THE DISCLOSURE this week of a secret databank operation tracking international financial transactions has caused renewed concerns about civil liberties in the United States. But this program is just the latest in a series of secret surveillance programs, databanks and domestic operations justified as part of the war on terror.
Disclosed individually over the course of the last year, they have become almost routine. Yet, when considered collectively, they present a far more troubling picture, and one that should be vaguely familiar.
Civil liberty-minded citizens may recall the president's plan to create the Total Information Awareness program, a massive databank with the ability to follow citizens in real time by their check-card purchases, bank transactions, medical bills and other electronic means. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, was assigned this task, but after its work was made public, Congress put a stop to it in September 2003 as a danger to privacy and civil liberties.
However, when Congress disbanded the Total Information Awareness program, it did not prohibit further research on such databanks, or even the use of individual databanks.
And, according to a recent study by the National Journal, the Bush administration used that loophole to break the program into smaller parts, transferring some parts to the National Security Agency, classifying the work and renaming parts of it as the Research Development and Experimental Collaboration program.
It was long suspected that Total Information Awareness survived, and the disclosure this week of another massive databank operation has only reinforced that fear. The spawn of DARPA seem to be turning up in secret programs spread throughout agencies.
The administration learned that it could not create a network of databanks in one comprehensive system, but it could achieve the same results by creating smaller systems that could be easily daisy-chained at a later date into the same kind of massive computer bank that Congress thought it had shut down. It is DARPA, albeit with assembly required for the ultimate user.
Consider some of the recent disclosures:
* A domestic surveillance program operated without warrants involving thousands of calls that are isolated by computers at the NSA.
* A massive databank that contains information on hundreds of millions of telephone calls of Americans that is described as the world's largest database.
