- In a way, it galls me. Except for the little voice deep
down - the one that keeps smirking.
-
- In 2003, it was the Terrorism (formerly "Total")
Information Awareness Office. Then "Super-Snoops." Mid-January
2004, it was news concerning a collusion between a prominent government
agency giving an airline some 90 days' worth of private information on
some 440,000 US citizens - to assess terrorist risks. The same month we
learned that 2000 census data had been used in a data-mining effort to
cross-match so-called "anomalies" with passenger lists. Cendent
Corporation's "massive database'" on customers, with more than
200 pieces of cross-referenceable information. Potential of arrest for
"crimes of opinion."
-
- All this dovetails with a culture of political correctness
run so completely amok, that one's views can be known - and dealt with
- even before a person has had a chance to give them voice.
-
- And our legislators, journalists and commentators are
outraged. Shocked!
-
- Since 1990 a plethora of award-winning books and articles
(my own and others') have outlined the breadth and scope of data-trafficking,
cross-referencing and information-sharing in the U.S. and abroad. PBS's
NOVA series featured a special, "We Know Where You Live." Business
Week writer/analyst, Jeffrey Rothfeder, wrote Privacy for Sale, which revealed,
among other things, just how much unauthorized information the author was
able to dig up, on a lark, about a certain Vice President Dan Quayle, of
whom he was not particularly fond. Until, one day it wasn't so funny, and
Rothfeder started writing his watershed book. Earl R. MacCormac, science
advisor to the then-Governor of North Carolina, penned a lengthy document
for his boss warning of a technological and legal nightmare. MacCormac
started with a scrap of paper and explained just how much personal information
he could locate about someone via computerized cross-matching in just 24
hours.
-
- The bottom line? Your privacy's toast.
-
- My own particular emphasis was the unethical use of schools
and children, an angle none of the other writers up to that time had looked
into. I focused on a little-known technique (outside of advertising and
marketing circles) known as "psychographic surveying" with a
view to altering attitudes. Then I traced the evolution of automatic transfer
capability to federal and international databases from 1969 onward. A definition
of psychographics is found in Webster's New World Communication and Media
Dictionary: "the study of social class based upon the demographics
income, race, color, religion, and personality traits." These characteristics,
says the dictionary, "can be measured to predict behavior" -
prediction being the point of the exercise.
-
- How? By collecting personal information, especially "lifestyle
data," which includes opinions and preferences, via surveys, tests,
and questionnaires; cross-matching the responses with various public and
private records; and then applying a mathematical model (a) to predict
individual and group reactions to future, hypothetical scenarios, and (b)
to find areas of commonality among socioeconomic, demographic, political
and religious groups.
-
- As early as 1989, evidence started accumulating concerning
questions falling under the rubric of psychographics which, inexplicably,
were being included in standardized school achievement tests. The first
what-would-you-do-if queries and word-association games passed off as vocabulary
questions I saw were test items from Pennsylvania's Educational Quality
Assessment in 1985. As time went on, test creators got better at devising
questions in such a way that the "target subjects," as it was
termed, would be unaware just how much they were divulging.
-
- Soon, technical papers detailing state and nationwide
plans for compiling and storing computerized, private information were
uncovered - the U.S. Department of Education's "Measuring the Quality
of Education" (1981) and "A Plan for the Redesign of the Elementary
and Secondary Data Collection Program" (1986). The next shocker featured
justifications concerning "the permissibility of deception" in
school testing based on "the rights of an institution to obtain information
necessary to achieve its goals," set out by behavioral scientists
Richard Wolf and Ralph Tyler.
-
- Wolf pointed out in "Crucial Issues in Testing,"
that privacy implications aside, there "are occasions in which the
test constructor [finds it necessary] to outwit the subject so that he
cannot guess what information he is revealing." Wolf and Tyler both
emanated from the Educational Testing Service (ETS). Tyler was also a former
Commissioner of Education under the US Department of Health, Education
and Welfare - which seemed rather a conflict of interest at the time, but
apparently nobody cared. He was largely responsible for creating our nationwide
test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Under separate
contract he wrote, or weighed in heavily, on at least 12 state tests -
called "assessments" to hedge the legal definition of testing.
-
- So offended were citizens when news of attitudinal questions
incorporated into achievement tests hit the presses with my first book
in 1991 that lines to the Department were temporarily jammed with irate
callers.
-
- "Rubbish," howled Robert J. Coldiron, head
of Pennsylvania's Chief of Testing and Evaluation at the State Education
Agency in Harrisburg in a Letter to the Editor in Education Week.
-
- "Nonsense," insisted Ohio's then-chief of testing
when I was invited to Columbus to speak at a state board meeting at the
insistence of parents there.
-
- With my second book in 1994, officials from various agencies
- among them, the National Center for Education Statistics - were asking
for a meeting with me to "prove" none of this was happening.
