Re: data-mining from

It's a bio-sculpture. No worries.

On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, joy garnett wrote:

> Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 15:20:10 -0500
> From: joy garnett <[email protected]>
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: RHIZOME_RAW: data-mining from hell
>
> NYTimes (you know it's bad when safire is worried…)
> Nov 14, 2002
> http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html
>
> You Are a Suspect
> By WILLIAM SAFIRE
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> + the best is the enemy of the good
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> +
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>

o
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