TIA wasn't just passive surveillance, "Program X" is Universal Terrorist Profiling

leveymg

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Fri Jul-27-07 02:04 PM
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TIA wasn't just passive surveillance, "Program X" is Universal Terrorist Profiling

Edited on Fri Jul-27-07 02:55 PM by leveymg

The scandal that seems most likely to bring down Attorney General Gonzalez centers on the warrantless surveillance program. His refusal to cooperate with Congress, and inconsistencies in his testimony, have finally forced public attention on continued illegal wiretapping, even after a 2004 confronation with career Department of Justice officials who tried desperately to shut it down.

But, the actual scope of the illegal domestic spying program that followed Total Information Awareness (TIA), what is being called Program X, looks to be far broader -- and more politicized and dangerous -- than has been publicly suggested. Read this, and then consider the brief photo essay that follows:

Analysis: Gonzales Testimony Part of Broader Effort to Conceal Surveillance Program
By Spencer Ackerman and Paul Kiel - July 26, 2007, 6:54 PM

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003787.php

Alberto Gonzales' testimony that there was "no serious disagreement" within the Bush Administration about the NSA warrantless surveillance program has left senators sputtering and fulminating about the attorney general's apparent prevarications. But a closer examination of Gonzales' testimony and other public statements from the Administration suggest that there may be a method to the madness.

SNIP

In essence, the issue is this: if Gonzales succeeds in convincing the committee that there really is a material distinction between the program as it existed before and after Comey’s intervention, he won't just save himself from perjury. He will perhaps have preserved an administration strategy of concealing the scope of Program X from the public and most of Congress -- making it appear that the program that Bush disclosed in December 2005, incorporating Comey's objections, is the same program that existed since October 2001, long before Comey put the brakes on at least some aspects of it. That may be at the heart of the White House's claim of executive privilege to prevent the Senate Judiciary Committee from seeing documents detailing the genesis of Program X.

SNIP

Interesting, but hardly surprising. We already know what they can do with the billions provided in various budgets for DHS and NSA for surveillance. Here's a brief overview.

By 2004, the technology and political will existed to do the folowing: using private sector contractors and telecoms, DHS, NSA, CIA, DIA combined their files and intercepts with all the commercially available data to create one enormous database containing all known electronic records of all the people in the United States and in a host of foreign countries.

This data was then fed into a series of NSA supercomputers programmed to produce a profile and social link chart that was supposed to measure and predict the probabilities that any individual is willing, able and ready to carry out terrorist acts.

NSA supercomputers

This isn't just speculation and Science Fiction. These profiling systems are under development by various agencies: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0%2c1895%2c2158541%2c00.asp

The Bush administration is itching to update a snooping law to encompass new technologies, even as a DOJ report shows the FBI is using data mining on a dizzying array of U.S. citizens' non-terrorist activities: Think auto insurance fraud and Medicare claims abuse.
...
The report covers six data-mining initiatives. Their summaries, as quoted from the DOJ's report:

The System-to-Assess Risk (STAR) Initiative, which is not yet operational, will be designed to help FBI analysts prioritize the risks associated with individuals who have already been identified as persons of interest in connection with a specified terror threat. The initiative will not label anyone a terrorist, but is designed to save time in helping to narrow the field of individuals who may potentially merit further scrutiny with respect to a specific terrorist threat.

The Identity Theft Intelligence Initiative examines and analyzes consumer complaints about identity theft in order to identify commonalities that may be indicative of major identity theft rings in a given geographic area. The initiative helps identify possible offenders who are the subject of multiple, similar consumer complaints in a given geographic area. This initiative has been used to identify major identity theft trends and organizations as well as generate leads for FBI field offices since 2003.

The Health Care Fraud Initiative examines summary health care billing records in government and private insurance claims databases to help the FBI identify anomalies that may be indicative of fraud or over-billing by health care providers. Introduced in 2003, this initiative has resulted in the initiation of more than 50 FBI investigations and nearly 200 referrals to state and local and other federal agencies, resulting in numerous criminal convictions and civil settlements for violations of health care fraud statutes.

You may have seen Spielberg's adaption of Philip K. Dick's, MINORITY REPORT, about the near-future where all murders are predicted in advance, and those found capable of them are arrested and put into permanent lockup. Everything from a person's diet to his or her credit history and publicly-known political expressions was factored in to create a risk quotient. It's something like Dick's dark prophesy of an (almost) perfect system to prevent political crime, only using computer algorithms instead of clairvoyance.

A graphic algorithm

The major problem with this program is that it's more effective at drawing up lists of the Bush Administration's political enemies, and spying on them, then 'neutralizing' them in various ways, than detecting and preventing actual terrorism.

All computer (and government) programs reflect the biases of their creators: