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A few hundred ways you could be put on the terrorist watch list Nearly one billion people belong to (and own) cooperatives NYPD shares secret spying center with One Percenters FBI & Justice Department think concern about privacy or paying in cash may indicate terrorism  Above from Wikipedia. In addition, according to Michelle Alexander, the United States "imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid"  VIA LEE BANKS US Attorney plans to destroy legal personal files on MegaUpload Scientist faces 20 years in prison for helping whales eat blubber they were about to eat anyway Rahm Emanuel's war on democracy Chicago council passes Emanuel's protest suppression bill Surprise: Supreme Court thinks 4th Amendment still exists Can Congress act on Citizens United without a constitutional amendment? Supreme Court rejects predominantly Christian prayer at government meetings This Maine state trooper ought to train NYC cops 2012 terrorist identification
chart  2011 Free speech now costs $355 (to a private corporation) in Los Angeles Federal court of appeals approves barring police applicant because he's too smart Appeals court approves telecom immunity for helping NSA spy on citizens Word President Obama has just stated a policy that he can have any American citizen killed without any charge, without any review, except his own. If he’s satisfied that you are a terrorist, he says that he can kill you anywhere in the world including in the United States. Two of his aides just … reaffirmed they believe that American citizens can be killed on the order of the President anywhere including the United States. You’ve now got a president who says that he can kill you on his own discretion. He can jail you indefinitely on his own discretion Jonathan Turley Obama administration declares talking about jury nullification to be a crime Capital sentences hit 35 year low
The Israelization of America's police The biggest threat to America: ourselves Obama admin prosecuting 79 year old man for telling truth about jury rights Police who tell the truth about drug war are being fired 60 Senators vote in support of dictatorship Obama admin prosecuting 79 year old man for telling truth about jury rights THE WIRE'S WRITERS COME OUT FOR FULL JURY RIGHTS Capital police illegally spying on all drivers Mall of America security guards question up to 1200 people a day Apple snubs nose at Constitution to find an Iphone. Sex Offenders: The Last Pariahs Bart shuts down wireless because of expected protest As part of an ACLU FOIA lawsuit, the government gave several declarations attempting to justify the redaction of the documents. The ACLU came across this unexpectedly honest explanation from the FBI of why the government doesn't want us to know which "electronic communication service providers" participate in its dragnet surveillance program. Baltimore United Way demands McCarthesque loyalty oath from donees Court of Appeals says emails protected by 4th Amendment DETROIT POLICE TERRORIZE ART GALLERY, ABUSE PATRONS THREE INTERNET OLIGOPOLIES AGREE TO MASSIVE CENSORSHIP OF THOUSANDS OF USER GROUPS THINK TUB PROPOSES NYC COPS ALL HAVE TASERS U.S. QUITS HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL RECORD 2.3 MILLION IN AMERICAN PRISONS UNLOCKING AMERICA: THE DAMAGE OUR PRISON POLICY HAS DONE PASSAGE FROM ORWELL OVER SCHOOL LOUDSPEAKER TURNS INTO PROTEST COPS TASER YOUTH HAVING SEIZURE HOW BUSH & OTHER PRESIDENTS PLANNED A DICTATORSHIP VICTIMS OF FUNDAMENTALIST MORMONS VICTIMIZED BY STATE OF TEXAS BUSH WRITES HIMSELF ANOTHER LAW AIR FORCE SEEKING CONTROL OVER ALL COMPUTERS FAKE DEA AGENT FOOLS LOCAL COPS CHICAGO COPS TURN INTO MILITARY FORCE THE NEW INTERNET & THE POLICE STATE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MADAMS AND JOHNS SPY CAMERAS DON'T REDUCE CRIME PATRICK LEAHY EXPLAINS THE CONSTITUTION TO EX BUSH STAFFER HOW COPS SHOULD HANDLE PROTESTS CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY FIRES QUAKER TEACHER FOR MODIFYING OATH OF ALLEGIENCE ATTORNEY GENERAL WANTS TO OVERRIDE JUDGES ON CRACK-COCAINE SENTENCING ROMNEY WOULD IMPRISON DOCTORS WHO PERFORM ABORTIONS OUTLAWING ABORTION DOESN'T REDUCE IT - ONLY MAKES IT MORE DANGEROUS BUSH'S APPOINTEE AS HEAD OF FAMILY PLANNING CALLED BIRTH CONTROL "CULTURE OF DEATH" SEATTLE POLICE TAKE DISCIPLINARY ACTION IN ONLY ONE PERCENT OF POLICE BRUTALITY CASES MARIO CUOMO CALLS ON LAWYERS TO RISE UP IN DEFENSE OF CONSTITUTION BUSH REGIME TO LAUNCH MASSIVE DOMESTIC SPYING PROGRAM FORMER TELCOM EXEC SAYS NSA TRIED TO GET THEM TO SPY ILLEGALLY SIX MONTHS BEFORE SEPTEMBER 11 PENTAGON SPIED ON CITIZENS' BANK RECORDS FORMER TOP BRASS CALL FOR END OF 'DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL' 195 CORPORATIONS GET 100% RATINGS FROM GAY RIGHTS CAMPAIGNERS SOME REASON GAY MARRIAGE IS UNAMERICAN VINCENTE FOX REVEALS PLAN FOR NORTH AMERICAN CURRENCY BLACKWATER HOLDING COMPANY HAS PRIVATE SPY BUSINESS RUN BY TWO TOP EX-CIA SPOOKS DC PLANS DRIVERS LICENSE THAT WILL SPY ON USERS MONTANA'S GOVERNORS URGES COLLEAGUES TO STAND AGAINST NATIONAL ID IS REAL ID PLAN ON ITS DEATHBED? SEATTLE MAYOR'S PANEL WOULD HOLD POLICE ACCOUNTABLE SUPREME COURT RULES IT'S OKAY FOR FEDERAL COPS TO STEAL POLICE BRUTALITY CASES ON THE RISE STUDY FINDS PRISON SYSTEM A "COSTLY FAILURE" HOW COPS SHOULD HANDLE PROTESTS FEDERAL JUDGE RULES CEASE AND DESIST LETTERS CAN BE COPYRIGHTED MPAA BADLY MISLED CONGRESS OVER COLLEGE PIRATING REPORT FINDS CONNECTION BETWEEN IMPLANTED RFID CHIPS AND CANCER IN ANIMALS STUDY: INTERNET PORN MAY HAVE AIDED BIG DROP IN RAPES TASERS FOUND NOT TO REDUCE POLICE SHOOTINGS CONGRESS WEAKENS BUSH'S GRAB OF NATIONAL GUARD THE GOVERNMENT'S MOST GAGGED WHISTLEBLOWER BUSH REGIME USING CELLPHONE TRACKING FOR ILLEGAL SURVEILLANCE HIGH SCHOOLS ABUSING STUDENT RIGHTS WITH MASS BREATHALYZER TESTS TRAINING THE BUSHJUNGEN OF TOMORROW Military
interference in domestic affairs
SOPA,
PIPA, ACTA
FBI
misconduct
New
York City misconduct Bloomberg leaves prisoners to fend for themselves in hurricane
Prisons 
 THE ATTICA THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN One year after Attica, there was a prisoner revolt at the Washington, DC Jail during which the director of DC Corrections and a number of guards were taken hostage. But, unlike Attica, no one was killed. Perhaps this is why so few remember what happened on a night when judges, politicians, U.S. Marshals, prisoners, and hostages all gathered in Courtroom 16 to see what could be done - brought together by a single judge who wasn't afraid to talk when others wanted to shoot. The peaceful resolution of the DC Jail uprising was one of the most extraordinary stories I ever covered - Sam Smith Filming
police
Obama
and civil liberties
Britain Brits to do random stops of baby strollers?
Checkpoints Michigan sheriff sets up highway drug checkpoints
 Police misconduct Where police abuse people the most  How the police squelch free speech  Constitution-free America as defined by the Border Patrol 2010 LIEBERMAN & MCCAIN INTRODUCE BILL TO ALLOW DICTATORSHIP BUSH CAPOS OKAYED DITCHING CONSTITUTION Matthew Rothschild, Progressive - The Bush Justice Department, if you can call it that, issued legal opinions in late 2001 asserting that the President had the authority to use the military within the US against suspected terrorists, and that he could use the military to barge into your home without a warrant. "The warrant and probable cause requirements . . . are unsuited to the demands of wartime and the military necessity to successfully prosecute a war against an enemy," said an October 23, 2001, memo. The authors were John Yoo, who was then deputy assistant attorney general, and Robert Delahunty, who was special counsel at the Justice Department. And they sent the memo to Alberto Gonzales, then the counsel to the President. Domestic eavesdropping without a warrant was also OK, according to Bush lawyers at Justice. They also said the President could unilaterally abrogate treaties, and that Congress had no say-so over the treatment of detainees. Yoo and Delahunty clearly contemplated waging war here at home. "Efforts to fight terrorism may require not only the usual wartime regulations of domestic affairs, but also military actions that have normally occurred abroad," said the Yoo-Delahunty memo. It contemplated using the U.S. military in the United States for "attacking civilian targets, such as apartment buildings, offices, or ships where suspected terrorists were thought to be; and employing electronic surveillance methods more powerful and sophisticated than those available to law enforcement agencies." And it recognized that these actions could be "involving as they might American citizens.". . . Yoo and Delahunty also proposed shelving the First Amendment. "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," they wrote. WERE SPECIFIC REPORTERS TARGETED BY NSA WIRETAPS? IOWA NATIONAL GUARD TRIES TO TRAIN CITIZENS FOR A POST-CONSTITUTIONAL AMERICA THE NSA WANTS TO KNOW HOW YOU THINK; MAYBE EVEN WHAT YOU THINK Even the government admits it's illegally spying on citizens Deficit chips away at America's love for prisons A cop's advice for dealing with cops Beginning January 1, car dealers will have to invade your privacy before completing the deal 83 PAGE ARTICLE ON THE MIDDLE FINGER AND THE LAW THE POLICE STATE FINALLY COMES TO YALE BETTER CHECK UNDER YOUR CAR FOR AN FBI TRACKING DEVICE THE COURTS WON'T PROTECT YOU UNPATRIOTIC POLICE USE OF PATRIOT ACT In 2009 it was reported that 763 warrant requests were made under the Patriot Act. Of those, less than half a percent were related to charges of terrorism and 62% were related to drug charges.- Huffington Post POOR BEING CHARGED FOR PUBLIC DEFENDERS SUPREME COURT SAYS CONSTITUTION DOESN'T APPLY TO NSA MARYLAND JUDGE UPHOLDS RIGHT TO RECORD COPS IN PUBLIC PLACES COURT: CORPORATIONS STOP BEING PERSONS WHEN THEY COMMIT AN INTERNATIONAL CRIME BLOOMBERG BULLIES ARREST ARTIST FOR PAINTING OUTDOORS PENNSYLVANIA HOMELAND SECUIRTY SPYNG ON ACTIVISTS ACLU SUES TO STOP PRISON FROM BARRING MAIL FROM INMATES FEDERAL COURT FINDS TATOOS PROTECTED BY FIRST AMENDMENT VICTIMS OF POLICE NEIGHBORHOOD CHECKPOINT GET SETTLEMENT WOMAN CONVICTED FOR PHOTOGRAPHING ARREST FROM HER PORCH HISTORIAN FINDS GERMANY'S 19TH CENTURY INDUSTRAL EXPANSION AIDED BY LACK OF COPYRIGHT LAW NOLA COPS TOLD TO SHOOT LOOTERS AFTER KATRINA AUGUST 2010 REPORTING DUO EXPOSE MAJOR URBAN POLICE FRAUD ACLU GETS PRISONERS OUT OF SQUIRREL CAGES IN LOUISIANA FULL BODY SCANNERS BEING USED ON AMERICAN STREETS CLEVELAND TO SPY ON CITIZEN'S TRASH HOW THE FBI TRASHES THE CONSTITUTION 50,000 TIMES A YEAR US MARSHALS SERVICE ADMITS STORING 35,000 NAKED BODY SCANS OF PEOPLE ENTERING US COURTHOUSES FBI TRIED TO HAVE HOWARD ZINN FIRED AMTRAK WRONGLY ARRESTS PHOTOGRAPHER, PAYS FIVE FIGURE SETTLEMENT MARYLAND CITIZEN FACES 16 YEARS FOR PHOTOGRAPHING COP IN PUBLIC PLACE SUPREME COURT CRIMINALIZES PEACEKEEPING BRAZIL, UNLIKE U.S., USES COMMON SENSE ON COPYRIGHT FEDERAL GOVERNMENT'S CRUEL & UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT JULY 2010 LOUISIANA ABUSES SUICIDAL PRISONERS SUPREME COURT FURTHER UNDERMINDS CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS, SUPPORTING KAGAN'S VIEW GREEN CANDIDATE FOR NEVADA GOVERNOR QUESTIONED BY SECRET SERVICE FOR ATTENDING CLINTON SPEECH JUN 2010 FEDERAL COURT ALLOWS NY POLICE TO KEEP DETAILS OF ITS 2004 CRIMINAL CONVENTION RAMPAGE SECRET SUPREME COURT BOWS TO BIG BUCKS AGAIN LIEBERMAN & COLLINS WOULD LET PRESIDENT SEIZE INTERNET IN AN 'EMERGENCY' IF HELEN THOMAS HAS TO GO, WHAT ABOUT MIKE HUCKABEE? HOW THE COMMERCE CLAUSE COULD KILL THE REST OF THE CONSTITUTION MAY 2010 MAJOR SETTLEMENT IN POLICE ABUSE OF ANTI-WAR ACTIVIST MILITIAS AND THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER'S SCARE TACTICS TERRORISM YOU PAY FOR: POLICE RAIDS FOR MINOR OFFENSES RECORD NUMBER OF WIRETAPS; NOT ONE REQUEST TURNED DOWN DEMOCRATS PUSH FOR NATIONAL ID CARD CBS EXCLUSIVE: COPY MACHINES SAVE & HIDE WHAT YOU COPY JUDGE FIND 'DAY OF PRAYER' UNCONSTITUTIONAL 12 YEAR OLD SUES NYC OVER ARREST APRIL 2010 SEATTLE COMMUNITY COURT CELEBRATES FIVE YEARS OF ALTERNATIVE JUSTICE COPS ADD SAFE SEX TO THEIR LIST OF OFFENSES LAWMAKERS PUSHING FOR NATIONAL ID CARD FOR ALL WORKERS AUSTRALIA STUDY FINDS COMMUNITY JUSTICE CENTER WORKS OBAMA'S MED RECORDS ACT A MAJOR THREAT TO PRIVACY MARCH 2010 NYPD ENGAGES IN MASSIVE ILLEGAL STOP AND FRISKS AND THEN KEEPS THE DATA THE UNEXAMINED RISK OF TSA BODY SCANNERS NYC COP BLOWS WHISTLE ON CITY'S ARREST QUOTA SYSTEM PENTAGON WOULD LIKE TO BE ABLE TO STRIP AMERICANS OF CITIZENSHIP OBAMA INCREASES PRISON SPENDING WHILE SEEKING WAYS TO CUT MEDICARE FEBRUARY 2010 6-YEAR OLD WINS SEXUAL HARASSMENT CASE OBAMA SUPPORTS TRACKING YOUR MOVES BY CELLPHONE DATA OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SAYS IT HAS RIGHT TO KILL YOU WHEN YOU'RE OVERSEAS CIVIL LIBERTIES LAWYERS ATTACK OBAMA'S CLAIMED RIGHT TO KILL AMERICANS ABROAD AMERICANS SAY NO TO NATIONAL ELECTRONIC PATIENT DATABASE ORLANDO AIRPORT OFFICIAL THREATENS TWO REPORTERS FEDERAL JUDGE RULES NSA CAN SPY ON AMERICANS SUPREME COURT ENDS DEMOCRATIC ELECTIONS JANUARY 2010 FBI BROKE LAW MORE THAN 2,000 TIMES IN TELEPHONE SPYING DOMESTIC POLITICAL TERRORISM MAKES A MAJORITY OF AMERICANS AFRAID OF FREEDOM THE TORTURE OF SOLITARY CONFINEMENT DC GOVERNMENT THINKS WOMEN WITH MORE THAN TWO CONDOMS ARE WHORES FRENCH COURT RESCUES WORKER FIRED FOR DOWNLOADING PORN FEDERAL APPEALS COURT GIVES STATE'S FELONS RIGHT TO VOTE FEDERAL APPEALS COURT LIMITS USE OF TASERS OHIO SUPREME COURT: POLICE NEED WARRANT TO SEARCH CELL PHONES VERIZON GETS 'TENS OF THOUSANDS' OF LAW ENFORCEMENT REQUESTS TO SPY ON CUSTOMERS OBAMA ADMINISTRATION DECLARES PETA TERRORIST THREAT NEWSPAPER SAYS CARTOONS AREN'T MEANT TO OFFEND DECEMBER 2009 FBI COMES UP WITH BIGGEST CONSPIRACY YET: 400,000 ON WATCH LIST COPS STEALING FROM THE INNOCENT NOVEMBER 2009 JUSTICE DEPARTMENT HARASSES PROGRESSIVE WEB SITE LOCAL POLICE CREATING AN AMERICAN STASI BRITISH POLICE PUT PEACEFUL PROTESTERS ON SPY WATCH LIST  LAPD'S SICK AD TO GET PEOPLE TO SPY ON EACH OTHER JURORS USED BIBLE AS JUSTIFICATION FOR DEATH PENALTY OBAMA BACKS MAJOR RESTRICTIONS ON FREE SPEECH OCTOBER 2009 HATE CRIME BILL'S SUBTLE ATTACK ON FIRST AMENDMENT ACLU CHALLENGES REQUIRED DNA SAMPLES FROM ARRESTEES FEES FOR CITIZENSHIP UP TEN FOLD MICHIGAN WOMAN THREATENED WITH JAIL FOR BABYSITTING FOR FRIENDS PITTSBURGH POLICE ABUSE AT G20 MEETING SEX OFFENDER LAWS ARE HURTING OUR CHILDREN EUROPE FUNDS ORWELLIAN SPY PROGRAM THAT WOULD MONITOR 'ABNORMAL BEHAVIOR' ON WEB SEPTEMBER 2009 MEDINA, WASHINGTON MONITORS EVERY VEHICLE THAT ENTERS TOWN THE TECHNOLOGICAL TOOLS OF DICTATORSHIP AUGUST 2009 GAYS ARE TOO LATE TO DESTROY TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE OBAMA TO CONTINUE ILLEGAL BORDER COMPUTER SEARCHES BRITAIN: IT TAKES A THOUSAND SPYCAMS TO SOLVE ONE CRIME LONDON POLICE TO TRY NEW TACTIC FOR PROTESTS: PUT WOMEN OFFICERS IN CHARGE OBAMA ADMIN CLAIMED RIGHT TO SPY ON CAR DEALERS' COMPUTERS WHY ISN'T OBAMA GETTING RID OF BUSH-APPOINTED U.S. ATTORNEYS? DNA EVIDENCE CAN BE FABRICATED SAY SCIENTISTS SCALIA DOESN'T THINK INNOCENCE IS GROUNDS TO OVERTURN CONVICTION PHILADELPHIA BANS MULTITASKING SKATEBOARDERS WHEN LAWYERS TAKE OVER BURNING MAN, YOU KNOW WE'RE IN TROUBLE PRISONERS STEALING POEMS TO WIN PRIZES AMERICA'S OVER THE TOP SEX OFFENDER LAWS COURT ORDERS CALIFORNIA TO CUT NUMBER OF INMATES BY A QUARTER CIA MAINTAINS UNCLASSIFIED DATA IS STILL CLASSIFIED FLORIDA POLICE CAUGHT ON VIDEOTAPE IN CRASH COVERUP WHITE LAWYER GETS THE GATES TREATMENT JULY 2009 WHY DISORDERLY CONDUCT LAWS ARE OUT OF ORDER PROTECTING YOUR PRIVACY ON FACEBOOK MCDONALD'S WORKER ARRESTED FOR OVER-SALTING HAMBURGER CALIFORNIA TOWN WANTS TO SPY ON EVERY CAR ENTERING ITS BORDERS THE FRAUD OF MANDATORY ARBITRATION OBAMA'S CZARS SHORT CIRCUIT THE CONSTITUTION OBAMA JUNGEN: NOW THE MARINES WANT IN FEDERAL ABORTION LAW DISCRIMINATES AGAINST POORER WOMEN COURT TELLS DC POLICE THEY CAN'T HAVE NEIGHBORHOOD CHECKPOINTS COURT UPHOLDS YANKEE SPECTATORS' RIGHT TO PEE PLAN TO SPY ON EVERY CAR ON AMERICAN ROADS INMATE TELLS ABOUT AMERICA'S SECRET PRISONS FIREFIGHTERS ARE NOT LAW CLERKS JUNE 2009 WHY MADISON WOULD BE HAVING NIGHTMARES VIRGINIA CITIZENS BEING FINED FOR SEEKING TO UNSEAT SUPERVISORS PENTAGON DEFINED LEGAL PROTEST AS TERRORISM JURY AWARDS OUTRAGEOUS FINE IN MUSIC DOWNLOADING CASE NSA ANALYSTS SPIED ON OWN WIVES AND GIRLFRIENDS STUDY PUNCTURES MUSIC INDUSTRY FILE SHARING MYTHS NEW MONTANA GUN LAW PART OF MOVE TO REVIVE TENTH AMENDMENT FEDS FAIL TO REGULATE HEDGE FUND GAMBLING BUT ZAPS ONLINE POKER PLAYERS MOVIE CORPORADOS GET EVEN GREEDIER JUDGE UPHOLDS UNCONSTITIONAL PHONE SPYING OPPOSITION GROWS TO TSA PHOTO STRIP SEARCHES FEDERAL JUDGE RULES POLICE CAN TAKE DNA SAMPLES WITHOUT A WARRANT GENERAL TO BE PUT IN CHARGE OF DOMESTIC SECURITY BRITAIN EXPANDS SYSTEM OF SPY CAMS ANOTHER RED LIGHT CAM SCAM EXPOSED MAY 2009 FCC CLAIMS RIGHT TO SEARCH YOUR HOUSE WITHOUT WARRANT MINNESOTA REJECTS REAL ID CARD TSA SHOWING PUBLIC DUMBED DOWN VERSION OF VIRTUAL SEARCH MACHINE BORN IN MOZAMBIQUE, WHITE MEDICAL STUDENT HARASSED FOR CALLING HIMSELF AFRICAN-AMERICAN HEY, IT WORKED FOR HITLER
