by Michael Snyder
June 10, 2013
from
EndOfTheAmericanDream Website
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Are you on the list?
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Are you one of the millions of
Americans that have been designated a threat to national
security by the U.S. government?
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Will you be subject to detention
when martial law is imposed during a major national emergency?
As you will see below, there is actually a list
that contains the names of at least 8 million Americans known as
Main Core that the U.S.
intelligence community has been compiling since the 1980s.
A recent article on
Washington’s Blog quoted a couple of old magazine articles that
mentioned this program, and I was intrigued because I didn’t know what it
was. So I decided to look into
Main Core, and
what I found out was absolutely stunning - especially in light of what Edward
Snowden has just revealed to the world.
It turns out that the U.S. government is not
just gathering information on all of us.
The truth is that the U.S. government has used
this information to create a list of threats to national security that the
government would potentially watch, question or even detain during a
national crisis. If you have ever been publicly critical of the government,
there is a very good chance that you are on that list.
The following is how Wikipedia
describes Main Core…
Main Core is the code name
of a database maintained since the 1980s by the federal government of
the United States.
Main Core contains personal and
financial data of millions of U.S. citizens believed to be threats to
national security. The data, which comes from the NSA, FBI, CIA, and
other sources, is collected and stored without warrants or court orders.
The database’s name derives from the fact
that it contains “copies of the ‘main core’ or essence of each item of
intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other
agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.”
It was Christopher Ketchum of Radar
Magazine (The
Last Roundup - Compilation of a Secret List of Citizens Who Could Face
Detention under Martial Law) that first reported on the existence
of Main Core.
At the time, the shocking information that he
revealed did not get that much attention.
That is quite a shame, because it should have
sent shockwaves across the nation…
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.
Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as
to what might constitute a “national emergency.”
Executive orders issued over the last 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.
So if that list contained 8 million names all
the way back in 2008, how big might it be today?
That is a very frightening thing to think about.
Later on in 2008, Tim Shorrock of
Salon.com
also reported on Main Core…
Dating back to the 1980s and known to
government insiders as “Main Core,” the database reportedly collects and
stores - without warrants or court orders - the names and detailed data
of Americans considered to be threats to national security.
According to several former U.S. government
officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core
in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal
data on Americans,
including NSA intercepts of bank and
credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the
FBI, the CIA and other agencies.
One former intelligence official described
Main Core as “an emergency internal security database system” designed
for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a
suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law.
So why didn’t this information get more
attention at the time?
Well, if Obama had lost the 2008 election it
might have. But Obama won in 2008 and the liberal media assumed that he
would end many of the abuses that were happening under Bush. Of course that
has not happened at all. In fact, Obama has steadily moved the police state
agenda ahead aggressively.
Edward Snowden has just made that
abundantly clear to the entire world.
After 2008, it is unclear exactly what happened
to Main Core. Did it expand, change names, merge with other programs or get
superseded by a new program? It appears extremely unlikely that it simply
faded away. In light of what we have just learned about NSA snooping,
someone should ask our politicians some very hard questions about Main Core.
According to Christopher Ketchum, the exact kind
of NSA snooping that Edward Snowden has just described was being used to
feed data into the Main Core database…
A host of publicly disclosed programs,
sources say, now supply data to Main Core. Most notable are the NSA
domestic surveillance programs, initiated in the wake of 9/11, typically
referred to in press reports as “warrantless wiretapping.”
In March, a front-page article in the Wall
Street Journal shed further light onto the extraordinarily invasive
scope of the NSA efforts:
According to the Journal, the government
can now electronically monitor, “huge volumes of records of domestic
e-mails and Internet searches, as well as bank transfers, credit
card transactions, travel, and telephone records.”
Authorities employ “sophisticated software
programs” to sift through the data, searching for “suspicious patterns.”
In effect, the program is a mass catalog of the private lives of
Americans.
And it’s notable that the article hints at
the possibility of programs like Main Core.
“The [NSA] effort also ties into data
from an ad-hoc collection of so-called black programs whose
existence is undisclosed,” the Journal reported, quoting unnamed
officials.
“Many of the programs in various
agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been
given greater reach.”
The following information seems to be fair
game for collection without a warrant:
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the e-mail addresses you send to and
receive from, and the subject lines of those messages
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the phone numbers you dial, the
numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the
calls
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the Internet sites you visit and the
keywords in your Web searches
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the destinations of the airline
tickets you buy
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the amounts and locations of your
ATM withdrawals
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the goods and services you purchase
on credit cards
All of this information is archived on
government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into
the Main Core database.
This stuff is absolutely chilling.
And there have been hints that such a list still
exists today.
For example, the testimony of an anonymous
government insider that was recently posted on shtfplan.com
alluded to such a list…
“We know all this already,” I stated. He
looked at me, giving me a look like I’ve never seen, and actually pushed
his finger into my chest. “You don’t know jack,” he said.
“This is bigger than you can imagine, bigger
than anyone can imagine.
This administration is
collecting names of sources,
whistle blowers and their families, names of media
sources and everybody they talk to and have talked to, and they already
have a huge list.
If you’re not working for MSNBC or CNN,
you’re probably on that list.
If you are a
website owner with a brisk readership and a conservative bent, you’re on
that list. It’s a political
dissident list, not an enemy threat list,” he stated.
What in the world is happening to America?
What in the world are we turning into?
As I mentioned in a previous article, the NSA
gathers
2.1 million gigabytes of data on all of us every single hour.
The NSA is currently constructing a
2 billion dollar data center out in Utah to
store all of this data.
If you are disturbed by all of this, now is the
time to stand up and say something. If this crisis blows over and people
forget about all of this stuff again, the
Big
Brother surveillance grid that is being constructed all
around us will just continue to grow and continue to become even more
oppressive.
America is dying right in front of your eyes and
time is running out.
Please stand up and be counted while you still
can.
