Civil libertarians were aghast when news leaked in 2002 of a Pentagon research program designed to give national security officials advance warning of terrorists attacks by analyzing trillions of bytes of computer data in search of tell-tale activities in everyday life.
Known initially as the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the name was subsequently changed to Terrorism Information Awareness in a bid to blunt the explosion of negative publicity occasioned by TIA’s exposure.
People feared civil liberties abuses would inevitably follow giving government security bureaucrats unlimited access to supposedly private information on everybody’s credit card usage, travel reservations, cell-phone number assignments, bank account transactions, and much else.
That’s why changing TIA’s name didn’t help, as the chorus of justified indignation about a government program with such obvious Orweillian possibilities quickly overcame Bush administration claims of potential benefits to be gained in identifying terrorists living among us while preparing the next 9/11.
Congress withdrew its approval of TIA in 2003, and most of the program’s constituent elements were farmed out to assorted black corners of the intelligence community, never to be heard from again.
Or so it was thought. Now we learn that the new age of post-partisan enlightenment brought about by the election of Barack Obama as president is subject to the same temptations to use government power in ways certain to abuse individual privacy and erode civil liberties.
Seems Senators Jay Rockefeller, D-WV, and Olympia Snowe, R-ME, have introduced the Cyber-security Act of 2009 to give the federal government unprecedented new powers to monitor and control the flow of information on the Internet, while tossing aside all privacy laws to access any data about Internet usage needed to counter real and imagined cyber threats to national security.
Call it Son of TIA.
Son of TIA’s disturbing implications rival and even surpass those of TIA. According to the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), it would “give the president unfettered power to shut down Internet traffic in emergencies or disconnect any critical infrastructure system or network on national security grounds.”
Also, according to CDT, “the bill would grant the Commerce Department the ability to override all privacy laws to access any information about Internet usage in connection with a new role in tracking cybersecurity threats…. [and] would also give the government unprecedented control over computer software and Internet services, threatening innovation, freedom and privacy.”
Put otherwise, where TIA allegedly granted government apparatchiks access to anonymous data that could only be linked to individual people if credible evidence of potential criminal conduct was found, Son of TIA gives the president the power to shut down or otherwise control all or part of the Internet
And it is the Internet that since 2001 has become the national economy’s central nervous system, the crucial forum for sharing public policy news and opinion, and the country’s virtual living room for social intercourse and entertainment.
Such unfettered executive branch power would make China’s web censorship look like a bunch of amateurs.
A few alarums have been raised, including articles this week in Mother Jones on the Left, and WorldNetDaily.com and American Thinker.com on the Right. There will be more as word spreads across the Blogosphere and beyond to the mainstream media.
What will be interesting to watch is how the Democratic leadership in Congress responds to the expected avalanche of civil libertarian outrage. Before, the Bush administration tried to defend TIA but withered quickly in the face of uncompromising demands from Democrats for shutting the program down.
But don’t be surprised if those same Democrats and their usual activist allies in the non-profit community take a much more conciliatory approach to Son of TIA, even a willingness to compromise in order to make it palatable.
So much is suggested by CDT senior counsel Greg Nojeim, who told Mother Jones that “we will be working with [Congress] to clarify just what is needed and how to accomplish that.” He is even “hopeful that some of the very broad powers that the bill would confer won’t be included”
Had such “reasonableness” been prevalent in 2002, TIA would today be an intrusive daily reminder that when you give government an inch, it soon takes a mile regardless which party is in power.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk on washingtonexaminer.com.
