iSay - It's after the election and so the remaking of America starts with a convicted felon, John Poindexter from the Iran-Contra days, unleashing an Orwellian plan to surveil and compile data on all Americans day to day activities in a grand unified database system known as Total Information Awareness. The Homeland Security Act if passed as it stands will allow this snooping and huge loss of personal privacy. Once this bureaucracy is created and funded there is no chance of going back.
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 [~] 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.
Chief Takes Over New Agency to Thwart Attacks on U.S.
By John Markoff
Feb. 13, 2002
John M. Poindexter, the retired Navy admiral who was President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, has returned to the Pentagon to direct a new agency that is developing technologies to give federal officials instant access to vast new surveillance and information- analysis systems.
By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Sep. 4, 2002
From the moment the Transportation Security Administration was formed, agency officials have been consumed by the idea of a vast network of supercomputers that would instantly probe every passenger's background
By John Markoff
Nov. 9, 2002
The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe [~] including the United States.
As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant
By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Nov. 9, 2002
"We can develop the best technology in the world and unless there is public acceptance and understanding of the necessity, it will never be implemented," Poindexter said. "We're just as concerned as the next person with protecting privacy."
Getting the Defense Department job is something of a comeback for Poindexter. The Reagan administration national security adviser was convicted in 1990 of five felony counts of lying to Congress, destroying official documents and obstructing congressional inquiries into the Iran-contra affair, which involved the secret sale of arms to Iran in the mid-1980s and diversion of profits to help the contra rebels in Nicaragua.
By William Safire
Nov. 14, 2002
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.
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