Knowledge is power

This wasn't supposed to happen here

[Reprinted from Issues & Views November 18, 2002]

Here, once again, is columnist Bill Safire (New York Times, 11/14/02) expressing his concern over particular clauses in the Homeland Security Act. Describing what the Defense Department calls "a virtual, centralized grand database," Safire writes: "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," will go into that database.

Is this really what this country's Founders had in mind? No, but it seems to have been on the mind of John Poindexter for the past 20-odd years. He's the former adviser to President Ronald Reagan, who now heads something called the "Information Awareness Office," which has a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on all of us--that means 300 million Americans.

On the same subject, Washington Post journalist Robert O'Harrow (11/12/02) cites technology specialists who question the feasibility of such a massive surveillance system:

Paul Werbos, a computing and artificial-intelligence specialist at the National Science Foundation, doubted whether such "appliances" can be calibrated to adequately filter out details about innocent people that should not be in the hands of the government. "By definition, they're going to send highly sensitive, private personal data," he said. "How many innocent people are going to get falsely pinged? How many terrorists are going to slip through?"

Safire further warns:

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 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.

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