Other Politech messages: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=poindexter --- Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 17:04:43 -0500 (EST) From: "John F. McMullen" <observerat_private> Subject: Hentoff: We'll All Be Under Surveillance >From the Village Voice -- http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0250/hentoff.php We'll All Be Under Surveillance Computers Will Say What We Are by Nat Hentoff How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. -- George Orwell, 1984 The writers who most influenced me were: Charles Dickens (a superb journalistin his appalled description of a hanging at New York's Tombs, for exampleas well as an enduring novelist) and Arthur Koestler (whose Darkness at Noon taught me when I was 15 that dishonest means irredeemably corrupt all ends, no matter how noble). But above all was George Orwell, who, like Thoreau, listened to his own drum. Orwell died in 1950. Prophetic as he was in 1984, however, he could not have imagined how advanced surveillance technology would become. His novel is now being actualized in real time at the Defense Department, headed by the Washington press corps's favorite cabinet officer, the witty Donald Rumsfeld. John Markoff of The New York Times broke this story on February 13, when he wrote that retired admiral John Poindexter, national security adviser for President Ronald Reagan, "has returned to the Pentagon to direct a new agency that is developing technologies to give federal officials access to vast new surveillance and information-analysis systems." There was scarcely any follow-up in the media until Markoff, on November 9, aroused the dozing press by reporting that "the Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globeincluding the United States." Without any official public notice, and without any congressional hearings, the Bush administrationwith an initial appropriation of $200 millionis constructing the Total Information Awareness System. It will extensively mine government and commercial data banks, enabling the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies to collect information that will allow the governmentas noted on ABC-TV's November 14 Nightline"to essentially reconstruct the movements of citizens." This will be done without warrants from courts, thereby making individual privacy as obsolete as the sauropods of the Mesozoic era. (Intelligence from and to foreign sources will also be involved.) [snip --DBM] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ Recent CNET News.com articles: http://news.search.com/search?q=declan -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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