"There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously."
Ketcham goes on to explain that the Bush Administration was cross-referencing Main Core with its warrantless wiretap program. I'm not entirely clear whether Ketcham is saying BushCo used Main Core to come up with potential targets of warrantless wiretapping, or whether they used the warrantless wiretapping intercepts to add to Main Core--I think, but am not positive--it's the latter.
This is wholesale slaughter and elimination of FISA, and the constitution. As Digby notes, I could be wrong, but I would guess offhand that liberal bloggers and their readers might be among the future inhabitants of such gulags.
Everything you say and do goes into Main Core
The e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database.
Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull from federal, state, and local "intelligence" reports; print and broadcast media; financial records; "commercial databases"; and unidentified "private sector entities." Additional information comes from a database known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law enforcement, and border posts.
Read the Radar story yourself. The scope of ChimpCo's crimes will take your breath away. To Quote DIgby again:
It's not a stretch to think that under pressure, any government could, (*ahem*) overreach just a tad and decide that certain political undesirables need to be dealt with. If they've built the capability, there is every chance they will use it. It's how these things work.
What's this got to do with Total Information Awareness? The TIA Program was part of the US Information Awareness Office from February to May 2003, when it was renamed Terrorism Information Awareness Program Following public criticism that the development and deployment of these technologies could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003, although several of the projects run under IAO have continued under different funding.
Well, apparently, it went ahead with out Justice department approval and was funded anyway. Read what the unamerican commies at the ACLU said about this in 2003.
To sum up, the most unpopular US president ever, makes the biggest strategic failure in US history, and maybe is also the biggest federal criminal ever.
