Talk Radio News Service: News, Politics, Media

By Ellen Ratner
Three things converged this week to give any American pause, or more precisely, a scare. The New York Times revealed that, ''The Pentagon has been using a little known power to obtain banking and credit records of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage . . . '' Earlier in the week Charles Stimson, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, said on a radio show that businesses should boycott law firms that have lawyers representing Guantanamo Bay prisoners pro bono. Third, President Bush put in writing that the government may open mail of people who the government may find suspicious.

To be fair, the Pentagon disavowed Deputy Assistant Stimson's remarks, but did not go so far as to remove him from his job. Deputy assistant secretaries do not need Senate confirmation. They are appointed by the administration and are often there to carry out the political will of the administration in charge. This disavowing could be, as they say in the spy business, "plausible denial," on the part of the higher ups in the Pentagon.

The Pentagon isn't a fan of the lawyers representing the uncharged men in the custody of the United States at Guantanamo Bay. There has been well-placed suspicion that the reason the Pentagon did not seek warrants from the special FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court is that they did not want to admit they were attempting to get information about the lawyers defending the Guantanamo prisoners. So, while the Pentagon says Mr. Stimson was wrong, he has served to act as chaff, or a decoy for the practices of the Pentagon and other government agencies.

The conservative talk media says America shouldn't be worried about the shredding of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. They explain how important the information is that the government is illegally collecting, and how it is aggregated without identifying specific people, and how we are fighting a ''war on terror'' in a new world that demands that we fight with at least the same tools the terrorists have. Congressional hearings on data mining this week challenge this viewpoint. Several witnesses from various political backgrounds and viewpoints said that data mining is not effective. Leslie Harris from the Center for Democracy and Technology said, ''There is little evidence of the efficacy of ... data mining in the antiterrorism context and that the sample of known terrorists whose behavior can be studied is statistically insignificant to identify an unusual or unique pattern of behavior.'' Other witnesses discussed the false positive rate and what that would mean for individual citizens without the recourse to get their status changed. Jim Harper of the libertarian Cato Institute said that consumer data mining companies see the government as a lucrative customer. Big business always seems to be the greatest beneficiary in the war on terror.

What is most disturbing is the flouting of the law by both the CIA and the Defense Department. Neither agency has the legal authority to spy on American citizens without warrants issued by a legitimate court. Citizens who elect our government don't even know the extent of the data mining or other government surveillance of individual citizens or groups. The existence of this wholesale spying and data collection of phone bills, credit card expenses and the like would have never been known if brave individuals did not leak this information.

The arguments by supporters of these practices say, ''I haven't done anything illegal so I don't care.'' Communist party members made these same arguments behind the ''Iron Curtain.'' Only in the light of recent history are citizens of Poland and East Germany finding out that their neighbors reported on their activities and sometimes incorrectly for their own purposes. No, we are probably not at this point having neighbor spy on neighbor, but what if the collected information is incorrect? How many times have we found incorrect information on a credit report or phone calls charged that we did not make?

For everyone who says that we should just trust the government, I wonder if they will say the same thing when the next President takes office. The underlying premise of our Constitution is that government is not to be trusted. Our Founding Fathers had it right.