In Reality, 'Big Brother' Soon May Be Watching You

Newsday
December 1, 2002
http://www.ashcroft-watch.org/article.asp?id=178

'Big Brother" may soon have a name. It's retired Adm. John Poindexter, head of Pentagon research on a project called the Total Information Awareness System, a data-mining scheme that, if implemented, would have the potential to invade the privacy of ordinary people on a massive scale.

The idea is to use computers to troll vast amounts of data in government and private-sector databases around the world. Records of everyday transactions - credit-card purchases, car rentals, medical treatments, telephone calls, prescription purchases, bank deposits - would be sifted to ferret out patterns that could be signs of terrorist activity.

Washington must tread carefully here. Both the project, with its its notorious director and its unsettling overtones of Orwell's "1984," are cause for alarm. Stringent oversight is needed now - both by Congress and perhaps a privacy watchdog commission - before a system of such stunning intrusiveness is set in place. If its development is to continue, privacy issues should be debated now, and protections should be integrated into the technology as it's created, not as an afterthought.

Poindexter at the helm inspires little confidence that Congress will ever know what researchers are up too. Total Information Awareness is his brainstorm. But as national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan, he became famous for his squirrelly assertion that it was his duty to lie to Congress during the Iran-contra scandal. He was convicted of felonies for misleading Congress about that scheme to illegally sell arms to Iran and funnel the proceeds to Nicaraguan rebels. Poindexter's convictions were overturned because he'd been given immunity, but his history raises alarms about his guardianship of legal rights.

At this point, Total Information Awareness is just a research project of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the high-tech innovators who helped develop the Internet and the military's stealth technology. It is a five-year project with a $137-million budget for 2003, an eerie logo - the eye at the top of the pyramid on the reverse of America's Great Seal scanning the globe - and the slogan "Scientia Est Potentia," knowledge is power.

Pentagon officials say the system will be fed fictional data while in development, and that Poindexter and his staff are simply creating a tool. How it is used, or if it is ever used, would be up to policy-makers in Congress and the White House.

If implemented the system could give law enforcement an intimate electronic portrait of the lives of everyone in the United States. And anyone flagged as suspicious - even victims of inevitable false positives - could end up with government dossiers and the FBI at the door.

Federal law enforcement's job became infinitely tougher after Sept. 11, 2001. Preventing terrorism, its new mission, is a lot harder than solving crimes and catching criminals. New tools may be required. But the pay-off in added security must be worth any loss in freedom. With Total Information Awareness, the most extensive electronic surveillance system in history, Congress needs to weigh that trade-offs carefully. Very carefully.

Copyright 2002 Newsday, Inc.

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