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July 11, 2007

Nothing New Under The Sun

rom today's Washington Post article "FBI Plans Initiative To Profile Terrorists":

"The System to Assess Risk, or STAR, assigns risk scores to possible suspects based on a variety of information, similar to the way a credit bureau assigns a rating based on a consumer's spending behavior and debt. The program focuses on foreign suspects but also includes data about some U.S. residents. A prototype is expected to be tested this year."

From chapter 9 of my forthcoming book "American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II":

"Yet at the same time as the Western Defense Command ("WDC") was scaling back its proposed criteria for gauging Japanese American disloyalty, it was also ramping up a new plan to compile and process vast amounts of intelligence data about the entire Japanese American population in the United States. Under the plan, WDC technicians would key every known piece of biographical information onto IBM punch cards for every Japanese American in the United States – age, sex, citizenship, last known address, residency in a relocation center, and so on. This biographical information would take up half the card; the other half would be reserved for codes reflecting every piece of derogatory intelligence information about the person that was to be found in the files of every military and civilian investigative agency in the country. A processing machine would then allow the Western Defense Command to sort Japanese Americans' punch cards for any type of biographical data and any type of derogatory intelligence information. This punch-card system was to be the "total information awareness" program of its day – a massive, mechanized system for keeping tabs on an entire American ethnic group. If, for example, the WDC wanted a list of all Buddhist Nisei from Los Angeles who belonged to the Japanese American Citizens League and competed in judo, the system was designed to produce that list."

Posted by Eric at July 11, 2007 8:52 PM