If you're an American reading this, then under expansive definitions being used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and several states in their counterterrorism training, you just might be a domestic terrorist.
An officious bureaucrat with the U.S. Army has tried to intimidate the Federation of American Scientists into removing from its Web site a copy of the Army's recently updated regulation on operational security. And FAS government secrecy project director Steven Aftergood told the bureaucrat in no uncertain terms to get lost.
Noah Shachtman reported Wednesday at Wired News that new Army regulations would severely restrict soldiers' ability to maintain web logs and send personal email, requiring them to clear every single post with a commanding officer. The Army says that's just not true and that nothing has changed for soldiers on the ground.
"Terrorists win when the fear of them induces us to destroy the rights that make us free." Those were the words of one victim of post-9/11 anti-terrorism hysteria to a Congressional committee on Wednesday. So we got national security letters, a terrorist surveillance program, and probably many other programs, but instead of stopping terrorists, these programs have targeted ordinary Americans.
The United States Census Bureau turned over names and addresses of American citizens of Japanese descent to the Secret Service during World War II. How dare those supposedly patriotic Americans not turn themselves in to their designated concentration camps!
In case you haven't noticed, there haven't been any posts here in several days. This is primarily because I've been wrapped up with another project which has taken up virtually all of my time since the last post. To make it up to you, I'm just going to give you links to several interesting items in my unread list for you to enjoy.
Being forced by the government to spy on your own neighbors, customers, friends and family. It's coming. And it will be brought to you by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose national security letters have recently attracted national attention due to findings of abuse and lawbreaking by FBI agents.
REAL ID, that bitter pill which will further centralize identification of virtually every American, not to mention cost you untold billions of dollars, is so tough to swallow that many states are balking at it. But one state is eagerly accepting REAL ID after the Department of Homeland Security held out a carrot along with its sharp stick.
The master list the federal government keeps of known and suspected terrorists, from which other government agencies derive their own watch lists, already hundreds of thousands of names large, is growing out of control, filling with "fragmentary," "inconsistent" and "sometimes just flat-out wrong" information, a top counterterrorism official said.
"Soccer teams, family reunions and Civil War re-enactors" are in danger of being misidentified as terrorists from a data-mining program the Department of Homeland Security is testing which may have already violated privacy laws.
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