Taking Liberties With Our Freedom
By Lauren Weinstein for Wired News.

Law enforcement interests pushed through a variety of surveillance measures, including some unrelated to terrorism, that had long been rejected as inappropriate in a free society.
Important protections related to monitoring and intelligence gathering, established after serious past abuses, were swept away with the assurance that this time the government won’t abuse its powers.
Among various alarming provisions, the law opens up enormous avenues for monitoring Internet communications, without even after-the-fact notifications. Virtually any government agency at any level can initiate surveillance on flimsy grounds. No subpoenas or court oversight are required.
Not to be left off the gravy train, big business also pushed through its own grab bag of perks in the new legislation.
One of the most egregious and potentially dangerous of these travesties is the Homeland Security Act’s creation of new and very broad exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act.
Businesses now have a new way to evade liability for safety violations, hazards to consumers and other abuses. They need merely report the information about their behavior — even totally unclassified activities — to the federal government, and claim it’s related to homeland security. In the parlance of the Homeland Security Act, they declare the data to be “CII,” or Critical Infrastructure Information.
Instantly, the company filing drops that information into a black hole of secrecy, hidden from public view. If a government employee releases any such data without the permission of the company that submitted it, regardless of its importance to the public, they could be subject to jail time.
That’s potentially a major blow to the government’s regulation of corporate misdeeds, since it’s often not until such abuses become publicly known that officials take steps to deal with them properly. As long as there’s cover, the urge to let sleeping dogs lie is strong indeed.
Ironically, the existing statute, the Freedom of Information Act, already had exceptions for information that truly needed to be kept private. The new homeland security law goes much farther, creating a magic rubber stamp that can make a host of problems disappear from the public radar.
The dangers of the new restrictions extend beyond obvious infrastructure risks related to power, water, manufacturing, pollution and the like. They could also strike to the heart of the computer industry and Internet as well.
By invoking the exemptions of the Homeland Security Act, software and computer hardware companies could hide the existence of critical security flaws or other bugs, claiming (with a familiar refrain) that letting anyone know about them was just too big a risk.

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article cited previously

Information Awareness Office – Scientia Est Potentia (“Knowledge is Power”)

Total Information Awareness System Description Document
(PDF file – 150 pages – first draft, May 1, 2001)

Keep Big Brother’s Hands Off the Internet Senator John Ashcroft, 1997

Meet Big
Brother – John Poindexter and the Iran Contra Reunion Tour HereInReality.com

Refuting ‘Big
Brother’ Charge Newsday

Sacrificed for Security Mother Jones

Total
Information Awareness Electronic Privacy Information Center

Total
Information Awareness Resource Center

1984
e-text

Why the Pentagon will watch where you shop
New Total Information Awareness project will sniff company databases for terrorists.
by Faye Bowers and Peter Grier for the Christian Science Monitor.
See the ton of good links at the bottom too!

Credit-card companies already carry out such paper profiling as an antifraud device, say proponents of the new effort. That’s why you get a call when you suddenly start spending lots of money far from home, or exceed your daily allotment of transactions. Using such techniques to prevent another Sept. 11 may thus be simply a natural progression in technology.
But the recent theft of thousands of identities from commercial databases points out what can happen when such data falls into the wrong hands, say critics. And the federal government is not American Express. It has far greater power, and citizens thus need to assiduously protect their privacy from its snooping.
“Data files that become available [to the government] are likely to be used beyond their initial purpose, and we need to guard against that somehow,” says Robert Pfaltzgraff, professor of international security at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Mass.

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Senator Robert Byrd and Senator Debbie Stabenow — Delivered on the Floor of the US Senate
re: THE HOMELAND SECURITY ACT OF 2002
[Excerpted from Congressional Record of 11/14/02]

There are a few things that I know are in it by virtue of the fact that I have had 48 hours, sleeping time included, in which to study this monstrosity, 484 pages. If there ever were a monstrosity, this is it. I hold it in my hand, a monstrosity. I don’t know what is in it. I know a few things that are in it, and a few things that I know are in it that I don’t think the American people would approve of if they knew what was in there…
And this is one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation I have seen in my 50 years. I will have been in Congress 50 years come January 3… Never have I seen such a monstrous piece of legislation sent to this body. And we are being asked to vote on that 484 pages tomorrow. Our poor staffs were up most of the night studying it. They know some of the things that are in there, but they don’t know all of them. It is a sham and it is a shame.
We are all complicit in going along with it. I read in the paper that nobody will have the courage to vote against it. Well, ROBERT BYRD is going to vote against it because I don’t know what I am voting for. That is one thing. And No. 2, it has not had the scrutiny that we tell our young people, that we tell these sweet pages here, boys and girls who come up here, we tell them our laws should have…
This is a hoax. This is a hoax. To tell the American people they are going to be safer when we pass this is to hoax. We ought to tell the people the truth. They are not going to be any safer with that. That is not the truth. I was one of the first in the Senate to say we need a new Department of Homeland Security. I meant that. But I didn’t mean this particular hoax that this administration is trying to pander off to the American people, telling them this is homeland security. That is not homeland security.

