Homeland Snoopers raise Privacy Fears
WASHINGTON (Nov. 26) - ''They'' already know about your athlete's foot, that naughty movie you rented and the weight you lied about on your driver's license.
Right now, ''they'' are usually businesses that want to sell you something. But soon, ''they'' could be the U.S. government's Total Information Awareness system, and that has privacy advocates worried.
Privacy rights watchdogs are also uneasy about the man who has articulated the outlines of this system: retired Adm. John Poindexter, the Reagan-era national security adviser who was convicted -- the conviction was later set aside -- of deceiving Congress in the Iran-Contra affair.
''They are drowning in information now, they're not able to do good data analysis,'' said Jerry Berman, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology. ''Who are the new analysts they have in mind? Do they really mean Adm. Poindexter? He's not a man who gets much of my confidence.''
Total Information Awareness, or TIA, is meant to be part of the U.S. war on terror. While it has yet to be put into practice, Poindexter described it in August as a way to track potential terrorists by the cyber-signatures they leave behind when they make electronic transactions.
To do this, he said, TIA will need sophisticated ways to ''mine'' information already collected in disparate databases, Poindexter said.
A graphic of how TIA will ''detect, classify, identify, understand and pre-empt'' terrorists is available at darpa.mil.
The problem for groups that safeguard rights to privacy lies in the fact that ordinary people who have no ties to terror may leave some of the same signatures and wind up on the same list of suspects.
Until now, government and commercial sleuths have gone after personal electronic data on a case-by-case basis, Berman said in a telephone interview.
Law enforcement, Social Security and businesses, to name three examples, all collect different information in pursuit of those suspected of wrongdoing, Berman said by telephone.
''What is different now is that there is a generalized interest in all of this information, regardless of whether or not the subject has engaged in a crime,'' Berman said.
There is plenty of information available, for those who know where to look.
DROWNING IN INFORMATION
Credit card purchases, stops at the automatic teller machine and Internet surfing are three obvious ways to track personal information, but these are hardly the only paths companies -- or the TIA analysts -- could take to find out about potential terrorists, or almost anyone else.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, known as EPIC, said supermarket savings cards, telephone directories, surveys, sweepstakes entries, financial and property records, product warranty cards and magazine subscriptions can all be used to compile consumer profiles useful in marketing.
These seemingly unrelated documents can give a detailed picture that can include not just shopping preferences and income, but ''lifestyle preferences'' such as what kind of pet a person owns, what religious groups get the person's charity and whether they have maladies ranging from foot fungus to cancer.
With all this information available in different databases, Poindexter said, ''The relevant information extracted from this data must be made available in large-scale repositories with enhanced semantic content for easy analysis to accomplish this task. The transactional data will supplement our more conventional intelligence collection.''
''There has obviously been a growing problem within the private sector over collection of information for targeted marketing,'' said David Sobel, general counsel at EPIC. ''What's different now is the government is putting major resources into getting access to privately collected data.''
This could mean the difference between worrying about getting more junk mail and worrying about getting ''caught up in some sort of government investigation if (the) pattern of activities meets some profile of suspicious behavior,'' Sobel said by telephone.
Even for those who manage to conduct an all-cash life, there are risks, Sobel said: it is nearly impossible to rent a car or buy an airline ticket with cash in the United States and avoid suspicion.
The American Civil Liberties Union has mounted a campaign on its Web site -- aclu.org -- to ''Stop Computer Snooping'' through the TIA, calling it an ''Orwellian program'' that goes too far.
''We must not sacrifice our freedom and liberty in order to prosecute the 'War on Terrorism,''' ACLU said on its site.
Reuters 12:03 11-26-02
Copyright 2002 Reuters Limited. |
