homeland security act (off-topic)

[Guest guest]

Geez, guys, watch what you say about the raw milk over email; the government

will soon be recording every email into a general government database! The

vaccination thing is horrible, and so it this. This is off-topic, but since

the HSA came up, this is from the NYT as a peek into some other crazy

tyrannical things in this bill.

chris

You Are a Suspect

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

ASHINGTON — 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 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 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 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

Markoff of The Times, followed by 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.