Post-Orlando Call for Expanded Watch List Tests Civil Liberties
The Orlando massacre is fueling demands that the government greatly expand the number of people it monitors as potential terrorists, a proposal critics worry veers dangerously close to the dystopian science fiction of "Minority Report."
While the ACLU and the NRA say it’s already too hard for innocent people to get their names off watch lists, there are calls for the government to create an alumni list to track those whose investigations are closed for lack of evidence. The Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, was removed from the government’s list in 2014, so no one in law enforcement was alerted when he purchased firearms used in his attack.
"The terror watch list is an on-off switch," said Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary of Homeland Security. "We need to think about gradations of it, especially when it comes to purchasing weapons and travel."
The calls for broader surveillance come as the challenge of identifying potential threats is vastly complicated by the shift from the centrally directed terrorism of al-Qaeda to the individual "lone-wolf" attacks that Islamic State seeks to inspire. A task that once relied heavily on identifying connections to known terror groups and targeting weak links in a conspiracy now depends instead on the vagaries of determining an individual’s evolving psyche.
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An official with the American Civil Liberties Union a year ago compared the opaque process of compiling the watch list to the "precrime" policing of "Minority Report." In the 1956 short story by Philip K. Dick and a 2002 movie starring Tom Cruise, a fictional society drives down crime rates by acting on predictions of citizens’ future conduct.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-06-16/post-orlando-call-for-expanded-watch-list-tests-civil-liberties
