[Reader-list] On the record

[Harsh Kapoor]

Le Monde Diplomatique
August 2003

On the record

By Ignacio Ramonet

"Big Brother is watching you" George Orwell, 1984

If you were thinking of taking your summer holidays in the United States
this year you might like to know that, under an agreement between the
European Commission and the US federal authorities, items of personal
information will be communicated, without your consent, by the airline
company with which you travel to the US Customs. Even before you board the
plane the US authorities will already know your surname, first name, age,
address, passport number, credit card number, state of health, food
preferences (which could indicate your religion) and your previous travels.


All this information will be fed into a data- processing system known as
CAPPS (computer-assisted passenger pre-screening system) to help identify
suspect people. By checking the identity of every traveller and
cross-checking it with information available from the police, the State
Department, the Department of Justice and the banks, CAPPS will evaluate the
degree of danger passengers pose and will colour-code them accordingly:
green for harmless, yellow for doubtful and red for those to be prevented
from boarding. If the visitor is Muslim, or from the Middle East, a yellow
code will be assigned automatically. The Border Security programme
authorises customs officers to photograph the yellow-coded and take their
fingerprints.

Latin Americans are also being watched. We now know that 65 million
Mexicans, 31 million Colombians and 18 million citizens of Central America
have files on them in the US, without their knowledge. Each file has their
date and place of birth, gender, names of their parents, a physical
description, their marriage status, the number of their passport and their
stated profession. Often the files include confidential information such as
personal addresses, phone numbers, bank account details, car registration
numbers and fingerprints. It seems that the entire population of Latin
America is gradually being put on file by Washington.

James Lee, spokesman for ChoicePoint, the company that buys these files to
re-sell them to the US government, explained the process: "Our whole purpose
in life is to sell data to make the world a safer place.What risks do people
coming into our country represent?" (1). It should be noted that in the US
it is against the law to stockpile personal data. But there is no law
preventing a private company from collecting data on behalf of the US
government. ChoicePoint, with its headquarters near Atlanta, Georgia, is a
familiar name from the recent past. In Florida, during the US presidential
elections in 2000, its subsidiary Database Technologies was hired by the
state to reorganise its electoral lists. The result was that thousands of
Floridians were deprived of their right to vote, which then affected the
result of the election: it was won by George Bush by a mere 537 votes, a
victory that put him into the White House (2).

Foreigners are not the only people subjected to increased surveillance.
Americans themselves are suffering from the current paranoia. New controls,
authorised by the USA Patriot Act, are threatening personal privacy and
secrecy of correspondence. Authorisation is no longer required for telephone
tapping. Inquiring authorities can now access personal information without
needing a search warrant. For example, the FBI is currently asking libraries
to provide them with lists of the books and internet sites consulted by
their members as a way of building "intellectual profiles" of individual
readers (3).

The scariest of all the projects of illegal state surveillance is the one
being created by the Pentagon under the codename Total Information Awareness
(4), a system for total data surveillance that has been entrusted to the
care of Admiral John Poindexter, a man who was sentenced in the 1980s for
having been the instigator of the Iran-Contra affair.

The project proposes collecting an average 40 pages of information on each
of the 6 billion inhabitants of this planet and entering them into a
supercomputer. By processing all available personal data - credit card
payments, media subscriptions, banking activities, phone calls, website
visits, email, police files, insurance details, medical and social security
information - the Pentagon is hoping to establish a tracker profile of every
adult alive.

As in Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report, the US authorities imagine
that this will enable them to prevent crimes before they are committed. John
Petersen, president of the Arlington Institute [which calls itself a
"future-oriented research institute"], claims that there will be less
privacy but more security. "We will be able to anticipate the future, thanks
to the interconnection of all information to do with you. Tomorrow we shall
know everything about you" (5).

One step on from Big Brother.