Ethics, morality and legality aside, I'd be really curious to see what information is actually stored in these "dossiers", besides (presumably) one's name, address, and other details that other branches of the government legitimately have.
I'm guessing that it's a timeline with some useful visualizations that allow the viewer to see patterns based on all the available data.
They'd have income/employment/tax data, your "network" as defined by google, facebook, the phones #s you dial, the phone #s that call you, family, classmates, etc.
They'd also have information about (and tools to easily search for) internet community involvement, travel history, banking history, credit score, and TONS of clickstream data.
The challenge for the government is that there is so much data on each person (available already or available with a few automated warrants) that creating tools to facilitate automated and human pattern recognition are crucial.
There are likely lots of metrics (formulated similarly to something like a credit score or a life insurance policy quote) that are updated automatically and indicate the chances that you'll do various things.
While it's very unlikely that most of us are of any interest whatsoever to authorities, the power of this information is when it can be used on someone else connected to you who is a target. Suppose the system flags 500 individuals as potential domestic terrorists. There is humint needed to rule these out as quacks, which the intel in your dossier might be useful for.
I think that what we have to keep in mind is that the state having these powers is tolerable now only b/c we are still in the infancy of this kind of technology and those in power haven't really developed a clear path toward totalitarianism yet, though now and then they start to come close.
Well, yes, I know that. ;) I meant that ethically, morally, and legally, I wouldn't want to know what they have (the NSA knowing is enough; better to destroy it than make it all public, probably), but I'm curious nonetheless.
Is that the sort of thing you can ask for with a FOIA request?
If you have some spare time it might be worth trying--it certainly couldn't hurt. I'm not familiar enough with the actual procedure to say if it would be particularly difficult or not.
Not really, unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, if one is speaking practically and not philosophically, since I'd rather terrorists not know what intelligence agencies have on them).
FOIA has an extensive list of exemptions, and pretty much anything relating to do with national security is exempt from FOIA requests. And well, it's called the National Security Agency for a reason; even though the information probably isn't legitimately related to national security, can you prove that it isn't, keeping in mind that you can't see it until you've proven that it's not?
If you try you will get a form letter basically saying that spying on Americans is not in the NSA charter, so they don't have any info on you. Tried it in 2005-ish myself.
