You Are Safer Than Ever

Now that the deeply-hostile-to-the-processes-of-democracy Obama Administration has voted not only itself but foreign despots as well the power to access pretty much any private information about you it wants and call it “counterterrorism”.

Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal. Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens—even people suspected of no crime.

Not everyone was on board. “This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public,” Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security, argued in the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.

A week later, the attorney general signed the changes into effect.

Through Freedom of Information Act requests and interviews with officials at numerous agencies, The Wall Street Journal has reconstructed the clash over the counterterrorism program within the administration of President Barack Obama. The debate was a confrontation between some who viewed it as a matter of efficiency—how long to keep data, for instance, or where it should be stored—and others who saw it as granting authority for unprecedented government surveillance of U.S. citizens.

The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. That is a departure from past practice, which barred the agency from storing information about ordinary Americans unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation.

Now, NCTC can copy entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited. Data about Americans “reasonably believed to constitute terrorism information” may be permanently retained.

This man is a tyrant. He dislikes having to pay attention to rights of lesser breeds. He knows what’s best.

We are not far from roundups, indefinite detentions, and even assassinations if another 9/11 scale outrage occurs. And, as with our drone wars, it will be broadly supported not only by snooty lefties who consider themselves the natural masters of the lower orders, but by warmongering righties who mysteriously drop their bred-in-the-bone hatred of Obama for one reason: to cheer for his lawless warmaking. What abortion is for the Left, war now is for movement conservatism: its sole core value. Except, of course, that the people who order it and yak on talk radio and FOX about it, never seem to go fight it themselves.