Legal — 4

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
If these legislated abuses of your long held rights were not enough, Attorney General John Ashcroft is attempting to use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)’s lesser foreign intelligence standard for run of the mill criminal warrants rather than the more strict criminal standard of probable cause. Just last year, the secret FISA court issued a rare public opinion rejecting Attorney General Ashcroft’s attempt to use FISA to obtain evidence for law enforcement purposes when it has always been interpreted to only apply to gathering information on foreign intelligence.

Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II
These are not the only efforts the government took to obtain expansive information from the citizenry in order to catalogue Americans. The Transportation Security Administration’s Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II, or CAPPS II, database profiles airline passengers based on their address, flying history and other personal information. This system has already unjustly barred individuals from flying and will continue to cause flight delays and can potentially create a blacklist. As of now there is no clear process for correcting errors, which result from misinformation. Furthermore, this process is useless in stopping terrorism because terrorists can falsify information and steal identities.

Terrorist Information Awareness
The Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) hopes to implement the Terrorist Information Awareness program, also known as TIA. TIA was initially called “Total Information Awareness” because it is designed to sift through masses of private, personal data using powerful computer algorithms in an attempt to uncover patterns of suspicious activity. DARPA changed the name to reflect an “anti-terrorist” goal only after the public denounced the agency’s “big brother” efforts.

Taken together, all of these laws and programs are deeply alarming invasions of the civil liberties upon which our country was founded. It is incumbent upon us to educate our members about these abuses so they can make informed decisions in the next election.