Technology already available and already demonstrated to be effective " makes it possible for law-abiding officials, together with experienced technical people to create a highly efficient system in which both security and privacy can be assured. Advanced technology can pinpoint and thwart corruption in the intelligence, military, and civilian domain. At its core, this requires automated analysis of attributes and transactional relationships among individuals. The large data sets in government files already contain the needed data. On the Intelligence Community side, there are ways to purge databases of irrelevant data and deny government officials the ability to spy on anyone they want. These methodologies protect the privacy of innocent people, while enhancing the ability to discover criminal threats. In order to ensure continuous legal compliance with these changes, it is necessary to establish a central technical group or organization to continuously monitor and validate compliance with the Constitution and U.S. law. Such a group would need to have the highest-level access to all agencies to ensure compliance behind the classification doors. It must be able to go into any agency to inspect its activity at any time. In addition ... it would be best to make government financial and operational transactions open to the public for review. Such an organization would go a long way toward making government truly transparent to the public.
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Each summary is created using a consistent editorial procedure. The target length is approximately 16 lines of 11-point Arial text in a 650-pixel-wide column. Up to 25% of a summary may be set in bold to emphasize the most important ideas. Summaries are composed of verbatim excerpts presented in the same sequence as they appear in the original news source, with very minor editorial additions. Where material has been omitted between excerpts, the omission is indicated with ellipses (...). Any words added by an editor for clarity or context appear in [brackets]. Our original news editor was Fred Burks. Tod Fletcher edited most summaries from 2007 through 2014, and Mark Bailey has served as news editor since 2014.