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Obama's Attorney General Secretly Granted Government Ability to Develop and Store Dossiers on Innocent Americans
Earlier this year,
Attorney General Eric Holder granted the center the ability to copy entire
government databases holding information on flight records, casino-employee
lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and other data,
and to store it for up to five years, even without suspicion that someone in the
database has committed a crime, according
to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story.
Whereas previously the law prohibited the center from storing
data compilations on U.S. citizens unless they were suspected of terrorist
activity or were relevant to an ongoing terrorism investigation, the new powers
give the center the ability to not only collect and store vast databases of
information but also to trawl through and analyze it for suspicious patterns of
behavior in order to uncover activity that could launch an investigation reports Wired Magazine.
Americans need to learn to the Goose Step
A former senior White House official told the Journal
that the new changes were “breathtaking in scope.”
But counterterrorism officials tried to downplay the move by
telling the Journal that the changes come with strict guidelines about
how the data can be used.
“The guidelines provide rigorous oversight to protect the
information that we have, for authorized and narrow purposes,” Alexander Joel,
Civil Liberties Protection Officer for the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, told the paper.
The NCTC currently maintains the Terrorist Identities Datamart
Environment database, or TIDE, which holds data on more than 500,000 identities
suspected of terror activity or terrorism links, including friends and families
of suspects, and is the basis for the FBI’s terrorist watchlist.
Under the new rules issued in March, the NCTC can now obtain
almost any other government database that it claims is “reasonably believed” to
contain “terrorism information.”
This could conceivably include collections of
financial forms submitted by people seeking federally backed mortgages or even
the private health records of anyone who sought mental or physical treatment at
government-run hospitals, such as Veterans Administration facilities, the paper
notes.
Liberty . . . Going, going, almost gone. |
"The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves." George Washington |
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