posted on August 26, 2003 02:32:42 PM new
The Domestic Security Enhancment Act The (Patriot Act II)
The bill is signed into law would..
Give the executive branch powers to order secret executions of US citizens.
(Sections 101)
Make it easier for the government to initiate surveillance and wiretapping of U.S. citizens under the shadowy, top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. (102 and 107)
Shelter federal agents engaged in illegal surveillance without a court order from criminal prosecution if they are following orders of high Executive Branch officials. (Section 106)
Authorize, in statute, the Department of Justice’s campaign of secret detentions by including a provision that would preempt federal litigation challenging non-disclosure of basic information about detainees. (Section 201)
Threaten public health by severely restricting access to crucial information about environmental health risks posed by facilities that use dangerous chemicals. (Section 202)
Harm Americans’ ability to receive a fair trial by limiting defense attorneys from challenging the use of secret evidence. (Section 204)
Reduce the ability of grand jury witnesses in terrorism investigations to defend themselves against public accusations by gagging them from discussing their testimony with the media or the general public. (Section 206)
Allow for the sampling and cataloguing of innocent Americans’ genetic information without court order and without consent. (Sections 301-306)
Permit, without any connection to anti-terrorism efforts, sensitive personal information about U.S. citizens to be shared with local and state law enforcement. (Section 311)
Undercut trust between police departments and immigrant communities by opening sensitive visa files to local police for the enforcement of complex immigration laws. (Section 311)
Terminate court-approved limits on police spying, which were initially put in place to prevent McCarthy-style law enforcement persecution based on political or religious affiliation. (Section 312)
Provide an incentive for neighbor to spy on neighbor and pose problems similar to those inherent in Attorney General Ashcroft’s "Operation TIPS" by granting blanket immunity to businesses that phone in false terrorism tips, even if their actions are taken with reckless disregard for the truth. (Section 313)
Further criminalize association -- without any intent to commit acts of terrorism -- with unpopular organizations labeled as terrorist by our government. (Section 402)
Under the pretext of fighting terrorism, unfairly target undocumented workers with extended jail terms for common immigration offenses. (Section 502
WASHINGTON – At a forum entitled “CAPPS II: Passenger Screening and Privacy Concerns,” hosted by the American Civil Liberties Union, prominent conservatives and the Washington head of the NAACP today warned Congress about potential threats to privacy and civil rights under the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) now infamous Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System (CAPPS II) airport spying system.
"Not only would CAPPS II threaten privacy and likely reduce security, but there’s no guarantee against bias in the system," said Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative office. "Further, TSA officials are already hinting that CAPPS II could be used outside of the airports - a clear example of mission creep."
“We will soon join dozens of other groups in filing comments urging officials to scrap the program in its current form,” Murphy added. “Safety and freedom are not served by overreaching and ineffective security measures.”
Murphy was joined this morning by former Congressman Bob Barr (R-GA); James X. Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology; David Keene of the American Conservative Union; Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, and Hilary Shelton of the Washington Bureau of the NAACP. The discussion this morning reflected the growing concern in America about the lack of privacy safeguards and potential ineffectiveness of CAPPS II.
CAPPS II came under fire recently when the TSA published proposed regulations in the Federal Register this summer and announced a sixty-day public comment period that closes at the end of September. CAPPS II is designed to perform extensive background checks using sensitive information to determine the security risk of all airline passengers. The most intrusive and dangerous element of the program - the construction of a system for conducting background checks - would depend on shadowy intelligence/law enforcement databases of questionable reliability.
Many groups have raised concerns about CAPPS II being an integrated database that would run several searches on individual travelers' personal information. The database could be used for purposes far beyond air travel, allowing access to individuals' personal information for government functions at the local, state, federal and even international level. Not only would the database limit individuals' ability to travel freely, but it would also provide the basis for arrest and detention. This system would scrutinize every traveler, greatly increasing the chance that innocent people would be identified as terrorists, which would potentially undermine security. Some groups have also raised concerns that CAPPS II would have a disproportionate impact on racial, ethnic and religious minorities.
“It is bad enough that the CAPPS II system would create a de facto government blacklist that will hurt innocent Americans,” added Murphy. “But it is even more intolerable that minorities could be hurt more than other Americans. This panel demonstrates that all of us should be concerned with this new incarnation of Big Brother”
posted on August 26, 2003 02:54:50 PM new
What is the Total Information Awareness (TIA)
TIA may be the closest thing to a true "Big Brother" program that has ever been seriously contemplated in the United States. It is based on a vision of pulling together as much information as possible about as many people as possible into an "ultra-large-scale" database, making that information available to government officials, and sorting through it to try to identify terrorists. Since the amount of public and private information on our lives is growing by leaps and bounds every week, a government project that seeks to put all that information together is a radical and frightening thing.
