The following is a library / archive copy of an article by William Safire that was published in the New York Times Friday, November 14, 2002.
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
WASHINGTON, D.C. - 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
website 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.