Government Relaxes Rules on Reading Emails and other Tweets

Reading about the government relaxation of the rules on the use of private information, I sighed and wondered how much more relaxation can they take. Do you remember the Ohioan Demjanjuk? Do you remember him? I know he is not your run- of-the-mill celebrity, and he also just passed away somewhere abroad. But his body is on its way to an Ohio burial place. So, his fame will always be part of American history.

Why did I remember this expired male product? Because of the information surrounding him. When Mr. Demjanjuk’s gassing past was ready to catch up with him, he crossed the pond and applied for asylum as a soviet refugee. Our government’s initial reaction was a total lack of interest in finding any information about the past of this Ukrainian  at the time he immigrated. This disinterest was so blatant – or ideological –that it ignored the soviet data, especially an archived identification card stating on its sides that “Iwan Demjanjuk is employed as a guard in the Guard Units (Wachmannschaften) of the Reich Leader of the SS for the Establishment of SS and Police Headquarters in the New Eastern Territory. . . . Headquarters Lublin, training camp Trawniki.”

That was just the indiscretion of his youth. Later on, Mr. Demjanjuk performed more specialized jobs, such as that of one of Treblinka death camp’s guards. Among those guards, he distinguished himself for placing prisoners in the gas chambers and operating the motors which sent the gas into the chambers. He performed these duties from 1942 through 1943. This rich documentation surfaced decades later during his denaturalization and extradition procedures, after he had established himself in the United States and reached an old age surrounded by his American family. But we are a nation of immigrants after all!

This is an example of the fastest speed our government employs to gather and process information.

The NY Times  reported recently that the Obama administration is moving to relax the rules about the amount of time the National Counterterrorism Center, (NCC) a federal agency, can retain and process information about Americans with ties to terrorism.

“Why?” I asked myself rhetorically.

The government does not need five years — instead of the current 180 days —to analyze suspicious information. Look back to Demjanjuk. You cannot deny that man his major terrorist past. You cannot deny the easily discoverable documentation about his past either. We ignored it. Or chose to ignore it. No background check happened, although the government had or could have had access to the relevant information.  It never happened either because ideologically the US did not consider Demjanuk’s actions terrorism, or because the information we had was regarded as unreliable, because it came from soviet archives. If the latter is true I can only wonder what changed in our ideology or otherwise that we can perceive as reliable the information we receive today about the new generation of terrorists and terrorist suspects.