SEE ALSO:
* Who's watching the watchers? by Derrick Z. Jackson, 11/22/2002
* No more Mr Scrupulous Guy, by John Sutherland, The Guardian, 2/18/02
* The Globalization of Repression: A Special Report to the European
Parliament, Dec 2001
* STOA: An Appraisal Of The Technologies Of Political Control, Sept 1998
"The development of such advanced surveillance and data-mining
techniques has raised new concerns among civil liberties groups in
the United States, and Mr. Poindexter was involved in disputes
about the government's role in computer security during the
1980's.
"`Mr. Poindexter was responsible for several computer policy
mistakes in the computer security realm in the 1980's,' said Marc
Rotenberg, a former counsel with Senate Judiciary Committee, referring
to Mr. Poindexter's policies that shifted control of computer security
to the military. `It took three administrations and both political
parties over a decade to correct those mistakes.'
"As national security adviser, Mr. Poindexter was involved with a
Reagan administration initiative in 1984 known as National Security
Decision Directive, N.S.D.D. 145, which gave intelligence agencies
broad authority to examine computer databases for `sensitive but
unclassified information.'"
"Chief Takes Over New Agency to Thwart Attacks on U.S."
by John Markoff, New York Times, 13 Feb 2002
The following is mirrored from its source at:
http://www.justiceonline.org/webdocs/info_office.html
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John Poindexter to Head New Domestic Espionage Office:
Is The Government Monitoring Our Every Communication Already?
The Partnership for Civil Justice Legal Defense and Education Fund
On February 13, 2002 the Bush Administration quietly announced
that John Poindexter, previously convicted for obstructing
official inquiries and lying to Congress will now head the
Government's newest operation for massive domestic spying, the
Information Awareness Office. Poindexter, and his partner Oliver
North, got their convictions overturned by an appellate court on
the grounds that their testimony before Congress was immunized.
This new office received scant coverage in the U.S. domestic
press, but was highlighted in an article in the U.K.'s Guardian
newspaper entltitled, "No more Mr. Scrupulous Guy: How one of the
two brains behind the Iran-Contra scandal this week became one of
America's most powerful men".
The Information Awareness Office is a component of the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which some
may recognize as the Agency that developed the
government network backbone that became the Internet.
The mission of the Information Awareness Office,
according to the DARPA web site, is to achieve "total
information awareness."
What does total information awareness mean? The Guardian explains,
"Think, Big Brother is Watching You. IAO will supply federal
officials with `instant' analysis on what is being written on
email and said on phones all over the US. Domestic espionage."
For years, the United States' National Security Agency has
maintained a satellite surveillance network called Echelon which
intercepts almost all European satellite, microwave, fax, telex,
cellular, cable and fiber optic (primarily as it emerges to
microwave towers) communications traffic. Echelon scans European
voice and data communications against dictionaries containing all
the names, places, codewords, or subjects that might be of
interest. Messages acquired at any of the listening posts
containing requested keywords are then automatically passed on to
the intelligence organization requesting those keywords. Long
suspected, the existence and capabilities of the Echelon system
was publicly confirmed in a 1997 report issued by the European
Parliament's committee on civil rights. For more information on
Echelon, see http://www.flash.net/~bob001/echelon.htm.
The only way for the Information Awareness Office to achieve its
goal of total information awareness is to deploy Echelon
technology to comprehensively intercept all domestic voice,
Internet, fax, cellular and other communication.
We know of no legal authority that would allow the U.S. government
to engage in wholesale interception and collection of domestic
communications, not even the expansive USA-PATRIOT Act.
Perhaps the Ashcroft Justice Department will assert a claim of
inherent national security authority, and argue that the executive
branch and intelligence agencies are therefore authorized to read
every e-mail and listen to every one of our telephone calls.
In being selected to head up this domestic spying operation, Mr.
Poindexter joins a growing list of recycled Reagan/Bush officials
who had their hands in that administration's contra scandal who
are now finding a home in the George W. Bush administration,
including Otto Reich, Elliott Abrams and John Negroponte.
There are many questions about this operation that the U.S. public
is entitled to have answers to now. If this massive
unconstitutional intrusion is allowed to proceed now with
acquiescence, we will likely learn decades after-the-fact (like
the Europeans) that the U.S. Government has been listening in on
our every communication and spoken thought.
Copyright © 2002 The Partnership for Civil Justice Legal Defense
and Education Fund
Reprinted for Fair Use Only.
See Also:
* Part IV, Chap. 3, United States v. John M. Poindexter, from Final
Report Of The Independent Counsel For Iran/Contra Matters
* Executive Summary and Summary of Prosecutions:
Final Report Of The Independent Counsel For Iran/Contra Matters
* Poindexter: Overview of the Information Awareness Office, DARPATech
2002 Conference, 8/2/02
* Privacy International: 2002 US Big Brother Awards - Lifetime Menace
Award to Admiral John Poindexter, for NSDD-145, "Sensitive but
Unclassified" and the new Office of Information Awareness to spy on
everyone just in case you are a terrorist.
* The Man From Auntie, by Jeff Elkins, LewRockwell.com, 11/19/02
* National Security Archive/White House E-Mail - The Top-Secret Computer
Messages the Reagan/Bush White House Tried to Destroy, edited by Tom
Blanton, 11/22/95
* Iran-Contra: White House e-mail, CNN Interactive
* Echelon: America's Secret Global Surveillance Network, by Patrick S.
Poole, 2000
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/PoindyEar.html (hypertext)
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/PoindyEar.txt (text only)
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/PoindyEar.pdf (print ready)