DIDN'T IT?  DRIVERS CHARGE POLICE PIRACY IN TEXAS MASSACHUSETTS POLICE TAPPING INTO PRIVATE DATA OF CELEBRITIES FEDERAL JUDGE PUNISHES TEACHER FOR CALLING CREATIONISM 'NONSENSE' JUSTICE DEPARTMENT HAS DIFFERENT RULES FOR BACKERS OF ISRAEL AND PALESTINE FEINGOLD GIVES OBAMA A "D" FOR HANDLING OF SECRETS ISSUES APRIL 2009 ADMINISTRATION PLANS TO FORCE COMPUTERIZED STRIP SEARCHES ON ALL AIR PASSENGERS HOMELAND POLICE SAY SUPPORT OF SECOND OR TENTH AMENDMENT COULD BE SIGN OF POLITICAL EXTREMISM JUSTICE THOMAS THINKS AMERICANS HAVE TOO MANY RIGHTS THE FLIP SIDE OF ZERO TOLERANCE  HE WAS ABUSED BY BORDER PATROL ANOTHER GOVERNMENT FUNDED FUSION CENTER BAD MOUTHING DEMOCRACY ZERO TOLERANCE CLAIMS A VICTIM BILL WOULD ALLOW PRESIDENT TO SHUT DOWN INTERNET CITIZENS FIGHTING BACK AGAINST SPY CAMS CONGRESS BANNED RESELLING CHILDREN'S BOOKS PRINTED BEFORE 1985 MARCH 2009 RIGHT TO COUNSEL SLIPPING AWAY SOUTH LEADS NATION IN LOCK UPS - ESPECIALLY BLACKS 15 REASONS WHY THE DRINKING AGE SHOULD BE 18 STUDENT LOSES FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS BY DISCUSSING SECOND AMENDMENT LOCAL HEROES: MISSISSIPPI HOUSE VOTES TO BAN TICKET CAMERAS LOCAL HEROES: JURIES NULLIFY LAWS THEY DON'T LIKE NEW YORK CITY CUTS CRIME & LOWERS NUMBER IN PRISON FEBRUARY 2009 OBAMA TO KEEP USING RENDITIONS NY POLICE SHOW BLATANT BIAS IN STOP & FRISK ACTIVIST UNMASKS HIMSELF AS FBI INFORMANT IN G.O.P. CONVENTION CASE LOCAL HEROES: SOUTH DAKOTA COURT RULES CURSING AT COP PROTECTED SPEECH FLIGHT ATTENDANTS ABUSING TERROR LAWS JANUARY 2009 CALIFORNIA USING MARINES FOR CIVILIAN POLICE WORK JESSE VENTURA ON THE CIA'S INTEREST IN MINNESOTA FBI USING CELLPHONES AS HIDDEN MIKES MPAA PROPOSES VICIOUS INTERNET SPYING, BLACKLISTING RECORDING INDUSTRY TERRORIZE TRANSPLANT PATIENT OVER DOWNLOADS CLOSING GITMO IS FINE, BUT WHAT IS OBAMA GOING TO DO ABOUT HIS OTHER 27,000 ILLEGAL PRISONERS? 2008
WERE SPECIFIC REPORTERS TARGETED BY NSA WIRETAPS? POLICE LISTED GAY RIGHTS GROUP AMONG TERRORISTS HOLDER SUPPORTS SECRET SEARCHES OF LIBRARY & BOOKSTORE RECORDS NEW POLICE REVELATIONS ILLUSTRATE MADNESS OF WAR ON TERROR MILITARY PREPARING FOR MARITAL LAW THE MILITARY IS MUSCLING IN EVERYWHERE ARMY'S NEW OCCUPATION FORCE IN U.S. QUESTION AND SEARCH YOU WITHOUT A WARRANT  AUTOMATED SPYING ON EVERYONE & EVERYTHING Tom Burghardt, Global Research - If incorporating personal details into an RFID (radio-frequency identification) chip implanted into a passport or driver's license may sound like a "smart" alternative to endless lines at the airport and intrusive questioning by securocrats, think again. Since the late 1990s, corporate grifters have touted the "benefits" of the devilish transmitters as a "convenient" and "cheap" way to tag individual commodities, one that would "revolutionize" inventory management and theft prevention. Indeed, everything from paper towels to shoes, pets to underwear have been "tagged" with the chips. "Savings" would be "passed on" to the consumer. . . RFID tags are small computer chips connected to miniature antennae that can be fixed to or implanted within physical objects, including human beings. The RFID chip itself contains an Electronic Product Code that can be "read" when a RFID reader emits a radio signal. The chips are divided into two categories, passive or active. A "passive" tag doesn't contain a battery and its "read" range is variable, from less than an inch to twenty or thirty feet. An "active" tag on the other hand, is self-powered and has a much longer range. The data from an "active" tag can be sent directly to a computer system involved in inventory control--or surveillance. But as Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center state in a joint position paper, "RFID has the potential to jeopardize consumer privacy, reduce or eliminate purchasing anonymity, and threaten civil liberties." As these organizations noted, while there are beneficial uses of RFID, some attributes of the technology could be deployed in ways that threaten privacy and civil liberties: - Hidden placement of tags. RFID tags can be embedded into/onto objects and documents without the knowledge of the individual who obtains those items. As radio waves travel easily and silently through fabric, plastic, and other materials, it is possible to read RFID tags sewn into clothing or affixed to objects contained in purses, shopping bags, suitcases, and more. - Unique identifiers for all objects worldwide. The Electronic Product Code potentially enables every object on earth to have its own unique ID. The use of unique ID numbers could lead to the creation of a global item registration system in which every physical object is identified and linked to its purchaser or owner at the point of sale or transfer. - Massive data aggregation. RFID deployment requires the creation of massive databases containing unique tag data. These records could be linked with personal identifying data, especially as computer memory and processing capacities expand. - Hidden readers. Tags can be read from a distance, not restricted to line of sight, by readers that can be incorporated invisibly into nearly any environment where human beings or items congregate. RFID readers have already been experimentally embedded into floor tiles, woven into carpeting and floor mats, hidden in doorways, and seamlessly incorporated into retail shelving and counters, making it virtually impossible for a consumer to know when or if he or she was being "scanned." - Individual tracking and profiling. If personal identity were linked with unique RFID tag numbers, individuals could be profiled and tracked without their knowledge or consent. For example, a tag embedded in a shoe could serve as a de facto identifier for the person wearing it. Even if item-level information remains generic, identifying items people wear or carry could associate them with, for example, particular events like political rallies. BAGHDAD ON THE POTOMAC ANTI-TERRORISM CENTERS DON'T HAVE ENOUGH BUSINESS, SO WHY NOT SPY ON ALL OF US? BUSH FINDS NEW WAYS TO KEEP THINGS SECRET BUSH HAS SEIZED MORE POWER THAN ANY BRITISH OR AMERICAN LEADER SINCE 17TH CENTURY THE NEW INTERNET & THE POLICE STATE BUSH CLAIMS RIGHT TO ARREST & SEND YOU
TO A MILITARY BRIG BUSH TERROR TACTICS AGAINST CITIZENS INCREASE AS TERROR PROSECUTIONS DECLINE SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD, LA TIMES - The Bush administration recently announced it will allow select members of Congress to read Justice Department legal opinions about the CIA's controversial detainee interrogation program that have been hidden from Congress until now. But as the administration allows a glimpse of this secret law -- and it is law -- we are left wondering what other laws it is still keeping under lock and key. It's a given in our democracy that laws should be a matter of public record. But the law in this country includes not just statutes and regulations, which the public can readily access. It also includes binding legal interpretations made by courts and the executive branch. These interpretations are increasingly being withheld from the public and Congress. Perhaps the most notorious example is the recently released 2003 Justice Department memorandum on torture written by John Yoo. The memorandum was, for a nine-month period in 2003, the law that the administration followed when it came to matters of torture. And that law was essentially a declaration that the administration could ignore the laws passed by Congress. The content of the memo was deeply troubling, but just as troubling was the fact that this legal opinion was classified and its content kept secret for years. As we now know, the memo should never have been classified because it contains no information that could compromise national security if released. In a Senate hearing that I chaired April 30, the top official in charge of classification policy from 2002 to 2007 testified that classification of this memo showed "either profound ignorance of or deep contempt for" the standards for classification. The memos on torture policy that have been released or leaked hint at a much bigger body of law about which we know virtually nothing. The Yoo memo was filled with references to other Justice Department memos that have yet to see the light of day, on subjects including the government's ability to detain U.S. citizens without congressional authorization and the government's ability to bypass the 4th Amendment in domestic military operations. Another body of secret law involves the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In 1978, Congress created the special FISA court to review the government's requests for wiretaps in intelligence investigations, which is -- and should be -- done behind closed doors. But with changes in technology and with this administration's efforts to expand its surveillance powers, the court today is doing more than just reviewing warrant applications. It is issuing important interpretations of FISA that have effectively made new law. These interpretations deeply affect Americans' privacy rights, and yet Americans don't know about them because they are not allowed to see them. Very few members of Congress have been allowed to see them either. When the Senate recently approved some broad and controversial changes to FISA, almost none of the senators voting on the bill could know what the law currently is. The code of secrecy also extends to yet another body of law: changes to executive orders. The administration takes the position that a president can "waive" or "modify" a published executive order without any public notice -- simply by not following it. It's every president's prerogative to change an executive order, but doing so without public notice works a secret change in the law. And, because the published order stays on the books, Congress and the public have no idea that it's no longer in effect. We don't know how many of these covert changes have been made by this administration or, for that matter, by past administrations. No one questions the need for the government to protect information about intelligence sources and methods, troop movements or weapons systems. But there's a big difference between withholding information about military or intelligence operations from the public and withholding the law that governs the executive branch. Keeping the law secret doesn't enhance national security, but it does give the government free rein to operate without oversight or accountability. Even the congressional intelligence committees, which are supposed to oversee the intelligence community, have been denied access to some of these legal opinions. Congress should pass legislation
to require the administration to alert Congress when the law
created by Justice Department opinions ignores or even violates
the laws passed by Congress, and to require public notice when
it is waiving or modifying a published executive order. Congress
and the public shouldn't have to wonder whether the executive
branch is following the laws that are on the books or some other,
secret law.  CHENEY'S LAWYER SAYS CONGRESS HAS NO POWER OVER VICE PRESIDENT BUSH AIDE MADE LEGAL CASE FOR CRUEL DICTATORSHIP JUSTICE DEPARTMENT CLAIMED FOURTH AMENDMENT DIDN'T APPLY TO MILITARY d FBI S prolly readN yr txt msgs HOMELAND SECURITY'S FIVE YEARS OF SCREW UPS BUSH REGIME ENGAGING IN MASSIVE ILLEGAL SPYING ON AMERICANS VIRGINIA SETTING UP ITS OWN BIG BROTHER OPERATION BUSH REGIME BUILDING CONCENTRATION CAMPS BACKED BY DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS' APPROVAL OF MARTIAL LAW LEWIS SEILER & DAN HAMBURG, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE - Since 9/11, and seemingly without the notice of most Americans, the federal government has assumed the authority to institute martial law, arrest a wide swath of dissidents (citizen and non-citizen alike), and detain people without legal or constitutional recourse in the event of "an emergency influx of immigrants in the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs." Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States. The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees. According to diplomat and author Peter Dale Scott, the KBR contract is part of a Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of "all removable aliens" and "potential terrorists." Fraud-busters such as Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, have complained about these contracts, saying that more taxpayer dollars should not go to taxpayer-gouging Halliburton. But the real question is: What kind of "new programs" require the construction and refurbishment of detention facilities in nearly every state of the union with the capacity to house perhaps millions of people? Sect. 1042 of the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act, "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies," gives the executive the power to invoke martial law. For the first time in more than a century, the president is now authorized to use the military in response to "a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, a terrorist attack or any other condition in which the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to the extent that state officials cannot maintain public order." The Military Commissions Act of 2006, rammed through Congress just before the 2006 midterm elections, allows for the indefinite imprisonment of anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on a list of "terrorist" organizations, or who speaks out against the government's policies. The law calls for secret trials for citizens and non-citizens alike. Also in 2007, the White House quietly issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD-51), to ensure "continuity of government" in the event of what the document vaguely calls a "catastrophic emergency." Should the president determine that such an emergency has occurred, he and he alone is empowered to do whatever he deems necessary to ensure "continuity of government." This could include everything from canceling elections to suspending the Constitution to launching a nuclear attack. Congress has yet to hold a single hearing on NSPD-51. U.S. Rep. Jane Harman, D-Venice has come up with a new way to expand the domestic "war on terror." Her Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (HR1955), which passed the House by the lopsided vote of 404-6, would set up a commission to "examine and report upon the facts and causes" of so-called violent radicalism and extremist ideology, then make legislative recommendations on combating it. . . investigative power to combat it. A clue as to where Harman's commission might be aiming is the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, a law that labels those who "engage in sit-ins, civil disobedience, trespass, or any other crime in the name of animal rights" as terrorists. Other groups in the crosshairs could be anti-abortion protesters, anti-tax agitators, immigration activists, environmentalists, peace demonstrators, Second Amendment rights supporters ... the list goes on and on. According to author Naomi Wolf, the National Counterterrorism Center holds the names of roughly 775,000 "terror suspects" with the number increasing by 20,000 per month. What could the government be contemplating that leads it to make contingency plans to detain without recourse millions of its own citizens? The Constitution does not allow the executive to have unchecked power under any circumstances. The people must not allow the president to use the war on terrorism to rule by fear instead of by law. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8067 LOCAL HEROES: OHIO MAYOR REPELS MARINES WHO WANT TO PLAY WAR GAMES IN HIS TOWN THE FBI'S SECRET PRIVATE DEPUTIES - WITH PERMISSION TO SHOOT TO KILL? MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD, THE PROGRESSIVE - Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does -- and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to "shoot to kill" in the event of martial law. InfraGard is "a child of the FBI," says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm. . . InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing the local InfraGard chapters. (There are now eighty-six of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization of private sector InfraGard members. "We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility," says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing. "At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector," the InfraGard website states. "InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories." In November 2001, InfraGard had around 1,700 members. As of late January, InfraGard had 23,682 members, according to its website, www.infragard.net, which adds that "350 of our nation's Fortune 500 have a representative in InfraGard." To join, each person must be sponsored by "an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization." The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation. . . InfraGard is not readily accessible to the general public. Its communications with the FBI and Homeland Security are beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act under the "trade secrets" exemption, its website says. And any conversation with the public or the media is supposed to be carefully rehearsed. http://www.alternet.org/rights/76388/ CONYERS GIVES BUSH REGIME A PASS ON ITS CRIMES PENTAGON: TREAT INTERNET LIKE AN ENEMY WEAPONS SYSTEM GLOBAL RESEARCH - The Pentagon's Information Operations Roadmap is blunt about the fact that an internet, with the potential for free speech, is in direct opposition to their goals. The internet needs to be dealt with as if it were an enemy "weapons system". The 2003 Pentagon document entitled the Information Operation Roadmap was released to the public after a Freedom of Information Request by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in 2006. . . From the Information Operation Roadmap. . . "We Must Fight the Net. DoD [Department of Defense] is building an information-centric force. Networks are increasingly the operational center of gravity, and the Department must be prepared to fight the net. DoD's Defense in Depth strategy should operate on the premise that the Department will fight the net as it would a weapons system." It should come as no surprise that the Pentagon would aggressively attack the information highway in their attempt to achieve dominance in information warfare. Donald Rumsfeld's involvement in the Project for a New American Century sheds more light on the need and desire to control information. The Project for a New American Century was founded in 1997 with many members that later became the nucleus of the George W. Bush administration. The list includes: Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, I. Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz among many other powerful but less well know names. Their stated purpose was to use a hugely expanded U.S. military to project "American global leadership." In September of 2000, PNAC published a now infamous document entitled Rebuilding America's Defences. This document has a very similar theme as the Pentagon's Information Operations Roadmap which was signed by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. From Rebuilding America's Defenses: "It is now commonly understood that information and other new technologies... are creating a dynamic that may threaten America's ability to exercise its dominant military power." "Much as control of the high seas - and the protection of international commerce - defined global powers in the past, so will control of the new "international commons" be a key to world power in the future. An America incapable of protecting its interests or that of its allies in space or the infosphere will find it difficult to exert global political leadership. "Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and "combat" likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, cyber-space," and perhaps the world of microbes. . . Part of the Information Operation Roadmap's plans for the internet are to "ensure the graceful degradation of the network rather than its collapse. . . As far as the Pentagon is concerned the internet is not all bad, after all, it was the Department of Defense through DARPA that gave us the internet in the first place. The internet is useful not only as a business tool but also is excellent for monitoring and tracking users, acclimatizing people to a virtual world, and developing detailed psychological profiles of every user, among many other Pentagon positives. But, one problem with the current internet is the potential for the dissemination of ideas and information not consistent with US government themes and messages, commonly known as free speech. Naturally, since the plan was to completely dominate the infosphere, the internet would have to be adjusted or replaced with an upgraded and even more Pentagon friendly successor. TERROR JUNKIES TAKING OVER CAMPUSES MICHAEL GOULD-WARTOFSKY, NATION - From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention"--as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name--have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university. Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission: 1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with student protesters in the cross hairs. The government's number-one target? Peace and justice organizations. From 2003 to 2007 an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice system, a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats" to the Defense Department itself. In 2006 the ACLU uncovered, via Freedom of Information Act requests, at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the United States--some listed as "credible threats"--from student groups at the University of California, Santa Cruz; State University of New York, Albany; Georgia State University; and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.. . . 2. Lock and load. Many campus police departments are morphing into heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry, from Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles. Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of the "war on crime" only escalated with the President's "war on terror." Each school shooting--most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech--adds fuel to the armament flames. . . 3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused on campus. Surveillance has become a boom industry nationally--one that now reaches deep into the heart of campuses. In fact, universities have witnessed explosive growth since 2001 in the electronic surveillance of students, faculty and campus workers. . . The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators reports that surveillance cameras have found their way onto at least half of all colleges, their numbers on any given campus doubling, tripling or, in a few cases, rising tenfold since September 11, 2001. Such cameras have proliferated by the hundreds on private campuses, in particular. The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, has more than 400 watching over it, while Harvard and Brown have about 200 each. . . 4. Mine student records. Student records have in recent years been opened up to all manner of data mining for purposes of investigation, recruitment or just all-purpose tracking. From 2001 to 2006, in an operation code-named Project Strike Back, the Education Department teamed up with the FBI to scour the records of the 14 million students who applied for federal financial aid each year. The objective? "To identify potential people of interest," explained an FBI spokesperson cryptically, especially those linked to "potential terrorist activity.". . . 5. Track foreign-born students; keep the undocumented out. Under the auspices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been keeping close tabs on foreign students . . . As of October 2007, ICE reported that it was actively following 713,000 internationals on campuses, while keeping more than 4.7 million names in the database. 6. Take over the curriculum, the
classroom and the laboratory. . . . DHS has launched its own
curriculum under its Office of University Programs, intended,
it says, to "foster a homeland security culture within the
academic community." http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20080128&s=gould-wartofsky HOW CHENEY FOUGHT TO GIVE BUSH DICTATOR STATUS PBS - For three decades Vice President Dick Cheney conducted a secretive, behind-closed-doors campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power. Finally, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department and the White House made a number of controversial legal decisions. Orchestrated by Cheney and his lawyer David Addington, the department interpreted executive power in an expansive and extraordinary way, granting President George W. Bush the power to detain, interrogate, torture, wiretap and spy -- without congressional approval or judicial review. . . "The vice president believes that Congress has very few powers to actually constrain the president and the executive branch," former Justice Department attorney Marty Lederman tells Frontline. "He believes the president should have the final word -- indeed the only word -- on all matters within the executive branch." After Sept. 11, Cheney and Addington were determined to implement their vision -- in secret. The vice president and his counsel found an ally in John Yoo, a lawyer at the Justice Department's extraordinarily powerful Office of Legal Counsel. In concert with Addington, Yoo wrote memoranda authorizing the president to act with unparalleled authority. "Through interviews with key administration figures, Cheney's Law documents the bruising bureaucratic battles between a group of conservative Justice Department lawyers and the Office of the Vice President over the legal foundation for the most closely guarded programs in the war on terror," says Frontline producer Michael Kirk. . . In his most extensive television interview since leaving the Justice Department, former Assistant Attorney General Jack L. Goldsmith describes his initial days at the OLC in the fall of 2003 as he learned about the government's most secret and controversial covert operations. Goldsmith was shocked by the administration's secret assertion of unlimited power. "There were extravagant and unnecessary claims of presidential power that were wildly overbroad to the tasks at hand," Goldsmith says. "I had a whole flurry of emotions. My first one was disbelief that programs of this importance could be supported by legal opinions that were this flawed. My second was the realization that I would have a very, very hard time standing by these opinions if pressed. My third was the sinking feeling, what was I going to do if I was pressed about reaffirming these opinions?" As Goldsmith began to question his colleagues' claims that the administration could ignore domestic laws and international treaties, he began to clash with Cheney's office. According to Goldsmith, Addington warned him, "If you rule that way, the blood of the 100,000 people who die in the next attack will be on your hands." