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(photo: US Government)
Guidelines for how long officials at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a “clearinghouse” for terrorism established after the September 11th attacks, are being expanded to allow for the retention of information on US citizens with no ties to terrorism.
The expanded guidelines allow for the NCTC to hold information for up to five years instead of 180 days, which was the requirement for information on US citizens not suspected of terrorism.
A “number of different agencies,” according to general counsel in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Robert S. Litt, attempted to strike up the “correct balance” between “information-sharing” and “protections for people’s privacy and civil liberties.” These “agencies” looked at the need to retain data and decided that visa and travel records and other data from the FBI needed to be held longer in order to fight terrorism.
This expansion of executive power that involves monitoring US citizens is just as Machiavellian as the Obama administration’s legal justification for executing alleged terror suspects abroad without charge or trial. And Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel.net has done an excellent job so far of hashing out the critical details.
As Wheeler highlights in her analysis, the NCTC doesn’t really have a mandate to collect information on domestic terrorists. These new guidelines twist the mandate to justify such data collection. The NCTC is also claiming the authority to access any information “maintained by other executive departments and agencies,” which means “tax, social security, health and human services, immigration, military, and other federal databases” could be mined for data. And the Director for National Intelligence James Clapper is to have access to all of this information for “national security” efforts.
There is no guarantee that the information would be safe. Wheeler shows in another post that NCTC will have access to all this information and will likely lack basic network security that would protect the data. She notes that the Defense Department admits “our networks” are “totally compromised” so “when someone leaks all this data for public release (or when China and Iran use it to advance their own spying agendas) the government will act surprised, again, as they do every time their gaping security holes get compromised.”
Why else should Americans be wary of these expanded guidelines? The additional data that will be held longer now on US citizens is likely to fuel fishing expeditions into groups and communities that are not engaged in any unlawful activity.
From the FBI’s own government website:
Created by Congress in 2004 and led by the Director of National Intelligence, NCTC tracks threats 24 hours a day from inside its Northern Virginia facility. FBI personnel—many from the Bureau’s Counterterrorism Division—are among those who work at NCTC, with all-source intelligence analysts representing the largest group. “Working in this environment gives you insight into the culture of the other agencies, how they do business, how they think,” says one FBI employee working at NCTC.
The FBI will have access to this information. And it is common knowledge that the FBI has gone after activist groups.
In recent years, the FBI has targeted at least 23 antiwar, labor and international solidarity activists in Chicago, the Twin Cities in Minnesota and other areas. They’ve raided their homes and issued grand jury subpoenas that allege they provided “material support for terrorism.” They even used an informant named Karen Sullivan to infiltrate an antiwar group planning protests for the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul.
The FBI spied on and possibly infiltrated a Pittsburgh peace group, the Thomas Merton Center. They were monitored for opposing the Iraq War. And, though the FBI lacked probable cause, the agency paid particular attention to individuals who “appeared to be of Middle Easter descent” because they might launch an attack.
The data may also be used to expand the use of entrapment schemes or “sting operations” in Muslim communities like in the case of the Newburgh Four. The FBI has, since 9/11, paid informants to go into communities and instigate terrorism. The FBI constructs plots and provides weapons (usually fake or unarmed). Vulnerable individuals who are young or in poverty are pushed to commit terrorism, and when they do go to mount the planned attack (using the plan provided to them by an informant), they are arrested.
It is highly likely that the increased amount of information will produce more secret police/spy game activities that Americans are expected to believe keep the homeland safe.
Mike German, ACLU senior policy counsel and a former FBI agent, has come out against the expansion:
The decades-old rules limiting the collection and retention of U.S. citizen and resident information by the intelligence community and the military existed for a very good reason: to ensure that the powerful tools designed to protect us from foreign enemies are not turned against Americans. Authorizing the ‘temporary’ retention of non-terrorism related citizen and resident information for five years essentially removes the restraint against wholesale collection of our personal information by the government, and puts all Americans at risk of unjustified scrutiny
German concludes, “Having innocent people’s information in intelligence databases for five years without any suspicion of wrongdoing creates an unacceptable risk to Americans’ privacy through error and abuse.”
