Some of these stories broke today, others in the last few weeks. This seems to be part of an alarming trend in which revelations of domestic spying hit the newswire without much attention paid by the general public.
Terror Database Has Quadrupled In Four Years
Each day, thousands of pieces of intelligence information from around the world -- field reports, captured documents, news from foreign allies and sometimes idle gossip -- arrive in a computer-filled office in McLean, where analysts feed them into the nation's central list of terrorists and terrorism suspects.
New York Cops Tracked Activists Ahead of 2004 Republican Convention
Undercover New York police officers traveled around the United States and to Europe to observe activists who planned to protest at the 2004 Republican National Convention — including hundreds who showed no sign of illegal intent, a newspaper reported.
Posing as activists or sympathizers, the officers attended meetings of political groups in at least 15 U.S. states and filed reports with the police department's intelligence division, The New York Times reported on its Web site Saturday.
Tapping into privacy
Between 2003 and 2005, the FBI made 143,000 NSL demands for information, where each demand could be for thousands of records. In 2004, for example, a request for information involving 11,000 separate phone numbers was made using just nine NSLs.
The report found some of this personal information wasn't even examined. It was just uploaded into three separate FBI databases, where it could be accessed by thousands of FBI and non-FBI employees. There was no process for deleting records when it was clear that they involved innocent people. The inspector general found NSLs were used to collect information about people "two or three steps removed from their subjects" without there being suspicious ties. He found that increasingly the agency was focusing on gathering data on Americans and residents.
Congress Wants to Monitor All Emails, IMs, Etc.
A bill introduced last week by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) is beginning to raise eyebrows. It would require ISPs to record all users’ surfing activity, IM conversations and email traffic indefinitely.
White House panel OKs surveillance work
A White House privacy board has determined that two of the Bush administration’s surveillance programs - domestic wiretapping and financial tracking - do not violate citizens’ civil liberties.