This is so typical - a government agency screws up, so it blames the fact that it didn't have enough powers, and does another power grab:<p>"However, Mr. Abdulmutallab and his underwear did alter U.S. intelligence-gathering. A Senate investigation revealed that NCTC had received information about him but had failed to query other government databases about him. In a scathing finding, the Senate report said, "the NCTC was not organized adequately to fulfill its missions."<p>"This was not a failure to collect or share intelligence," said John Brennan, the president's chief counterterrorism adviser, at a White House press conference in January 2010. "It was a failure to connect and integrate and understand the intelligence we had.""<p>From what I'm reading here, this person would have been within the jurisdiction of the previous rules as a person connected with terror activities. The agency just failed to connect the dots. If I recall recall correctly, the guys own father had contacted US Embassy to tell them that his son is trying to get involved with terrorists...<p>The solution to this problem seems to be better data interconnection between agencies, in order to ensure that as much detail about identified threats is available. I don't see how have more data about a much broader set of citizens is going to help... if anything, it's going to make the identification process more complex.
At risk of stating the obvious, the false positive rate will create a vast number of innocent citizens flagged for further investigation. This automated flagging will overwhelm the human investigators, creating a situation in which terrorists find it easier to hide and operate amongst the citizenry, with the added feature that innocent citizens swept up will become truculent and less likely to cooperate. Net result; the US government makes terrorism easier, at vast expense to the US taxpayer.
A couple of key paragraphs:<p>"Now, NCTC [National Counterterrorism Center] can copy entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited. Data about Americans 'reasonably believed to constitute terrorism information' may be permanently retained.<p>"The changes also allow databases of U.S. civilian information to be given to foreign governments for analysis of their own. In effect, U.S. and foreign governments would be using the information to look for clues that people might commit future crimes."
A very telling line in the Article -
"The guidelines provide rigorous oversight to protect the information that we have, for authorized and narrow purposes," said Alexander Joel, Civil Liberties Protection Officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence"<p>A "guideline" is supposed to provide rigorous oversight...how many guidelines have you heard of that provide rigorous Anything?
Basically the government wants to be able to Datamine every single database within their control for anything suspicious. Unfortunately the definition of "suspicious activity" can be elastic enough to be almost anything.<p>Occupy Wallstreet? - suspicious<p>Protest against Oil drilling - suspicious<p>Blog post criticizing NY police "stop & frisk" - suspicious<p>Criticize the Feds for overstepping on something - suspicious<p>Sad - we are sleep waking into the Total information awareness state. The terrorists attacks have worked - they have destroyed the very values that America was built on
No mention in this article (that I saw) that points out that this data is also used to find new candidates for the extrajudicial "kill list" using the "disposition matrix":<p>>the "disposition matrix" has been developed and will be overseen by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). One of its purposes is "to augment" the "separate but overlapping kill lists" maintained by the CIA and the Pentagon<p><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/24/obama-terrorism-kill-list" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/24/obama-te...</a><p>There's been a slow, steady consolidation of state power post-9/11, including the establishment of NORTHCOM: a command post for war in North America. It seems like they're worried about domestic insurgence rather than conventional terrorism.
Bin Laden won the war on terror. They're all scared now. Even China does not monitor its own citizens like that. Soon Chinese citizens will enjoy more freedom and privacy than western citizens.