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Sure. Prior to World War II, the FBI began keeping a list of people to be rounded up "in the event of a national emergency" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Index ). Some people on this index were put in concentration camps during World War II, notably people of Japanese heritage (and as Cygnus co-founder John Gilmore notes, some of these people were identified, via a legal fiction, by them filling out that they were of Japanese heritage on census forms http://www.toad.com/gnu/census.html) World War II did not end the list, it grew. Finally, Watergate, the death of Hoover and exposure of programs like COINTELPRO led to the Church Committee and the supposed disabling of the list. Since then, all information has been that the only thing that has changed is that the list is not officially for the detention of American citizens. Some of the people involved in Iran-Contra in the 1980s were also maneuvering for a US military invasion of Nicaragua, which they thought might necessitate putting anti-war protesters into concentration camps( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_84 ). Of course, that plan was so far out that the plan might be more nutty than scary, but then again, these are people who secretly broke the US's own arms embargo against Iran to sell Iran weapons, the money from which they used to fund a war against Nicaragua which Congress had banned. It's kind of like that Utah Data Center ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center ) they're building to store what is probably permanent recordings of our phone calls, SMS messages, e-mails, web browsing history etc. They didn't spend $1.5 billion on it so far to not use it. |