Sounds more like Big Brother...

"You Are a Suspect"
By WILLIAM SAFIRE - The New York Times


WASHINGTON — If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.

Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in Nicaragua.

A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his testimony. He famously asserted, "The buck stops here," arguing that the White House staff, and not the president, was responsible for fateful decisions that might prove embarrassing.

This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even more scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information Awareness Office" in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet and stealth aircraft technology. Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private act of every American.

Even the hastily passed U.S.A. Patriot Act, which widened the scope of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and weakened 15 privacy laws, raised requirements for the government to report secret eavesdropping to Congress and the courts. But Poindexter's assault on individual privacy rides roughshod over such oversight.

He is determined to break down the wall between commercial snooping and secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral dismisses such necessary differentiation as bureaucratic "stovepiping." And he has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans.

When George W. Bush was running for president, he stood foursquare in defense of each person's medical, financial and communications privacy. But Poindexter, whose contempt for the restraints of oversight drew the Reagan administration into its most serious blunder, is still operating on the presumption that on such a sweeping theft of privacy rights, the buck ends with him and not with the president.

This time, however, he has been seizing power in the open. In the past week John Markoff of The Times, followed by Robert O'Harrow of The Washington Post, have revealed the extent of Poindexter's operation, but editorialists have not grasped its undermining of the Freedom of Information Act.

Political awareness can overcome "Total Information Awareness," the combined force of commercial and government snooping. In a similar overreach, Attorney General Ashcroft tried his Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), but public outrage at the use of gossips and postal workers as snoops caused the House to shoot it down. The Senate should now do the same to this other exploitation of fear.

The Latin motto over Poindexter"s new Pentagon office reads "Scientia Est Potentia" — "knowledge is power." Exactly: the government's infinite knowledge about you is its power over you. "We're just as concerned as the next person with protecting privacy," this brilliant mind blandly assured The Post. A jury found he spoke falsely before.
---@ http://www.nytimes.com/20...ner=GOOGLE
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knock knock, hello America...sorry to wake you but this is slightly important.

Yeah... hope you are all enjoying living in the land of the free and all that Year by year the US is becoming more and more like a police state. Civil liberties disappear every few months and nobody seems to mind.

Oh Great! We are turning into a fascist state!

The thing I hate most is that now soulpower will really lord it over us.

Anyway, here's the first entry for my file Dr. Poindexter:

This is slightly important, thank U MrChristian...Hmmm...how do these same people keep retaining power and influence? Think about it...

We need 2 come 2gether, come 2gether as one

Too many Americans continue to ignore the details of issues like this. Many act like they don't care that freedom is vanishing or show little concern. There aren't enough voices in the media crying out about it or enough citizens up in arms to make an impact. What do you do try to inform others in the hope a change can be made, or continue to sleep with the collective masses?

Is this for real? It wouldn't surprise me, but then it would--I don't think the supreme court would tolerate this.

teller said:

U mean the supreme court that intervened in the 2000 election? Never thought the court had a say in election issues...:hmrph:

We need 2 come 2gether, come 2gether as ONE

KFUNK said:

The Supreme Court is weighed 5-4 in favor of more conservative issues, but i'm not sure they'll let this stand. They've struck down pieces of legislation in the past that restricted freedom of speech, but who knows how long they'll hold on to that principle--and if, by chance, a sitting justice retires, who will they be replaced by in a Republican controlled Congress and White House.
But KFUNK, you're right the American people have spoken, and they've chosen security over the Bill of Rights. Unfortunately, only about 45-60% of eligible voters vote, so people need to get off their ass and out of the house for elections.

Amendment IV to the constitution of the United States:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

teller said:

Of course in times of security...rights can be suspended...but that wouldn't happen in the United States...would it?

We need 2 come 2gether, come 2gether as ONE

You would think by now people would be fed up with the shanitigans of politicians addicted to the power they wield over our lives. I'm still in stock that the American public allow the Republicans to take over the House and Senate. We still haven't learned a damn thing, but yet we complain when Big Brother starts dealing with us as he so pleases. That's because we allow him to do it to us by being afraid of change. Considering this is the most hypocratic nation on the face of the planet its a wonder we still have any freedom at all. But Americans brought this upon themselves!


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