Be scared, be very scared

Be scared, be very scared


You Are a Suspect.
Op-ed by conservative columnist William Safire, via Privacy Digest



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.


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(DARPA), 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.

Background from Privacy Digest archives: