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Pentagon database is step toward police state, Libertarians say
Total Information Awareness is a massive public surveillance system under development by the Pentagon. "Total Information Awareness" could help lay the framework for a police state in America and should be halted immediately, Libertarians say. This is Big Brother on steroids. The government of a free country shouldn�t want surveillance powers like these. The goal of the program, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is to construct a �virtual, centralized, grand database� containing every Americans� electronic transactions, such as credit card purchases, bank and medical records, travel data, e-mails and phone calls.

That information is to be linked with biometric data such as face recognition technology and digital fingerprints, and provided instantly to law enforcement to detect patterns of terrorist activity, the government says. Spearheading the initiative is former Navy Rear Adm. John Poindexter, a Reagan administration official who was implicated in the illegal sale of arms to the Nicaraguan Contras. As the anti-privacy aspects of the project have become clear, civil liberties groups and editorial pages around the USA have urged Congress to torpedo the program.

Unless this Orwellian project is dismantled, innocent Americans will suffer under the kind of high-tech, 24-hour surveillance that the Stasi and the KGB would have envied. Like most counterterrorism measures, Total Information Awareness is based on a myth, Libertarians say � the myth that the only way to prevent terrorism is to erode Americans� freedom.

posted by Hal 7:41 PM