The News Tribune from Tacoma, Washington (2024)

March 8, 1978

Publication:

The News Tribunei

Location:

Tacoma, Washington

Issue Date:

Wednesday, March 8, 1978

Page:

8

Extracted Article Text (OCR)

JACK ANDERSON The Tacoma News Tribune FBI eyes computer snooper A-S Wtd North 1 1971 FRANK BAKER 1879-1960 WILLIAM ROBINSON President-General Manager DONALD DUNCAN Managing Editor ELBKRT BAKER II Chairman-Publisher DONALD A PUGNETTI Editor Moving NOAA to Tacoma approved he told our associate Gary Cohn Cochran said he waa unaware of the promise that Congress would be consulted But congressional sources believe the FBI tried to sneak-play operating on the assumption that if they could get contractors to include specific messageewitching proposals in the bids they could confront the Carter administration and Congress with a fait accompli Cochran also claimed the FBI had been given permission by the General Services Administration the government's supplier to include the messageswitching language in the bid invitations But Frank Carr GSA's computer commissioner said the FBI has not complied with his guidelines George Orwell in his concept of 1984 warned of an omnipotent state police apparatus holding sway over the most intimate lives of the people Moss says message switching an importance far transcending its innocent and innocuous sounding name It relates to problems of preserving privacy and maintaining control over expansion of federal influence in state and local law enforcement Under the plan the FBI would become a centralized control element dominating and controlling all state data" limited FfBturt Syndicate) John Moss (IFCalif) sldrtnjcW tta moves White House aide Jack Watson wrote concerned congressmen on pec 12: is my understanding that no final decisions have been made In fart a comprehensive study on privacy Is now underway" Three days later the Justice Department was even more emphatic in a private letter to Capitol Hill: shall hot be undertaking any initiative in this area (message switching) without prior consultation with and approval by the Congress" Yet only four days later unbeknownst to Congress the FBI sent out special instructions to computer firms inviting them to bid on telecommunications equipment Their proposals had to Include hardware and software components necessary for message switching" the FBI declared in direct violation of the White House and Justice Department pledges Furthermore competitors for contracts would be judged on the messageewitching factor the FBI emphasized Jay Cochran the FBI's assistant director for technical services argued that the solicitation was proper because it advised the bidders that the message system had not been actually authorized The bureau wished the option proposal included just in case message switching should later be WASHINGTON The FBI has an insatiable itch to get its hands on a forbidden new computer telecommunications system that eventually could compile dossiers on virtually every person in the United States Officials at the fortress-like Edgar Hoover headquarters building recently made a quiet pitch to obtain the Orwellian system despite promises by the White House and Justice Department to make no move without consulting Congress The system is known in government circles by two innocent-sounding words: message switching Once it becomes cooperative it could place the FBI in physical control of all state criminal data in the country with access to every data inquiry from one police jurisdiction to another Through the wizardry of electronics the FBI would transmit each message between local police departments By delaying or expediting messages the FBI would be in a position to hinder or help local authorities for their cooperation with the FBI The flood of Information throughout the country could easily be copied and stored in computer banks and pulled out with a flick of an FBI finger By offering the service free of charge the FBI would swiftly gain a tight monopoly on all criminal data ADVOCATES OF MAKING more use of computers in the war against crime contend that a computerized master file would provide the FBI with speedy and accurate information needed to solve crimes This Information could be flashed instantly to any police unit in the country But critics fear the FBI message switching would create a national data bank and thereby turn the FBI into a national police force Even if computers could be restricted to police records these contain names of thousands of Americans who have never committed a crime but have become innocently involved In investigations In the past the FBI has abused the rights of people whom the late Edgar Hoover like Agents illegally tapped private phones opened mail and used entrampment tactics against anti-war and minority groups that were ideologically unpopular THESE EXCESSES have been stopped and the FBI is returning to the tenacious police work that made it famous Conscientious officials felt they could improve FBI efficiency by installing a message-switching system They obtained permission from the Justice Department hierarchy to go ahead with it But vigorous protests from Rep