EFF Review Of May 20 Report On Total Information Awareness: “Even without TIA, we’ve had hints of the problems. One example: an FBI database, the Violent Gang and Terrorist Organization File (VGTOF), is expanding. In 1995 VGTOF was mainly used to track violent urban street gangs; today, it includes categories like “anarchists,” “militia,” “white supremacist,” “black extremist,” “animal rights extremist,” “environmental extremist,” “radical Islamic extremist,” and “European origin extremist.” And of course, data accuracy is a problem here.
The Denver police department had for years been keeping secret files on political activists such as the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker peace-activist group, and the pro-gun lobby. Last summer, when a man listed in the Denver files as a gun-rights group member got into a fender-bender, a police officer checking VGTOF found him described as “a member of a terrorist organization” and part of a “militia.”
According to a Denver police memo, the officer reported the stop to the FBI as a “terrorist contact.” The Denver police and the FBI decline to comment on how the man ended up in VGTOF.
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