Prying Eyes. They’re Watching You.

Thursday, November 14th, 2002

This logo isn’t some funny, exaggerated concoction of privacy nuts or satirists. It’s the actual logo used by the “Informaton Awareness Office,” an office so Orwellian, I’m breaking my self-imposed restriction on calling things “Orwellian” just so I can point out how damned Orwellian it is.

I’d meant to blog on this scary article from the NY Times last weekend, but stalwart civil liberties defender Bill Saffire beat me to it.

This stuff should scare the shit out of you. It’s not about a “slippery slope” anymore. We’ve already slipped. We’ve fallen all the way down, and we’re staring back up at the slope. Your U.S. government has hired a man — John Poindexter — who has been convicted by a jury of lying to his superiors and, by extension, to the American people, and who has made no qualms about his lust for power and his abmivalence toward privacy rights, to oversee a massive, unconscionably invasive database cabable of tracking and recording nearly every thing you do.

Scary thing is, I haven’t the slightest idea how we can stop it from happening. Note that Poindexter has a slogan above his desk: “Knowledge is Power.”

Yes. It is.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 14th, 2002 at 1:22 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

49 Responses to “Prying Eyes. They’re Watching You.”

#1 | Charlie D. | November 14th, 2002 at 2:03 pm
That slogan is also on the logo – that’s what “Scientia est Potentia” means.
#2 | Anonymous | November 14th, 2002 at 2:34 pm
The scary thing is, they don’t actually have to be watching what we do… we just have to think they are, and *poof* liberty disappears.

When law abiding citizens will not exercise their independence for fear of retribution by those in power, there can be no dissent.
#3 | Frank | November 14th, 2002 at 2:45 pm
The ramifications are incomprehensible.
#4 | B Kieffer | November 14th, 2002 at 2:50 pm
C’mon Radley, don’t be so paranoid. I’m sure that this information will only be accessible by people who are competent and want to protect you… They really do have YOUR best interest in mind.

….Is your water back on yet?

I think a better logo would depict Poindexter laughing with his pinky finger to the corner of his mouth, while he drops a big steamer on the Constitution.
#5 | Jim Henley | November 14th, 2002 at 4:14 pm
This is an object lesson to our neolibertarian friends: lie down with Republicans and get up with a police state.
#6 | James Landrith | November 14th, 2002 at 5:17 pm
Yeah, what Jim said!
#7 | John J. Coupal | November 14th, 2002 at 11:11 pm
This is all so shockingly new!

Yeah, right…

Look at the back of the $1 bill. That design has been around for what.., no more than 5 years?
#8 | Scott Ott | November 15th, 2002 at 2:30 pm
ScrappleFace is proud to announce that it is the first news weblog to receive the new Information Awareness Office Seal of Approval.
#9 | Conor O'Brien | November 19th, 2002 at 11:44 am
Vigilance, yes. But parinoia is not unheard of in libertarian circles. Just noticed this on the Volokh Conspiracy:

FACT VERSUS FICTION ON “TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS”: The press has been giving a lot of coverage to the military’s proposed Total Information Awareness database. Here’s William Safire’s column on it; and here’s a Washington Times story about it and some of the reactions against it. As often happens when the press gets its hands on a “Big Brother” government surveillance story, a great deal of what the press says about the program appears to be quite false, or at least highly misleading. As best I can tell, these are not just little errors, but rather basic errors about what the program is and what it isn’t– all errors tending to make the program seem extremely scary.

The beginning of William Safire’s column provides a good example. Safire writes:
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.” This would be incredibly frightening, except I’m pretty sure it’s wrong. First of all, as best I can tell there’s nothing in any version of the Homeland Security Act that has anything to do with Total Information Awareness. The Act has sections that relate to information analysis, but I don’t see anything that sounds like TIA. (If you see something I’m missing, please let me know.)

Second, and more importantly, Safire’s nightmarish scenario appears to have no basis in fact. The Total Information Awareness program is a proposal to create a database to “data mine” evidence the government has already legally collected, not to collect new evidence. The program would let evidence already collected by different parts of the government and found in the public domain to be assembled together and examined for clues about terrorist activity. In other words, TIA would not authorize the collection of evidence about your credit card purchases, magazine subscriptions, websites you visit, e-mails you send or receive, academic grades, bank deposits, or trips (much less all of these, as Safire claims). The framework of privacy laws that the government must comply with to collect evidence would remain unchanged.

As best I can tell, TIA is not a surveillance system, but the press has decided to cover it as if it were. Strange. Very strange.
#10 | Ron Wilkinson | November 23rd, 2002 at 1:00 am
Consolidation of the intelligence operations under one department coupled with the Total Information Agency and the U.S.A. Patriot Act should effectively neutralize the system of checks and balance envisioned by the Founding Fathers. A Congressman will not dare challenge any action under this patriotic legal triad without personal retribution. This all because coordinating information at the national level is “too” difficult to accomplished from the White House. FDR found he could cordinate the necessary information during WWII when technology did not assist to the extent it does today. FDR could stand the heat in the kitchen while he upheld the Constitution.
#11 | Scared of J.P. | November 23rd, 2002 at 4:33 pm
Note which side of the globe the eye on the pyramid is viewing. That’s right, it’s our own hemisphere!
#12 | Mac | December 18th, 2002 at 10:57 am
In the name of “national security” we will limit our freedoms until there’s nothing left to defend…that’s absurd!
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49 Responses to “Prying Eyes. They’re Watching You.”