Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
How Far Will the Government Go in Collecting and Storing All Our Personal Data?
New FBI Documents Shed Light on the Answer
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer equated GPS surveillance with the ultra-repressive government monitoring in George Orwell’s 1984 this week during the oral argument in United States v. Jones (.pdf). The case asks whether the use of a GPS tracking device to monitor an individual’s movements without a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. But between the potential to monitor all public movements via GPS and the FBI’s ever-expanding Next Generation Identification (.pdf)(NGI) system, which collects and stores all aspects of our personal physical characteristics– our biometric data – Big Brother is already upon us.
NGI is a massive database program that collects and stores personal identifying information such as fingerprints, palm prints, iris scans, scars, marks, tattoos, facial characteristics, and voice recognition. Data can be collected not only from arrested individuals, but also from latent prints (fingerprints left behind at a crime scene or anywhere else) or through handheld “FBI Mobile” biometric scanning devices. Worse than the FBI accessing all your personal data, when NGI becomes fully operational in 2014, other federal agencies will gain access to the bio-data without your knowledge or consent.
Documents that the FBI turned over only after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Day Labor Organizing Network, and the Benjamin Cardozo Immigrant Justice Clinic reveal that the FBI views massive biometric information collection as a goal in itself. The FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services division (CJIS) has already conducted a test study with latent fingerprints and palm prints, collected more than one million palm prints, scheduled an iris scan pilot program, and plans future deployment of technology nationwide to collect other biometric data like scars, marks, tattoos, and facial measurements (.pdf). What’s more, the government continues to expand domestic use of FBI Mobile (.pdf) scanners initially used in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The newly-released documents also reveal that not only do the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice already have access to this personal information, but so do the Department of Defense, the U.S. Coast Guard, foreign governments, and potentially the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Indeed, CJIS has information-sharing relationships with more than 75 countries.
This ubiquitous world-wide surveillance of anyone and everyone should serve as a wake up call for what the future may hold. Rapid deployment of the new technologies uncovered in the FOIA records brings us closer to an extensive and inescapable surveillance state, where we blindly place our hands on electronic devices that capture our digital prints, stare into iris scanning devices that record the details of our eyes, and have pictures taken of different angles of our faces so that the FBI and other federal agencies can store and use such information.
Some state and local officials have heavily resisted (.pdf) sharing the fingerprints of non-citizens with immigration authorities, as it can cause community members to fear reporting crime, break up families through unjust detentions and deportations, and lead to law enforcement abuse of authority or racial profiling. Yet the FBI and DHS have prohibited states and localities from placing limits on the FBI’s use of the data. Recently, high-ranking Immigration and Customs Enforcement official Gary Mead was asked by local advocates at a debate in New York why the agency insisted on overriding the governors’ request to prevent federal sharing of immigrant prints. He responded that allowing the FBI to share data with other agencies is the “price of admission” for joining “the FBI club.” But none of us—those paying the price of having our personal data collected, analyzed, and shared—want the FBI club to indiscriminately share our personal information.
Expanding NGI raises numerous concerns about government invasion of privacy (because of the access, retention, use, and sharing of biometric information without individual consent or knowledge), the widening of federal government surveillance (the NGI database will hold information that can be used to track individuals long into the future), and the increased risk of errors and vulnerability to hackers and identity thieves.
Federal agencies don’t like to admit that they make mistakes, but we know it happens. Take for example Mark Lyttle, a United States citizen who was mistakenly deported and sent to five different countries in four months after a criminal corrections administrator erroneously typed “Mexico” as his place of birth. Or U.S.-born Brandon Mayfield, who was wrongly accused of perpetrating the 2004 Madrid train bombing and was held in police custody for two weeks based on an alleged match between his fingerprints and latent prints from the crime scene, a match that was later deemed inaccurate.
These types of mistakes are even more likely to occur as the FBI relies upon new, questionable physical-trait scanning technologies. One recent study (.pdf)found that when used among large populations, facial recognition will inevitably lead to misidentifications because of the lack of variation across individuals’ faces. Indeed, John Gass of Massachusetts was the victim of facial recognition technology errors when his driver’s license was revoked based on a facial recognition system that determined his authentic and legitimate license was fake.
These disturbing examples will become only more frequent and have more serious consequences as the database grows and more federal agencies and foreign governments join the “FBI club.” The rapid and massive expansion of NGI’s collection, storage, and sharing capabilities is moving us closer and closer to the type of pervasive surveillance referenced by Justice Breyer. We can only wonder, is Orwell’s Thought Police next?
