smygo writes:

"Fear is only another form of awareness and awareness is
only a form of love. Total fear is total awareness. Once you
give in to fear completely, it ceases to exist, and all
that's left is awareness. All that's left is love."
--Charles Manson

"George Bush's Big Brother"

Jonathan Turley, LATimes November 17, 2002

Orwell would recognize the plan to monitor citizens using
databases.

In George Orwell's book "1984," the government used
"doublespeak" to change the meaning of words to make the
horrific appear commonplace. Thus the war department was
called the Ministry of Love, and citizens were instructed
that "slavery is freedom."Long thought dead, it now appears that Orwell is busy at
work in the darkest recesses of the Bush administration and
its new Information Awareness Office.

It is a title that is truly a masterpiece of doublespeak.
After all, who could be against greater awareness of
information?

What was not known until last week was what information the
administration is seeking and how it wants to acquire it.
With no public notice or debate, the administration has been
working on the creation of the world's largest computer
system and database, one with the ability to track every
credit card purchase, travel reservation, medical treatment
and common transaction by every citizen in the United
States.

It has been the dream of every petty despot in history: the
ability to track citizens in real time and to reconstruct
their associations and interests.

Welcome to the latest product from the good people at DARPA.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been
working on this project, and the pending homeland security
bill would lay the foundation for the system.

In a little-discussed provision, the bill combines huge
government databases into a single, massive system. It
further weakens protections under the Privacy Act of 1974,
opening the door for DARPA to develop a prototype system.

With a requested $200-million down payment, the "Total
Information Awareness" system could allow the government to
study the purchases and activities of citizens to isolate
people for further investigation, feeding names into the new
massive surveillance system constructed after Sept. 11.

This project is the brainchild of a man who hardly needs a
new technological boost into infamy: retired Vice Adm. and
former National Security Advisor John M. Poindexter.

Poindexter's previous noteworthy public service was as 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.

Along with various other Reagan administration officials,
Poindexter was convicted of five felony counts of lying to
Congress, destroying documents and obstructing Congress in
its investigation. He was sentenced to jail but was saved on
a technicality: a poorly crafted immunity grant by Congress
that required some evidence to be suppressed.

One would think that a convicted felon who escaped by a
technicality hardly would be welcome in the Bush
administration. Yet when asked about Poindexter's prior
criminal conduct, President Bush released a statement that
he believed "Adm. Poindexter has served our nation very
well."

In some ways, Poindexter is the perfect Orwellian figure for
the perfect Orwellian project. As a man convicted of
falsifying and destroying information, he will now be put in
charge of gathering information on every citizen. To add
insult to injury, the citizens will fund the very system
that will reduce their lives to a transparent fishbowl.

What is most astonishing is the utter lack of public debate
over this project.

Over the last year, the public has yielded large tracts of
constitutional territory that had been jealously guarded for
generations. Now we face the ultimate act of acquiescence in
the face of government demands.

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.

This new, untapped power has been an irresistible temptation
for many like Poindexter, who has reportedly been working on
such ideas for years. Soon after Sept. 11, he appeared at
the door of the administration like a J. Edgar Hoover vacuum
salesman, promising a system that could digest huge amounts
of information and produce neatly packaged leads on
suspected citizens.

A government's desire for "Total Information Awareness" of
its citizens is nothing new. Our founders understood that
the quality of government is determined not by the powers
given but by those denied to it. A free society cannot be
maintained under the continual surveillance of its
government.

DARPA has finally brought us to a constitutional Rubicon.
Yet all that is required is for citizens to do nothing.
DARPA will do the rest.

Jonathan Turley is a professor of constitutional law at
George Washington University.