Saturday, May 29, 2004
Fact Worse than Fiction, Part II
What Attorney General John Ashcroft was saying this week isn't really scary.0 comments
THIS is scary:
ACLU Unveils Disturbing New Revelations About MATRIX Surveillance Program
This is the Florida ACLU following up on the national ACLU action.
As this update to last week's story shows, the administration is moving fast on this one.
Last week we had a report on this insanity, along with some background on John Poindexter and his Pentagon TIA precursor to this new system, called MATRIX (the Multistate Anti-TeRrorism Information eXchange), which has been funded and run out of the Department of Homeland Security since July of 2003.
Supposedly, this system is already bearing fruit:
This surveillance system combines information about individuals from government databases and private-sector data companies, and makes that data available for search by government officials to comb through the millions of files in a search for “anomalies” that may be indicative of terrorist or other criminal activity. (Clip)
Another document obtained by the ACLU indicated that Matrix operators compiled of a list of 120,000 names of individuals who scored highly on a computerized ‘terrorism quotient,’ and sent that list to federal law enforcement authorities. Seisint, the company that operates Matrix, claimed that scores of arrests resulted from the list.
Thankfully, the Florida ACLU is on the case.
You'll recall from our earlier post that Seisint is the company formed by the former Florida drug smuggler Hank Asher who sold the plan to Florida Governor Jeb Bush for use down there.
Think about it—120,000 names have already been spit out of this computer as having a high "terrorism quotient."
Reports this week peg possible world-wide al Qaeda strength at 18,000.
Who are all those people in that database?
Where did the names come from?
Who has access to these names?
How many of these 120,000 have been arrested?
How many detained?
On what charges?
How many convictions?
How many phones have been tapped, houses searched, life histories scoured?
By whom?
And to what end?
It's paramount that no one be misled by the dopey movie title tie-in. This is not a game or play-acting.
This is deadly serious.
This is the story and the issue that I urge you to keep the closest eye on. It may well prove to be the single greatest threat (foreign or domestic) that we face as a country and as a functioning society.
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posted by Gotham 11:21 AM
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