Issue 94, Summer 2004
Remember Total Information Awareness? (Censorship News 88) The Government Accounting Office reports that the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security may be utilizing private data bases, including credit card records and Internet logs, to gain information about ordinary citizens. Another data-mining surveillance program, MATRIX (Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange) allows government officials to search millions of files for “anomalies” that might implicate terrorists, according to an ACLU white paper, The Matrix: Total Information Awareness Reloaded. See www.aclu.org.
Meanwhile, as the government seeks total disclosure about individuals, the Administration is stonewalling about U.S. treatment of Iraqi prisoners. Thousands of pages of documents urgently requested by Congress, including Red Cross warnings, have still not been released.