-Caveat Lector-
http://news.com.com/2010-1071-975908.html?tag=fd_nc_1
Perspective: A tech tool for future tyrants?
By Tom Giovanetti
December 4, 2002, 4:00 AM PT
A healthy distrust of government was a hallmark of this country's
founding, and has protected us from much harm over the last 226 years.
The founders may have disagreed about many things, but they all agreed
that limited government power was a key to freedom.
Distrust of central government power was among the primary reasons
for the designs of both our system of separation of powers and our
system of federalism. The founders distrusted government because they
had firsthand experience with tyrants. They had seen that "power
corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Note the logical
order in the phase. It isn't the corruption that comes first--it is
power that comes first. When power is amassed and available, corruption
comes as a result. So the trick is to limit power up-front--to prevent
the amassing of too much power by any single person, or any single
agency, or department, or government.
Another famous quotation, "knowledge is power," adorns (in its
Latin form) the logo of the Total Information Awareness project at the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. A visit to the TIA Web site
will take your breath away. Its name, slogan and logo reek of Orwellian
elements. In fact, the Web site looks like either a parody Web site, or
every civil libertarian's nightmare.
But it is not a parody. Nor is this a simple case of unwise
choices of agency name and logo design. Rather, the name, logo, slogan
and Web site contents are all a pretty accurate description of the
intentions behind the TIA.
Distrust of government has also been a hallmark of conservatism in
the United States. Yet today, we have a conservative president and a
Republican-controlled Congress advocating and defending a program that
says it will amass a vast database of information on the American
people. Even some conservative organizations are telling us that we have
nothing to fear from the "total information" system.
[...]
To those who say that safeguards will be built into the system, I
say that the government has a pretty poor track record of following
such safeguards. To those who say it will be impossible to use the
database to violate the privacy of citizens, well, it's just a matter of
who is sitting at the console. Your privacy policy is only as good
as your most disgruntled employee with access to your database.
Yes, we are under a new threat of terrorism, and we must take
steps to protect ourselves. But, in defending America, we should not
betray our founding principles and turn America into the founders' worst
nightmare.
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