By WILLIAM SAFIRE
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/youaresuspect15nov02.shtml
November 15, 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
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