In this quick segment, we talk to Declan McCullough, award-winning journalist and Chief Political Correspondent for CNET News. He also writes for Wired and does a lot of work on international law going on with the Internet.
00:00:11.000Barney and Stan and Fred and Craig and many, many others here momentarily.
00:00:15.000In this quick segment, we've got Declan McCullough, award-winning journalist and chief political correspondent for CNET News.
00:00:23.000He also writes for Wired and does a lot of work on international law going on with the Internet.
00:00:31.000We know with the Total Information Awareness Network and Poindexter and the rest of it, that it's total military occupation.
00:00:38.000They wanted to add a internet tracker number to everything you do on the web, and you'd have to use a virtual browser that we offer at infohorse.net once you want them tracking everything you do.
00:00:48.000This is total Fourth Amendment violations they're talking about in the tens of billions a week.
00:00:53.000Declan, good to have you on the show, sir.
00:01:06.000I mean, the problem is that a lot of these are proposals in progress, and you've got these work in papers, all these PowerPoint presentations, and you're trying to figure out what the government actually means.
00:01:19.000But what we do know, and this is largely due to the reporting of the New York Times, there was a plan to tag internet users out with the unique identifier so that the
00:01:36.000clear email and web browsing would have these unique identifiers
00:01:40.000and if you were trying to go to a secure area of the internet and you did not
00:01:45.000have the identifier but they are coming from a country that didn't allow that didn't require or have this
00:01:51.000then you would not be allowed in and that's what the european union has been
00:01:55.000asking for is a way to block their public from australia to england from our websites
00:02:01.000yeah i don't know what the europeans are at the separate but the little wacky
00:02:06.000But the broad theme here is that this is coming out of DARPA, a defense department agency, and another defense department project that's also coming out of DARPA is one that is headed by John Poindexter, the retired admiral who got into trouble over Iran-Contra.
00:02:29.000Uh, then you have the Department of Homeland Security bill signed into law by President Bush less than an hour ago that makes it easier for police to spy on internet traffic and telephone conversations without a court order first.
00:02:44.000It allows Internet providers like AOL or corporations or universities or what have you to turn over confidential information about subscribers.
00:02:54.000Well that's a hallmark of Homeland Security is actually paying big Fortune 500 companies to be spies for the government then not letting corporate employees blow the whistle on that.
00:03:08.000So what you have, the Poindexter program, the tagging Internet users suggestion, the Department of Homeland Security, now law, all this is coming together in sort of a perfect storm to limit Americans' privacy and increase government It's exactly the wrong direction.
00:03:34.000So they're burrowing in even deeper, secretly, giving themselves more power, taking our rights, while leaving the north and southern borders wide open.
00:03:45.000What we should be doing is going the other direction.
00:03:48.000We should be protecting privacy while trying to prevent terrorism, but increasing our ability to conduct oversight of government.
00:03:58.000I mean, we know that some government people, bureaucrats, Agencies are perfectly honorable and accountable, but you can't trust all of them.
00:04:08.000And so that's why you need open government laws and that kind of thing, which is what the Bush administration is trying to shield against, and the Department of Homeland Security specifically disallows.
00:04:21.000Now they'll say, we're not going to do the TIPS program now, but go ahead and ram forward with it.
00:04:26.000Certainly this internet tagging thing isn't dead.
00:04:28.000We know Echelon's already been doing this for decades.
00:04:30.000Now they're just going public with this plan, aren't they?
00:04:33.000They are, but it wasn't because they wanted to.
00:04:38.000They didn't choose to say, hey, here's our plan, hold a press conference, or maybe another way would have been to brief Congress and say this is what kind of scheme we're concocting.
00:04:49.000That at least would have had the veneer of some sort of public oversight.
00:04:53.000What happens is that reporters get a hold of these documents uh... or on and then they could they could they
00:04:59.000get leaked out in the press and this is not a way to run a government if you