YOU ARE A SUSPECT

By William Safire

New York Times

Thursday, November 14, 2002

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html?ex=1037854800&en=37788

29e1bec3dc2&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

WASHINGTON - If the Homeland Security Act is not amended

before passage,

here is what will happen to you:

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.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what

will happen to your

personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter

gets the

unprecedented power he seeks.

Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at

the Naval Academy,

later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national

security adviser under

President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant idea of

secretly selling

missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with the

illicit proceeds

to illegally support contras in Nicaragua.

A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts

of misleading

Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court

overturned the

verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his

testimony. He

famously asserted, "The buck stops here," arguing that the

White House

staff, and not the president, was responsible for fateful

decisions that

might prove embarrassing.

This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a

plan even more

scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information

Awareness Office" in

the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced Research Projects

Agency, which

spawned the Internet and stealth aircraft technology.

Poindexter is now

realizing his 20-year dream: getting the "data-mining"

power to snoop on

every public and private act of every American.

Even the hastily passed U.S.A. Patriot Act, which widened

the scope of the

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and weakened 15

privacy laws, raised

requirements for the government to report secret

eavesdropping to Congress

and the courts. But Poindexter's assault on individual

privacy rides

roughshod over such oversight.

He is determined to break down the wall between commercial

snooping and

secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral

dismisses such necessary

differentiation as bureaucratic "stovepiping." And he has

been given a $200

million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million

Americans.

When George W. Bush was running for president, he stood

foursquare in

defense of each person's medical, financial and

communications privacy. But

Poindexter, whose contempt for the restraints of oversight

drew the Reagan

administration into its most serious blunder, is still

operating on the

presumption that on such a sweeping theft of privacy

rights, the buck ends

with him and not with the president.

This time, however, he has been seizing power in the open.

In the past week

John Markoff of The Times, followed by Robert O'Harrow of

The Washington

Post, have revealed the extent of Poindexter's operation,

but editorialists

have not grasped its undermining of the Freedom of

Information Act.

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.

There is a new site that is an excellent resource for information and action regarding the Total Information Awareness program, the Total Information Awareness Resource Center.