PRISONPLANET.com NEWS ALERT
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Red Scare 
Dallas County is setting up a surveillance system a Commie would love

Dallas Observer 01/17/03: Jim Schutze  

Original Link: http://www.dallasobserver.com/issues/2003-01-
16/schutze.html/1/index.html  

This is Dallas, a conservative bastion. But the county government is 
setting up a system for spying on private citizens that would have 
turned old Joe Stalin green with envy.  

The county has signed a $40 million contract with a French 
multinational corporation to take over all of its information technology, 
from property tax payments to court files to election records. The 
company, SchlumbergerSema of Paris, is an international pioneer in the 
technology of "smart cards"--chips embedded in plastic ID cards and in 
machinery, even surgically embedded, to enable the minute monitoring 
of individual behavior.  

Schlumberger is one of several companies competing to develop smart 
cards that will marry biometrics with miniprocessors. The goal is a 
chip containing the bearer's photograph, fingerprints, lip kiss prints, 
iris recognition image, even DNA. The chip would exchange information 
about the bearer with reader machines connected to vast national 
databases.  

In a New York press release announcing the agreement, Schlumberger 
promised it would help make Dallas "Homeland Security compliant, 
providing both physical and logical [information] security.  

"For example," the company said, "SchlumbergerSema is creating a 
bio-terrorism tracking system, which will help gather and disseminate 
information for the county. Furthermore, SchlumbergerSema is 
streamlining the county's law enforcement/court system with a new 
system designed by SchlumbergerSema."  

SchlumbergerSema said it would talk to me about its contract but then 
backed out after I breathed the word "privacy." Dallas County officials 
said they would provide a copy of the contract then changed their minds 
after a similar conversation.  

That left me to do some reading on my own about the state-of-the-art 
smart cards and about the federal government's push for "Total 
Information Awareness" as an anti-terrorism tool. Let's play this 
out in simple terms:  

Imagine that two years from now Schlumberger, whose primary business 
is oilfield services, hits a really bad patch financially and finds 
a way to avoid ruin by aggressively marketing some of the data it has 
mined as an IT consultant to companies and governments. Imagine that 
your own longtime employer is on hard times as well. And let's imagine 
that you are four years from retirement and have been diagnosed with a 
very early cancer that is affecting your kidneys.  

Your company decides it needs to deep-six anybody who's going to 
incur major medical expenses any time soon. They drop a nickel in the 
Schlumberger information jukebox, and out pops the fact that you have 
been flushing your toilet a lot between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m.  

They also notice that you've been making cell calls to an oncology 
practice. But the really irritating thing they find is that last year, 
after you were told to vote for the Work, Family and Discipline candidate 
for governor, you voted for that weak- kneed Republican they hate.  

Too weird? Some of it's real right now. The rest is just around the 
corner.  

The Jacksonville, Florida, Electric Authority, called JEA, which serves 
350,000 electric customers and 227,000 water customers in northeast 
Florida, is under contract with Schlumberger to set up wireless metering 
of all residential accounts. The system, under construction as we 
speak, will send in reports on an individual home's electric and water 
consumption every five minutes. An article in City and County magazine 
gushes that "The wireless fixed network will allow engineers and 
planners to take an instant true-load snapshot by house, by area or by 
town."  

Right now they can minutely monitor the load for your whole house. 
Tomorrow they will put chips in every outlet and at each faucet.  

Smile. You're on Candid Camera.  

During the 2001 Super Bowl in the Ybor City district of Tampa, 
Florida, Tampa police tried to use a biometric system based on facial 
characteristics to monitor vast crowds. Computers were to search for 
matches between faces in the crowd and a database of bad people. 
The system didn't work at all, because of problems with lighting and 
anomalies that occur when people change their hairdos or alter their 
facial expressions.  

But they'll get there. How long ago was it that you almost had to stop 
your car at the Tollway so that the machine could read your tag? Now 
you can do it at 70 mph, right?  

When these systems are perfected, you will be asked to expose your 
eye to an iris recognition reader, or to press your fingerprint against 
a pane of glass, or submit a fluid, or perhaps kiss a portrait of your 
corporate leader: When the reader agrees that you are the proper bearer 
of your card, and when the card agrees that it works for the reader, then 
the card and the reader will exchange all sorts of information about you. 
You will not know what they're talking about.  

