Uncle Sam as Peeping Tom

The Bush administration says analyzing large databases of known and suspected terrorists and organizations has enabled it to foil plots against Americans since Sept. 11. Last fall, Congress helped that national security effort along by passing legislation to create the Terrorist Identification Classification System, a shared database meant to encourage bickering agencies such as the CIA and the FBI to cooperate on information-sharing.

Recently, however, the administration has been quietly working on a much more ambitious surveillance scheme that goes beyond legitimate policing to searches as indiscriminate as drift-net fishing. The spookily named Total Information Awareness (TIA) program would use the Internet to search bank statements, telephone bills and other personal records.

Last week, a House-Senate conference committee unanimously passed an amendment by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to temporarily suspend funding for the TIA program. Legislators recognized that the program was on its way to trampling privacy rights. Their job, however, is far from over: The program’s director, retired Adm. John M. Poindexter, seems determined to move it forward with or without new funding.

Remember Poindexter? In 1990, a jury convicted the former Reagan aide on five felony counts of misleading Congress and making false statements to obscure his role in selling missiles in Iran to pay ransom for hostages and then using illicit proceeds to illegally support U.S-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Now he is in a good position to “help” another administration.

Though technically still a research project, the Orwellian Total Information Awareness program has developed a working prototype, and federal agencies outside the Defense Department are quietly studying how to replicate it under less attention-drawing names.

To truly unplug Poindexter’s information campaign, Congress should pass S 188, a bill introduced last month by Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.) and awaiting a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee. S 188 affirms the need for government agents to perform focused data searches based on a demonstrable need to know but imposes a moratorium on government use of giant databases to scour mountains of unfocused data about individuals, a technique known as “data mining.”

After reporters discovered TIA in November, their best and nearly only information came from the program’s Web site. There, along with the symbol of an eye atop a pyramid (a symbol used more benignly on the dollar bill) and the slogan Scientia est potentia (Knowledge is power), they found useful links to documents on the design of the program.

A few weeks ago, the Big Brother slogan, key Web links and the pyramid vanished. That doesn’t mean the ever more penetrating government eye is not getting ready to spy again -- on suspected terrorists and everyone else as well.

After Sept. 11, Congress rushed to give the nation’s law officers extraordinary new powers to watch and listen to Americans. The government has shown no evidence that it needs power to intrude further. By passing Feingold’s bill, lawmakers can help keep Uncle Sam from becoming an ever more impulsive Peeping Tom.