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 In last few days we witnessed a number of things that happened in the USA. Let’s summarise the rough facts:
1. FBI director Robert Mueller called on ISP's to record online activities of their users
2. U.S. President Bush signed Un-American Military Commissions Act, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reported on Tuesday.
3. White House issued new policy for U.S. control of space.
Three new measures giving clear indications about U.S. strategic plans for homeland security.
The first initiative, we dealt with yesterday, could be seen as a necessity because according to Mueller, "terrorists coordinate their plans cloaked in the anonymity of the Internet " and since ISPs’ normal procedure counts a fast deletion of records, sometimes these information get lost before the authorities could use them to identify the offenders.
And even appealing to Data Preservation , a measure approved in 1996 with the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act, Internet providers are asked to retain records for no more than 90 days, which are considered not enough.Unfortunately, this necessity opens a discomforting issue about the implications of a new legislation that Mueller's application would bring about, and specifically it makes us wonder how these data sets will be protected against misuse.
This comes hand in hand with new Un-American Military Commissions Act that U.S. President Bush signed Tuesday, authorizing military trials of terrorism suspects. The legislation also eliminates some of the rights defendants are usually guaranteed under U.S. law, and it authorizes continued harsh interrogations of terror suspects. Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of ACLU- The American Civil Liberties Union - already expressed his concerns:
"The President can now - with the approval of Congress - indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions. Nothing could be further from the American values we all hold in our hearts than the Military Commissions Act."
What will Mueller's call and new Un-American Military Commissions Act convey? Remember Gary McKinnon ? What will happen in similar cases, from now on?
The above measures by US Government, haven’t been the only initiative coming out from the Whitehouse this week, indeed on Wednesday, almost all the TV magazines and Newspapers around the world reported the announce that President Bush had released a new Act depicting US space strategy. The new US National Space Policy, focuses on two main principles:
o The United States is committed to the exploration and use of outer space by all nations for peaceful purposes, and for the benefit of all humanity. Consistent with this principle, "peaceful purposes" allow U.S. defense and intelligence-related activities in pursuit of national interests;
o The United States consider space capabilities -- including the ground and space segments and supporting links -- vital to its national interests. Consistent with this policy, the United States will: preserve its rights, capabilities, and freedom of action in space; dissuade or deter others from either impeding those rights or developing capabilities intended to do so; take those actions necessary to protect its space capabilities; respond to interference; and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national interests.
The first thing that we thought when reading the Plan, was: what exactly did they mean by “U.S. national interests”? Maybe homeland security? Maybe economic interests? It is quite unclear, to say the truth, and it reminds us of the early eighties, and of a Strategic defence initiative (soon baptized “Star Wars”) promoted by President Reagan.
The second one is: who is cnsidered as an Enemy for the USA? Countries, single persons?
The question is not about militarizing space. Clearly, we have been using and will continue to use space for military purposes. But, whereas we are currently using space assets to support terrestrial (ground, sea, and air) military operations, what Sen. Robert C. Smith (R-N.H.), the Space Commission (which was chaired by current Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld), and others have proposed is that the United States move toward "weaponizing" space for space control, in spite of international agreements.
Actually, as everybody knows perfectly, up there lots of satellites for telecommunication, science and intelligence purposes exist, and they aren't from U.S. institutions and agencies only.
And what's more, we all know that space provide a priviledged perspective for communication controlling and other countries' activities monitoring. National security must be one element of total U.S. space policy, but it must certainly not be the primary component, as it emerges in an interesting document published on Cato institute web site
So, if all the above initiatives aren’t based only on U.S. attempt to secure this world from criminal, terrorist activities and wars… what kind of collateral activities do they represent?
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