Five Before Chaos

The new issue of Radar magazine has a feature that oughta scare the shit out of you. The Last Roundup is a piece by Christopher Ketcham that details a secret government spy program that may very well spy on or detain as many as 8 million Americans.

Entitled “Main Core”, it first came to light last year during the testimony of James Comey, who worked right under then-attorney general John Ashcroft.You might remember hearing something about Alberto Gonzales trying his damnedest to get a bedridden and hospitalized Ashcrof to sign off on and certify a new surveillance program. Ashcroft wouldn’t sign it, and due to his condition, Comey was acting AG, and he wouldn’t sign off on it either, at one point later threatening resignation over the matter.

Kecham dug around and found that the program involves a massive data-mining effort. And here’s the scary part:

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, “There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

Yeah, sounds like something in Stalin’s Soviet Union, doesn’t it? And as far as what would constitute a “national emergency”? Well, it’s not too clear:

Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a “national emergency.” Executive orders issued over the past three decades define it as a “natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency,” while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like “riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order.” According to one news report, even “national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad” could be a trigger.

And what kind of info?

Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull from federal, state, and local “intelligence” reports; print and broadcast media; financial records; “commercial databases”; and unidentified “private sector entities.” Additional information comes from a database known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to include about 435,000 names. The FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center border crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000 names a year. A former NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to Main Core, as does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor antiwar protesters and environmental activists such as Greenpeace.

If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main Core database includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people.

It’s really just the tip of the iceberg. Ketcham really did his homework on this, citing many historical examples and telling signs as to what is involved.

So it’s a crapshoot as to what could trigger something like this. But that’s only part of the deal. The Continuancy of Government (COG) plans could indeed very much be a police state, with the executive branch holding all of the cards. There’s a lot more to it than I can paraphrase here, but it’s indeed quite chilling in its scope. Go and read the whole thing.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites