Wall Street Journal Report admits details Infowars warned of nine months ago

Steve Watson
Infowars.com
Dec 14, 2012

Back in March Infowars noted that new guidelines put forth by the Obama administration will allow US spy agencies, under the umbrella of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), to keep records on innocent Americans without oversight for up to five years.

The rules on data retention were relaxed Following the 2009 Christmas day underpants bomber debacle. US representatives immediately called for the NCTC’s authority to be expanded, saying that there was not enough communication between intelligence agencies.

We warned that changes in such rules would aid the already vast spying architecture that the federal government has aimed directly at the American people.

This week, a report in the Wall Street Journal issues the very same warning, noting that the NCTC can use the data it collates from every US intelligence agency’s database, and analyze it to to predict possible criminal behavior of any U.S. citizen.

The WSJ report notes how a head “privacy officer” at the Department of Homeland Security explained to the Obama administration that the new privacy busting powers provided to the NCTC would bring about a “sea change”.

From now on, citizens interacting with the federal government are subjected to a procedure where the first question asked is”Are they a terrorist?”, according to the DHS official.

The ACLU has noted that NCTC is now capable of carrying out “massive, secretive data collection and mining of trillions of points of data” regarding U.S. citizens, and that “literally anything the government collects is fair game”.

The ACLU also noted that these new powers are extremely disturbing, given that the NCTC also presides over government “kill lists”, deciding which suspected terrorists are added to them via analyzing data through its “disposition matrix”.

Writing in the London Guardian, Greg Greenwald recently noted “the NCTC — now vested with the power to determine the proper “disposition” of terrorist suspects — is the same agency that is at the center of the ubiquitous, unaccountable surveillance state aimed at American citizens.”

The NCTC, made up of a combination of intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, was created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and has drawn criticism ever since for infringement on the Fourth Amendment and basic privacy rights. It now has the ability to act as a central data point for all information on any American citizen submitted to any department of government, or procured by any intelligence agency.

Considering recent revelations that agencies such as the NSA and the CIA are vastly expanding their domestic spying operations the can only mean one thing – more Big Brother.

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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.

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