Trust Me

The changes to FISA that were approved by Congress as it was packing its bags for its August vacation were bad enough. See, e.g., Defending the Framework. Now comes word that the scope may go well beyond what was originally contemplated. As the NYTimes says:

Broad new surveillance powers approved by Congress this month could allow the Bush administration to conduct spy operations that go well beyond wiretapping to include — without court approval — certain types of physical searches on American soil and the collection of Americans’ business records, Democratic Congressional officials and other experts said.

Administration officials acknowledged that they had heard such concerns from Democrats in Congress recently, and that there was a continuing debate over the meaning of the legislative language. But they said the Democrats were simply raising theoretical questions based on a harsh interpretation of the legislation.

They also emphasized that there would be strict rules in place to minimize the extent to which Americans would be caught up in the surveillance.

See, Concerns Raised on Wider Spying Under New Law. Of course, the Bush Administration doesn't quite say that it won't interpret the new law as broadly as civil libertarians worry -- instead it says don't worry about all that, just trust us to do the right thing.

Trust us. Based upon the conduct of Homeland Security with the ADVISE program, trust is the last thing this Administration deserves. As reported in DHS Data Mining Program Suspended After Evading Privacy Review, Audit Finds:

A controversial Homeland Security data mining system called ADVISE that dreamed of searching through trillions of records culled from government, public and private databases analyzed personal information without the required privacy oversight, may cost more than commercially available alternatives and has been suspended until a privacy review has been completed, according to an internal audit.

The Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement program, one of twelve DHS data mining efforts, hit the trifecta of civil libertarians concerns about data mining programs – invasiveness, secrecy and ineffectiveness, according to a recent DHS Inspector General report (.pdf).

DHS hoped the data sifting tool would help analysts "detect, deter, and mitigate threats to our homeland and disseminate timely information to its homeland security partners and the American public." The idea was to build a generic toolset that could find hidden relationships in massive amounts of data and provide the tool to groups working with data sets as divergent as intelligence and newspaper reports to WMD sensor data.

Started in 2003, the program has gotten $42 million in funding through 2007.

But the data-mining program faces a troubled future, due to revelations that its tests did not simply use fake data as the DHS Science and Technology section publicly said they did.

"The pilots used live data, including personally identifiable information, from multiple sources in attempts to identify potential terrorist activity," the report said. (Emphasis added).

And then there was news of the Talon program that was supposedly stopped some time ago -- that wasn't. And the Program just happened to pick up such terrorist activities as perpetrated by anti-war activists and peace groups. According to DOD 'Talon' Database Declawed:

[T]he Pentagon announced that it's canceling a database created to monitor threats to Defense Department installations in the U.S. that ended up compiling lists of citizens engaged in peaceful, constitutionally-protected protest speech.

* * * *

Internal DOD memoranda obtained and disclosed by the ACLU revealed that Talon had ensnared information on over 2,000 American citizens, some for posing little more of a threat than "the possibility" of "some type of vandalism."

Additionally, a recent Pentagon inspector-general report found irregularities and unanswered questions about how Talon purged information on American citizens deemed not to pose a security threat. Notably, DOD announced today that the agency overseeing Talon, known as the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), will "maintain a record copy of the collected data in accordance with intelligence oversight requirements." In other words, CIFA will keep records both of what Talon possesses and what information it deleted, in order to demonstrate that it wasn't covering up for improper or illegal intelligence collection.

I trust you alright. I trust that you will spy and lie.

Tags: Civil Liberties, Law, FISA, Talon, surveillance, spying