Government spying: it’s gotten so bad, so out of control, that the rich and powerful are complaining about it. Ted Stevens’ wife, Catherine Stevens, was detained over and over because authorities somehow thought she might be singer and Muslim convert Cat Stevens, in drag.
The Washington Post has a great forest-for-the-trees article on an expanded database to watch citizens who have committed no crimes. It’s called TIDE now, an acronym for Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment. That’s right: Datamart. Like K-mart, or Radiomart, or Wal-Mart, or Petsmart — except that this Mart offers data — data that could be about you. The government maintains files on 435,000 people now in just this system, up from 100,000 people in 2003. Once you’re on the list, you’re probably going to stay there: just 31 names were removed in 2005. What goes into the database? Why, just about everything in that spooky-sounding Total Information Awareness system that Congress thought it stopped back in 2002, but really didn’t. Travel plans go into the database. Spending habits go into the database. Gossip and hearsay go into the database. And when your name pops up above a low threshold probability, based on government projections, that you will become a terrorist, your name gets farmed out to federal, state, and local law enforcement, travel, and other officials. And then, like Senator Ted Stevens’ wife Catherine, your life will change as you find yourself questioned, detained, questioned, detained.
Catherine Stevens is having her treatment reviewed. But if you’re not married to a Senator, what will happen to you?
This is what’s called a police state: the authorities at the local level as well as the national level take liberties with your freedom of speech, autonomy and assembly, recording your words, searching your physical and virtual effects, tracking you where you go. You just have to hope that some government statistical package won’t declare you a presumptive future enemy of the state and farm your name out for preemption.