The retention of data for five years practically encourages intelligence agencies to engage in the kind of mapping of communities that the NYPD has come under criticism for because they are the product of racial or religious profiling.
Further troubling, the NCTC has access to National Security Agency (NSA) data and in the past week the NSA has come under scrutiny for a program called Stellar Wind. AT&T and Verizon participated in the warrantless wiretapping program that, according to former senior NSA crypto-mathematician William Binney, included not only domestic eavesdropping on “domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email” too.
Details on Stellar Wind were revealed in a Wired magazine article for the first time just over a week ago. Binney told the magazine “highly sophisticated software” is used to conduct “’deep packet inspection,’ examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.”
The software, created by a company called Narus that’s now part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.
The NSA also “gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world.” [Wired notes that had not been confirmed until now. ]
All this information collected through Stellar Wind or any other secret programs being employed by the US government are likely to be accessed by the NCTC. The NSA is one agency where the NCTC is likely to get data that will be stored for up to five years now.
Stellar Wind is a program that President George W. Bush ordered Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to go get approval for reauthorization of this program from Attorney General John Ashcroft. He sent the men to get a signature for reauthorization when Ashcroft was in the hospital for surgery because he had gallstone pancreatitis.
While Ashcroft was incapacitated, as Tim Weiner details in his book Enemies: A History of the FBI, acting attorney general James Comey was the one who had to sign the reauthorization. Both Ashcroft and Comey were not about to give their signature.
FBI director Robert Mueller also had opposed the reauthorization, but as Weiner notes in the book he has never spoken about his opposition publicly.
In the aftermath, Comey described what had been coming out of the White House to “a select audience” at the National Security Agency:
If we don’t do this, people will die.” You can all supply your own this: “If we don’t collect this type of information,” or “If we don’t use this technique,” or “If we don’t extend this authority.” It is extraordinarily difficult to be the attorney standing in front of the freight train that is the need for this… It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say “no” when it matters most. It takes moral character. It takes an ability to see the future. It takes an appreciation of the damage that will flow from an unjustified “yes.” It takes an understanding that in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country.
There apparently was no Ashcroft, no Comey to say the warrantless retention of data on Americans should not be expanded. Apparently, Mueller did not step up to stop the intelligence community. No person showed moral character in this instance. Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on the guidelines
Holder gave a greenlight to the fusing together of records in a manner that was proposed as a part of the “Total Information Awareness” program under Bush. That program, Charlie Savage of the New York Times notes, was “partially shut down by Congress an after an outcry.”
As Democrats opposed the “Total Information Awareness” program when Bush was president, there should be a massive outcry against President Barack Obama for allowing this expansion of guidelines to happen while he is President. Such outcry is likely to not happen. It is an election year. Making this an issue would not be good for a president, who needs to be seen as strong on national security.
The silence from Democrats, including but not limited to those in the party’s base, will again further solidify the bipartisan national security consensus. It will, as with other expansions of Bush counterterror policies, invite condemnation from former Bush administration officials, who wonder why it is permissible for this president to grow the imperial presidency when it was not acceptable under Bush. And, there will no doubt be columns in the Wall Street Journal from the worst purveyors of warrantless spying on Americans under the Bush Administration.
The op-eds will explain how pleasant it is that Obama has come around to supporting increased monitoring of innocent Americans. The op-eds won’t stop there though. They will go on to take issue with the fact that Obama did not go far enough (as torture memo author John Yoo did in his critique of Holder’s targeted killing speech).
From refusing to oppose the reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act, which permits warrantless wiretapping, to this new expansion of NCTC guidelines, President Obama is Top Secret America’s man. In fact, if re-elected to a second term, one should presume there will be more grand expansions of executive power approved so the never-ending war on terrorism can run more smoothly because there does not seem to be much of anything the president won’t do for the security-industrial complex of America.
