Total Information Awareness: Back to the Future

A lot has been written about John Ashcroft and his religiousity. Lots of people (mostly liberal) have said that his mixing of state affairs with his reverence for Jesus is inappropriate.

But I don't get bothered much by Ashcroft's religion. I think Ashcroft's failure as Attorney General has nothing to do with his religion.

Have you heard of a program called Total Information Awareness (TIA)?

TIA is a Pentagon program designed to build a large-scale counter-terrorism database from lots of different sources, including e-mail, electronic and credit card purchases, airline travel, rental cars, telephone calling cards, gun purchases, and medical records.

Now here's what bothers me about Ashcroft:

The administration's interest in e-mail is a wholly unhealthy precedent, especially given this administration's track record on FBI files and IRS snooping.

Nevertheless, this is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our e-mail diaries, open our ATM records, read our medical records, or translate our international communications.

OK. Still with me? Do you think I'm being alarmist? Do you think the previous 3 italicized paragraphs are coming from the ACLU, or the the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or the Southeastern Legal Foundation (all of whom have been critical of TIA)?

Do you? You would be wrong.

Those italicized words were written in October 1997 by then-Senator John Ashcroft.

At the time, he was making a point about the Clinton administration's views on the Internet and it's proposed regulations and controls.

But today, Attorney General Ashcroft has been curiously quiet on the issue of TIA.

Hey, at the time, he had a point -- TIA would be bad for civil liberties, bad for the Internet and the emerging e-commerce sector and lastly, ineffective in catching terrorists.

Was he wrong then, or wrong now?

As far as TIA helping us "connect the dots": one of our major shortcomings in intelligence pre-9/11 was an over-reliance on technology and an underestimation of the value of human intelligence.

Nope, I'm not impressed with Mr. Ashcroft. I think he is dangerously misguided in his approach to the war on terror at home.

That's why I don't like him. The religion argument is a straw man.