Thomas Cincotta

It’s well known that the FBI has historically abused its power to investigate non-criminal Americans—in the 1960s, the FBI relied on informants and undercover agents to burglarize the offices of the Socialist Workers Party and other movement organizations to steal membership lists, bank accounts, and other sensitive data. Now, a proposed amendment to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act would allow the FBI to bypass judicial review and obtain this same information on demand.

As Guantanamo is in the agonizingly slow process of shutting its doors, another kind of facility seems poised take its place on U.S. soil. Communication Management Units (CMUs), special divisions within American prisons nicknamed ‘Little Guantanamos,’ house political and terrorism convicts who are denied the basic services provided to prisoners in the United States.

Behavioral profiling, the latest trend in pre-emptive policing, has been used in America’s airport terminals since 2003 when the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program was implemented by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) across the United States. This past May, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GOA) issued a report assessing the program’s effectiveness, how much validity was established before SPOT went nationwide, and any improvements that could be made. The results reveal serious flaws in the SPOT program’s makeup and implementation.