Monitoring America

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Source: Washington Post

Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.

Other democracies - Britain and Israel, to name two - are well acquainted with such domestic security measures. But for the United States, the sum of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny.

Read more: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/monitoring-america/

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This goes on for eight pages online, and it is part of a series by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin. The Post has started emphasizing these investigative journalism pieces lately, as the sort of thing you'd expect from the print media. If you click on the index of articles, you'll see this is the fourth one in the series.

[Downwinder]

1. Hey Joe, who is the high-tech terrorist? n/t

[midnight]

2. Is this constitutional?

[PSPS]

3. No, it isn't. But like virtually everything else illegal started under bush, it continues anyway.

[snappyturtle]

4. This type of data collecting seems like a lot of busy work to justify enormously

ballooning governmental agencies. The constitutionality of this 'project' greatly bothers me. Maybe I'm simplistic but why wouldn't the 'dangers' be noticed by law enforcement agencies during their normal operating procedures eliminating the accumulation of massive amounts of data collected on the citizens-at-large? Seems like over-kill and dangerous infringement on individual rights.

[RKP5637]

6. It's creeping costs, creeping infringement and plain creepy. An over-kill. n/t

[ixion]

5. TIA lives

and we are no longer a democratic republic. :(

[City Lights]

7. Who is monitoring the monitors?

:mad:

[laylah]

8. Terrific question! +a Brazillion :) nt