* Financial records from corporate databases, such as hotel and rental car company transactions; millions of “suspicious activity reports” from financial institutions. All voluntarily supplied.
* Fifteen million records from commercial data firms, given voluntarily.
* A multitude of law enforcement and non-law enforcement government databases.
* Public information from the personal sites on the internet, telephone and utility records and a large area of information taken from published news articles.

The NSAC records include the FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse, which was identified in a 2007 Department of Justice Inspector General report as the database storing information collected by the FBI through the use of National Security Letters (NSLs).

The ‘USA Patriot Act’ instituted after the rigged 9/11 atacks, purposefully expanded the FBI’s authority to collect information about people it does not specifically suspect of wrong-doing, to include, but not be limited to, financial, credit and communications information, using NSL's and enhanced suspicious activity reporting requirements from banks, casinos and car dealerships.

We might also mention the so-called Total Information Awareness (TIA) program. Shortly after 9/11, the government sought to build TIA, designed to be an immense data mining operation that would gather and evaluate an extensive list of databases containing personal information about Americans – including communications, medical, travel, education and financial data – in an attempt to detect supposedly “suspicious” patterns.

It does not matter if an American citizen is completely innocent of any wrong-doing, connection with purported “terrorists” or any such breach of what is now termed ‘National Security’ but so afraid is the government of public dissatisfaction and potential revolt that anything concerning any American citizen is important. After all, they reason (and this from a memo to the President from Cass Sunstine) ‘the more we can know, the better prepared we will be for public dissent. It is better to arrest a hundred innocent men than to let one terrorist, domestic or foreign, escape our net.’”