Cato Daily Dispatch for August 6, 2003
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Florida Creating New Counterterrorism DatabaseRumsfeld: No Need to Increase Size of U.S. Military
Bush Expected to Resume Anti-Drug Flights over Colombia
Florida Creating New Counterterrorism Database
"Police in Florida are creating a counterterrorism database designed to give law enforcement agencies around the country a powerful new tool to analyze billions of records about both criminals and ordinary Americans," reports The Washington Post.
"Organizers said the system, dubbed Matrix, enables investigators to find patterns and links among people and events faster than ever before, combining police records with commercially available collections of personal information about most American adults. It would let authorities, for instance, instantly find the name and address of every brown-haired owner of a red Ford pickup truck in a 20-mile radius of a suspicious event.
"The state-level program, aided by federal funding, is poised to expand across the nation at a time when Congress has been sharply critical of similar data-driven systems on the federal level, such as a Pentagon plan for global surveillance and an air-passenger-screening system."
Florida's database is similar in many ways to the Pentagon's controversial Terrorist Information Awareness program. In "Total Information Awareness for the Ages," Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., director of technology policy, writes: "Ironically, the project could also increase security risks. Even the Pentagon's resources are limited: Most people are not terrorists, and it can be a costly diversion to attempt to monitor the torrent of chatter that will be generated by this misguided program. Terrorists already immerse themselves in mainstream society, even using their real names and official government documents. They can learn and anticipate the trigger patterns that will supposedly generate red flags, and then avoid them."
Rumsfeld: No Need to Increase Size of U.S. Military
"Despite the stress of global missions on the U.S. military, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday he had seen no conclusive evidence yet that America's 1.4 million troops should be increased," Reuters reports.
"Rumsfeld said he was studying the problem with top military officials but that other avenues for making the military more efficient remained available, including shifting tens of thousands of non-combat jobs handled by troops to civilian defense workers.
"Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also warned at a Pentagon news conference that increasing end strength, including the Army's active 480,000 troops, was a very expensive and laborious step."
Cato scholars have written studies and commentaries arguing that U.S. troops supporting worldwide commitments, such as in South Korea, are unnecessary. Senior Fellow Doug Bandow makes the case for troop withdrawal from the Korean Peninsula in "Bring the Troops Home: Ending the Obsolete Korean Commitment," and Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy studies, gives good reasons to bring troops stationed in Saudi Arabia home in "Troops in Saudi Arabia Are Superfluous and Dangerous".
Bush Expected to Resume Anti-Drug Flights over Colombia
"President Bush is expected to approve the resumption of anti-drug surveillance flights in Colombia that result in the forcible grounding or destruction of planes suspected of smuggling narcotics, officials said yesterday," according to The New York Times.
"This so-called shootdown policy in Colombia and Peru was suspended two years ago after a small plane flying over Peru was identified as suspicious and later shot down. An American missionary, Veronica Bowers, and her infant daughter, Charity, were killed in the crash.
"Colombia's president, Álvaro Uribe, has been especially aggressive in seeking to resume the program, which is intended to weaken the traffickers' `air bridge' from coca-growing areas in Peru and Colombia to the United States."
Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, details the failure of U.S. anti-drug policy in Latin America in "Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America.". In the book, Carpenter takes a broad view of the fiasco that is Washington's drug war and provides a candid portrait of the situation in Latin America.
Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org