Everyone seems to be
up in arms these days about privacy and security from our own government.
Unfortunately, the business of intelligence has been around for hundreds of
years and most countries have less stringent requirements for reporting than
the United States does. The idea of having the citizenry be knowledgeable of
its agents operations through transparency of government is a noble idea, but
when that information is available to the citizens, it is also available to
their enemies. The United States must strike a balance between knowledge and
privileged information, one that does not infringe upon our constitutional
rights, and still provides intelligence analysts an avenue to adequately
complete their jobs.
In 2002, DARPA was
developing the Total Information Awareness Project (TIA) and later renamed the
Terrorism Awareness Project is the collection and analysis of online personal
information, including emails, travel, health records, purchases, education, and
e-commerce. The program utilizes a web crawler to compile this information on
each individual, in effect creating a digital version of every citizen. To make
matters worse, it was headed by John Poindexter of the Iran-Contra scandal and
confidence in President Bush's privacy commitment was fairly low. Fortunately,
the CATO Institute and other civil liberties organizations reported that TIA
has significant civil liberties implications, would hamper e-commerce with
people unwilling to have their data tracked, and poses a significant securities
threat with all this data housed in one system. This type of data collection
also goes against our current justice system which requires warrants for
specific data, and the data must not have been already collected prior to the
issuance of a warrant. The TIA was supposedly shut down in 2003 when it was
defunded by the Senate as an integrated program, but continued with their data
collection through the use of the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information
Exchange (MATRIX) until that was shut down in 2005. The government continues to
collect information from their data mining efforts, they now just operate
on a more secretive basis and collect information from private industry.
Private industry has also utilized data mining in what some textbooks calls a
rudimentary form of the TIA. These programs (Accurint, TLO, Acxiom, etc) are
used commercially and by police departments to find people, assets, and
associates.
While I feel that
the scale of what the federal government has been doing with their information
collection is outside the scope of the constitution, I can appreciate the
usefulness of commercially available products available for government
operations. TLO and Accurint are products that I use on a daily basis as a
peace officer to collect information regarding potential new recruits,
suspects, victims, witnesses, and reporting parties. Obviously most of the time
we are trying to find contact information, but it is also a useful tool to
determine other aspects of a person's life as well. No matter the origin of
information that comes into our possession, it is our duty as ambassadors of
government to guard that information carefully and treat it with the respect of
the constitution.
With regard to the
whistleblowing of Edward Snowden on the NSA's most resent surveillance
practices, many new agencies are reporting in favor of Snowden's revelations
and a few are siding with government officials with their charges of espionage.
Most people are equating the actions of the government and the reactions of the
Obama Administration to totalitarian rule, some are even calling it Orwellian
and Facist. I have even seen the government referred to as making the same
mistakes as the Nazis, only this time we should know better. Governments have
always pushed the envelope with regards to surveillance and control versus
privacy, and most citizens are not aware of everything that is being
surveilled. Even those who make an attempt to be "off the grid" do
not truly have privacy from the government. I also do not think this is limited
to the United States. Privacy rights and government surveillance is something
that every country must deal with and attempt to strike a balance. Especially with
regard to electronic information, policies will always lag behind technology
and it is imperative that information is safeguarded to ensure the privacy of a
country's citizenry.
