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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.”

William Binney is among a group of N.S.A. whistle-blowers, including Thomas A. Drake, who have each risked everything — their freedom, livelihoods and personal relationships — to warn Americans about the dangers of N.S.A. domestic spying; A top-secret program he says is broadly collecting Americans' personal data.

It was an open secret that the National Security Agency was bolstering a Homeland Security program to detect and respond to cyber attacks on government systems, but a summary of that program declassified Tuesday provides more details of NSA’s role in a Homeland program known as Einstein.

A book published earlier this month, "Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry," contains revelations about the NSA's snooping efforts, based on information gleaned from NSA sources. According to a detailed summary by Shane Harris at the Washingtonian yesterday, the book discloses that a codename for a controversial NSA surveillance program is "Ragtime" -- and that as many as 50 companies have apparently participated, by providing data as part of a domestic collection initiative.

The biggest worry is likely to be this: That this program sets out to accomplish the same aims as the National ID scheme. Difference is, rather than trying to get the states to do the heavy lifting, Washington is going to try and compel private companies to do it.
So a campaign has already started to convince Americans to trust the government on this. (insert canned laughter here)

Under a controversial 2005 domestic security program passed by Congress and known as Real ID, states were required to issue more secure licenses initially by May of 2008, extended to December 2009 and now to May of 2011. DHS said 46 states are not in compliance with the requirements, and 13 have passed laws refusing to participate.

Op-Doc with the NSA whistleblower who built software tools used against the US in "Stellar Wind", a post-9/11 domestic spying program that targets everyone in the US...

City government funded a $22,000 program to let people sleep in their cars. You have to jump through their hoops if you want to sleep in YOUR car on PRIVATE church parking lots. Without government intervention, those people would have to pay $120! when caught. How would people be motivated to live in a house without a special program?

The federal government is launching an expansive program dubbed "Perfect Citizen" to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants, according to people familiar with the program.