Poindexter's Laboratory
The know-it-all plan to fight terrorism
By Jacob Sullum
"We're just as concerned as the next person with protecting privacy," John
Poindexter recently told The Washington Post. Maybe, if the next person
happens to be J. Edgar Hoover.
Poindexter, a former national security adviser, now heads the Information
Awareness Office (IAO), a new division of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency. This obscure little office with a blandly creepy
name has a grand mission: Total Information Awareness�in a word, omniscience.
"The goal of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program," the IAO's Web
site explains, "is to revolutionize the ability of the United States to
detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists�and decipher their
plans�and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully
preempt and defeat terrorist acts." Accordingly, the IAO is developing
hardware and software to look for suspicious patterns in vast collections
of information, including travel itineraries, credit card purchases, bank
accounts, e-mail messages, Web site visits, and medical records.
That's where you come in. You're probably not a terrorist, but the
government can't be sure until it puts your information in a huge,
centralized database, where Poindexter's computers can sniff it over. You
haven't visited any terrorist havens, purchased books about weapons, read
subversive online propaganda, or undergone plastic surgery lately, have you?
No need to answer�the government will know soon enough if Poindexter's
vision is realized. As he put it in a speech he gave this year, "We must
become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new sources
of data, mine information from the new and old, generate information, make
it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge, and create actionable
options."
Given the amount of data Poindexter wants to collect, the government would
be not just mining but strip mining, scooping up huge piles of information
in the hope of finding a useful nugget. "By definition, they're going to
send highly sensitive, personal data," noted a computer scientist
interviewed by the Post. "How many innocent people are going to get falsely
pinged? How many terrorists are going to slip through?"
Former Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.), a member of the U.S. Commission on
National Security, said Poindexter's project, which has a $200 million
annual budget, could be "a huge waste of money." He said it represented
"total overkill of intelligence," based on "an Orwellian concept." Repeat
after me: Total Awareness Is Total Security.
There are some obstacles to Poindexter's know-it-all plan. Several
statutes, including the Privacy Act of 1974, the Right to Financial Privacy
Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and the Fair Credit
Reporting Act, limit the government's authority to collect and share
information.
Legislation establishing a Department of Homeland Security, which Congress
is expected to pass soon, could loosen some of those restrictions. The
language dealing with information collection in the original bill alarmed
privacy advocates in the House, who added several reassuring provisions
that may or may not be in the final bill.
Legal barriers aside, Americans can be awfully touchy about their privacy.
They don't like the idea that so many details of their lives�the places
they go, the things they buy, the magazines they read, the e-mail they
send, the medicine they take�could be available for the government to
peruse at will.
"We can develop the best technology in the world," Poindexter told the
Post, "and unless there is public acceptance and understanding of the
necessity, it will never be implemented." This is the perennial complaint
of the technocrat, impatient with a public that fails to appreciate the
brilliance of his plan. Why can't people learn to stop worrying and trust
the experts?
Granted, Poindexter's last big scheme, which involved raising money for
Nicaraguan rebels by selling weapons to Iran, did not work out so well. In
1990 the former Navy admiral was sentenced to six months in jail for trying
to cover up the deal by lying to Congress, destroying documents, and
otherwise interfering with a congressional investigation. An appeals court
overturned the conviction after concluding that it was based on
congressional testimony for which Poindexter had been granted immunity.
Maybe Poindexter has learned that sneakiness has its price. So far his
office has been admirably up-front about its intentions. The IAO's ominous
emblem features an eyeball scanning the globe from atop a pyramid. Below it
is the motto "Scientia Est Potentia": "Knowledge Is Power." Hoover couldn't
have put it better.
� Copyright 2002 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
Jacob Sullum's weekly column is distributed by Creators Syndicate. If you'd
like to see it in your local newspaper, write or call the editorial page
editor.
http://reason.com/sullum/111502.shtml
AND
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/28107.html
The Vultures are circling.
