[A-List] US national insecurity state

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Please tell me that this news is a hoax. Sabri

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Sorry, Sabri, but this has been circulating all week now in so many
different places that either it's an absolutely splendid hoax or it's all
too real. I incline to the latter, especially given the personalities
involved, especially Admiral Poindexter.


Pentagon creates a Big Brother so Uncle Sam can keep his eye on us

Lawrence Donegan San Francisco
Sunday November 17, 2002
The Observer

The motto of the Information Awareness Office in Washington DC reads
'Knowledge is Power' and, just a few months into its life, it's clear that
the newly founded Pentagon offshoot aims to become very powerful indeed.

In a development which has provoked outrage across America's political
spectrum, the IAO has begun work on a global computer surveillance network
which will allow unfettered access to personal details currently held in
government and commercial databases around the world.

Contracts worth millions of dollars have been awarded to companies to
develop technology which will enable the Pentagon to store billions of
pieces of electronic personal information - from records of internet use to
travel documentation, lending library records and bank transactions - and
then access this information without a search warrant. The system would also
used video technology to identify people at a distance.

'Total Information Awareness,' or TIA, was proposed to the Pentagon by
Admiral John Poindexter after the terrorist attacks of September 2001. A
former official in the Reagan administration who was convicted for his
leading role in the Iran-Contra scandal, Poindexter was appointed head of
the IAO in February.

Implementing the proposal would require legislation, which is before
Congress, to amend existing laws protecting people's privacy.

Poindexter made his first public comments about TIA this week, saying that
because the war against terrorism was global so, too, would be the data his
agency would seek.

'How are we going to find terrorists, and pre-empt them, except by following
their trail? The problem is much more complex than we've faced before - how
to harness with technology the street smarts of people on the ground on a
global scale,' he said. His remarks prompted civil rights groups to claim
that countries such as Britain would be caught up in the Pentagon's network.

'From what little we know of the Information Awareness Office, it is clear
that, by comparison, 1984 was just a primer,' said Mihir Kshirsagar, a
policy analyst at the Electronic Privacy Information Centre in Washington.
'This will intrude on every aspect of people's lives and completely change
our culture. It is the government saying, "We will collect every piece of
information about you and then we will decide whether or not we like what
you are doing."'

Former senator Gary Hart, of the US Commission on National Security, said
the plan was a 'total overkill of intelligence,'and, potentially, a huge
waste of money.

-----

Someone to watch over me

Watch out - extra government powers granted as security measures have a
nasty habit of sticking around

Ian Buruma
Tuesday November 19, 2002
The Guardian

Call it the Tokyo Police Syndrome. When I lived in Japan during the 1970s, I
noticed an odd thing: every time a foreign leader came to visit, there would
be more cops in the streets and heavier measures were taken to protect the
visitor's security, measures which then came to be seen as normal. Once
granted, police powers never reduce. When extra powers become law, you have
a serious problem. Consider, most recently, the cases of Hong Kong and the
United States.

It isn't entirely clear whether Hong Kong is slowly being strangled, or
committing political suicide, but the Hong Kong government's plan to enact
legislation, under article 23 of the Basic Law, which prohibits acts of
treason, secessions, sedition, subversion, or theft of state secrets, as
well contacts with foreign political organisations, is likely to wreck the
one comparative advantage Hong Kong still has over other cities in China:
its residual civil liberties. What it could mean is that a newspaper article
about, say, Taiwanese independence, lands the writer and his editor in
prison. An anti-government demonstration, or even a memorial of the
Tiananmen massacre, could lead to arrests. Trade unions, parties or
religious groups could be banned for having contact with foreign political
organisations.

This might seem a little alarmist, but one should remember the case in 1993
of the Hong Kong reporter who spent four years in a Chinese jail for writing
that the government was going to raise interest rates (divulging state
secrets). The trouble with subversion laws is that they are vague enough for
authorities to abuse them. Anything can be banned in the interest of
national security, public safety or public order.

Since Hong Kong has no particular problem with national security, one
wonders why its rulers want this now. My guess is that there is a
convergence of fears: the Chinese government fears that Hong Kong could
become a base for subversive activities, and Hong Kong's local mandarins
fear that their authority, which is not based on a democratic mandate, might
be undermined by criticism from their own citizens. As far as democratic
tolerance is concerned, there is little to choose between the business men
who run Hong Kong and their technocratic masters in Beijing.

There might be a more Machiavellian explanation for Chinese pressure on Hong
Kong: snuffing out its freedoms would make Hong Kong less competitive with
the mainland cities. Why do business in authoritarian Hong Kong, if Shanghai
is cheaper? Western businessmen have said as much.

In the USA, on the other hand, pretty much every politician prides himself
on his love of democracy and freedom. Yet there too civil liberties are
under siege, and for the same ostensible reason: national security. If the
Homeland Security Act, in its present form, becomes law, the US government
will have the right to snoop into every aspect of its citizens' lives: what
they buy or sell, what websites they visit on the internet, what medicines
they take, what they write in their emails, and where they are and what they
are doing at any given moment. And the man who wants to administer the
Information Awareness Office, the chief snoop, is Admiral John Poindexter.

Poindexter was Ronald Reagan's former national security adviser, the man who
thought up the Iran-Contra scam and was convicted in 1990 for misleading
Congress and making false statements. The fact that Poindexter is an
unsavoury character is not, however, the point. The Homeland Security Act is
just the latest of several proposals to strengthen state power at the
expense of individual privacy. The USA Patriot Act is already law. The
Terrorism Information and Prevention System, encouraging informers, was shot
down in the House. But despite some ferocious criticism from such
libertarians as William Safire, the conservative columnist, this bill is
expected to pass. And where the US goes, Britain is likely to follow.

Open societies, such as Britain or the US, are, of course, vulnerable to
terrorism, and it may be so that we have to grant our governments more
powers to cope with potential disasters. But once those powers are there,
they will be very hard to dislodge, even in calmer times. Poindexter may be
a more malign snoop than Jack Straw or an American Democrat, but the fact is
that no democratic government should be given powers that are too easy to
abuse.