November 11, 2002
Big Brother: A Little Bigger
Now that W really thinks he has a mandate, he's rehabilitating another old Iran Contra criminal, Admiral John Poindexter, who is now overseeing a project to build the Pentagon a computer that can look into everyone's personal data. (See The New York Times.)This system would give the spooks "instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant."
Poindexter was Reagan's National Security Adviser who was found to have authorized some of the illegal payments to the Contras. He claimed to have hidden the activities from Reagan, providing plausible deniability. He was convicted in April of 1990 on five counts of deceiving Congress and sentenced to six months in prison. His conviction was later overturned because he had testified under immunity before Congress on television, not because he wasn't guilty.
Beware the Brain Police!