“Trust us — we’re from the government.” You’d think that phrase would never (seriously) pass the lips of anyone who considers themselves a conservative or a Republican, but it’s the mantra that the current Administration and its congressional supporters keep uttering when it comes to the War on Terror and the Need to Keep Vewwy Vewwy Quiet about What We’re Doing to Combat It.
Which wouldn’t be a problem if the government were actually rigorously intelligent, thoughtful, wise, diligent, accurate, dispassionate robots, rather than human beings who make mistakes, act on their own, or work from less-than-savory agendas.
In which case you get things like this happening:
A federal Department of Homeland Security agent passed along information about student protests against military recruiters at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, landing the demonstrations on a database tracking foreign terrorism, according to government documents released Tuesday.
The documents were released by the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a Freedom of Information Act request on behalf of student groups that protested against recruiters who visited their campuses in April 2005.
The students were angry when they turned up in the database of a Pentagon program called Threat and Local Observation Notice, or TALON, which the government started in 2003 as a way to collect data that could help stop terrorist attacks. Officials have acknowledged that the reports on protests should not have been included.
[…] NBC News revealed the database in December. The Pentagon acknowledged that the protest reports should not have been included in the database, which now has more than 13,000 entries. The reports “have been removed,” Pentagon spokesman Greg Hicks said Tuesday.
As far as we know. Since they shouldn’t have been there in the first place, it’s difficult to trust in either the accuracy or the veracity of the reported deletions. And, of course, if not for Treasonous Journalists and Pinko Activists, nobody would have known the names were there in the first place. And what sort of ill effects might that have had for those people down the road — or, on the flip side, what sort of difficulties might it have caused anyone who was legitimately trying to mine
that information to detect and forestall real terrorist threats?
Some activities, by their nature, need to be secret. But make too much secret, and remove accountability, and you inevitably allow error and ill-will to turn even the best-intentioned plans into a nightmare.
(via Les)
UPDATE: And, in related news the EFF has scored a victory as a judge ruled against the government’s and AT&T’s motions to dismiss their case against AT&T for assisting the NSA’s spying program. Feel free to support the EFF by sponsoring me for the Blogathon.
That’s it! You’re on the list!
The thought has occurred to me. After all, I’m already Dave Hill, International Man of Mystery.