New York Times: Even Those Cleared of Crimes Can Stay on F.B.I.’s Watch List Bulloop:! So in effect the F.B.I. can have people targeted for harassment at all levels whenever they have to interact with police or smurfs. Sure sounds like an extra-judicial system to me, totally alien to the concept of equal protection under the law. "Department of Homeland Security" translated into German yields "Stasi". Coincidence? When you've created your very own extra-judicial system, who needs due process? Here are the documents that were uncovered by EPIC's FOIA request: Terror Watch List FOIA
There are people in jail in this country -- in the hideous Supermax in Florence, Colorado -- after being railroaded on bogus "terrorism" charges. Ever loan your cellphone to a friend? Better watch out -- you could be liable for whatever phone calls that friend makes from your phone, even though you know nothing about it. This is the country we're now living in.
Great comment by Jane Smiley, who, I'm guessing, is the famous author Jane Smiley (let's see if the quotation block goes through correctly on this -- fingers crossed):
So the FBI has a watch list. Criminal watch list? Terrorist watch list? Is it the same as DHS' watch list? Probably not. Oh, and is DHS' watch list the same as the No-Fly List? And if this is a criminal watch list, does the FBI have a separate list for terrorists? How does that compare to DHS/TSA watch/no-fly lists? The sheer number of indices of badguy names has the potential to grow so large that it's dangerously easy to lose track of who's on what list, or even what lists still exist/are kept current. Reeeeeal easy for these things to slip through the cracks and go unnoticed. Fortunately, should that be the case, government incompetence may work in the favor of the people if these things get so unwieldy that some future administration says "F*ck it, we're starting over." (Disclaimer: if any of this post fails to make sense, it's because it's almost 3 AM and my brain wants to go to runlevel 0.)
Of course they'll screw it up. They have so many lists now, and so little responsible coordination between them, of course they make all kinds of mistakes. Remember Erik Larson's Universal Laws: THE NAKED CONSUMER in 1992 (pub Henry Holt), about privacy and data collection, from p. 14 of the book: My research for this book convinced me there are four universal laws governing the flow of data collected about individuals, which I call the 'laws of data dynamics': 1. Data must seek and merge with complementary data. 2. Data always will be used for purposes other than originally intended. 3. Data collected about individuals will be used to cause harm to one or more members of the group who provided the information or about whom it was collected, be it minor (the short-term aggravation of a 'junk call' during dinner) or major (the sorrow of getting a free sample of formula just after your miscarriage). 4. Confidential information is confidential only until someone decides it's not.