Who runs the program?
TIA is run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a branch of the Department of Defense that works on military research. It is headed by John Poindexter, the former Reagan-era National Security Adviser known for his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal, who famously said that it was his duty to withhold information from Congress.
Is this program unique?
No. There is another effort underway that could bring about a similar result: an airline profiling system called CAPS II. CAPS II would collect massive amounts of information about the tens of millions of American who fly each year and use that information to create profiles. Its use in the airline context gives it a lot more surface appeal, and it has been presented in a far less threatening manner, but it is based on the same faulty premise that terrorism can be prevented by collecting hoards of information about everyone and then subjecting them to a virtual dragnet.
How much information would be available to the program?
Virtual dragnet programs like TIA and CAPS II are based on the premise that the best way to protect America against terrorism is to for the government to collect as much information as it can about everyone - and these days, that is a LOT of information. They could incorporate not only government records of all kinds but individuals' medical and financial records, political beliefs, travel history, prescriptions, buying habits, communications (phone calls, e-mails and Web surfing), school records, personal and family associations, and so on.
In the last decade we have witnessed an enormous explosion in the amount of tracking and information of individuals in the United States, due mainly to two factors:
Technology. The explosion of computers, cameras, location-sensors, wireless communication, biometrics, and other technologies is making it a lot easier to track, store, and analyze information about individuals' activities.
The commercialization of data. Corporations in recent years have discovered that detailed information about consumers is extremely valuable, and are in the process of figuring out how to squeeze every available penny out of this revenue source. That is why consumers are increasingly being asked for their information everywhere they turn, from product registration forms to loyalty programs to sweepstakes entry forms. As a result, private sector incentives are now aligned with the interests of those in government who wish to track everyone's behavior. The government has not been shy about buying that data, and it is envisioned as a primary source for the TIA database.
The information that is generated and retained about our activities is becoming so rich that if all that information about us was put together, it would almost be like having a video camera following us around. Programs like TIA would make such "data surveillance" a reality.
What is wrong with the TIA Program?
There are five major problems with the concept behind programs like "Total Information Awareness" and CAPS II:
It would kill privacy in America. Under this program, every aspect of our lives would be catalogued and made available to government officials. Americans have the right to expect that their lives will not become an open book when they have not done, and are not even suspected of doing, anything wrong.
It harbors a tremendous potential for abuse. The motto of the TIA program is that “knowledge is power,” and in fact the keepers of the TIA database would gain a tremendous amount of power over American citizens. Inevitably, some of them will abuse that power. An example of the kind of abuses that can happen were chronicled in a July 2001 investigation by the Detroit Free Press (and December 2001 followup): the newspaper found that police officers with access to a database for Michigan law enforcement had used it to help their friends or themselves stalk women, threaten motorists, track estranged spouses – even to intimidate political opponents. Experience has shown that when large numbers of Americans challenge the government’s policy (for example in Vietnam), some parts of the government react by conducting surveillance and using it against critics. The unavoidable truth is that a super-database like TIA will lead to super-abuses.
It is based on virtual dragnets instead of individualized suspicion. TIA would represent a radical departure from the centuries-old Anglo-American tradition that the police conduct surveillance only where there is evidence of involvement in wrongdoing. It would seek to protect us by monitoring everyone for signs of wrongdoing - by instituting a giant dragnet capable of sifting through the personal lives of Americans. It would ruin the very American values that our government is supposed to be protecting.
It would not be effective. The program is based on highly speculative assumptions about how databases can be tapped to stop terrorism, and there are good reasons to suspect that it would not work at all (see below).
It fails basic balancing tests. The benefits of this program in stopping terrorism are highly speculative, but the damage that it would do to American freedom is certain.
Why would TIA be ineffective?
There is no question that if government agents track the lives and activities of everyone, they will probably experience some marginal improvement in their ability to stop terrorism - though even a perfect totalitarian society could not stop every attack (the Nazis were unable to stop attacks by the Resistance in France and other occupied nations during World War II, for example). And there is no question that many other, more direct steps that the U.S. is taking will significantly improve our security. The real question is how much additional safety would a TIA program bring us over and above all the other steps we're taking (tightened borders, improved overseas intelligence, increased airport security, etc).
