Posted on 11/14/2002 3:44:40 PM PST by Arthur Wildfire! March
William Safire's editorial today is heating up an important debate. There are two camps: "This is war." vs. "This is Orwellian." I want to open a third camp. "This is ridiculous."
Our borders are wide open. Terrorists could blindside us at will. The foreign threats are much greater than the domestic threats in this war of terrorism. So naturally, we do NOTHING about that. Instead, we strip away our privacies. Sorry. That doesn't fly. If it were truly important to take away our privacy, the borders would have been secured a year ago.
It appears that it is easier to ask us to live in fish bowls than to tell illegal immigrants that we cannot afford to have such loose border control anymore. It appears to be a political calculation. Does that not reduce the lost privacy aspect to nothing but political calculations? Which is more important? Our safety? Or as Dick Morris says it, the 'browning of America'? But hey, the 'browning of America' ends when the borders are secure. Thus, the ridiculousness aspect only grows.
GW Bush is well intentioned, I'm sure. But his political calculations reveal that taking away our privacy can't be all that important, if he isn't willing to tick off parts of the Hispanic community by securing our borders.
This is my suggestion, for what it's worth:
1. First seal the borders.
2. Mention a timeline for this lost privacy. No 'continuation triggers' either. Settle for 4 years of this lost privacy. Then destroy the data of all non-suspects. Only keep data of suspects that is deemed worth keeping by a warrant.
3. Non-citizens can be monitored and that info can be filed at will. Americans generally would like that idea.
4. Put someone in charge other than Poindexter. Why give ammo to the desperate DNC? It makes no sense.
If GW fails to heed this advice, I forsee political havoc. And I will be a part of it.
Had Winston Churchill been alive in the months subsequent to Sept. 11 he might well have described U.S. intelligence agencies' performance prior to the attack thusly: Never have so many known so much and done so little. On Wednesday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will begin awarding contracts for the design and implementation of a Total Information Awareness (TIA) system. It's a system which, it hopes, will ferret out terrorists' information signatures -- clues available before an attack, but usually not correctly interpreted until afterwards -- and decode them prior to an assault. It's a task, the Information Awareness Office (IAO) says, that is beyond "our current intelligent infrastructure and other government agencies." TIA program directors make it clear they also believe the task to be beyond current technology, noting that they are primarily interested in revolutionary advances in science, technology or systems and "development of collaboration, automation and cognitive aids technologies that allow humans and machines to think together about complicated and complex problems." So insistent are they on building a better mousetrap -- or, more accurately, a brand new terrorist trap -- that they have officially warned potential contractors that not a dime will be invested in "research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to existing technology." According to the IAO's blueprint, TIA's five-year goal is the "total reinvention of technologies for storing and accessing information ... although database size will no longer be measured in the traditional sense, the amounts of data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes." It is precisely the thought of petabytes of raw data being under the control of an agency with limited public accountability that troubles civil liberties activists like Lee Tien, senior staff attorney of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We should resist the expansion of any 'data-veillance' program that doesn't have adequate safeguards and accountability," Tien says. "This program sounds like a counterpart of the movement toward requiring a national ID card. People like to think of that as an identification system, but it's actually a tracking system. "The Total Information Awareness program, with its ability to provide persistent storage of everything from credit card, to employment, to medical, to ISP records, is a recipe for civil liberties disaster unless there are provisions for citizens to find out who is looking at their records and to see and correct those records." "What I don't want to see is a system that's the worst of both worlds, unable to predict acts of terrorism in a timely manner because of the sheer mass of mostly irrelevant information clogging its channels, but perfectly attuned for intimate spying on regular citizens and activists like Martin Luther King." Even in these early days, Tien's concerns have some resonance. Among the topics DARPA spokespersons would not discuss in connection with this article were the program's budget, whether the technology was being developed for deployment by an existing intelligence department or a new "super spy" agency, and which program elements the contracts being issued this month cover. "This DARPA project sounds a lot like Spielberg's Minority Report premise of 'PreCrime,'" said security consultant and author Richard Forno, referring to the fictional law enforcement office that arrests folks before they commit a crime. "I mean, I'm a geek, but my two degrees are in international relations. Does that mean if all of a sudden I start buying books on terrorism, bio-war or current affairs, I'm going to be labeled a potential bad guy?" By Eliot Borin
The perverse part of Echelon is that we spy on our allies, while our allies spy on us. Then we share the info to each other.
We gave them the technology to spy on us. Why? Because it's unconstitutional for us to spy on ourselves. Bottom line: we have Canadians, Aussies, and Brits spying on us who might not be as gun-ho as we are about nabbing Islamic extremists. Rather, they might be looking for hot stock tips for all I know. The echelon system is completely insane. But it would take a constitutional amendment to do it any other way.
Like you said, in this current climate, unless we lose even more privacy than we already lost, we won't make any progress in personal privacy.
That NYT link backs up Safire. You are definitely on-the-ball. [Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans] But it's the NYT, LOL! When ABC gets Bush OUT of hot water, I don't know what to think. My 'truth' compass is spinning counter clockwise.
After Enron backfired in Clinton's face and the Cheney/Haliburton fiasco, I vowed to myself that if Bush looks like a demon, I should wait two weeks to see if he still has horns. I rashly I broke that vow. I feel like a sucker. So, I'm going to try to force myself to wait a week to see if he still has horns.
The only thing that's frightened me (so far) in that website is the centralization of information concerning individuals. It smacks too much of Nazi beaurocracy. Combined with the Human ID program (which seems to be a good thing all by itself), this could do some serious evil in the wrong hands (think Hillary or Algore).
Our economy at this point is built on illegal labor. Sealing the borders would destroy our economy because citizen labor costs too much. I can post more info on this if you like.
Putting corporations in charge of this would be very smart. They already track individuals as it is and are very good at it. :( Have a group contracted with gathering the information, then download into a government owned database. Easy.
The fact is, this WILL be a database of EVERY possible data element pertaining to US CITIZENS. It is exactly as described by Safire, and is a threat to privacy and freedom.
It will automatically trigger "actions" when certain events occur, such as a credit card transaction, a sequence of purchases, or simply visiting certain websites.
We are a free people should vehemently oppose such intrusions into our private lives. Terrorists will just bypass any of these measures by using false indentities, it will be regular US citizens that'll be under scrutiny with this Orweillian system.
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