The Total Information Awareness System

As I was writing the final pages of this book, a flurry of articles revealed that at the beginning of 2002, the Bush administration had put retired admiral John Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's national security advisor, in charge of a newly created "Information Awareness Office." Armed with an initial budget of $200 million, Poindexter was asked to set up an enormously powerful computer system capable of collecting and analyzing data from thousands of federal, state, and commercial databases.

The ostensible purpose of the system, known as "Total Information Awareness" (TIA), is to identify and track the activities of people hostile to the United States by looking for suspicious patterns of behavior. With disturbing ease, however, the TIA system will allow Poindexter to compile, as columnist William Safire put it, "computer dossiers on 300 million Americans." ^[1] Concern over Poindexter's activities is creating strange bedfellows. In my own database of information on this issue, Safire's column wound up side-by-side with a similar piece by The Village Voice's Nat Hentoff, who declared that Poindexter's warrantless searches will make "individual privacy as obsolete as the sauropods of the Mesozoic era." ^[2]

It's not just their mutual fondness for the word "Orwellian" that binds those two writers. It's also their obvious understanding of the potential unintended consequences of a system like TIA—the possibility, if not the likelihood, that the collected information will be misused. As noted British scholar Lord Acton observed almost exactly one century before Poindexter was convicted of lying to Congress, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." ^[3]

Overlooked in the growing hubbub over Admiral Poindexter's resurfacing, however, is the fact that to one degree or another, private businesses have been creating and operating their own "information awareness offices" for the last half century. As we'll see throughout this book, employers have collected far more information about individuals in this country than the federal government.

A certain amount of information about and supervision of employees is a necessary component of a successful business. A company will fail if it hires people who have lied about their experience and credentials; if it allows employees to steal inventory or trade secrets; or if it allows employees to spend excessive amounts of time talking on the phone, playing computer games, or surfing the Web for personal reasons. The fact that on the first Monday after Thanksgiving this year, Americans rang up $275 million in online purchases during normal working hours may be good news for the nation's economy, but less promising for the nation's productivity.

As justified as workplace surveillance may be in limited quantities, the situation is rapidly getting out of hand. Advances in technology are making it possible for companies to routinely gather unprecedented quantities of information about the people who work for them. Unfortunately, as the power and sophistication of surveillance tools steadily improve, an increasing amount of human intervention is required to sift relevant information from the irrelevant. More often than not, it is simply easier and cheaper for companies to collect information about their employees without regard to whether it is actually relevant to an employee's qualifications or job performance.

The collection of excessive amounts of private information about employees is troubling enough when the collection, compilation, and analysis is done by a single company. It is far more troubling in an era when the federal government has the capability and increasingly the will to use that information for public policy purposes. It's a trend directly related to times of civic stress: The government first began collecting information about employee salaries during the Great Depression, and today's search for total information awareness is obviously driven by the threat of terrorism.

No one who watched the horrific events of 9/11 unfold on television and computer screens around the world can legitimately question whether the threat of terrorism is real or worthy of aggressive opposition. But as numerous commentators have asked (and not just during the present conflict), if the cost of victory is the freedoms we value, then is it a victory worth having?

By itself, the issue of workplace privacy is worth examining for what it says about the economic and social structure of this nation. But in light of the growing collaboration and data exchange between government and business, workplace surveillance now has the potential to play an important role in undermining our most fundamental freedoms.

^[1]William Safire, "You Are a Suspect," The New York Times (November 14, 2002).

^[2]Nat Hentoff, "We'll All Be Under Surveillance," The Village Voice (December 6, 2002). Sauropods were long-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs, the best-known example of which is the Jurassic period's Brachiosaurus. The gargantuan animals (fifty feet tall, up to eighty-five feet long) were one of the species featured in Steven Spielberg's enormously popular movie, Jurassic Park.

^[3]Lord Acton, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887. Poindexter's conviction was entered in 1990, but was later overturned on the grounds that the basis of his conviction—his testimony to Congress—was given under a grant of immunity.