Clark and Acxiom; Or: Why Privacy Is A Myth
****Update: It's always nice when someone shares your opinion. Timothy Noah of Slate addresses the "JetBlue scandal," where JetBlue provided a government contractor with the names, addresses and itineraries of former passengers. The contractor, Torch Concepts, paired this with financial and social security data it had purchased. Like this blogger, Noah points out that the government already has this information so nobody's privacy was actually violated.****
Defending Wesley Clark from the stones and arrows flying in from all directions could prove to be a full-time job. Fortunately most of the arrows are blunted and the stones fall well short of their mark.
One of today's projectiles concerns Clark's work lobbying on behalf of an Arkansas corporation called Acxiom, which maintains a database of legally obtained information that it provides to telemarketers or research groups. Acxiom won a contract from the Pentagon to assist in building a passenger database called CAPPS II that airlines would use to screen for potential terrorists. According to an Acxiom executive and government officials who attended the meetings, Clark was vigilant about insisting that privacy rights be balanced with security needs.
CAPPS II was to be a database of information such as housing stats, telephone numbers, and car ownership. The government can already access most of this information through DMV records (see the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994), state property tax records and phone bills for toll free government numbers, which document the number of every caller, listed or unlisted.
Many people are surprised when they learn about the wealth of publicly available information: extensive property records; birth, marriage, and death certificates; court records. Ever hear of The Smoking Gun? They post legally obtained court records concerning the famous and infamous on-line.
Thanks to the Social Security Administration, the federal government possesses the social security number of every citizen who has one, along with his or her name, birthdate, and latest known address. Based on annual tax filings, the government knows where people work, how much money they make, how many dependents they claim and the social security numbers of those dependents. They know even more about those who itemize, such as where their children attend daycare or whether the person likes to gamble.
In truth, privacy is a myth when it comes to personal information.
The problem isn't the information, available for anyone to find; rather, it's how the government uses it. CAPPS II, now on hold, would cross-reference its database of information with an established terrorist profile and color-code flyers as green (safe), yellow (question), or red (detain). This would eliminate the random security checks of seventy-five year old men with walkers or harried mothers struggling to control two small children.
The CAPPS II program bears some similarity to work done by ClearForest, an Israeli company that specializes in data-mining. The US government has purchased a program from ClearForest that will scan 200 pages per minute, analyzing text and performing 'structural extraction.' According to ClearForest developers, this is an "extraction of entities from the document based on their visual characteristics and relative position in the document layout," which it then translates into XML. The program uses a learning algorithm to hunt for relationships between the various documents. For example, in Israel, the program noted an increase in the number of calls made from homes of suspected Palestinian militants days prior to an attack. Now the program scans phone records for such increases to predict attacks and pinpoint possible attackers.
Everyone wants to be safe. Nobody wants to board a plane only to discover that the person next to them is a hijacker, but nobody wants to be evaluated as a potential terrorist either, which is what programs like CAPPS II do. Under such a program, everyone is evaluated as a possible terrorist and only exonerated if their information fails to match a pre-established terrorist profile. But coincidence can be a kicker sometimes. What if you drive the same kind of car terrorists drive and live in a house similar to one terrorists prefer? The CAPPS II system would flag you as a potential terrorist and cause you to be detained.
On the other hand, the program currently in place is too simplistic and flags people on the basis of name similarity and their presence on a TSA 'no-fly' list. The ACLU has filed suit against the TSA for including anti-war activists and others opposed to Bush administration policies on a second 'no-fly' list that tags such individuals for further investigation before allowing them to fly. The TSA initially denied creating such a list, but now admits its existence although it refuses to disclose any information about the list and acknowledges that nobody actually monitors the list for accuracy.
Following 9/11, Congress voted away citizens' rights and passed the PATRIOT Act, which was ostensibly for fighting terrorism but in reality has often been applied to non-terrorist crimes, like drug trafficking, insider trading, and blackmail. Terrorism prevention was a ruse to convince lawmakers to broaden the government's powers to invade the privacy of its citizens at will with little oversight.
Some may argue that any tool that helps catch any kind of criminal is worthwhile, but it should be acknowledged that not everyone investigated, arrested, charged or even convicted of a crime is guilty. Thanks to advances in DNA technology, many innocent people have been released from our prisons. But what about those cases that do not involve DNA? It is statistically unlikely that false convictions are only made in cases involving DNA.
Clark, as he did while lobbying on behalf of Acxiom, stresses the need to balance citizens' reasonable expectations of privacy against the needs of the government to derail terrorism. He has called for a halt on any effort to expand the Patriot Act and believes the act itself it requires a complete review.
We have to be very careful of the PATRIOT Act. It was passed at a time of enormous perception of threat in this country. It was passed without full legislative analysis and review. It’s been in place, a number of people have been arrested, a number of people have been deported. I think the PATRIOT Act needs a good, open air, public review, in the sunshine, before we retain it or modify it, or add to it.
...one of the risks you have in this operation is that you’re giving up some of the essentials of what it is in America to have justice, liberty and the rule of law. I think you’ve got to be very, very careful when you abridge those rights to prosecute the war on terrorists.
The problem with efforts like the PATRIOT Act, the TSA lists and the new "Victory Act" bill, which among other things allows prosecutors to obtain records through administrative subpoenas, is that they insulate themselves with secrecy provisions that thwart oversight. Administrative subpoenas would completely remove judicial oversight, allowing prosecutors to subpoena anyone's records for any reason they chose. Without judicial oversight, there would be no way to determine whether administrative subpoena power was being misapplied and no way for someone to find out whether his or her records had been requested.
This is a "dangerous piece of legislation," as presidential candidate Howard Dean said in response to Bush's urged support for the measure. Any program, no matter how well-intentioned, is not acceptable if it allows the government to conduct its actions in secrecy. The power of invisibility invites temptations of the worst kind.
Clark's involvement with Acxiom is a non-issue, like many other non-issues the media seems to be pursuing. The problem isn't Acxiom, which is merely another company taking advantage of capitalism and angling for a lucrative contract. The problem is the CAPPS II program created by the government, and not because it violates privacy. Again, the information is already out there and was never private to begin with. Nobody broke the law to obtain it. The concern is that the program is not foolproof, and innocent people will be scrutinized, which already occurs under the system in place. CAPPS II could only be an improvement over the current system if it is subjected to proper protocols of oversight and scrutiny to prevent abuse.
