Posted by JOHN MARKOFF on November 22, 2002 at 10:27:30:
John,
Teachers, Students, and the readers of your informative books need to know that the Defense Department's plan to establish a system of "Total Information Awareness" means that no American will be able to use the Internet to fill a prescription, subscribe to a magazine, buy a book, send or receive e-mail, or visit a web site free from the prying eyes of government bureaucrats.
Dig this:
New York Times, Nov. 14, 2002
"YOU ARE A SUSPECT"
(By William Safire)
Washington--The Homeland Security Act: 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 as John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.
Remember Poindexter? 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 Contra Rebels 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. This ring-knocking master of deceit heads the "Information Awareness Office" in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet. Poindexter is now realizing
his dream: getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private act of every
American.
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.
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 need to let everyone know.
Thanks,
John Markoff
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