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U.S. Relaxes Limits on Use of Data in Terror Analysis
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: April 2nd, 2012
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/us/politics/us-moves-to-r...
The Obama administration is moving to relax restrictions on how counterterrorism analysts may retrieve, store and search information about Americans gathered by government agencies for purposes other than national security threats. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. [has] signed new guidelines for the National Counterterrorism Center. The guidelines will lengthen to five years from 180 days the amount of time the center can retain private information about Americans when there is no suspicion that they are tied to terrorism, intelligence officials said. The guidelines are also expected to result in the center making more copies of entire databases and data mining them. They also set off civil-liberties concerns among privacy advocates who invoked the Total Information Awareness program. That program, proposed early in the George W. Bush administration and partially shut down by Congress after an outcry, proposed fusing vast archives of electronic records like travel records, credit card transactions, phone calls and more. Were all in the dark, and for all we know it could be a rerun of Total Information Awareness, which would have allowed the government to make a computerized database of everything on everybody, said Kate Martin, the director of the Center for National Security Studies, who criticized the administration for not making the draft guidelines public for scrutiny ahead of time.
Note: For excellent and insightful analyses of the disturbing growth of government surveillance and secrecy described in this NYT report, click here and here and here and here.
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