National Counterterrorism Center gets insane new power over private data on Americans

[Eugen Leitl]

http://endthelie.com/2012/03/23/national-counterterrorism-center-gets-insane-new-power-over-private-data-on-americans/

National Counterterrorism Center gets insane new power over private data on
Americans

By Madison Ruppert

Editor of End the Lie

Barack Obama with (now former) NCTC Director Michael Leiter, center right,
leadership and analysts in the secure video teleconference room at the
National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Va, Oct. 6, 2009. (Image credit:
White House/Samantha Appleton) Just when you thought the ludicrously paranoid
federal government of the United States of America couldnbt get any worse;
Attorney General Eric Holder signed new guidelines for the National
Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).

The American Big Brother surveillance state has grown exponentially over
recent years and it does not look like it is going to be slowing down any
time soon with the new guidelines which allow private data on Americans can
be held when there is no suspicion of them being tied to terrorism for a
whopping five years.

Keep in mind, internet service providers just announced that they will soon
be engaging in the largest digital spying operation in history, along with
the National Security Agency (NSA) building a behemoth data center to process
information, which could include just about anything.

Now the NCTC is getting even more power from the Obama administration,
something akin to the George W. Bush-era bTotal Information Awarenessb
program which was supposedly partially shut down by Congress.

For those who are unaware, the NCTC was established by Presidential Executive
Order 13354 in 2004 and later actually codified by the Intelligence Reform
and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. They are in an interesting position
given that they report directly to the President and to the Director of
National Intelligence, while following the policy dictated by the President
and the National and Homeland Security Councils.

Their primary focus is the collection and sharing of information, supposedly
related to terrorism, but thanks to the new guidelines, they really donbt
need to even pretend it is about terrorism anymore.

Their information sharing reach goes far and wide, including the intelligence
community and bState, Local, Tribal, and Private partners b in coordination
with DHS, FBI, and other members of the ITACG Advisory Council,b according to
the official website.

Anyone who has been following these issues likely realizes that the federal
government just repackaged the Total Information Awareness program.

Now it exists as a much more distributed network of data harvesting and
analysis systems involving both private and public entities.

Much of the raw data mining work has been taken up by Silicon Valley giants
and the technology sector, but now the NCTC will be better able to openly
utilize this information against Americans who have absolutely no links to
terrorism whatsoever.

While the guidelines are public, I seriously doubt that the public document
is the true, complete guide for their operations.

Seeing as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seems to have absolutely
no problem blatantly deceiving Congress, I see no reason to believe that the
government would be upfront with the American people about anything these
days. After all, they wonbt even tell us why they have decided that it is
legal to kill us.

These new guidelines are expected to result in the NCTC cloning entire
databases of personal information on Americans, which they then will data
mine using highly complex algorithms which supposedly can search for patterns
that might indicate a possible, potential threat.

According to unnamed intelligence officials cited by the New York Times,
these new guidelines have been under development for some 18 months.

They claim that they came in the wake of the designed-to-fail bunderwear
bomberb attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

They claim that after the fact, they discovered that they had intercepted al
Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) communications and a report from the
United States Consulate in Nigeria which could have identified Abdulmutallab
before he was shuffled on to a plane by a U.S. government agent, according to
eyewitness and practicing attorney Kurt Haskell.

These changes will supposedly allow analysts to identify suspected terrorists
more quickly, yet this assertion is patently absurd since Abdulmutallabbs
father attempted to warn both the United States and Nigeria about what his
son was doing.

Clearly, they were not interested, and it is likely the case that the
government knew full well what was going on, perhaps even running the
operation from the top as they have so many terrorist patsies, the most
recent of which came just last month.

Haskellbs testimony is damning to say the least and the governmentbs reaction
to it was even more damning.

Dutch counterterrorism officials claimed that Abdulmutallab had a valid
Nigerian passport when he boarded the flight, also citing security footage
which did not show any accomplices.

When Haskell encouraged them to put out the video to prove him wrong, U.S.
officials then claimed that they were trying to identify and find the
well-dressed man with the American accent that ushered Abdulmutallab on to
the plane, adding that they believed he was there to make sure Abdulmutallab
bdid not get cold feet.b

I could go on for years tearing apart the farcical fairy tale that is the
underwear bomber case, but I have touched on it before and my readers are
likely astute enough to do their own research and come to their own
conclusions on this matter.

The main thing you should take away from this is that you should be extremely
skeptical of the justifications given to wildly expand these NCTC powers,
especially when even DHS officials claim to be ignorant when it comes to
these critical details of the Abdulmutallab case. Itbs a lot easier to just
ignore the facts rather than address them and attempt to explain them away,
which is essentially impossible at this point.

bThere is a genuine operational need to try to get us into a position where
we can make the maximum use of the information the government already has to
protect people,b said Robert S. Litt, the general counsel in the office of
the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the National
Counterterrorism Center.

This is the typical justification evoked by those who would love to see
nothing more than every single last one of our rights stripped away from us
in the name of safety.

bWe have to manage to do that in a way that provides protection to peoplebs
civil liberties and privacy. And I really think this has been a good-faith
and reasonably successful effort to do that,b Litt added.

