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 material 
is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior 
interest in receiving the included information for research and 
educational purposes.)  

(c) : t r u t h o u t 2002

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SO: Truthout - http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/12.08E.hentoff.orwell.htm


Cheers, Steve..

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