Suspicious activity reporting programs or SAR will have a negative affect on private investigators and the U. S. public.
Are you a terrorist? Do you associate with terrorists? If the answer to those questions is no — which it undoubtedly is for the overwhelming majority of Americans — collecting detailed information about your personal behavior for the sake of “intelligence gathering” would violate your rights and waste the government’s resources, but not make you any safer. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening with the government’s growing number of Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) programs.
SAR programs are based on the theory that collecting information about a multitude of “suspicious” behaviors will help law enforcement and intelligence agencies find criminals and terrorists. The problem, however, is that many of the behaviors these SAR programs identify as precursors to terrorism include innocuous and commonplace activities that ordinary people engage in every day.
For this reason, SAR programs not only pose civil liberties threats, but they also subvert counterterrorism efforts, as the extraneous information collected only pollutes the intelligence system and makes it less useful and reliable for law enforcement.
The civil liberties dangers posed by SAR programs are significant. Under SAR programs, engaging in everyday activities like taking photographs, drawing diagrams or taking notes or measurements could result in a policemen, FBI or Department of Homeland Security agent stopping you, demanding ID and detaining or arresting you.
After that, your information could be entered into a database of “suspicious” potential terrorists — despite the fact that you’ve done nothing wrong —simply because the government has determined that a small number of terrorists might also engage in these same ubiquitous activities.
Some SAR programs request public participation, with hyperbolic public service announcements that suggest reporting your neighbor’s photography might stop the next 9/11. Think about the implications for the average tourist shooting a photo of the Brooklyn Bridge, or the art student fascinated by the structure of the subway.
Under SAR programs, artists and journalists have been systematically harassed or detained by federal, state and local law enforcement and, in some instances, the ensuing confrontation with police escalated to the point where photographers were arrested and their photos erased or cameras confiscated with no reasonable indication that criminal activity was involved.
Link:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/10/26/102551/commentary-how-to-spot-a-law-abiding.html