After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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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 Bush, Poindexter set up shop in a wing of the Pentagon called DARPA— Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
TIA was a 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 by Pentagon computers, ostensibly to detect suspicious behavior patterns that would identify the terrorists amongst us.
Noting that this would be likely to label millions of us suspected terrorists, and amount to a wholesale invasion of our privacy, the public screamed, congress cut- off TIA's funding, and Poindexter ultimately was forced back to Disgraceland.
But, wait...TIA didn't die. Congressional leaders just moved it from DARPA to ARDA— Advanced Research and Development Activity, where it's pursuing the exact same assault on our privacy, 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.