Assessment: Routinely intimidating journalists — including using Washington’s mammoth surveillance apparatus — is like something out of a ’70s conspiracy thriller …
The federal government keeps a terrorist database, which should come as no surprise, but the ease with which law-abiding Americans get caught in it just might.
There’s a chilling report out on the National Targeting Center, a secretive division of Customs and Border Protection, using that terrorist database to target American journalists.
“But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived” 2 Timothy 3:16
It’s like something right out of George Orwell’s 1984 — if Oceania had bothered with niceties like buying a woman a drink before intimidating the hell out of her.
Yahoo’s Jana Winter reports on Jeffrey Rambo of the Targeting Center, and, man, did they get that first word right.
Rambo apparently posed as a possible source for national security reporter Ali Watkins, and so they met at an unmarked Washinton speakeasy:
Once at the bar, however, she found that the man seemed more interested in gathering information about her than in providing her with information. And he appeared to know a lot about her, including details of her travels and her relationship with James Wolfe, an older man who worked on Capitol Hill.
If this is starting to look to you like a federal agent intimidating a reporter, you’re right. Using an anti-terrorist database to help get the dirty job done, too.
It was Rambo’s defense of his actions that might disturb you most:
As part of that process, he and others he worked with vetted those potential contacts, pulling email addresses, phone numbers and photos from passport applications and checking that information through numerous sensitive government databases, including the terrorism watchlist.
…
“When a name comes across your desk you run it through every system you have access to, that’s just status quo, that’s what everyone does,” Rambo told investigators.
“All of the things that led up to my interest in Ali Watkins were standard practice of what we do and what we did,” he told Yahoo News. “And probably what’s still done to this day.”
Read More @ PJ Media HERE