Emerson Elliott, then-head of NCES urged: "Come see the new National
Assessment tests for yourself. Oh . And by the way, that computer you named
- the Elementary and Secondary Integrated Data System - it doesn't exist."
-
- And so on, in one state after another on my lecture circuit
- New Hampshire, Nebraska, Indiana, Maryland. Meanwhile, I was amassing
enough proof from informants, anonymous and otherwise, to wallpaper the
entire Department with phony test questions.
-
- Then there was the House and Senate. The then-legislative
assistant for education to Senator Charles E. Grassley - the same fellow
now demanding congressional review of the huge profiling database about
to be brought online to snoop for potential terrorists via the Pentagon's
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) - huffed that my allegations
were "alarmist" and could never happen here. By the time my third
and final book, Cloning of the American Mind, hit the street in 1998, the
official tune had changed. Well, they said, there were "a few demographic"
as well as "noncognitive" questions included on state and national
tests. Then, testing companies admitted that "some" questions
were aimed at assessing "extenuating factors" (including home
life, parents' habits, worldviews, magazines, financial status, etc.) which
might affect a child's learning. Finally, curriculums in subjects like
health and sex required some method, after all, of estimating and predicting
their impact, above and beyond "mere" right or wrong answers.
-
- All this was passed off as part of an increased emphasis
on accountability. As for my earlier allusions to the Department of Education's
Elementary and Secondary Integrated Data System, taken from Appendix E
in the 1988 Nation's Report Card: Well, heh, heh, you see, there were ongoing
technical difficulties in computer compatibility at the state and local
levels; so the Department of Education, through the Council of Chief State
School Officers, launched a series of "incentives" to improve
matters until there emerged a bigger and better version of the system,
the SPEEDE/ExPRESS, into which all student, teacher, and school records
have flowed since the mid-1990s. So many computer experts were there on
the project that Florida's Associate Commissioner of Education, Cecil Golden,
was once prompted to remark (prophetically, as it turned out): "[L]ike
those assembling an atom bomb, very few of them understand what they're
building, and won't until we put all the parts together."
-
- For the past decade students have had to plow through
not only quasi-tests called "assessments," featuring all sorts
of questions about their parents and home life, but a multitude of intimate
and personal surveys, nearly all of them computerized, as part of their
class work. Where do you think newspapers get statistics like "12%
of students say they have had intercourse by age 15," or smoked a
joint in the last 6 months, or dislike their parents?
-
- But, of course, these responses are anonymous, you say.
-
- Dream on. Surreptitious "slugging," "bar-coding,"
"sticky-labeling," and "embedding identifiers": All
these techniques, and more, are described at length in the testing contracts
and literature, should anyone bother to read them.
-
- Children have always been the consummate sources of data,
notoriously undiscerning about the kinds of information they disclose.
Like all computerized facts and figures, youngsters' responses can be cross-matched
with everything from medical and health insurance records to credit card
transactions. But no legislation or guidelines have emerged from our hallowed
regulative bodies to sufficiently put the brakes on the tremendous upswing
of such activity over the past two decades. The 80s and 90s were spent
largely in denial. If anything, our leaders made it worse by swallowing
malarkey about the supposed benefits of mental health profiling, personality
inventories and behavioral screening - to identify potential troublemakers
and ensure public safety. Society's reward? More Columbine-like atrocities
- and a near-perfect political weapon, now neatly in place.
-
- I used to be asked on talk shows: Who would ever use
such a thing? What kind of democracy would amass information, and snoop
on its own citizens?
-
- None, of course - unless national security were at stake,
unless there were a dire threat, some trigger. September 11 was that trigger.
Sleeper cells of terrorists are that threat. We can argue all day about
porous borders, lax immigration control, permissive childrearing and bleeding-heart
responses to crime as contributing factors to our public and private security
woes. None of that matters anymore. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy
Act - like the 1970 Fair Credit Reporting Act, the 1974 Privacy Act, the
1978 Right to Financial Privacy Act, the 1988 Cross-Matching and Privacy
Protection Act, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and all the various other incarnations
- are virtually meaningless. They're so filled with loopholes they look
like Swiss cheese. Not only is every scintilla of your personal information
available to government agencies (both national and international), but
incorporated is a capability to assess anything from parental fitness and
tax fraud to a child's state of mind. Not only that, so-called "directory"
information - including a youngster's name, address, phone number, picture,
and e-mail address - can be released without consent to predators.
-
- So now our revered legislators and media moguls are worried
about amassing dossiers, covert cross-matching, government prying, and
freedom of conscience.
-
- Well, it's a tad late, Suckers. The horse has busted
out the barn door and is galloping down the street. Go catch it if you
can.
-
- [Note: This piece was first published in Media Bypass
Magazine in January 2003. In light of recent events, it is more true now
than it was even then, and the second paragraph and third reflect the news
updates.]
-
- © 2004 Beverly Eakman - All Rights Reserved
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