Who's Counting?: Privacy and Terrorists

Jan. 5 -- Remember the trial in Alice in Wonderland where the sentence precedes the verdict? Not only did last summer's movie, Minority Report, borrow the theme, but so too does the federal government as it hunts for would-be terrorists.

Minority Report takes place in 2054. Its star, Tom Cruise, heads a police unit using futuristic technology and seemingly infallible psychics (or "pre-cogs") to locate people intending to commit murder. The unit's job is to spot these "pre-perpetrators" and then move in, arrest, and incarcerate them before they commit the crime.

The movie, like Alice in Wonderland, is a fantasy. Disturbingly reminiscent of the film, however, is a real-life practice that the city of Wilmington, Del., adopted this past August.

The Wilmington policy calls for police to take pictures of people on the streets near the sites of drug busts. Authorities collect the photos along with the names and addresses of these potential pre-perpetrators and add them to a special law-enforcement database. Although most of these bystanders are guilty of no crime, the police deem them more likely than other citizens to commit one in the future.

Total Information Awareness

Much more ominous and ambitious than this local initiative in Delaware is the Pentagon's recently proposed techno-surveillance system, Total Information Awareness.

Headed by retired Adm. John Poindexter of Iran-Contra notoriety, the initial $10 million for this project (some think the cost will be $240 million over three years) will help set up a system to "detect, classify, ID, track, understand, pre-empt." The objects of these verbs are possible terrorists, whom Poindexter hopes to spot before they do any harm.

Using supercomputers and data-mining techniques, the TIA will keep records on credit-card purchases, plane flights, e-mails, Web sites, housing, and a variety of other bits of information in the hope of detecting suspicious patterns of activity — buying chemicals, renting crop-dusting planes, subscribing to radical newsletters, etc.