CONFIRMED:
US Counterterrorism Agency Can Amass Data On Any Citizen
13
December, 2012
As
of March 2012, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) can copy
and examine entire government databases to predict possible
criminal behavior of
any U.S. citizen, Julia Angwin of The Wall
Street Journal reports.
Previously
the agency didn't have the authority to keep data about unsuspected
Americans or to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior.
Department
of Homeland Security (DHS) officials resisted the enactment of what
amounts to an unprecedented domestic surveillance dragnet, but in
the end the overarching desire to combat terrorism won out over the
privacy of U.S. citizens.
Angwin
details how Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the DHS,
argued to the White House that the NCTC new authority would
constitute a "sea change" because, whenever
citizens interact with the government, the first question asked is
now: "Are they a terrorist?"
The
report confirms a
July report by Chris Calabrese of
the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that the NCTC performs
"massive, secretive data collection and mining of trillions of
points of data" about U.S. citizens, which carries extra
significance since the NCTC also handles
the government "kill lists" by
analyzing information about suspected terrorists in its "disposition
matrix."
What
this means, Glenn
Greenwald explained,
is that "the NCTC — now vested with the power to determine the
proper "disposition" of terrorist suspects — is the same
agency that is at the center of the ubiquitous, unaccountable
surveillance state aimed at American citizens."
Calabrese
noted that "literally
anything the government collects is fair game,"
which implies that the NCTC can obtain conventional government
records — law enforcement investigations, health information,
employment history, travel and student records — as well as
unconventional government intel such as electronic activities
collected by the National
Security Agency's domestic spying apparatus and
biometric data collected by the CIA-linked
surveillance network TrapWire.
Furthermore,
the NCTC can choose to share U.S. civilian information with federal,
state, local, or foreign entities for analysis of possible criminal
behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them.
It
should be noted that the NCTC was reportedly given this unprecedented
snooping authority in the wake of the botched Christmas Day underwear
bombing in 2009, the
authenticity of which has been called into question.
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