They're Making a List, Checking It Twice

Digby has a report from Radar Magazine which argues that the Bush administration has been conducting data mining operations on domestic citizens under a top-secret "Continuity of Government" (COG) Program.

The concept behind COG is that the U. S. Government would need to prepare to maintain itself in case there were a catastrophic terrorist attack that killed millions of people and threatened the basic operations of American government. (Radar via Digby)

COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces—and effectively suspend the republic. In short, it's a road map for martial law.

It's reasonable to assume that COG has a number of dimensions, but what Digby picks out of the Radar article is that the Bush administration has been using data mining techniques to collect information on potential dissidents who could be considered a threat to the government (Rader via Digby).

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

It appears that the administration also wants to know about the friends of everyone listed in Main Core as well (Radar via Digby).

Another well-informed source—a former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence community—says this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets' behavior and tracks their circle of associations with "social network analysis" and artificial intelligence modeling tools.

In my mind's eye, I can see William Kristol claiming that Americans shouldn't worry about the government making up lists of domestic dissidents given that Santa Claus draws up universal lists of children.

He's Making a List and Checking It Twice
Gonna Find Out Who's Naughty and Nice.

George Packard writes in the New Yorker that conservatives

were not much interested in governing . . . They hadn’t made much of a dent in the bureaucracy, and they had done nothing to provide universal health-care coverage or arrest growing economic inequality . . .

True, conservatives prefer defense and foreign policy over health policy, disaster management, and banking. But the right-wing has been keenly interested in using the federal government and private institutions to suppress their liberal competitors ever since the end of WWII. In this sense, McCarthism was mostly about leveraging accusations of communism into a general effort to dampen New Deal liberalism, civil rights activists, feminists, and other liberal activists and conservatives were happy with the role of the FBI, CIA, and other federal institutions in collecting information on American liberals and radicals and disrupting their activities. They were even more happy to have the cooperation of labor unions, Hollywood, the television networks, newspapers, and other private institutions

From this perspective, the 60's not only meant the Great Society, the Civil Rights Movement, and the rise of the anti-war agitation, it also meant the dismantling of the whole apparatus for discouraging liberal activism. By the time Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the federal government was doing much more of the domestic policy administration that conservatives loathed and almost none of the "domestic security" work they wanted to see.

The irony of the Bush years is that the 9-11 attacks gave conservatives an opportunity to revive a version of neo-McCarthyite government in relation to the War on terrorism and the occupation of Iraq. Far from being disinterested in government, committed right-wingers like Dick Cheney, David Addington, Douglas Feith, and John Yoo were inspired to trash the laws governing the interrogration of terror suspects and create their kind of government.

Ironically, what's undone the Republicans has been their lack of interest in the non-repressive dimensions of domestic government within the United States. Because of their unwillingness to take health care, wealth disparities, Katrina, global warming, energy policy, and the rest of domestic government seriously, the right-wing is going to lose the national security state they really liked.

Santa Claus came to the American right on 9-11-01 but they blew it.