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/cheney/etc/synopsis.html STUDY: YOU'RE AS LIKELY TO DROWN IN A TOILET AS TO BE KILLED BY A TERRORIST POLICE STATE NATIONAL ID CARD COMES CLOSER TSA CRIBS DIRECTLY FROM OWELL'S '1984' CORY DOCTOROW, BOING BOING - TSA screeners are learning to recognize a set of secret, forbidden facial expressions. If your face slips into one of these during a TSA inspection, you will be taken off and given a thorough, secondary screening. . . Making Light's Avram Grumer draws a vivid parallel to Orwell's facecrime: "He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself - anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called. (Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part 1, Chapter 5)" It's a complicated issue: on the one hand, this beats racial profiling. On the other hand, the penalty for wearing the wrong face is nigh-unlimited. We've all heard stories of screeners detaining people, forbidding them to fly, and so on, in a kind of bottomless expression of authority without oversight. I'd feel a lot better about this if the TSA would publish the forbidden faces (look, if it's peer-reviewed science, that means terrorists can just look it up in the damned journals, and if it's not science, why should we believe it works?) so that we can all verify for ourselves whether this actually works or whether it's just a bunch of hooey; I'd also feel better if the TSA acted as though the Constitution mattered to them, securing us from unreasonable search and seizure, being answerable to us as their tax-paying employers, and maintaining the presumption of innocence throughout our traveling experience. http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/01/tsa-to-punish-fliers.html BUSH REGIME TRIED TO SPY ON NEIGHBORHOOD TO NEIGHBORHOOD PHONE CALLS  RAW STORY - Bush has issued 1100 signing statements -- almost twice as many as all previous presidents put together -- often completely reversing the intended effect of legislation. For example, when Congress voted overwhelmingly to ban torture, Bush announced that this would "make it clear to the world that this government does not torture." Two weeks later, he added a signing statement to the bill that allowed him to ignore it. Similarly, when a bill required the Justice Department to report to Congress on the use of the Patriot Act, Bush added a proviso that he could override this requirement any time he thought necessary. Law professor Jonathan Turley told Abrams that the practice has two very serious effects. On one hand, "by using signing statements to this extent, the president becomes a government unto himself." But it also gives lower-level officials cover for their own illegal behavior by creating a deliberate area of ambiguity about the meaning of the laws. "How does he get away with it?" [MSNBC'S Dan] Abrams asked Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage. Savage explained that signing statements have previously been considered merely as instructions to the executive branch on how to interpret legislation, and typically no one outside the executive branch even reads them. "It's an extraordinarily destabilizing effect upon our system," Turley emphasized. "Our system really only has one rule that can't be broken ... That one rule is, you can't go outside the rules." Once the executive ceases to respect the authority of the legislative branch, everything else is thrown into doubt. Savage noted that Dick Cheney appears to be the motivating force in this expansion of presidential power. Cheney was chief of staff to President Gerald Ford in the 1970's, when Congress was taking steps to prevent any future Watergate-style excesses, and he has never ceased trying to bring things back to the way they were under Nixon. According to Savage, Cheney's aide David Addington, who has been with him since the 1980's "is said to be the chief architect of these signing statements" and is the leader of the legal team pushing the most radical theories of presidential power. "It's astounding to me how they continue to get away with this," Abrams concluded. DAN ABRAMS VIDEO REPORT BUSH REGIME TO LAUNCH MASSIVE DOMESTIC SPYING PROGRAM TIM SHORROCK, CORPWATCH - A new intelligence institution to be inaugurated soon by the Bush administration will allow government spying agencies to conduct broad surveillance and reconnaissance inside the United States for the first time. Under a proposal being reviewed by Congress, a National Applications Office will be established to coordinate how the Department of Homeland Security and domestic law enforcement and rescue agencies use imagery and communications intelligence picked up by U.S. spy satellites. If the plan goes forward, the NAO will create the legal mechanism for an unprecedented degree of domestic intelligence gathering that would make the U.S. one of the world's most closely monitored nations. Until now, domestic use of electronic intelligence from spy satellites was limited to scientific agencies with no responsibility for national security or law enforcement. The intelligence-sharing system to be managed by the NAO will rely heavily on private contractors including Boeing, BAE Systems, L-3 Communications and Science Applications International Corporation. . . The NAO is "an idea whose time has arrived," Charles Allen, a top U.S. intelligence official, told the Wall Street Journal in August 2007 after it broke the news of the creation of the NAO. Allen, the DHS's chief intelligence officer, will head the new program. The announcement came just days after President George W. Bush signed a new law approved by Congress to expand the ability of the NSA to eavesdrop, without warrants, on telephone calls, e-mail and faxes passing through telecommunications hubs in the U.S. when the government suspects agents of a foreign power may be involved. . . Donald Kerr, a former NRO director who is now the number two at ODNI, recently explained to reporters that the intelligence community was no longer discussing whether or not to spy on U.S. citizens: "Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety," Kerr said. "I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up, in terms of anonymity, but [also] what safeguards we want in place to be sure that giving that doesn't empty our bank account or do something equally bad elsewhere." DECEMBER 2008 CONSTITUTIONAL DEAD LETTERS: HOW OUR RIGHTS DISAPPEARED PUBLIC DEFENDERS IN SEVEN STATES REFUSING NEW CASES OR SUING TO PREVENT THEM FEDERAL JUDGE OKAYS APARTHEID STYLE NEIGHBORHOOD BLOCKADES ACLU DETAILS STEPS NEW PRESIDENT SHOULD TAKE TO RESTORE LIBERTIES ACLU PRESSES BUSH REGIME ON DOMESTIC MILITARY USE MOST AMERICANS NOW OPPOSE MANDATORY MINIMUM SENTENCES OCTOBER 2008 MARYLAND CLASSIFIED 53 NONVIOLENT ACTIVISTS AS TERRORISTS HOMELAND POLICE PROCEEDING WITH NEW PLAN TO SPY ON YOU WITHOUT THEM SPYING ON YOU  HOMELAND POLICE FIND NEW WAY TO INSULT CONSTITUTION AUTOMATED SPYING ON EVERYONE & EVERYTHING BUSH REGIME THUMBS NOSE AT WHISTLEBLOWER ACT MASSIVE TAKEDOWN OF ANTI-SCIENTOLOGY VIDEOS ON YOUTUBE TEXAS SCHOOLS PUT ANKLE BRACELETS ON TRUANTS DENVER POLICE CONTINUE TO IGNORE CITY'S WILL ON POT ENFORCEMENT FREE MARKET CAPITALISM ENDS ON THE SIDEWALK BUSH'S PLAN TO EXPAND SPYING ON INNOCENT AMERICANS  FOR DRAWNG THIS PICTURE NYC HAS TO PAY $2 MILLION FOR 5O FALSE PROTEST ARRESTS RECOVERED HISTORY: WHERE AMERICA'S DRINKING LAW CAME FROM LOUISIANA GOVERNOR MAKES IT'S OK TO DISCRIMINATE AGAINST GAYS COLLEGE PRESIDENTS SAY IT'S TIME TO RETHINK DRINKING AGE HOMELAND POLICE ABUSE PASSENGERS AT JFK AIRPORT SEPTEMBER 2008  THEIR BRUTALITY AT DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION AUGUST 2008 BUSH REGIME PLANS TO EXPAND SPYING ON AMERICAN CITIZENS, GROUPS OHIO COURT SAYS COPS CAN'T IGNORE WARRANT REQUIREMENT ARKANSAS MAYOR TRIES FASCISM TO CURB VIOLENCE MOVIE MAKERS WANT TO SEIZE CONTROL OF YOUR TV FBI TRIED TO HIDE QUESTIONS ABOUT DNA ACCURACY MARYLAND STATE POLICE SPIED ON, INFILTRATED ACTIVIST ORGANIZATIONS COPS SEIZE CARS WITHOUT CONVICTIONS; TAKE THEM FOR PRIVATE USE HOMELAND POLICE ABUSE PASSENGERS AT JFK AIRPORT WHAT OUR PRISON POLICIES HAVE COST US JULY 2008 U.S. - 5% WORLD'S POPULATION, 25% OF ITS PRISONERS CUSTOMS OFFICIALS ROUTINELY SEIZING 5-10% OF LAPTOPS APPEALS COURT BLOWS WHISTLE ON GITMO CASE WHY VIRTUAL STRIP SEARCHING AIRLINE PASSENGERS IS WRONG BUSH PLANS DATA BASE ON AMERICAN CITIZENS MILITARY RATTLES DENVER WITH MOCK EXERCISE DENVER BUYING WEAPONS TO SUPPRESS DISSENT JUNE 2008 HOW OUR SEXUALITY IS BEING RESTRICTED ONE BAD LAW AT A TIME COMCAST HIRING SPIES TO KEEP TRACK OF CUSTOMERS ONE IN NINE YOUNG BLACK MEN BEHIND BARS MAY 2008 A BRITISH COMMUNITY COURT AT WORK UPDATED DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE JUDGE REJECTS BUSH’S VIEW ON WIRETAPS RESTORING EX-FELONS VOTING RIGHTS STUDENT DIES AFTER POLICE ALLEGEDLY ABUSE HIM PASSENGERS ON LOS ANGELES TRANSIT SUBJECTED TO RANDOM SEARCHES WILL PUBLIC DEFEND INTERNET AGAINST GOVERNMENT ATTACK? THE SUPREME COURT DOES SOMETHING RIGHT JUDGE BACKS CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR AGAINST ARMY POLICE PSYCHOLOGISTS SAYS COPS HAVE BEEN 'BRAINWASHED' ABOUT TASERS WHY UC BERKELEY SHOULD FIRE ITS TORTURE PROFESSOR UNLOCKING AMERICA: THE DAMAGE OUR PRISON POLICIES DO  RICK MOORE A major report entitled "Unlocking America," coauthored by nine leading criminology and penal experts--including the University of Minnesota's Joshua Page--explores the causes of the exploding prison population and offers suggestions for reversing the numbers. Among the report's recommendations are eliminating prison as a sanction for technical parole and probation violations, reducing the length of some prison sentences, and reducing the number of people incarcerated for "victimless" crimes, including many drug offenses. "We need to reduce the number of people that are going to prison and be methodical about reserving prison beds and allocating resources for the most serious and violent offenders, and figure out alternative sanctions for other offenders," Page says. According to Page, the number of people incarcerated grew for various reasons. More people have been given prison sentences instead of alternative sanctions such as probation, particularly for drug offenses. In addition, sentences have become longer, with mandatory minimum sentences and the implementation of "truth-in-sentencing"--which reduces the amount of time that can be deducted from a sentence for good behavior (making it more "true" to the original sentence). Last year, roughly 32 percent of new admissions to Minnesota prisons were for people who violated the terms of their probation or parole, known as "technical violators," [Joshua Page, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota] says. (This could be for reasons like failing a drug test or not finding work.) "And then if you add the 21.6 percent that are for drug offenses, more than half of Minnesota's prison population are for [technical] violators and drugs." Page and the other authors [of a new report] recommend de-criminalizing victimless crimes, meaning people would not receive any criminal punishment for drug use, prostitution, and the like. They also suggest that states use alternative sanctions for some offenders who currently serve prison sentences--for instance, selective property offenders. Options might include paying restitution or performing community service, whether it's picking up trash on the side of the road or serving food at a homeless shelter. UNLOCKING AMERICA President Bush was right. A prison sentence for Lewis "Scooter" Libby was excessive- so too was the long three year probation term. But while he was at it, President Bush should have commuted the sentences of hundreds of thousands of Americans who each year have also received prison sentences for crimes that pose little if any danger or harm to our society. In the United States, every year since 1970, when only 196,429 persons were in state and federal prisons, the prison population has grown. Today there are over 1.5 million in state and federal prisons. Another 750,000 are in the nation's jails. The growth has been constant- in years of rising crime and falling crime, in good economic times and bad, during wartime and while we were at peace. A generation of growth has produced prison populations that are now eight times what they were in 1970. And there is no end to the growth under current policies. The PEW Charitable Trust reports that under current sentencing policies the state and federal prison populations will grow by another 192,000 prisoners over the next five years. The incarceration rate will increase from 491 to 562 per 100,000 population. And the nation will have to spend an additional $27.5 billion in operational and construction costs over this fi ve-year period on top of the over $60 billion now being spent on corrections each year. This generation-long growth of imprisonment has occurred not because of growing crime rates, but because of changes in sentencing policy that resulted in dramatic increases in the proportion of felony convictions resulting in prison sentences and in the length-of-stay in prison that those sentences required. . . . Prisons are self-fueling systems. About two-thirds of the 650,000 prison admissions are persons who have failed probation or parole - approximately half of these people have been sent to prison for technical violations. Having served their sentences, roughly 650,000 people are released each year having served an average of 2-3 years. About 40% will ultimately be sent back to prison as "recidivists"- in many states, for petty drug and property crimes or violations of parole requirements that do not even constitute crimes. This high rate of recidivism is, in part, a result of a range of policies that increase surveillance over people released from prison, impose obstacles to their reentry into society, and eliminate support systems that ease their transition from prison to the streets. Prison policy has exacerbated the festering national problem of social and racial inequality. Incarceration rates for blacks and Latinos are now more than six times higher than for whites; 60% of America's prison population is either African-American or Latino. A shocking eight percent of black men of working age are now behind bars, and 21% of those between the ages of 25 and 44 have served a sentence at some point in their lives. At current rates, one-third of all black males, one-sixth of Latino males, and one in 17 white males will go to prison during their lives. Incarceration rates this high are a national tragedy.2 Women now represent the fastest growing group of incarcerated persons. In 2001, they were more than three times as likely to end up in prison as in 1974, largely due to their low-level involvement in drug-related activity and the deeply punitive sentencing policies aimed at drugs. The massive incarceration of young males from mostly poor- and working-class neighborhoods- and the taking of women from their families and jobs- has crippled their potential for forming healthy families and achieving economic gains. The authors of this report have spent their careers studying crime and punishment. We are convinced that we need a different strategy. Our contemporary laws. . . By far the major reason for the increase in prison populations at least since 1990 has been longer lengths of imprisonment. The adoption of truth in sentencing provisions that require prisoners to serve most of their sentences in prison, a wide variety of mandatory minimum sentencing provisions that prevent judges from placing defendants on probation even when their involvement in the conduct that led to the conviction was minor, reductions in the amount of good time a prisoner can receive while imprisoned, and more conservative parole boards have significantly impacted the length of stay. For example, in a special study by the U.S. Department of Justice on truth in sentencing, between 1990 and 1997, the numbers of prison admissions increased by only 17% (from 460,739 to 540,748), while the prison population increased by 60% (from 689,577 to 1,100,850). . . . Proponents of prison expansion have heralded this growth as a smashing success. But a large number of studies contradict that claim. Most scientific evidence suggests that there is little if any relationship between fluctuations in crime rates and incarceration rates. In many cases, crime rates have risen or declined independent of imprisonment rates. New York City, for example, has produced one of the nation's largest declines in crime in the nation while significantly reducing its jail and prison populations.Connecticut, New