Prisonplanet.com
Monday, Dec 20th, 2010
The Washington Post today reports on the vast growing domestic spying apparatus that the federal government is using, in conjunction with the Pentagon, to target millions of law-abiding American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing.
In a lengthy report entitled “Monitoring America”, the Post details how a vast centralized snooping machine is being constructed and employed by local, state and federal agencies as well as military investigators, to collect, store and analyze swathes of personal information.
Everything contained within the Post’s article has already been reported and covered in depth by this website and others in the alternative media that have consistently warned of the threat of the exponential rise of the big brother spy system over the past decade.
The report details Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano’s recent “See something, say something” campaign, which encompasses the federal government hooking up with Wal-Mart, Amtrak, major sports leagues, hotel chains and metro riders to encourage citizens to file “suspicious activity reports” if they see any activity they think could be criminal or terroristic.
The government defines a suspicious activity as “observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity” related to terrorism.
As we reported recently, critics of the program have been literally dubbed insane by it’s coordinators, despite legitimate concerns over asking citizens to effectively spy on each other for the government.
The Washington Post report notes that such suspicious activity reports are just one piece of information being collected at the local and state levels and fed into a vast “Guardian” database via fusion centers, which ultimately connect to the FBI, the DHS and even the Department of Defense.
According to the report, the spook network includes 4,058 federal, state and local organizations.
Intelligence centers run by states across the country have access to personal information about millions of Americans, including unlisted cell phone numbers, insurance claims, driver’s license photographs and credit reports.
Dozens of the fusion centers were created after 9/11 to identify potential threats and “improve the way information is shared”. The centers use law enforcement analysts and sophisticated computer systems to compile, or fuse, disparate tips and clues and pass along the refined information to other agencies.
The centers have received billions in funding from the Department of Homeland Security and also work in conjunction with the military arm of the DHS, NORTHCOM.
They also have subscriptions to private information-broker services that keep records about Americans’ locations, employment history, financial holdings, associates, relatives, firearms licenses and the like.
Some of these data-brokers, such as one in Maryland called Entersect, claim to hold records about 98 percent of Americans.
Read the entire article
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