DHS: IT’S NOT PERSONAL, WE SPY ON EVERYONE

ITEM: A bipartisan Senate report on the Department Of Homeland Security’s “fusion centers” project to mine and share info with state and local law-enforcement agencies in the name of fighting Teh Terrorismz concludes that the program has not only failed to uncover any actual terrorist plots, but has been used for crimes completely unrelated to terrorism, and has gathered data on innocent people unrelated to crime of any kind.

Put country simple: fusion centers aren’t catching terrorists, so the DHS is using them to fight ordinary crime and gather info on people who aren't guilty of anything (yet).

I recommend reading the breakdowns from Associated Press and Danger Room for more details.

One takeway from Danger Room is this:

… it’s worth considering what the director of the northern California fusion center told a Senate panel in 2011.
The director, Ronald Brooks, mentioned that there isn’t any transnational terrorism in Oakland. But Oakland did have 740 recent shootings, and so he defended spending federal terrorism grants solving those crimes. “That’s terror right there in our own community,” Brooks said. “And that kind of terror is one that’s experienced in big cities and small towns across the country.”

Think of that.

Also, there’s this from AP:

Because of a convoluted grants process set up by Congress, Homeland Security officials don't know how much they have spent in their decade-long effort to set up so-called fusion centers in every state. Government estimates range from less than $300 million to $1.4 billion in federal money, plus much more invested by state and local governments. Federal funding is pegged at about 20 percent to 30 percent.

Despite that, Congress is unlikely to pull the plug. That's because, whether or not it stops terrorists, the program means politically important money for state and local governments.

Think of that.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office has just released its Homeland Security budget review for 2013, which reveals the US govt spent $68 billion on homeland security in 2012 – less than a peak in 2009, but considerably more than in 2001.

As Bruce Schneier points out, that’s outside the regular budgets for the War Dept (including the war funding for Iraq and Afghanistan) and the Justice Dept.

Presidente Obama is requesting around $70 billion for 2013.

The point, if there is one, is one that civil libertarians warned of all the way back in 2001 when the Bush Posse came up with the DHS, the Patriot Act and any number of cockamamie data mining programs, to include warrantless wiretaps on everyone’s phones, which is this:

When the govt curtails civil liberties and establishes surveillance/info-gathering programs in the name of fighting terrorism and only terrorism, you can be sure of four things:

1) The programs will get bigger, not smaller.

2) They’ll be used for lots of other things besides terrorism cases.

3) Their list of suspicious people and groups will include a lot of people who are not terrorists or criminals.

4) The longer the programs exist, the more normalized they seem to the public, and the harder they are politically to dismantle, even if you wanted to do so.

And so here we are.

Small Govt!

I’ll be watching you,

This is dF

BAD COVER VERSION 053: SHE’S GONNA GET YA FROM BEHIND (BLUEGRASS VERSION)

re Cliff Richard’s "Devil Woman" being a great song – 

It is. It’s good enough that it translates well into bluegrass music.

As Hayseed Dixie will now demonstrate.

See?

If you don’t know, Hayseed Dixie has been making a career out of proving that rock music can sound good (or at least amusing) in a bluegrass arrangement. They started mainly doing AC/DC songs (hence the homonymic name), but they’ve broadened their range since then.

Highway to hell,

This is dF

I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (OCTOBER 2012 EDITION)

Knocking out book reports like James Bond knocks out security guards … or something like that.

JUST FINISHED

A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carre

I’ve only read Le Carre once before (The Little Drummer Girl, back in the late 80s), and decided it was high time to try him again, so I went with this recent post-9/11 novel about a young Chechen Muslim named Issa who turns up in Hamburg to claim an inheritance from a bank account used by his dad for money-laundering. Banker Tommy Brue gets roped into spy games as several intelligence agencies are convinced Issa is a terrorist waiting to happen. But is he? Reading this, I remember now why I stopped reading Le Carre – his writing style can best be described as “leaving in the parts people skip” (to paraphrase Elmore Leonard) – meandering detail and tangential asides that personally I find distracting. However, plotwise it’s a pretty good story and a low-key yet scathing commentary on the state of Western intelligence when it comes to dealing with terrorism. I’ll probably give Le Carre another try, now that I know what parts to skip.

JUST STARTED

Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut

I’m a fan, but I haven't read his 80s stuff, so we’ll start with this, which involves a double murder, Hitler and a neutron bomb. Sounds promising.

( ALSO: Orwell! Greene! Mad science! And bad monkeys! )

Just give him whiskey,

This is dF

AND NOW, THE DEAD BOYS AND DIVINE

Just like it says. 



[Via Suicide Watch]

Young loud and snotty,

This is dF