Our "terrorist" tracking system by the numbers

Ashley Wells, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly; Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux (The Intercept, "Barack Obama’s Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers"

Support independent cartooning: join Sparky's List—and visit Tom Tomorrow's Emporium of Fun, featuring the new book and plush Sparky! (The Nation/ThisModernWorld.com).

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Biggest group on watchlist not terrorists

Nearly half of the people on the U.S. government’s widely shared database of terrorist suspects are not connected to any known terrorist group, according to classified government documents obtained by The Intercept.

 

Of the 680,000 people caught up in the government’s Terrorist Screening Database -- a watchlist of “known or suspected terrorists” that is shared with local law enforcement agencies, private contractors, and foreign governments more -- than 40 percent are described by the government as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” That category -- 280,000 people -- dwarfs the number of watchlisted people suspected of ties to al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah combined.

1984: The numbers are shocking and aimed at something far more sinister than "terrorism."

 

Peter, are you targeting American citizens?

The documents, obtained from a source in the intelligence community, also reveal that the Obama Administration has presided over an unprecedented expansion of the “terrorist” screening system. Since taking office, Obama has boosted the number of people on the no fly list more than tenfold, to an all-time high of 47,000 -- surpassing the number of people barred from flying under [Unprecedented President] George W. Bush.

 

Obama and Nixon (TTDB)

“If everything is terrorism, then nothing is terrorism,” says David Gomez, a former senior FBI special agent. The watchlisting system, he adds, is “revving out of control.”

 

The classified documents were prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center, the lead agency for tracking individuals with suspected links to international terrorism. Stamped “SECRET” and “NOFORN” (indicating they are not to be shared with foreign governments), they offer the most complete numerical picture of the watchlisting system to date. Among the revelations:

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When Guns Are Everywhere in police hands (Tom Tomorrow/thismodernworld.com)

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• The second-highest concentration of people designated as “known or suspected terrorists” by the government is in Dearborn, Michigan -- a city of 96,000 that has the largest percentage of Arab-American residents in the country.
• The government adds names to its databases, or adds information on existing subjects, at a rate of 900 records/day.
• The CIA uses a previously unknown program, code-named Hydra, to secretly access databases maintained by foreign countries and extract  data to add to the watchlists.

Puppet "Capt. America" and Nixon (thenation)

A U.S. counterterrorism official familiar with watchlisting data told The Intercept that as of November 2013, there were approximately 700,000 people in the Terrorist Screening Database, or TSDB, but declined to provide the current numbers. Last month, the Associated Press, citing federal court filings by government lawyers, reported that there have been 1.5 million names added to the watchlist over the past five years. More

Greenwald on the NSA live in L.A.

Pat Macpherson, Ashley Wells, Pfc. Sandoval, Dhr. Seven, CC Liu, Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly; HaymarketBooks.org; Pacifica Radio Los Angeles (KPFK.org, Uprising)

The best alternative to being tracked and spied on by Google-search is Startpage.com

Secret partners expand NSA spying dragnet; NSA uses Germany to spy on Europe; felon/NSA head James Clapper goes unindicted after lying to Congress (firstlook.org/theintercept)

Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald spoke tonight at the Japanese Cultural Center, Little Tokyo, downtown Los Angeles. It was amazing. He began by joking that it was the beginning of the American leg of his speaking tour so he was fresh and lucid. That he was. Using notes only when directly quoting the consistently misleading mainstream media -- which paints every story in ways that supports structures of power even when they are feigning that real "objectivity" is possible -- he was vivid, funny, and shocking.

He had only one overarching point to make: Privacy matters, and anyone who says it does not can immediately by shown to not be thinking or to be lying. How? Let's say someone says, "If you're not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide." Or better yet, "I'm not doing anything wrong, so I've got nothing to hide." Greenwald has a foolproof comeback for that kind of thoughtless and pernicious statement:

Sponsored by Haymarket Books, The Center for Economic Research and Social Change, Metropolitan Books, and KPFK FM (Pacifica Free Speech Radio, Los Angeles).

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Read a chapter free (truthdig.org)

"Oh really? Great. Here's my personal email address, when you get home, I want you to email me all your email, social media, and other passwords. Then I'm going to troll through them for whatever interests me, pick out what I like, and post it in your name for everyone to see." I mean, if you've done nothing wrong then you've got nothing to worry about, right? He's never gotten a reply to his offer, and he's waited by his email many the night. Privacy matters.

Google goes "evil" (anorak.co.uk).

