Heather MacDonald lashes out at "privacy fanatics" opposed to TIA, CAPPS II [priv]

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

This is not an April Fool's joke (I'm serious). We've mentioned Heather 
MacDonald's work on Politech before 
(http://www.politechbot.com/p-03349.html) and she's had these opinions 
for a long time (see http://news.com.com/2100-1029-995229.html and 
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/137dvufs.asp).

MacDonald's column is part of the Bush partisans' attempt to 
rehabilitate these programs by demonizing their critics. It's a shame 
that it's published under the aegis of the Manhattan Institute, which 
does good work in other areas and, I thought, sought to advance the 
principles of limited government and individual liberty.

-Declan

---

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004894


The 'Privacy' Jihad
"Total Information Awareness" falls to total Luddite hysteria.

BY HEATHER MAC DONALD
Thursday, April 1, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

The 9/11 Commission hearings have focused public attention again on the 
intelligence failures leading up to the September attacks. Yet since 
9/11, virtually every proposal to use intelligence more effectively--to 
connect the dots--has been shot down by left- and right-wing 
libertarians as an assault on "privacy." The consequence has been 
devastating: Just when the country should be unleashing its 
technological ingenuity to defend against future attacks, scientists 
stand irresolute, cowed into inaction.

The privacy advocates--who range from liberal groups focused on 
electronic privacy, such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center, 
to traditional conservative libertarians, such as Americans for Tax 
Reform--are fixated on a technique called "data mining." By now, 
however, they have killed enough different programs that their operating 
principle can only be formulated as this: No use of computer data or 
technology anywhere at any time for national defense, if there's the 
slightest possibility that a rogue use of that technology will offend 
someone's sense of privacy. They are pushing intelligence agencies back 
to a pre-9/11 mentality, when the mere potential for a privacy or civil 
liberties controversy trumped security concerns.

The privacy advocates' greatest triumph was shutting down the Defense 
Department's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program. Goaded on by New 
York Times columnist William Safire, the advocates presented the program 
as the diabolical plan of John Poindexter, the former Reagan national 
security adviser and director of Pentagon research, to spy on "every 
public and private act of every American"--in Mr. Safire's words.

The advocates' distortion of TIA was unrelenting. Most egregiously, they 
concealed TIA's purpose: to prevent another attack on American soil by 
uncovering the electronic footprints terrorists leave as they plan and 
rehearse their assaults. Before terrorists strike, they must enter the 
country, receive funds, case their targets, buy supplies, and send phone 
and e-mail messages. Many of those activities will leave a trail in 
electronic databases. TIA researchers hoped that cutting-edge computer 
analysis could find that trail in government intelligence files and, 
possibly, in commercial databases as well...

But according to the "privacy community," data mining was a dangerous, 
unconstitutional technology, and the Bush administration had to be 
stopped from using it for any national-security or law-enforcement 
purpose. By September 2003, the hysteria against TIA had reached a 
fevered pitch and Congress ended the research project entirely, before 
learning the technology's potential and without a single "privacy 
violation" ever having been committed.

The overreaction is stunning. Without question, TIA represented a 
radical leap ahead in both data-mining technology and intelligence 
analysis. Had it used commercial data, it would have given intelligence 
agencies instantaneous access to a volume of information about the 
public that had previously only been available through slower physical 
searches. As with any public or private power, TIA's capabilities could 
have been abused--which is why the Pentagon research team planned to 
build in powerful safeguards to protect individual privacy.

[...]

The bottom line is clear: The privacy battalions oppose not just 
particular technologies, but technological innovation itself. Any effort 
to use computerized information more efficiently will be tarred with the 
predictable buzzwords: "surveillance," "Orwellian," "Poindexter." This 
Luddite approach to counterterrorism could not be more ominous. The 
volume of information in government intelligence files long ago 
overwhelmed the capacity of humans to understand it. Agents miss 
connections between people and events every day. Machine analysis is 
essential in an intelligence tidal wave.

[...]
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