Gonzo: FBI "snooping" broke law
...The FBI program that uses the letters is a “Friendster for Fascists,” which is the part of the story that’s getting buried...
... The numbers look really bad.
In 2000, for example, the FBI issued an estimated 8,500 requests. That number peaked in 2004 with 56,000. Overall, the FBI reported issuing 143,074 requests in national security letters between 2003 and 2005.
But that did not include an additional 8,850 requests that were never recorded in the FBI’s database, the audit found. A sample review of 77 case files at four FBI field offices showed that agents had underreported the number of national security letter requests by about 22 percent.
And now, from a Corrente post w-a-a-a-y back in 2005, here are some things that the AP story does not mention about the information that the FBI has been gathering.
1. These records are private records; for example, financial records of ordinary Americans who had “casual or unwitting contact” with a suspect.
2. The record-keeping is not reviewed after the fact for accuracy.
3. The records are widely shared among Federal agencies, the states, localities, and “appropriate private sector entities.” (Wackenhut? The RNC?)
4. The records are never discarded.
5. The records are gathered using a technique called “contact chaining,” meaning that if Alice is a suspect and knows Bob, then Bob is surveilled, and if Bob knows Carol, Carla, and Charles, they are surveilled. And since everyone in the world can be connected via “six degrees of separation,” that means that the number of people surveilled under this program will grow exponentially if left unchecked...
The program, for which the National Security letters are just a tool, really is a Friendster for Fascists.
So if the Pentagon's planning on doing this too, does that mean there will be at least two such databases? Because neither of these groups exactly likes to share either credit or blame. Then there's the NSA's, and the CIA's pet databases too. Probably CSC/ DynCorp will add their own just for grins. And AT&T will want a copy too. Not to mention Google. But access for the discerning di$creet clients only!
Back to Lambert's original 2005 post:
Well, the outlaw Bush regime—surely not excessive rhetoric, with so many Republicans indicted—is having the FBI build a panopticon, using the Patriot [cough] Act as their excuse. (WaPo, The “FBI’s Secret Scrutiny: In Hunt for Terrorists, Bureau Examines Records of Ordinary Americans”) What’s a panopticon?
'The concept of the [panopticon’s] design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a “sentiment of an invisible omniscience...” '
...The surprise: By the math of the “Six Degrees of Separation” theory, the Republicans really are going to end up surveilling everybody. And about everything. They really are building a Panopticon; it’s not a metaphor or a rhetorical flight. Read on:
A little background on “Six Degrees” theory:
Stanley Milgram’s “Six Degrees of Separation” theory is a (well-tested) theory about social relationships; code implementing it has been patented, and it’s the formalism that underlies technologies like friendster. You may have played the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game, which demonstrates the theory in game form, in the movie industry. Briefly, the Six Degrees theory states that:
"[A]nyone on earth can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries..."
Here’s what WaPo has to say... :
' “National security letters,” created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.
'The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters — one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people — are extending the bureau’s reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans...
'Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics [Yeah, right], which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot...
'Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for “state, local and tribal” governments and for “appropriate private sector entities,” which are not defined. '
Hmm… Appropriate private sector entities… Like, say, Wackenhut? Nah. Crazy talk. The Republicans would never privatize domestic surveillance! Let’s be reasonable!
...Let’s review. Using a National Security Letter:>=
1. The FBI can collect information on one individual, that individual’s contacts, those individual’s contacts, all the way out to Six Degrees.
2. The FBI can get any information it wants, with no review or oversight.
3. The FBI “shall” store this information permanently.
4. The FBI can use this information to build a “model” of any individual through data mining and transactional analysis
5. Do the math, using conservative estimates 30,0000 National letters (above) * 10 years * 10 contacts (as above) * 10 of their contacts * 10 of their contacts (i.e., three Degrees of Seperation) = 300,000,000.
So, in 10 years at the outside, just doing the math, the FBI could have a complete permanent record of every citizen, including behavior models based on consumer purchases from transactional analysis.
I can see how a theocracy would find this very useful—it sure would help with tithing—but it’s hard to see what use a free society would have for this. Eh? So, if the Republican’s have their way, we’ll shortly be living in a very small world indeed…
A small world run by even smaller people with tiny little agendas designed to amass large amounts of money and power.
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