He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good. Santa Claus? Nope. John Poindexter.

You may remember John Poindexter, the comically named National Security Adviser of the Reagan White House. Poindexter was convicted by a jury in 1990 of five felony counts of lying to Congress about his efforts to sell missiles to axis-of-evil nation Iran to finance Contra rebels in Nicaragua. An appeals court later overturned the convictions because, they said, testimony given under a grant of immunity had tainted his trial.

Had Poindexter been a drug dealer or armed robber, of course, there’d have been an outcry over felons being turned loose on "technicalities." But the Bush II Administration has apparently decided that Poindexter has rehabilitated himself. They’ve tapped Poindexter to head the new project that hopes to give the government what they call TIA. The acronym stands for "Total Information Awareness" and yes, it is as scary as it sounds.

The project is another bright idea from our own home-grown crop of mad scientists at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), those wonderful people who brought us the Internet. According to their website "The DARPA Information Awareness Office (IAO) will imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful for preemption; national security warning; and national security decision making." Now who can argue with that? For that matter, who the heck can understand it?

What it boils down to is, Poindexter and the boffins at the IAO want to use high-powered computer technology to combine "Biometric Data"—facial ID’s, fingerprints, even the way you walk—with what they euphemistically refer to as "transactional data". In plain English, "transactional data" means commercial and business data: credit card records, phone bills, e-mails, you name it. "One of the significant new data sources that needs to be mined to discover and track terrorists is the transaction space," Poindexter blandly asserted in a speech back in August. Among the types of information listed as "transactional data" are "financial, education, travel, medical, veterinary", etc. Yes, that’s right veterinary. They not only want to get into Americans’ medical records, they want access to Fido and Muffin the Cat’s records as well. All of this info, commercial as well as governmental, will be combined into "Automated Virtual Data Repositories" and sifted by supercomputers to find "patterns" that might indicate terrorist activity.

You think I’m just being paranoid, friends? This is from their website. This is the stuff they’re bragging about.

IAO has been given a 200 million dollar startup budget and a nifty new logo: an all-seeing eye on a pyramid turning its unblinking gaze on a globe of the Earth, with the motto "Scientia Est Potentia" -- "knowledge is power." If you can look at that logo without a chill running down your spine, then you’re more trusting of your government than I am. It looks like the kind of symbol the bad guy from a James Bond movie would be sitting beneath, petting his cat. Knowledge is power? No joke. That’s what scares me.

But, you say, these are troubled times. Our leaders need this information to fight the threat of Osama bin Laden and his ilk. All they’re looking for, according to an interview Poindexter recently gave to the Washington Post, are such anomalies as "travel to risky areas, suspicious e-mails, odd fund transfers and improbable medical activity, such as the treatments of anthrax sores."

The problem with "mining" the transaction space" is that it’s not only terrorists that live there. It’s you and me. The wizards of TIA say that all they want to be able to do is develop technology to pull suspicious transactions out of what they call the "background noise". But that "noise" is our lives, and the government will be listening to it.

Let me just ask: would you feel comfortable if this technology was in the hands of a Clinton Administration—like, say, a Hilary Clinton Administration? How about (fill in the name of whatever politician gives you the hives)? Don’t think it could happen? Did you think Bill Clinton could get elected until it happened? Even if you think George Dubbya is the greatest leader since Lincoln, nobody gets to stay President forever. Sooner or later this will fall into what someone would describe as the wrong hands. For my own part, I don’t think there are any right hands for this much power.

John Poindexter insists that "We're just as concerned as the next person with protecting privacy." If that makes you feel better, please return to the second paragraph of this column. Convicted. Lying to Congress. Five counts. Scared enough yet?

Ben Franklin summed it up better than I ever could. He once said "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." There’s no guarantee that DARPA will be able to overcome the daunting technological challenge of sifting through billions of transactions made by millions of Americans. On the other hand, in the words of the old saying, we put a man on the moon. Who’s to say we can’t put John Poindexter’s all-seeing eye into your private life? But why should we allow him to try?

COPYRIGHT 2002 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.