Who Watches The Watchers

What if the watchers are breaking the law? Who watches the watchers?

Interesting how this commentary is published outside the USA while USA sheeple are fed BS while they pay for a monstrous police state that spies on it's citizens.


Who's watching the watchmen?
Matthew Harwood
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 24 March 2009

There's an ominous and Orwellian sounding phrase creeping into Washington discourse: "homeland security intelligence". The heart of homeland security intelligence is this: getting good intelligence into the hands of local and state police officers so they can prevent a terrorist attack before it occurs.

This means the perfectly reasonable goal of building information-sharing systems that enable a mutual flow of intelligence between all levels of government to increase the likelihood that enough dots get connected to breakup a terrorist plot.

But what is good intelligence? This is where things get scary. Pioneered by the Los Angeles police department, law enforcement agencies nationwide are adopting suspicious activity reports (SARs) that task police officers with collecting and reporting information that indicates pre-operation terrorist planning. But much of what indicates terrorist planning also doubles as completely innocent behaviour such as taking pictures of buildings, bridges and monuments.

...

From 2005 to 2006, the Maryland state police, with help from DHS, surveilled non-violent anti-war and anti-death penalty groups and labelled 53 individuals and groups as diverse as the DC Anti-War Network and Amnesty International as terrorists.

In February, the ACLU criticised a leaked bulletin from the North Central Texas Fusion System that concocted a crazy conspiracy theory that Muslim civil rights and anti-war activists were working together to spread sharia law inside the United States, which even if true, would not be illegal. Among the possible unwitting co-conspirators was the US Treasury department for hosting a conference on Islamic finance.

...

If you hold a political opinion outside the conventional two-party system, you're suspect.

...