21 Comments
Obama: neither “change” nor someone “you can believe in.”
The USG will keep this info forever and whenever you (and that is every you in the U.S.) make some minor infraction, like demoing against PTB, they’ll data mine it for info against you.
Boy-oh, Kevin. The interesting thing about this is it seems to be a write-only database. How could you ever get out the information that you needed to do a dragnet operation? Too much noise to good information. And lengthening the timeframe just makes it worse.
Could this all have been done without “9/11″?
No.
That “New Pearl Harbor Event” ushered it all in. Kind of like the old Reichstag Fire. The event, from the get go led to disquieting thoughts. “Where was the much vaunted NORAD we had all been told would protect us?” was my first disquieting thought. The evidence kept piling up.
Building 7, which I remember, is a large “smoking gun” from that day.
Until we have the guts to face up to it, this stuff will continue. It will get worse. Hiding under the bed for the last 40 years is why we are here.
Or, there’s always this advice:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K5M0xtxQVQ
Re-assuring, isn’t it?
well, that assumes there wouldn’t have been a different event to accomplish the same goal
Yes. But not as quickly. And not with as much public silence. The FBI has been around for 100 years. And only Watergate and the exposure of FBI malfeasance by the Church commission slowed the integration of government databases before personal computers arrived on the scene.
More that 9/11, the delivery of the Presidency into the hands of Bush and Admiral Poindexter accelerated this trend. Congress slapped down Poindexter ten years ago. Not as likely now unless the Tea Party really gets exercised about Obama violating their Constitutional rights. Oh right, they’re essentially gone except for the millionaires in Congress and governors mansions.
Anyone wanna place bets on where Clapper will open Lark Hill?
Whether it’s the TP or OWS, them thar Congress Critters don’t give a hoot. Once elected, they all wait until the so-called leadership tells them what to do.
Kucinich, Grayson, Paul and Paul are the exceptions to the rule of maintaining comity in the cloak room and — above all else — absolutely no votes to reign in the executive. That could lead to expectations regarding Congress Critters having real responsibilities. And what smart CC wants that?!
Any idea whether Clapper has had any unpleasant hitchhiking experiences?
So many possibilities of military bases to choose from. Around some of the Cold-War era missile silos would be a good bet. Dakotas. Isolated. Extremes of temperatures. What’s not to like?
The Reichstag fire may well have been set by van der Lubbe and not the Nazis, but either way the Nazis sure took advantage of it.
As for Building 7 — that was put to rest years ago. (By the way, metals get softer — and weaker — as they approach their melting point; that is why steel doesn’t have to be fully molten to collapse, and that is what makes blacksmithing possible. Ever watch someone bang on red-hot flame-softened bits of steel?) Regardless of who called for 9/11, we can definitely see that the PNAC Platoon (especially Donald “Go Massive” Rumsfeld) was eager to use this as a pretext to attack Iraq.
The thing is that provoking an armed response from the US was bin Laden’s goal from the start:
“The expanded guidelines allow for the NCTC to hold information for up to five years instead of 180 days, which was the requirement for information on US citizens not suspected of terrorism.”
Stasi, is that you?
“A “number of different agencies,” . . . attempted to strike up the “correct balance” between “information-sharing” and “protections for people’s privacy and civil liberties.”
Sure they did. This whole ball of wax has always, first and foremost, been about domestic control, just as it has been in any nation that throws out the rule of law in exchange for the Fuehrerprinzip.
So many wonderful undisclosed locations!
For building 7 to fall as it did all of the load bearing supports would have had to fail at the same time. The claim that the collapse was due to fire requires the fire be equally distributed throughout the entire floor of the building, providing equal heat for an equal amount of time, so that all of the load bearing members would fail at the exact same time. Does anyone think that is remotely possible. Popular Mecanics is a joke.
