Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Friday, Nov. 15, 2002 - 5:10 a.m.

Hey, you guys, know what the Google equivalent is in Japan? Wakwak. Which would actually be broken down into 4 syllables: wah-ku-wah-ku. You just kinda don't say the oo sound in the ku syllables. But it still makes me think of wakawaka, which is what Fozzie Bear says, so it cracks me up.

Whatever. Shut up; I am not a geek.

So, here's what's up today and really upsetting me:

Welcome to Nazi America
With apologies and full credit given to the NY Times and writer William Safire, I am going to lift whole sections of his article, which normally I would never do, but this is pretty damned important. Please go read the whole thing, and then for God's sake, please get involved and at least send a fricking email to your Congressmen. PLEASE.

"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."

To those of you who don't remember, John Poindexter is the asshole who was behind Iran-Contra: he secretly sold missiles to Iran and then sent the proceeds to the Nicaraguan contras, then lied to Congress and every court of law he appeared before about the deal. He was found guilty of 5 counts of felony, but that conviction was overturned on appeal because he had been given immunity to testify to Congress...the same Congress he gave false testimony to, thus nullifying his immunity agreement, but whatthefuckever, sure, cut the lying sack of dung free.

He is also the hubristic schmuck who said out loud and in public that it's the White House staff, not the President, who should make the decisions that might later prove embarrassing. Like I want anyone not the President to make a decision that affects my life. I don't want the fucking president making most of them, either, but he's better than some clandestine fuck making major decisions in secret that not even the president knows about. Consider the ramifications, if you don't agree. What if some secret, underground group of WH staffers were running around completely unchecked, making decisions like whether or not to suddenly drop a bomb in another country and start a war, or to gas a building hostages were in or attack a group of people protesting on American soil, or any other number of things that might later prove to be a "bad decision" and embarrassing to the White House. The sort of things that might turn out to be embarrassing to the White House are precisely the sort of things only the president should be in control of.

So Poindexter is now in control of the "Information Awareness Office" of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Which is actually the R&D branch of the Dept. of Defense. For those of you unaware, among other things, DARPA funded the research that made the internet possible. We'll get back to that later. DARPA "adheres to" this founding principal:

"Substantial autonomy and freedom from bureaucratic impediments"

That means not only are they not held accountable for their actions by any government agency, they also do not have to make their actions known to any other government agency.

As well, DARPA maintains a small core staff, with supporting personnel (researchers, technicians, etc.) on a temporary and constantly rotating basis in highly specialized fields. Which means that no one is there long enough to know what the applications they help develop are used for or how it fits in with any other application or department, because they don't know what anyone else is working on either. Which is great if you're trying to build a weapon or national defense system, but not so great if what you're doing is violating the rights of your citizens en masse.

DARPA reports only to the Director for Defense Research and Engineering. Do you know who the fuck that is? Because that's an awful lot of power for a guy to have, and I never even knew the position existed. I love this next bit, culled from the DARPA website:

"Other than the reporting chain, there have been only minor changes in approach [since inception]. Each Director recognized the wisdom of the agency's historical approach and defended the organization from outside influences that would constrain its freedom and flexibility. In addition, the Department of Defense's senior management, seeing the value of an agile, forward-looking R&D group unconstrained by conventional thinking and able to investigate ideas and approaches that the traditional R&D community finds too outlandish or risky, has consistently protected the independence of DARPA. Failure to keep the bureaucracy at bay would have doomed the value of DARPA and this has been consistently recognized over the years.

In other words, DARPA pokes its nose into stuff that you probably don't want it poking its nose into on a daily and routine basis...stuff like how to gather information on and track the activities of every citizen of the United States. In short, how to institute Big Brother.

So let's go back to that internet thing. The net makes it pretty easy to access information, huh? And it pretty much centralized everything: medical records, purchases, online activity, bank records, credit records, personal identification, traffic offenses, legal documentation, email, property records, marriage/divorce/death/birth records, library systems and records, police reports, 911, 411, phone and utilities records, atm transactions, public surveillance cameras, every computer connected to the net right this very second. And we're not talking mega or even gigabytes of your information, people. We're talking petabytes. To put that in perspective, a kilobyte is 1000 bytes. A megabyte is 1000KB. A gigabyte is 1000 MB. A terabyte is 1000GB. A petabyte is 1000TB, or 1 billion megabytes.

Welcome to 1984, people.

Right now, wherever he is, George Orwell is one smug sonofabitch, going around to everyone he knows and shouting a big, fat "I told you so" in their faces.

I thought the Patriot Act was pretty bad, running roughshod over 15 separate right to privacy laws. I talked briefly about it here. But that at least came with a stipulation of the formality of going thru court action and telling someone in another branch of government what the snoopers were up to. This new act does not. If it passes, John Poindexter will have the right to bend you and your privacy over backwards without so much as a please or lubricant. A guy who believes it is his God-given right to violate every bit of privacy you have without any fucking accountability to anyone will have free reign and a minimum $200 million budget to create and maintain computer dossiers on every single citizen of this country. The same guy who caused the single biggest national scandal of the 1980's AND the Reagan-Bush administrations and even when it blew up in his face maintained the arrogant belief that he was above both the law and the Office of the President of the United States. It's pretty freaking interesting to note his agency's motto is "Knowledge is Power."

So much for George W. Bush's bullshit claim that he stood for Americans' right to privacy. He lied. And not about whether or not he'd ever done drugs or gotten a DUI, or any other embarrassing faux pas that would keep him out of office. Not even about whether or not he got head in the fucking Oval Office. He lied about something far more fundamental and precious. Your freedom. And your fundamental right to fucking privacy.

DARPA has already started issuing contracts, but apparently refuses to disclose the TIA budget, what agency material is being gathered for - new or existing, or what kind of elements are currently being issued development contracts (ie. whether or not you should be aware that your email or medical records are now totally fair game).

Get involved now; the Senate is expected to vote by early next week. Please write your Senators and tell them you oppose passage of the Homeland Security Act as it now stands. Tell them you don't approve of "Total Information Awareness" and the Information Awareness Office. Tell them you want your private information to STAY PRIVATE. You can do so at this website. Just enter your zipcode in the box labelled "enter zip" under "Write Elected Officials," at the top of the page. A new page will load with your Representative and Senators and a link under each of their pictures. It's absolutely simple and takes all of maybe 5 minutes; however long it takes you to write please don't vote for anything that creates a police state like Total Information Awareness will. If you do nothing else even remotely political the rest of your ever-lovin' life, please take these 5 minutes and do something that really matters. Please.

Other sources:
Wired.com
NY Times, November 9, 2002
Entire text of Wm. Safire's article, if the link at the beginning no longer works
the second paragraph - Harper's Bazaar Weekly Review Online.
O'Reilly Network

Katie

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