The Senate and the House voted in mid-November to create the cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, which will merge 22 federal agencies, including the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Customs Service, Coast Guard, Secret Service, and the new Transportation Security Administration. The move will centralize and streamline many of the operations already carried out by these federal agencies, including domestic spying. The measure was first proposed last year by Democratic senator Joseph Lieberman. The Bush administration initially opposed the bill--drafted largely by Democrats--but ended up backing a bipartisan version of it.

One attack on workers’ rights codified by the Homeland Security Act is a curb on union rights for the 170,000 federal employees of the newly created department. The law gives bosses more leeway to hire, fire, and discipline these workers, and maintains executive powers to lift workers’ union protection in the name of "national security."

The Total Information Awareness provision in the new law would allow federal authorities to "mine" information gathered from both commercial and government sources--from credit card purchases to medical prescriptions to Internet use. U.S. officials say the information would be used to define an "information signature" of individuals--that is, their patterns of everyday life, ties to organizations, and other legal activities.

Pentagon spokesperson Jan Walker justified this domestic spying operation, which has a $200 million budget, by saying it would enable Washington to "successfully pre-empt and defeat terrorist acts."

Office of Information Awareness head John Poindexter, a retired Navy admiral and former national security adviser, said the program is designed to give federal cops instant access to personal information without a search warrant. To implement the measure, the government would first have to amend the Privacy Act of 1974, which sets legal limits on what government agencies can do with private information.

One of the sharpest critics of the Total Information Awareness program has been conservative columnist William Safire. In a November 14 opinion piece titled "You Are Suspect," he condemned the "Orwellian" TIA for giving the government the "power to snoop on every public and private act of every American."

In a November 18 editorial, the New York Times criticized the TIA as "a snooper’s dream." The liberal editors complained that the program would be "unchecked by Congress," and declared that "T.I.A. needs immediate oversight" to make sure it doesn’t go beyond the stated goal of "enhancing national security."

Meanwhile, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review ruled November 18 that the U.S. government has broad new powers under the USA Patriot Act, enacted last year, to use wiretaps for prosecuting individuals labeled "terrorists." Removing a formal wall between officials from the intelligence and criminal arms of the Justice Department, the ruling allows criminal prosecutors to take an active role in deciding how to use wiretaps authorized by the court.

This top-secret court was established 24 years ago to allow the FBI and other cop agencies to obtain a warrant without going to a regular court. In that time it has approved more than 10,000 wiretaps for federal snoops, never having turned down a single request.

Attorney General John Ashcroft called the ruling a "giant step forward" and announced that he would rapidly increase the number of requests for new wiretaps and surveillance orders.

In a related development, bosses at private companies have been using a "watch list" of individuals provided by the FBI a year ago, the Wall Street Journal reported November 19. The FBI circulated the list to banks, travel reservation systems, firms that collect consumer data, truckers, and others, asking the companies to collaborate in tracking down these individuals. The big-business daily reported that "some companies fed a version of the list into their own databases and now use it to screen job applicants and customers."  
 
 
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