Jersey, Ohio, and Massachusetts have also reduced their prison populations during the same time that crime rates were declining. A study of crime and incarceration rates from 1980 to 1991 in all 50 states and the District of Columbia shows that incarceration rates exploded during this period. The states that increased incarceration rates the least were just as likely to experience decreases in crime as those that increased them the most. . . Other studies reach similar conclusions, finding "no consistent relationship between incarceration rates and crime rates" and "no support for the ‘more prisoners, less crime' thesis." . . . Incarceration may not have had much impact on crime, but it has had numerous unintended consequences, ranging from racial injustice and damage to families and children to worsening public health, civic disengagement, and even increases in crime. Bruce Western demonstrates the extraordinarily disparate impact of imprisonment on young black males compared to any other subgroup of society. For example, he shows that nearly one-half of all young black males who have not finished high school are behind bars, an incarceration rate that is six times higher than for white male dropouts. He then shows how incarceration damages the lifetime earnings, labor market participation, and marriage prospects for those who have been to prison and concludes that the U.S. prison system exacerbates and sustains racial inequality. British penologists Joseph Murray and David Farrington have analyzed data sets about child development from three nations and found that parental incarceration contributes to higher rates of delinquency, mental illness, and drug abuse, and reduces levels of school success and later employment among their children. . . The failure of efforts to develop methods of accurately identifying the small number of offenders who do commit particularly horrendous crimes after serving their sentences fueled demands for longer sentences across the board. The logic of this argument was that if we can't single out the truly dangerous, we will assume that anyone with two or three convictions for a relatively wide range of offenses is a dangerous habitual criminal, and keep them all in prison for an extremely long time. On the basis of this reasoning, a number of states adopted mandatory sentencing, truth in sentencing and in some states "three strikes" laws, all of which extend prison sentences. These laws have done little to reduce crime. Few convicted persons have the requisite number of previous felony convictions to qualify for the enhanced sentences. This is because rates of return to serious crime on the part of those released from prison are not high. Just 1.2% of those who served time for homicide and were released in 1994 were rearrested for a new homicide within three years of release, and just 2.5% of released rapists were arrested for another rape. Sex offenders were less likely than non-sex-offenders to be rearrested for any offense. . . . The U.S. Department of Justice conducted a major study of criminal involvement of prisoners who had been released in 1994. It found that only 5% of the 3 million arrests made in seven states between 1994 and 1997 were of recently released prisoners.47 California's "three strikes" law has had a number of evaluations; almost all found that it failed to reduce crime. These studies make clear that, while many people who are released from prison end up back behind bars, they are but a fraction of the overall crime problem. Lengthening their sentences, as a means of dealing with crime will at best have only marginal impact. . . At the turn of the 19th century reformers
realized that brutal prisons embitter prisoners rather than reform
them. Yet this persistent faith that prisoners can be discouraged
from returning to crime by subjecting them to harsh penalties,
or that the population at large can be deterred more effectively
with severe penalties than with milder ones, has never had empirical
support. Decades of research on capital punishment have failed
to produce compelling evidence that it prevents homicide more
effectively than long prison sentences. Community penalties,
it has been shown, are at least as effective in discouraging
return to crime as institutional penalties. Rigorous prison conditions
substantially increase recidivism. Evaluations show that boot
camps and "scared straight" programs either have no
effect on recidivism or increase it.  DC's police chief Kathy Lanier came up with a plan to get people to allow officers to search their homes for any object by granting them immunity only from the city' gun law. The local ACLU, led by Johnny Barnes, got on the case with a door to door information campaign that soon turned into a neighborhood march. With this sort of protest, Chief Lanier soon backed off of her sneaky search scheme. APRIL 2008 SUPREME COURT RULES ILLEGAL ARREST DOESN'T INVALIDATE SEARCH 17 YEAR OLD COLUMNIST FIRED FOR TELLING THE TRUTH NJ COURT: INTERNET USERS HAVE PRIVACY RIGHTS TO THEIR DATA GUN OWNERS ARE HAPPIER THAN OBAMA SUPPORTERS VIRGINIA STATE POLICE CONSPIRED WITH FBI TO LIMIT STATE'S OPEN GOVERNMENT LAW SUPREME COURT RULES ILLEGAL ARREST DOESN'T INVALIDATE SEARCH PENTAGON HEAVILY MANIPULATED TELEVISION MIKLITARY COVERAGE   NEXT TARGET OF THE PRIVACY INVADERS: YOUR MIND  DC MAYOR WANTS TO SPY ON EVERYONE WITH 5,000 CAMERAS MORE REASONS TO INVESTIGATE TASER USE ACLU CHARGES MILITARY USING FBI TO SPY ON AMERICANS PENTAGON STUDY SUGGESTS ILLEGAL INTERFERENCE WITH BLOGS INCLUDING CO-OPTING BLOGGERS, CREATING FAKE BLOGS, HACKING, CORRUPTING AND "TAKING DOWN" SITES DANGER ROOM, WIRED Since the start of the Iraq war, there's been a raucous debate in military circles over how to handle blogs -- and the service members who want to keep them. One faction sees blogs as security risks, and a collective waste of troops' time. The other (which includes top officers, like Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell) considers blogs to be a valuable source of information, and a way for ordinary troops to shape opinions, both at home and abroad. [A] 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, "Blogs and Military Information Strategy," offers a third approach -- co-opting bloggers, or even putting them on the payroll. "Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering," write the report's co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning. Lt. Commander Marc Boyd, a U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman, says the report was merely an academic exercise. "The comments are not 'actionable', merely thought provoking," he tells Danger Room. "The views expressed in the article publication are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policy or position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, USSOCOM [Special Operations Command], or the Joint Special Operations University.". . . The report introduces the military audience to the "blogging phenomenon," and lays out a number of ways in which the armed forces -- specifically, the military's public affairs, information operations, and psychological operations units -- might use the sites to their advantage" |||| Information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence... to pass the U.S. message. In this way, the U.S. can overleap the entrenched inequalities and make use of preexisting intellectual and social capital. Sometimes numbers can be effective; hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering. On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the U.S. military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust. An alternative strategy is to "make" a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however, and depending on the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the blog could be put online to any useful effect. Still, there are people in the military today who like to blog. In some cases, their talents might be redirected toward operating blogs as part of an information campaign. If a military blog offers valuable information that is not available from other sources, it could rise in rank fairly rapidly. |||| Denning, the report's author, has promoted controversial opinions before. In the early 1990s, when she was chair of the Georgetown University's computer science department, Denning emerged as the leading advocate for the so-called "Clipper Chip," a cryptographic device for protecting communications -- until the government wanted to listen in. The project was cancelled by 1996. In her 2006 paper, Denning warns that blogs can and will be used by America's enemies. These sites, she argues, can also be used to serve U.S. government interests. |||| There are certain to be cases where some blog, outside the control of the U.S. government, promotes a message that is antithetical to U.S. interests, or actively supports the informational, recruiting and logistical activities of our enemies. The initial reaction may be to take down the site, but this is problematic in that doing so does not guarantee that the site will remain down. As has been the case with many such sites, the offending site will likely move to a different host server, often in a third country. Moreover, such action will likely produce even more interest in the site and its contents. Also, taking down a site that is known to pass enemy EEIs (essential elements of information) and that gives us their key messages denies us a valuable information source. This is not to say that once the information passed becomes redundant or is superseded by a better source that the site should be taken down. At that point the enemy blog might be used covertly as a vehicle for friendly information operations. Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data-merely a few words or phrases-may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience. Better yet, if the blogger happens to be passing enemy communications and logistics data, the information content could be corrupted. If the messages are subtly tweaked and the data corrupted in the right way, the enemy may reason that the blogger in question has betrayed them and either take down the site (and the blogger) themselves, or by threatening such action, give the U.S. an opportunity to offer the individual amnesty in exchange for information. |||| http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/03/report-recruit.html MARCH 2008 POLICE REMOVE 80 YEAR OLD CHURCH DEACON FROM MALL FOR WEARING ANTI-WAR T SHIRT SUPREME COURT RESTRICTS FBI SEARCHES OF CAPITOL HILL d FBI S prolly readN yr txt msgs BANKS ENGAGED IN MASSIVE SPYING ON CUSTOMERS SCHOOL CENSORS STUDENT PAPER FOR SURVEY THAT FINDS SCHOOL DOESN'T LISTEN TO STUDENTS CLICKING ON THE WRONG WEB LINK IS NOW A FEDERAL CRIME HOMELAND POLICE BACK DOWN A BIT ON REAL ID REPORT: CRIME CAMERAS DON'T WORK BOSTON COMMUNITIES PROTEST BACKDOOR APPROACH TO POLICE SEARCH OF HOMES MAINERS STAND UP AGAINST REAL ID HOUSE GOP CONS DEMOCRATS INTO 5TH SECRET SESSION SINCE 1812 FEBRURY 2008    ATTORNEY GENERAL WANTS TO OVERRIDE JUDGES ON CRACK-COCAINE SENTENCING JANUARY 2008 WHY HATE CRIME LAWS ARE DANGEROUS 2007 NOVEMBER 2007 CORPORATIONS HELPING BUSH REGIME IN HUGE DOMESTIC SPYING PROGRAM FEDS HAVE DONE BACKGROUND CHECKS ON 25 MILLION AMERICANS THIS YEAR LOS ANGELES POLICE PLAN TO STEREOTYPE WHOLE MUSLIM COMMUNITIES CORPORATIONS HELPING BUSH REGIME IN HUGE DOMESTIC SPYING PROGRAM ELECTRONIC PRIVACY INFORMATION CENTER - In September 2006 the Department of Homeland Security reported that 38 state and local Information Fusion Centers supported by $380 million in federal dollars were operational. The investment in time, energy, and resources are focused on one objective: maximizing access to the greatest amount of information as possible. The range of information to be collected by service providers who participate in the fusion center effort could include: all sources of financial records kept by banking institutions; all contacts with the criminal justice system by criminals and non-criminals, all forms of education (day cares, preschools, primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities, and technical schools); government issued licenses and permits, access to medical records held by hospitals, public health, and primary care physicians, hospitality and lodging, information and telecommunication service providers, military facilities and defense industrial base; postal and shipping services, private security (alarm companies, armored car companies, investigative firms, corporate security offices); public works; social services; and transportation. . . Strategic information may provide data on individuals not under criminal investigation or operations that an entity manages, and tactical information may provide data be in support of ongoing criminal investigations. It would be very difficult to imagine someone living within the United States who would not have one or multiple points of information confluence in the proposed system. The Fusion Center guidance said the following about the "Fusion Center Functions" Along with a host of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, private companies also participated in the Public Safety Fusion Group, which included Walt Disney World Company, Fidelity Investments, Microsoft, and Archer Daniels Midland. . . . The intelligence and analysis of information is proposed to be based on the needs of users. With the list of users including all levels and types of law enforcement, intelligence community, DOD, private sector entities, it appears the official uses could be limitless. The Fusion Center guidelines repeatedly stress the importance of collaboration and cooperation, to the success of the center. The focus of the work of fusion centers will not be limited to terrorism or terrorist activity, but will according to the appendices of the Fusion Center guidelines extend to among other things the investigation of persons on public assistance, illicit drugs, traffic accidents, and aviation accident analysis. Exchanging information is only the beginning of the process, the goal is "institutionalizing the relationships between the fusion center and the public safety and private sector partners." http://www.epic.org/privacy/fusion/ AUGUST 2007 HOMELAND STASI SEARCH URBAN BUS RIDERS http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070802/LOCAL/70802006 BLUE DOT RED FIELD, DAILY KOS - Federal agents, including Air Marshals were present and patted people down, looked in bags, and performed "behavior" tests for the stated purpose of finding weapons and people who were a threat to public safety. . . 20 or more agents of the federal government came to Indianapolis, downtown, and setup two search stops for those wanting to ride the bus. People could decline, legally, but only if the knew they could. Traveler safety was the excuse, but in reality all the were on an explicit fishing operation that included everything plus "behavior detection officers." Did people even know they could
decline the search? That is unclear. But at least one report
indicates that they TSA weren't even aware of local law. Indiana
allows licensed individuals to carry firearms and accepts permits
from other states for individuals to carry firearms as well.