An annotated index of newly released FOIA documents related to NGI and the FBI’s role in Secure Communities, along with the documents, is available at: http://uncoverthetruth.org/?p=2058.To read previously released documents related to NGI and a related fact sheet, go to www.uncoverthetruth.org/foia-ngi/ngi-documents. To learn more about Secure Communities and how you can prevent its implementation in your community or state, visit www.uncoverthetruth.org. For more information about the case NDLON v. ICE brought by CCR, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and the Benjamin Cardozo Immigrant Justice Clinic, visit CCR’s case page.
40 Comments so far
Show AllIf CD readers have not yet seen the cult film, "Brazil," directed by Terry Gilliam, they should! It's the blueprint for these types of surveillance tools, and where they invariably lead.
It seems that the greater the tools of the surveillance state, the easier it is for the genuine terrorists to slip through tears in the enormity of the drift net. For all that was spent on Defense, that 911 happened presents its own case in point (even if it was an inside job).
C'mon! isn't that what Facebook, and G+ are for??? you just type up most of it and their search engines get the rest... all nice and neet ready for Federal USE!!! >^^<
In regard to Facebook, for anyone who hasn't seen it, this is a classic:
http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-cut-agencys-cos,19753/
Brazil:
Jack Lint: It's not my fault that Buttle's heart condition didn't appear on Tuttle's file!
Sam Lowry: I only know you got the wrong man.
Jack Lint: Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the *right* man. The wrong one was delivered to me as the right man, I accepted him on good faith as the right man. Was I wrong?
personal information is only of interest until the chip goes in...
after that, it doesn't really matter...
tell it to your drone, if you have time...
the question becomes: how far will one let the government go?
Already got mine, it hangs from my belt,,, cleaverly disguised as a phone!! with advanced GPS two cameras so one will be clear at all times.. So Cameras, Mic's, and GPS!!! what more could the intelligences ask for??? >^^<
The answer is " As far as possible". When they decide to round up the malcontents there will be that much less preliminary work to do.
I've seen Brazil. It scares me a little more each time.
The banksters are also collecting finger prints and putting your face on the credit card they issue to you.
This article scares the hell out of me. Unfortunately, you don't read about this in the MSM, which means the vast, vast majority of the Amereichan people doesn't know about it. Scarier still: a large percentage of them won't even care. "If you don't have anything to hide, then it shouldn't bother you" will be the apathetic response parroted by millions.
"First they came for the trade unionists....."
Actually it is First theycame for the gypsys, then they came for the homeless, the unionists probably aren't even on the list, they sold us out long ago!! >^^<
A former boss of mine used that line "If you have nothing to hide.." on me once too often. I was able to say some things I had been suppressing for some time.
All the more reason to take some part in the OWS movement. The oligarch's agenda to disempower by disenfranchising the 99% of the rest of us is very real. And there's no denying their strategy is brilliant because it's working. Sarah Palin and her ilk try to divert attention to the government when the government is just the fall guy for "Big Money." It's big money who gets them reelected and provides those great benefits. Sure, don't protest when they they want to digitally fingerprint you at the checkout counter when you want to buy food to stay alive. Just keep telling yourself "this is all to keep me safe, this is all to keep me safe."
Friends have been teasing me that my name must be on some government FBI or CIA list due to my 40+ years of activism for justice and peace. I received an address from my congressman to find out, by invoking the Freedom of Information Act, if my name is on any list . Part of the FOIA response was:
"Please be advised that the FOIA does not require federal agencies to answer inquiries or create records in response to a FOIA request, but rather is limited to requiring agencies to provide access to reasonably described, non exempt records.... You have failed to reasonably describe the records you are seeking , your request is not a perfected request therefore we are unable to initiate a search for responsive records."
I was trying to find out if there are any records on me, how can I reasonably describe records when I don't know if any exist?
"I was trying to find out if there are any records on me, how can I reasonably describe records when I don't know if any exist?"
_______________________
It's Through the Looking Glass logic, also reminiscent of "Catch-22", the Marx Brothers, and even Abbott and Costello:
"What records is the government keeping on me?"
"Which records are you asking about?"
"The records that the government is keeping on me."
"We can't tell you what records the government is keeping on you until you tell us what records you're looking for."
"I'm looking for the records that the government is keeping on me."
"We already told you: we can't tell you that until you tell us which records you want information about."
"Well, then, can you at least tell me who's on first?"
The U.$. Government will go as far as the criminal ruling class demands it should go. The Federal Government has been captured by a vicious criminal $yndicate... and the Amerikan corn-syrup people have been too dumb-downed by pharmaceutical poisions... and also the corp-rat owned media... to know anything beyond pro-$ports bread & circus and faster poo-food.
In a flash from the 1960s past comes this from Marchall McLuhan famed expert on media's impact of people "The computer is (or wil become) the universal gossip column." That's just what happened.
When will more of our politicians become statesman and stand up for the liberties of the people? Democracy's very survival is at stake.
