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John Poindexter's evil design for an all-seeing God Machine seems torn from the pages of visionary science fiction, where such schemes rarely end well.
In Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem's collection of short stories, "Imaginary Magnitude," there is a tale of a DARPA project to create a deus computing system -- a vigilant and all-knowing god machine.A handful of technical monstrosities with names like Golem XIV, Supermaster and the Honest Annihilator are built. None perform as predicted and, as I recall, the Honest Annihilator mysteriously shuts itself off after being forced to deal with people too much.
When reading of scalawag John Poindexter's supreme anti-terrorist Total Information Awareness System (TIAS), I thought I had stumbled into another Lem fable of the future. Lem loved dry references to overseeing national security mechanisms, not unlike the Information Assurance Office and its motto "Scientia Est Potentia" -- "Knowledge is Power," and he used them as props in bitter jokes on the nature of technological domination.
In Lem's stories, grand brute force projects of this nature always turned on their makers, or are misused in interesting ways in a headlong march toward failure.
Today, serious questions about the practicality or even desirability of a deus machine are thrust aside in favor of rationalizations torn from the moment. ("It would have caught the DC snipers!") No one is brave enough to be a doubter from within DARPA; It's for security and the war on terror so shut up or be relieved. Any doubters mill about on the outside flapping their arms.
For the PBS Newshour, NSA exposer James Bamford offered that there was no evidence that he could see that the intelligence community's computerized information sharing was any better since 9/11. This cast reasonable doubt, he said, that any vague tracking system for the future would be superior.
And "the lack of clear public information about [the TIAS] and the absence of any real oversight already indicate a serious lapse of judgment," commented William Safire from the redoubt of his syndicated column.
Homeland Secrecy
Another lapse of judgment which garnered no opposition from within is the new exemption to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the Homeland Security Act.
Designed to protect the flow of confidential vulnerability information between the private sector and the U.S. government, it is almost a perfect legislative bookend to John Poindexter's TIAS, which is supposed to snoop on and correlate everyone's information.
"It's the decline of western civilization," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists when asked for an opinion.
Although Aftergood was speaking humorously, he also took time to debunk one of the evolving memes that has risen to rationalize the need for the new FOIA exemption: that al Qaeda downloaded Government Accounting Office documents on security vulnerabilities into the caves of Afghanistan.
The myth, as presented by Congressman Tom Davis of Virginia, claims that a FOIA exemption for critical information would prevent terrorists from taking advantage of our open society by using this democratic tool to unearth secrets.
But, said Aftergood, there is no hard evidence of any truly critical information on vulnerability residing on al Qaeda computers -- or even proof that they have a lot of PCs and people doing this.
For the record, Aftergood said when he challenged a Davis staffer on the issue he was told attempts would be made to verify that al Qaeda was getting secrets from government servers. No call backs on that yet, though.
The Abuse Excuse
Aftergood also makes the point that GAO reports, like the recent one on government's failing (that's with a capital F) grade in computer security, are given away into the public domain anyway, no FOIA necessary. So what's the big deal?
And anyone who uses FOIA knows it to be an agonizing and often frustrating exercise in democratic information retrieval -- not open to abuse by anyone.
The desire for FOIA exemption used to be the exclusive property of the small computer security lobby prior to the millennium. Broadly recommended by Richard Clarke and Utah senator Bob Bennett since 1998, there was little enthusiasm for it outside of the industry until the start of the war on terror.
Then, the rationalization was the same as now, although narrowly limited to allegedly foil a subset of electronic terrorists looking to vacuum up private sector computer vulnerabilities.
In retrospect, Bennett's FOIA exemption proposals were moderate. They didn't undermine local sunshine laws or extend all across U.S. society for the sake of cybersecurity. In the past I have said critical things about him and for this I apologize.
In Lem-ian fashion, it will be shown that the wish to do something proactive, whether it be the creation of our own version of the Honest Annihilator or a broad legal excuse for more oppressive secrecy, will always blow up in our faces.