However, there has been absolutely no protection of peoplebs civil liberties
or privacy, in fact their bgood-faith and reasonably successful effortb has
led directly to increased monitoring of the internet by DHS, which has been
objected to by Representative Jackie Speier, not to mention the complete
eradication of the right to due process and Eric Holderbs declaration that
they have the legal authority to assassinate Americans.

What few civil liberties we have left and what miniscule shred of privacy
remains is being quickly swept away, as evidenced by these new NCTC
guidelines.

The NCTC has already created a list of databases to copy in their entirety b
which Litt and others refuse to detail b and the DHS already shares a great
deal of information, including biometric databases, as revealed by a FOIA
lawsuit in November of last year.

These new guidelines were also signed by Director of National Intelligence
James R. Clapper Jr., who made news here at End the Lie early last month when
he nonsensically claimed that Iran is bnow more willing to conduct an attack
in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that
threaten the regime.b

The previous guidelines issued in 2008 outlined three ways for the NCTC to
gather information on Americans collected by another agency.

These options were: conducting a blimitedb search for the target data on
their own, asking another agency to perform the search, or by copying the
entire database and analyzing the information at the NCTC.

Of course such division between agencies now are little more than theater,
one example being the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court which
green-lighting nearly all of the requests they get for years.

If the NCTC asks an agency to conduct a search, I seriously doubt that the
NCTC would have to ask twice, and it is likely the case that the agency would
just hand over the entire database.

After all, our tyrannical federal government has been making a concerted
effort to break down any and all barriers (many of which are highly
beneficial to the rights, privacy and safety of Americans) through such
centers as the NCTC and the nationwide Fusion Centers.

While the new NCTC guidelines will keep these three methods in place, they
are placing a strong emphasis on the third option, likely because they want
to collect and analyze as much private information on Americans as humanly
possible.

Handling data of this magnitude will be quite a bit easier when the NSAbs new
data center is finished. Remember, all of these agencies work hand in hand.

The new guidelines allow for private information on Americans with no
suspected ties to terrorism to be held for five years, although I suspect in
actuality it will be much longer.

This is because the previous guidelines instructed the NCTC to delete data on
innocent Americas promptly, which they somehow decided was 180 days if no
ties to terrorism were detected (or manufactured).

Furthermore, the first two options do not allow the bpattern analysisb
techniques the NCTC loves so much, but there are no restrictions on cloned
databases.

The executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)
has raised concerns about how these new guidelines could come into play with
the many proposals to give the government increased access to a wide range of
information and networks under the guise of protecting critical
infrastructure.

I have been covering this issue as much as possible, including McCainbs
proposal which would give the power to the NSA and the military, along with
the alternative proposal which would give the power to the DHS.

Both of these proposals follow the recommendations made by a report published
by MIT which had a laundry list of corporate badvisersb who would directly
benefit from such legislation. In effect, they are identical; it is just a
matter of which alphabet agency will be the standard bearer.

These new guidelines do not mention how data mined from commercial sources b
such as credit card records, travel records, etc b will be used, but the
NCTCbs partnership with the private sector is far from reassuring.

Furthermore, back in 2009 Wiredbs Threat Level got their hands on a list of
the databases which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) acquired.

As noted above, the FBI is one of the NCTCbs many government partners when it
comes to sharing information, which means we can assume that the NCTC has all
of the databases the FBI has obtained.

These databases included almost 200 million records of private information
belonging to Americans which was obtained through private so-called bdata
brokersb like ChoicePoint. They also included some 55,000 records from
Wyndham hotels and this was only what was obtained from a single agency a
single time in 2009.

Whatever the justification du jour may be, I recommend that you take a few
steps back and examine the situation at hand.

The government is neither keeping us safe nor serving us as they truly
should. In fact, they manufacture terrorism, and have been doing so for quite
a while now, in order to make us think that they are keeping us safe and keep
believing that they are serving our interests while happily handing over our
hard-earned cash and most critical rights.

Instead, they are robbing us blind through several means including the naked
corruption of the private Federal Reserve, while taking away every last one
of our most critical freedoms and slaughtering countless innocent people
across the world while turning just about everything, including innocuous
bodily movements, into indicators of terrorism.

We, as Americans, must push back against the American surveillance state and
start asserting our right to privacy and the fact that we now know beyond a
reasonable doubt that the war on terror has been a scam from the start.

Take a stand, raise awareness and help us turn the tide against citizen
spying (see also here, here, and here), the rapidly growing surveillance
market, and the behemoth agency known as the DHS which would make the likes
of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Mussolini green with envy several times over.

Only through making Americans aware of the reality of the dire situation we
are in can we hope to begin to push back. As long as the government can
successfully push their manufactured narrative through false flag terrorism
and fear mongering, the American people will remain easily controlled.

You can help by taking the few moments out of your day to share this article
with anyone and everyone who can manage to get past their programming and
face the facts. All it takes is a single person to set off a chain reaction
of awakening and enact real change.

On that note, Ibll leave you with this fitting quote from Samuel Adams:

bIt does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in peoplebs minds.b

Did I miss anything or would you like to submit some of your own original
writing or perhaps send a story tip or some other information my way? Email
me at [email protected]