“If everything is terrorism, then nothing is terrorism.” This eloquent quote by former senior FBI special agent David Gomez speaks to what is now emerging as an “out of control” surveillance program initiated by the Obama administration in its overarching effort to monitor terrorist links.
That the US government is engaged in unprecedented snooping worldwide matchless in its scale is known for some time now, thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden. But fresh disclosures from a new source, based on classified government documents leaked to the website Intercept, suggests that Washington may be running amuck, putting under surveillance hundreds of thousands of people merely on suspicion, and possibly on account of their religious or ethnic affiliation.
The new disclosures, which could cause a fresh round of consternation in world capitals that have not signed on to the program, also reveal that the CIA uses a previously unknown program, code-named Hydra, to “secretly access databases maintained by foreign countries and extract data to add to the US watchlists.”
The numbers are just staggering. According to the latest disclosures, there are around 700,000 people caught up in the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database (TSD) — a watchlist of “known or suspected terrorists” that is shared with local law enforcement agencies, private contractors, and foreign governments. Of them, more than 40% — 280,000 — are described by the government as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation,” dwarfing the number of watchlisted people suspected of ties to al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah combined.
According to the documents, the Obama administration has also boosted the number of people on the no-fly list more than ten-fold, to an all-time high of 47,000 — surpassing the number of people barred from flying under George Bush. The government also adds names to its databases, or adds information on existing subjects, at a rate of 900 records each day
The second-highest concentration of people designated as “known or suspected terrorists” by the government is in Dearborn, Michigan, a city of 96,000 that has the largest percentage of Muslims in the country.
According to the government’s watchlisting guidelines, published by The Intercept last month, officials don’t need “concrete facts” or “irrefutable evidence” to secretly place someone on the terrorist watch list — only a vague and elastic standard of “reasonable suspicion.” “You need some fact-basis to say a guy is a terrorist, that you know to a probable-cause standard that he is a terrorist,” it quoted Gomez, the former FBI agent, as saying. “Then I say, ‘Build as big a file as you can on him.’ But if you just suspect that somebody is a terrorist? Not so much.”
Most people placed on the government’s watchlist begin in a larger, classified system known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE). According to the Intercept, in the summer of 2013, U.S officials actually celebrated what the National Counterterrorism Center (NCC) referred to as “a milestone” — boosting the number of people in the TIDE database to a total of one million, up from half a million four years earlier.