PATRIOT ACT Agreement Reached

Fang-Face says:

It’s a step in the wrong direction
When Google refused to turn over the search term data Big Bubba demanded, I wrote in a comment on my site that I believed Big Bubba had something it wanted to test, although I had no basis for that belief. Now I do.

The regime of King George the Pathtetic has basically resurrected the TIA program under a new name. It’s still the same old authoritarian spying on private citizens, however. See the article US Plans Massive Data Sweep, by Mark Clayton, from the Christian Science Monitor, and reprinted at CommonDreams. In it, Clayton writes:

ADVISE “looks very much like TIA,” Mr. Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes in an e-mail. “There’s the same emphasis on broad collection and pattern analysis.”

But Mr. Sand, the DHS official, emphasizes that privacy protection would be built-in. “Before a system leaves the department there’s been a privacy review…. That’s our focus.”

Some computer scientists support the concepts behind ADVISE.

“This sort of technology does protect against a real threat,” says Jeffrey Ullman, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. “If a computer suspects me of being a terrorist, but just says maybe an analyst should look at it … well, that’s no big deal. This is the type of thing we need to be willing to do, to give up a certain amount of privacy.”

Others are less sure.

“It isn’t a bad idea, but you have to do it in a way that demonstrates its utility – and with provable privacy protection,” says Latanya Sweeney, founder of the Data Privacy Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University. But since speaking on privacy at the 2004 DHS workshop, she now doubts the department is building privacy into ADVISE. “At this point, ADVISE has no funding for privacy technology.”

She cites a recent request for proposal by the Office of Naval Research on behalf of DHS. Although it doesn’t mention ADVISE by name, the proposal outlines data-technology research that meshes closely with technology cited in ADVISE documents.

Neither the proposal – nor any other she has seen – provides any funding for provable privacy technology, she adds.

The Bush regime is utterly faithless. It has no concern for anything but power and it is for this reason it shits all over the Bill of Rights every time it tries to do anything. I have no doubt this regime will protect its further illegal activities under some provision in USAPA; even if it has to twist and distort its reasoning beyond all rationality. It has established precedent too firmly for me to believe anything else.