We have the highest per capita concealed carry population in
the nation and the TSA was not even aware of our laws. "He was told rudely 'YOOOOUUU
CAN'T CARRY A GUN AROUND HERE!' And he replied 'I bet I can,
this isn't an airport...' By then a supervisor walked over, took
a quick look at his Kentucky CCW and asked the Indianapolis PD
next to him if it was any good. The Indy cop replied that a CCW
from any state or country is valid in Indiana. So the supervisor
declared in a loud voice to let him proceed, treat anyone with
a CCW like a cop and pass them on. Needless to say though, he
had a very quiet bus ride with lots of passengers staring at
him the whole time. So what was this operation, why was it needed, and what does it mean for us all? First, it was a clear encroachment on our 4th Amendment rights. Even if it was legal (because individuals could refuse it), the fact that law enforcement is searching people without cause is an encroachment. Second, it was an encroachment done by the Federal Government in the guise of proposed safety. While Indianapolis has had crime problems, the bus system has not been the hub of those problems. Nor have any federal crimes been committed on Indianapolis busses. Third, it was a Federal operation performed by those who are not even aware of the law. Since they had no understanding of Indiana weapons laws and were performing weapons searches, why should I have any confidence in their understanding of, and care for Constitutional law in regards to personal searches. Fourth, it was a Federal invasion of civilians that used our federal tax dollars to search bus passengers, who if criminal could have moved on to the next bus stop or just declined the search. The very same Air Marshals that are supposed to be protecting our plans are searching people at bus stops. This operation could hardly have been an effective expenditure of resources, especially as no reported arrests or confiscations took place. Fifth, the stops seem to be better explained as a test of what encroachments Americans will accept, and the fact that only one article has mentioned it, sparsely at that, makes their test a likely success for federal agencies that seek to expand their powers. So now it is up to us to decide, again, what is acceptable and what is not. http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/8/3/03736/76330 BUSH'S NEW ORDER STILL VIOLATES GENEVA CONVENTION HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH - President George W. Bush's new executive order on the Central Intelligence Agency's detention and interrogation program is contrary to the Geneva Conventions. The new order, issued today, purports to determine that the CIA's detention and interrogation program "fully complies" with US obligations under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 as long as the CIA follows a series of requirements in carrying out the program. But enforced disappearance - the hallmark of the CIA program, involving secret, incommunicado detention - is itself inconsistent with the requirement under Common Article 3 that detainees be treated humanely. A number of CIA prisoners were held for three or more years in secret detention facilities, known as "black sites," before being transferred to military custody at Guantanamo Bay in September 2006. Others who were believed to have been held in CIA detention remain "disappeared." "By international human rights and humanitarian law standards, the CIA program is illegal to its core," said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism director at Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch also expressed skepticism that the treatment requirements set out in the new order - that detainees not be tortured or ill-treated, and be fed adequately, among others - will be followed. It is well documented that holding detainees in prolonged incommunicado detention, without judicial or other independent oversight, is an invitation to torture and other abuse. Human Rights Watch pointed out that even the International Committee of the Red Cross has not been allowed to visit detainees in CIA custody. In addition, because the written policies governing the CIA interrogation program will be classified, it will be impossible for any outside monitor to assess whether the interrogation practices they allow are consistent with international standards. Given that then-CIA director Porter Goss once referred to waterboarding - a form of mock drowning - as a "professional interrogation technique," Human Rights Watch is concerned that abusive methods might still be authorized. Notably, US officials have still refused to publicly denounce waterboarding as torture. In criticizing the CIA program, Human Rights Watch continued to draw attention to more than three dozen missing CIA detainees. In June, Human Rights Watch and five other human rights groups published a report listing 39 people who were believed to have been held at some time in CIA prisons, and who remain "disappeared". One of the missing detainees, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, recently reappeared in Pakistan. "Detainees in CIA custody were in many cases 'disappeared' for years," Mariner said. "Several dozen are still 'disappeared' with no information about their fate." http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/07/20/usdom16444.htm BUSH WON'T REVEAL MARTIAL LAW PLAN TO CONGRESS PAUL JOSEPH WATSON PRISON PLANET - Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-OR) was asked by his constituents to see what was contained within the classified portion of the White House's plan for operating the government after a terrorist attack. Since DeFazio also sits on the Homeland Security Committee and has clearance to view classified material, the request would have appeared to be routine, but the Congressman was unceremoniously denied all access to view the documents, and the White House wouldn't even give an excuse as to why he was barred. "I just can't believe they're going to deny a member of Congress the right of reviewing how they plan to conduct the government of the United States after a significant terrorist attack," DeFazio told the Oregonian on Friday. "We're talking about the continuity of the government of the United States of America," DeFazio says. "I would think that would be relevant to any member of Congress, let alone a member of the Homeland Security Committee." "Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right," DeFazio concluded. The article also quotes Norm Ornstein, a legal scholar who studies government continuity at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who told the paper he "cannot think of one good reason" to deny access to a member of Congress who serves on the Homeland Security Committee. "I find it inexplicable and probably reflective of the usual, knee-jerk overextension of executive power that we see from this White House," Ornstein said. http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2007/230707martiallaw.htm JULY 2007  THE BANDERLOG IF YOU CAN'T CATCH HIM DOING IT  JUNE 2007 THE HIDDEN DANGER OF BLACKWATER CHRIS HEDGES, NY TIMES - There are an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 armed security contractors working in Iraq, although there are no official figures and some estimates run much higher. . . The privatization of war hands an incentive to American corporations, many with tremendous political clout, to keep us mired down in Iraq. But even more disturbing is the steady rise of this modern Praetorian Guard. The Praetorian Guard in ancient Rome was a paramilitary force that defied legal constraints, made violence part of the political discourse, and eventually plunged the Roman Republic into tyranny and despotism. Despotic movements need paramilitary forces that operate outside the law, forces that sow fear among potential opponents, and are capable of physically silencing those branded by their leaders as traitors. And in the wrong hands, a Blackwater could well become that force. American taxpayers have so far handed a staggering $4 billion to "armed security" companies in Iraq such as Blackwater, according to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif. . . Mercenary forces like Blackwater operate beyond civilian and military law. They are covered by a 2004 edict passed by American occupation authorities in Iraq that immunizes all civilian contractors in Iraq from prosecution. Blackwater, barely a decade old, has migrated from Iraq to set up operations in the United States and nine other countries. It trains Afghan security forces and has established a base a few miles from the Iranian border. The huge contracts from the war - including $750 million from the State Department since 2004 - have allowed Blackwater to amass a fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gunships. Jeremy Scahill, the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, points out that Blackwater has also constructed "the world's largest private military facility - a 7,000-acre compound near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina." Blackwater also recently opened a facility in Illinois ("Blackwater North") and, despite local opposition, is moving ahead with plans to build another huge training base near San Diego. The company recently announced it was creating a private intelligence branch called "Total Intelligence." Erik Prince, who founded and runs Blackwater, is a man who appears to have little time for the niceties of democracy. He has close ties with the radical Christian Right and the Bush White House. He champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, in an act as cynical as it is dishonest, take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. But what he and his allies have built is a mercenary army, paid for with government money, which operates outside the law and without constitutional constraint. . . If the United States falls into a period of instability caused by another catastrophic terrorist attack, an economic meltdown that triggers social unrest, or a series of environmental disasters, such paramilitary forces, protected and assisted by fellow ideologues in the police and military, could ruthlessly abolish what is left of our eroding democracy. War, with the huge profits it hands to corporations, and to right-wing interests such as the Christian Right, could become a permanent condition. And the thugs with automatic weapons, black uniforms and wraparound sunglasses who appeared on the streets in New Orleans could appear on our streets. GO OUTBOARDING AND THE TERRORISTS WIN JACKELYN BARNARD, FIRST COAST NEWS,
FL - With thousands of boats on the waterways, the worry is the
recreational boat is now a Homeland Security threat. A simple boat could be used as a weapon. . . The head of the U.S. Coast Guard is throwing around a couple of ideas on how to keep you safe. One would require licenses for all boaters in all states. The other would call for transponders on recreational boats so authorities can track their location. . . http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/topstories/news-article.aspx?storyid=82887 REAGAN ERA JUDGE SENT JUDITH
MILLER TO JAIL & ORDERED ONLY FBI RAID ON CONGRESSIONAL OFFICE
IN U.S. HISTORY JACOB G. HORNBERGER, LEW ROCKWELL SITE - The presiding judge in the Jose Padilla case has held that the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of a speedy trial does not protect American citizens from being indefinitely incarcerated by the Pentagon. Padilla had filed a motion to dismiss the case on the ground that the federal government had denied him his right to a speedy trial. Padilla has been in custody since May 2002 and his trial, which is scheduled to begin in April, is not being held until some five years later. . . The presiding judge in the case, Marcia Cooke, denied Padilla's motion to dismiss. The judge held that when a person, including an American citizen, is held in custody by the Pentagon as an "enemy combatant," the time doesn't start running with respect to his right to a speedy trial. It begins running, she held, only when he becomes part of the federal criminal-justice system. Gee, I wonder if the judge's reasoning applies to the rest of the Bill of Rights as well. Maybe the First Amendment doesn't apply if it's the Pentagon that is suppressing speech and assembly as part of its perpetual "war on terror." Or maybe the Second Amendment prohibits only the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), not the Pentagon, from seizing guns from the American people, as it is doing as part of the "war on terror" in Iraq. Our 18th-century American ancestors would have found Judge Cooke's ruling to be ludicrous. If a military department of government is exempt from the restrictions of the Bill of Rights, then the entire executive branch is exempt for the obvious reason: Whenever the government wants to exempt itself from the Bill of Rights, all it has to do is employ the military to do the dirty deed. The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to protect the American people from the federal government, not a particular department of the federal government. http://www.lewrockwell.com/hornberger/hornberger122.html FEBRUARY 2007 NY TIMES FINALLY NOTICES THE CREEPING COUP NY TIMES EDITORIAL - A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night. So it was with a provision quietly tucked into the enormous defense budget bill at the Bush administration's behest that makes it easier for a president to override local control of law enforcement and declare martial law. The provision, signed into law in October, weakens two obscure but important bulwarks of liberty. One is the doctrine that bars military forces, including a federalized National Guard, from engaging in law enforcement. Called posse comitatus, it was enshrined in law after the Civil War to preserve the line between civil government and the military. The other is the Insurrection Act of 1807, which provides the major exemptions to posse comitatus. It essentially limits a president's use of the military in law enforcement to putting down lawlessness, insurrection and rebellion, where a state is violating federal law or depriving people of constitutional rights. The newly enacted provisions upset this careful balance. They shift the focus from making sure that federal laws are enforced to restoring public order. Beyond cases of actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or to any "other condition." Changes of this magnitude should be made only after a thorough public airing. But these new presidential powers were slipped into the law without hearings or public debate. The president made no mention of the changes when he signed the measure, and neither the White House nor Congress consulted in advance with the nation's governors. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/19/opinion/19mon3.html JANUARY 2007 PEOPLE CHIPS: THE ULTIMATE NATIONAL ID DAVID E. GUMPERT, BUSINESS WEEK - [Scott] Silverman's company, Verichip Corp., is preparing for widespread marketing of its people chips with an initial public offering that it expects to complete within the next 60 days. It has begun building what he refers to as "the infrastructure" by signing up more than 400 hospitals to adopt system scanners and databases and about 1,200 physicians to make chips available to patients likeliest to benefit from them, such as diabetics. . . The big attraction . . . and the reason for the upcoming Verichip public offering, is the lure of implanting the chips into people. . . Of course, no discussion . . . It's important to remember that adoption of the RFID chips doesn't necessarily need to be legislated to become nearly universal. If enough hospitals and insurance companies begin requiring them, or treating patients wearing them more expeditiously than nonusers, or providing discounts for usage of the chips, they well could become the norm. Then, not wearing a chip might be akin to not having a bank ATM card or, increasingly in Eastern states with toll roads and turnpikes, not having a transponder to pay tolls in your car. http://www.businessweek.com/print/smallbiz/content/jan2007/ sb20070111_186325.htm BUSH INVADES STATES' POWERS TO TAKE OVER NATIONAL GUARD [One of America's most important defenses against a dictatorship has been power of the governors over their state militias: the National Guard. Bush's action dramatically changes this] KAVAN PETERSON, STATELINE - A little-noticed change in federal law packs an important change in who is in charge the next time a state is devastated by a disaster such as Hurricane Katrina. To the dismay of the nation's governors, the White House now will be empowered to go over a governor's head and call up National Guard troops to aid a state in time of natural disasters or other public emergencies. Up to now, governors were the sole commanders in chief of citizen soldiers in local Guard units during emergencies within the state. . . President Bush sought to federalize control of Guardsmen in Louisiana in the chaos after the hurricane, but Gov. Kathleen Blanco(D) refused to relinquish command. Over objections from all 50 governors, Congress in October tweaked the 200-year-old Insurrection Act to empower the hand of the president in future stateside emergencies. In a letter to Congress, the governors called the change "a dramatic expansion of federal authority during natural disasters that could cause confusion in the command-and-control of the National Guard and interfere with states' ability to respond to natural disasters within their borders." The change adds to tensions between governors and the White House after more than four years of heavy federal deployment of state-based Guard forces to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, four out of five guardsmen have been sent overseas in the largest deployment of the National Guard since World War II. Shortage of the Guard's military equipment - such as helicopters to drop hay to snow-stranded cattle in Colorado - also is a nagging issue as much of units' heavy equipment is left overseas and unavailable in case of a natural disaster at home. A bipartisan majority of both chambers of Congress adopted the change as part of the 439-page, $538 billion 2007 Defense Authorization Bill signed into law last October. http://www.stateline.org/live/details/story?contentId=170453 CIA, MILITARY EXPAND SPYING ON U.S. CITIZENS AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE - US Vice-President Dick Cheney has admitted that the US military and CIA have been spying on the financial dealings of Americans -- intelligence gathering normally authorized only by civilian policing agencies. The New York Times broke the story, reporting that the Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency had been using "national security letters" to obtain the banking and credit records of Americans and foreigners suspected of terrorist activities in the United States. The US military and the CIA have long been restricted in their spying activities inside the United States and are barred from conducting traditional domestic law enforcement work in the country. . . [Cheney] called the spying "a perfectly legitimate activity" . . . Citing unnamed intelligence officials, The New York Times said the Pentagon and CIA actions were part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering which is traditionally the realm of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. http://www.breitbart.com/news/2007/01/14/070114153813.ahatfwm8.html BUSH CLAIMS POWER TO READ YOUR MAIL JAMES GORDON MEEK, NY DAILY - President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the Daily News has learned. The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions. That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it. Bush's move came during the winter congressional recess and a year after his secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program was first revealed. It caught Capitol Hill by surprise. http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/485561p-408789c.html DECEMBER 2007 HOMELAND POLICE USING FIRE DEPARTMENTS TO SPY ILLEGALLY ON CITIZENS   AT
LEAST, POLICE DEPARTMENT APOLOGIZED THIS TIME NEARLY