There is good reason to think the answer is: not much at all. Some versions of TIA described by Defense officials are based on the dubious premise that "terrorist patterns" can be ferreted out from the enormous mass of American lives using techniques known as "data mining" that try to identify hidden patterns in large masses of data. What attracts proponents of this scheme is that data mining has proven very successful in some commercial contexts, such as the discovery of suspicious spending patterns that indicate credit card fraud. The problem is that in order to be effective, data miners need an enormous amount of sample data to work from. Credit card companies experience a vast amount of fraud, which allows them to go back and find patterns of behavior that are associated with it. But as horrific as the 9/11 attacks were, there have been very few overall incidents of terrorism within the United States in the recent past, so it is difficult to understand how these programs will be able to identify true patterns of suspicious behavior, and easy to imagine how they will simply end up reflecting the beliefs and prejudices of their programmers about what that behavior looks like (and there's no need to sift through data about millions of citizens to do that).
A debate appears to be underway within government over the utility of data mining to fight terrorism. Publicly, TIA officials have recently said that they never intended to carry out such data mining. Even their more modest descriptions of what TIA would do, however, are of questionable effectiveness and would devastate privacy. (See the May 2003 ACLU report on the questions TIA must answer for Congress: Total Information Compliance.)
In fact, a program like TIA could actually reduce our security by draining resources from more effective measures like improved collection of on-the-ground foreign intelligence.
In the wake of the September 11 attacks, numerous intelligence experts declared that the government’s problem was a failure to sift targeted intelligence information from the masses of useless data. The TIA solution to that problem would be to exponentially increase the amount of junk data that the government collects. You don’t find a needle in a haystack by bringing in more hay.
If TIA is implemented, it will probably fail at preventing the next terrorist attack. But once created, that kind of failure is unlikely to lead to the program being shut down. Instead, it will probably just spur the government into an ever-more furious effort to collect ever-greater amounts of personal information on ever-more people in a vain effort to make the concept work. We would then have the worst of both worlds: poor security and a super-charged surveillance tool that would destroy Americans' privacy and threaten our freedom.
What can I do to help stop this program?
There are at least four things you can do to help stop the blatantly un-American goal of "Total Information Awareness"
Educate yourself about this program and tell your friends about it.
Use the ACLU's "Action Alert" page to send a free and easy fax to President Bush asking him to pull the plug on this research.
Let your member of Congress know how you feel (locate your member here and check out tips on writing your elected representatives.
Support the ACLU's efforts to fight this program by joining us .
For more on TIA see the ACLU analysis: Is the Threat From TIA "Overblown"? and the ACLU Report Total Information Compliance
posted on August 27, 2003 11:07:26 AM new
How it all unfolds:
Gets a job at a Mega-huge Corporation or Ultra-secret Government Agency;
Learns that the employer's latest discovery has a Nasty Side Effect or involves some obvious human rights abuses;
Confronts the employer, who casually dismisses the researcher's concerns and chides her/him for not being a "team player";
Tries to blow the whistle to avert disaster;
Gets hounded by Shadowy Malevolent Goons;
Attempts to meet with inside sources, and finds them either dead or with just enough life left to utter a cryptic clue;
Watches the disaster overtake the CEO;
Testifies before Congress;
Enters the Witness Protection Program;
in roughly the order given above.
Aliens invade earth in order to eat humans.
posted on August 27, 2003 11:12:02 AM new
You should start watching C-SPAN. Everything I just posted is in the making. John Ashcroft and Orrin Hatch will introduce the Victory Act in September.
posted on August 27, 2003 11:20:46 AM new
One time my cousin Walter got this cat stuck in his ass. True story. He bought it at our local mall, so the whole fiasco wound up on the news. It was embarrassing for my relatives and all. But, the next week, he did it again--difference cat, same results, complete with another trip to the emergency room. So, I run into him a week later in the mall and he's buying another cat. And, I says to him, "Jesus, Walt, what are you doing?! You know you're just going to get this cat stuck in your ass, too." And, he said to me, "Brodie, how the hell else am I supposed to get the gerbil out?"
posted on August 27, 2003 12:02:21 PM new
Bigcity wearing his Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie:
Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie An Effective, Low-Cost Solution To Combating Mind-Control
When To Use
As a matter of safety, you should wear your AFDB at all times since you never know when or where psychotronic signals will reach you. (Users of MindGuard are safe if they choose to be beanieless within its range but it would still be advisable to wear one; you never know when there will be a power failure.) Do not remove your AFDB before going to bed! When people are sleeping they are very vulnerable to mind control and need all the protection they can get.
Wears it only when thinking (seldom worn).
"Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence." --Ann Coulter
