Attorney
General Secretly Granted Gov. Ability to Develop and Store Dossiers on Innocent
Americans
wired.com
December 15, 2012
In a secret government
agreement granted without approval or debate from lawmakers, the U.S. attorney
general recently gave the National Counterterrorism Center sweeping new powers
to store dossiers on U.S. citizens, even if they are not suspected of a crime,
according to a news report.December 15, 2012
Earlier this year, Attorney General Eric Holder granted
the center the ability to copy entire government databases holding information
on flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting
foreign-exchange students and other data, and to store it for up to five years,
even without suspicion that someone in the database has committed a
crime, according
to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the
story.
Whereas previously the
law prohibited the center from storing data compilations on U.S. citizens
unless they were suspected of terrorist activity or were relevant to an ongoing
terrorism investigation, the new powers give the center the ability to not only
collect and store vast databases of information but also to trawl through and
analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior in order to uncover activity
that could launch an investigation.The changes granted by Holder would also allow databases containing information about U.S. citizens to be shared with foreign governments for their own analysis.
A former senior White House official told the Journal that the new changes were “breathtaking in scope.”
But counterterrorism officials tried to downplay the move by telling the Journal that the changes come with strict guidelines about how the data can be used.
“The guidelines provide rigorous oversight to protect the information that we have, for authorized and narrow purposes,” Alexander Joel, Civil Liberties Protection Officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told the paper.
The NCTC currently maintains the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database, or TIDE, which holds data on more than 500,000 identities suspected of terror activity or terrorism links, including friends and families of suspects, and is the basis for the FBI’s terrorist watchlist.
Under the new rules issued in March, the NCTC can now obtain almost any other government database that it claims is “reasonably believed” to contain “terrorism information.”
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