Post by RS Davis on Dec 13, 2004 12:32:42 GMT -5
AppleJax said:
There is no reason to believe the government would be tracking peaceful citizens. The database would simply be used for crime suspects. A database already exists for people who have already had encounters with the law. I don't expect anything to really change.
There are plenty of reasons. Ever heard of TIA? It's called Total Information Awareness. It even originally had a cute, creepy Orwellian logo, that was changed into a less ominous visage later:
[/img]
The much-discussed original and the new,
less frightening "sanitized" version.[/center]
The first logo is more appropos, though. According to the ACLU:
TIA may be the closest thing to a true "Big Brother" program that has ever been seriously contemplated in the United States. It is based on a vision of pulling together as much information as possible about as many people as possible into an "ultra-large-scale" database, making that information available to government officials, and sorting through it to try to identify terrorists. Since the amount of public and private information on our lives is growing by leaps and bounds every week, a government project that seeks to put all that information together is a radical and frightening thing....
There are five major problems with the concept behind programs like "Total Information Awareness" and CAPS II:
- It would kill privacy in America. Under this program, every aspect of our lives would be catalogued and made available to government officials. Americans have the right to expect that their lives will not become an open book when they have not done, and are not even suspected of doing, anything wrong.
- It harbors a tremendous potential for abuse. The motto of the TIA program is that “knowledge is power,” and in fact the keepers of the TIA database would gain a tremendous amount of power over American citizens. Inevitably, some of them will abuse that power. An example of the kind of abuses that can happen were chronicled in a July 2001 investigation by the Detroit Free Press (and December 2001 followup): the newspaper found that police officers with access to a database for Michigan law enforcement had used it to help their friends or themselves stalk women, threaten motorists, track estranged spouses – even to intimidate political opponents. Experience has shown that when large numbers of Americans challenge the government’s policy (for example in Vietnam), some parts of the government react by conducting surveillance and using it against critics. The unavoidable truth is that a super-database like TIA will lead to super-abuses.
- It is based on virtual dragnets instead of individualized suspicion. TIA would represent a radical departure from the centuries-old Anglo-American tradition that the police conduct surveillance only where there is evidence of involvement in wrongdoing. It would seek to protect us by monitoring everyone for signs of wrongdoing - by instituting a giant dragnet capable of sifting through the personal lives of Americans. It would ruin the very American values that our government is supposed to be protecting.
- It would not be effective. The program is based on highly speculative assumptions about how databases can be tapped to stop terrorism, and there are good reasons to suspect that it would not work at all (see below).
- It fails basic balancing tests. The benefits of this program in stopping terrorism are highly speculative, but the damage that it would do to American freedom is certain.
Our government is on a mission right now to find more ways to watch us, track our movements and purchases, and determine which of us are terrorists. What happens when they start looking for other types of people?
National IDs and databases just serve to make it easier for a centralized power, if malevolent, to do unspeakable things. Imagine how complete our Japanese Internment Camps would have been if FDR had already had a list of every Japanese person and persons of Japanese descent in the country.
Imagine we have another terrorist attack and our government now has the ability to round up every person of Middle Eastern descent, their friends, religious associates, in a matter of days? It's not like we haven't done it before, but we've never been able to do it more efficiently. And it is because of power our people are willingly abrogating to our government.
And this is just one of many possiblities. The best way to keep the government from abusing its power is to limit its power, and we've all but given up on that as a nation.
- Rick
...when he's around
