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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (44808)	5/17/2004 8:38:34 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793822

OP-ED COLUMNIST Security With Liberty By WILLIAM SAFIRE Published: May 17, 2004 ASHINGTON — The draft of a report of great importance to our personal lives as well as our nation's security has been floating around Congress and the administration for the past two months. Because "Safeguarding Privacy in the Fight Against Terrorism" is not stamped secret — and because it is intended to prevent a future body blow to our system rather than expose a past scandal — the 119-page document commissioned by the Department of Defense has not surfaced until now. Advertisement Cast your mind back about 18 months to revelations of a "Total Information Awareness" project under way in the Pentagon. Adm. John Poindexter, a brilliant mind with no common sense, headed a team of top technicians assembling a "centralized grand database." Its Latin motto translated as "Knowledge Is Power." But the government's knowledge of everything we say and do — from our bank accounts and credit charges, medical and academic records, travel plans and Internet visits, e-mail and cellphone bills, added to police, F.B.I. and C.I.A. raw files — concentrates too much power and invites abuse. Congress, aroused by the press, wisely refused to fund it. The Pentagon responded sensibly. The dangerous idea of programming computers with the likely or even far-fetched plans of terrorists, and then "mining" databases both commercial and governmental to fit those patterns — thereby to turn up suspicious movements and potential suspects — is curiously creative. But how could it be done without turning the U.S. into a police state? As originally set up, the civil liberties canary in the data mine died for lack of safeguards. A year ago, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld decided that this thinking "outside the box" had to be rethought outside the Pentagon. He appointed a Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee, unique in this administration, of heavy hitters in the law. Newt (Vast Wasteland) Minow is the chairman; members are Floyd Abrams, Zoë Baird, Griffin Bell, Gerhard Casper, William Coleman, Lloyd Cutler and John Marsh. These are serious old pros, mostly Democrats, who are not bedazzled by the ever-changing techiedegook. When the supersnoops described "a series of increasingly powerful configurations that can be stress-tested in operationally relevant environments using real-time feedbacks," Abrams dismissed such foo-foo dust as "simply not comprehensible." In plain language, the Minow committee finds that the defunded program "was a flawed effort to achieve worthwhile ends." It concludes that laws covering data mining are "disjointed and often outdated, and as a result may compromise the protection of privacy, public confidence and the nation's ability to craft effective and lawful responses to terrorism." Then the panel tells the administration, in constructive detail, how to go about tracking terror without destroying all privacy. It includes calls for: written findings by top officials before undertaking any mining; appointing a policy-level privacy officer; making data anonymous; creating an audit trail; court authorization; oversight by a single committee of Congress; developing "technological and other tools for enhancing privacy protection"; and "a culture of sensitivity to . . . privacy issues." Is this enough? Not quite. The committee is too trusting of judges; in 35 years, federal and state courts have approved 29,250 wiretap orders and turned down only 32. It also thinks that the main flaw in the original proposal was an insensitive presentation. But this is a good-faith attempt to strike a balance, and Bill Coleman's objections supporting Poindexter and paying lip service to privacy underscore the majority's attempt to satisfy civil libertarians. In obtaining actionable antiterror intelligence, there is a connection between (1) today's concern for protecting a prisoner's right to humane treatment and (2) tomorrow's concern about protecting free people's right to keep the government from poking into the most intimate details of their lives. Must we wait until intrusive general searches mushroom into scandal, weakening our ability to collect information that saves lives? Congress should debate this Pentagon report balancing personal liberty and national security now, exercising foresight, rather than years from now, in the high dudgeon of hindsight.

To: Lane3 who wrote (44808)	5/17/2004 3:29:19 PM
From: KLP	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793822

karen, it's too bad that with the exception of any veteran's prgrams, the rest of the federal employees who are retired, don't retire with the same type of programs as the average of the top 1000 companies and the average of ALL companies in the US with under 500 employees (definition of small business) in the US do. Most companies today are not paying full benefits to retirees, if any, and most are certainly not offering pensions. It would be most interesting to know what all the federal retirees are getting for retirement benefits. I also think the same should apply to all active federal, state, and local government workers as well.... At the very least, ALL the salaries and ALL the benefits should be out in the open for ALL the positions any of the governments offer.