Slashdot Mirror
The Secret Government Rulebook For Labeling You a Terrorist
Advocatus Diaboli sends this report: The Obama administration has quietly approved a substantial expansion of the terrorist watchlist system, authorizing a secret process that requires neither "concrete facts" nor "irrefutable evidence" to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist, according to a key government document obtained by The Intercept. ...The heart of the document revolves around the rules for placing individuals on a watchlist. "All executive departments and agencies," the document says, are responsible for collecting and sharing information on terrorist suspects with the National Counterterrorism Center. It sets a low standard—"reasonable suspicion"—for placing names on the watchlists, and offers a multitude of vague, confusing, or contradictory instructions for gauging it. In the chapter on "Minimum Substantive Derogatory Criteria"—even the title is hard to digest—the key sentence on reasonable suspicion offers little clarity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Finally, silly bureaucratic holdups will no longer preclude Mr. Archibald Buttle's addition to the terror list!
Soon enough (if not already), they will have "reasonable suspicion" to add all Slashdot users to the list.
Hmm, let's see:
- technologically savvy? Check.
- Interested in/knowledgeable about cryptography/biology/chemistry? Check.
- Generally Libertarian (pro-individual-freedom) mentality? Big ol' check.
- NOT large donors to political campaigns? Good chance of another check here.
Sounds like yes, we as a group do indeed meet the Fascist, er Federal Government's definitions of "terrorist."
Any attributes I failed to list, that makes our community a target for clandestine government agencies?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
What's terrifying about this is, there has been a precedent set that being a "terrorist" voids your constitutional rights. If you're a terrorist, the US government can assassinate you, even if you're a citizen. They can lock you up indefinitely in secret prisons. They can spy on all of your communications, and conduct searches that are otherwise illegal. They can torture you. They can do anything they want in the name of "winning the War on Terror".
So once you have that kind of policy towards terrorism, there's only one thing, in theory, protecting your constitutional rights: a strict definition of 'terrorist'.
If terrorist have no rights, and anyone can be considered a terrorist, then nobody's rights are protected. Now someone might respond, "No, you still have your rights. You can speak freely, you can bear arms, there are no soldiers in your house, and the government isn't searching through your belongings." And you're right. I currently have all of those freedoms. However, if those freedoms are contingent on the will of a government official, and those freedoms can be arbitrarily taken away, then they aren't 'rights' anymore.
Meh. The joke's been around forever, except it's no joke:
There was a inter-agency meeting where various federal agents discussed what makes a person getting off a plane suspicious. They came to a conclusion that:
Anyone who gets off first, or near the front, is obviously rushing, and thus is suspicious.
Anyone who gets off last, or near the back, is obviously being cautious, and thus is suspicious.
And anyone who gets off in the middle is trying to lose themselves in the crowd, and thus is suspicious.
Point is, if they want you on 'a list', they'll put you on the list, no matter what you do or don't do. /isn't that a 'police state'? //...I mean "I love Big Brother!"
Keep lowering the bar. Eventually it'll be so low that everyone will be a terrorist... and then what will there be left to terrify?
The list will always be finite. Don't be ignorant. There will be people who will NEVER be on this list no matter what they do or say. However, we need to stop assuming the government does not have the ability to enslave (incarcerate) far more than you could ever imagine.
I never imagined that the city of Boston could be turned into a Stazi police state in a matter of hours. It happened. Right under our eyes. With ten times the law enforcement resources we thought we had on hand.
That capability can now be deployed to every major city across the US. Within hours.
Don't wonder or assume where your tax dollars go. It's the armored troop carriers and drones staring you in the face that ALL law enforcement agencies suddenly NEED to do their job. Regardless of the threat yesterday or over the last decade, Bubba Joe Sheriff apparently can't do his job tomorrow without it, so it's automatically approved in the budget. Fuck you and your privacy. Stop bitching. You're "safe" now.
Ahhh, can't you just smell the freedom in the air...
I mean, if I had to name someone a terrorist, I'd start with Rupert Murdoch, and then think about the CEO of Goldman Sachs (Blankenfein?)... Then there's that bank HSBC, that knowingly laundered money to terrorists and drug cartels.
If you really think about it, the 1% are the nastiest bunch of terrorists around, but I'll bet you the entire planet (which the 1% own), that these terrorists never, ever, ever get their names on any terrorist list.
So, what's a terrorist then? Someone, I guess... who represents a threat to the real terrorists running the world.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
This is the real problem. We have no knowledge of who and what are on these lists, nor do we have any way of obtaining that knowledge. Every single person on them could be someone who trained in Pakistan with known terrorists or every single one of them could be regular people who have done absolutely nothing to warrant surveillance (which is what a "watch" list is, if you didn't gather by the name). We don't know, we can't know. The system is entirely and completely opaque to anyone outside it (and probably the vast majority of those tasked with updating it).
