[xtypo_dropcap]T[/xtypo_dropcap]he American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has reported that U.S. citizens are facing widespread surveillance, which poses a threat to their personal information and privacy.
Personal information is making its way into the databases of both public and private companies and institutions, and has been categorized by the ACLU as “illegal domestic spying.”
And it's being conducted by the government.
According to the ACLU, the fear of terrorism in a post-9/11 world has led intelligence agencies, state and local police, the military, and even emergency services to gather and share detailed personal information with federal institutions, joint terrorism task forces, and “public-private partnerships.”
The civil liberties group says that this increase in intelligence activities targets political activists, immigrants, and “racial and religious minorities,” adding that spying in America occurs “in ways the founders of our country never could have imagined.”
The group says this disturbing trend has been underway for years, where the government's powers of surveillance and monitoring have steadily grown, while restrictions to keep these powers in check have progressively weakened or vanished.
The ACLU's website features “Spy Files” of various intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), federal departments like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Defense (DoD), as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other law enforcement entities.
In July, the ACLU requested more detail from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in response to the agency's domestic terrorism guide, which outlines new investigative techniques for collecting racial and ethnic data
Mike German, a retired FBI domestic terrorism agent and member of the ACLU Policy Counsel, described the FBI's activities as “unjust.”
“It's un-American, it's inappropriate for law enforcement to be collecting this type of information,” he said.
“If somebody's making a bomb, that's behavior the government should be focusing on,” German added, in a video statement. “And they should focus all of their resources on that, rather than on trying to investigate an entire racial group or an entire religion.”
In its “Spy Files,” the ACLU criticized increased militarization of law enforcement agencies through “domestic support” operations and Congress's weakening of the post-Civil War Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibited the Army from conducting law enforcement operations on U.S. soil.
The group also recently reported on multi-jurisdictional “fusion centers,” which “can employ officials from federal, state, and local law enforcement and homeland security agencies, as well as other state and local government entities, the federal intelligence community, the military, and even private companies, to spy on Americans in virtually complete secrecy.”
