This is not an April Fool's joke (I'm serious). We've mentioned Heather
MacDonald's work on Politech before
(http://www.politechbot.com/p-03349.html) and she's had these opinions
for a long time (see http://news.com.com/2100-1029-995229.html and
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/137dvufs.asp).
MacDonald's column is part of the Bush partisans' attempt to
rehabilitate these programs by demonizing their critics. It's a shame
that it's published under the aegis of the Manhattan Institute, which
does good work in other areas and, I thought, sought to advance the
principles of limited government and individual liberty.
-Declan
---
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004894
The 'Privacy' Jihad
"Total Information Awareness" falls to total Luddite hysteria.
BY HEATHER MAC DONALD
Thursday, April 1, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
The 9/11 Commission hearings have focused public attention again on the
intelligence failures leading up to the September attacks. Yet since
9/11, virtually every proposal to use intelligence more effectively--to
connect the dots--has been shot down by left- and right-wing
libertarians as an assault on "privacy." The consequence has been
devastating: Just when the country should be unleashing its
technological ingenuity to defend against future attacks, scientists
stand irresolute, cowed into inaction.
The privacy advocates--who range from liberal groups focused on
electronic privacy, such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center,
to traditional conservative libertarians, such as Americans for Tax
Reform--are fixated on a technique called "data mining." By now,
however, they have killed enough different programs that their operating
principle can only be formulated as this: No use of computer data or
technology anywhere at any time for national defense, if there's the
slightest possibility that a rogue use of that technology will offend
someone's sense of privacy. They are pushing intelligence agencies back
to a pre-9/11 mentality, when the mere potential for a privacy or civil
liberties controversy trumped security concerns.
The privacy advocates' greatest triumph was shutting down the Defense
Department's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program. Goaded on by New
York Times columnist William Safire, the advocates presented the program
as the diabolical plan of John Poindexter, the former Reagan national
security adviser and director of Pentagon research, to spy on "every
public and private act of every American"--in Mr. Safire's words.
The advocates' distortion of TIA was unrelenting. Most egregiously, they
concealed TIA's purpose: to prevent another attack on American soil by
uncovering the electronic footprints terrorists leave as they plan and
rehearse their assaults. Before terrorists strike, they must enter the
country, receive funds, case their targets, buy supplies, and send phone
and e-mail messages. Many of those activities will leave a trail in
electronic databases. TIA researchers hoped that cutting-edge computer
analysis could find that trail in government intelligence files and,
possibly, in commercial databases as well...
But according to the "privacy community," data mining was a dangerous,
unconstitutional technology, and the Bush administration had to be
stopped from using it for any national-security or law-enforcement
purpose. By September 2003, the hysteria against TIA had reached a
fevered pitch and Congress ended the research project entirely, before
learning the technology's potential and without a single "privacy
violation" ever having been committed.
The overreaction is stunning. Without question, TIA represented a
radical leap ahead in both data-mining technology and intelligence
analysis. Had it used commercial data, it would have given intelligence
agencies instantaneous access to a volume of information about the
public that had previously only been available through slower physical
searches. As with any public or private power, TIA's capabilities could
have been abused--which is why the Pentagon research team planned to
build in powerful safeguards to protect individual privacy.
[...]
The bottom line is clear: The privacy battalions oppose not just
particular technologies, but technological innovation itself. Any effort
to use computerized information more efficiently will be tarred with the
predictable buzzwords: "surveillance," "Orwellian," "Poindexter." This
Luddite approach to counterterrorism could not be more ominous. The
volume of information in government intelligence files long ago
overwhelmed the capacity of humans to understand it. Agents miss
connections between people and events every day. Machine analysis is
essential in an intelligence tidal wave.
[...]
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