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Now there’s “privacy control” software that claims it can capture every click, email, and chat thread by those cheating husbands and wifes pretending to work late on the computer all of the time. (C’mon now. We all know what they’re really up to.)
Now all we need is an influx of marriage counselors to deal with the severe situations that will undoubtedly be caused by snooping wives and husbands screwing things up on their spouses’ computers while trying to install and use this crap. “You deleted my last two weeks of work because….why?”
What was even creepier is was the spam they sent me — which I clicked on unknowingly because it looked like a privacy-related domain: http://www.us-privacy.org.
This kind of product also reinforces the backwards concept that by invading someone elses privacy, you are somehow protecting or “controlling” your own privacy. (Or in this case, your family’s “security.”)

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The public is growing increasingly concerned John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness project.
Here’s a new website with lots of helpful links on the subject.
The Washington Post and NY Times have warned us all about the implications.
The ACLU has a letter writing campaign:

In the last several days, media reports have revealed that a little-known Defense Department office is developing a computer system that threatens to turn us all into “suspects” and would provide the government with the ability to snoop into all aspects of our private lives without a search warrant or proof of criminal wrongdoing.
This program is being created in the Pentagon by a new Office of Information Awareness, which has been charged with creating a system it is calling “Total Information Awareness:” effectively a computer program that will provide government officials with immediate access to information about everything from our phone calls to Internet mail, from our financial records to the history of what we buy online or in our local pharmacy, from every trip we book to all of our academic and medical records.
Leading this initiative is John Poindexter, the former Reagan era National Security Adviser who famously said that it was his duty to withhold information from Congress. In his new post as Head of the Office of Information Awareness, Poindexter has been quietly promoting the idea of creating “a virtual centralized database” that would have the “data-mining” power to pry into the most minute and intimate details of our private lives.

So I’m going over the government’s ANALYSIS FOR THE HOMELAND SECURITY ACT OF 2002, and I’m not sure if there’s a particular part of it I’d amend exactly that would make it OK.
Figured I’d start out with:
TITLE II

Big bleep on the Reinstein Radar today: Danger Will Robinson! Danger!
Poindexter…Poindexter…I knew that name sounded familiar as I’ve been reading through this last week’s frightening headlines about the “Total Information Awareness” project and the guy spearheading the whole thing: John “Iran Contra” Poindexter — The token “bad guy” who took the fall in the Iran-Contra trial so everybody else involved in the scandal could get off (like President Reagan and Ollie North). I’d forgotten that an appeals court had overturned Poindexter’s conviction shortly afterward. (Meaning it was time to go back to working for the Bush’s apparently!)
These days, Poindexter is making a name for himself as the head of the DARPA’s “Information Awareness Office” — and if the Homeland Security Act passes through the Senate next week without any amendments, he will be the central point of control for all of your commercially-obtained once-considered private information. We’re talking government intrusion on your privacy in its purest Orwellian-style form. And what security will we get in return? They’re going to have to get back to us on that one…

You Are a Suspect
By William Safire for the NY Times.

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

Turns out that the Shrub’s “No Child Left Behind Act” is actually the “All Childrens’ Private Information Is Ours For The Taking Or We’ll Cut Your Federal Funding” Act.
Parents and Students: you have the right to withhold your records! Exercise it!
Here’s more information in a Mother Jones article by David Goodman:
No Child Unrecruited

But when Shea-Keneally insisted on an explanation, she was in for an even bigger surprise: The recruiters cited the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush’s sweeping new education law passed earlier this year. There, buried deep within the law’s 670 pages, is a provision requiring public secondary schools to provide military recruiters not only with access to facilities, but also with contact information for every student — or face a cutoff of all federal aid.
“I was very surprised the requirement was attached to an education law,” says Shea-Keneally. “I did not see the link.”
The military complained this year that up to 15 percent of the nation’s high schools are “problem schools” for recruiters. In 1999, the Pentagon says, recruiters were denied access to 19,228 schools. Rep. David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana who sponsored the new recruitment requirement, says such schools “demonstrated an anti-military attitude that I thought was offensive.”
…The new law does give students the right to withhold their records. But school officials are given wide leeway in how to implement the law, and some are simply handing over student directories to recruiters without informing anyone — leaving students without any say in the matter.
“I think the privacy implications of this law are profound,” says Jill Wynns, president of the San Francisco Board of Education. “For the federal government to ignore or discount the concerns of the privacy rights of millions of high school students is not a good thing, and it’s something we should be concerned about.”

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