by http://www.eff.org
It makes no difference if Edward Snowden, who had fled to
Hong Kong and revealed that the American government was spying upon American
citizens, is a traitor or a hero.
Intelligence agencies from China, Russia, England,
Israel, and maybe even Lichtenstein, probably already know that the National
Security Administration (NSA) is collecting data of all the phone calls and
emails of Americans, and linking them to conversations with foreign nationals.
What is unsettling is that everything the NSA is doing is legal. Secret federal
courts can issue secret warrants to agencies that maintain secret files.
Americans who have been paying attention should also know
that electronic spying--it sounds better when the government says it's data
mining to prevent terrorism--has been going on at least a decade.
In 2002,
the federal government disclosed Operation TIPS , the Terrorist Information and
Prevention System . Dreamed up within the Department of
Justice , the "spy on your mommy" nationwide
program would have given, according to the Department of Justice, "millions of
American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility
employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity."
When the U.S . Postal Service refused to
participate in this witch hunt, the program failed.
About
the time the Department of Justice was developing TIPS, the Air Force's Office of
Special Investigations developed TALON, the Threat and Local Observation Notice
System. Like TIPS, TALON's purpose was to encourage "civilians and military
personnel to report on activities they consider suspicious." The reports were
"raw, non-validated" reports of "anomalous activities," and likely to be "fragmented
and incomplete," according to a classified memo written in May 2003 by Paul
Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense. These unverified tips were then sent by
"automated information systems or via e-mail attachment" to the secret
Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) office, created in December 2002, and
added to an equally super secret database.
Other
than the problem of Defense staff spending significant time and money on the
collection and analysis of massive amounts of unverified and mostly useless
data, not only wasn't that data purged within 90 days, as promised, but
subsequent investigations revealed the Department of Defense had been
collecting data on persons who opposed the war in Iraq but posed no threat to
national security.
More
sinister than TIPS and TALON was TIAP , the Total
Information Awareness Program to create an "ultra-large-scale" database of databases about individuals. The program was
designed to develop a file on every American. That program was never fully
funded, apparently because even Congress didn't want the government spying on
whatever it is that Congress does.
However, parts of
discredited programs were quickly moved into classified status, with "need to
know" stamped all over them, and then fused into new programs. Next up: the
Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC). The program, under the CIA but with
the input from several other federal agencies, was designed to "merge and
analyze terrorist-related information collected domestically and abroad in
order to form the most comprehensive possible threat picture."
However, the
inspector general of the Department of Justice revealed the program "could not
ensure that the information in that database was complete and accurate." It
noted conflicting information, that some on the list were noted as "armed and
dangerous" but given the lowest rating, while others with little or no history
of violence were given higher ratings. The report was especially critical of
the handling of data--"A lack of sufficient training, oversight and general
management of the call screeners has left the activities of the call center
vulnerable to procedural errors, poor data entry and untimely responses to
callers."
MATRIX , the name imposed by the
acronym-happy government for the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange , was was finally shut down in April
2005 when the federal government reluctantly stopped its funding. MATRIX was
created to give local and state governments a common database that merged government and private records. Like
private credit reports, MATRIX included data that was incomplete or completely
wrong. Seisint, the private company that Congress showered millions of dollars
upon, also collected data about ethnicity, meal requirements, and telephone
calling records. Interestingly, MATRIX didn't include records of gun ownership,
which could be a far more important indicator to determine possible terrorism
potential than the color of eyes of an individual, based upon driver's license
information.
The Center for
Dynamic Data Analysis developed software and machine-learning algorithms that to
monitor the news media, blogs, web sites, and possibly internet messages for
any negative views about the United States and its leaders. The data mining
program, according to the government, was also to be used "to identify members
of groups who want to form a demonstration or oppose a particular event or
government policy," Publically, the government claimed only articles published
by non-American media would be captured and then mined. Even if accurate--President George W. Bush had sworn that
the U.S. wasn't routinely monitoring conversations between Americans, only to
later admit he wasn't telling the truth--numerous foreign publications include
articles and RSS news feeds from American publications.
In March 2003, all
airlines were required to provide U. S. Customs with electronic data of their
passengers' personal information, including ethnicity and meal requirements.
After bullying 25 European Union nations, the U.S. got agreements that would
yield personal data in 34 categories on every passenger who flies into or out
of the United States. Three years later, the European Court of Justice ruled
that the agreement between the 25-nation EU and the United States was illegal,
and ordered member nations not to supply data to the United States unless
changes to protect citizen rights and privacy were enacted.
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