The FBI has a Terror Watch List of 400,000 names on it. Does that seem extreme to you? Because it seems absolutely insane to me.
Newly released FBI data offer evidence of the broad scope and complexity of the nation’s terrorist watch list, documenting a daily flood of names nominated for inclusion to the controversial list.
During a 12-month period ended in March this year, for example, the U.S. intelligence community suggested on a daily basis that 1,600 people qualified for the list because they presented a “reasonable suspicion,” according to data provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee by the FBI in September and made public last week. […]
The ever-churning list is said to contain more than 400,000 unique names and over 1 million entries. The committee was told that over that same period, officials asked each day that 600 names be removed and 4,800 records be modified. Fewer than 5 percent of the people on the list are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. Nine percent of those on the terrorism list, the FBI said, are also on the government’s “no fly” list.
I have to wonder if we are slowing turning our “security forces” into the equivalent of East Germany’s notorious Stasi where everyone informs on everyone else and thee FBI keeps a record on everyone for any possible “anti-government” comment or association. I can’t even see the value of a list that large. All it does is make it harder to spot and investigate the real terror suspects from the mass of innocent people who likely will never commit a crime (outside a traffic offense), much less an act of terror. Once a list of this size is compiled, however, it takes on a life of its own. I strongly suspect that a list this large has little value as an investigative tool. What it does represent, however is far more ominous: a centralized state security apparatus that cannot stop itself from intruding into every aspect of our lives. As with the data bases compiled by the Pentagon and the NSA, this is just another sign that our fear of terrorism has allowed the Constitution to be gutted like a dead fish.
Hey, isn’t that what all you tea-baggers complain about? Losing your freedoms? Well people, when the FBI can add names to a terror watgh list willy-nilly with little if any oversight, when the NSA can read all your emails and text messages, when the Pentagon keeps a data base of Vegan groups and Quakers, don’t you think we’ve crossed a line. Maybe you could show some common cause with us on the left and start demanding our government dial back its absurd attempts to catalog every piece of information about everyone. After all, there’s a scary Democrat as the head of the executive branch. I for one don’t think it matters much which party heads up the federal government, if the security apparatus of that government gathers and controls all this information and assigns people to “terror lists” under cover of secrecy and national security. This ought to be a concern for every American, regardless of political affiliation.
Because, political parties come and go, but security forces, the people we don’t vote into office, never die. Maybe we all ought to spend some time figuring out what they have been doing this last decade, and trimming their powers and limiting their activities. Unless you really do want to wake up someday with a police state. Trust me, Left or Right makes no difference if that is the end result.
Exactly right and very, very important—of enduring importance:
Once a list of this size is compiled, however, it takes on a life of its own. I strongly suspect that a list this large has little value as an investigative tool. What it does represent, however is far more ominous: a centralized state security apparatus that cannot stop itself from intruding into every aspect of our lives. As with the data bases compiled by the Pentagon and the NSA, this is just another sign that our fear of terrorism has allowed the Constitution to be gutted like a dead fish.
Today, any expectation of privacy is now forfeit. “We” as a society (yourself and all like you as exceptions) haven’t begun to grasp the seriousness of this.
When, just before the advent of the Iraq invasion/war, a craven Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, gave their second-hand authorization to Bush in the form of a blank-cheque to wage war anywhere and in any manner he might see fit to do, I wrote that Bush’s fateful decision to launch the war would mean the end of the nation, its undoing as a society, one which should be then understood to have committed the political equivalent of “driving the nation off a cliff”, this is in part what I had in mind.
As a nation, we’re “asleep in a smoke-filled room”. That’s an emergency from which, in real life, rather than in a metaphorical sense, people often never wake up.
Your piece is a brilliant reminder of the danger. My view, now eight years old, is that the nation virtually shot itself in the head by allowing Bush to launch the war. I don’t expect the country to recover from this. But, maybe one day, others will learn something from the wreckage that is left behind. I see no reason to expect that people now living will be among them, though.
If democracy is to have a standard-bearer, that task is now going to fall to another people and another time. We had our shot and, frankly, we failed spectacularly when we once had so much in our favor. The rot goes way, way back, though. Some of the very people who drafted and voted into enactment the Constitution of the United States, grievously violated its most core principles when President Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798:
“…I knew there was need enough of both, and therefore I consented to them.” [President John Adams referring to his signing of the Alien and Sedition Acts, 1798]
We have again (what’s been a long time coming) what is, in practical effect, much of the injurious harms of those mistakes in a slightly updated form. The history we ignored at our peril is recounted in the book referenced in the following link:
http://www.amazon.com/American-Aurora-Democratic-Republican-Suppressed-Beginnings/dp/0312194374/ref=
sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257171499&sr=1-1
President Obama has read and praised Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. Let him now read Richard Rosenfeld’s American Aurora: A Democratic-Republican Returns; The Suppressed History of Our Nation’s Beginnings and the Heroic Newspaper That Tried to Report It .
When I was a kid, folks could go to a workplace without having to sign in, get a badge, and be escorted by an employee. The exception were large factories; and even then all you needed was to be escorted by the person you were visiting. You could also get a job by walking in and asking to speak to a particular manager and make your case–no HR screening, comparative lists, etc.
Today, in most large businesses and US government non-defense agency buildings, you must enter through a guard station, sign in with a security guard (no longer a receptionist), often be wanded for weapons, wait for your escort, be escorted to a restroom should you need it. In addition, the architecture of workplaces has become intentionally disorienting for someone who does not work there daily. Uniform cubes and offices in uniform arrangements with white walls except a restrooms, elevators, and break rooms.
And facilities that are doing “research” are surrounded by lots of acreage, hidden eight-foot, razor-wire topped fences, security cameras, and 24/7 patrols.
All of this was in place before 9/11. In the last eight years it has only gotten worse. One might as well not fly anywhere anymore, for example.