300 KILLED BY TASERSNOVEMBER 2007 CITY ATTORNEY BULLIES PUBLIC TV STATION AFTER IT DROPS HIM AS GUEST CORPORATIONS HELPING BUSH REGIME IN HUGE DOMESTIC SPYING PROGRAM FEDS HAVE DONE BACKGROUND CHECKS ON 25 MILLION AMERICANS THIS YEAR LOS ANGELES POLICE PLAN TO STEREOTYPE WHOLE MUSLIM COMMUNITIES  AN EPIDEMIC OF "ISOLATED INCIDENTS" OCTOBER 2007
  SEPTEMBER 2007  CRITICS - NOT COPS - GET TO DECIDE WHICH ART IS A BOMB MORE GREAT MOMENTS IN THE GENERAL LAWS OF MASSACHUSETTS [Yesterday we ran a Massachusetts law banning blasphemy and other theocratic offenses. Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer adds a few more goodies: Chapter 272: Section 34. Crime against nature Section 34. Whoever commits the abominable and detestable crime against nature, either with mankind or with a beast, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than twenty years. Chapter 272: Section 14. Adultery Section 14. A married person who has sexual intercourse with a person not his spouse or an unmarried person who has sexual intercourse with a married person shall be guilty of adultery and shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than three years or in jail for not more than two years or by a fine of not more than five hundred dollars. Chapter 272: Section 18. Fornication Section 18. Whoever commits fornication shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than three months or by a fine of not more than thirty dollars. http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/ REGAL CINEMAS HAS 19 YEAR OLD GIRL ARRESTED FOR 20 SECOND FILM CLIP TORRENT FREAK - Jhannet Sejas, a 19 year old girl was immediately arrested by the police after she recorded a 20 second clip from the movie "Transformers" that she wanted to show to her little brother. She now faces up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. Sejas was celebrating her 19th Birthday with her boyfriend in a local theater in Arlington [VA]. A few minutes after she taped the short clip the police came rushing in and took her into custody on the charges of "being a pirate". Sejas and her boyfriend were promptly escorted out of the movie theater, still confused about what just happened. "I was crying, I've never been in trouble before.", she later said in a response to the trip to the police station. Of course Sejas had no intention to sell the 600 millisecond clip, she wasn't even planning to put it on YouTube. The only thing she wanted to do was show it to her 13 year old brother, who was dying to see the movie himself. Unluckily theater owners just introduced their new zero-tolerance policy since everyone can be a pirate. Kendrick Macdowell, a representative National Association of Theater Owners said in a response: "We cannot educate theater managers to be judges and juries in what is acceptable. Theater managers cannot distinguish between good and bad stealing.". . . Sejas will go to trial later this month for recording a motion picture without permission, and is facing up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. Seriously unbelievable. http://torrentfreak.com/teen-arrested-for-recording-20-second-movie-clip/ DANIELA DEANE WASHINGTON POST - Arlington police spokesman John Lisle said it was the decision of Regal Cinemas Ballston Common 12 to prosecute the case, a first for Arlington police. . . Jason Schultz, senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said he is aware of only one case prosecuted under the federal statute. In September 2005, a Missouri theater employee pleaded guilty to two counts of using a camcorder to copy two movies. FIND THE REGAL CINEMAS IN YOUR AREA TO
AVOID JULY 2007 THE MYTH OF BREATH TESTS RADLEY BALKO, HIT & RUN - A local CBS television reporter went drinking to test various personal blood-alcohol devices. She found a wide disparity in readings among the different brands, showing I guess that you really shouldn't trust the things. What she fails to do, though, is ask why courts are then so reliant on them. She brought some patrol officers with her, and measured her results against the device she describes as "court-approved." But she never really questions whether or not that one is accurate. She then says that the police officers who helped her with the story told her that "how a drinker scores in a field sobriety test is the real measure of inebriation." In fact, this simply isn't true. The standard field sobriety test was adopted by NHTSA after one poorly administered test on 238 subjects in 1977. It's never been peer reviewed. One forensic expert in Georgia gave the test to 21 of his students, none of whom had a drop to drink. He then showed video of the tests to a group of police officers. They said they'd arrest nearly half of them. http://www.reason.com/blog/show/121187.html LAWRENCE TAYLOR, DUI BLOG - Unique among criminal offenses, a citizen accused of drunk driving faces trial by machine. . . Prosecutors continue to assure jurors that these state-of-the-art breathalyzers are highly accurate scientific instruments - so accurate and reliable that they can feel comfortable finding the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt based solely upon the machine. . . Just how accurate and reliable are these "state-of-the-art" breath machines? Not very, according to internal documents from the State of Virginia's Department of Forensic Science. Attorney Robert F. Keefer of Harrisonburg, Virginia, filed a demand under the Freedom of Information Act for records concerning the machine used in that state, the Intoxilyzer 5000 (the most commonly used machine in the country over the past 15 years. . . The following are direct quotes from those documents: "Funding of this request will allow the agency to replace instruments (Intoxilyer 5000 instruments) that are 9-10 years old and for which replacements are not available. These instruments are outdated and the manufacturer is no longer maintaining parts and not capable of fully supporting them since current instruments demonstrate two further generations of technological advancement." In response to the request form's question, "What are the expected results to be achieved if this request is funded?", the following response was given: "To replace outdated, unstable and unreliable breath alcohol instrumentation used by police officers throughout the Commonwealth to certify whether a driver is or is not impaired." Unstable and unreliable. But do you think this is what prosecutors in Virginia tell juries? Of course not http://www.duiblog.com/2007/06/13/report-breathalyzers-outdated-unstable-unreliable/ JUNE 2007   MAY 2007 WHY HATE CRIME LAWS AREN'T A GOOD IDEA GLOBE & MAIL, CANADA - The Vatican's official newspaper accused an Italian comedian on Wednesday of "terrorism" for criticizing the Pope and warned his rhetoric could fuel a return to 1970s-style political violence. In an unusually strongly worded editorial, L'Osservatore Romano said a presenter of a televised May Day rock concert, which is sponsored by Italy's labour unions, had launched "vile attacks" on Pope Benedict in front of an "excitable crowd". "This, too, is terrorism. It's terrorism to launch attacks on the Church," it said. "It's terrorism to stoke blind and irrational rage against someone who always speaks in the name of love, love for life and love for man." http://www.nysun.com/article/53574?access=962392 THE LIBERAL WAR ON FREE SPEECH Sam Smith IT'S hard enough defending the First Amendment against the right. But these days one is almost as often likely to find the foe a liberal who believes that free speech only belongs to the righteous, the appropriate and the responsible as defined by people like themselves. In today's liberal climate it would be hard to get an ACLU off the ground because its potential organizers would be too busy being morally superior to lesser mortals. The only way out of this trap seems to be to choose among the censors. Do you want liberals or conservatives telling you when to shut up? Those of us who share Walt Kelly's view that we must defend the basic right of all Americans to make damn fools of themselves are in a minority in both camps. A case in point is the despicable Ann Coulter, who has called John Edwards a "faggot" and suggested that Al Qaeda wants Obama to win the White House. John Edwards reaction: "Her outrageous comments are inexcusable and should not be tolerated in the public dialogue." Would attorney Edwards care to enlighten us on what Coulter could have said that would have been tolerated? Would it have been all right to call Edwards a "wimp" or to claim that a President Obama might weaken our stand against Al Qaeda? And how does one discover when the line of inexcusability has been crossed? The Democrats are also pressing for an expansion of hate crime legislation even though it is clearly constitutional to hate; it's just criminal to do anything about it that hurts someone or their property - matters already well covered by law. There are other problems with such an approach. It helps to drive hate further underground. It makes it harder to deal with in its political and psychological manifestations and, above all, it helps let off the hook all those related issues such as cross-ethnic economic inequities. Far better, say, to guide angry lower income white frustrations away from blaming immigrants towards tackling the big white guys in charge than implying - as liberals increasingly do - that if they're just nice to people everything will be fine. Unfortunately, liberals increasingly have become indifferent to the economic issues that a populist progressive would use to redirect misplaced anger. The liberal message has become one of propriety over progress and in the end you get neither. Since Edwards presumably is trying to learn as much about populism as he has about hedge funds, here's a suggestion. Say that Coulter can utter any stupid and mean thing she wants but if she does it on radio or TV, under an Edwards presidency there will be a revival of the broadcast fairness rule so that her victims can come right back at her on the same outlet. And talk about Coulter's ties with the big businesses that are ruining the lives and communities of so many Americans. Broadcasting didn't used to be this nasty. But the robber barons of the RBCB era* worked their evil magic on the airwaves just as they did on everything else. They killed the fairness doctrine and fostered the rise of the repulsive right. In the end, what we need is not less free speech but more of it. * RBCB is the Progressive Review's neologism of the day, standing for the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era  APRIL 2007 200TH WRONGFUL CONVICTION PROVEN BY DNA EZEKIEL EDWARDS, DMI BLOG - How can you simultaneously be one of the unluckiest and luckiest men in America? Ask Jerry Miller, who became the 200th person exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing. 200 people arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and sent to prison for years (14 of whom had been sentenced to death), eventually to have their innocence established by scientific proof. 200 people who served a total of 2,475 years in prison, almost one million nights, for crimes they did not commit. When Jerry Miller was 22 years old, the police picked him up after an officer said he resembled a composite sketch of a Chicago rapist. He was tried and convicted on the basis of the victim's subsequent misidentification, and served 24 years in prison before being released last year on parole. Since his release, he has lived as a registered sex offender, required to wear an electronic monitoring device at all times and prohibited from being alone with children or leaving his job for lunch. For more than a quarter of a century, he maintained his innocence. Through representation by the Innocence Project, Mr. Miller was able to secure a court order for testing DNA evidence in his case. The results: none of the forensic evidence came from Mr. Miller. . . Just since 2000, there have been 135 DNA-based exonerations. There have been 27 in Illinois alone. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, considering that in many of the older cases where there was DNA evidence, it has been lost, destroyed, or consumed by original testing. More disturbingly, the vast majority of crimes do not involve forensic evidence. Take robbery cases, for example: there are far more robbery cases than murder or rape cases; they are highly susceptible to misidentification; and they almost never involve forensic evidence, meaning that there are thousands of prisoners who are precluded from ever even having the chance to scientifically establish their innocence. So, despite the 200 exonerations, these cases are only a sliver of the nation's "innocence" cases, falling into a small category of almost exclusively murder and rape cases in which there was DNA evidence, and enough of it, and locatable, and which a court deemed appropriate for testing. This would be troubling in any criminal justice system, but none more so than In a country with 2.3 million people behind bars. . . MINNESOTA SUPREME COURT STRIKES DOWN RED LIGHT CAMS THE NEWSPAPER - The Minnesota Supreme Court delivered the highest-level court rebuke to photo enforcement to date with a unanimous decision against the Minneapolis red light camera program. The high court upheld last September's Court of Appeals decision that found the city's program had violated state law. The supreme court found that Minneapolis had disregarded a state law imposing uniformity of traffic laws across the state. The city's photo ticket program offered the accused fewer due process protections than available to motorists prosecuted for the same offense in the conventional way after having been pulled over by a policeman. The court argued that Minneapolis had, in effect, created a new type of crime: "owner liability for red-light violations where the owner neither required nor knowingly permitted the violation." "We emphasized in Duffy that a driver must be able to travel throughout the state without the risk of violating an ordinance with which he is not familiar," the court wrote. . . The court also struck down the "rebutable presumption" doctrine that lies at the heart of every civil photo enforcement ordinance across the country. "The problem with the presumption that the owner was the driver is that it eliminates the presumption of innocence and shifts the burden of proof from that required by the rules of criminal procedure," the court concluded. "Therefore the ordinance provides less procedural protection to a person charged with an ordinance violation than is provided to a person charged with a violation of the Act. Accordingly, the ordinance conflicts with the Act and is invalid." RULING MARCH 2007 INDENTURED SERVITUDE IN FULL SWING IN U.S. PRISONS EZEKIEL EDWARDS, DRUM MAJOR INSTITUTE - J. Tony Serra, a well-known California attorney, has brought a suit in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of inmates against a federal prison camp in Santa Barbara County challenging its prison pay system which compensates inmates for their labor at between 5 cents and $1.65 an hour. Serra knows what its like to labor for so little: he just spent 10 months in the prison for tax evasion and made 19 cents an hour. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Serra described a "nationwide network of prison camps churning out products made by low-paid inmates for contractors and federal agencies that might ... otherwise buy the same goods from unionized private plants.". . . The federal government's prison industries program, also known as UNICOR, by 2003 operated 100 factories generating over $665 million in sales using 20,274 prisoners. The prisoners are paid far below minimum wage and often work in unsafe environments, since FPI is not bound by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In addition to taking advantage of cheap labor, both government-run and private prisons also provide employment for thousands of people outside the prisons, from wardens to guards to construction workers to businessmen. Corrections Corporation of America, the world's largest private prison corporation, operates 59 facilities in 20 states, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom and Australia, despite being plagued by mismanagement and scandals, including inadequate health care and mental, emotional, and physical abuse of inmates within its prison walls (some of which resulted in death). . . As Grassroots Leadership has observed, "the existence of an industry based on incarceration for profit creates a commercial incentive in favor of government policies that keep more people behind bars for longer periods of time." Any discussion about reducing our prison population, pulling out of the war on drugs, or otherwise reforming the criminal justice system, faces a huge obstacle: the prison industry. From politicians who rely on prisons for their senate seats to counties that rely on federal funds because of the inflated size of its unemployed "residents", from correction guards and their powerful unions to entire towns employed by prisons, from the police narcotics units to narcotics prosecutors, all have a keen financial interest in keeping the prison industry alive and kicking, if not constantly growing, even if at the expense of the liberty of fellow citizens. It seems that, after money itself, prisons have become this country's primary domestic drug of choice, a drug which is destroying this nation from within and a habit we need desperately to kick. http://www.dmiblog.net/archives/2007/03/ten_cent_toil_also_known_as_pr.html US ATTORNEYS: IT'S NOT THE POLITICS BUT THE LACK OF LIMITS Sam Smith THE ASSUMPTION that the appointment and character of US Attorneys are traditionally free of politics - like, say, federal judges - is a nice one but can find little encouragement in American history. In fact, both US Attorney and federal judges are patronage appointments. This patronage power is limited by a number of factors such as, in the case of judges, a lifetime appointment, the need for Senate confirmation and the ratings of the American Bar Association. For U.S. attorneys the control has traditionally been confirmation by the Senate, a limited term (four years but typically the life of an administration), and the need for approval by any US Senator of the president's party in the state where the US Attorney will be assigned. Neither of these systems has worked as well as the establishment would have us believe, sometimes for reasons unrelated to national politics. For example, one study found that the cities in which US Attorney enforced drugs laws the least were Las Vegas and Nashville. Obviously, local politics plays a role. In the case of the Bush firings, the problem was not that the decisions were political but that they were made in the middle of a term after confirmation protection was surreptitiously excised by the Patriot Act. Part of the reason the US Attorney system has worked as well as it has is because once power has been assigned, the exercise of that power has been largely devolved to the US Attorney's office with a few notable exceptions in both Republican and Democratic administrations. As with other matters of patronage, a partial cure - the best that can be hoped for - is not in grand principles but in the checks that are applied. What the Bush regime did was to dump these checks with predicable results. Much as it offends purists, one partial solution is to revive the power that US Senators once had over the US Attorney appointments. Such patronage power at the very least spreads the potential for evil around rather than, as Bush would prefer, leaving it all up to him. Another, more radical approach, would be the suggestion that Ernie Fitzgerald and I made some time back: the election of the U.S. Attorney General - and than granting the AG some role in the naming of U.S. Attorneys. Strange as this may seem, the election of a reform-minded local district attorney has been one of the most effective approaches in dealing with urban corruption and might well have the same effect on the national level. Instead of having one highly ambitious politician in the White House you would have two such politicians in Washington, with one always worried about what the other would find looking through the files ELECTING AN ATTORNEY GENERAL WHY EXCESSIVE INCARCERATION DOESN'T WORK EZEKIEL EDWARDS, DMI BLOG - The