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William Safire: You are a suspect

Friday, November 15, 2002

By WILLIAM SAFIRE, New York Times News Service

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."

William Safire writes political commentary.

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 FBI, 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 New York 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.

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