Pynchon, PATRIOT Act, Total Information Awareness

[pynchonoid]

Thanks to Pentagon "black bag" funding, the Total
Information Awareness Program continues its Big
Brother snooping: 

"[...]When the woman in line deposited her paycheck at
the Bank of America branch, a record of that deposit
showed up immediately in the computer databanks in the
office across the street, just as financial, travel
and other personal transactions of virtually every
American do millions of time every minute," reports
Capitol Hill Blue. 

Lt. Col. Doug Dyer, a program manager for DARPA,
defends TIA as a necessary sacrifice in the war on
terrorism.

"Americans must trade some privacy for security," he
says. “Three thousand people died on 9/11. When you
consider the potential effect of a terrorist attack
against the privacy of an entire population, there has
to be some trade-off.”

The trade off means virtually every financial
transaction of every American is now recorded and
monitored by the federal government. Any bank
transaction, all credit card charges plus phone
records, credit reports, travel and even health
records are captured in real time by the DARPA
computers.


"Basically, TIA builds a profile of every American who
has a bank account, uses credit cards and has a credit
record," says security expert Allen Banks. "The
profile establishes norms based on the person’s
spending and travel habits. Then the system looks for
patterns that break from the norms, such of purchases
of materials that are considered likely for terrorist
activity, travel to specific areas or a change in
spending habits."

Patterns that fit pre-defined criteria result in an
investigative alert and the individual becomes a
"person of interest" who is referred to the Department
of Justice and Department of Homeland Security, Banks
says.

Such data mining is also called "database profiling"
and is prohibited under Fourth Amendment’s guarantee
against invasion of privacy says Barry Steinhardt,
director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the
American Civil Liberties Union.

Steinhardt points out the information is already being
used to create "no fly" lists of people who are
thought to be a danger but that safeguards are not in
place to insure the accuracy of the information. [...]

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_4648.shtml

Pynchon saw it coming: 

"The other day in the street I heard a policeman in a
police car, requesting over his loudspeaker that a
civilian car blocking his way move aside and let him
past, all the while addressing the drive of the car
personally, by name. I was amazed at this, though
people I tried to share it with only shrugged,
assuming that of course the driver's name (along with
height, weight and date of birth) had been obtained
from the Motor Vehicle Department via satellite, as
soon as the offending car's license number had been
tapped into the terminal -- so what? [...] The
question had only begun to arise of how to avoid, or,
preferably, escape altogether, the threat, indeed
promise, of control without mercy that lay in wait
down the comely vistas of freedom that computer-folk
were imagining then -- a question we are still
asking." 
--Thomas Pynchon, Introduction to Jim Dodge's Stone
Junction 




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http://pynchonoid.org/


	
		
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