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TIA and the Kiwis
Trading our privacy for security - 01.02.2003
By ROGER FRANKLIN - New Zealand Herald
Read this story on the internet, rather than its ink-and-paper version, and the day may not be that far off when, no matter where in the world you log on, an unseen but all-seeing presence in the United States will be looking over your shoulder. George Orwell would have recognised the watcher as Big Brother, but the author of 1984, who died more than half a century ago, didn't know the half of what computers would someday bring. Where Orwell erred was in imagining that the watchers would only be able to peep through keyholes. Even Winston Smith, 1984's doomed hero, enjoyed a blind nook in his flat where he could scratch forbidden thoughts in his journal without alerting the Telescreen that observed every other mundane detail of his drab life. If the Bush Administration's plans to introduce something it calls the Total Information Awareness programme come to pass, however, almost no private place anywhere in the world will be left unscanned. More than all-seeing, the battery of computer scanners the US wants to assemble will be all-knowing. "The current fuss," he told the Weekend Herald late last week, "concerns the ease with which elites, the agents of governments' security apparatus in this case, can gain access - not the access itself. "The information about every one of us is already there, so this is an abstract, artificial debate about the formality of getting a search warrant. If the ideological opponents of surveillance win, those fighting TIA will have achieved a terrible and pyrrhic victory. His solution, which he raised at what must have been a less-than-cordial meeting with Poindexter [...tried to commit suicide rather than testify against his president. He's a man, in other words, who knows his duty rather better than he understands the law] late last year, is panels of citizens chosen by lot and modelled on America's grand jury system. "One hundred of your neighbours with red badges and the right to demand immediate access to Big Brother's activities. Like a grand jury, it would operate behind closed doors - except if cause was found to bring charges into the open of the courtroom."

****Don't hold your breath****

posted by An Old Curmudgeon 6:16 AM