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Activist Group Sues US Border Agency Over New, Vast Intelligence System
An anonymous reader writes with news about one of the latest unanswered FOIA requests made to the Department of Homeland Security and the associated lawsuit the department's silence has brought. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has sued the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in an attempt to compel the government agency to hand over documents relating to a relatively new comprehensive intelligence database of people and cargo crossing the US border. EPIC's lawsuit, which was filed last Friday, seeks a trove of documents concerning the 'Analytical Framework for Intelligence' (AFI) as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. EPIC's April 2014 FOIA request went unanswered after the 20 days that the law requires, and the group waited an additional 49 days before filing suit. The AFI, which was formally announced in June 2012 by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), consists of "a single platform for research, analysis, and visualization of large amounts of data from disparate sources and maintaining the final analysis or products in a single, searchable location for later use as well as appropriate dissemination."
The government has every right to determine whom and what is coming into the United States. International visitors are asked to file paper work with the government to report a number of items (large sums of money, plant/food products, money making equipment, etc.).
The problem is that Obama (and some past presidents to a lesser degree) are willingly not enforcing border security. For known illegal immigrants already in their custody.
Which raises serious suspicions about any claims they make about their intentions for a highly invasive monitoring system.