The Business of Fighting Terror By Ryan Singel Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,66177,00.html
02:00 AM Jan. 05, 2005 PT Antiterrorism is an industry. Since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, the news has been filled with stories on proposed surveillance and data-mining programs, ranging from the Total Information Awareness system and the MATRIX to CAPPS II and journalist Steven Brill's drive for a private, biometric identification card. Antiterrorism books also form an industry -- albeit a smaller one -- but until Robert O'Harrow Jr., a reporter for The Washington Post, published No Place to Hide ($26, Free Press) this week, the true nature of an ever-growing national surveillance complex was largely unknown. In a masterfully written book, O'Harrow carefully diagrams the complex, post-9/11 intertwining of increased law enforcement powers, influential lobbyists, massive and unregulated troves of information marketed by private companies to government agencies, and government officials' newfound attraction to powerful data-mining applications. It's the story of how a nationwide obsession with preventing another terrorist attack in the United States has drawn together companies that used to make millions selling targeted lists to retailers, high-powered former government officials turned lobbyists, cutting-edge technologists and a national security apparatus hungry for new tools. To tell the story, O'Harrow mines his high-level government contacts to produce the first behind-the-scenes look at the nation's most known and unknown antiterrorism programs. No Place to Hide opens with an intimate account of the Patriot Act's birth, starting with the law's architect Viet Dinh's breakfast on Sept. 11 and leading to the backroom Patriot Act infighting between civil liberties-minded Sen. Pat Leahy and Attorney General John Ashcroft. O'Harrow then walks the reader through the way little-known data aggregators manipulate the public and hide the true extent of their record gathering and consumer profiling, and how the highest levels of government got involved in the development of a data-mining program developed by a known drug smuggler and likely Iran-Contra operator. O'Harrow here shows himself to be one of the nation's finest reporters, not least for the quality of his sources or his meticulous, and almost seamless, marshalling of detail. For the first time, the public learns how former Vice Adm. John Poindexter, best known for his deep involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal, and his friend Brian Sharkey, a former Darpa official working at a huge government contracting firm, hatched the plan for a worldwide data surveillance system while parked on the side of a highway Sept. 12. O'Harrow then tells the story of how Congress pulled the plug on Poindexter's spy machine for all the right and wrong reasons and how Poindexter actually won the battle by making sure the program's ideals and efforts survived the senators' weed whacking. No Place to Hide also catalogs, with unprecedented access, how two government bureaucrats tried to create a massive, but carefully firewalled, airline passenger profiling program that would use mounds of data to do instant antiterrorism background checks on passengers, only to see Department of Homeland Security officials create a public relations disaster by expanding the system's scope before it was ever deployed. But the real strength of O'Harrow's reporting in this book is not his access; it's his considered, but not equivocal, judgments. For instance, when discussing the role of data giant Acxiom, which stores billions of records and millions of "virtual dossiers" on Americans, O'Harrow takes the measure of the company's public face, its chief privacy officer, Jennifer Barrett: "As she spoke to Congress, Barrett pulled off the trick of seeming to support these fair information principles while in fact opposing their spirit head-on when they cut too close to Acxiom's business." His judgment is equally sharp when he reflects on the meaning of all his facts: "Surveillance comes with a price. It dulls the edge of public debate, imposes a sense of conformity and introduces the uneasy feeling of being watched. It chills culture and stifles dissent.... The new legal authorities and the government's partnership with private information companies now pose a direct threat to this three-decade-old effort toward openness. "It's a simple fact that private companies can collect information about people in ways the government can't. At the same time, they can't be held accountable for their behavior or their mistakes the way government agencies can. Their capabilities have raced far ahead of the nation's understanding and laws. The legacy of these efforts will be with us for many years." There is no J. Edgar Hoover in O'Harrow's book, no figure intent on keeping tabs on every anti-war protester using the latest technology. The figures in No Place to Hide, including Poindexter, are reasonable and human people, wary of the power of their technology, but mostly convinced that their efforts are in the country's best interest. Yet, O'Harrow clearly recognizes there is much to fear in a world where FBI agents use grand jury subpoenas and Patriot Act powers to cull millions of records from a major city's businesses for an ad-hoc data-mining project on the basis of increased "chatter," as happened in Las Vegas in the winter of 2003. If there is any weakness in O'Harrow's book, it is that he fails to attempt to measure the true threat Americans face in the battle against fanatical Islamic terrorists, or to investigate whether the best tools to prevent another attack might actually already be in the hands of diplomats, entrepreneurs or student dissidents in Iran. That task may well belong to a different writer altogether, however, because the brilliance of O'Harrow's work is not in his speculation, but in his thorough reporting that is unafraid of passing judgment once all the relevant facts can be found. Will the surveillance-intelligence complex continue to thrive and find new reasons to justify itself -- as the military-industrial complex did when the Cold War ended -- once Osama bin Laden becomes a name in history books and the barbarism of Islamic radicals' adolescentl violent reaction to modernity is mostly forgotten? O'Harrow does not ask this question, but his book, which ends with the phrase from the title, answers yes. You are a subscribed member of the infowarrior list. Visit www.infowarrior.org for list information or to unsubscribe. This message may be redistributed freely in its entirety. Any and all copyrights appearing in list messages are maintained by their respective owners.
