Oracle, Teradata, or DB2? Teradata?!? Cripes, Fred is our only Teradata guy and he's on vacation. Where is the metadata and the data dictionary? Man, I can't figure out these field naming conventions.

And that's just ONE system. To do the kind of modelling the feds would need to combine data from countless systems. OK, so they'll just work with the largest companies. So the terrorists will just get a card from a small bank or credit union, or just start paying cash more often.