Just as the powers that be would like you to think the "Patriot" Act was a product of the post 9-11 world, the Information Awareness Office Orwellian nightmare operation (even conservative William Safire calls it as it is) was designed before September 11, 2001.

Go here and download a PDF of the DARPA working paper fleshing out the plan for how the "Total Information Awareness" system would work, and check out "Appendix A," where it notes the timeline of the previous drafts of the document.

http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/tiasystemdescription.pdf

As always, American citizens need to sludge through a mountain of b.s. and propaganda to get to the truth.



Please take the time to contact your elected representatives and get them to amend the Homeland Security Bill to stop this DARPA agency (or, if you are more in the middle of the road on this sort of stuff, take some other position like extreme and extensive oversight of DARPA as mandatory). If you don't share either of those positions, you really have no clue what America is about and need to review history.

Please write to Safire and other journalists and get them to not only address IAO as Safire has done below, but to call upon them to address the fact that the IAO was designed BEFORE 9-11



--------------------

You Are a Suspect

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

Editorial

New York Times

Nov. 14, 2002

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html

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.

they dont get more orwellian than poindexter

click here to see short article



http://la.indymedia.org/news/2002/11/22474.php

I don't understand! This all boggles my mind. We have endured this blatant disreguard for our 4th and 1st ammendement rights before (Espionage and sedition acts) But still we don't learn. What can we as citizens do to counter this threat to individual rights and "freedeoms"

Hello,

Start by faxing your representatives. If you do any of those online petitions, know that they are nearly worthless in most cases. Real letters and faxes have more of an impact (as little as impact can sometimes be).

Here's an example of a letter you can use as a template:

http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/tialetter11.18.02.html

You can see much more info about TIA over there:

http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/

By the way, just to piss you off even more, most of the media -- including the New York Times and Safire -- has been painting this program as something that was proposed post-911. That's a propaganda lie. See: http://la.indymedia.org/news/2002/11/22474.php

After the letters, just keep informed on civil liberties issues and consider contacting groups like EPIC (see above), the ACLU and others, asking them what you can do. The ACLU has local chapters, including many in LA. They've got local organizing going on and you can help. I don't know about EPIC.

And know you're not alone!

Oh, and do what ziggy says above. That's a good idea. There are some gatekeepers of public opinion that are already in the camp of opposing this creature. Making the media note that this program is not a post 911 program is VERY important. Don't let them get away with that lie. The lie is more powerful than you think.

After you've taken some action per the above, it's important to get some humor too... If we lose our sense of humor, we lose everything

if you're a tech type person, you'll love this:

http://dc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=39611&group=webcast

It made me bust out laughing

There is a new site that is an excellent resource for information and action concerning the Total Information Awareness program.