If you want a shining example of how easily “homeland security” can be perverted by politicians and law enforcement, look no further than the recent dust-up in Texas between Republican lawmakers and a band of Democrats who fled the state rather than allow a redistricting power grab.
One of the IT guys here takes great pleasure in taunting me with what we both know is his unchecked ability to monitor my Web surfing habits.
He doesn’t actually spy on me, or at least that’s my understanding. It’s just joshing. And because there’s a high level of trust at this company, the joshing is all in good fun.
But there’s nothing funny about the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness data-mining program, in large part because I don’t trust most politicians and bureaucrats any further than I can throw Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. (Applying a coat of whitewash by changing the program’s name to Terrorism Information Awareness, as was done last week, insults everyone’s intelligence and doesn’t make Rumsfeld any easier to toss.)
The broad strokes of this issue are not controversial: No one wants to see another major terrorist attack happen on U.S. soil. And no one wants to sacrifice all of our civil liberties to minimize that prospect through whatever technological means our tax dollars can buy. Therefore, as with so many complex matters, this one is a balancing act.
The trouble is that we’ve lost our balance.
At the same time lawmakers are complicating your professional lives by mandating ever-stricter controls over the way companies handle private information – HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, Sarbanes-Oxley – that same government is granting itself ever-wider latitude to pry into the personal lives of Americans.
Of course, swapping privacy for “homeland security” is nothing to worry about as long as we’re confident that the men and women entrusted with these new powers and technologies will apply them rarely, infallibly and only against actual would-be terrorists. We’re worry-free, too, as long as the individuals employing these extraordinary surveillance and data-mining techniques are held strictly accountable by outside authorities – meaning Congress and the press, primarily – who genuinely appreciate the need to put privacy protection ahead of protecting bureaucratic backsides.
Oh, and risks all might make perfect sense if you presume that the rewards – significantly enhanced security – can be derived in the bargain.
And what are the odds on all of those stars aligning?
Positively terrific – a slam-dunk – we were assured last week by officials from the Bush administration and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which oversees Total Information Awareness. We’re all equally concerned about protecting civil liberties, these folks told Congress, so don’t be listening to the nervous Nellies.
The Nellies were unimpressed, to say the least.
“You won’t find terrorists buying C4 explosives with a MasterCard,” a computer scientist told The New York Times by way of expressing his skepticism that data-mining offers any significant payoff in terms of added security.
As for potential abuses, if you want a shining example of how easily “homeland security” can be perverted by politicians and law enforcement, look no further than the recent dust-up in Texas between Republican lawmakers and a band of Democrats who fled the state rather than allow a redistricting power grab. No Democrats meant no quorum, which meant no power grab. Incensed Republicans responded by not only marshaling local law enforcement – legal, if somewhat extreme – but also by calling on a federal “homeland security” agency designed to track terrorists for help in finding a lawmaker’s ostensibly “missing” airplane.
Do you believe for one minute that the Texas protectors of civil liberties who thought that was a good idea would hesitate to use something like Total Information Awareness to singe the backside of a real or imagined political foe?
There’s a better chance they’d give up their firearms than resist that temptation.
Unlike those Democratic lawmakers, the columnist cannot escape. You can find him at buzz@nww.com.
