Rood: How Big Is Big Brother? Assembling the Pieces of the Domestic Spy Op [View All]

By Justin Rood - May 26, 2006
I'd like to share some speculation about the domestic surveillance efforts we've heard about, in bits and pieces, over the last couple of years. Here's the thing: I've pulled a bunch of old articles on various aspects of these programs, and they seem to fit together.

In short, looking at stories over the last year or so by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the latest entry from USA Today (plus a bit of my own research), I get the following picture:

After the 9/11 attacks, the federal government assembled a cross-departmental effort to comb the United States for possible terrorist activity. Using massive databases and largely untested analytical techniques, the NSA generated thousands of false "leads" which were passed to the FBI. There, agents issued thousands of secret warrants for personal information, and spent thousands of man-hours chasing the results -- which were negligible. And you and I paid for it.
.....
I'll start at the beginning.

Two years ago, White House budget documents showed that the FBI in 2003 had 23,785 open terror investigations. For a country that hadn't seen a terrorist attack in two years, that was a lot of terrorist investigations! The previous year, 2002, they had something like 12,000 open terror probes; the stat was around 9,000 in 2001.

That's odd, isn't it? Despite the absence of terrorism, the FBI was continuing to open thousands of new terrorism investigations every year. What to make of it?

......MORE.......

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/000721.php