FILES ON INNOCENT AMERICANS KEPT BY NATIONAL COUNTER TERRORISM CENTER

In a scene right out of George Orwell's 1984, a secret government agreement issued in March of 2012 was approved by Attorney General Eric Holder that gives the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) the ability to copy entire government databases containing information on American citizens pertaining to flight records, casino-employee lists, names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and other data. The NCTC was also permitted store the information for up to five years without suspicion that someone in the database has committed a crime, as reported by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) . In other words, INNOCENT AMERICANS.

Does this sound familiar? Look at current events.

The WSJ stated that "other data" includes any government database that it claims may contain terrorism information. Theoretically including collections of financial forms submitted by Americans seeking federally backed mortgages or health records of anyone who sought treatment at government-run hospitals.

If that isn't bad enough, the new powers given to the NCTC allows them to conduct surveillance by randomly searching through the data, analyzing it for suspicious patterns of behavior in order to uncover activity that could be used to launch an investigation.

FAR WORSE, the changes granted by Holder also allows information about U.S. citizens to be shared with foreign governments.

It should be noted that during the George W. Bush administration similar surveillance proposals were struck down after receiving "widespread condemnation." However, the National Security Agency has collected and sifted through vast amounts of data that detailed who Americans spoke with, where they traveled and how they spent their money since 2002.

The U.S. Congress was bypassed by Holder. Prior to the change, the law prohibited the NCTC from storing information on U.S. citizens unless they were suspected of terrorist activity or were relevant to an ongoing investigation.

Alexander Joel, Civil Liberties Protection Officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told the WSJ, "The guidelines provide rigorous oversight to protect the information that we have, for authorized and narrow purposes.”

The NCTC maintains the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), which holds data on more than 500,000 people suspected of terror activity or terrorism links. This information is also used to monitor friends and families of suspects.

Under current law, the Federal Privacy Act prohibits government agencies from sharing data for any purpose other than the reason for which the data was initially collected, in order to prevent the creation of dossiers, but agencies can do an end-run around this restriction by posting a notice in the Federal Register, providing justification for the data request. Such notices are rarely seen or contested.