In a flash from the 1960s past comes this from Marchall McLuhan famed expert on media's impact of people "The computer is (or wil become) the universal gossip column." That's just what happened.
When will more of our politicians become statesman and stand up for the liberties of the people? Democracy's very survival is at stake.
Since the unPatriot Act, the government has built Football field sized computers, All over Wash D.C. with memory capicity even they don't fully understand,, well the machine must be fed and that's what thousands of gov contractors who serve the machines do 24/7 and so far they hav'ent come close to filling the memory of these insanely large machines. >^^<
Ladies, if you value your privacy and civil liberties, join the ACLU!
In his 1992 book, Visions of Liberty, former Executive Director of the ACLU, Ira Glasser writes:
"The use of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping emerged during the Prohibition era. Roy Olmstead was a suspected bootlegger whom the government wished to search. It placed taps in the basement of his office building and on wires in the streets near his home. No physical entry into his office or home took place. Olmstead was convicted entirely on the basis of evidence from the wiretaps.
"In his appeal to the Supreme Court, Olmstead argued that the taps were a search conducted without a warrant and without probable cause, and that the evidence seized against him should have been excluded because it was illegally gathered. He also argued that his Fifth Amendment right not to be a witness against himself was violated.
"By a 5-4 vote, the Court rejected his arguments and upheld the government's power to wiretap without limit and without any Fourth Amendment restrictions, on the grounds that no actual physical intrusion had taken place.
"Olmstead's Fifth Amendment claim was also dismissed on the grounds that he had not been compelled to talk on the telephone, but had done so voluntarily.
"Thus the Court upheld the government's power to do by trickery and surreptitious means what it was not permitted to do honestly and openly.
"It wasn't until 1967, in a similar case involving gambling, that the Court overruled the Olmstead decision by an 8-1 margin and recognized that the Fourth Amendment applied to wiretapping and electronic surveillance.
"The other major use of electronic eavesdropping has been to punish political dissent. For decades, former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover used wiretaps and other electronic devices to spy on political figures and citizens not yet suspected of having committed a crime. He built vast dossiers on their political activities and personal lives. Special units of local police called 'Red Squads' did the same.
"Nor has electronic surveillance been the only source of our loss of privacy. The widespread use of urine-testing in employment to see whether people may have been using illegal substances violates the rights of many innocent people.
"Urine-testing programs are usually not restricted to those who show evidence of impaired job performance that may be due to the use of drugs. These tests are normally administered randomly. Without any probable cause for search, this is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
"Many of these random tests have been struck down by the courts, where the government is the employer. But some have been upheld. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (hardly a Constitutional liberal!), denounced them as 'an immolation of privacy and human dignity in symbolic opposition to drug use.'"
In January 2006, on the eve of the West Coast Walk For Life in San Francisco, CA, Carol Crossed of Democrats For Life (kind enough to write the foreword to my own book, The Liberal Case Against Abortion) spoke optimistically of Roe v. Wade being overturned.
When I asked her if Roe could be overturned without Griswold v. Connecticut (the 1965 Supreme Court decision which guarantees a right to marital privacy regarding the practice of contraception) being overturned as well, Carol froze, and couldn't answer the question!
Although this was well before the scandals involving Republican poltiicans David Vitter and Larry Craig, I would have preferred it if Carol had said:
"You're right. Only a pervert watches or eavesdrops when others pee, defecate, copulate, masturbate, etc. It's wrong to put people under surveillance without their knowledge or consent. Democrats For Life will never resort to draconian tactics to protect prenatal life."
Democrats For Life of America, 601 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, South Building, Suite 900, Washington, DC 20004 (202) - 220 - 3066
VASUMURTI: Essentially, efforts to spy on citizens have been recently rendered retro-actively legal. That's what FISA is all about. Essentially there is no longer a presumption of innocence; and when the government wishes to know what you think, where you are, and what you spend your $ on, while conversely claimng State Secrets privileges whenever it wishes not to show its hand, well then Houston, we have a problem. (Glenn Greenwald has chronicled how this works in several prosecutions of whistle-blowers.)
And don't forget those body scanners!
I HAVE BEEN FOLLOWED , STALKED BY FUSION CENTER COMMUNITY WATCH GANG STALKERS FOR 5 YEARS 24/7 . THEY KNOW EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT ME, AND YET, THEY STILL FOLLOW AND STALK ME.
HOW FAR WILL THEY GO, UNTIL YOU DIE.
FUSION CENTER COMMUNITY WATCH GANG STALKERS
never heard of them
who are they?
Try this link: http://www.dhs.gov/files/programs/gc_1156877184684.shtm it takes you to DHS and describes the whole thing nicely. >^^<
Um, apparently that includes crime as part of its mandate, totally outside of what it was set up to supposedly address, namely terrorism. And it speaks about the "homeland" all over the place, as if it were from a nazi 101 manual. And "Angelo, the special agent, secret service" photo at the top looks like a mafia goon.
