richard
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Big Brother Is Watching
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Dec 30 18:00 UTC 2005 |
Big Brother is Watching. Big Brother knows who you are. George W.
Bush has made Big Brother more powerful than ever before:
Article linked from
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/
How Big Brother Is Watching, Listening and Misusing Information About
You
By TERESA HAMPTON & DOUG THOMPSON
You re on your way to work in the morning and place a call on your
wireless phone. As your call is relayed by the wireless tower, it is
also relayed by another series of towers to a microwave antenna on top
of Mount Weather between Leesburg and Winchester, Virginia and then
beamed to another antenna on top of an office building in Arlington
where it is recorded on a computer hard drive.
The computer also records you phone digital serial number, which is
used to identify you through your wireless company phone bill that the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency already has on record as
part of your permanent file.
A series of sophisticated computer programs listens to your phone
conversation and looks for keywords that suggest suspicious
activity. If it picks up those words, an investigative file is opened
and sent to the Department of Homeland Security.
Congratulations. Big Brother has just identified you as a potential
threat to the security of the United States because you might have
used words like take out (as in taking someone out when you were in
fact talking about ordering takeout for lunch) or D-Day (as in
deadline for some nefarious activity when you were talking about going
to the new World War II Memorial to recognize the 60th anniversary of
D-Day).
If you are lucky, an investigator at DHS will look at the entire
conversation in context and delete the file. Or he or she may keep the
file open even if they realize the use of words was innocent. Or they
may decide you are, indeed, a threat and set up more investigation,
including a wiretap on your home and office phones, around-the-clock
surveillance and much closer looks at your life.
Welcome to America, 2004, where the actions of more than 150 million
citizens are monitored 24/7 by the TIA, the Terrorist Information
Awareness (originally called Total Information Awareness) program of
DARPA, DHS and the Department of Justice.
Although Congress cut off funding for TIA last year, the Bush
Administration ordered the program moved into the Pentagon s black
bag budget, which is neither authorized nor reviewed by the Hill.
DARPA also increased the use of private contractors to get around
privacy laws that would restrict activities by federal employees.
Six months of interviews with security consultants, former DARPA
employees, privacy experts and contractors who worked on the TIA
facility at 3701 Fairfax Drive in Arlington reveal a massive snooping
operation that is capable of gathering in real time vast amounts
of information on the day to day activities of ordinary Americans.
Going on a trip? TIA knows where you are going because your train,
plane or hotel reservations are forwarded automatically to the DARPA
computers. Driving? Every time you use a credit card to purchase gas,
a record of that transaction is sent to TIA which can track your
movements across town or across the country.
Use a computerized transmitter to pay tolls? TIA is notified every
time that transmitter passes through a toll booth. Likewise, that
lunch you paid for with your VISA becomes part of your permanent file,
along with your credit report, medical records, driving record and
even your TV viewing habits.
Subscribers to the DirecTV satellite TV service should know but
probably don t that every pay-per-view movie they order is reported
to TIA as is any program they record using a TIVO recording system.
If they order an adult film from any of DirecTV s three SpiceTV
channels, that information goes to TIA and is, as a matter of policy,
forwarded to the Department of Justice s special task force on
pornography.
We have a police state far beyond anything George Orwell imagined in
his book 1984, says privacy expert Susan Morrissey. The everyday
lives of virtually every American are under scrutiny 24-hours-a-day by
the government.
Paul Hawken, owner of the data information mining company Groxis,
agrees, saying the government is spending more time watching ordinary
Americans than chasing terrorists and the bad news is that they aren t
very good at it.
It s the Three Stooges go to data mining school, Hawken says. Even
worse, DARPA is depending on second-rate companies to provide them
with the technology, which only increases the chances for errors.
One such company is Torch Concepts. DARPA provided the company with
flight information on five million passengers who flew Jet Blue
Airlines in 2002 and 2003. Torch then matched that information with
social security numbers, credit and other personal information in the
TIA databases to build a prototype passenger profiling system.
Jet Blue executives were livid when they learned how their passenger
information, which they must provide the government under the USA
Patriot Act, was used and when it was presented at a technology
conference with the title: Homeland Security Airline Passenger Risk
Assessment.
Privacy Expert Bill Scannell didn t buy Jet Blue s anger.
JetBlue has assaulted the privacy of 5 million of its customers,
said Scannell. Anyone who flew should be aware and very scared that
there is a dossier on them.
But information from TIA will be used the DHS as a major part of the
proposed CAPSII airline passenger monitoring system. That system, when
fully in place, will determine whether or not any American is allowed
to get on an airplane for a flight.
JetBlue requested the report be destroyed and the passenger data be
purged from the TIA computers but TIA refuses to disclose the status
of either the report or the data.
Although exact statistics are classified, security experts say the
U.S. Government has paid out millions of dollars in out-of-court
settlements to Americans who have been wrongly accused, illegally
detained or harassed because of mistakes made by TIA. Those who accept
settlements also have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and won t
discuss their cases.
Hawken refused to do business with DARPA, saying TIA was both
unethical and illegal.
"We got a lot of e-mails from companies even conservative ones
saying, Thank you. Finally someone won t do something for money, " he
adds.
Those who refuse to work with TIA include specialists from the super-
secret National Security Agency in Fort Meade, MD. TIA uses NSA s
technology to listen in on wireless phone calls as well as the
agency s list of key words and phrases to identify potential terrorist
activity.
I know NSA employees who have quit rather than cooperate with DARPA,
Hawken says. NSA s mandate is to track the activities of foreign
enemies of this nation, not Americans.
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