The Retreads Strike Again

by digby

Yesterday when reading Jason Vest’s interesting historical post about the young Dick and Don agitating for executive infallibility back in the 70’s, I clicked over to this story in Mother Jones and read this article about how Dick n’ Don also had been in favor of “privatising” government functions back in the 70’s:

In 1969, President Richard Nixon appointed Rumsfeld, a 37-year-old congressman from Illinois, to head the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was responsible for overseeing the War on Poverty. Nixon wanted the agency restructured, and Rumsfeld, with the assistance of his chief aide, Cheney, quickly began bringing in management contractors to do the work of the agency’s top civil servants.

In The Shadow Government, a 1976 book about the federal consulting industry, Daniel Guttman and Barry Willner quote Cheney as saying, “Don found himself with a bureaucracy that hated him…. [He] was forced to seek outside help. I remember Don reciting to me the Al Smith statement, ‘If I don’t look to my friends for help, who do I look to, my enemies?'”

[…]

Rumsfeld’s successor at the agency was Frank Carlucci, who later became Ronald Reagan’s Defense secretary. In 1971, Carlucci told Congress that he was dramatically curtailing the agency’s spending on management contractors, which amounted to $110 million between 1965 and 1971. “We did not think we were getting our money’s worth,” Carlucci testified.

There’s a surprise.

Fast forward to today and this article by Greg Palast:

… the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration’s Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI — though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.

The leader in the field of what is called “data mining,” is a company … called, “ChoicePoint, Inc,” which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.

Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain’t nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans — and I know they’ve expanded their ops at an explosive rate.

They are paid to keep an eye on you — because the FBI can’t. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you’re suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect if for “commercial” purchases — and under the Bush Administration’s suspect reading of the Patriot Act — our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.

[…]

And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, “hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States …linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]” from medical to voting records.

[…]

” And that scares the hell out of me,” said the executive (who has since left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It’s more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida “felons,” Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test “results” on rape case evidence … that didn’t exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase 145,000 credit card records.

But it won’t stop, despite Republican senators shedding big crocodile tears about “surveillance” of innocent Americans. That’s because FEAR is a lucrative business — not just for ChoicePoint, but for firms such as Syntech, Sybase and Lockheed-Martin — each of which has provided lucrative posts or profits to connected Republicans including former Total Information Awareness chief John Poindexter (Syntech), Marvin Bush (Sybase) and Lynn Cheney (Lockheed-Martin).

This has the ring of truth to it. Regardless of the outcome of investigations into NSA programs, this is probably the wave of the future. (Rumsfeldian Zombie conservatism apparently will not die.) Heckuva job cronies are making big bucks collecting and selling data and they may very well continue to do it after these bozos are long gone. We are seeing the creation of an Information Industrial Complex.

Privacy is going to be a new battleground in the culture war and it’s a fight that we on the left civil libertarian side are going to have to lead. The rightwing religions are already trying to invade the bedroom and the hospital room (not to mention women’s uteruses.) And people do not recognise yet that collection of data to find out what brand of yogurt you prefer is not all that benign in the hands of businesses with government contracts. This is the twin Big Brothers of Corporate America and Government creating a new industry of legal convenience to buy and sell your data for whatever reasons they deem necessary — and use your own tax dollars to fund it.

Oh, and Porter “Brownie” Goss and his pals are going to be running the thing.

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