The U.S. gov't. will now store information about Americans with no ties to terrorism for up to five years.
Washington - The U.S. intelligence community will now be able to store information about Americans with no ties to terrorism for up to five years under new Obama administration guidelines.
Until now, the National Counterterrorism Center had to immediately destroy information about Americans that was already stored in other government databases when there were no clear ties to terrorism.
“Following the failed terrorist attack in December 2009, representatives of the counterterrorism community concluded it is vital for NCTC to be provided with a variety of datasets from various agencies that contain terrorism information,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a statement late Thursday. “The ability to search against these datasets for up to five years on a continuing basis as these updated guidelines permit will enable NCTC to accomplish its mission more practically and effectively.”
The new rules replace guidelines issued in 2008 and have privacy advocates concerned about the potential for data-mining information on innocent Americans.
“It is a vast expansion of the government’s surveillance authority,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said of the five-year retention period.
The government put in strong safeguards at the NCTC for the data that would be collected on U.S. citizens for intelligence purposes, Rotenberg said. These new guidelines undercut the Federal Privacy Act, he said.
“The fact that this data can be retained for five years on U.S. citizens for whom there’s no evidence of criminal conduct is very disturbing,” Rotenberg said.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, voiced concerns about how the guidelines would interact with proposals to give the government greater access to telecommunications information in order to protect critical infrastructure from hackers.
Journalist Marcy Wheeler summed the new guidelines up nicely saying, “So…the data the government keeps to track our travel, our taxes, our benefits, our identity? It just got transformed from bureaucratic data into national security intelligence.”
Disturbingly, “oversight” for these expansive new guidelines is being directed by the DNI’s "Civil Liberties Protection Officer" Joel Alexander, who is so concerned about Americans’ privacy and civil liberties that he, as Marcy Wheeler notes, found no civil liberties concerns with the National Security Agency’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program when he reviewed it during President George W. Bush’s administration.
As other civil liberties organizations have noted, the new guidelines are reminiscent of the Orwellian-sounding “Total Information Awareness” program George Bush tried but failed to get through Congress in 2003—again in the name of defending the nation from terrorists. The program, as the New York Times explained, sparked an “outcry” and partially shut down Congress because it “proposed fusing vast archives of electronic records — like travel records, credit card transactions, phone calls and more — and searching for patterns of a hidden terrorist cell.”
The new rules are silent about the use of commercial data — like credit card and travel records — that may have been acquired by other agencies. In 2009, Wired Magazine obtained a list of databases acquired by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, one of the agencies that shares information with the center. It included nearly 200 million records transferred from private data brokers like ChoicePoint, 55,000 entries on customers of Wyndham hotels, and numerous other travel and commercial records.
National Counterterrorism Center Guidlines:
http://epic.org/privacy/profiling/2012-NCTC-Guidelines.pdf
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/intel-community-can-now-keep-info-about-americans-with-no-ties-to-terrorism-for-up-to-5-years/2012/03/22/gIQAHnUMUS_story.html
http://endthelie.com/2012/03/23/national-counterterrorism-center-gets-insane-new-power-over-private-data-on-americans/#axzz1pnBOEmpX
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/us/politics/us-moves-to-relax-some-restrictions-for-counterterrorism-analysis.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=eric+holder&st=nyt
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/foreign-affairs-defense/are-we-safer/new-counterterrorism-guidelines-allow-u-s-to-hold-americans-data-longer/