Trump's Secret New Watchlist Lets His Administration Track Americans Without Needing a Warrant
Trump's Secret New Watchlist Lets His Administration Track Americans Without Needing a Warrant
By E.D. Cauchi AND William M. Arkin On 5/18/20 at 9:26 AM EDT
Current Time 1:29
https://www.newsweek.com/trumps-secret-new-watchlist-lets-his-administration-track-americans-without-needing-warrant-1504772
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NSPM-7 defined the individuals, organizations, groups and networks "assessed to be a threat to the safety, security, or national interests of the United States" to include "cyber threat actors, foreign intelligence threat actors, military threat actors, transnational criminal actors, and weapons proliferators." However, the administration stated that it envisioned "an expansion ... to also include additional threat actor categories, as appropriate."
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"Insider threats" make up yet another category: leakers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, or corporate scientists and university professors researching sensitive areas like weapons or biotechnology. In February, FBI Director Wray told the House Judiciary Committee that the bureau had recently expanded initiatives "to focus on insider threats partnering with TCO [transnational criminal organization] actors."
By early 2020, the new watchlist was TOC in name only.
"It's an intelligence analyst's nightmare," says Nate Snyder, a former Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism official, about this loosening of definitions and conflation of terrorist and criminal threats. You wouldn't "treat this pandemic like you would a flood or a hurricane. The same thing could be said if you're taking a gang and you're now affiliating them with a terrorist organization. One is not like the other."
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"Once you're on the watchlist, the government has the ability to collect tremendous amounts of information," says retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent Jeff Danik, who spent most of his 28-year career tracking terrorist activity, including several years inside the classified watchlisting hub. "This data is a bomb," he says. "You should have great respect for the damage that it can do."
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"Compiling lists of national security enemies strikes me as what Hitler did in Germany in the 1930s or what Stalin did in Russia in the '30s, '40s and '50s," says General Taylor, the former head of intelligence for the Department of Homeland Security, referring to American citizens. "That is nothing more than trying to take a sledgehammer when you need a stiletto."
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