Miasma

Taking Liberties With Our Freedom. Law enforcement and big business were the big winners in the passage of the Homeland Security Act. Americans worried about the degradation of their civil liberties were not. A commentary by Lauren Weinstein. [Wired News]

"The fix is in." So said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) of the mammoth new Homeland Security Act, which was signed into law last week.

McCain was upset about an array of goodies that were tacked onto the bill at the last minute by the House of Representatives. These included broad liability protections for makers of vaccines, and an array of other extremely valuable giveaways.

[...]

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.

12:24:46 AM    

Miasma

Total Info System Totally Touchy. The U.S. government wants to create a massive database of Americans' personal information to help root out terrorists. Privacy advocates cry foul, and some in the industry aren't even sure it's technologically feasible. By Ryan Singel. [Wired News]

[...]

"Terrorists operate in shadowy networks," said Pentagon spokeswoman Jan Walker. "People have to move and plan before committing a terrorist act. Our hypothesis is their planning process has a signature."

[...]

"With meaningful pattern recognition, the order of magnitude of errors from inferences is huge, something like ten to the third (power)," said Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce and the chairman of information mapping software company Groxis. "There would be an incalculable expense to monitor a thousand wrong hits for one correct inference."

In fact, Hawken said, Groxis spurned, on principle, an offer from Poindexter's group to get involved in the project.

"We make tools for people to make sense of the information in the world, not for the world to make more information out of people," Hawken said. Hawken is skeptical about the project's ability to attract top industry names. He said he knows other people, including those who have worked for the National Security Agency, who refused to work on it for ethical reasons. "I don't know how you profile resentment and anger, but I don't think you do it from how many times someone goes to Wal-Mart," he said.

I like what he said, but didn't Paul Hawken sell nifty garden tools once upon a time? ed.
12:10:20 AM