(LAT) You're Being Watched: Efforts to Collect Data on Americanst

[rodeodance]

Published on Thursday, January 12, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times


You're Being Watched: Efforts to Collect Data on Americans Go Far Beyond the NSA's Domestic Spying Program


by Laura K. Donohue


Congress will soon hold hearings on the National Security Agency's domestic spying program, secretly authorized by President Bush in 2002. But that program is just the tip of the iceberg.

Since 9/11, the expansion of efforts to gather and analyze information on U.S. citizens is nothing short of staggering. The government collects vast troves of data, including consumer credit histories and medical and travel records. Databases track Americans' networks of friends, family and associates, not just to identify who is a terrorist but to try to predict who might become one.

Remember Total Information Awareness, retired Adm. John Poindexter's effort to harness all government and commercial databases to preempt national security threats? The idea was that disparate, seemingly mundane behaviors can reveal criminal intent when viewed together. More disturbing, it assumed that deviance from social norms can be an early indicator of terrorism. Congress killed that program in 2003, but according to the Associated Press, many related projects continued.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency runs a data-mining program called Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery, which connects pieces of information from vast amounts of data sources. The Defense Intelligence Agency trawls intelligence records and the Internet to identify Americans connected to foreign terrorists. The CIA reportedly runs Quantum Leap, which gathers personal information on individuals from private and public sources. In 2002, Congress authorized $500 million for the Homeland Security Department to develop "data mining and other advanced analytical tools." In 2004, the General Accounting Office surveyed 128 federal departments and agencies to determine the extent of data mining. It found 199 operations, 14 of which related to counterterrorism. ........

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0112-31.htm

[ShockediSay]

1. If they got our shopping history and medical history

what do you wanna bet their bank & credit card contributors and their insurance contributors have access?

[Rich Hunt]

2. it's high time...

Someone ran an article on this.

I started a great book on this subject - it's called No Place To Hide.

[AuntiBush]

3. You Might Want To Check...

... something Verizon offers its customers now. A way to track any cellphone caller to any point of their destination. I turned it down. But anyone can now do so.

If someone calls you on your cellphone, you can log in online and track there every move.

[EVDebs]

7. See book Spychips. They can track US, can't track OBL's dialysis equip

www.spychips.com

and Total Surveillance in Motherjones
http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2005/12/albrecht.html

Pretty sad situation IMHO.

[colonel odis]

8. that would imply they want to track osama's dialysis equip.

can you imagine how pissed the saudis would be at the u.s. if bush actually caught and prosecuted one of its wealthiest sons?

[AuntiBush]

4. This is Sick and a Disgrace.

Not in my name. Sick! What's become of us?

[usregimechange]

5. Maybe Iraq can help us with our freedom?

[EVDebs]

6. Total Information Awareness

With RFIDs and background checks for employment de riguer nowadays we have a corporate and governmentally abetted system in place to terrorize anyone who dares to dissent.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=2025401

Combine this information with the fact that Total Information Awareness has been offshored, outsourced, and privatized to Global Information Group Ltd. of the Bahamas (a company run by Ben H. Bell, IIIrd) and blend that with the goals of Operation Garden Plot and Operation Cable Splicer, the mass arrest and detention of anyone who dissents from the views of the current administration...and you have the 'suspension' of the Constitution which Ollie North tried to bring about during the Reagan years.

Come to think of it, wasn't one Samuel Alito working in the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel to the WH and having to 'sign off' on plans like North's ? It would be nice to know his views on suspending the Constitution and if he ever wrote about this...

But Dems are just too polite for their own good, and everybody else's for that matter. We can't make Mrs. Alito cry again you know.