Sound The Trumpet : Two Security Scandals That are Much Worse Than the Nsa's Surveillance

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“Two Security Scandals That are Much Worse Than the Nsa's Surveillance”
by The Week
August 7th, 2014

What could possibly be more invasive, more offensive, than the secret indiscriminate bulk collection of data by the National Security Agency?

Quite a number of things, actually.

Let's put aside, for now, the CIA's complicity in torture, which, to my mind, is the worst scandal of the Bush years. Then, as you read about the following two stories, compare them to the NSA's surveillance, and weigh the potential and actual harm to real people that the practices exposed herein would cause.

1. The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill, relying on classified documents, has exposed for all to see the ungainly expansion of terrorist watch lists after September 11, 2001, and particularly, the intrusive, invasive, and privacy-threatening means the government knowingly uses to secretly enrich its files on what must be thousands of innocents Americans, assuming that the actual bad people among them are very few. As of August 2013, Scahill reports, there were 5,000 Americans on watch lists.

According to the documents, the government does much more than simply stop watchlisted people at airports. It also covertly collects and analyzes a wide range of personal information about those individuals — including facial images, fingerprints, and iris scans.

In the aftermath of last year's Boston Marathon bombing, the Directorate of Terrorist Identities began an aggressive program to collect biometric data and other information on all Americans on the TIDE list. "This project includes record by record research of each person in relevant Department of State and [intelligence community] databases, as well as bulk data requests for information," the documents note.

The DTI also worked on the subsequent Chicago Marathon, performing "deep dives" for biometric and other data on people in the Midwest whose names were on the TIDE list. In the process, the directorate pulled the TIDE records of every person with an Illinois, Indiana, or Wisconsin driver license.

DTI's efforts in Boston and Chicago are part of a broader push to obtain biometric information on the more than one million people targeted in its secret database. This includes hundreds of thousands of people who are not watchlisted. In 2013, the directorate's Biometric Analysis Branch (BAB) launched an initiative to obtain biometric data from driver's license records across the country. At least 15 states and the District of Columbia are working with the directorate to facilitate access to facial images from driver's licenses. In fiscal year 2013, 2,400 such images were provided for inclusion in the secret TIDE database. [The Intercept]

Watchlisting is fine; the uncertainty about the identities of terrorists implies that the list of suspected al Qaeda members will be much larger than the actual list. But providing to the National Counterterrorism Center bulk biometric data from all Americans in a certain number of states? The disproportionate targeting of Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan? The ease with which the government can open a file on

Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13