Yes Virginia, it is a police state

The Bush administration assaults our freedoms in so many ways at once, it's hard to keep track of everything. As if sneak and peek tactics enabled by the Patrioit Act was not enough, today's disturbing development from the WaPo reveals the Pentagon is pushing to expand domestic surveillance even further over the lives of ordinary Americans.

"We are deputizing the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America. This is a huge leap without even a [congressional] hearing," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a recent interview.

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings already aptly analyzed the impact of this latest ploy, so I won't repeat it except to reiterate that the blurring of the line between intelligence gathering about potential crimes for the purposes of national security and the investigation of crimes already committed, a function reserved for domestic law enforcement agencies and the FBI, should be a matter of serious concern to anyone who values our civil liberties.

Meanwhile, Captain Ed doesn't see it as a privacy concern so much as bureauracy dangerously run amok. I think we should be concerned about both, but he hits home here.

All of this mischief started with the Commission's celebration of bureaucracy as the salvation of intelligence. Rather than demand a complete restructuring of the myriad intelligence entities in the US into two or three agencies -- one each for foreign, domestic, and military intel -- the Commission claimed that data-sharing was hampered not by artificial divisions of labor between bureaucracies but not enough layers of bureaucracy above the agencies themselves. It demanded (and received) two additional layers of management between the actual intel gatherers and the decision makers of the government.

A good point but Jo Fish finds the money quote.

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the data-sharing amendment would still give the Pentagon much greater access to the FBI's massive collection of data, including information on citizens not connected to terrorism or espionage.

The measure, she said, "removes one of the few existing privacy protections against the creation of secret dossiers on Americans by government intelligence agencies." She said the Pentagon's "intelligence agencies are quietly expanding their domestic presence without any public debate."

Not to mention operating without any public oversight. It's like I always say, facism doesn't arrive overnight. It creeps in by degrees and this takes us one step closer to Big Brother.