Mantis Claw
11-15-2002, 10:08 AM
Information Awareness Office Goes Primetime
Anthony Lappé, November 14, 2002
Outgoing Congressmen Bob Barr (R-Ga.) is not the kind of guy I would want to grab a beer with. He was the pointman in the sexual inquisition of Bill Clinton. The NRA loves him, Act Up calls him a tyrant, and if he had his way you'd do hard time for sparking up a joint. He's also a raging hypocrite. He's a "pro-family" moralizer and anti-abortion crusader who paid for his wife to have an abortion and then cheated on her. Perhaps because the messy details of his personal life were dragged into the open, by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt no less, Barr has become one of the nation's most outspoken privacy advocates.
Barr lost his Republican primary in August, but on his way out he's introduced a bill called the Federal Agency Protection of Privacy Act. If passed, it would require the government to provide public notices on the collection of personal information, what information will be obtained and how it will be collected, protected, maintained, used and disclosed. Think of it as a privacy version of an "environmental impact study," which businesses and government agencies must complete before construction can start on a potentially polluting project.
The good news, on October 7, Barr's bill passed in the House. The bad news, yesterday the Homeland Security Act passed in the House, and if it's not amended, Barr's swan song will do little to stop Big Brother from reaching deep into our personal lives.
As neocon columnist Bill Safire points out in today's New York Times, the Homeland Security Act will, among other things, empower an ominous new government agency called the Information Awareness Office (IAO). The mysterious agency, already much-discussed here on GNN, would allow:
"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."
Like Barr, Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter, current Sharon telephone pal and all-around icon of right wing thought, is one of the growing number of conservatives who fear Bush has become the living embodiment of Orwell's worst nightmare, creating a vast, unaccountable internal government spy apparatus that would give East Germany's Stasi a run for its money. Since coming to power, Bush has been shredding civil liberties and promoting secrecy like there's no tomorrow (quite literally), derailing the traditional protection of the courts, limiting congressional inquires into what really went down on 9-11, and increasing the government's ability to operate in the shadows.
As GNN's favorite Skull & Bones-buster Alexandra Robbins recently wrote in USA Today, Bush has been working feverishly:
"The USA Patriot Act Bush eagerly signed lets the FBI -- with permission from a secret Washington "spy court" -- view some customer records; store owners cannot reveal the review. In October 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft released a memo encouraging federal agencies to withhold as much information as possible from the public. A month later, just before documents from the Reagan-Bush administration were to be released, Bush signed an executive order severely hindering public access to former presidents' records. Bush also signed legislation that jails or fines journalists who publish sensitive leaks, essentially reviving the Official Secrecy Act that President Clinton vetoed."
Just one glance at the IAO web site and you know something creepy is going on. It's logo is an Illuminati-evoking pyramid with the all-knowing eye. It lists, among other goals, "Story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance" and "Biologically inspired algorithms for agent control." I am not sure what these mean, but they sound scary. Even scarier, the IAO is headed up by John Poindexter, the Iran-Contra player who was convicted on five counts of lying to Congress. I guess that's his idea of "truth maintenance."
As an anonymous guerrilla on GNN's forums recently noted, the agency's objective appears to be not just "processing" us, but "preempting" us, a la some sort of dark "Minority Report" scenario. The agency will use "biometrics," or biological ways to identify individuals like fingerprints, retinas, and facial features, to assemble a massive database on our entire being, summing up every purchase, phone call, web site visited, to look deep into our souls and determine if we are terrorists, or tree-huggers.
The reality is this technology is not just being developed to nab the bin Ladenites among us. It is part of a move by the government on all levels, from local police departments to the highest reaches of the national intelligence agencies, to gather detailed information on anyone who might threaten the administration's goals, whether that's drilling for oil in the Arctic or bombing for oil in Iraq. Recently, it was exposed that the Denver police had developed dossiers on 3,200 individuals and 208 organizations that they believed needed to be monitored, including a 74-year-old nun who supported the Zapatistas and an 82-year-old great-grandmother whose only apparent crime was attending a rally with a "Free Leonard Peltier" bumper sticker on her car.
If the Homeland Security Act goes through as is, and the IAO is put into action, paranoia won't be an affliction for people like me and you, it will be part of our survival.
"This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America," Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington told The New York Times' John Markoff ("Pentagon Plans Computer That Would Peak at Personal Data of Americans" Nov. 9, 2002). "The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is Darpa and the agency is the F.B.I. The outcome is a system of national surveillance of the American public."
