Posted on 19-8-2003

Enemy Of The People Has Become People Are The Enemy
From IGNACIO RAMONET/ Le Monde Diplomatique, 9/8/03

"In the past no country had had the power to keep its citizens under constant vigilance. Now, the Thought Police, was watching everyone constantly".
George Orwell, 1984

Those who plan to go to US should know that by virtue of an agreement between the European Commission and the federal authorities, the airlines will provide personal information, without their consent, to the US customs. Even before they take the plane, the US authorities will be aware of their name, age, address, passport number and credit cards, health state, food preferences (that may translate their religion), precedent trips, etc.. All these will be provided to a filter called CAPPS (Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening). Controlling the identity of each traveller and comparing it with the information of police services, the State Department, the Secretary of Justice and the banks, CAPPS will value the travellers degree of hazard and will grant him a colour code:

green for the harmless
yellow for doubtful cases
red for those will become unable to climb on the aeroplane.

If the visitor is Moslem or from middle East, automatically he will grant it the suspicious yellow code. And the Security border program authorises the custom agents to take his picture and his fingerprints. Also the Spanish American are in their view. They discovered that 65 million Mexicans, 31 million Colombians, and 18 million Central American are recorded without them knowing it. Each record has date and place of birth, sex, parents identity, physical description, married status, passport number and declared profession. Frequently the records have other confidential information, as personal addresses, telephone numbers, bank accounts, car plates, as fingerprints. This way little by little all Spanish Americans will be labelled in Washington. "The objective is to re-establish a safer world. We have to be informed on the risk that some persons means on coming to our country" James Lee declared, responsible of Choice Point, the corporation that buys those record to be sold to the US administration.

The US law prohibits storing personal information. But they can order a private society to do it for the government. Based near Atlanta, Choice Point is not an unknown corporation.

During the presidential election return of 2000 in Florida, its Database Technologies branch (DBT) received the government order to reorganise the electoral lists. As a result: thousands of people were deprived of their right to vote. This modified the results of the returns, Bush won by only 537 votes. This advantage allowed him to become president. Foreigners are not the only objects of an increasing vigilance. US citizens dont escape from this paranoia. New controls, authorised by the Act Patriot Law again question private life and mail secret. Authorisation is not required for phone listening. The investigators can have access to citizen personal information without searching order.

The FBI requests the libraries to supply the lists of books and internet pages their subscribers consult to be able to trace the "intellectual profile" of each reader. But the most delirious, raving, of all the illegal spy projects is the one elaborated by the Pentagon with the name of Total Information Awareness (TIA), a system of total vigilance of the information, entrusted to General John Poindexter, condemned in the eighties for being the instigator of the Iran-contra affair. The project consist in compiling 40 pages of information on each one of the six thousand million inhabitants of the planet and trust this to a hyper-ordenator. Having all the available personal dates--payment to credit cards, media subscribers, bank movements, phone calls, entries into web pages, emails, police records, insurance companies records, medical records and social security--the Pentagon plans to establish the complete profile of each individual.

Like in Steven Spielberg movie "Minority Report", the authorities believe to be able to prevent crimes even before they are committed. "It will be less private life, but more security" considers John L. Petersen, Arlington Institute President, "we will be able to anticipate the future thanks to the interconnection of all the information concerning everyone. Tomorrow we will know everything about yourselves. Big Brother is out of fashion.