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DOJ Signs New Rules To Let Intelligence Officials Access, Store And Search More Info About US Citizens
from the shockingly-unshocking dept
Remember earlier this week when the NSA's boss Keith Alexander tried to shoot down reports that it was storing and datamining all sorts of communications info about Americans (despite a mandate that says the NSA can't spy on Americans?). Yeah. So then there's this news:
The Obama administration is moving to relax restrictions on how counterterrorism analysts may access, store and search information about Americans gathered by government agencies for purposes other than national security threats.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Thursday signed new guidelines for the National Counterterrorism Center, which was created in 2004 to foster intelligence sharing and to serve as a clearinghouse for terrorism threats.
The guidelines will lengthen to five years — from 180 days — the center’s ability to retain private information about Americans when there is no suspicion that they are tied to terrorism, intelligence officials said. The guidelines are also expected to result in the center making more copies of entire databases and “data-mining them” — using complex algorithms to search for patterns that could indicate a threat — than it currently does.
NEW YORK (AP) — Thirty-three civil rights groups from around the country complained to the New York attorney general Friday about police documents that showed the New York Police Department recommending increased surveillance of Shiite mosques based on their religion.
It's unclear what the NYPD plans to do with footage obtained by TARU. But recording legal protest activity violates the Handschu decree, a set of legal guidelines designed to check the NYPD's historic tendency to steamroll First Amendment rights. The order emerged from a class-action lawsuit prompted by revelations that the NYPD had spent much of the 20th century and millions of dollars monitoring legal protest activity, an endeavor that generated up to a million files on such dangerous radicals as education reform groups and housing advocates. The Handschu decree prohibits investigations of legal political activity and the collection of data, including images and video of protests, unless a crime has been committed.
According to newly unearthed documents, the planning for this high tech facility on lower Broadway dates back six years. In correspondence from 2005 that rests quietly in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s archives, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly promised Edward Forst, a Goldman Sachs’ Executive Vice President at the time, that the NYPD “is committed to the development and implementation of a comprehensive security plan for Lower Manhattan…One component of the plan will be a centralized coordination center that will provide space for full-time, on site representation from Goldman Sachs and other stakeholders.”
Originally posted by Phage
What do you do while watching TV that you are so worried about being watched?
Worried about it when the set is off? Throw a blanket over it.