Are You in the FBI Terrorist Database? Acting Suspiciously Could Put You There
The FBI is building a terrorism database of thousands of U.S. residents identified as acting in a suspicious manner by police or fellow citizens.
The database is accessible to an increasing number of local police and military criminal investigators, raising concerns it will end up in the public domain, the Washington Post reports. Included in the database are tens of thousands of profiles of people who have not been accused of any crime.
The suspicious activity could range from buying fertilizer to snapping photos of a police boat, the newspaper says in its special report on Top Secret America.
“Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators,” the story says. “The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation’s history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.”
The story says the findings “paint a picture of a country at a crossroads, where long-standing privacy principles are under challenge by these new efforts to keep the nation safe.”
In some cases, technology developed for the battlefield is being used by local police departments. In Memphis, an automatic reader mounted on the cars of police officers captures license plate numbers. When an officer pulls over a driver, a hand-held device can instantly show whether there are outstanding warrants and display mug shots. A computer can display the owner of the vehicle and his or her criminal history, along with the criminal history of anyone else living at the same address. A record of any arrest is transferred to a command center where a map displays crime patterns.
Memphis police have used terrorism-fighting money to pay for 90 surveillance cameras, robotic surveillance equipment, radios, a mobile command center and three bomb-sniffing dogs, the story says. The equipment has resulted in no terrorism cases, but has been a boon to crime-fighting.
