From: Director@KEEPANDBEARARMS.COM (Angel Shamaya)
To: AZRKBA@asu.edu
Subject: You Are a Suspect
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 22:20:57 -0700


I don't usually agree with the NY Times columnist William Safire.
But this time, he's right on the money. ...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You Are a Suspect

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html

WASHINGTON

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
your 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.



--
IRA, CIA, FBI, KILL, TERRORIST,  BOMB, TARGET, TERMINATE, JIHAD,
CEASEFIRE,  ATHEIST, ALLAH, FREEDOM, TRUTH, JUSTICE, MARIJUANA,
POT, COKE, BREW, DOPE, SEX, DRUGS, TNT, C4, CORDITE, GUNPOWDER,
REBELS, OVERTHROW, I love it when the government reads my email.


From atheist  Thu Nov 14 21:57:39 2002
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Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 21:57:30 -0700 (MST)
From: atheist  (LARRY JOHNSON)
Subject: [rdestep136@EARTHLINK.NET: Safire on Government Snooping]
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================= Begin forwarded message =================

From: rdestep136@EARTHLINK.NET (RD)
To: AZRKBA@asu.edu
Subject: Safire on Government Snooping
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 23:19:23 -0700


The following stretches the mission statement of this list, but the
topic and Safire's writing on the subject scares the crap out of me.

Please read this, and copy and paste it to the Demo and Repub
legislators in your states. Include a crisp, clear statement that will
whop 'em up side the head.

Rick



You Are a Suspect

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html

WASHINGTON

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
your 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.



--
IRA, CIA, FBI, KILL, TERRORIST,  BOMB, TARGET, TERMINATE, JIHAD,
CEASEFIRE,  ATHEIST, ALLAH, FREEDOM, TRUTH, JUSTICE, MARIJUANA,
POT, COKE, BREW, DOPE, SEX, DRUGS, TNT, C4, CORDITE, GUNPOWDER,
REBELS, OVERTHROW, I love it when the government reads my email.