Keeping Terrorists off the front page Life for the boys in blue has never been busier. Criminals seem to be everywhere and into everything. Terrorists are being apprehended all the time, though because they are stopped before the crime, they are stopped for other things even though the government knows they are terrorists. Besides, Al Capone was sent to jail on tax evasion, not murder or anything that they would have liked to prove he did. Busting the terrorists on something stupid, before they blow themselves up in a crowded mall, is so much more reasonable than waiting for them to commit the big crime. Even if the ACLU is complaining about this tactic of preemptive arrest and deportation or jail.
The article I have linked to here is a great one that was mentioned years ago and then has been forgotten about. They do not arrest people. They do not monitor phone calls, except the ones to them. They do not carry badges or guns. Though some law enforcement agents assigned to work with them do. What they are are computer geeks and brainiacs.
Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) is almost as new as the Department of Homeland Security. While DHS is getting headlines for successes and screwups, mainly screwups because the successes can not be mentioned for about 100 years,the TSC works almost totally behind the scenes.
After 9/11 it came to be common knowledge that all of the various government agencies had databases about terrorists. Also, that all of these databases were different and had different numbers of suspects. The TSC is the organization that was created to consolidate all this information. Dozens of databases written in different computer languages and formats. They put it all together in less than four months and started working. The first week they were open they even helped arrest a terror suspect who had been stopped over a thousand miles from where he was 'known' to be. Who and where are highly classified, so do not even bother asking.
What is good though is that all of the Federal agencies have personnel working at the TSC. They are working together and feeding in the constant changes that intelligence and law enforcement officers around the world have collected. This can be a positive change when people are taken off the list because they were proven to have no ties to the terrorist they were suspected of having interaction with, or they can be positive in that the suspect has been arrested or killed.
I am very glad that the TSC exists. I am also glad that the government has pooled the resources so that suspected terrorists can be monitored more closely. This is a key reason that so few terrorist actions have taken place in the United States. If the Administration is able to achieve its goal of combining this database with foreign databases it will mean that more terrorists will be known, monitored and arrested. Some might call this Big Brother, but if my name is in that database it is going to be in a lonely file at the far back and never get called to the front.
Thank you President Bush for removing the barriers between these databases and thank you TSC for stopping the terrorists before Americans die.
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