Monday, 20 Dec 2010 08:09 AM
The U.S. government is creating a vast domestic
spying network to collect information about Americans in
the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and subsequent
terror plots, The Washington Post reported Monday.
The government is using for this purpose the FBI, local
police, state homeland security offices, and military
criminal investigators, the daily added.
The system collects, stores, and analyzes information
about thousands of 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
paper, which has conducted its own investigation of the
matter.
According to the report, the network includes 4,058
federal, state, and local organizations, each with its
own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions.
At least 935 of these organizations have been created
since the 2001 attacks, The Post added.
The probe has revealed that technologies and techniques
developed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and
Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law
enforcement agencies in the United States, the paper
pointed out.
In addition, the FBI is building a database with the
names and personal information of thousands of U.S.
citizens and residents, the report said.
The database is accessible to an increasing number of
local law enforcement and military criminal
investigators, the report noted.
In a bid to counter what is seen as a threat from
radical Islam, some law enforcement agencies have hired
as trainers people whose extremist views on Islam and
terrorism are considered inaccurate and
counterproductive by U.S. intelligence agencies, the
paper pointed out.
The cost of the network is difficult to measure, the
paper said. But the Department of Homeland Security has
given $31 billion in grants since 2003 to state and
local governments for homeland security and to improve
their ability to find and protect against terrorists,
The Post said.
Only this year, it gave $3.8 billion to local law
enforcement agencies.
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