You Are a Suspect
(Nov 21 Boston Globe Story below)
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.
US defends plan for search of data
By Robert Schlesinger, Boston Globe Staff, 11/21/2002
WASHINGTON - US Defense Department officials defended a controversial computer project yesterday that would sift through data such as car rentals and gun purchases in search of patterns that could indicate terrorist activity. Privacy advocates contend the program would result in unwarranted government intrusion into the lives of private citizens, but defense officials insist it is a necessary measure for national defense.
''This is an important research project to determine the feasibility of using certain transactions and events to discover and respond to terrorists before they act,'' Edward C. Aldridge, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, told reporters.
The project is being developed by retired Navy rear admiral John Poindexter, who was tarred by the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980s.
Poindexter's project would cull data from all available sources, including driver's licenses, credit card transactions, airline tickets, and gun purchases. Privacy advocates object, saying that the system would be a radical departure from US legal traditions that limit surveillance of innocent citizens.
''Americans expect and have the right to expect that their lives don't become an open book when they have not done and aren't even suspected of doing anything wrong,'' said Katie Corrigan, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.
The Total Information Awareness project, as the system is known, is in some ways a response to questions raised after the Sept. 11 attacks about the failure of US intelligence agencies to connect data that pointed toward suicidal hijackers. While various US intelligence services had pieces of information, the dots were not connected until after the fact. Part of the answer lay in the enormous amount of data.
''The war on terror and the tracking of potential terrorists and terrorist acts require that we search for clues of such activities in a mass of data,'' Aldridge said. ''It's kind of a signal-to-noise ratio. What are they doing in all these things that are going on around the world? And we decided that new capabilities and new technologies are required to accomplish that task.''
Poindexter, who was national security adviser under President Reagan, brought the proposal to the Pentagon after the Sept. 11 attacks and is developing it under the auspices of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency at a cost of $10 million this fiscal year, Aldridge said.
The project marks a return to government service for Poindexter, who was convicted in 1990 of lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal, although the conviction was subsequently overturned.
The information could be gathered from sources such as passports, visas, work permits, drivers licenses, credit card transactions, airline tickets, rental cars, gun purchases, chemical purchases, arrests, reports of suspicious activities, or flying lessons, Aldridge said. If the experiment proves successful, he said, the technology would be turned over to law enforcement agencies.
The research project is in its early stages and could be years from deployment, Aldridge said.
In its current experimental form, it is using some real-world data, but relying on fictional information in areas that could raise privacy issues, he said.
The idea is to examine the feasibility of a program that could sort through galaxies of data and detect patterns that could point to terrorist activity. For example: the purchase of huge quantities of toxic chemicals, and rental of a crop-duster airplane by a city-dweller with no reason to dust crops or possess such substances.
But critics fear the project would transform how law enforcement investigates terrorist activities because it would require gathering and analysis of data on people before they are suspected of wrongdoing. Officials must get warrants before tapping phones or searching through many forms of personal information.
The project ''represents a radical departure from a longstanding tradition that the government conducts surveillance only where there is evidence of wrongdoing,'' Corrigan said. ''The system would seek to protect us by monitoring everyone for suspicious activity. It therefore represents a surveillance tool of average Americans.''
But Jim Steinberg, an official of the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, said the argument was drawn along the wrong lines. Steinberg - who was part of a task force on national security in the information age, sponsored by the Markle Foundation - contends that it is a good idea to develop the technology to screen huge amounts of data.
But he was skeptical of whether total information access is necessary. ''We had all the information that we needed to identify every one of the hijackers from information that was already available to the government,'' Steinberg said. ''That doesn't mean that the technology that Poindexter is developing and some of the methodology that he's developing isn't useful in the context of ... the information that we have.'' But more needs to be done with such data, he said. ''Where we ought to start is doing a better job with the information we have.''
Robert Schlesinger can be reached at schlesinger@globe.com.
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 11/21/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