I am reading a book about “undisclosed locations”. It is an excellent read. Trevor Peglen, Dark Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World.
Not necessarily. For the twin towers themselves, enough of the supports would have had to fail to overstress the remaining supports on the first of the floors to fail. That failure would overstress at least a floor below it, which might fail at a slightly lower temperature.
Because the attack was down from the top of the building, the entire weight of all floor above the weakened floor would fall against the floor below. At some point, there is enough weight above to pancake the building even though the supports are a ambient temperature.
Building 7 could have been stressed enough without heat by the earthquake caused by Buildings 1 and 2 hitting the ground, causing a shock wave to rapidly raise and lower the entire building.
And this makes one big huge assumption about the buildings in question. That they were indeed built to engineer’s specifications and that no materials or work was scrimped on.
If you want indications of Presidential involvement, look no further than the response to the Aug. 6 intelligence briefing. “OK, Sonny, you’ve covered your ass. Now run along.”
There was a cover-up. That much is clear, and the Congress collaborated in it.
Of the various conspiracy theories out there, “let it happen” is the most likely to be true.
Good post. But I’d like to expand upon it a little. The view of the NCTC appears to be from the bottom up. It attempts to step up the ladder, and state, for example, that the FBI will have access to information in the vast data center under construction. I think we need to think top down. Consider:
1. The National Counter Terrorism Center reports to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
2. ODNI has penultimate budget responsibility, next only to the President, for the “funding of all programs” which are part of the National Intelligence Program (NIP).
3. The NIP is comprised of the intelligence functions of the following agencies and departments: Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Energy (Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence), Department of Homeland Security (Office of Intelligence and Analysis), Department of State (Bureau of Intelligence and Research), Department of the Treasury (Office of Intelligence and Analysis), Drug Enforcement Administration (Office of National Security Intelligence), Federal Bureau of Investigation (National Security Branch), National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, National Security Agency/Central Security Service, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, US Air Force, US Army, US Coast Guard, US Marines, US Navy.
4. The ODNI is charged under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act (IRTPA) of 2004 with the responsibility to “Oversee the development and implementation of a program management plan for acquisition of major systems, doing so jointly with the Secretary of Defense for DoD programs, that includes cost, schedule, and performance goals and program milestone criteria.”
This therefore is about executive branch information to any access collected about citizens, for use by any of the departments/agencies named in bullet #3 should the ODNI decide to share that information (plus the White House, of course).
Excellent points. And each of those other agencies are in competition with NCTC for funds and delivering to their high-level “clients” the information they request. But all of them have responsibilities for sharing data to “prevent terrorism” at levels below the view of high-level clients. Bureaucratic incentives mean that there will be the tendency to limit the sharing of information, try to read the information as supporting a worst-case scenario, and be the first agency to identify a terrorist plot.
Again I ask where are the folks that in the 1970s were paranoid about linking housing data and city physical planning data and insistent that even aggregate census information below a certain level not be shared with other executive agencies?
And so, this move could be just as much a threat to US citizens’ privacy as it is a threat to some agency that had been struggling with the NCTC, a new kid on the block after 9/11.
We know there are turf battles. They are detailed in William Arkin and Dana Priest’s book “Top Secret America.” So, thanks jiacovelli for your comment.
Turf battles raise the probability of an agency engaging in extra-Constitutional actions against citizens.
That is complete and utter bullshit. I personally suspect if two or more load bearing supports failed the whole build will fail. Fail = fall down.
It depends on the safety margin for static and wind loads, typically 300 to 500%. Large impacts will cause supports to fail (typically large impacts are called demolition).
In addition there is a statement somewhere that the NYFD pulled the building because it was compromises.
Didn’t Building 7 contain the diesel fuel tanks for the center’s emergency generators? That would be a whopping amount of fuel to sustain the blaze until failure point was reached.