From a New York Times article:
You Are a Suspect
November 14, 2002
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
WASHINGTON - 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 John 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 Ronald
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 George 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 John Markoff of The Times, followed by
Robert 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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html?ex=1038315549&ei=1&en=eb129261d76178d7
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