Eclecticism

I don’t have the posts available at the moment to reference (I’m still in the process of resurrecting all my posts from April through August of this year after my webserver crashed), but if you’ve been checking in on me for a bit, you may remember my being up in arms about Operation TIPS. In essence, this was a to be a government-sponsored system for US citizens to snitch on each other, calling on postal workers, utility workers, and anyone who volunteered to “turn in” people they suspected of “suspicious activity”. Ick.

Well, according to Wired news today, one of the upsides to the recently passed ‘Homeland Security Act’ was the nixing of the TIPS program.

A controversial government initiative to recruit Americans to spy on each other in an attempt to prevent terrorist attacks was quietly killed with the passage of the Homeland Security Act.

Caught in a hail of criticism, the Justice Department decided not to engage mail or utility workers in the program. Officials then toned down the TIPS website, deleting references to the one million snoops and excising the exhortation to “Volunteer now!”

In July, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), introduced legislation to ban TIPS (Sec. 880). The bill also prevented the Justice Department from using the Homeland Security Act as a launch pad to create a National ID system (Sec. 1514), and to create a Privacy Officer (Sec. 222).

“Mr. Armey was adamant about keeping those provisions in the bill,” said Richard Diamond, a spokesman for Armey, who recently retired after 18 years in Congress. “He felt the programs were not consistent with free society.”

Kudos to Mr. Armey for standing up for the freedoms of his constituents — I have to wonder of that was doubly galling for Pres. Bush, as Mr. Armey was representing Bush’s home state! A pity he recently retired, but at least he got some good work in before he stepped down.

On the “lose some” side of the equation, however, we’ve still got the Homeland Security Act itself to cope with, full of goodies like provisions allowing ISPs to turn over customer’s e-mail records without a warrant, and of course, Mr. Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness System.

Wheeeeeee.

High school students nationwide may be surprised to know that the Pentagon knows their name, address and phone number.

A provision of a new federal education law requires high schools to hand over the information for recruiting purposes, or risk losing federal funds.

— via Boing Boing

Just freaky. I suppose I can kind of understand that school rosters would be a prime source for recruiting people (though I’d prefer that the government at least waited until people were 18, and just stuck to colleges), but threatening to withold funding if they don’t get the rosters? That’s just ridiculous.

So, over the past few weeks, it’s been announced that Henry Kissinger is heading up the 9/11 inquiry, and John Poindexter is the new head of the Total Information Awareness office. And we’re supposed to accept these announcements as good decisions?

When in office, Henry Kissinger organized massive deceptions of Congress and public opinion. The most notorious case concerned the “secret bombing” of Cambodia and Laos and the unleashing of unconstitutional methods by Nixon and Kissinger to repress dissent from this illegal and atrocious policy. But Sen. Frank Church’s commission of inquiry into the abuses of U.S. intelligence, which focused on illegal assassinations and the subversion of democratic governments overseas, was given incomplete and misleading information by Kissinger, especially on the matter of Chile. Rep. Otis Pike’s parallel inquiry in the House (which brought to light Kissinger’s personal role in the not-insignificant matter of the betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds, among other offenses) was thwarted by Kissinger at every turn, and its eventual findings were classified. In other words, the new “commission” will be chaired by a man with a long, proven record of concealing evidence and of lying to Congress, the press, and the public.

— Slate, “The Latest Kissinger Outrage — Why is a proven liar and wanted man in charge of the 9/11 investigation? (via Antipixel)

Some people are suspicious that the degenerate Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness system will be used to harass and track the activities of people who some significant fraction of society disagree with. They fear a replacement of today’s general tolerance (and official blindness to one’s Bill-of-Rights-protected activities such as speech and association), with specific harassment of those whose names pop up in the database. Such harassment of people who are not reasonably suspected of criminal activity would destroy much of value in our society, such as the presumption of innocence and the “live and let live” philosophy that encourages diversity. Offering dissidents “a death of a thousand cuts” by constantly harassing them and denying them the privileges of ordinary life would be far worse than charging them with a (bogus) crime, which they could clear up merely by demonstrating their innocence in court.

It would be good to have an early public demonstration of just how bad life could become for such targeted citizens. While ratfink’s system is probably not working yet, and a large part of it is classified, much of it can be manually simulated for demonstration purposes. Public records can be manually searched and then posted to the net by people who happen to be looking there for something else. Many Internet public records search sites also exist; try searching for “People finder”. (Matt Smith at matt.smith@sfweekly.com has offered to “publish anything that readers can convincingly claim to have obtained legally”.) Photographs and videos of the target, their house, car, family, and associates, can be made and circulated to demonstrate facial recognition techniques.

— Eyeballing Total Information Awareness (via Aaron Swartz)

I think if I could cringe any more violently, I’d implode.