Academic

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, WE?D SEE SOME KIND OF CREEPY TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS PR?

By Glenn Reynolds

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, WE’D SEE SOME KIND OF CREEPY TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS PROGRAM. And they were right! Govt ‘creating vast domestic snooping machine.’

The 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, 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 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 paper, which has conducted its own investigation of the matter.

Luckily, this stuff is only creepy when there’s a Republican President. Otherwise I’d be worried. But as we all know, to worry about this when there’s a Democrat in the White House is merely a sign of the “paranoid strain” in American politics.

UPDATE: Here’s the full WaPo story.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on December 20, 2010 (boomark / email).