Massive databases threaten us all... even if we have nothing to hide

Since the beginning of the Bush Administration (even before 9/11), the U.S. government has massively expanded its (unconstitutional) spying on ordinary Americans. Our government — by which I mean the NSA and similar secret organizations about which even Congress knows little — electronically captures, records and can access virtually every email, phone call, credit card purchase, blog post, and Internet search. Just a few examples:

The threat to personal liberty is unprecedented.

Many say, “If I have nothing to hide, let them look.”

The biggest problem with complete transparency is that although YOU may have nothing to hide, powerful Congressmen, government officials… even the president… might. And knowledge of crimes or embarrassing facts equals power. Those who possess secrets about the people running America could blackmail them into acting in their interests and against the people’s interests.

Don’t think this could really happen? It already has.

For years, the government gagged former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds — on the grounds that what she knew was protected as “state secrets” — from telling her shocking story, but the brave Ms. Edmonds has recently testified about what she learned at the FBI:

The deposition included criminal allegations against specifically named members of Congress. Among those named by Edmonds as part of a broad criminal conspiracy: Reps. Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Dan Burton (R-IN), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Bob Livingston (R-LA), Stephen Solarz (D-NY), Tom Lantos (D-CA), as well as an unnamed, still-serving Congresswoman (D) said to have been secretly videotaped, for blackmail purposes, during a lesbian affair.

High-ranking officials from the Bush Administration named in her testimony, as part of the criminal conspiracy on behalf of agents of the Government of Turkey, include Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Marc Grossman, and others.

During the deposition… Edmonds discusses covert “activities” by Turkish entities “that would involve trying to obtain very sensitive, classified, highly classified U.S. intelligence information, weapons technology information, classified Congressional records…recruiting key U.S. individuals with access to highly sensitive information, blackmailing, bribery.”

You can read more in The American Conservative magazine, which includes this segment detailing how secret information on individuals' vulnerabilities has been used to blackmail them:

GIRALDI: So the network starts with a person like [Marc Grossman, then the third highest-ranking official at the State Department] providing information that enables Turkish and Israeli intelligence officers to have access to people in Congress, who then provide classified information that winds up in the foreign embassies?

EDMONDS: Absolutely. And we also had Pentagon officials doing the same thing. We were looking at Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. They had a list of individuals in the Pentagon broken down by access to certain types of information. Some of them would be policy related, some of them would be weapons-technology related, some of them would be nuclear-related. Perle and Feith would provide the names of those Americans, officials in the Pentagon, to Grossman, together with highly sensitive personal information: this person is a closet gay; this person has a chronic gambling issue; this person is an alcoholic. The files on the American targets would contain things like the size of their mortgages or whether they were going through divorces. One Air Force major I remember was going through a really nasty divorce and a child custody fight. They detailed all different kinds of vulnerabilities.

GIRALDI: So they had access to their personnel files and also their security files and were illegally accessing this kind of information to give to foreign agents who exploited the vulnerabilities of these people to recruit them as sources of information?

EDMONDS: Yes. Some of those individuals on the list were also working for the RAND Corporation. RAND ended up becoming one of the prime targets for these foreign agents.

GIRALDI: RAND does highly classified research for the U.S. government. So they were setting up these people for recruitment as agents or as agents of influence?

EDMONDS: Yes, and the RAND sources would be paid peanuts compared to what the information was worth when it was sold if it was not immediately useful for Turkey or Israel. They also had sources who were working in some midwestern Air Force bases. The sources would provide the information on CD’s and DVD’s. In one case, for example, a Turkish military attaché got the disc and discovered that it was something really important, so he offered it to the Pakistani ISI person at the embassy, but the price was too high. Then a Turkish contact in Chicago said he knew two Saudi businessmen in Detroit who would be very interested in this information, and they would pay the price. So the Turkish military attaché flew to Detroit with his assistant to make the sale.

Even if you leave aside the issue of government blackmail, the idea that people with nothing to hide shouldn’t fear an all-knowing government is nonsense. Do you really want strangers poking through your bank accounts, Google searches for medical information, and credit card purchases, for example? Would you show that information to your neighbors? Then why let total strangers poke around in your (not so) private life?

Yesterday’s news gives another good reason to disallow the creation of massive databases of valuable information: many of the people with access to those databases are not trustworthy. According to “Bankers Gone Bad”:

70 percent of financial institutions say… they have experienced a case of data theft by one of their employees in the past 12 months, according to new survey data.

Shirley Inscoe, who spent 21 years at Wachovia handling insider fraud investigations and fraud prevention, says banks don’t want to talk about the insider fraud, and many aren’t aware that it’s an “epic problem.”

“There needs to be more training around this issue,” says Inscoe, who co-authored a book about bank insider fraud called Insidious — How Trusted Employees Steal Millions and Why It’s So Hard for Banks to Stop Them, which publishes later this month. “We are seeing a huge increase in this country of organized crime rings threatening individuals who work in financial institutions and making them [commit fraud on their behalf],” she says.

Posted by James on Tuesday, October 06, 2009