Washington Post (reg req): Bahamas Firm Screens Personal Data To Assess Risk. It began as one of the Bush administration’s most ambitious homeland security efforts, a passenger screening program designed to use commercial records, terrorist watch lists and computer software to assess millions of travelers and target those who might pose a threat. The system has cost almost $100 million. But it has not been turned on because it sparked protests from lawmakers and civil liberties advocates, who said it intruded too deeply into the lives of ordinary Americans. The Bush administration put off testing until after the election. Now the choreographer of that program, a former intelligence official named Ben H. Bell III, is taking his ideas to a private company offshore, where he and his colleagues plan to use some of the same concepts, technology and contractors to assess people for risk, outside the reach of U.S. regulators, according to documents and interviews.
This isn’t just about assessing risk. It’s also about making our most personal information available to anyone who wants to see it — and contorting the law in the process.
Getting personal data from quasi-private contractors has been a tactic of choice for the Bush administration and other privacy invaders lately. The fairly weak privacy legislation we now have, dating back several decades, has given rise to this end run on the law. This scheme takes the technique to an entirely new level.
Are you willing to see what’s left of your privacy shredded by government control freaks — who will be joined by corporate purchasers, local authorities and, eventually, anyone with requisite cash? This will be big business, after all.
If you aren’t outraged by what’s going on here, you are a lamb heading to the slaughter.
Posted by: George on October 16, 2004 09:43 AM
Dan…
> a tactic of choice for the Bush administration other privacy invaders <
Here again, it’s not limited is it?
Posted by: George on October 16, 2004 09:45 AM
Last post got hosed.
———-
Dan…
>> a tactic of choice for the Bush administration
Do you know anything about other administrations, either republican or democratic? I know you like to smear the Bushies but I have the feeling it isn’t that limited. Do you know what the Kerry position is or are you just making a presumption it’s better?
>> other privacy invaders
Here again, it’s not limited is it?
Posted by: Dan Gillmor on October 16, 2004 10:03 AM
George, I don’t have any great comfort that Kerry would be significantly better, though he’s said he’d try to roll back pieces of the “Patriot” Act (which he voted for).
I was tough on Clinton’s administration for whacks at privacy and civil liberties, and I’d give Kerry no quarter on this, either. But Bush is in a league of his own. In my lifetime, there has been no government remotely as contemptuous of privacy and liberty as this one, and if he’s reelected he’s going to work to make it immeasurably more invasive. He’s made no secret of this; heck, he’s bragged about it.
Posted by: James Salsman on October 16, 2004 12:17 PM
Why can’t we just adopt the European Community information privacy standards? Isn’t that something that any company operating or doing business in Europe has to do anyway?
P.S. I have an economic table pertaining to some of your recent columns at http://www.bovik.org/jobstable.html
Posted by: Alex on October 17, 2004 05:40 PM
I would say, that this tiny ‘episode’ is just a tiny piece of the “puzzle” – EVERYTHING’s going offshore… and with an ever growing pace, I would admit. Why? Because hi-tech economy is sort of jet-propulsion engine tied with rubber bands on top of obsolete steam engine of political system still carrying coal back and forth over railways. Rubber bands are extended to ‘offshore’ now… some day they will tear up altogether, guys.
Posted by: query on October 16, 2004 08:17 AM
So, electing John Kerry will mean that folks like Ben H. Bell III will be barred forever from
leaving government service to apply information technology expertise in the private sector? Or
will their passports will be taken away as a condition of government service?
Dan is outraged because a private citizen leaves government service?
“We’ll stop the revolving door” said Bill Clinton in 1992 (who also said elect me and “you’ll
get the most ethical Administration in American history”).
It never really works out that way, because (i) Democrat demagoguery and socialist wage leveling
for unionized government officials has prevented for generations the development of a civil
service compensated at fair market value, and (ii) it’s all lies from the Left anyway — they
have no intention of “reforming” the revolving door, they *REVEL* in it.
Propose sweeping reforms of civil service regulations — eliminating most of the hard union
Left concessions that make wages level and firing/discipline non-existent — offer to make
government service a career alternative to the private sector, and maybe we can talk.
The Democrats will never do this because they are heavily funded by big Labor, and government
unions are the only growth sector for their economic interference and corruption.
(Except maybe the hotel sector in San Francisco, where the unions are disrupting the daily
lives of everyone without reasonable restraints).