Even Google Corporation's Eric Schmidt, whose salary recently doubled, found that out when he said he had "nothing to hide." He then banned everyone working at Google, Inc. from talking to CNET about him or disclosing his publicly available information as gathered and compiled by Google. Nice going on that "Do no evil" pledge, Google, Chairman Schmidt. It's easy to feel safe when you're helping take away everyone else's safety.

• See him live: Glenn Greenwald Speaks: Edward Snowden, NSA, and US Surveillance State

Edward Snowden, NSA, US Surveillance State

"Collect it all." How the NSA spies on me

Greenwald was signing his newest book, No Place to Hide, as well as answering personal questions one on one. Catch him on tour in a town near you. This is history in the making. And with the release of whistleblower and former spy (not merely low level contractor) Ed Snowden's revelations, Greenwald (editor at The Intercept) is making a fearless, incisive, and essential contribution to the world's understanding of the US surveillance state. Tickets were only $6.

Light will soon create matter: science

Pat Macpherson, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly; TheGuardian.com

NSA reform: lawmakers aim to bar U.S. spying agency from weakening encryption

 

Prism. Prism? Prism! Light refracts, just as all the colors of white light contain a rainbow array of information. The NSA wants it all, which means no privacy for anyone in the world. Science will be like that within a year, some scientists claim. Light will soon be converted into matter. Who will stop them? Moreover, who will stop or slow down the National "Security" Agency, the NSA, one U.S. branch of America's spying apparatus. Even if Oversight Committee Chair Feinstein keeps her love spat with the CIA going, nothing much is being done here. Other countries will have to stand up.

Matter will be created from light within a year, scientists claim

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Everyone should know just how much the government lied to defend the NSA

Do we live in a police state? (Part 2)

Chase Madar (Pasadena Weekly); Pat Macpherson, CC Liu, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly

2013 in review (Tom Tomorrow/thismodernworld.com)

 
Throwing police power at social problems

Civil liberties? (stopandfrisk.org)

If all one has is a hammer then everything starts looking like a nail. If police and prosecutors are our only tool, sooner or later everything and everyone in America will be treated like a criminal. 

This is increasingly the way of life we are being forced to endure, a path that involves “solving” social problems (even non-problems) by throwing more and more cops at them, with disastrous results. 

Shut up the F up, old man! (latimes.com)

Wall-to-wall criminal law encroaches on everyday life as police power is applied in ways that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago.

By now, the militarization of the police has advanced to the point where the “War on Crime” and “War on Drugs” are no longer metaphors but understatements. There is a proliferation of:

• heavily armed SWAT teams even in small towns
• school lock downs treating children like prison inmates
• the use of shock-and-awe tactics to bust small-time bookies
• no-knock raids to recover trace amounts of drugs often resulting in the killing of family dogs or family members
• waging a counterinsurgency drug war in communities where drug treatment programs were once  key...

But American over-policing involves far more than the widely reported up-armoring of our local precinct. It’s also the way police power has entered the DNA of social policy, turning just about every sphere of American life into a police matter. More

Do we live in a police state?

Pat Macpherson, CC Liu, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly; Chase Madar (Pasadena Weekly)

Tom Tomorrow (thismodernworld.com)

Mind if I swab your cheek to profile you on our DNA database, boy? I didn't think so.

 
Checkpoints, documents, DNA tests
AirTalk, KPCC FM (SCPR.org, Dec. 30, 2013)

Jack boot, duck step (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The LAPD will begin administering "voluntary" [failure to comply could mean a 12 month suspension of driving privileges] cheek swabs that detect drug and alcohol levels at their DUI checkpoints on New Year’s Eve.
 
[The pretext for invasions of privacy are always clothed in socially useful ambitions.] "Sobriety" checkpoints have traditionally included tests to determine whether drivers have consumed alcohol, including breathalyzers, but the new cheek swabs also pick up on drugs, including cocaine, marijuana, and ecstasy.

[The individual may not be intoxicated, but any trace level or false positive can lead to arrest. What is most likely to determine arrest? Race, age, clothing, obedience level, not this inadmissible test. Cheek swabs are not yet admissible in court, so jails will fill with targeted groups while others, even those who are genuinely incapacitated, are allowed to slide.]
 

You saw her; she came at me with that flower!

Different drugs can be detected by a cheek swab after various amounts of time. Cocaine and marijuana are traceable for up to 24 hours, ecstasy and meth for three days, and alcohol for just 12 hours.
 
Drivers stopped at DUI checkpoints may be asked to take the oral swab test, but can refuse. If the police suspect the driver to be intoxicated and arrest them, drivers can still refuse testing and have their license suspended for 12 months, otherwise a blood test would be administered to test for drug and alcohol levels. More

Police State?

