We'll All Be Under Surveillance
Computers
Will Say What We Are
Nat Hentoff
Friday, 6 December, 2002
How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in any
individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched
everybody all the time. But at any rate, they could plug in your wire
whenever they wanted to. --George Orwell, 1984
The writers who most influenced me were: Charles Dickens (a
superb journalist--in his appalled description of a hanging at New
York's Tombs, for example--as well as an enduring novelist) and Arthur
Koestler (whose Darkness at Noon taught me when I was 15 that dishonest
means irredeemably corrupt all ends, no matter how noble). But above all
was George Orwell, who, like Thoreau, listened to his own drum.
Orwell died in 1950. Prophetic as he was in 1984, however, he
could not have imagined how advanced surveillance technology would
become. His novel is now being actualized in real time at the Defense
Department, headed by the Washington press corps's favorite cabinet
officer, the witty Donald Rumsfeld.
John Markoff of The New York Times broke this story on February
13, when he wrote that retired admiral John Poindexter, national
security adviser for President Ronald Reagan, "has returned to the
Pentagon to direct a new agency that is developing technologies to give
federal officials access to vast new surveillance and
information-analysis systems."
There was scarcely any follow-up in the media until Markoff, on
November 9, aroused the dozing press by reporting that "the Pentagon is
constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic
dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for
terrorists around the globe--including the United States."
Without any official public notice, and without any
congressional hearings, the Bush administration--with an initial
appropriation of $200 million--is constructing the Total Information
Awareness System. It will extensively mine government and commercial
data banks, enabling the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies
to collect information that will allow the government--as noted on
ABC-TV's November 14 Nightline--"to essentially reconstruct the
movements of citizens." This will be done without warrants from courts,
thereby making individual privacy as obsolete as the sauropods of the
Mesozoic era. (Intelligence from and to foreign sources will also be
involved.)
Our government's unblinking eyes will try to find suspicious
patterns in your credit-card and bank data, medical records, the movies
you click for on pay-per-view, passport applications, prescription
purchases, e-mail messages, telephone calls, and anything you've done
that winds up in court records, like divorces. Almost anything you do
will leave a trace for these omnivorous computers, which will now
contain records of your library book withdrawals, your loans and debts,
and whatever you order by mail or on the Web.
As Georgetown University law professor Jonathan Turley pointed
out in the November 17 Los Angeles Times: "For more than 200 years, our
liberties have been protected primarily by practical barriers rather
than constitutional barriers to government abuse. Because of the sheer
size of the nation and its population, the government could not
practically abuse a great number of citizens at any given time. In the
last decade, however, these practical barriers have fallen to
technology."
Once the story of Americans being under constant surveillance
began to have legs, press interest was particularly heightened by the
Defense Department's choice to head this unintended tribute to George
Orwell. Poindexter, as Turley reminded us, "was the master architect
behind the Iran-Contra scandal, the criminal conspiracy to sell arms to
a terrorist nation, Iran, in order to surreptitiously fund an unlawful
clandestine project in Nicaragua."
Poindexter was convicted of lying to Congress and destroying
documents. His sentence was reversed because he had been granted
immunity for testifying in the case. But the evidence against him
stands. So this lawbreaker has been put in charge of a project, paid for
by our tax dollars, to direct all kinds of personal information on all
of us into interconnected computers.
As Richard Cohen wrote in The Washington Post, "Soon, another
computer--this one a behemoth--will reassemble us digitally,
authoritatively, and we will be what it says we are."
In all the media stories I've seen on this creation of a
real-life Big Brother, Poindexter's boss, Donald Rumsfeld, has gotten a
pass from the press in that he escapes mention as the Bush cabinet
member who approved the hiring of Poindexter. And since Rumsfeld is a
hands-on administrator, he must surely know what Poindexter is doing
with his initial $200 million budget.
As usual, George W. Bush, the commander-in-chief of the
Pentagon, has been ignored by the press as the ultimate authorizer of
the Total Information Awareness System--except for one reference.
Queried about Poindexter's Iran-Contra history, Bush said, "Admiral
Poindexter has served our nation very well."
In Orwell's 1984, "the telescreen [at home] received and
transmitted simultaneously," so that the viewer could be seen and heard
by Big Brother. Now under development are advanced forms of interactive
television that will also make this prophecy real.
Meanwhile, on National Public Radio, Larry Abramson reported
that the Office of Information Awareness, which Poindexter heads, is
developing techniques of "face recognition, using CCTV camera systems
that would allow government officials to identify individuals moving in
public space." As we move, we could also be identified by the way we
walk or the sound of our voices.
And in an editorial, The Washington Post added, "If computers
can learn to identify a person through a video camera, then constant
surveillance of society becomes possible too."
Democrat Russell Feingold of Wisconsin--the only member of the
Senate to vote against the USA Patriot Act--urges that the
administration "immediately suspend the Total Information Awareness
program . . . until Congress has conducted a thorough review," and cut
off the funding until then. But why even consider continuing the funding
at any point?
Tell your representatives in Washington what you think.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
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