You could be sitting at the loan officer's desk, and the message on his 
computer screen might be telling him, "...applicant makes late-night cell 
calls to fellow worker of opposite sex; also buys expensive gifts, which 
fellow worker, unbeknownst to sap applicant, returns for cash."  

I spoke to John Hennessey, Dallas County's chief information officer, as 
well as to the administrator for the county Commissioners Court, about 
the scope of the Schlumberger contract in general. I asked specifically 
whether the new arrangement might include some introduction of a 
smart-card identification system for access to county buildings and 
records. Hennessey said the contract with Schlumberger "is flexible 
enough that it [a smart-card system] could be a part of this agreement." 

Much of the thinking about smart cards seems to be aimed at 
universalizing them less through mandatory requirements than through 
incentives. The federal government is exploring the use of smart cards 
for "safe travelers"-- people who agree to be checked out in advance, 
once and for all, and who then will be able to step around long security 
lines by presenting their smart cards. Retailers are beginning to offer 
smart cards as "loyalty cards"--frequent shopper cards--with some sort 
of discount attached.  

It is by no means inconceivable that the county, under Schlumberger's 
tutelage, would require or encourage people seeking access to its 
computer systems to carry smart cards. And there is a hitch to which I 
as a reporter happen to be especially sensitive. I was a reporter before 
PCs existed.  

In the days when records were kept in great big hand-logged ledger 
books, I don't think I ever entered a single South Texas or rural 
Michigan courthouse and asked to see a public record without getting 
grilled.  

"Well, who are you? Are you a lawyer? Do you have some ID? Why do 
you want to see our records? Whose records in particular are you 
looking for?"  

And, of course, I had a right--not as a reporter but as an American 
citizen--to see public records, my records, records I owned as a citizen, 
without telling anybody who I was or what I was doing. That was often 
the point: Two-thirds of getting the goods is in the sneaking up.  

You allow somebody to put a smart card between you and the records, 
those days are over. Count on it. Start checking on a legislator's voting 
record, and his staff will know who you are and which terminal you're on. 

Some people don't care that President Bush's guru in charge of anti-
terrorist data mining, John Poindexter, was convicted in 1990 of lying to 
Congress on behalf of a terrorist state in Iran. I guess this is the 
"nobody's perfect" theory of civil virtue. But in recent months civil 
libertarians from all points of the political spectrum have been pointing 
out that the people attracted to data mining too often are typified by the 
dark figure of Poindexter, a man who never saw a secret he didn't want 
to keep. Or use.   

Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice has been especially eloquent in arguing 
that anxiety over terrorism has coupled with an explosion of technical 
capacity to threaten American liberties as never before. American cities 
from the liberal Northwest to arch-conservative Arizona have been 
forming "Bill of Rights Defense Committees" to resist federal 
encroachments on constitutional rights in the wake of 9/11. As many as 
two dozen cities have passed resolutions directing local officials to 
question or closely examine federal information-gathering techniques 
before cooperating.  

Hentoff not included, most of us in the press probably harp too hard on 
our own right to know while harboring an unattractive disdain for 
everybody else's right not to be known. Somewhere at the far extreme is 
the ugly idea that there is no such thing as true or ultimate privacy. 
Whether it's President Clinton's sex life or Martha Stewart's diary, the 
notion is that someone, acting on some theory, has a right to scour any 
or every individual clean of privacy.  

It almost doesn't matter where that idea resides--in the media, in 
government, in banks, in organized religion, who cares? The idea itself 
is fundamentally totalitarian and inimical to the American way. Privacy 
is liberty. The ability to scrape people bare of their privacy is exactly 
what Joe Stalin wanted all along. Scrape them or kill them, whichever 
comes first.  

County government here is not signing away its trust as custodian of 
our records because people in county government want to see us 
stripped of our liberty. They're doing it because: 1. They haven't thought 
it through; 2. They're typical people older than 25 who have way too 
much faith in computers; and 3. You and I have not told them that we 
care deeply about our privacy.  

But if it were ever going to come, if Big Brother were ever going to slip 
the hood over America's head, it would arrive not as a plot but as a big  
lazy puddling accident. Either way, the hood is dark.

                               -==-

Source: Prison Planet - http://www.prisonplanet.com/news_alert_011703_tia.html

Cheers, Steve..

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