[CTRL] The Man From Auntie

[William Shannon]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/elkins/elkins72.html



The Man From Auntie
by Jeff Elkins
 

TIA, Total Information Awareness, is now the watchword of the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office. Strangely enough, TIA is also Spanish for "Aunt." So, rather than Big Brother, we have Auntie, now headed by Iran-Contra felon, Admiral John Poindexter, USN Ret.

Poindexter lost his job as National Security Adviser under Ronald Reagan, and in 1990 was convicted of conspiracy, lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and destroying evidence in the Iran Contra scandal. The conviction was later overturned, on the grounds that the Congress had given Poindexter immunity in exchange for his testimony.

In addition, in 1989 the Costa Rican government accused Poindexter of being involved in cocaine trafficking. Though he never stood trial in Costa Rica, it was the opinion of the Costa Rican Drug Commission that Poindexter, along with Oliver North and a few others, should "never again be allowed to enter Costa Rica."

The Man from Auntie has been a busy boy since his temporary loss of power. Serving as a vice-president for shadowy British-owned contractor Syntek Technologies, Poindexter worked for years with DARPA to develop Project Genoa, an advanced surveillance system which falls into the category of software known as "data-mining applications."

Founded in 1994 by Dr. Reuven Leopold, Syntek Technologies, Inc. is a technical and engineering professional services consultancy that has hitherto stayed out of the public eye. Based in Arlington, Virginia, SYNTEK gains the majority of its income providing services to various federal government agencies, ranging from DARPA and the CIA to the US Navy and even the Coast Guard.

SYNTEK is a wholly owned subsidiary of British Maritime Technology. According to their website, BMT is an "international, multi-disciplinary engineering and technology consultancy specializing in design support and risk management services to the international defense, environment, offshore oil and gas, and transportation markets." BMT was established in 1985 as an independent research and technology organization through the merger of the National Maritime Institute and the British Ship Research Association. Data mining is merely an important sideline for this company. It's not surprising to find that they have major interests in the oil and gas sectors – that seems to be a signature of the Bush administration's hirelings.

I wrote about data mining in an earlier LRC column entitled Data Miners and the State, which was mainly concerned with efforts of John Ashcroft's FBI to utilize commercial data-mining software. As bad as Ashcroft's efforts are, Auntie's Project Genoa is a much deadlier threat to our personal liberty. It further involves the military in the creation of a total surveillance state, blithely ignoring Posse Comitatus (increasingly a dead letter as we saw during the Washington sniper affair) and increasing exponentially the number of potential federal spies peering into our personal lives.

Data mining is the software equivalent of strip-mining. Data-mining services use advanced relational databases to build a picture of you that is truly shocking in its totality. Currently, the telemarketer that interrupts your dinner may know where you shop, what you drive, whether you own or rent, your brand of toothpaste, what you read – and your personal political beliefs. Now the Man from Auntie wants to place all of that information in the hands of the Pentagon.

The real question here is why? Why do our putative masters in DC want to increase their power over our lives in such a fashion?

Surely, it can't be to "protect" us from foreign terrorists. If that were the case, we'd see the government address what the folks at VDARE call the "National Question," unchecked immigration to our shores. After all, every one of the 9/11 hijackers were of Middle Eastern extraction, not native Americans. And Auntie's Project Genoa targets the ordinary citizen.

No, what the Man from Auntie wants and what all of the others of his ilk want is total control over your life. It's a characteristic of their breed, regardless of any meaningless party affiliation. Despite the recent farce of our mid-term elections, Republican or Democrat makes no difference. The State wants to know what you read so they can control you. The State wants to know where you cyber-surf so they can control you. The State wants to know what you buy so they can control you.

That goal is well on its way to being fully achieved. We now have almost totally militarized local police forces, clad in ninja black, armed with weapons that the ordinary citizen can't match. Our "driver's licenses" are a de facto internal passport, only awaiting linkage through federal databases that are already in place, thanks to our "public servants," men such as Ashcroft and Poindexter, who already wield power that would make Goebbels and Himmler drool with envy.

The State wants total ownership of your life. The Man from Auntie is in place to make sure that they get it.

November 19, 2002