Further NOAA ships berthed in Commencement Bay would have more direct access to Puget Sound and the open sea Use of the Sand Point location would mean NOAA vessels would have to negotiate the Hiram Chittenden Iocks and slowly traverse the narrow Lake Washington Ship Canal to get to their pier facilities The Save Lake Washington group has suggested dividing the operation by building the shore-based headquarters at Sand Point but keeping the NOAA vessels berthed in Seattle's Lake Union Such a split arrangement ought to be rejected out of hand It would be costly inefficient and wasteful to have the two halves of the NOAA operation separated by the time it takes to travel the better-than five miles between Lake Union and Sand Point The more you examine the Tacoma site the better it looks Even Sen Warren Magnu-son the of the Sand Point location has said the Tacoma offer deserves a close look With Magnuson and Congressman Norm Dicks working on it we're certain the idea will get the attention it deserves Meantime City Councilman Phil Schroeder and City Manager Erling Mork deserve praise for their heads-up work in making a timely and cogent proposal to move NOAA to Tacoma It makes a good deal of sense to move the regional headquarters of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration from Seattle to Tacoma First there is considerable doubt whether the new facility will ever be built at its planned Sand Point location on Iake Washington Second the Sand Ioint site never was a very logical choice anyway A lawsuit brought by a group called Save Lake Washington has at least temporarily stymied plans to construct pier facilities and a headquarters complex at Sand Point Considering the lengths to which citizen opposition can he taken it is likely the delays could stretch into years Thus the state could well lose the chance to be the home port of an $833-millin regional NOAA facility Unless of course a decent alternative exists Tacoma is the logical choice In fact a good argument can be made that Tacoma's Commencement Bay would be a far superior location for the NOAA facility than would Lake Wash-iigton Commencement Bay has the room required for lierthing a dozen of NOAA's seagoing research vessels Unlike the Sand Point site there would be no need fur the huge amounts of dredging that would disturb the freshwater ecology of Lake Washington TOM BRADEN Carter dares Israels lobby government does not want peace except on its own terms and those terms are totally unsatisfactory to every other country in the world Jimmy Carter is trying to tell the Israelis that though they may not need peace in the Middle East the United States does It remains to be seen whether the Congress will back him in this view im tmm mmiomi doubt A turndown for Egypt might well lead to retaliation in the form of a turndown of US requests to keep the lid on the price of oil And this might lead to strained relations between this country and the Saudis In either event chances for peace in the Middle East would suffer Which may not be altogether to Israel's dislike It is dear now that Begin's form the Israeli lobby decides to frame its opposition makes little difference from the president's standpoint He is rushing headlong into a major confrontation with the most powerful legislative influence group in the country and for no other reason than his conviction that the arms package is in the hest interests of the United Stales Of which there would seem little Earning a diploma WASHINGTON One of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's assistants approached him after he told the Congress recently that the arms package sale to the Middle East was an all-or-nothing proposition and asked that for the secretary of state replied where we're going to stand" It's a brave stand I can't remember when an American administration last told the Israeli lobby that the interests of Israel were not identical to the interests of the United States Unless memory betrays me Carter's is the first And Vance's tough statement has set the Israeli lobby back on its heels Jewish organizations were cranking up for a campaign to persuade the Congress to disapprove the arms sales to Egypt and Saudi Arabia while approving the sale to Israel BUT AFTER VANCE had his say the operation came to a sudden halt One senator with a large Jewish constituency back home said he hadn't received a single telegram on the arms sale subject since Vance expressed his all-or-nothing view Speculation on the Hill is that Jewish organizations may now be trying to make up their minds whether to challenge Vance directly by pushing for congressional disapproval of the Arab part of the package or whether to try to defeat the whole package and then come back later and introduce a separate and new proposal on behalf of Israel Meantime the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations has begun to level a steady fire at Jimmy Carter accusing him of favoring Egyptian views and calling on him to put Sadat in his place is time for the president to tell Sadat to start talking peace not de- Because of its importance and nianding surrender And tell him to its