Fergie's Tech Blog

Privacy Tech: Bush's Data Strip-Mining Plans

John Prado writes on TomPaine.com:

Nothing seems to prevent the Bush administration from demanding more and more of our personal information. They observe few moral or constitutional barriers. There’s no evidence that all this information increases our security, but that doesn’t slow them down. They just keep coming.

For instance, Alberto Gonzales’ Department of Justice, in little-noticed moves, has proposed to amend a 1994 law governing how the communications industry helps law enforcement to require Internet companies to design their applications so as to be wiretap-friendly . And in June 2006 Justice further proposed the companies be required to retain and store everyone’s Internet transaction records for the feds to pore over. Most recently, the Department of Homeland Security, after efforts to create a massive database on airline passengers not only encountered technical difficulties but were prohibited by Congress, revealed they simply modified a counter-narcotics program to the same end.

With typical cynicism, the Bush administration has continually immersed its initiatives in a web of secrecy, and congressional allies have further muddied the waters. Many remember the Bush fiasco of a few years ago, appointing Reagan-era Iran-Contra figure John Poindexter to head a Total Information Awareness Program that was going to sort through masses of detail gathered from all sources—thus including files on every American—to find terrorists.

posted by Fergie @ 12/20/2006 05:53:00 PM