The 'Privacy' Jihad

[Tyler Durden]

Silly bitch. But then again, she may just be looking for a gig.

Can someone out there slip her name into the do-not-fly registries so we can 
have a new privacy advocate?

Here's the part I love...

>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.

Not just safeguards, but powerful ones at that! Well, now I feel bad about 
losing TIA!

-TD


>From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
>To: cryptography at metzdowd.com, cypherpunks at al-qaeda.net
>Subject: The 'Privacy' Jihad
>Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 07:25:58 -0500
>
><http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB108079540145771406,00.html>
>
>The Wall Street Journal
>
>       April 1, 2004
>
>  COMMENTARY
>
>
>The 'Privacy' Jihad
>
>By HEATHER MAC DONALD
>April 1, 2004; Page A14
>
>
>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.
>
>TIA would have been the most advanced application yet of "data mining," a
>young technology which attempts to make sense of the explosion of data in
>government, scientific and commercial databases. Through complex
>algorithms, the technique can extract patterns or anomalies in data
>collections that a human analyst could not possibly discern. Public health
>authorities have mined medical data to spot the outbreak of infectious
>disease, and credit-card companies have found fraudulent credit-card
>purchases with the method, among other applications.
>
>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. But the most important thing to
>remember about TIA is this: It would have only used data to which the
>government was already legally entitled. It differed from existing
>law-enforcement and intelligence techniques only in degree, not kind.
>Pattern analysis -- the heart of data mining -- is conventional
>crime-solving, whether the suspicious patterns are spotted on a crime pin
>map, on a city street, or in an electronic database.
>
>The computing world watched TIA's demolition and rationally concluded:
>Let's not go there. "People and companies will no longer enter into
>technology research [involving national-security computing] because of the
>privacy debates," says a privacy officer for a major information retrieval
>firm.
>
>But the national-security carnage was just beginning. Next on the block: a
>biometric camera to protect embassies and other critical government
>buildings from terrorist attack; and an artificial intelligence program to
>help battlefield commanders analyze engagements with the enemy. In the
>summer of 2003, New York Times columnists Maureen Dowd and Mr. Safire
>sneered at the programs, portraying them as -- once again -- the personal
>toys of the evil Mr. Poindexter to invade the privacy of innocent
>Americans. The Dowd-Safire depictions of the projects were fantastically
>inaccurate; but Pentagon researchers, already reeling from the
>public-relations disaster of TIA, cancelled both projects without a fight.
>Special forces leaders in Afghanistan and embassies in terror-sponsoring
>states will just have to make do.
>
>The privacy vigilantes now have in their sights an airline-passenger
>screening system and an interstate network to share law-enforcement and
>intelligence information. Both projects could soon go down in flames. As to
>whether that would be in the national interest, readers should ask
>themselves if they would be happy to fly seated next to Mohamed Atta. If
>yes, they needn't worry about the cancellation of the Computer Assisted
>Passenger Prescreening System (known as Capps II). And if they don't care
>whether police can track down a child abductor within minutes of his crime,
>then they shouldn't care about the crippling of the Multistate
>Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, either.
>
>Capps II seeks to verify that an airline passenger is who he says he is and
>has no terrorist ties. To that end, the program would ask passengers to
>supply their name, address, phone number and date of birth upon purchasing
>a plane ticket. A commercial databank would cross-check those four
>identifiers against its own files to see if they match up. Next, Capps II
>would run the passenger's name through anti-terror intelligence files.
>Depending on the results of both checks, the system would assign a risk
>score to air travelers -- acceptable, unknown, or unacceptable.
>
>Privacy zealots have mischaracterized Capps II as a sinister rerun of TIA
>-- which it is not, since it has nothing to do with data mining -- and as a
>plot to trample the privacy rights of Americans. They argue that, by asking
>your name and other minimal identifying information already available on
>the Internet and in countless commercial and government databases, aviation
>officials are conducting a Fourth Amendment "search" of your private
>effects for which they should obtain a warrant based on probable cause that
>you have committed a crime. Such a broad reading of the Constitution is
>groundless, but even were the collecting of publicly available information
>a "search," it is clearly reasonable as a measure to protect airline 
>safety.
>
>Development of Capps II has come to a halt, due to specious privacy
>crusading. Air passengers can only hope that when the next al Qaeda
>operative boards a plane, baggage screeners are having a particularly good
>day, free of the human errors that regularly let weapons on board.
>
>Also under a death sentence: a state-run law-enforcement program called
>"Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange." Known as Matrix, it
>allows police officers to search multiple law-enforcement databases and
>public records in the blink of an eye after a crime has been committed. It
>uses only information that law enforcement can already routinely access:
>its own records on suspects, convicts and sexual offenders, as well as
>publicly available data from county courthouses, telephone directories and
>business filings. Strong protections against abuse are built into the
>system.
>
>Matrix developers had hoped to allow law-enforcement agencies nationwide to
>instantaneously connect the dots about itinerant felons like the D.C.
>snipers. That won't happen, however, thanks to the lies of the privacy
>community. Using the familiar tactic of tying the hated program to TIA and
>data mining, and of invoking Big Brother totalitarianism, the advocates
>have browbeaten nearly two-thirds of the states that had originally joined
>the data-sharing pact into withdrawing from it.
>
>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.
>
>Before the privacy onslaught, scientists and intelligence officials were
>trying to find ways of identifying those fanatics who seek to destroy
>America before they strike again. Now many avenues are closed to them. This
>despite the fact that proposals for assessing risk in such areas as
>aviation do not grow out of an omnivorous desire to "spy on citizens" but
>out of a concrete need to protect people from a clear threat. And since
>9/11, no one's "privacy rights" have been violated by terror pre-emption
>research.
>
>The "privocrats" will rightly tell you that eternal vigilance is the price
>of liberty. Trouble is, they're aiming their vigilance at the wrong target.
>
>Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This is adapted from
>the forthcoming issue of City Journal.
>
>
>--
>-----------------
>R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
>The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
>44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
>"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
>[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
>experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
>

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