possibly deep ramifications sUrt the recommendation must TOE TONE only a little more receive careful and objective strident than that adopted by Israeli consideration Prime Minister Menachem Begin who What is at stake is the urgent has set forth his timetable for the con-need to improve the quality of gmssional agenda during considera- students who are emerging from of nur hi oh school' Dyan who has said flatly that the our mgn scnoois president is wrong and that his propos als must be defeated So there is no question that Carter is in for a difficult time In whatever and public appeal in the back-to-the-basics movement Yet our schools cannot emphasize the basics to the detriment of other areas particularly those subjects which equip youth for entry into college Still we're confident these potential problems can be avoided Given time and careful consideration school administrators teachers parents and students will be able to gear themselves toward implementation of a basic-skills test system Final decisions are yet to be made of course The next step comes this Thursday when school administrators and staff will be called upon to give their views and provide their advice about the citizens' committee recommendations Then the Tacoma School Board is to begin its consideration of the basic-skills test proposal on March 23 A citizens' committee headed by Judge Vernon Pearson has formally issued its recommendation that Tacoma students be required to pass a basic-skills test before they can receive their high school diplomas It seems a reasonable requirement After all if a diploma is to mean anything it must signify that the recipient has attained a degree of knowledge that equips him to cope with the work-a-day world But the issue is not all that simple There are as Judge Pearson noted certain hazards involved in requiring and administering a basic-skills examination First is the matter of deciding what a basic-skills test should contain How difficult should it be? Make it too hard and you will have a lot of diploma-less students leaving Tacoma high schools Make it too easy and you defeat the purpose of the test Then too what sort of impact will a requirement for competency in basic skills have upon the curriculum in Tacoma's public schools? There is considerable value 1 Two historic -one ran on booze The Navy plans to retire the Nautilus next year perhaps mothballing it in the reserve fleet But since the Nautilus was the first nuclear-powered submarine and the first vessel to travel under the North Pole it would seem to deserve more than mothballs per haps in time the kind of commissioned preservation accorded the old USS Constitution It may of course be a few decades more into the space age before the Nautilus becomes as revered as the Constitution which dramatized American maritime history in a number of ways not always involving water Leo Aikmann reports in the Atlanta Constitution that the Constitution set sail from Boston in 1779 with 46600 gallons of fresh water plus food ammunition and 7000 gallons of rum The ship took on 68300 more gallons of rum plus flour for Jamaica Thus fueled it defeated five British war ships and scuttled 12 merchant ships before running out of ammunition Still it made a night raid at the Firth of Clyde where a landing party captured a whiskey distillery and 40000 gallons of its contents Six months later the Constitution arrived back in Boston without ammunition food rum or whiskey It did hold thousands of gallons of stagnant water which may show how the iron men on those wooden ships felt about their liquid surroundings Or perhaps Old Ironsides was powered by more than the wind St Leuis Pest-Dispatch SYDNEY HARRIS MICHAEL NOVAK Crime on wheels From Ali and Bella to Jimmy of the main reasons The recent popularity of the van You can't steal a lot of big stuff with a car but you can stack a whole room of furniture into a van and nobody can tell unless he opens the doors NOW HAVE HUNDREDS of vans coming into the county in the summer and it's impossible to police them They can pull up to the back door of a house or a store and make off with large objects that wouldn't fit into a conventional auto And with curtains over most of their windows no way to look in and see what load the van is Well snowmobiles have been a godsend to rural people in winter releasing them from tedious months of nearhibernation And vans have a practicality that has made them immensely popular Neither can be successfully legislated against or out of existence They are technological in modem transportation Yet if we keep on making and buying them one of the important tradeoffs is the mounting loss of security we used to ha ve just as one of the tradeoffs for the speed of air flight has become the vulnerability to hijacking and terrorism There is no more in the benefits of technology than there is in economics IFteW There is on the whole very little violence in rural areas Isut crime against property is the biggest problem facing the authorities in the last few years the burglary rate has risen nearly twice as much in the country as in the cities And in the last decade the rural rate of