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.
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