ADMIRAL POINDEXTER’S REVENGE

[defrog]

ITEM: The Wall Street Journal reports that the little-known National Counterterrorism Center has been granted sweeping new authority to store and monitor massive datasets about innocent Americans.

The NCTC has had this ability since March 2012, but it was only made public last month. And it’s news in part because some officials in the DHS and the DOJ are adamantly opposed to giving the NCTC that kind of power.

Here’s what the NCTC can do with that authority:

[E]xamine 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. Data about Americans "reasonably believed to constitute terrorism information" may be permanently retained.

Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies also want everyone’s mobile phone text messages to be added to that data pool. Last month, some cops went to the Senate and asked them to amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) so that every cell-phone operator in the country would be required to store every text message their users send in a database repository for two years.

And so much for the 4th Amendment.

The text message idea is slightly comical, in that more people are using apps like WhatsApp (as well as Facebook and various chat apps) to send messages, to the point that industry experts are predicting that these apps will kill off text messaging eventually. (Some say in the next few years – personally I think it’ll be more like 10 or 15 years, but whatever.)

Still, out of all the other angles of the NCTC story and massive data surveillance, here's the part I’d emphasize:

The snooping effort, which officials say is subject to “rigorous oversight,” is reminiscent of the so-called Total Information Awareness initiative, dreamt up in the aftermath of 9/11 by the Pentagon’s research unit DARPA. The aim of the TIA initiative was essentially to create a kind of ubiquitous pre-crime surveillance regime monitoring public and private databases. It was largely defunded in 2003, after civil liberties concerns. However, other similar efforts have continued, such as through the work of the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence-gathering “Fusion Centers.” Most recently, Fusion Centers were subjected to scathing criticism from congressional investigators, who found that they were accumulating masses of data about “suspicious” activity that was not of any use. The intelligence being swept up, the investigators found, was “oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections.”

Put simply, the US Govt has wanted to put something like this together for the last ten years, and despite all the hoo-ha over civil liberties at the time, the government went ahead and did it anyway – just more quietly.

No surprise, really – this is just How Things Are in the post-9/11 world. When the NYPD is creating a massive database of telephone logs of stolen cell phones without a warrant on the assumption that they can just go ahead and do it and who could possibly object to it, you know this is just The Way Things Are now.

FUN FACT: The headline is a reference to Admiral John Poindexter, who was selected by the Bush Posse to head up the original TIA project. Poindexter’s previous resume included Iran-Contra.

Fun times, eh Jim?

All yr data are belong to us,

This is dF