E-Government Privacy and Security in the U.S.

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.