National Counterterrorism Center to Examine Government Files of U.S. Citizens for Possible Criminal Behavior
December 13th, 2012Via: Wall Street Journal:
Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal. Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens—even people suspected of no crime.
Not everyone was on board. “This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public,” Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security, argued in the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.
A week later, the attorney general signed the changes into effect.
Through Freedom of Information Act requests and interviews with officials at numerous agencies, The Wall Street Journal has reconstructed the clash over the counterterrorism program within the administration of President Barack Obama. The debate was a confrontation between some who viewed it as a matter of efficiency—how long to keep data, for instance, or where it should be stored—and others who saw it as granting authority for unprecedented government surveillance of U.S. citizens.
The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. That is a departure from past practice, which barred the agency from storing information about ordinary Americans unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation.
Now, NCTC can copy entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited.
The changes also allow databases of U.S. civilian information to be given to foreign governments for analysis of their own. In effect, U.S. and foreign governments would be using the information to look for clues that people might commit future crimes.
“It’s breathtaking” in its scope, said a former senior administration official familiar with the White House debate.
Counterterrorism officials say they will be circumspect with the data. “The guidelines provide rigorous oversight to protect the information that we have, for authorized and narrow purposes,” said Alexander Joel, Civil Liberties Protection Officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the parent agency for the National Counterterrorism Center.
The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution says that searches of “persons, houses, papers and effects” shouldn’t be conducted without “probable cause” that a crime has been committed. But that doesn’t cover records the government creates in the normal course of business with citizens.
Congress specifically sought to prevent government agents from rifling through government files indiscriminately when it passed the Federal Privacy Act in 1974. The act prohibits government agencies from sharing data with each other for purposes that aren’t “compatible” with the reason the data were originally collected.
But the Federal Privacy Act allows agencies to exempt themselves from many requirements by placing notices in the Federal Register, the government’s daily publication of proposed rules. In practice, these privacy-act notices are rarely contested by government watchdogs or members of the public. “All you have to do is publish a notice in the Federal Register and you can do whatever you want,” says Robert Gellman, a privacy consultant who advises agencies on how to comply with the Privacy Act.
It would be interesting to be able to see what files, if any, the government(s) has on yourself, and what is in those files. Of course not being able to find out is just another part of the game they play with us: we can know everything about you, but you can only beg for or dream about knowing anything about us.
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Homeland Security moves forward with ‘pre-crime’ detection
Internal Homeland Security document indicates a program to predict criminal intent is being tested on members of the public, raising questions about whether it’s a bit too close to a real-life Minority Report.
http://epic.org/privacy/body_scanners/EPIC-DHS-FOIA-09-14-11.pdf
I imagine the anti-Constitution creatures at DHS and the National Counterterrorism Center could integrate their systems with the Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST)
Introduction
EPIC filed two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the United States Department of Homeland Security’s Science & Technology Directorate (S&T) to obtain information about the agency’s public testing of a new sensor array used to conduct covert surveillance of individuals who are not suspected of any crime. The sensors secretly collect and record information concerning individuals, including video images, audio recordings, cardiovascular signals, pheromones, electrodermal activity, and respiratory measurements. EPIC received several responsive documents, including emails, contracts, and program descriptions. EPIC has filed an administrative appeal challenging the redaction, in whole and in part, of several requested documents.
EPIC also filed a follow-up request for a “Privacy Threshold Analysis” that was referenced in the first set of documents.
Background on FAST
According to documents published by the Department of Homeland Security, FAST is a “Minority Report” style initiative that seeks to determining the probability that an individual, who is not suspected of any crime, might commit a future criminal act. Under the FAST program, the DHS will collect and retain of a mix of “physiological and behavioral signals” from individuals as they engage in daily activities.
FAST is funded by S&T’s Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, and is managed by S&T’s Human Factors Behavior Sciences Division. FAST is designed to allow the agency capture biological and behavioral information from subjects. According to a 2008 Privacy Impact Assessment prepared by the agency, the DHS intends to monitor and collect data including “video images, audio recordings, cardiovascular signals, pheromones, electrodermal activity, and respiratory measurements.”
http://epic.org/privacy/fastproject/
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