A Penguin in the Orchard

TIA

Even the staunchest conservative institutions are in an uproar over this one. In Bush’s backyard - the typically conservative business community - leaders are raising concerns about Total Information Awareness. An editorial in Business Weekly Online today points out the scope of this program’s reach:

The outrage over TIA doesn’t seem to have reached the President’s ear, but it should. It’s not too late for him to realize the folly of such a plan. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the project would combine every American’s bank records, tax filings, driver’s license information, credit-card purchases, medical data, and phone and e-mail records into one giant centralized database. This would then be combed through for evidence of suspicious activity.

The editorial goes on to rip the very idea of this plan.

What these plans, including TIA, have in common is the goal of collecting in a central repository what innocent citizens do, where, and with whom. The war on terrorism is a serious matter. But spying on everybody in an effort to catch a few bad guys is lousy policy — whether it’s a giant new federal agency like the Homeland Security Dept., TIPS, or the TIA database, which in addition to collecting personal data also proposes to use special software attached to high-tech security cameras for monitoring and categorizing the way you walk.

The Bush administration seems to have completely divorced itself from the Constitution - a document that allows this type of government intrusion only when a judge can be convinced that there’s a compelling need. TIA completely separates the issue of suspicion from the issue of privacy. Probable cause be damned. Apparently, everyone is a suspect in the war on terrorism.