"Big Brother is watching you" George Orwell, 1984



All this information will be fed into a data- processing
system known as CAPPS (computer-assisted passenger
pre-screening system) to help identify suspect people. By
checking the identity of every traveller and cross-checking
it with information available from the police, the State
Department, the Department of Justice and the banks, CAPPS
will evaluate the degree of danger passengers pose and will
colour-code them accordingly: green for harmless, yellow for
doubtful and red for those to be prevented from boarding. If
the visitor is Muslim, or from the Middle East, a yellow code
will be assigned automatically. The Border Security programme
authorises customs officers to photograph the yellow-coded
and take their fingerprints.

Latin Americans are also being watched. We now know that 65
million Mexicans, 31 million Colombians and 18 million
citizens of Central America have files on them in the US,
without their knowledge. Each file has their date and place
of birth, gender, names of their parents, a physical
description, their marriage status, the number of their
passport and their stated profession. Often the files include
confidential information such as personal addresses, phone
numbers, bank account details, car registration numbers and
fingerprints. It seems that the entire population of Latin
America is gradually being put on file by Washington.

James Lee, spokesman for ChoicePoint, the company that buys
these files to re-sell them to the US government, explained
the process: "Our whole purpose in life is to sell data to
make the world a safer place.What risks do people coming into
our country represent?" (1). It should be noted that in the
US it is against the law to stockpile personal data. But
there is no law preventing a private company from collecting
data on behalf of the US government. ChoicePoint, with its
headquarters near Atlanta, Georgia, is a familiar name from
the recent past. In Florida, during the US presidential
elections in 2000, its subsidiary Database Technologies was
hired by the state to reorganise its electoral lists. The
result was that thousands of Floridians were deprived of
their right to vote, which then affected the result of the
election: it was won by George Bush by a mere 537 votes, a
victory that put him into the White House (2).

Foreigners are not the only people subjected to increased
surveillance. Americans themselves are suffering from the
current paranoia. New controls, authorised by the USA Patriot
Act, are threatening personal privacy and secrecy of
correspondence. Authorisation is no longer required for
telephone tapping. Inquiring authorities can now access
personal information without needing a search warrant. For
example, the FBI is currently asking libraries to provide
them with lists of the books and internet sites consulted by
their members as a way of building "intellectual profiles" of
individual readers (3).

The scariest of all the projects of illegal state
surveillance is the one being created by the Pentagon under
the codename Total Information Awareness (4), a system for
total data surveillance that has been entrusted to the care
of Admiral John Poindexter, a man who was sentenced in the
1980s for having been the instigator of the Iran-Contra
affair.

The project proposes collecting an average 40 pages of
information on each of the 6 billion inhabitants of this
planet and entering them into a supercomputer. By processing
all available personal data - credit card payments, media
subscriptions, banking activities, phone calls, website
visits, email, police files, insurance details, medical and
social security information - the Pentagon is hoping to
establish a tracker profile of every adult alive.

As in Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report, the US
authorities imagine that this will enable them to prevent
crimes before they are committed. John Petersen, president of
the Arlington Institute [which calls itself a
"future-oriented research institute"], claims that there will
be less privacy but more security. "We will be able to
anticipate the future, thanks to the interconnection of all
information to do with you. Tomorrow we shall know everything
about you" (5).

One step on from Big Brother.
________________________________________________________

(1) La Jornada, Mexico, 22 April 2003.

(2) The Guardian, London, 5 May 2003.

(3) The Washington Post, national weekly edition, 21-27 April
2003.

(4) Faced with protests by defenders of personal privacy the
name was changed to Terrorism Information Awareness. See
Armand Mattellart, Histoire de la société de l'information,
La Découverte, Paris, new edition, October 2003.

(5) El País, Madrid, 4 July 2003.



Translated by Ed Emery