{"id":14885,"date":"2012-12-14T11:41:54","date_gmt":"2012-12-14T18:41:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=14885"},"modified":"2012-12-14T11:41:54","modified_gmt":"2012-12-14T18:41:54","slug":"dhs-unbridled-surveillance-on-all-us-citizens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=14885","title":{"rendered":"DHS Unbridled Surveillance on All US Citizens"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone is Fair Game: Spy Agency Conducts Surveillance on All US Citizens<\/strong>
\nBy Russia Today – Global Research – 14 December, 2012<\/p>\n

The Obama administration overruled recommendations from within the US Department of Homeland Security and implemented new guidelines earlier this year that allow the government to gather and analyze intelligence on every single US citizen.<\/p>\n

Since the spring, a little-know intelligence agency outside of Washington, DC has been able to circumvent the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution and conduct dragnet surveillance of the entire country, combing massive datasets using advanced algorithms to search and seize personal info on anyone this wish, reports the Wall Street Journal this week.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no safeguard that says only Americans with criminal records are the ones included, and it\u2019s not just suspected terrorists that are considered in the searches either. The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) has been provided with entire government databases and given nearly endless access to intelligence on everyone in the country, regardless of whether or not they\u2019ve done anything that would have made them a person of interest. As long as data is \u201creasonably believed\u201d to contain \u201cterrorism information,\u201d the agency can do as they wish.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more is the NCTC can retain that information for years, reviewing it whenever they\u2019d like to take a look.<\/p>\n

The update to the agency\u2019s policies, reported by RT at the time and reexamined this week in the Journal, expose any person in the country to invasive and nearly endless government surveillance.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public,\u201d Mary Ellen Callahan is reported by the Journal to have said during a Situation Room meeting earlier this year within the walls of the White House. At the time, Callahan was chief privacy officer at DHS as well as one of the only staffers inside the Obama administration concerned with what was about to happen.<\/p>\n

According to documents obtained by the Journal through Freedom of Information Act requests and conversations between the paper and persons familiar with that Situation Room sound-off, Ms. Callahan unsuccessfully argued against updating a 2008 Justice Department memo about what intel the NCTC can have and how they use it. Just weeks after that meeting, new guidelines were authorized and, within months, Ms. Callahan was working elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Despite her efforts, a 32-page document, \u201cGuidelines for Access, Retention, Use and Dissemination by the National Counterterrorism Center and other Agencies of Information in Datasets Containing Non-Terrorism Information,\u201d went into effect, and with that the NCTC was no longer restricted to only terrorism-related intelligence and instead<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 2008 memo\u2019s title referred to NCTC\u2019s access to \u2018terrorism information\u2019 contained in non-terrorism datasets. The 2012 title simply refers to \u2018information\u2019 in those datasets,\u201d reports the Journal. \u201cThe removal of the world \u2018terrorism\u2019 is an indication of how this memo expands NCTC\u2019s mandate to allow surveillance of US citizens based on more than just the terrorism information.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, the changes aren\u2019t just within the name of the document. The 2012 update to the NCTC\u2019s data-mining policies expand the intelligence the agency can comb while at the same time removing safeguards that were in place for privacy\u2019s sake. Under the new rules, data on innocent Americans can be retained for five years, and intel on anyone \u201creasonably believed to constitute terrorism information\u201d can be kept until the end of time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s breathtaking\u201d in its scope, one former senior administration official tells the Journal.<\/p>\n

According to the paper, \u201cflight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others\u201d can be collected indefinitely and searched at will within the NCTC, an agency only nine years old and not nearly as well-known as her sister spy groups: the CIA and FBI.<\/p>\n

Once the NCTC has the info, though, they can decide who else can be made privy to it. If the US government is so inclined, intelligence on specific citizens can be sent to any foreign nation in the world. …source<\/p>\n

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Everyone is Fair Game: Spy Agency Conducts Surveillance on All US Citizens By Russia Today – Global Research – 14 December, 2012 The Obama administration overruled recommendations from within the US Department of Homeland Security and implemented new guidelines earlier this year that allow the government to gather and analyze intelligence on every single US more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[3821],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14885"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14885"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14886,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14885\/revisions\/14886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}