Is the US Creating a Massive Snooping Machine?
The US government is creating a vast domestic spying network to collect information about Americans in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks and subsequent terror plots, said a Washington Post report.
The government is using for this purpose the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators, the report said.
The system collects, stores and analyses information about thousands of US citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing, the report noted.
The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, noted the report.
According to the report, the network includes 4,058 federal, state and local organisations, each with its own counter-terrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions.
At least 935 of these organizations have been created since the 2001 attacks, the Post said.
In addition, the FBI is building a database with the names and personal information of thousands of US citizens and residents, the report said. The database is accessible to an increasing number of local law enforcement and military criminal investigators.
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