[IP] Heather MacDonald lashes out at "privacy fanatics" opposed to TIA, CAPPS II [priv]
Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2004 14:50:28 -0500
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@xxxxxxxx>
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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