Anthony Lappé is Executive Editor of GNN.tv.
Anthony Lappé, November 14, 2002
Outgoing Congressmen Bob Barr (R-Ga.) is not the kind of guy I would want to grab a beer with. He was the pointman in the sexual inquisition of Bill Clinton. The NRA loves him, Act Up calls him a tyrant, and if he had his way you'd do hard time for sparking up a joint. He's also a raging hypocrite. He's a "pro-family" moralizer and anti-abortion crusader who paid for his wife to have an abortion and then cheated on her. Perhaps because the messy details of his personal life were dragged into the open, by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt no less, Barr has become one of the nation's most outspoken privacy advocates.
Barr lost his Republican primary in August, but on his way out he's introduced a bill called the Federal Agency Protection of Privacy Act. If passed, it would require the government to provide public notices on the collection of personal information, what information will be obtained and how it will be collected, protected, maintained, used and disclosed. Think of it as a privacy version of an "environmental impact study," which businesses and government agencies must complete before construction can start on a potentially polluting project.
The good news, on October 7, Barr's bill passed in the House. The bad news, yesterday the Homeland Security Act passed in the House, and if it's not amended, Barr's swan song will do little to stop Big Brother from reaching deep into our personal lives.
As neocon columnist Bill Safire points out in today's New York Times, the Homeland Security Act will, among other things, empower an ominous new government agency called the Information Awareness Office (IAO). The mysterious agency, already much-discussed here on GNN, would allow:
"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."
Like Barr, Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter, current Sharon telephone pal and all-around icon of right wing thought, is one of the growing number of conservatives who fear Bush has become the living embodiment of Orwell's worst nightmare, creating a vast, unaccountable internal government spy apparatus that would give East Germany's Stasi a run for its money. Since coming to power, Bush has been shredding civil liberties and promoting secrecy like there's no tomorrow (quite literally), derailing the traditional protection of the courts, limiting congressional inquires into what really went down on 9-11, and increasing the government's ability to operate in the shadows.
As GNN's favorite Skull & Bones-buster Alexandra Robbins recently wrote in USA Today, Bush has been working feverishly:
"The USA Patriot Act Bush eagerly signed lets the FBI -- with permission from a secret Washington "spy court" -- view some customer records; store owners cannot reveal the review. In October 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft released a memo encouraging federal agencies to withhold as much information as possible from the public. A month later, just before documents from the Reagan-Bush administration were to be released, Bush signed an executive order severely hindering public access to former presidents' records. Bush also signed legislation that jails or fines journalists who publish sensitive leaks, essentially reviving the Official Secrecy Act that President Clinton vetoed."
Just one glance at the IAO web site and you know something creepy is going on. It's logo is an Illuminati-evoking pyramid with the all-knowing eye. It lists, among other goals, "Story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance" and "Biologically inspired algorithms for agent control." I am not sure what these mean, but they sound scary. Even scarier, the IAO is headed up by John Poindexter, the Iran-Contra player who was convicted on five counts of lying to Congress. I guess that's his idea of "truth maintenance."
As an anonymous guerrilla on GNN's forums recently noted, the agency's objective appears to be not just "processing" us, but "preempting" us, a la some sort of dark "Minority Report" scenario. The agency will use "biometrics," or biological ways to identify individuals like fingerprints, retinas, and facial features, to assemble a massive database on our entire being, summing up every purchase, phone call, web site visited, to look deep into our souls and determine if we are terrorists, or tree-huggers.
The reality is this technology is not just being developed to nab the bin Ladenites among us. It is part of a move by the government on all levels, from local police departments to the highest reaches of the national intelligence agencies, to gather detailed information on anyone who might threaten the administration's goals, whether that's drilling for oil in the Arctic or bombing for oil in Iraq. Recently, it was exposed that the Denver police had developed dossiers on 3,200 individuals and 208 organizations that they believed needed to be monitored, including a 74-year-old nun who supported the Zapatistas and an 82-year-old great-grandmother whose only apparent crime was attending a rally with a "Free Leonard Peltier" bumper sticker on her car.
If the Homeland Security Act goes through as is, and the IAO is put into action, paranoia won't be an affliction for people like me and you, it will be part of our survival.
"This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America," Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington told The New York Times' John Markoff ("Pentagon Plans Computer That Would Peak at Personal Data of Americans" Nov. 9, 2002). "The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is Darpa and the agency is the F.B.I. The outcome is a system of national surveillance of the American public."
Anthony Lappé is Executive Editor of GNN.tv.