November 15th, 2002
Dear Senator,
I am deeply troubled by the prospect of the Homeland Security Act’s passage in the Senate. While I can see the merit of better coordination between governmental agencies, I am struck by many of the Act’s very harmful side effects:
1. As originally proposed, the Act included a Freedom of Information Act exemption for companies that disclosed “critical infrastructure” information that was very vague and open to abuse. Other provisions provide immunity from civil liability, which is step away from corporate accountability. Even the Bennet amendment is only a small revision from the original flawed language.
2. The Act muzzles whistleblowers who might wish to report instances where the department over-reaches its legal mandate. The federal Whistleblower Protection Act is a historic and necessary check on the power of government, and I don’t want to see it sidelined.
3. Most troubling of all is the proposed collection of a wealth of private data on the buying, library browsing, internet habits, and movements of millions of Americans. To me, this is a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure. This IS Big Brother, only 18 years later than Orwell forecast; we already have the shadowy “security alerts” being issued by federal officials.
According to the news I read, and the Office of Information Awareness (OIA) web site, the government is proposing to gather information on residents of the United States on an unprecendented scale. The OIA web site says “Elements of the solution include gathering a much broader array of data than we do currently...” A Wired.com article reports that the data that will be gathered is measured in petabytes, an enormous size beyond human comprehension, and notes that the OIA operates on an unknown budget with very little public oversight. William Safire’s column today claims that the Homeland Security Act, and the OIA, will tie together virtually every recorded fact about every resident of the United States.
I love my country. However, I am becoming less and less proud of it. The overblown response of the Bush administration to vague threats of terrorism has eroded and threatens to destroy the freedoms of speech and free association and presumed innocence before conviction. If implemented as described, our government will resemble the former Soviet Union in the level of paranoia it has about its citizens. All that will be missing is the Gulag.
Sincerely,
Kurt