Govt. May Have Massive Surveillance Program For Use In ‘National Emergency,’ 8 Million ‘Potential Suspects’»
Pastor Dale Morgan
Govt. May Have Massive Surveillance Program For Use In ‘National
Emergency,’ 8 Million ‘Potential Suspects’
*Think Progress *
*
Last year, former deputy attorney general James Comey revealed that in
2004, he refused to “certify” the legality of certain aspects of the
National Security Agency (NSA) spy program. Comey witnessed Alberto
Gonzales and Andrew Card try to force a bed-ridden John Ashcroft to
approve the program. Comey, however, did not publicly give specifics as
to what program he opposed.
CAP’s Peter Swire wrote on ThinkProgress at the time that Comey’s
testimony implied that “other programs exist for domestic spying”
outside of the NSA program. Radar’s Christopher Ketcham suggests that
another spy program does exist: “Main Core,” a program that authorizes
“computer searches through massive [unspecified] electronic databases”
in order to discover “potential threats” in the event of a “national
emergency”:
According to a senior government official…”There exists a database
of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are
considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be
incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of
the state’ almost instantaneously.” … One knowledgeable source claims
that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially
suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be
subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to
direct questioning and possibly even detention.
These so-called “Continuity of Governance” plans, Radar notes, “are
shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated by Congress or the
courts.” “Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal
information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific
targets,” said a former military operative. Furthermore, the NSA
domestic surveillance program reportedly “suppl[ies] data to Main Core.”
According to Radar, a “number of former government employees and
intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance
operations” say Main Core is strikingly similar to what Comey refused to
authorize at Ashcroft’s bedside:
[T]he program that caused the flap between Comey and the White House
was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential
threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the
program say that the government’s data gathering has been overzealous
and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection
from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.
“We are at the edge of a cliff and we’re about to fall off,” said
constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce
Fein. “To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to
stability.”