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At the same time, the Pentagon developed a Total Information Awareness program with "detailed electronic dossiers" on millions of unsuspecting Americans. Public outrage got Congress to ban it, but the NSA, CIA and FBI continued it, monitoring Americans electronically, including private email and phone communications as well as access to financial, medical and other personal information.
In 2004, the FBI established an Investigative Data Warehouse "centralized (counterterrorism) repository," and in two years amassed 659 million individual records, now perhaps double that amount. It includes social security data, drivers' licenses, financial records, and virtually any information considered important to monitor - potentially making everyone's private life an open book to know about and abuse, including by warrantless wiretaps and other lawless methods.
Since taking office, Obama advanced the Bush agenda, endangering Americans more than ever under surveillance. For example, the FBI's "Terrorist Watchlist" adds 1,600 names daily to hundreds of thousands already included. A new Lackland Air Base cyber-command is charged with targeting enemy computers and repelling hostile cyber-attacks against US networks. Official denials notwithstanding, no one escapes surveillance.
The combined intelligence/Homeland Security/US Northern Command (NORTHCOM)/local authorities apparatus constitutes a formidable force against civil unrest, mass protests, designated terrorists, dissidents, and other perceived homeland threats - their combined might and sophisticated technology charged with containing them. Already, constitutional freedoms have been seriously compromised on their way toward total abolition.
Moreover, "presidential power has grown relentlessly" after Bush claimed "unitary Executive" authority, what Chalmers Johnson called a "ball-faced assertion of presidential supremacy dressed up in legal mumbo jumbo," but it persists under Obama to rule by Executive Orders and other unilateral directives, unchecked by congressional approval.
McCoy said it "open(ed) the way to unchecked electronic (satellite, drone, biometric, and other type) surveillance, the endless detention of (uncharged) terror suspects (including US citizens), and a variety of inhumane forms of interrogation" after Bush made torture official US policy. It continues seamlessly, though quietly, under Obama more than ever hardening America's police state apparatus.
Big Brother now watches everyone, including with growing numbers of digital cameras monitoring streets, commercial areas, airports, highways, public and private transportation, government and office buildings, and shopping malls - virtually everywhere people congregate, work, reside, recreate, or inhabit for any reason. Anti-terrorist SWAT teams are ready to react against any suspected provocation or threat.
As a result, American democracy fundamentally changed. Always more illusion than reality, total surveillance reveals a harshness too ugly to hide, especially when sophisticated technologies target anyone for any reason, what McCoy calls "the stuff of dystopian science fiction."
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