The ACLU says that the government’s terrorist watch list now has one million names on it.
This is an example of what you might call the dysfunctional security state. We have a government that is increasingly broken-down, its capacities degraded thanks to hackish Bush political appointees, multiple reorganizations, bewildering contracting arrangements, and arbitrary, earmark-driven priorities.
What happens when you give such a government more power, more access to information, more tools to spy with? It will abuse those things – not out of malice but just as a matter of course, because it doesn’t know how not to.
So: the federal government has become adept at collecting vast amounts of previously-unknown or secret information on its citizens. A tiny, tiny fraction has intelligence value. Otherwise, most of this is useful only to corporations and marketing firms. But the bureaucracy has to justify its existence and do something with the info. So it does things like create massive, metastasizing terrorist watch lists which serve no useful purpose other than make-work, while randomly labeling people potential terrorists.
Via Yglesias.
