You Are a Suspect — Op-Ed from the New York Times:

If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:
Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend %u2014 all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as “a virtual, centralized grand database.”
To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you %u2014 passport application, driver’s license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance %u2014 and you have the supersnoop’s dream: a “Total Information Awareness” about every U.S. citizen.
This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.

I thought I was writing scary stuff this month. Yeesh.

Interesting stuff. Also shocking and creepy, depending on how far you’re willing to ride along with the writer, who certainly fills us in on Poindexter’s past failings (a good long list by itself). Not the sort of guy you’d really want as the mastermind behind this project. Ugh.

I wish they would spend this money in upgrading the police information network to be a workable entity.

In the world where we have the internet, and I can get information in a thousand tongues from around the world, the police in city 'A' can't easily share their warrants, searches and arrest records with city 'B.' It's insane.

And since law enforcement is a 'local' problem, the big guys in our gov't don't want to fork out cash for any solutions. Let the cities figure it out for themselves. Yeah, right.

Wouldn't fixing things on the micro level of crime solving help immensely in the macro?

Oh, damn, there I go being an Utopist again.
Shame on me.

I think the more uncompatable law enforcment data is, the better for the citizens. Perhaps not at the micro-level, but at the macro-level.

I mean, look at nation-states with a great level of sharing data and organization at the intellegence and law enforcement level.

Soviet Union
Nazi Germany
And the best ever
Communist East Germany

In the recent "sniper" crisis in Maryland, DC and Virgina, ATF and FBI did alot of breathing down citizens with .223 rifles registered for no other reason than they had .223s. A number of them had ARs taken for "testing" and did not get them back, even after the arrests were made.

One by one, the building blocks for a fascist takeover are assembled. Accident? Hope so.

Fascist implies extreme right wing. This sort of crap would come in handy for any police state, left or right. In fact the examples given are mostly commies.

If it comes to pass, I will enjoy spoofing their data by random credit purchases, subscriptions and web surfing completely unrelated topics. Let them figure that shit out.

The sad thing is, most of this stuff is already being collected and sold as marketing data and has been for a few years. You are already being watched by beady little eyes trying to predict your spending habits for sale to the highest bidder.