The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State by Shane Harris

Author:Shane Harris [Harris, Shane]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: #genre
ISBN: 9780143118909
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Published: 2010-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

THE UNRAVELING

On November 14, 2002, Bob Popp sat down at his desk, opened his e-mail in-box, and found a string of panicked messages from friends and colleagues. They all asked the same question: “Did you see the following?”

It was Bill Safire’s weekly column in the New York Times. Safire, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and one of the country’s most widely read conservative libertarians, had just gotten wind of Poindexter’s new project. And under the headline “You Are a Suspect,” he sounded an alarm.

“The supersnoop’s dream,” Safire called it. “ ‘ Total Information Awareness’ about every U.S. citizen.” The Pentagon was building “a computerized dossier on your private life,” he wrote, the likes of which battle-worn privacy activists like Safire had never seen. The Times’s John Markoff had first reported about TIA less than a week earlier; he had quoted Marc Rotenberg, who called the system “the perfect storm for civil liberties in America.” The Washington Post followed with a story. But Safire felt that editorial writers had not fully grasped the ramifications of Poindexter’s new undertaking.

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend—all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as “a virtual, centralized grand database.”

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