Mukhabarat

The Jordanian security service- the mukhabarat- is an efficient organization. It has to be. When you serve a small country in a tough neighborhood, safety can only be assured by using every means necessary. Some say that the Service has become a law responsible only to itself, so powerful that the Chief actually lights up and smokes on Royal Jordanian Airlines.

An indication of the efficiency of his organization is the televised confession of the wife of the Iraqi suicide bomber. Any doubt as to who was responsible for the murderous act should have been dispelled by her account of who sent them to the wedding at the Raddison SAS Hotel.

It was touching, in a macabre sort of way. Even suicide monsters can have a human touch. Her husband saw her fumbling with the detonator of her belt bomb, and pushed her outside the ballroom before returning to kill dozens of children and women and men, all Jordanians and Palestinians.

Ruthless and implacable enemies require small ruling elites to institutionalize powerful secret services. It is the simple cost of staying in power. Everything must be monitored for signs of potential threat, all areas of public and private life are under surveillance.

They say the mukhabarat nailed the woman through internet surveillance. They are on top of this stuff.

The State Department is delicate about how the security services work overseas, since it usually highlights human rights violations in annual reports. But the word at Foggy Bottom has always been “Don’t mess with the Hashemite Kingdom ,” and that was true in the Defense and Intelligence communities, too. Jordan was too important to the regional balance of power, and besides, isn’t a vigorous security posture in everyone’s best interest?

I’m just glad we have laws to protect our privacy here. The strict firewall between what the intelligence people and the cops can do under their distinct authorities is important. Intelligence people collect information to divine the future, and hopefully take action to change it.

Cops collect information to convict people of crimes. These are different beasts, with different requirements. Or at least it used to be.

The fact that terrorists are running around the Homeland, taking aviation courses or taking our Hazardous Material licenses is a cause for concern. Many smart people have been trying to address the issue, see if there might be something we could do to use the intelligence authorities to stop crimes before they happen.

Admiral John Poindexter is one of the smart guys who tried. He was working on several interesting projects at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. There was one in which investors with real money at stake pooled their best guesses on what the future would hold. It essentially was a betting pool, but it had promise as an attempt to get outside the box of government analysis that proved unable to anticipate 9/11, or the collapse of the Soviet Union .

That caused outrage, as did a scheme to mine the commercial databases for indications and warnings of what all of us were up to, to see if potential terrorists could be identified before they acted. That was a worthy goal. But the problem was that the Admiral had to look at hundreds of millions of us to see if he could find a few thousand Bad Guys.

The idea that the Federal Government was combing financial records of American citizens without probable cause and without warrant raised some concerns in the privacy community, and some Congressional growls about government intrusion.

No one wanted that sort of mukhabarat established in the US , and the project was dropped. At least it was publicly, and the spotlight of attention moved on to other parts of the circus ring. But I thought at the time that the methodology was useful, and if the private information was stripped out, it could be used for things like medical surveillance.

There was the potential to monitor the sale of over the counter drugs in retail stores, and perhaps identify public health problems before patients began to appear at the emergency room. In the age of anthrax attacks, it seemed like a prudent thing to do.

Apparently some of the rest of the government agreed with me, but they went about things differently. If the government can’t do something itself, it out-sources the work to a private contractor. And that appears to be exactly what they have done.

According to documents released under the Freedom of information act, and published in the National Journal, the FBI and the Defense Department entered into a contractual agreement with the ChoicePoint Company of Georgia for an exclusive data service.

You may remember the company. They do most of their business collecting public records, collating them, and selling the results to other companies for market research and other purposes. Preventing the curse of insurance fraud, for example, takes a lot of information and detailed surveillance.

Con artists posing as a legitimate business entered into a business relationship with ChoicePoint, and gained access to several hundred thousand social security numbers, and went on their merry way.

You can do a lot with a social security number. You can do even more if it is associated with credit card information and bank accounts.

The ChoicePoint contract gives law enforcement and intelligence agencies the ability to use the private data minter to do work that they are legally prohibited from doing without authorization of the Court.

I knew the loss of privacy from the government was coming, and you probably did, too. There is just too much information out there, taken from us voluntarily or by coercion by the tax people and the motor-vehicle mafia and the mortgage vultures. I was just startled this morning to see how it had happened, since the law said that it wasn’t supposed to.

The government just out-sourced it, and we never even felt the theft.

After the ChoicePoint theft, I signed up with a credit protection service that alerts me with an e-mail when someone queried the database at the three major credit bureaus for information about me. It appears that the spooks did the same thing.

Oh, and about you, too.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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