McCarthy was not spying on all Americans, tapping all their phones, reading all their mail, groping them at the airport, sifting through their medical records (after forcing those records to be electronic and part of a national system) and so on.
Furthermore, McCarthy was onto a real problem before he went way overboard (I hate being in a position that looks like I am defending him, which I am NOT). There actually were a few commies in the government (as we learned decades later after the collapse of the soviet union and the opening of the archives) and there actually were a few commies in Hollywood having secret meetings (though they were more like social gatherings and the form of communism was more of an innocent idealism about "some other way" borne from the great depression). There also really were spies in the US transferring military (particularly nuclear) tech to the Soviet Union, which really was an actual national security matter. A drunken, bloated, publicity-hungry man with no sense of self-restraint and common sense was not the best person to dig into these issues.
In the current situation, 99% of the population is easily identifiable as being NO threat at all... the people trying to harm us are all Muslim extremists and the vast majority are from outside the US. Oh, and SOMEBODY always injects Tim McVeigh in here as a "domestic terrorism" counter-point - it's not. He was a vile criminal who attacked a specific Federal Building associated with the Waco raid, NOT a terrorist randomly attacking civilians.... very bad and deadly, BUT a very different matter requiring a response not connected to the "war on terror" (lumping McVeigh in with Muslim extremists is precisely the sort of thing that wrongly enables the feds to pretend their universal spying is necessary). If the goal is to stop terror attacks (rather than eliminate all crime, which is an impossible goal) there's simply no reason to spy on any American atheist, Jew, Christian, Buddist, Hindu, Seikh, etc and very little reason to give even a second look at any Muslim who's not forcing his wife and daughters into personal body tents, not trying to slice-and-sice his daughter's "naughty bits", not trying to send his daughters "home" to the middle-east for arranged marriages, and not trying to cut-off the hand of a guy at the local mosque (as happened in Philly recently)... in other words: there's even a difference between "moderate" Muslims and the crazy evil bloodthirsty whackjob Muslims who we need to be spying on intensely. Groping little children of non-muslims, and elderly nuns at the airport is NOT security - it's "security theater". Snooping on a bunch of young guys who play Halo because your phone taps caprtured the word "explode" is just plain idiotic.
We currently have, in Barack Millhouse Hussein McCarthy a man who is completely out of control. His political opponents have found themselves being probed by the IRS, the ATF, the FBI, and the EPA, while he has declared that he has the right to single-handedly re-write the clear text of laws and choose to not enforce laws he does not like. He has taken programs originally designed to snoop on people outside the US (normal spying activity done by all nations) but expanded post-9-11 to also snoop on people within the US wo were in contact with outsiders who were possible threats (Constitutionally-dubious, but an understandable temporary reaction to thousands of dead bodies) and transformed it into a permanent program of spying on EVERYBODY at all times. When you unite universal comprehensive spying with using government agencies to hassle political opponents and a disregard for any inconvenient law you have totalitarianism. If people were looking at this clearly, they would be FREAKING OUT right now (Imagine if a "President Cheney" was doing it and the people in the cross-hairs were progressives...) but since Obama is supported by all but one of the news media outlets, most Amercians are being spoonfed a supportive view of some of this and not told about the r
These days, you don't even have to be a dirty commie, or Chinese, or both, to be Anti-American; the Commander-in-Chief hisself is one
I can't help but wonder if Obama's own dossier is to go through the same expanded terrorist watchlist system would Obama be labeled as one of the terrorists?
Especially when neither "concrete facts" nor "irrefutable evidence" is required
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Re "Point is, if they want you on 'a list', they'll put you on the list, no matter what you do or don't do."
Reworking the old Soviet "owning a western watch" joke:
Three frequent flyers in a military prison get to talking about why they are there.
"I am here because I always got to airport five minutes late, and they charged me with sneaking in", says the first.
"I am here because I kept getting to airport 2 hours early, and they charged me with spying" says the second.
"I am here because I got to airport on time," says the third, "and they charged me with owning a watch."
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Makes the Patriot Act seem kind of quaint, no?
So now we're going to tar and feather the current President over this, right? Since he's far worse?
What's that, no? Just vaguely complain?
I've read many articles already that suggests that there is a purge that is happening within the ranks of the military already. Over 200 top brass have been forced out over the past 5 years for various reasons. http://www.washingtontimes.com...
Combine that with the rumored questionnaire that surfaced at "29 Palms" training facility around 1995, and has made a comback in headlines, of the military personnel being asking questions like "would you fire on American citizens", and posing circumstances like "if guns were outlawed, and civilians were ordered to turn them in, would you aid in forceful confiscation of [aka shooting at] those who refused to voluntarily turn them in?"
I know many people pass this stuff off as 'tin foil hat' territory, but in today's political climate, with mass surveillance, government lying to us on a daily basis, half of the bill of rights being eroded down to mean nothing... I don't think it's out of the realm of plausible. I might have a 'tin foil' hat on, but if you think this is even remotely possible, then you would have to have your head in the sand.