Safire on Poindexter

[fable]

I knew of Shrub's appointment of Poindexter as Homeland Tsar, of course. The latter is ideologically immaculate, and morally rotten: his part in the Iran-Contra Affair remains strongly etched in my mind, as well as the fact that he escaped years of certain incarceration because he'd turned Federal witness against Ollie North. (Whom I regard as a cynical fanatic--if such a contradiction can exist inside one person.)

But then a friend sent along this William Safire column to me. What's surprising is that it's Safire, an arch-conservative, and one of the most articulate. But I think you'll agree, you don't have to be conservative or any other kind of ism to appreciate his arguments. Bear in mind, Safire's not talking out of his anal port. He's studied the documents, he's in the Washington loop, and he knows exactly what's going on. Which is scary:


You Are a Suspect
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

ASHINGTON — If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial
sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.

Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in Nicaragua.

A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his testimony. He famously asserted, "The buck stops here," arguing that the White House staff, and not the president, was responsible for fateful decisions that might prove embarrassing.

This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even more scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information Awareness Office" in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet and stealth aircraft technology. Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private act of every American.

Even the hastily passed U.S.A. Patriot Act, which widened the scope of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and weakened 15 privacy laws, raised requirements for the government to report secret eavesdropping to Congress and the courts. But Poindexter's assault on individual privacy rides roughshod over such oversight.

He is determined to break down the wall between commercial snooping and secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral dismisses such necessary differentiation as bureaucratic "stovepiping." And he has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans.

When George W. Bush was running for president, he stood foursquare in defense of each person's medical, financial and communications privacy. But Poindexter, whose contempt for the restraints of oversight drew the Reagan administration into its most serious blunder, is still operating on the presumption that on such a sweeping theft of privacy rights, the buck ends with him and not with the president.

This time, however, he has been seizing power in the open. In the past week John Markoff of The Times, followed by Robert O'Harrow of The Washington Post, have revealed the extent of Poindexter's operation, but editorialists have not grasped its undermining of the Freedom of Information Act.

Political awareness can overcome "Total Information Awareness," the combined force of commercial and government snooping. In a similar overreach, Attorney General Ashcroft tried his Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), but public outrage at the use of gossips and postal workers as snoops caused the House to shoot it down. The Senate should now do the same to this other exploitation of fear.

The Latin motto over Poindexter"s new Pentagon office reads "Scientia Est Potentia" — "knowledge is power." Exactly: the government's infinite knowledge about you is its power over you. "We're just as concerned as the next person with protecting privacy," this brilliant mind blandly assured The Post. A jury found he spoke falsely before.

[Scayde]

Originally posted by fable

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."

GASP.!!!!!!

fable, you know me as a very Rt. wing Rt. winger...this is a chapter out of my worst nightmare. I cannot immagine any conservative John Doe American being comfortable with this. It flies in the very face of the "small government" ideal we hold so dear...an e-mail is on the way to my congressmen as I enter this post. I do not like the idea of being so violated by those I pay to "serve".....

Thank you for bringing this to our attention.......

*beer toast*
Scayde

[Beowulf]

Surely that wouldn't stand up to any kind of reasonably determined legal challenge, even if it did pass?
Or would Bush's men in the Supreme Court let it slide?

[Ambiorix]

Don't know this Safire guy but his critical article against a fellow rightwinger shows we conservatives can sort ourselves out. Now we don't need the lefties for anything anymore.

[fable]

Originally posted by Ambiorix
Don't know this Safire guy but his critical article against a fellow rightwinger shows we conservatives can sort ourselves out. Now we don't need the lefties for anything anymore.

The fact that Poindexter has been protected, coddled, given cushy jobs and is now being promoted to looking into every transaction that you or I do over a twenty year period, when people who achieve one-tenth of what he did serve decades in prison and later social ostracism, would seem to indicate otherwise. Ideologues protect their own, left and right, and that's a very deserving blanket condemnation of both.

[Ambiorix]

You have a point, Fable. But change the words "right" to "left" in this sad story of ideologues protecting their own and I give you Europe. That's where I live.

[fable]

Originally posted by Ambiorix
You have a point, Fable. But change the words "right" to "left" in this sad story of ideologues protecting their own and I give you Europe. That's where I live.

No question. I'm still waiting to see if one day, the Dutch actually bring to trial the politicians whose incompetence led to Srebrenica, and the military who tried covering it up.

[frogus]

My sister got her wallet stolen a little while ago...today a policeman came to take a statement, which he wrote down, and then got her to sign in various places...before he left he turned his paper over. 'What's your maiden name?' he asked. 'What is your job and where do you work? How tall are you?'

[Ambiorix]

Originally posted by fable
No question. I'm still waiting to see if one day, the Dutch actually bring to trial the politicians whose incompetence led to Srebrenica, and the military who tried covering it up.

Us Belgians have a similar story: Rwanda.