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TECHNOLOGY BREAKDOWN: See, I Told You So
*After the 9/11 incident, when the Patriot Act was being ramrodded through Congress(there was no real debate, remember), I wrote that the legislation was the most serious threat to American liberty ever conceived in the minds of politicians. Then, as now, those who are blind supporters of the Bush Administration and its “war on terror” argue that those who disagree with their approach to ensuring national security are somehow not patriotic. It is precisely the freedom to disagree and to not only question, but hold accountable those in leadership positions that is a quintessential component of American democracy. Also, then as now, I argued that the Patriot Act, particularly its provisions allowing the government to conduct warrantless interceptions of communications over the internet was reckless and dangerous, given that the then emergence of “voice over internet protocol” or VoIP provided the government with a dangerous loophole facilitating what would otherwise be illegal wiretaps of telephone conversations.
Those fears proved unfounded as details began to emerge late last year that the Bush Administration had embarked on a program of domestic spying, engaging in precisely the form of electronic wiretapping described numerous times in this column. Gen. Michael Hayden, who was only last week confirmed as the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency, was responsible for overseeing the Administration's domestic spying program. As you may already be aware, the program overseen by Gen. Hayden amassed phone call records of tens of millions of Americans using information supplied by Verizon, BellSouth, and AT&T (formerly known as SBC). Statements obtained from people involved with the program under guarantees of anonymity indicate that these companies were working under contract with the government since shortly after the 9/11 incident. According to a USA Today story published on May 11, 2006, these sources were quoted, "It's the largest database ever assembled in the world. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders”.
The three companies involved, AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth, control a vast telecommunications network servicing over 200 million Americans with local an wireless services. Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest refused to cooperate with the government, concerned about the legal implications of handing customer information over to the government without warrants. These revelations seem to confirm the concerns expressed in a American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) report on the buildup and privatization of a “surveillance-industrial complex”. If this seems like, as former New York Yankee Yogi Berra said, “deja-vu all over again”, it should. At the same time that in all likelihood, the government was mining your phone records, there was another big stink involving JetBlue, American, and Delta Airlines' cooperation with another Bush Administration program of Orwellian surveillance then called CAPPS-II, which has been since renamed “Secure Flight” whose publicly stated purpose was to profile airline passengers to prevent terrorists from boarding aircraft, but would ostensibly facilitate government generation of electronic dossiers on the general population.
On Friday (May 26, 2006), the Bush Administration filed papers to asking federal judges to dismiss a pair of lawsuits brought against the National Security Agency (NSA) over the domestic spying program, citing that “it would be impossible to defend the legality of the spying program without disclosing information that would be useful to terrorists”. In a story published on May 28, 2006 by David B. Caruso in the Chicago Sun-Times, Shayana Kadidal, an attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights remarked "The Bush administration is trying to crush a very strong case against domestic spying without any evidence or argument," Kadidal further noted. "Can the president tell the courts which cases they can rule on? If so, the courts will never be able to hold the president accountable for breaking the law."
The bottom line is that technology is available that will very easily allow the kind of police state described by George Orwell in “1984”, and in subsequent works of science fiction since. The fact is, it is no longer science fiction, it is technology reality. It is incumbent on each and every person of voting age to exercise their right to question and hold accountable elected officials and private corporations, whether they are working with the government or not, as to how they leverage technology to collect information on private citizens. You know there is a serious problem when the government has more information on the law abiding citizenry than it does on convicted felons (a fact). In six months, the mid-term elections will be upon us. Candidates will be involved in campaign appearances and town hall meetings to drum up support. That would be a good time to start asking some serious questions.
Russell de Pina is a Principal for n2active, a technology consulting firm located in Houston, TX and Long Beach, CA. Russell can be reached by email at rdepina@n2active.com
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