Posted on 02/16/2003 1:24:52 AM PST by Ed Straker
Domestic spy agency is a terrible proposal
We have lived with fear of the unknown for a year and a half now. Since 9/11, the unknown terrors that await us have not lessened nor are they likely to as we ready to engage in war.
With all the anxiety, it has not been easy to get across-the-board agreement that a governmental surveillance project, Total Information Awareness - billed as necessary for national security - is a really, really bad idea. A bipartisan Congress, however, has done just that and begun what we hope will be the dismantling of TIA.
TIA, a misdirected project of the Pentagon packaged with the Homeland Security Act last year, it was going to become the end-all program of electronic snooping. This marriage of innumerable public and private information sources was ostensibly going to ensure the federal government had information to thwart future terrorist attacks. Nothing - no personal record, no conversation, no piece of paper of an American citizen - would have been exempt from the purview of this super agency headed by that paragon of virtue, John Poindexter.
Initially it was only a few who sounded the alarm that this program, with such power over U.S. citizens, was too much. Republicans and moderates have since joined the wild-eyed liberal Democrats in expressing enough concern over the scope of the TIA program that a Republican-controlled Congress has finally put a brake on its development by withholding any funding if, within 90 days, the Pentagon doesn't provide a detailed impact report that Congress can accept. TIA already has awarded more then $20 million in contracts to various cyber and research companies to connect existing governmental databases and develop prototypes for new, un-thinkable ones.
It is a House and Senate conference committee amendment to the overall budget bill that sets the 90-day report deadline and reinforces Congress' ultimate and infinite oversight of any part of the program that survives. The Pentagon, in reaction to growing concern about TIA, had set up two committees, one with internal members and one with external, to allay fears of superspying and to remove from Congress the need to have the oversight and accountability function it wanted.
Thank goodness, the bipartisan Congress didn't agree with this attempt to overthrow its authority, nor with the concept of undermining U.S. citizens' privacy rights.
The amendment's passage last week goes to show the concern over erosion of civil liberties wasn't a one party, one extreme ideological viewpoint: Our very liberal and our very conservative elected representatives have joined forces to put a temporary, if not permanent, halt to this sanction of domestic spying.
TIA was a bad idea from the beginning. It created more fears than it could ever sooth.
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