Last March, US intelligence officials met at the White House to debate a proposal to “create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about US citizens — even people suspected of no crime.” So reports Julia Angwin, writing for the Wall Street Journal in an article published 12 December.
The debate centered on two core factions: Those who saw the issue as a “matter of efficiency” and those who saw it as “granting authority for unprecedented government surveillance of US citizens.”
The focus of the argument centered on the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and the scope of its surveillance and datamining activities. Previously, the NCTC was prohibited from storing information about US citizens unless the individual was either a terrorism suspect or related to an investigation. But the efficiency faction won and US Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr. signed an order allowing the NCTC “to examine the government files of US citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them,” according to Angwin.
Holder’s order was executed secretly, without approval of the US Congress.
Until now, the NCTC was an almost unknown government agency outside of spook circles. It compiles and maintains the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) database containing records on more than 500,000 individuals suspected of terrorist activity or links to suspected terrorists. TIDE is the database used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for its terrorist watchlist.
Under Holder’s order, the NCTC can store and analyze information on ordinary US citizens for up to five years and can store data “reasonably believed to constitute terrorism information” permanently.
While the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits searches without probable cause, the Obama administration is taking the position it doesn’t apply to “records the government creates in the normal course of business with citizens,” writes Angwin.
The Privacy Act prohibits data matching between government agencies for purposes that aren’t compatible with the reason the information was originally collected. But, Angwin notes, government agencies can exempt themselves from the Privacy Act simply by publishing a notice in the Federal Register.
Angwin sums up the new surveillance and datamining abilities:
“The changes also allow databases of US civilian information to be given to foreign governments for analysis of their own. In effect, US and foreign governments would be using the information to look for clues that people might commit future crimes.”
In 2002, the Pentagon proposed a massive surveillance and datamining operation that would merge public and private databases that could be analyzed for clues to terrorism activity. The program, called Total Information Awareness, was supposedly killed in 2003 by the US Congress. In March 2008, Siobhan Gorman, writing for the Wall Street Journal, reported the program had been revived and placed in the hands of the US National Security Agency (NSA).
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NCTC free to surveil and datamine the US citizenry at will was originally published by ARTS & FARCES internet on Wednesday, 19 December 2012 at 10:32 AM CDT. Copyright © ARTS & FARCES LLC. All rights reserved. | ISSN: 1535-8119 | OCLC: 48219498 | Digital fingerprint: 974a89ee1284e6e92dd256bbfbef3751 (64.237.45.114)