Blackmoor Vituperative

A few pieces over the weekend that are worth reading.

NYT op-ed columnist Frank Rich takes a swipe at competitive sourcing:

Mr. Safavian, a former lobbyist, had a hand in federal spending, first as chief of staff of the General Services Administration and then as the White House’s chief procurement officer, overseeing a kitty of some $300 billion (plus $62 billion designated for Katrina relief). He arrived to help enforce a Bush management initiative called “competitive sourcing.” Simply put, this was a plan to outsource as much of government as possible by forcing federal agencies to compete with private contractors and their K Street lobbyists for huge and lucrative assignments. The initiative’s objective, as the C.E.O. administration officially put it, was to deliver “high-quality services to our citizens at the lowest cost.”

The result was low-quality services at high cost: the creation of a shadow government of private companies rife with both incompetence and corruption. Last week Representative Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who commissioned the first comprehensive study of Bush administration contracting, revealed that the federal procurement spending supervised for a time by Mr. Safavian had increased by $175 billion between 2000 and 2005. (Halliburton contracts alone, unsurprisingly, went up more than 600 percent.) Nearly 40 cents of every dollar in federal discretionary spending now goes to private companies.

George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley in the LAT on the return of TIA:

‘Big Brother’ Bush and connecting the data dots [LAT, 6.24.2006] The Total Information Awareness program was killed in 2003, but its spawn present bigger threats to privacy.

And WP tech columnist Rob Pegoraro on the missing personal data:

We’ve spent years trying to secure our computers against online identity theft, but the clumsiness or incompetence of Big Government and Big Companies is going to leave us unguarded anyway.

(from FCW Insider, The FCW Insider: Some weekend reading)

Future government-issued travel documents may feature embedded computer chips that can be read at a distance of up to 30 feet, a top Homeland Security official said Tuesday, creating what some fear would be a threat to privacy.

Jim Williams, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s US-VISIT program, told a smart card conference here that such tracking chips could be inserted into the new generation of wallet-size identity cards used to ease travel by Americans to Canada and Mexico starting in 2008. Those chips use radio frequency identification technology, or RFID. […]

Williams’ remarks at an industry conference are likely to heighten privacy concerns about RFID technology, which has drawn fire from activists and prompted hearings before the U.S. Congress and the Federal Trade Commission. One California politician has even introduced anti-RFID legislation.

Many of the privacy worries center on whether RFID tags — typically miniscule chips with an antenna a few inches long that can transmit a unique ID number — can be read from afar. If the range is a few inches, the privacy concerns are reduced. But at ranges of 30 feet, the tags could theoretically be read by hidden sensors alongside the road, in the mall or in the hands of criminals hoping to identify someone on the street by his or her ID number.

(from CNet News, New RFID travel cards could pose privacy threat)

Just one more step toward universal surveillance.

I get irritated when I read someone who ought to know better defend universal surveillance. Larry Seltzer on eWeek makes the claim that there is no privacy interest in public places. He draws a comparison between having a camera on every corner and having a police officer on every corner, as if there is no difference. A camera on every streetcorner is vastly different from a police officer on every streetcorner.

1. Police officers can respond to a citizen in need — cameras can’t. Even if every camera is actively monitored by a human being (which is impossible), dispatching assistance to a camera’s location takes as long as responding to any other 911 call.
2. Police officers are not all networked to the same system which stores what each of them sees. Cameras are. There is a HUGE difference between having a single human being aware of what’s on this corner, today, and having that same human being watching this corner, and every corner, every day. No one can be trusted with that level of omniscience. No one.

Universal surveillance is a huge invasion of privacy: that is its sole purpose. “Privacy” does not simply apply to what is done behind closed doors (although there are cameras to record that, as well.). “Privacy” applies equally as much to not having one’s activities tracked and monitored on a continual basis.

Universal surveillance is not a “slippery slope” to Big Brother: it is a pit trap, and Big Brother is waiting at the bottom.