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.”
[See:
AT&T
Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance]
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.
…
In the days after our hypothetical terror
attack, events might play out like this: With the population gripped by
fear and anger, authorities undertake unprecedented actions in the name
of public safety.
Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin
actively scrutinizing people who - for a tremendously broad set of
reasons - have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats.
Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call, others
a request to register with local authorities.
Still others might hear a
knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some
instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions.
Other
suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities,
where they could be detained without counsel until the state of
emergency is no longer in effect.
…
Another
well-informed source - a former military operative regularly briefed by
members of the intelligence community - says this particular program has
roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the
Defense Intelligence Agency.
He has been told that the program utilizes
software that makes predictive judgments of targets’ behavior and tracks
their circle of associations with “social network analysis” and
artificial intelligence modeling tools.
[See:
Synthetic Environments for
Analysis and Simulation]
“The more
data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can
predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will
turn to for help,” he says.
“Main Core is the table of contents for all
the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on
specific targets.”
An intelligence expert who has been briefed by
high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that
a database of this sort exists, but adds that,
“it is less a
mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at
the same time.”
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.”
[See: NSA, AT&T and
the NarusInsight Intercept Suite]
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:
-
the e-mail addresses you
send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages
-
the
phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the
durations of the calls
-
the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in
your Web searches
-
the destinations of the airline tickets you buy
-
the
amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals
-
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.
[See:
Next Major Security Threat: Disaffected Americans Using the Internet]
Main Core also allegedly draws on four
smaller databases that, in turn, cull from federal, state, and local
“intelligence” reports; print and broadcast media; financial records;
“commercial databases”; and unidentified “private sector entities.”
Additional information comes from a database known as the Terrorist
Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law
enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the
Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007
to include about 435,000 names.
The FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center
border crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007,
grows by 200,000 names a year.
A former NSA officer tells Radar that the
Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an
electronic-funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to
Main Core, as does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to
monitor anti-war protestors and environmental activists such as
Greenpeace.
If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any
indication, the Main Core database includes dissidents and activists of
various stripes, political and tax protestors, lawyers and professors,
publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign
nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people.
A veteran CIA intelligence analyst who
maintains active high-level clearances and serves as an advisor to the
Department of Defense in the field of emerging technology tells Radar
that during the 2004 hospital room drama, James Comey expressed concern
over how this secret database was being used,
“to accumulate otherwise
private data on non-targeted U.S. citizens for use at a future time.”
Though not specifically familiar with the name Main Core, he adds,
“What
was being requested of Comey for legal approval was exactly what a Main
Core story would be.”
A source regularly briefed by people inside the
intelligence community adds:
“Comey had discovered that President Bush
had authorized NSA to use a highly classified and compartmentalized
Continuity of Government database on Americans in computerized searches
of its domestic intercepts.
[Comey] had concluded that the use of that
‘Main Core’ database compromised the legality of the overall NSA
domestic surveillance project.”
If Main Core
does exist, says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism officer
and an outspoken critic of the agency, the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) is its likely home.
“If a master list is being compiled,
it would have to be in a place where there are no legal issues” - the CIA
and FBI would be restricted by oversight and accountability laws - “so I
suspect it is at DHS, which as far as I know operates with no such
restraints.”
Giraldi notes that DHS already maintains a central list of
suspected terrorists and has been freely adding people who pose no
reasonable threat to domestic security.
“It’s clear that DHS has the
mandate for controlling and owning master lists. The process is not
transparent, and the criteria for getting on the list are not clear.”
Giraldi continues, “I am certain that the content of such a master list
[as Main Core] would not be carefully vetted, and there would be many
names on it for many reasons - quite likely, including the two of us.”
