It was a little item in a little article off the front page of the Washington Post this weekend, so perhaps you didn’t notice it.
It’s a confirmation that Total Information Awareness is alive and well in the federal government. Remember Total Information Awareness? It was the military program, run by John Poindexter, with the goal of developing a government database that would track the private lives of every law-abiding American, keeping watch over what we buy, who we call, what we write in our email, where we go online, where we travel within the United States, and so on.
Well, it turns out that an intelligence agency in the military will still be working on Total Information Awareness. The CIFA, which stands for Counterintelligence Field Activity, is a military intelligence agency that has traditionally been active on foreign soil against military enemies. Lately, however, the Bush Administration has been working on legislation, now under consideration by committees in the House and Senate, to give the CIFA the power to engage in criminal investigations and spying on American soil against American citizens.
The thing is that part of the CIFA’s mission is to engage in data mining – gathering bits of information about people from disparate sources. An unclassified government document, the Budget Item Justification for Defense Joint Counterintelligence Program, released in February of last year, it was revealed that the CIFA has been building “the leading edge information technologies and data harvesting and storage capabilities to support tactical, operational, and strategic risk and threat assessments.” That means that CIFA has the mission to gather information on people to determine if they are threats to the United States government. The same document also reveals that the CIFA has already been gathering this kind of information from commercial databases, recommending that the CIFA be given the funds necessary to “Continue to provide support to the CI community in the areas of exploiting commercial data”. Those commercial databases can include your bank records, your internet activities, and even your medical records.
Piece it together now. If the CIFA is given the authority to conduct criminal investigations and espionage within the United States and against American citizens, then Total Information Awareness will soon be fully operational. What’s truly frightening is that this military spying agency would be authorized to share and receive information from other government spy and law enforcement agencies. We already know that the FBI has been building huge files on the lawful activities of anti-war and anti-Bush protesters. If the new legislation passes, the CIFA will be given the power to feed those files into its giant computer database, and then to share information with FBI agents about your personal habits as well. Anything that you do electronically, and many things that you don’t do electronically, would become part of your permanent government record within just a few days of electronic processing.
What’s worse, your member of Congress may end up having no say in the matter. A secretive panel on espionage policy, co-chaired by archconservative retired judge Lawrence Silberman, has recommended to George W. Bush that the expansion of CIFA powers “could be taken by presidential order and Pentagon directive without congressional approval.”
Taking away your freedoms by military proclamation and spying on you under presidential orders appears to be the Republican Party’s new definition of “small government”.