all crime has doubled Of course there are sociological factors at work here but even when these are accounted for there is still something left unsaid And this is the inevitable between civility and technology Last summer I was having coffee one morning with the sheriff of our rural county in Wisconsin which has only one town with more than a thousand people in it The subject turned to wheels DON'T THINK enough about the effect of wheels" he said the snowmobile came in some years ago the winter crime rate started to rise Summer homes that had been protected by snowfalls began being bur glarized by snowmobilers who could now get in and out fast Anil since they travel over fields and places cars can't go we found it hard to pursue them" about the summertime?" I rskrA what he was expecting me to the crime rate going up in the summer now He nodded and I'll tell you one citizens right where it is Carter's program involves government inefficiency and red-tape The Moynihan-Packwood plan is simplicity itself a mark on an incomf tax form once a year Carter's plan it the old liberalism The Moynihan-Packwood plan represents the new IT WILL BE FASCINATING to see if Carter is the his admir-ers say he is and whether he really is the last politician of an old era or the reluctant slow but gradually awakened leader of the new The night of Feb 14 in New York City at the screening of the Dupont Awards in Broadcast Journalism before an audience of distinguished news department personnel someone spoke of Carter's second A spontaneous snicker swept the audience No one planned it so But everyone present gained an insight into the perilously thin line that teparales Jimmy Carter from Ali and Abzug Thu is a difficult nation to govern Carter will find a great longing to follow a strong leader in a new direction once he ceases to be advised that liberalism means the visions of the 1960's One evening in February Muhammad Ali found the heavyweight championship of the world tom from his tired or perhaps more exactly he allowed it to be taken from him whether by calculation or by miscalculation The better and stronger boxer gave early rounds away gave them flagrantly and openly and then could not blow Mr Spinks out at the bitter end But that same midweek another champion of another era was also put away the former Stalinist and leader of the Houston feminists Bella Abzug Just as the citizens of New York State rejected her bid for the US Senate in 1976 just as they rejected her bid for the mayoralty in 1977 (way ahead in the beginning she finished fourth) so also they rejected her for a seat in the US House of Representatives Although Democrats in the district held a 3-1 advantage her opponent was virtually unknown and Mrs Abzug had only to submit to a one-month examination by the voters her vision was rejected In defeat Mrs Abzug brought a warning to Mr Carter too For her opponent an intelligent and sophisticated man urged his constituents to the president a message" They did THE MESSAGE IS: Forget the 1960s The people have had enough of the politics that many Carter underlings love best chipon-theahoulder politics the politics of proud outsiders kick-theestablishment politics the politics of contempt for the majority Even the elaborate funeral for Hubert Humphrey was a message to Jimmy Carter Humphrey was in 1968 in 1972 and even in 1976 a symbol of everything the new class opposed a symbol of the old politics the quintessential insider's politician After 13 months of Jimmy Carter's young Humphrey could be permitted the love and honor once withheld from him But the Carter people do not seem to understand the change Joe Califano is still poking the government's nose into people's personal habits Carter is stiU dedaring his preference for larger government bureaucracies as in his preference for giving grants to families to pay for higher education These are examples of the old liberalism The old liberalism held that government is an agency of moral goodness The new liberalism (Just being born) is cynical about government's moral motives The old liberalism desired to solve problems by collecting money from people then giving it back in the way government chose to do the job The new liberalism prefers to leave the money in the hands of those who earned it and to permit them to make the most liberal efficient and wisest use of it THE OLD LIBERALISM couldn't do anything without building bigger bureaucrades and fatter government payrolls The new liberalism holds that government bureaucracy is the least efficient least effective and least liberal method of accomplishing anything and prefers to reward private imagination and intelligence An activist effective government is in some matters domestic and foreign a necessity But the new liberalism is as critical of the old liberalism as of any other institution This is the key difference between educational grants programs and the Moynihan-Packwood tuition tax-credit program which the Congress seems to prefer program would require a larger bureaucracy The Moynihan-Packwood plan would permit money to stay in the hands of.

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