[ale] Homeland Security Act - Perhaps I should take up farming?

[John Wells]

Weird.  Doesn't sound like a browser issue, but perhaps it is.  I'm using
Mozilla and it comes through fine...

Anyway, for your reading pleasure:
You Are a Suspect
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.


Geoffrey said:

> I'd love to check it out, but the bloody page won't let me subscribe.
> Keeps telling me the email address I'm trying to use is already in use????
>
> If I go to the 'i forgit my password' page, it tells me the email
> address is not on record.  WTF????
>
> I've tried three different (real) addresses.
>
> John Wells wrote:
>> Just read this (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html)
>> article about the Homeland Security Act and everything that is being
>> tacked onto it.
>>
>> The concept of being tracked in an "a virtual, centralized grand
>> database"
>> makes me want give up the internet for good.  Of course, where would I
>> go
>> for all that free pr0n?
>>
>> John
>>
>>
>>
>> ---
>> This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
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>> should be
>> sent to listmaster at ale dot org.
>>
>>
>
> --
> Until later: Geoffrey		esoteric at 3times25.net
>
> I didn't have to buy my radio from a specific company to listen
> to FM, why doesn't that apply to the Internet (anymore...)?
>
>
> ---
> This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
> See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should
> be
> sent to listmaster at ale dot org.
>
>


---
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sent to listmaster at ale dot org.