US Relaxes Limits On How Data From SPYING On Citizens Can Be Used. Big Brother Giggles

Good news for everyone who doesn’t really care about their internet freedom! Limits have been laxed and now even people who are not  suspected of being terrorists (which has become such a flimsy word I think even my Nana could be argued to be one) can have their data mined and stored and gazed at by the Man with uncomfortably little restrictions.

Boing Boing:

At the New York Times, a story by Charlie Savage on new guidelines signed into law Thursday by US Attorney General Eric H. Holder for the National Counterterrorism Center, created in 2004 to “improve intelligence sharing and serve as a terrorism threat clearinghouse.”

The guidelines will lengthen to five years – from 180 days – the amount of time the center can retain private information about Americans when there is no suspicion that they are tied to terrorism, intelligence officials said. The guidelines are also expected to result in the center making more copies of entire databases and “data mining them” using complex algorithms to search for patterns that could indicate a threat.

As our own Eduardo Pluto likes to melodramatically proclaim to me time in and time out, the internet is dying! Or at least, making us think twice about what we’re looking at.