Congressman Brad Miller: Protecting the Constitution and our Privacy

While we ponder Barack Obama's puzzling vote on FISA, we can rest a bit easier knowing that at least one North Carolina Democrat is doing more than paying lip service to protecting the U.S. Constitution. Brad Miller not only voted against FISA, but he has quietly been working in Washington to make government agencies toe the line. That Republican rubber stamp congress did a lot of damage allowing these same agencies free reign without requiring any accountability. Brad Miller is quietly working to repair some of this damage.

ON THURSDAY, the US House Science and Technology Committee voted to deny the FBI $11 million to continue work on a massive database of government records on virtually all American citizens. The vote came after the FBI refused to tell Congress about its plans.

The database project, called the National Security Analysis Center (NSAC), was conceived after 9/11 to correlate hundreds of millions of electronic records created or collected by various government agencies at all levels. The idea was to use all that data to somehow predict who might be a potential so-called " terrorist" -- without a hint of probable cause to indicate any specific individual was linked to any radical or extremist group or ideology.

In January 2007 when Democrats inherited the job of cleaning up after Republicans run amok in the U.S. House, we celebrated Rep. Miller's assignment as chair of the new Investigations and Oversight subcommittee. At the time I think some of us were simply delighted that he would have subpoena power. Over the past year and a half the job has entailed more than investigating scientists intimidated into fudging the truth by the Bush administration. Now, Rep. Miller gets to take on the FBI. Thank goodness.

Security and information technology professionals have serious doubts as to whether such predictive data mining can be effective. Also, the FBI has an unbroken and spectacularly dismal track-record of botching such large IT projects, including wasting $170 million on a massive Virtual Case File effort that produced nothing useful and had to be scrapped.

The uptight FBI also has a long history from the days of J. Edgar Hoover of violating the privacy and civil rights of American citizens in its zeal to " protect" the country from the likes of trade unionists, civil rights and anti-war activists, hippies, inconvenient standup comedians, users of recreational drugs, political dissidents, and everyone disliked by the American corporate power structure -- which means virtually everyone who isn't them.

So, now the FBI will have a little less money to dig up a little less dirt on perfectly harmless American citizens. Here's the reasoning in Miller's own words:

Miller observed that NSAC was "being built on the backbone of an FBI task force whose original mission" was to find "aliens suspected of having ties to terrorist organizations."

:::snip:::

But that original mission had creeped alarmingly, Miller's letter noted, saying: "But the mission of NSAC has expanded far beyond that limited purpose and scope and the Justice Department claims that with this new data mining center's access to billions of personnel records the 'universe of subjects will expand exponentially.' The potential for abuse and the possibility that innocent American citizens will become wrongfully ensnared within the FBI's growing web of potential suspects is a grave concern."

The FBI's sulky continued insistance on secrecy eventually gave the committee all the rope it needed to hang NSAC. "By refusing to answer even the most basic questions about this program, the Department of Justice has given us little choice. In fact, we're only doing what they told us to do," Representative Miller said in a statement.

"The Department of Justice... said that if Congress didn't like what they were doing, we could pull their funding. Well, that's what we've done... Until an agency can provide reasonable explanations, and assurances that our citizens' privacy won't be violated, it would be irresponsible to give the Department of Justice this large increase in funds."

Thanks, Brad. We knew we could count on you.