A supersnoop's dream!

Language tucked inside the Homeland Security bill will
allow the federal government to track the e-mail, Internet use,
travel, credit-card purchases, phone and bank records of
foreigners and U.S. citizens in its hunt for terrorists.
In what one critic has called "a
supersnoop's dream," the Defense
Department's Total Information
Awareness program would be
authorized to collect every type of
available public and private data in
what the Pentagon describes as
one "centralized grand database."
Computers and analysts are
supposed to use all this available
information to determine patterns
of people's behavior in order to
detect and identify terrorists,
decipher plans and enable the
United States to pre-empt terrorist
acts.
The project first appeared in the Senate Democratic
proposal for the new Homeland Security Department, which
was defeated Wednesday in a 50-47 vote. However it was
included in the Republican-brokered agreement that passed
the House later that night in a 299-121 vote and is on the fast
track to pass the Senate by next week.
The computer-generated project of raw data will "help
identify promising technologies and quickly get them into the
hands of people who need them," according to a
congressional leadership memo outlining the legislation.
In a blistering op-ed piece in yesterday's New York
Times titled "You Are A Suspect," columnist William Safire
compared the database to George Orwell's Big Brother
government in the novel "1984."
"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 FBI, 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," Mr. Safire wrote.
"There is a great danger in this provision. It gives carte
blanche to eavesdrop on Americans on the flimsiest of
evidence, if any evidence at all," said Phil Kent, president of
the Southeastern Legal Foundation.
Mr. Kent called the provision "an unprecedented
electronic dragnet."
"I think it's the most sweeping threat to civil liberties since
Japanese-American internment," Mr. Kent said.
Mr. Kent and outgoing Rep. Bob Barr, Georgia
Republican, are lobbying the Senate to remove this and other
provisions they say are a threat to civil liberties and restrict
the public's right to know of government activities.
"In defense of members of Congress, many don't read the
whole legislation and very few people read the fine print,"
said Mr. Barr. "You would think the Pentagon planning a
system to peek at personal data would get a little more
attention.
"It's outrageous, it really is outrageous," Mr. Barr said.
The bill establishes the Total Information Awareness
program within a new agency — the Security Advanced
Research Projects Agency (SARPA), which would be
modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA), the central research office for the Defense
Department that pursues research and technology, and led to
the creation of the Internet. DARPA and SARPA both would
be under the supervision of Adm. John Poindexter.
Neither Adm. Poindexter nor a spokesman at his current
agency, DARPA, could be reached for comment. The phone
number listed for Adm. Poindexter in the government
directory reaches a recording that says incoming calls are not
accepted. A recording reached in the media relations office
states that Adm. Poindexter is "not accepting any interview
requests at this time."
Adm. Poindexter first hit the public eye as national
security adviser for President Reagan during the Iran-Contra
scandal. He was convicted in 1990 on five felonies including
lying to Congress and destroying evidence.
At a DARPA conference in Anaheim, Calif., Adm.
Poindexter made his first public appearance since taking the
post in February.
"During the years I was in the White House, it was
relatively simple to identify our intelligence collection targets,"
Adm. Poindexter was quoted as saying in Government
Executive magazine.
However, the United States now faces "asymmetrical"
threats that are loosely organized and difficult to find, and
require new, technology-driven defenses, he said. The goal of
his new office is to consider every source of information
available worldwide to uncover terrorists, the magazine said.
Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy
Information Center, said the computer system would capture
the data and analyze it to find patterns that match terrorist
activity.
Authorizing the project would require amending the
Privacy Act of 1974. The language contained in the homeland
security bill does not address the act directly, but authorizes
the creation of the agency.
Mr. Rotenberg said the database takes a convergence of
various factors to a system of public surveillance.
"They think the technology is about catching terrorists and
bad guys, but these systems can capture a lot of data at
different levels without oversight, judicial review, public
reporting or congressional investigations. I can't think of a
good countermeasure that would be good to safeguard civil
liberties in the United States," Mr. Rotenberg said.

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