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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tekboy who wrote (58900)	11/26/2002 2:40:50 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

One of the reasons we missed 911 is TMI, IMO. We could not process and analyze what we had. Now we are really going to have TMI. "REASON" 1. Freedom Is Info That great American political impulse to do some thing rather than the right thing has finally birthed the Homeland Security Department, in all its mutant glory. It is hard to imagine that a 484-page bill could contain so many bad ideas, but there is one theme that unites them: that the federal government requires more information about private citizens in order to keep them safe from harm. But that has it exactly backwards. Private citizens need more information about their federal government in order to stay safe from harm. A torrent of info washing over the federal watchers will merely help to obscure actual threats. And under the new info-hoarding rules, the failures of the system will never trickle out to the public, making corrective action impossible. The net result will be less security, not more. All that is wrongheaded with the Homeland approach is evident in the Total Information Awareness program it will help bring into being. This Pentagon research project aims to develop a database of every transaction in the country. Why? Because "knowledge is security." And don't worry about privacy, the program's boosters assure us. "I find it somewhat counterintuitive that people are not concerned that telemarketers and insurance companies can acquire this data but feel tremendous trepidation if a government ventures into this arena," attorney David Rivkin told Fox News. "To me it just smacks of paranoia." Well, one big difference just might be that we know what telemarketers want to do. They want to sell us stuff and make money. There is literally no telling what the government will do with the same information. Travel and financial transactions will be monitored, as will the purchase of dangerous materials, which certainly means guns and someday might mean "too much" motor fuel. Pay for the wrong item in the wrong place, and you might just end up on some kind of watch list. That list may or may not be cross-checked against other databases in order to build up a "profile." After all, it isn't possible to tell if you've deviated from your profile in some suspicious manner unless there is a profile of you. Read between the lines and you'll see that that's clearly what the info warriors have in mind: a constant churning of data in order to "flag" suspicious activity. But there is not one shred of evidence that the terrorists of 9/11 failed to send up enough flags. Everything from their visa applications to their pilot-training alarm bells to their demeanor boarding their planes/missiles flagged them as suspicious characters. Yet all were missed by the same feds who want a few trillion more bits of information to mull over.