Anti-terror agencies win anti-privacy awards
NEW YORK-Anti-terrorism surveillance proposals from the Defense, Justice and Homeland Security departments earned the scorn of the activist group Privacy International here on Thursday as the group issued its annual "Big Brother" awards.
The awards are presented at the annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference to the "government agencies, companies and initiatives that have done most to invade personal privacy," according to the London-based group. The recipients receive George Orwell statues of a large golden boot crushing a human head, inspired by the British author's classic 1984.
The Defense Department's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project was labeled the "most invasive proposal." TIA is an attempt to anticipate future terrorist attacks by using computer data-mining tools to sift through commercial records of millions of Americans.
Other nominees for that award included Microsoft's proposed "trustworthy computing" system once known as Palladium and the call for incorporating into automobiles "event data recorders" that are like the "black boxes" on airplanes to record data on traffic accidents.
Viet Dinh, assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, was named "worst government official" because of what Privacy International described as his "zealous pursuit of new police surveillance authority." The other nominee was Adm. James Loy, head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
Dinh heads Justice's Office of Legal Policy, an internal think tank for legislative proposals. Officials at the office helped prepare a proposal to permit wiretapping of citizens who gather information for either lawful or unlawful foreign organizations.
The proposal was leaked to the Center for Public Integrity and published on its Web site in early February; in testimony before Congress in March, Attorney General John Ashcroft declined to endorse or even to acknowledge the measure as a Justice Department idea.
Delta Air Lines won the title of "greatest corporate invader" for its participation in the TSA's testing of a system for screening airline passengers. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which has been seeking to obtain personal information about a Verizon Communications Internet user, and the Progressive Policy Institute, a Democratic-leaning think tank that promotes biometric driver's licenses, also were nominated.
The final award, the "Admiral John M. Poindexter Lifetime Menace" award, was presented to Osama bin Laden, the head of the al Qaeda terrorist network. Displaying video of a speech by bin Laden, Privacy International activists offered this translation: "Terrorists are clearly determined to force USA to curtail freedoms. I am here to tell you that we have won."
This year, Privacy International also issued to three individuals who promote privacy the awards named after former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, an early privacy advocate.
The winners were: North Dakota state Rep. Jim Kasper and Charlene Nelson, a North Dakota farmer, for their successful ballot initiative on financial privacy; Joyce Meskis, owner of the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver, for refusing to relinquish patrons' purchase records; and Ed Mierzwinski of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, for his work on financial privacy.