Jeb Bush and the Matrix
Many in the blogosphere have discussed Matrix (or "Multi-State Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange"), the Department of Homeland Security's attempt to reach Total Information Awareness via a more innocuous pop title.
But also worth noting was the main player pushing Matrix to the principals in the Administration. From the Washington Post:
One day in January 2003, an entrepeneur from Florida named Hank Asher walked into the Roosevelt Room of the White House to demonstrate a counterterrorism tool he invented after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Soon to be called Matrix, it was a computer program capable of examining records of billions of people in seconds.
Accompanied by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and the state's top police official, Asher showed his creation to Vice President Cheney, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and Tom Ridge, who was about to be sworn in as secretary of the new Department of Homeland Security, according to people at the meeting.
The demonstration startled everyone in the room who had not seen it before. Almost as quickly as questions could be asked, the system generated long reports on a projection screen: names, addresses, driver license photos, links to associates, even ethnicity. At one point, an Asher associate recalled, Ridge turned toward Cheney and nudged him with an elbow, apparently to underscore his amazement at the power of what they were seeing.
The article also notes that Hank Asher, founder of Seisint, the information services company that created Matrix, has a colorful background:
Questions about Asher's past created controversy when the program became public last year. Confidential Florida police documents said he had been involved in drug smuggling in the early 1980s. Asher confirmed that he had limited involvement as a pilot for a few months, but police reports said he was never arrested or charged.
So Iran-Contra figure John Poindexter and his TIA are followed by a project headed by a 1980's drug smuggling pilot from Florida who was never arrested or charged. And Jeb Bush (who himself has a colorful past) is its chief backer.
Couple this with the fact that Jeb Bush was a principal supporter of the Project for the New American Century and you see that voting Dubya out of office is just one small battle in the long struggle of the American people to liberate themselves of the Bush clan -- a struggle that will take at least another decade.
10:23:22 AM 
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