The FBI Is Storing Biometrics En Masse In A Database

Russia today covers it:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) wants to prevent information about its creepy biometric database, which contains fingerprint, face, iris, and voice scans of millions of Americans, from getting out to the public.

The Department of Justice has come up with a proposal to exempt the biometric database from public disclosure. It states that the Next Generation Identification System (NGI) should not be subject to the Privacy Act, which requires federal agencies to give people access to records that have been collected concerning them, “allowing them to verify and correct them if needed.”

The proposal states that allowing individuals to view their own records, or even an account of those records, could compromise criminal investigations or “national security efforts,” potentially reveal a “sensitive investigative technique,” or provide information that could help a subject “avoid detection or apprehension…”

The proposal argues that the FBI should be able to retain the data it has collected on individuals even if they are later found to have done nothing illegal, as the information “may acquire new significance when new details are brought to light.”

I suspect part of the problem is that they have information they know the average citizen doesn’t want them to have – intimate information the government would only amass on people it viewed as enemies. If Joe blow finds the government has a specific file on him, with detailed surveillance imagery of his face, his medical records, his fingerprints, voice scans taken from dinnertime conversations or intimate phone calls, and his DNA, and he has never committed a crime, and never even thought of the government as an enemy, he will wonder whether government is viewing him as an enemy. Talk about amygdala. It builds fast once that realization happens.

Moreover, he may wonder how that DNA was acquired, how the dinnertime conversation was picked up, and when surveillance was deployed on him. My guess is if you are in the Tea Party, hang with the alt-right online, or have expressed “strong” political opinions that they have found out about, they probably have your name – and if you live near a major metropolitan area, you may very well either be on a list awaiting the spare manpower to fill out your file, or you may have a plump file already stored somewhere.

These are scary times. All indications are that the suits at the top of federal law enforcement have decided to amass an amazing amount of raw power, and build an all powerful machine. It is the kind of machine they know the public would be freaked out by, if they knew about it. But they are doing it anyway. They are even open about demanding that the public acquiesce to being kept in the dark about the power they have amassed – as if they view the public as an enemy they don’t trust. Whatever is coming, civilizationally, may be even huger than we claim here.

There are those who ask, “What do you care if you aren’t a criminal?”

The problem is, this is tremendous power given to the government – not to an unswayable arbiter of right and wrong. Today, this power may only be used to find terrorists and criminals. But already we see various government agencies used to punish people for political beliefs. The IRS selectively targets Tea Party members. There have been other accounts involving other agencies, ranging from EPA, to OSHA, to ATF. The woman who formed True the Vote was visited by five different government agencies, some of whom performed criminal inquiries while others sought to impose punitive fines on her business:

But Engelbrecht’s attorney, Cleta Mitchell, says it’s not just the Democratic Party that went after the conservative causes, but also the federal government. Within months of the groups filing for tax-exempt status, Engelbrecht claims she started getting hit by an onslaught of harassment: six FBI domestic terrorism inquiries, an IRS visit, two IRS business audits, two IRS personal audits, and inspections of her equipment manufacturing company by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the U.S. Department of Labor Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and Texas environmental quality officials.

Don’t let it escape your notice that the reporter who wrote the article quoted above was subsequently the target of a government operation that hacked her computers and planted classified documents on them, so she could be arbitrarily imprisoned and taken out of commission. Reread that again slowly, so the full implications sink in.

And this is in a period of relative glut and safety. What will happen when the turbulence, which we all know is coming, hits? What would happen if an outright socialist, like Bernie Sanders, were elected and filled every regulatory and law enforcement agency’s leadership with his outright socialist brethren, who even the Democrat party machine views as crazy?

Stalin signed an order to kill 50,000 people, while asking offhandedly, what difference their deaths would make in history? His minion probably dutifully agreed, only to find himself one day dragged into the basement, forced to confess, and executed. Those types of people come to power. Those types of governments can take over through a quirk of fate. Nothing says it will never happen here. Given the turbulence on the horizon, nothing says it is even unlikely.

Given that if Hillary is indicted Sanders would be seen as a credible candidate for President, and that socialist/communist ideologies have killed over 200 million people in the world, I could make a case that the government’s new security apparatus could one day kill more innocent Americans than every terrorist attack we have faced, multiplied by a factor of one hundred. Maybe even a factor of one thousand. And maybe a factor of ten thousand. Logically, if you remove the normalcy bias, it could easily be the case.

If our leadership viewed history honestly they would recognize this, and seek to protect the innocents of the future by making sure the retention of information on innocents was limited today.

Sadly, there is no indication the leaders at the top of this machine even care.

An Apocalypse could be fun if you live in the country. It could be like camping. But wherever you are, I’d stay ready to scramble, and factor in the need for a backup plan to temporarily disappear into thin air for a bit, should the right circumstances arise. Even though there is no doubt that the rabbits will catch the shit end of the stick this go around of the Apocalypse, this one looks a little more ominous every day that goes by.

Caution will be the order of the day.