Are You in the FBI’s Suspicious Activities Database?
The Washington Post's Dana Priest has another phone book's worth of terrifying revelations about our national security/police/prison state One that really chills given the FBI's track record is the "vast repository" the Bureau is building that (more).
The Washington Post’s Dana Priest has another phone book’s worth of terrifying revelations about our national security/police/prison state. One that really chills given the FBI’s track record is the “vast repository” the Bureau is building that “stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor.”
WAIT BEFORE YOU GO...The Washington Post:
At the same time that the FBI is expanding its West Virginia database, it is building a vast repository controlled by people who work in a top-secret vault on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington. This one stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor.
If the new Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, or SAR, works as intended, the Guardian database may someday hold files forwarded by all police departments across the country in America’s continuing search for terrorists within its borders.
The effectiveness of this database depends, in fact, on collecting the identities of people who are not known criminals or terrorists – and on being able to quickly compile in-depth profiles of them.
This year, the ground feels uncertain — facts are buried and those in power are working to keep them hidden. Now more than ever, independent journalism must go beneath the surface.
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Major papers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have complied with requests from the Bush and Obama administrations to conceal sometimes-illegal acts performed by the government in the name of national security, writes Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian.
After James Clapper's response to the devastating Washington Post series on the intelligence complex, President Obama should seriously reconsider his nomination to be director of national intelligence.
Truthdig tips its hat this week to Dana Priest and Anne Hull, the Washington Post reporters who revealed the shameful treatment of wounded military veterans and shoddy conditions at Washington's Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
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