NP? snitch culture algorithms/Vineland echo

[Doug Millison]

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0230/baard.php
"As John Ashcroft's Citizens Corps spy program prepares for its debut next
month, it seems scores of American companies have already become willing
snitches. A few months ago, the Privacy Council surveyed executives from 22
companies in the travel industry-not just airlines but hotels, car rental
services, and travel agencies-and found that 64 percent of respondents had
turned over information to investigators and 59 percent had lowered their
resistance to such demands. In that sampling, conducted with The Boston
Globe, half of the businesses said they hadn't decided if they'd inform
customers of the change, and more than a third said outright that they
wouldn't. Only three said they would go public about the level of their
cooperation with law enforcement.  The final destination of all that data
scares Ponemon and other civil libertarians, defenders of the Fourth
Amendment prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure. onemon, for one,
suggests federal authorities are plugging the information into algorithms,
using the complex formulas to create a picture of general-population trends
that can be contrasted with the lifestyles of known terrorists. If your
habits match, expect further scrutiny at the least.

"I can't reveal my source, but a federal agency involved in espionage
actually did a rating system of almost every citizen in this country,"
Ponemon claims. "It was based on all sorts of information-public sources,
private sources. If people are not opted in"-meaning they haven't chosen to
participate-"one can generally assume that information was gathered through
an illegal system."  After crunching those numbers through the algorithm,
he says, its creators fed in the files of the 9-11 terrorists as a test.
"The model showed 89.7 percent accuracy 'predicting' these people from rest
of population," Ponemon reports. [...]  "I am not a number!" shouted
Patrick McGoohan, star of the British TV show The Prisoner, when he
rejected life in an idyllic village where he was held and constantly
monitored. "I am a free man." Now that this nation is at war with terror,
perhaps you'll remain free as long as your "Potential Terrorist Quotient"
remains low enough. "


"Someplace there would be a real ax, or something just as painful, Jasonic,
blade-to-meat final -- but at the distance she, Flash, and Justin had by
now been brought to, it would all be done with keys on alphanumeric
keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic
presence or absence."  (Vineland, 90)
"