Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad

By Paul McLeary The Bush administration’s use of the English language reads like something out of a dystopian political novel. Some of its recent concoctions, like The Department of Homeland Security; Rumsfeld’s “old Europe” bon mot; the Office of Information Awareness (OIA); the USA PATRIOT Act; Weapons of Mass Destruction; the Axis of Evil and the Information Exploitation Office (IEO) are just a few of the more Orwellian terms that seem to inspire a mix of the Weimar Republic and doom itself. There are two new programs – one which has been stalled by Congress, while the other was just recently leaked to an unresponsive press – that seek to give the government broad powers to spy, gather information on and imprison American citizens on ill-defined national security grounds. The first, dubbed the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, is being developed by the OIA, but, for the moment, has been blocked by a bipartisan coalition of skeptical Congressmen and several watchdog groups. The TIA- data mining for a safer America? The TIA program is a Defense Department research project aimed at developing and implementing broad sweeps of commercial data, called “data mining.” Targets include credit card records, Internet logs, medical data, merchant purchases and travel records. The goal is to “mine” this data in search of suspicious patterns that may indicate possible terrorist movement. If the program worked properly, it would be a boon to investigators trying to weed out possible sleeper cells in the United States. Data mining is already an established practice within companies that retain customer data. Large retailers, for example, comb customers purchase history, usually attached to indexes such as credit card numbers, customer names or other “index keys.” The information is used to identify customer habits, and ostensibly, to allow the company to make “more compelling offers” (in marketing speak) to their existing customer base. The problem, however, is that none of the drafters of the program has come forward to explain how to avoid errors in its implementation that may result in people mistakenly being tagged as terrorists, making them subject to false arrest, smear campaigns or government harassment. According to the program, the government wouldn’t have to inform anyone about the investigation, allowing officials to gather information on private citizens with no public oversight or accountability. Developed in February 2002 under the auspices of The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), whose ancestor, ARPA, invented the Internet, the new office has quietly been instilled under the dubious leadership of John Poindexter, who was indicted in 1988 for defrauding the U.S. government and obstructing justice as part of the Iran-Contra scandal. Although the convictions were overturned in 1990 when Congress granted him immunity in exchange for his testimony, the joke was on Congress as the testimony he gave them turned out to be false. Since those good old days, Poindexter has been Vice President of Syntek Technologies, a major government technology contractor. We shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Syntek, with Poindexter at its […]