The Hightower Report

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STALKING 'THE THING'

It's back. "The Thing That Just Won't Die" has returned in mutated form to terrorize the good people of our country, gorging itself on gargantuan fistfuls of our First and Fourth Amendment rights.

"The Thing" was once known as TIA – Total Information Awareness – the Orwellian/ Frankensteinian creation of John Poindexter, the disgraced, convicted, and totally loopy former operative from the Reagan White House. Brought in from the cold by George W., Poindexter set up shop in a wing of the Pentagon called DARPA – Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

At DARPA, the maniacal Poindexter put together his TIA, a supercomputerized program to gather every scrap of data there is on everybody – from our bank accounts to video rentals, our medical histories to photos of protests we've attended. All of this was to be sifted and sorted, ostensibly to detect suspicious behavior that would tag someone as a possible terrorist.

Noting that this would make millions of Americans suspected terrorists and amount to a wholesale invasion of our people's privacy, the public screamed, Congress cut off TIA's funding, and Poindexter ultimately was forced back to Disgraceland.

But, wait ... TIA didn't die. It metamorphosed from DARPA to ARDA – Advanced Research and Development Activity. While publicly pretending to kill TIA, congressional leaders had quietly funneled money to ARDA to resurrect TIA as the Thing, which is now pursuing the exact same assault on our privacy as TIA was, even using some of Poindexter's old crew.

ARDA says that its Thing can wolf down a "petabyte or more" of data. How much is that? A petabyte will hold 40 pages of text on every man, woman, and child in the world, with room left to get information on your dog and parakeet.

To help us finally drive a stake through the heart of this Thing, call the Center for Democracy and Technology: 202/637-9800.

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THE MADNESS OF OUR MAD COW POLICY

When the first undeniable case of American mad cow disease broke into the news last December, a host of Bush officials trotted out to shout: "Just an isolated case. ... America's beef supply is the safest in the world. ... Trust us, we're experts." Even George told the media that he'd eaten beef for Christmas dinner – so, see, no problem, all clean, don't think about it any more.

Yes, admitted the ag department's top animal scientist, the mad cow in question was part of a herd of 80 cattle that also could be infected, but, by gollies, our animal tracking system is excellent, so, "We feel confident that we are going to be able to determine the whereabouts of most, if not all of these animals, within the next several days." Trust us.

Seven weeks later, the ag scientist had to admit that only one-third of the suspect cattle could be found. "We never expected to be able to find all of them," he lied, apparently hoping we wouldn't recall his earlier promise. The other two-thirds couldn't be tracked and presumably had ended up in our lunches and dinners. Declaring the investigation over, he said, "It's time to move on."

Move on? To where? To a mad cow burger? So much for our "experts."

And when real experts do speak, the Bushites cover their ears. Ag Secretary Ann Veneman had attempted to calm public concern last December by convening a panel of international experts on mad cow, expecting the panel to say everything is okeydokey. Instead, the experts concluded that the reason the USDA has found only one case of mad cow disease is that it has not looked very hard. Of 30 million cattle slaughtered each year, only 40,000 are tested for the deadly disease. The panel chairman said that USDA might find "a case a month" of mad cow if it did enough testing.

Rather than implementing any of the safety measures proposed by the panel, however, Veneman continues to mouth the industry line that this was just an isolated case and our beef supply is perfectly pure.