H/T to RawStory...
For real, I am having the strangest sense of deja vu...
What the hell!? TALON? Seriously, fscking TALON? Oh, I'm sorry it's not TALON, it's FICOR, so that's ok...
So, the Obama Administration is getting into the domestic spy game. Read the proposal outlined in the federal register in the previous link. It's the same information metric with the same parameters for capturing American citizens in the net as the old system attempted by the Bush Administration and their favorite psychowarrior Adm. James Poindexter.
This new system, FICOR, purports to capture, among other things:
Social Security Number (SSN), address, citizenship documentation, biometric data, passport number, vehicle identification number and vehicle/vessel license data.
Doesn't sound like they're going to be looking at a lot of dispossessed al Qaeda operatives in Yemen... Sounds more like they're gathering information on U.S. citizens.
Here's a bit from the RawStory post:
Mike German, a former FBI agent now working with the ACLU, says "Americans should be just as concerned" about the new database as the previous one under the Bush administration.
"It’s a little hard to tell what this is exactly, but we do know that DIA took over 'offensive counterintelligence' for the DoD once CIFA was abandoned," he told the Post's Stein. "It therefore makes sense that this new DIA database would be collecting the same types of information that CIFA collected improperly."
After it was learned that the system was being used to keep tabs on American anti-war activists, TALON came under a lot of political heat, and even some Bush administration loyalists were uncomfortable with the amount of power being given to the Pentagon for what amounted to domestic surveillance of political dissidents.
Apparently TALON really was shut down in the wake of the criticism, but the databases never wiped, so that it was all there waiting for another bite at the apple.
At this point it's getting a bit far into the administration to blame this all on Bush holdovers. This is just freekin' crazy. I did not work that hard to get one crank out of office, keep another from taking office only so that another crank could come in a continue on with the same policies that pissed me off so much the first time.
On the other hand... hey Red State: I don't suppose you remember us here at the wire asking you the question, "are you sure you want to the President to have this kind of power? Would you be comfortable with Hillary Clinton using this kind of power?"
And yes, by the way, the State Department is a major player in this, according to the proposal and some of it's guiding administrative principles, namely DoD Directive 5240.1, one of three main documents regulating U.S. Intelligence spying on U.S. citizens...
So seriously... what the hell?!
mojo sends
