by Nat Hentoff

AS AN ENGLISH NOVELIST FORESAW, BIG BROTHER KEEPS GETTING BIGGER AND MORE INTRUSIVE.

During the Presidential campaign, neither candidate has shown any urgent concern for how pervasively this country is becoming what George Orwell envisioned in his futuristic novel 1984. Nor has there been any marked alarm from the citizenry at the extinguishing of our personal privacy—revealing how conditioned Americans have become to being under the government’s unblinking eye.

An exception is the alarm raised in an April 10, 2008, editorial in the conservative Washington Times. Titled “D.C. Police State,” it condemned the District of Columbia police’s “unprecedented access to a city network of 5,200 traffic, school and public housing cameras— now to be used for anticrime and antiterrorism purposes in the D.C. police closedcircuit surveillance system.”

The shaken editorial writer asked, “Do we then install cameras inside homes and offices and automobiles?”

Not yet. But no matter who’s in the White House and who controls Congress in 2009, another 9/11 or its equivalent—a portable nuclear device detonated in New York City’s subway system, for instance—could provide a further negative answer to a recent indignant protest by Andrew Davis of the Libertarian Party: “In America, people should not be forced to assume that they’re being monitored by law enforcement throughout the day.”

However, I’ve been alerted by the Washington- based Defending Dissent Foundation about a Justice Department plan that is to be implemented by the end of this year—a grim farewell gesture by Big Brother George W. Bush.

Have you ever heard of the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005? I hadn’t until Sue Udry, Defending Dissent’s director, reported that once this proposal kicks in, “federal agencies will be required to collect DNA samples of everyone arrested prior to conviction, when you’re still supposed to be considered innocent.”

I turned to Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which is often ahead of the ACLU in detecting and opposing government raids on the Constitution. He explained that “at the end of 2005 a little-noticed provision— the DNA Fingerprint Act—was slipped into the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) reauthorization bill that provided the federal government with broadly expanded powers to collect and permanently keep DNA samples from millions of people. Under this new law the government would collect DNA from anyone arrested for any crime—whether or not they are convicted—any non-U.S. citizen detained by federal authorities for any reason, and everyone in federal prison.”

This would, of course, include those dangerous Americans exercising their First Amendment right “peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances” as they denounce an egregious edict like the DNA Fingerprint Act.

If elected President, would Barack Obama go along with this boundless invasion of our privacy, aware that, as CCR attorney Matthew Strugar warns, “DNA is not a simple fingerprint— it contains vast amounts of private medical information the government has no business keeping on us”?

Well, candidate Obama approved the “compromise” Foreign Intelligence Surveillance bill. As the ACLU points out, this legislation is “an unprecedented extension of government surveillance over Americans…[that] permits only minimal court oversight” over any President’s serial violations of the Fourth Amendment.

Yet Obama concurred with George W. Bush and both Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress that this compromise “firmly reestablishes basic judicial oversight over all domestic surveillance in the future.” A President John McCain, not a notable champion of the Bill of Rights, would hardly disagree.

Not only the Justice Department will be able to harvest the most intimate details of your medical records. Reading the fine print of the Justice Department’s presentation of this rule in the April 18, 2008, Federal Register reveals: “This statute also provides that the Attorney General may ‘direct any other agency of the United States that arrests or detains individuals or supervises individuals facing charges to carry out any function and exercise any power of the Attorney General under this section.’”

An incalculable number of federal eyes would be able to sift through whatever signals your DNA reveals about your potential to be a risk to America’s national security.

As the climate of fear darkens in this nation, it’s not inconceivable that the government could look with interest at a proposal in Orwell’s native land by Gary Pugh, director of forensic services at Scotland Yard. In the March 16, 2008, issue of The Observer, Pugh summarizes how close we are coming to 1984: “Primary schoolchildren should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behavior indicating they may become criminals in later life…some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.”

