July 3, 2008

Terror profiling without evidence considered in U.S.

Not scared yet? The Bush Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing.

Critics say the presumption of innocence is lost in the proposal. The FBI will be allowed to begin investigations simply "by assuming that everyone's a suspect, and then you weed out the innocent," said Caroline Fredrickson of the American Civil Liberties Union, who was immediately added to the FBI's watch list.
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"We don't know what we don't know," said one FBI official, vaguely channelling dippy loser Don Rumsfeld. "And the object is to cut down on that."
I'm feeling safer already.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wonder if the military-industrial complex will be superceded by the military-intelligence complex? We are making less and less (non-military items, at least) in the US every year, but we're expanding our 'intelligence' gathering inversely.

Besides being anti-privacy and unconstitutional, this proposed intelligence expansion is pragmatically bad. Recall, for instance, that ECHELON* was in place long before 9/11, but didn't prevent it - - undoubtedly because programs that try to monitor ALL communications are SO overwhelmed by the volume of data that it just becomes a huge bureaucracy with virtually NO preventative value.

(*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON)

Anonymous said...

Big Em writes: Recall, for instance, that ECHELON* was in place long before 9/11, but didn't prevent it

Don't try to pin the blame on SIGINT: the Bush Admin simply wasn't paying atttention.

I'm going to say out loud what by now should be bloody obvious: Had Al Gore been in the office, the WTC attack would have been anticipated-- and prevented.

It's just that simple.