YOU ARE BEING MINED

If giving Americans the creeps is the goal, the Pentagon missed nothing when designing a new anti-terrorism surveillance system. The name – Total Information Awareness, or TIA – conjures up an Orwellian eyeball that never sleeps. The head of this project, John Poindexter, is the same John Poindexter who sold President Reagan on the plan to sell arms to Iran illegally, who then lied to Congress about it and, when caught, said he had a duty to lie to the American people. The thumbnail description of TIA is that it will use the vast networking powers of the computer to “mine” huge amounts of information about people, a bone-chilling way to put it.

TIA is Mr. Poindexter’s brainchild, conceived shortly after Sept. 11 and sold to the White House. It already has a $10 million budget and more is on tap for next year. Critics – members of Congress, civil libertarians and other such nuisances – already are being dismissed by the Pentagon’s PR machine as either paranoid or soft on terrorism. Concerns about Mr. Poindexter’s fitness for the job already are being assuaged with the promise that once TIA is up and running he will step aside. Besides, TIA will only create the technology; it will be up to others to decide how to use it.

And what technology it will be. Every transaction, every movement, every thought or notion that can be digitized and fed into a computer will be subject to mining. Credit-card purchases, airline tickets, rental cars, telephone records (including cell phone use), Internet use (including Web habits and e-mail), passport and visa records, bank statements, even the pictures collected by department store security cameras, will be part of these domestic dossiers. Assurances that TIA will not trample on the Fourth Amendment are broken as they are uttered – the very idea of TIA is an unreasonable search.

Congress has much to do when it reconvenes after the holidays. One of the first things it must do is to shut down TIA as an independent, stand-alone Pentagon project. It was, after all, put into motion before President Bush signed on to the idea of creating the Department of Homeland Security. Now that there is such a department, any project to engage in wholesale domestic intelligence gathering – that is, surveillance not directly connected to a specific investigation – must first be subject to vigorous and open debate and any degree of such surveillance must have ongoing, regular congressional oversight.

It is projects like TIA, not law-abiding Americans, that need to be watched.