U.S. Gov't To Keep Data On Non-Terrorist Citizens For 5 Years

[ElNono]

"The Obama administration has approved guidelines that allow counterterrorism officials to lengthen the period of time they retain information about U.S. residents (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/new-counterterrorism-guidelines-would-permit-data-on-us-citizens-to-be-held-longer/2012/03/21/gIQAFLm7TS_story.html), even if they have no known connection to terrorism. The changes allow the National Counterterrorism Center, the intelligence community's clearinghouse for terrorism data, to keep information for up to five years (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_INTELLIGENCE_DATABASE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-03-22-21-36-13). Previously, the center was required to promptly destroy — generally within 180 days — any information about U.S. citizens or residents unless a connection to terrorism was evident."

[Winehole23]

saw that. creeps me right the fuck out, but I know from experience that hardly anyone gives a shit about this.

hell, most people are probably for it.

[Winehole23]

or don't really care.

despite historically low approval of government and bureaucracy, apparently now we trust national security bureaucracies to handle our personal information for five years without compromising our privacy and liberty.

[coyotes_geek]

"Why should I worry? I have nothing to hide."

[Winehole23]

it gives the government a lever for blackmail or worse. it's not unimaginable unscrupulous public servants will abuse the information.

[jack sommerset]

Why would anyone care at this point. The last 10 years people complain about republicans and their sterotypical politics regarding people's privacy and then bam!, democrats continue the trend. Obama is a hypocrite but that is preaching to the choir at this point.

"And to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you"God bless

[jack sommerset]

it gives the government a lever for blackmail or worse. it's not unimaginable unscrupulous public servants will abuse the information.

That's is the real concern, nice point. God bless.

[FromWayDowntown]

The steady erosion of historically recognized civil liberties is chilling.

[Winehole23]

simply by tweaking the standard for a regulation

[mavs>spurs]

nobody ever listens to alex who predicted all this 15 years ago.

[Drachen]

sigh
So sad. Pretty soon we will have to move to China to get our civil liberties back.

[FromWayDowntown]

simply by tweaking the standard for a regulation

necessitated by the ever-threatening, faceless boogeyman (who, ironically, hated us for our freedoms and liberties).

[Drachen]

necessitated by the ever-threatening, faceless boogeyman (who, ironically, hated us for our freedoms and liberties).

He likes us now...

[Winehole23]

nobody ever listens to alex who predicted all this 15 years ago.Apparently you were listening. What did Alex Jones predict? Please be specific, if possible.

[Winehole23]

necessitated by the ever-threatening, faceless boogeyman (who, ironically, hated us for our freedoms and liberties).I guess Congress immunizing wholesale domestic surveillance set the tone in 2008.

If it's ok for the government to spy on us wholesale, without any particularized suspicion at all, it's absurd to require them to destroy the information gained thereby.

[Winehole23]

in order to make us safer, they must violate our privacy and curtail our liberty; if they respect liberty and privacy, mass murderers go free.

[Winehole23]

to get a few bad guys, we must all throw liberty on the pyre

[Winehole23]

http://www.target.com/p/Come-Back-with-a-Warrant-Doormat/-/A-541543

[mavs>spurs]

Apparently you were listening. What did Alex Jones predict? Please be specific, if possible.

the erosion of civil liberties that we are seeing today

[Winehole23]

(golf clap)

[Winehole23]

I’m going to have a series of posts on the new National Counterterrorism Center data sharing guidelines (http://t.co/lty3XyFw). As a reminder, the whole point of these guidelines is to allow the NCTC to obtain information on US persons, dump it into their datamining, and then ultimately pass it on. In this, I’ll show how, by magic of cynical bureaucracy, the government is about to turn non-terrorist data into terrorist data.

Here’s how that trick is accomplished rhetorically. In the Background section (and in one or two other places), the document includes this language to legally justify throwing US person data into big databases to be data mined. It starts by laying out NCTC’s data mandate:
[NCTC] shall “serve as the primary organization in the United States for analyzing and integrating all intelligence possessed or acquired by the United States Government pertaining to terrorism and counterterrorism, excepting intelligence pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorists and domestic counterterrorism.
It blathers on about how NCTC also has the responsibility to request information and pass it on. This is the legal language they’re going to translate to mean the opposite of what it says.


Jumping ahead a bit, the guidelines acknowledges that NCTC is only supposed to have access, if needed, to domestic terrorism information.
In the National Security Act of 1947, as amended, Congress recognized that NCTC must have access to a broader range of information than it has primary authority to analyze and integrate if it is to achieve its missions. The Act thus provides that NCTC “may, … receive intelligence pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorism from any Federal, State, or local government or other source necessary to fulfill its responsibility and retain and disseminate intelligence.” [my emphasis]
See that? It can have all the foreign terrorism information, and then if it needs to, it can have the domestic terrorism information.


Now, going back a few lines, it takes this authority–”pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorism”–and uses it to get … everything.
NCTC’s analytic and integration efforts … at times require it to access and review datasets that are identified as including non-terrorism information in order to identify and obtain “terrorism information,” as defined in section 1016 of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) of 2004, as amended. “Non-terrorism information” for purposes of these Guidelines includes information pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorism, as well as information maintained by other executive departments and agencies that has not been identified as “terrorism information” as defined by IRTPA. [my emphasis]
Note that bolded section is not a citation from existing law. It is, instead, NCTC turning NCTC’s authority to sometimes get domestic terrorism information into authority to get any dataset maintained by any executive agency that NCTC believes might include some information that might be terrorism information.


Those of us in the US Government’s tax, social security, HHS, immigration, military, and other federal databases? We’ve all, by bureaucratic magic, been turned into domestic terrorists.


Now, NCTC seems to understand what a grasp this is, so it deploys one more rhetorical effort, this time noting that the Director of National Intelligence–to whom NCTC reports–also gets access to all national security intelligence.
[The National Security Act] provides that “[u]nless otherwise directed by the President, the Director of National Intelligence shall have access to all national intelligence and intelligence related to hte national security which is collected by any federal department, agency, or other entity…”
So in addition to all of us in government databases–that is, all of us–being deemed domestic terrorists, the data the government keeps to track our travel, our taxes, our benefits, our identity? It just got transformed from bureaucratic data into national security intelligence.


We are all, now, first and foremost potential terrorists now. Only after NCTC destroys our data in five years (if they don’t find some excuse to keep it before then) will we become citizens again.
http://www.emptywheel.net/2012/03/23/the-national-counterterrorism-center-just-declared-all-of-us-domestic-terrorists/