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The National Counterterrorism Center has been granted sweeping new authority to store and monitor massive datasets about innocent Americans.
The guidelines allow the NCTC, for the first time, to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, using “predictive pattern-matching,” to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. The data the counterterrorism center has access to includes “entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others.”

A fast-growing FBI data-mining system billed as a tool for hunting terrorists is being used in hacker and domestic criminal investigations, and now contains tens of thousands of records from private corporate databases, including car-rental companies, large hotel chains and at least one national department store, declassified documents obtained by Wired.com show.

Washington, D.C. - Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch will testify this week at a Senate hearing on facial recognition technology and the privacy and civil liberties risks associated with rapidly growing biometric databases. The hearing is set for Wednesday, July 18, at 2:30 p.m. Facial recognition technology is becoming increasingly sensitive and sophisticated, creating new ways for government and private entities to identify and track people throughout the United States.

The website has collated a variety of records including cables, intelligence reports and congressional correspondence and is releasing them in a searchable form on Monday.

Assange has carried out much of the work from his refuge in Ecuador's embassy in London and told the Press Association that the records highlighted the "vast range and scope" of US influence around the world.

Insider Trading Evidently Rampant among Senators because current laws make it unlikely for them to get prosecuted!

The latest round of documents published by Wikileaks offers a rare glimpse into the world of surveillance products. The collection—which Wikileaks calls the Spy Files—includes confidential brochures and slide presentations that companies use to market intrusive surveillance tools to governments and law enforcement agencies... The group says that these files are only the first set of a larger collection and that more will be published in the future.

WikiLeaks announced today it has begun publishing the Syria Files – more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies, dating from August 2006 to March 2012. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could not attend today’s press conference announcing the release of the data trove because he is still inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London in an attempt to avoid extradition to Sweden.

The Wall Street Journal today published an in-depth review of a new, relatively unknown program run by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). Although we have been warning about the dangers of the program for months, and I testified before Congress about the issue in July, the Journal’s story conveys how controversial the program was even inside the government. It also describes the broad scope of new authority the government is granting itself.

Washington is reportedly considering opening all US financial records to national intelligence agencies in order to prevent future crimes.