Besides, soon enough abuses will be unnecessary

Sometimes it seems the only thing George Orwell had wrong was the date. In a breathless, wide-eyed piece that just reeks with "Gee whiz!" the Washington Post recently reported that

[s]everal thousand law enforcement agencies are creating the foundation of a domestic intelligence system through computer networks that analyze vast amounts of police information....

The purpose, of course, is "to fight crime and root out terror plots." And my oh my, who could be against that?

It does on in more or less the same vein, about how local and state agencies are connecting to a new federal system called the National Data Exchange, or N-DEx, about how "It's going from the horse-and-buggy days to the space age, that's what it's like," about how easy it was for a cop in Tuscon to create a "visual chart" showing supposed connections between a fraud suspect in Arizona and people in southern California (including names and addresses), about how "searches that might have taken weeks or months" now take "seconds" - goes on, in fact for 25 more paragraphs before it even mentions privacy or civil liberties. And then it's to explain that authorities really are aware of such concerns and know that "all of this is unsettling."

Damn effing straight it is, especially when the article blithely mentions that much of these new abilities to poke and prod into our lives is being done via a commercial data-mining system called Coplink, now used by over 1500 jurisdictions, which puts connections among the mass of data inputted by police and gathered from other records by Knowledge Computing, Coplink's makers and marketers, into the hands of cops everywhere - and, of necessity, into the hands of Knowledge Computing.

And after the passing mention of deep official concern, the article goes on for a half-dozen more paragraphs before going into how police and the feds are striving to "allay the public's fears" with "guidelines" and "restrictions" to "prevent abuse." Finally, in the 37th paragraph of a 42-paragraph story, it gets around to actually, if briefly, addressing civil liberties concerns:

But even some advocates of information-sharing technology worry that without proper oversight and enforceable restrictions the new networks pose a threat to basic American values by giving police too much power over information. Timothy Sample, a former intelligence official who runs the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, is among those who think computerized information-sharing is critical to national security but fraught with risks.

"As a nation, our laws have not kept up," said Sample, whose group serves as a professional association of intelligence officials in the government and intelligence contracting executives in the private sector.

That's pretty much all of it. This despite the fact that, as the article itself had already noted,

[t]hree decades ago, Congress imposed limits on domestic intelligence activity after revelations that the FBI, Army, local police and others had misused their authority for years to build troves of personal dossiers and monitor political activists and other law-abiding Americans.

Since those reforms, police and federal authorities have observed a wall between law enforcement information-gathering, relating to crimes and prosecutions, and more open-ended intelligence that relates to national security and counterterrorism. That wall is fast eroding following the passage of laws expanding surveillance authorities, the push for information-sharing networks, and the expectation that local and state police will play larger roles as national security sentinels.

That is, we are forgetting all the lessons painfully learned about what happens when you turn cops, prone to think every non-cop person is a suspect and every non-cop thing is a threat, loose with virtually unsupervised abilities to collect and collate personal data. And we are apparently not only supposed to embrace this amnesia, we are supposed to do it with a "Wow! Way cool stuff!" grin.

Yes, I find that very "unsettling."

Footnote the One: The police chief of Tucson praised Coplink to the skies

[b]ut he too acknowledges that such power raises new questions about how to keep it in check and ensure that the trust people place in law enforcement is not misplaced. ...

"If there's any kind of inkling that we're misusing our power and our technology, that trust will be destroyed."

Funny, Robert Mueller said much the same thing: "We are committed to ensuring that we not only get this right, but maintain the vital trust of the American people."

The more these people talk about "trust" the creepier I feel.

Footnote the Two: Regular readers know that privacy is a big issue with me. This particular one of police using linked databases to obtain a wide range of information about individuals who may have done nothing wrong is one I was talking about here more than three and a-half years ago.