Cybersecurity
Post-Orlando Call for Expanded Watch List Tests Civil Liberties
- Shooter was dropped from list so gun buy didn’t trigger alerts
- Critics of more monitoring invoke dystopian ‘Minority Report’
Obama Says He Hopes Congress Can Rise to Moment on Guns
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The Orlando massacre is fueling demands that the government greatly expand the number of people it monitors as potential terrorists, a proposal critics worry veers dangerously close to the dystopian science fiction of "Minority Report."
While the ACLU and the NRA say it’s already too hard for innocent people to get their names off watch lists, there are calls for the government to create an alumni list to track those whose investigations are closed for lack of evidence. The Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, was removed from the government’s list in 2014, so no one in law enforcement was alerted when he purchased firearms used in his attack.