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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html

You Are a Suspect

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

ASHINGTON If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passa=
ge, 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 boo=
k and every event you attend all these transactions and communications wil=
l 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 appl=
ication, driver's license and
bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy nei=
ghbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camer=
a surveillance and you have the
supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citize=
n.

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 unpreced=
ented 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 und=
er 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 Nica=
ragua.

A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of misleading Con=
gress and making false statements, but an appeals court overturned the verdi=
ct 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 sca=
ndalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information Awareness Office" in the=
otherwise excellent Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet and stealth a=
ircraft technology. Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting t=
he "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 r=
equirements 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 sec=
ret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral dismisses such necessary dif=
ferentiation as bureaucratic
"stovepiping." And he has been given a $200 million budget to create comput=
er dossiers on 300 million Americans.

When George W. Bush was running for president, he stood foursquare in defen=
se of each person's medical, financial and communications privacy. But Poind=
exter, whose contempt for the
restraints of oversight drew the Reagan administration into its most seriou=
s blunder, is still operating on the presumption that on such a sweeping the=
ft 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 Po=
st, have revealed the extent
of Poindexter's operation, but editorialists have not grasped its undermini=
ng of the Freedom of Information Act.

Political awareness can overcome "Total Information Awareness," the combine=
d force of commercial and government snooping. In a similar overreach, Attor=
ney General Ashcroft tried his
Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), but public outrage at t=
he 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 P=
otentia" "knowledge is power." Exactly: the government's infinite knowledg=
e 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.

a friend of mine believed the real coause of war is inventory. When there is too
much, people have to get rid of it all regardless of the cost. This is the
ultimate inventory. so my idea is that we charge as many things as possible.
instead of ordering a bunch of things from a place, just one at a time then
order and cancel other things.
Better yet be in to places at once. call collect by remote viewing

John Starrett wrote:

> http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html
>
> You Are a Suspect
>
> By WILLIAM SAFIRE
>
> ASHINGTON ï¿½ If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passa=
>
> ge, 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 boo=
>
> k and every event you attend ï¿½ all these transactions and communications wil=
>
> l go into what the Defense
> Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."
>
> /

-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
The Wandering Medicine Show
KXLU 88.9 FM 8-9PM PST

Patriot database to contain everything about everyone

🔗John Starrett <jstarret@...>

🔗Kraig Grady <kraiggrady@...>

🔗Gene Ward Smith <genewardsmith@...>

🔗John Starrett <jstarret@...>

🔗John Starrett <jstarret@...>