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Act On Total Information Awareness
pberry writes "The EFF Action Center has two new alerts (1, 2) on stopping "Total Information Awareness." TIA is a collection of DARPA-funded initiatives that are very scary.
The project is headed by Admiral John Poindexter and has no implementation guidelines thus far. In other words, it is misguided to say that these tools will be used in any particular way, but it is clear that if they do what they say they will, America could be a very scary place to live."
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Total Information Awareness: Public Hearings Now!
This may sound like science fiction, but Total Information Awareness (TIA) is a *real* threat to your civil liberties. TIA is a Defense Department project that is creating a range of technologies for a surveillance society.
If TIA continues, the government will effectively have wiretaps, dossiers, and tracking devices for every American citizen. Urge Senator Orrin Hatch (likely to be the next Chair of the Judiciary Committee), to hold public hearings!
December 9, 2002
The Honorable Orrin G. Hatch
United States Senate
104 Hart Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Your U.S. representative
Dear Senator Hatch,
I am writing to express my concern regarding the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Total Information Awareness (TIA) project. Senator Dianne Feinstein has asked that you, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, permit either the Technology and Terrorism Subcommittee or the full Judiciary Committee to hold oversight hearings on TIA. I strongly urge you to do so because TIA will, if implemented as planned, destroy our privacy and civil liberties.
TIA proposes several technical thrusts, including an effort to compile and search thousands of public and private databases. Undersecretary of Defense Pete Aldridge has publicly stated that TIA will involve "discovery of connections between transactions -- such as passports; visas; work permits; driver's license; credit card; airline tickets; rental cars; gun purchases; chemical purchases -- and events -- such as arrest or suspicious activities and so forth."
Further, TIA's "Bio-Surveillance" program will collect data from grocery store sales, pharmacy databases, school absentee databases, animal surveillance networks, and veterinarian and health care records. The ability to aggregate commercial and government data on a citizen's purchases, communications, medical records, and relationships may represent a seductive arsenal of weapons for law enforcement, but it also raises the specter of a surveillance society. Moving in this direction would represent a dramatic shift in government policy and gravely threaten our civil rights.
Data mining or "dataveillance" is not the only Orwellian aspect of TIA; it also invests heavily in the development of biometric surveillance technologies like facial, iris, expression, and gait recognition.
In a troubling fit of cynical irony, reliance on biometrics is bad for civil liberties in both imperfect and perfect implementations. If the system makes mistakes, it will falsely identify innocent people. If it is "perfect," I fear that it will usher in an age of ubiquitous surveillance because of its passive nature. Neither scenario is acceptable. A society in which everyone's actions are tracked is not, in principle, free; such a society stands in opposition to the conceptions of freedom that Americans hold most dear.
TIA itself may be several years in the future, but other government data-mining programs like the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II (CAPPS II) are much further along. There have been reports that "watch lists" connected to the existing CAPPS are harming innocent air travelers. I expect that technologies developed in TIA will be tested on the data that will be accessible through CAPPS II.
These programs raise serious legal issues, statutory and constitutional. Never has the question "who watches the watchers?" been more important. This is not a partisan political issue. I urge you to support oversight hearings on TIA. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Your signature will be added from the information you provide below.
Actions to Take
Total Information Awareness: Public Hearings Now!
Total Information Awareness: Tell Congress to Cut TIA Funds!
Liberty is not a concept... Liberty is a way of life!!!
Many people think that Osama bin Laden could not possibly have found support from other Arabs without the anger that comes from the U.S. government supporting the killing of Arabs in Palestine. If you are a U.S. citizen, you should know that you contribute over $900 of your money for every man, woman and child in Israel for the purpose of buying U.S. weapons from U.S. weapons manufacturers, so that they can make more profit. You contribute that amount every year. This policy is bad for Jews, it is bad the Arabs, and it is bad for U.S. citizens. Giving money for weapons to a country involved in a conflict is like throwing gasoline on a fire. There are always people who want to kill others and destroy property; for them it is like an adult video game.
See my article about this: What should be the Response to Violence? The article needs updating, but there are many links to important, well-respected news sources.
If you don't begin taking action now, the hidden forces inside the U.S. government will take over completely.
Keep your data out of the databases. Use cash, ask marketers to remove your name from their lists. Use cash. Use cash. Use cash.
If you've got a "shoppers club" card with your name attached to it. Give it up. Cut it up. Get another one - without your real name and address.
Encrypt your IM traffic with others that are capable. Put SSL on your web server.
Adopt IPv6. Setup IPsec on IPv4/v6 connections. Use SSH (duh!). Get an anonymizer.com account. $30 bones for a year. You can get a 6-month free trial if you sign up as a member of the EFF. $25 bones. You get a sticker. Spend a little more and you get a hat or a T-shirt. Do it.
If you've got flash, watch this.
No need to contribute "useful" data to the databases, right?