The only thing it describes nicely is der fuehrerland.
Who says nuclear fusion failed?
okay, got it, i think.
All it seems to be is the long needed system for various law enforcement sectors to co-operate and share information
Unlike other countries teh US has needed extradition btw states and there has been no system of information sharing bte departments/states.
That's why perps get away with shit here they can't overseas, like serial killing, cos it was harder to profile when perps move from city to city, state to state.
I dunno. It seems to me that if a group wants to oppress or even exterminate another group that very little information is required.
Not in a slow extermination march. Got to pick em off one by one, without anyone the wiser to it. IBM may just be "successful" this time around.
We have come a ways since the punch card index; retrieval and cross-matching is infinitely quicker. One thing that has not changed though is that humans can still defeat any technology, so perhaps there is yet hope. A 'Manning' can still wreak havoc on a database, particularly one that will inevitably have many natural errors -and especially if it is done randomly and incrementally over time.
Personal data was collected on the Jews and others by the Nazis, they were tattooed, AFTER they were rounded up and put in concentration camps.
The primary information was word of mouth.
Same as during the Purge in the USSR. Word of mouth. Or the Cultural Revolution. Cambodia. Rwanda.
McCarthyism was word of mouth.
I'm not defending data collection . I'm just trying to show how the system has worked in the past.
Snitchery is still the primary source from first grade till death. You friends, neighbors, and relatives whisper behind your back, the motivation is jealousy, revenge, vindictiveness and ambition, so lots of lies are mixed in with "the facts."
Everybody knows in their hearts that snitchery is wrong.
Facebook is collecting far more information about us than the U.S. government, most of it information that users are handing over voluntarily. FB knows who your friends are, what you buy, what THEY buy, what you like, what they like, what pictures of you look like, where you've been. And they haven't the slightest qualm about selling that information to the highest bidder.
For better or worse, there seems to be a "generation gap" regarding attitudes toward privacy, confidentiality, and overall discretion.
My fiftysomething sister finally caved in and is using Facebook after my thirtysomething niece kept insisting that our anti-Facebook squeamishness or skepticism is some kind of retro "Cold War paranoia" hangup.
My sister tries to be "careful" and limit the information she publishes on the site, and now encourages me to dip my digits in the Facebook water in order to check out photos, etc.
I cling to my retro Cold War paranoid hangup, though, and remain leery. Apart from the disclosure issue, I also have a reflexive aversion to Internet sites that actively tweak and re-arrange preferences, and are programmed to constantly "adjust" content and format to allegedly "optimize" the user's experience.
I find this disagreeably pushy and intrusive at best.
But then, I've always loathed the "nanny" component of Microsoft programs, e.g. Word, that make supposedly helpful suggestions to tell you what IT thinks YOU'RE thinking or trying to say-- and never shut up.
Maybe the younger generation welcomes this sort of thing as indeed user-friendly and helpful; I'll have to ask my niece about that.
It's a Brave New World, I suppose.
My cat has a facebook page and doesn't mind a bit when I assume her identity.
"NGI is a massive database program that collects and stores personal identifying information such as fingerprints, palm prints, iris scans, scars, marks, tattoos, facial characteristics, and voice recognition. Data can be collected not only from arrested individuals, but also from latent prints (fingerprints left behind at a crime scene or anywhere else) or through handheld “FBI Mobile” biometric scanning devices. Worse than the FBI accessing all your personal data, when NGI becomes fully operational in 2014, other federal agencies will gain access to the bio-data without your knowledge or consent."
Two points: 1--This is already available to the MIC, at least since before 9/11. 2--Time to throw out our criminal justice system methodologies. The gig is up, and the game is now rigged.
A message to all CDers from your Corporate Government's MOI:
Comply and obey.
Maybe we should stop fretting 1) about economic collapse, hyper-inflation, and other financial catastrophes that will destroy our economy, 2) about climate change with floods and windstorms that will destroy our infrastructure, and 3) about the end-of-oil that will destroy our industial, commercial "civilization". Maybe one of these will come to fruition just in time.
"Federal agencies don’t like to admit that they make mistakes, but we know it happens. Take for example Mark Lyttle, a United States citizen who was mistakenly deported and sent to five different countries in four months after a criminal corrections administrator erroneously typed “Mexico” as his place of birth."
I hope this guy was heavily compensated. Think of how much that mistake cost the taxpayers.
Forty years ago I made friends with a deputy who had voluntarily moved his family out of his own house to live with his father nearby. There was no housing available in the entire community where I had just taken a job. As we were becoming better friends and I was inquiring about his specific job on the force, he asked me, "Do you have any naked pictures of your wife"? I answered no. He then said, "Do you want to buy some"?