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A bit in the mouth of Big
Brother
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - In an amendment to an all-purpose
2003 spending bill, US lawmakers this week agreed to
halt development of the Pentagon's Total Information
Awareness (TIA) project for 90 days, during which time
the agency is to prepare a comprehensive report on the
viability, cost and impact of the system on civil
liberties and privacy.
The move is seen as a
sharp defeat for President George W Bush's plans to
construct a powerful new computerized spying system.
"Inclusion of this measure is a major win for privacy
rights in the United States and a significant first step
in the limitation of total information awareness," said
Katie Corrigan, legislative counsel for the American
Civil Liberties Union. "Congress, however, must take
further concrete steps to ensure safety and freedom for
all Americans."
While the congressional move,
which was led by a coalition of lawmakers on both the
political right and left, put the TIA on hold, new
initiatives by the administration have cast a pall over
their victory.
Draft legislation from the
Justice Department, leaked to the Center for Public
Integrity last Friday, has provoked a spate of new
charges that the administration is using its war on
terror to threaten basic freedoms.
The 80-page
draft document, called the Domestic Security Enhancement
Act of 2003, would make it far easier for the government
to withhold information from the public, further ease
curbs on spying and information-sharing by
law-enforcement agencies beyond the 2001 USA Patriot
Act, and give the attorney general the power to strip US
citizenship from any person found to have given
"material support" to a group listed by the Justice
Department as a "terrorist organization".
Besides weakening safeguards against law
enforcement agencies spying on citizens, the Patriot Act
makes it easier for authorities to detain indefinitely
or deport non-citizens. The Justice Department, which
had previously insisted that it was only discussing
possible new measures that would refine the Patriot Act,
has not yet commented on the status of the draft, which
was quietly circulated to Republican leaders in Congress
last month.
"It now seems clear that there is no
civil right - even the precious right of citizenship -
that this administration will not abuse to secure
ever-greater control over American life," wrote Jack
Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School, in Thursday's
Los Angeles Times.
"We are fortunate that these
proposals came to light now," he added. "Otherwise, the
administration probably would have revealed them only
after it began its war with Iraq, when political
opposition would be inhibited by support for our
troops."
The latest developments reflect the
ongoing struggle between civil liberties and new
security requirements that the administration says are
warranted by the unprecedented threats posed by
terrorism aimed against the United States.
It
has already been roundly criticized, both here and
abroad, for its treatment of hundreds of Muslim
prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas
and taken to the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
where they have been denied due-process rights,
including those required under the Geneva Conventions
covering prisoners of war.
Similarly, roundups
of hundreds more mainly South Asian and Arab men
detained incommunicado for weeks and sometimes months in
the weeks that followed the September 11 terrorist
attacks have drawn comparisons to the internment of
Japanese-American families during World War II.
The TIA has been widely viewed as a particularly
ominous development in the administration's
post-September 11 security strategy, not only due to its
ambition, but also because of the man who conceived it,
ret Admiral John Poindexter.
Poindexter, former
president Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, was
convicted of five felony counts of lying to Congress
about the Iran-contra affair of the mid-1980s, although
those convictions were later thrown out by a court that
found Congress had granted him immunity from prosecution
in exchange for his testimony about his role in the
scandal.
The TIA system, whose vastness and
intrusiveness evoked comparisons with the totalitarian
mechanisms described in George Orwell's novel
1984, would have enabled the federal government
to collect commercial, as well as public, information on
law-abiding people - including driving records, tapes
from airport surveillance cameras, high-school
transcripts, book purchases, library and Internet usage,
medical records, phone conversations and e-mail
correspondence.
The system would then sift
through these records in hopes of finding "suspicious
patterns" that would help to identify terrorists and
stop planned attacks. The plan drew sharp opposition
from both left and right, and civil libertarians in both
major parties. The Senate last month voted 100-0 to
adopt the so-called Wyden amendment, named for its main
author Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, to suspend all funding
for the project until it can be far more thoroughly
reviewed.
TIA, whose symbol - Poindexter's own
design - includes the all-seeing eye depicted on the US
dollar bill, has its supporters both in the
law-enforcement community and among conservatives. "The
threat of another horrific attack is simply too grave to
justify prematurely cutting off such a promising
anti-terrorism tool as TIA," according to Paul
Rosenzweig of the Heritage Foundation.
He and a
co-author recently wrote that efforts to depict the
scheme as "an Orwellian monster" threatening basic
constitutional liberties were not grounded in reality.
Some neo-conservatives, such as William Kristol of the
Weekly Standard magazine and chairman of the influential
Project for the New American Century, accused TIA's
critics of being "privacy fanatics".
But more
libertarian thinkers on the right, including another
neo-conservative, The New York Times' columnist William
Safire, warned that the plan was a "supersnoop's dream".
He cited the "blessed stupidity" of Pentagon officials
in appointing Poindexter to head the project as a major
reason for congressional opposition.
To try to
save the program, the Pentagon agreed to appoint two
independent panels to review it, but this was
insufficient to prevent Wyden's bill from prevailing.
Still, civil rights activists say they cannot afford to
rest easy. Michael Posner, director of the New
York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, noted
that the amendment includes a "waiver" that can be
invoked by Bush if he decides the program is "vital" to
national security, and that TIA could still be used to
support military operations outside the United States
and in support of other foreign intelligence agencies
working within the country against non-US citizens.
(Inter Press Service)
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