Do we want our government to have access to the many electronic records and footprints we leave scattered across computer systems every day? Reporter Shane Harris argues in his new book, The Watchers, that a battle over this question has been going on since long before 9/11 and he puts one man at the center of the quest for more access to our personal data: John Poindexter.
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Comments [1]
Poindexter. Back in the day, the name rang a bell. Not from reality, but from a cartoon - though he eerily resembled the character - the brainy friend of Felix the Cat, he of "his wonderful, magical bag of tricks!" That would, in that context, have been Col. Ollie North. It is a bit hard to believe that even he imagined that the government would really invest enough money to truly "anonymize" the databases.
As far as Harris' thought that it should be Congress and the White House task to determine how we protect privacy in the face of this onslaught of intelligence, maybe but not likely. Try the ACLU.
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