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Secret Counterterrorism Rule Changes Allow the Government to Spy on Anyone

Get out your tinfoil hats, ladies and gentlemen, because those Patriot Act-era measures that let the Feds spy on unknowing citizens were worse tha we thought.

Get out your tinfoil hats, ladies and gentlemen, because those Patriot Act-era measures that let the Feds spy on unknowing citizens were worse than we thought. Earlier this year, top intelligence officials got nervous that the existing counterterrorism efforts to spot potentially dangerous patterns of behavior weren't enough to keep the country safe. And so, in secret, authorities wrote new rules that would let the little known National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) create a government dragnet that pulled all kinds of data on pretty much every single American -- it doesn't matter if you're a suspected terrorist anymore -- and is handily sneaking past the Fourth Amendment. One former senior administration official called the scope of the database "breathtaking."

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Details of the new program come from a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests made by The Wall Street Journal. The documents the paper got back reveal a pretty alarming narrative. It's not simply the scope of the NCTC's new powers. It's the head-scratchingly opaque process that enabled unelected officials not only to infringe on Americans' Fourth Amendment rights but also potentially break the Federal Privacy Act of 1974 which was passed specifically to avoid letting government agents sift through citizens' private lives.

The new rules arrived in March without any public debate or even public knowledge of what was going on, and allowed the NCTC to access any government database that might be "reasonably believed" to contain "terrorism information." We're not talking about specific files for specific suspects here, either. The NCTC can literally make copies of entire databases from flight records to the list of American families hosting foreign exchanges students to the lists of employees working at casinos. There had been some restrictions in place that required the NCTC to erase these copies after, say, 30 days, but those have been largely ignored or overturned.

What's really upsetting about this whole program is the simple fact that we don't even know how well it works. In fact, our earlier terrorist tracking surveillance rules have let us down from time-to-time, most famously on Christmas Day 2009 when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a flight from Detroit to Amsterdam with a bomb in his underwear. Even though the NCTC had built and maintained a database of 500,000 suspected terrorists, some of whom only had loose affiliations with known groups, Abdulmatallab didn't make it onto any of the watchlists. A Senate investigation later revealed that his name had actually come up, but the agency didn't crosscheck it with other databases which would've potentially thrown up red flags.

Realistically speaking, the NCTC's failing to catch the underwear bombers is ultimately what gave them more power to spy on everyday citizens. If they could just have more time with the databases or if they could just collect more information from more people, the spies might've said, they could definitely catch the terrorists. Heck you know what would be really great for catching terrorists? If we just let the government listen to all of our phone calls and track what we do online and install video cameras on every corner. Oh wait, that's all happening, too.

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