But why not go further back? There are now multidimensional sonograms that clearly show the behavior of fetuses in the womb. This might be a new branch of forensics, leading to national security abortions. You think I’ve lost my marbles? When Orwell’s 1984 was first published in 1949, some readers scoffed at haunting passages such as this: “How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.”

That ain’t fiction anymore. 

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Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This America?

From The Brad Blog written by guest blogger Steve Heller of VelvetRevolution.us:

The Republican IT guru, recently described [2] as a “high tech Forrest Gump” for his proclivity to be “at the scene” of so many troubling elections since 2000, and even at the heart of the “lost” White House email scandal, has been ordered by a federal judge to appear for an under-oath deposition next Monday in Ohio.

The BRAD BLOG [3] has learned that Mike Connell, the Republican IT guru whose company, GovTech Solutions, created Ohio’s 2004 election results computer network, appeared in federal court today, as compelled, and has been ordered to appear for his deposition on Monday, November 3, just 24 hours before Election Day 2008.

Today’s court order came after a contentious hearing, at which Connell was present. The hearing was part of a long-standing voting rights violations lawsuit, King Lincoln v. Blackwell [4], as previously covered by The BRAD BLOG [5] and by Velvet Revolution’s Election Protection Strike Force here [6] and here [7].

Though Connell’s attorneys have fought to quash the subpoena, recently issued after the judge lifted a stay on the case several weeks ago, it looks like his options to avoid testimony, or at least jail for avoiding it, may have come to an end. The attorneys in the case have said that Connell’s testimony may well lead to the subpoenaing and under-oath questioning of Karl Rove, who, they say, would be unable to use Executive Privilege as an excuse to avoid such a subpoena in a civil RICO case…
For the rest of the article click here
From today’s Democracy Now!:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s start where I haven’t seen much mention, and that is this man, Mike Connell, in Ohio, testifying. Who is he? What is his relevance to the big day, to Election Day tomorrow?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, this event in a courtroom in Columbus may be one of the most important things to happen in this whole election and may be one of the most important things to happen in American history. I mean, this sounds hyperbolic, I know, but it is true.

Mike Connell is—has been named as Karl Rove’s computer guru since 2000. The lawyers in the case refer to Connell as a high-IQ Forrest Gump, because he’s been on the scene of every dubious election we’ve had over the last eight years, starting with Florida 2000.

Now, he has been named by a man named Stephen Spoonamore, S-P-O-O-N-A-M-O-R-E, who’s a very unusual and particularly unimpeachable kind of whistleblower. He’s a conservative Republican; he’s a former McCain supporter. But above all, he is a renowned and highly successful expert at the detection of computer fraud. He works for big banks. He works for foreign governments, the Secret Service. His job is to figure out how computers are used to steal money or information or votes. Well, he’s named a lot of people in the Bush-Cheney election subversion conspiracy. He has worked with them. He knows them personally. And months ago, he named Mike Connell and his company GovTech Solutions as having played a crucial role in the—basically the electronic subversion of the vote in Ohio in 2004. And Spoonamore has actually described the computer architecture that was used to do this.

Now, on the strength of this testimony, the lawyers in the case had the judge issue a subpoena to Mike Connell last week. Connell defied the subpoena; he was in contempt. Late last week, the lawyers filed a motion to compel compliance, and to everyone’s surprise and delight, the judge ordered Connell to appear today and to be deposed for two hours about his role in this longstanding electronic plot, basically, to flip votes towards the Republicans.

Some of this deposition will be sealed, and I have to tell you the part that’ll be sealed. Apparently, Rove has threatened Connell. He told him that if Connell did not take the fall for this whole thing, the Department of Justice would start investigating Connell’s wife Heather for improper lobbying practices. Now, that part of the deposition we’re not going to know the answers to. But what’s astonishing to me
For the Whole Interview click here

For election fraud information check out these sites:

http://www.velvetrevolution.us/

http://www.libertytreefdr.org/

http://bradblog.com/

http://www.nomorestolenelections.org/