This spy agency you've probably never heard of almost certainly has a file on you
While we've been focused on the NSA, another domestic surveillance agency has been quietly chugging along, spying on probably all of us. The National Security Analysis Center (NSAC) is a Justice Department division that is remarkably unknown — and expansive. Gawker reports:
The NSAC grew out of a post-9/11 program, the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force (FTTTF), which was originally focused on monitoring foreigners suspected of terrorist activity. With the establishment of the NSAC, however, that scope widened to include Americans, zeroing in on Muslims and young people deemed susceptible to terrorist influences, as well as military members and other government employees (plus all their family and friends) who have connections abroad.
Today, the agency conducts mass surveillance in service of the wars on terror and drugs. Because it straddles the line between intelligence and law enforcement, the NSAC "skirts limitations that exist in each community, allowing it to collect and examine information on people who are not otherwise accused of or suspected of any crime."
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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