Big Sister calms fears about Pentagon data collection

THERE'S NO NEED to worry about the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness initiative at all because we can trust computers completely, a leading blue-rinsed lady from the Manhattan Institute has told the delightfully named Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe.

And suggestions that John Poindexter is an unsuitable candidate for the job of "spying on Americans" is an ad hominem attack and a "diversion", Heather MacDonald, a lass with a great Scots name, told Hiawatha.

In fact, said Heather, critics of the "All Watching Eye" program, are "stifling technology" and US citizens should not care about the Pentagon collecting heaps of data because multinational corporations already have much of that info, so they can "shop on the Internet using credit cards".

Journalists like William Safire of the New York Times wrote a "column that was filled with falsehoods", said Heather.

She adds that the United States' biggest defensive weapon is information technology, and Heather reckons that this is a "superiority" that the country has compared to the rest of the world.

Perhaps that was true before the USA ceded lots of the technology to Red China in the 1990s, in the interest of trade.

Perhaps also Heather doesn't have any problems with Turbotax, her PC runs Linux and Open Office and so never crashes at all.

And perhaps the Cottingley Fairies were real manifestations of the existence of the supernatural, too.

L'INQ
Boston Globe
CNN on Poindexter