Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database

NEW YORK POST:

Such databases have never before existed. Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history. He is creating a diversity police state where government race cops and civil-rights lawyers will micromanage demographic outcomes in virtually every aspect of society.

The first black president, quite brilliantly, has built a quasi-reparations infrastructure perpetually fed by racial data that will outlast his administration.

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Data Intercept Technology Unit (DITU) is the NSA's indispensable partner in its global spying operations: an obscure, clandestine unit of the FBI

When the media and members of Congress say the NSA spies on Americans, what they really mean is that the FBI helps the NSA do it, providing a technical and legal infrastructure that permits the NSA, which by law collects foreign intelligence, to operate on U.S. soil. It's the FBI, a domestic U.S. law enforcement agency, that collects digital information from at least nine American technology companies as part of the NSA's Prism system. It was the FBI that petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order Verizon Business Network Services, one of the United States' biggest telecom carriers for corporations, to hand over the call records of millions of its customers to the NSA.

But the FBI is no mere errand boy for the United States' biggest intelligence agency. It carries out its own signals intelligence operations and is trying to collect huge amounts of email and Internet data from U.S. companies -- an operation that the NSA once conducted, was reprimanded for, and says it abandoned.

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The ATF Wants ‘Massive’ Online Database to Find Out Who Your Friends Are

WIRED:

The ATF doesn’t just want a huge database to reveal everything about you with a few keywords. It wants one that can find out who you know. And it won’t even try to friend you on Facebook first.

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They know what you read and where you shop, what kind of work you do and who you count as friends

Politico reports:

CHICAGO — On the sixth floor of a sleek office building here, more than 150 techies are quietly peeling back the layers of your life. They know what you read and where you shop, what kind of work you do and who you count as friends. They also know who your mother voted for in the last election.

The depth and breadth of the Obama campaign’s 2012 digital operation — from data mining to online organizing — reaches so far beyond anything politics has ever seen, experts maintain, that it could impact the outcome of a close presidential election. It makes the president’s much-heralded 2008 social media juggernaut — which raised half billion dollars and revolutionized politics — look like cavemen with stone tablets.

Obama’s data advantage

How long has this been going on?

Ace of Spades was talking about a Washington Post article on 3/8/2006:

Apparently it's okay to data-mine to determine Americans' likely political preferences so they can be targeted for mailings, but it's a gross breach of the Constitution to use the same techniques to find likely terrorists...

Check out this succinct history of Data Mining from Doug Alexander at the University of Texas which starts with Data Collection in the 1960's:

Chart (scroll down): The Evolution of Data Mining

May the best data-miner win.