Chase Madar

We're here to "protect" you (KC)

The term “police state” was once brushed off by mainstream intellectuals as the hyperbole of paranoids. Not so anymore.

Even in the tweediest precincts of the legal system, the over-criminalization of American life is remarked upon with greater frequency and intensity.

“You’re probably a (federal) criminal” is the accusatory title of a widely read essay co-authored by Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit of the US Court of Appeals in Pasadena.

But I'm suppo'd to be the "decider"!

A Republican appointee, Kozinski surveys the morass of criminal laws that make virtually every American an easy target for law enforcement. Veteran defense lawyer Harvey Silverglate has written an entire book about how an average American professional could easily commit three felonies in a single day without knowing it.

 

The daily overkill of police power in the US goes a long way toward explaining why more Americans aren’t outraged by the “excesses” of the war on terror, which, as one law professor has argued, are just our everyday domestic penal habits exported to more exotic venues. It is no less true that the growth of domestic police power is, in this positive feedback loop, the partial result of our distant foreign wars seeping back into the homeland (the “imperial boomerang” that Hannah Arendt warned against).

• Support for US War on Afghanistan falls to 17%, making it the longest and most unpopular war in country's history even using 9-11 spectacle as its pretext

Look, young lady, whistleblowing is a crime!

Many who railed against our country’s everyday police overkill have reacted to the revelations of NSA surveillance with exasperation: Of course we are over-policed!

Some have responded with resentment: Why so much sympathy for this Snowden kid when the daily grind of our justice system destroys so many lives without comment or scandal? After all, in New York, the police department’s “stop and frisk” tactic, which targets African-American and Latino working-class youth for routine street searches, was until recently uncontroversial among the political and opinion-making class.

The United States of Fear

If “the gloves came off” after Sept. 11, 2001, many Americans were surprised to learn they had ever been on to begin with.

 

A hammer is necessary in any toolkit. But we use our hammer to turn screws, chop tomatoes, brush teeth. Yet, the hammer remains our instrument of choice, both in the conduct of our foreign policy and in our domestic order. The result is NOT  peace, justice, or prosperity but rather a police state that harasses and imprisons its own people while shouting ever less intelligibly about freedom. More

Story first appeared at TomDispatch.com and alternet.org. Follow TomDispatch on Twitter, join on Facebook or Tumblr, check out the newest Dispatch Book, Ann Jones’ They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars — The Untold Story.

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NSA spying on American's PORN habits

Maya, Wisdom Quarterly; OnTheMedia.org

The NSA Spies on People's Porn Habits: Whistle blowing journalist Glenn Greenwald, formerly of Britain's The Guardian, pops up in The Huffington Post today with a new Edward Snowden leak story. This one is about how the NSA has spied on the porn viewing habits of six unidentified Muslim targets [and one can bet countless nominally-Christian Americans who could be transcending by crossing their legs].

2012 review (thismodernworld.com)

USA (NSA) spying on Europe (video)

CC Liu, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez, DemocracyNow.org

Barry Obama and Sec'y of State John Kerry on drones and spying (economist.com)

American activists gather in Washington, D.C. protesting NSA's illegal activities. Democrat Diane Feinstein, who chairs a congressional committee overseeing America's (known) spying apparatus, plans new legislation to shut down protesters by making NSA spying legal (DN).

 

The Empire is at it again, and it only gets worse with every revelation of intrusive homeland spying, Internet monitoring, and cellphone (mobile) wiretapping. The NSA has been doing it to the nation's allies in Europe as well.

 

  

(10-28-13) As new revelations of NSA (National Security Agency) spying stoke the ire of Germany, France, and Spain [and other Eurozone countries], thousands of infuriated Americans marched on Washington, D.C., on Saturday in a rally against government surveillance. Organizers say the protest was the largest to date against NSA monitoring since Edward Snowden’s disclosures became public through Glenn Greenwald and the UK's The Guardian in June.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald

Jesselyn Radack, a former Justice Department lawyer who now works for the Government Accountability Project reads a message from Edward Snowden; NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, who was charged with espionage after he was suspected of revealing information about the agency’s warrantless wiretapping program, also speaks. And New Mexico’s former Republican governor, Gary Johnson, chimes in. More

• Reports: NSA spying on Germany since 2002; Obama briefed in 2010 
  
• Report: NSA illegally tracked millions of calls in Spain 
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• Journalist Glenn Greenwald's new job after The Guardian: [E-Bay founder funds new] media venture to empower adversarial journalism and thereby hold the powerful accountable