From Marcy Wheeler’s emptywheel blog, late this morning…
Today, in honor of Constitution Day, the ACLU just released a report showing how the FBI’s expanded mandate since 9/11 has led to Constitutional abuses...
As some reading this may be aware, I posted an extensive piece here on this story, very early this morning: "
"'Unleashed and Unaccountable,' ACLU Calls On U.S. Gov't to Rein In Power of FBI (Updated!)."
Just one of the, literally, hundreds of stunning tidbits from the ACLU’s 69-page document (thanks to Marcy's always-incisive efforts) …
ACLU to Jim Comey: Welcome. Now Fix This.
By: emptywheel Tuesday September 17, 2013 11:07 am
...FBI collects Suspicious Activities Reports that duplicate — but lower the standard for — an existing database
Another major problem is that eGuardian effectively competes with another federal government SAR. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 established the Information Sharing Environment (ISE) to serve as the conduit for terrorism-related information sharing between state and local law enforcement and the federal government.114 A March 2013 Government Accountability Office report found that though the two programs share information between them, eGuardian uses a lower evidentiary threshold for inclusion of SARs, which creates risks and privacy problems.
The Government Accountability Office found that “many fusion centers have decided not to automatically share all of their ISE-SARs with eGuardian” because eGuardian doesn’t meet ISE standards.115 One fusion center said it would never provide SARs to eGuardian because of the fusion center’s privacy policy.116 The Government Accountability Office also found that the two systems “have overlapping goals and offer duplicative services.”117
FBI will soon have the equivalent of 20 pieces of intelligence on every American — and they share this broadly
An FBI budget request for fiscal year 2008 said the FBI had amassed databases containing 1.5 billion records, and two members of Congress described documents predicting the FBI would have 6 billion records by 2012, which they said would represent “20 separate ‘records’ for each man, woman and child in the United States.”119
[snip]
According to a 2012 Systems of Records Notice covering all FBI data warehouses, the information in these systems can be shared broadly, even with foreign entities and private companies, and for a multitude of law enforcement and non-law enforcement purposes.133...
"Nothing to see here. Move along..."
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