Free Republic

<p>A report from the Terrorism Information Awareness program contains a major loophole that allows the government to data mine "everything under the sun" including medical and credit records, says the top Senate Democrat on privacy issues.</p> <p>The report said the program to track terrorists will use information collected and analyzed that is "legally obtained and usable by the federal government under existing law."</p>

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) - Defense contractor Lockheed-Martin will develop a new system to check background information and assign a threat level to all commercial air passengers, the Transportation Department announced.</p> <p>The company, which employed Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta in the mid-1990s, was awarded a five-year contract to administer the program. The first phase of the contract is worth $12.8 million, transportation officials said.</p>

© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com Identity theft – the fastest-growing crime in the United States – is already being used by international terrorists as a vehicle for raising money and laundering it, but law-enforcement officials fear the situation could worsen to crisis proportions as the crime becomes increasingly widespread. The issue hit home in the case of the hunt for five men suspected of illegally slipping into the U.S. from Canada last week. The FBI released photographs of the quintet, but now officials believe none of the photographs actually represent the men being sought. U.S. law-enforcement authorities searching now believe they are part of...