This is not an April Fool's joke (I'm serious). We've mentioned Heather MacDonald's work on Politech before (http://www.politechbot.com/p-03349.html) and she's had these opinions for a long time (see http://news.com.com/2100-1029-995229.html and http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/137dvufs.asp). MacDonald's column is part of the Bush partisans' attempt to rehabilitate these programs by demonizing their critics. It's a shame that it's published under the aegis of the Manhattan Institute, which does good work in other areas and, I thought, sought to advance the principles of limited government and individual liberty. -Declan --- http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004894 The 'Privacy' Jihad "Total Information Awareness" falls to total Luddite hysteria. BY HEATHER MAC DONALD Thursday, April 1, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST The 9/11 Commission hearings have focused public attention again on the intelligence failures leading up to the September attacks. Yet since 9/11, virtually every proposal to use intelligence more effectively--to connect the dots--has been shot down by left- and right-wing libertarians as an assault on "privacy." The consequence has been devastating: Just when the country should be unleashing its technological ingenuity to defend against future attacks, scientists stand irresolute, cowed into inaction. The privacy advocates--who range from liberal groups focused on electronic privacy, such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center, to traditional conservative libertarians, such as Americans for Tax Reform--are fixated on a technique called "data mining." By now, however, they have killed enough different programs that their operating principle can only be formulated as this: No use of computer data or technology anywhere at any time for national defense, if there's the slightest possibility that a rogue use of that technology will offend someone's sense of privacy. They are pushing intelligence agencies back to a pre-9/11 mentality, when the mere potential for a privacy or civil liberties controversy trumped security concerns. The privacy advocates' greatest triumph was shutting down the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program. Goaded on by New York Times columnist William Safire, the advocates presented the program as the diabolical plan of John Poindexter, the former Reagan national security adviser and director of Pentagon research, to spy on "every public and private act of every American"--in Mr. Safire's words. The advocates' distortion of TIA was unrelenting. Most egregiously, they concealed TIA's purpose: to prevent another attack on American soil by uncovering the electronic footprints terrorists leave as they plan and rehearse their assaults. Before terrorists strike, they must enter the country, receive funds, case their targets, buy supplies, and send phone and e-mail messages. Many of those activities will leave a trail in electronic databases. TIA researchers hoped that cutting-edge computer analysis could find that trail in government intelligence files and, possibly, in commercial databases as well... But according to the "privacy community," data mining was a dangerous, unconstitutional technology, and the Bush administration had to be stopped from using it for any national-security or law-enforcement purpose. By September 2003, the hysteria against TIA had reached a fevered pitch and Congress ended the research project entirely, before learning the technology's potential and without a single "privacy violation" ever having been committed. The overreaction is stunning. Without question, TIA represented a radical leap ahead in both data-mining technology and intelligence analysis. Had it used commercial data, it would have given intelligence agencies instantaneous access to a volume of information about the public that had previously only been available through slower physical searches. As with any public or private power, TIA's capabilities could have been abused--which is why the Pentagon research team planned to build in powerful safeguards to protect individual privacy. [...] The bottom line is clear: The privacy battalions oppose not just particular technologies, but technological innovation itself. Any effort to use computerized information more efficiently will be tarred with the predictable buzzwords: "surveillance," "Orwellian," "Poindexter." This Luddite approach to counterterrorism could not be more ominous. The volume of information in government intelligence files long ago overwhelmed the capacity of humans to understand it. Agents miss connections between people and events every day. Machine analysis is essential in an intelligence tidal wave. [...] _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Apr 01 2004 - 13:17:41 PST