number of inmates incarcerated for drug possession between 1980 and 2005 grew by more than 1000% and now cost $8.3 billion dollars every year. As a result, between 1985 and 2004, states increased spending on corrections by 202%, while spending on public assistance decreased by more than 60%, and spending on higher education, Medicaid, and secondary/elementary education grew by just 3%, 47 %, and 55% respectively. With an eye towards our prison epidemic, the Vera Institute of Justice released a report recently on imprisonment in America titled "Reconsidering Incarceration: New Directions for Reducing Crime". Here is a summary of its findings: - Research shows that while the U.S. experienced a dramatic drop in crime between 1992 and 1997, imprisonment was responsible for just 25% of that reduction. - The remaining 75% was caused by other factors, including lower unemployment, higher wages, more education, more high school graduates, fewer young persons in the population, increase in the number of police officers (provided that the number of police did not necessarily translate into more arrests), and decreases in crack cocaine markets. - The impact of incarceration on crime is inconsistent from one study to the next (research suggests that a 10% increase in incarceration could lead to no difference in the crime rate, or a 22% decrease, or a decrease only in property crime). The most consistent figure is that a 10% increase in imprisonment results in a 2% to 4% drop in crime rates. - Researchers focusing on specific neighborhoods found that more incarceration can actually increase crime rates, arguing that "high rates of imprisonment break down the social and family bonds that guide individuals away from crime, remove adults who would otherwise nurture children, deprive communities of income, reduce future income potential, and engender a deep resentment toward the legal system. As a result, as communities become less capable of maintaining social order through families or social groups, crime rates go up." -Increases in prison populations in states which already have large prison populations have less impact on crime (and eventually begin to increase crime rates) than in states with smaller prison populations. - Analysts are nearly unanimous in their conclusion that continued growth in incarceration will prevent considerably fewer, if any, crimes, and at substantially greater costs to taxpayers. - The more employment, the less crime. Imprisonment reduces employment, and hence can foster more crime. "Incarceration creates problems of low earnings and irregular employment for individuals after release from prison by dissuading employers from hiring them, disqualifying them from certain professions, eroding job skills, limiting acquisition from work experience, creating behaviors inconsistent with work routines outside prison, and undermining social connections to good job opportunities." Moreover, employers may shun neighborhoods with high incarceration rates, and prison can generate connections to illegal rather than legal employment. . . - Research showed that a 10% increase in real wages produced significant decreases in both real property and violent crime. - An increase in citizens' education levels were associated with lower crime rates . . . Researchers argued that a 1% increase in male high school graduation rates would save the country $1.4 billion through crime reduction. Moreover, prison-based education programs were found to dramatically reduce recidivism rates. . . FERUARY 2007  THE ABUSE OF ROADBLOCKS RADLEY BALKO, REASON - Police in Escondido recently set up a DUI roadblock from 6pm to 12am. The tally: 1,600 cars stopped, 931 drivers screened, 82 drivers pulled aside for extra scrutiny, 32 vehicles impounded, 52 tickets issued to drivers other than those whose vehicles were impounded, and, drum-roll please.... ...one DUI arrest. Given that the Supreme Court has only ruled on the legitimacy of roadblock checkpoints for DUI policing (it has declared them illegal for the purposes of drug policing, for example), you have to wonder at what point what these roadblocks are achieving in practice begins to make them constitutionally dubious, despite the fact that their stated purpose may be. THE HUMAN COST OF NO KNOCK RAIDS DAVID BORDEN, DRUG WAR CHRONICLE - One of the regularly repeating outrages in the drug war is that of innocent people terrorized, physically harmed or killed in drug raids gone bad. Retired Boston minister Accelyne Williams, felled by a heart attack after a SWAT-style squadron battered his door down and tackled him to the floor; 23-year old Anthony Diotaiuto, shot ten times by a SWAT team in Sunrise, Florida; Harlem's Alberta Spruill, dead from a heart attack after police detonated a flash grenade in her home; many others, from many places, their lives and deaths touching many others far and wide. No-knock drug raids are demonstrably dangerous, carrying a predictable risk of injury or death to innocent or otherwise undeserving victims. Nevertheless, police forces around the country continue with their immorally reckless ways despite the continuing carnage. This week's Supreme Court ruling, then, paving the way for even more such behavior, is especially unfortunate. Though there is still technically a distinction between regular and "no-knock" warrants, a majority on the court has decided there should be no penalty -- no exclusion of evidence -- when police forces without authorization to do a no-knock raid go ahead and do one. Without such a penalty, and with no criminal penalties attaching to levels of recklessness by police officers that would land any ordinary citizen behind bars or in civil court facing liability of millions, the problem is bound to increase. http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/440/realworld.shtml POLICE USE TORTURE GUN ON STUDENT WHO FAILS TO SHOW ID IN LIBRARY SARA TAYLOR DAILY BRUIN - An incident in which a UCLA student was stunned at least four times with a Taser has left the UCLA community questioning whether the university police officers' use of force was an appropriate response to the situation. Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a UCLA student, was repeatedly stunned with a Taser and then taken into custody when he did not exit the CLICC Lab in Powell Library in a timely manner. Community Service Officers had asked Tabatabainejad to leave after he failed to produce his BruinCard during a random check at around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday. UCPD Assistant Chief of Police Jeff Young said the checks are a standard procedure in the library after 11 p.m. . . Young said the CSOs on duty in the library at the time went to get UCPD officers when Tabatabainejad did not immediately leave, and UCPD officers resorted to use of the Taser when Tabatabainejad did not do as he was told. A six-minute video showed Tabatabainejad audibly screaming in pain as he was stunned several times with a Taser, each time for three to five seconds. He was told repeatedly to stand up and stop fighting, and was told that if he did not do so he would "get Tased again.". . . The officers used the "drive stun" setting in the Taser, which delivers a shock to a specific part of the body with the front of the Taser, Young said. . . According to a study published in the Lancet Medical Journal in 2001, a charge of three to five seconds can result in immobilization for five to 15 minutes, which would mean that Tabatabainejad could have been physically unable to stand when the officers demanded that he do so. "It is a real mistake to treat a Taser as some benign thing that painlessly brings people under control," said Peter Eliasberg, managing attorney at the ACLU of Southern California. "The Taser can be incredibly violent and result in death," Eliasberg said. According to an ACLU report, 148 people in the United States and Canada have died as a result of the use of Tasers since 1999. http://dailybruin.com/news/articles.asp?id=38960 VIDEO OF INCIDENT NYC POLICE CHIEF DECLARES WAR ON DEMONSTRATORS RUSSELL BERMAN, NY SUN - The New York City Bar Association is coming out against a Police Department proposal to regulate protests by groups of 10 or more pedestrians or bicyclists. The proposals, which the department revised after criticism over the summer, would require parade permits from groups of 10 or more pedestrians or bicyclists who plan to travel more than two city blocks without obeying traffic laws. The police also want to mandate permits for any organized procession of 30 or more vehicles, including bicycles, regardless of whether they follow traffic laws. In testimony to be submitted at a public hearing today, the bar association said the department's new definition of a "parade" that requires a permit is "a serious and unwarranted infringement on associational freedom." Urging that the proposals be withdrawn, the association said the City Council - and not the police - should regulate parade permits. . . The plans have been seen as an attempt to crack down on the frequent "Critical Mass" bike rides that take over city streets. The New York Civil Liberties Union also is opposing the new rules. "There is no justification for them, and they impose an onerous burden on protest," the executive director of the NYCLU, Donna Lieberman, said yesterday. http://www.nysun.com/article/44118| UK COPS TO HAVE CAMERAS IN HEADGEAR REGISTER, UK - Police officers in London have begun to use a camera mounted on their headgear. . . Officers in the 19 safer neighborhood teams in the Haringey area have been issued with eight cameras, each the size of an AA battery, that record video images to a special utility belt. They are activated by a switch on the belt. The equipment, which costs around L1,800 per pack. . . can store up to 12 hours of video. An extra battery pack can extend this to up to 400 hours, although this makes the equipment much heavier. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/21/met_police_heargear_cameras/ HOUSTON POLICE ABUSE DEMONSTRATORS SUPPORTING JANITORS' UNION ANNA DENISE SOLIS, HOUSTON - We sat down in the intersection and the horses came immediately. It was really violent. They arrested us, and when we got to jail, we were pretty beat up. Not all of us got the medical attention we needed. The worst was a protester named Julia, who is severely diabetic. We kept telling the guards about her condition but they only gave her a piece of candy. During roll call, she started to complain about light-headedness. Finally she just collapsed unconscious on the floor. It was like she just dropped dead. The guard saw it but just kept going through the roll. Susan ran over there and took her pulse while the other inmates were yelling for help, saying we need to call somebody. The medical team strolled over, taking their own sweet time. She was unconscious for like 4 or 5 minutes. They really tried to break us down. The first night they put the temperature so high that a woman - one of the other inmates - had a seizure. The second night they made it freezing and took away many of our blankets. We didn't have access to the cots so we had to sleep on a concrete floor. When we would finally fall asleep the guards would come and yell 'Are you Anna Denise Solas? Are you so and so?' One of the protesters had a fractured wrist from the horses. She had a cast on and when she would fall asleep the guard would kick the cast to wake her up. She was in a lot of pain. The guards would tell us: 'This is what you get for protesting.' One of them said, 'Who gives a shit about janitors making 5 dollars an hour? Lots of people make that much.' The other inmates - there were a lot of prostitutes in there - said that they had never seen the jail this bad. The guards told them: 'We're trying to teach the protesters a lesson.' Nobody was getting out of jail because the processing was so slow. They would tell the prostitutes that everything is the protesters' fault. They were trying to turn everybody against each other. I felt like I was in some Third World jail, not in America. One of the guards called us 'whores' and if we talked back, we didn't get any lunch. We didn't even have the basic necessities. It felt like a police state, like marshal law, nobody had rights. Some of us had been arrested in other cities, and it was never this bad before. http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2006/11/update_on_antiunion_brutality.php AVERAGE BRIT FILMED MORE THAN 300 TIMES A DAY; RECORDING CONVERSATIONS NEXT TIMES, UK - The microphones can detect conversations 100 yards away and record aggressive exchanges before they become violent. The devices are used at 300 sites in Holland and police, councils and transport officials in London have shown an interest in installing them before the 2012 Olympics. The interest in the equipment comes amid growing concern that Britain is becoming a "surveillance society". It was recently highlighted that there are more than 4.2m CCTV cameras, with the average person being filmed more than 300 times a day. The addition of microphones would take surveillance into uncharted territory. . . The equipment can pick up aggressive tones on the basis of 12 factors, including decibel level, pitch and the speed at which words are spoken. Background noise is filtered out, enabling the camera to focus on specific conversations in public places. If the aggressive behavior continues, police can intervene before an incident escalates. Privacy laws in Holland limit the recording of sound to short bursts. Derek van der Vorst, director of Sound Intelligence, the company that created the technology, said: "It is technically capable of being live 24 hours a day and recording 24 hours a day. It really depends on the privacy laws in a particular country." http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2471987,00.html 2006 DECEMBER 2006 COMING: A MICROCHIP IN EVERY CITIZEN KEVIN HAGGERTY, TORONTO STAR - By the time my four-year-old son is swathed in the soft flesh of old age, he will likely find it unremarkable that he and almost everyone he knows will be permanently implanted with a microchip. Automatically tracking his location in real time, it will connect him with databases monitoring and recording his smallest behavioral traits. . . A select group of people are already "chipped" with devices that automatically open doors, turn on lights, and perform other low-level miracles. . . From this point forward, microchips will become progressively smaller, less invasive, and easier to deploy. Thus, any realistic barrier to the wholesale "chipping" of Western citizens is not technological but cultural. It relies upon the visceral reaction against the prospect of being personally marked as one component in a massive human inventory. NORTHCOM'S WAR PLANS AGAINST. . . YOU PETER BYRNE, BYRNE REPORT - On Oct. 26, the Army released an updated field manual for Soldiers called "Urban Operations." The manual declares, "The goal of modern warfare is control of the populace." That goal applies to domestic as well as foreign operations: "From the mid-1950s through the 1990s, the Army conducted UO [urban operations] in the U.S. . . . during civil unrest and anti-Vietnam [War] protests." Urban warfare doctrine targets poor inner city neighborhoods for destruction and occupation whether they are in Third World countries or festering inside the homeland. "Urban Operations" warn Soldiers that youth gangs in Los Angeles, known collectively as "Threats," temporarily united to fight soldiers during the policing of the Rodney King riots in 1992. Ignoring the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which generally prohibits soldiers from acting as law enforcers, the manual calls for "full spectrum" urban operations (led by NORTHCOM), which combine law enforcement and military operations with air support against the Threat flavor of the day. "Urban Operations" makes it clear that, as in Fallujah, Panama City and occupied Palestine, sections of rebellious cities will be exploded by air strikes or plastic explosives because "rubble piles provide excellent covered and concealed positions" for invading soldiers. "Shantytowns" may be "knock[ed] down and traversed [by tanks] without affecting mobility at all." Destruction of neighborhoods and vital infrastructure is termed "a necessary shaping operation." It is done to keep "insurgents" from merging with and politically mobilizing the populace. . . As a final warning, Soldiers are reminded that video only has one-way benefits: "[N]egative visual images of military operations presented by the media can change political objectives. . . . Commanders should . . . induce cooperation between the media and Army forces . . . successfully engaging the media as a force multiplier." And that is why you knew little or nothing about NORTHCOM and Global Hawk until today. Force multipliers don't report on those things. http://www.bohemian.com/bohemian/12.06.06/byrne-0649.html NOVEMBER 2006 PENTAGON SPIED ON CHURCHES NY TIMES - An antiterrorist database used by the Defense Department in an effort to prevent attacks against military installations included intelligence tips about antiwar planning meetings held at churches, libraries, college campuses and other locations, newly disclosed documents show. . . One tip in the database in February 2005, for instance, noted that "a church service for peace" would be held in the New York City area the next month. Another entry noted that antiwar protesters would be holding "nonviolence training" sessions at unidentified churches in Brooklyn and Manhattan. . . Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the A.C.L.U. in New York, said the new documents suggested that the military's efforts to glean intelligence on protesters went beyond what was previously known. If intelligence officials "are going to be doing investigations or monitoring in a place where people gather to worship or to study, they should have a pretty clear indication that a crime has occurred," Mr. Wizner added. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/washington/21protests.html JERRY SEPER, WASHINGTON TIMES - President Bush lacks the constitutional authority to designate groups and persons as terrorists under a post-September 11 executive order, according to a federal judge in Los Angeles. U.S. District Judge Audrey B. Collins, in a challenge brought by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of the Humanitarian Law Project, said a Sept. 24, 2001, executive order naming 27 groups and persons as "specially designated global terrorists" allowed no way for those designated to challenge the ruling. In a 45-page ruling, Judge Collins said the executive order "contains no definable criteria" to constrain the president's use of it, and, as a result, "is unconstitutionally vague on its face." She said the order is subject only to Mr. Bush's "unfettered discretion." The judge also said the order "contains no definable criteria for designating individuals and groups as SDGTs," and improperly gives the secretary of the Treasury the power to impose penalties for "mere association" with the groups. http://tinyurl.com/ya6lke SAM HOWE VERHOVEK, LA TIMES - A misidentified fingerprint cost federal taxpayers $2 million and led to an unusual formal apology to Brandon Mayfield, a Muslim lawyer in Oregon whom the FBI says it wrongly named as a suspect in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. The federal government "regrets that it mistakenly linked Mr. Mayfield to this attack," according to the apology issued by the Justice Department. It added that the FBI had implemented measures to "ensure that what happened to Mr. Mayfield and the Mayfield family does not happen again." But Mayfield, who under the settlement can still proceed with a legal challenge to the controversial Patriot Act, said the nightmare he endured could happen to someone else. . . The case highlighted the error potential for fingerprint matching, which some experts say is unacceptably high. http://tinyurl.com/yjyedo SPY CHIPS IN CREDIT CARDS COULD BE READ FROM A DISTANCE CASPIAN - The New York Times reports that a team of security researchers has found that virtually every one of these cards tested is vulnerable to unauthorized charges and puts consumers at risk for identity theft. Radio Frequency Identification is a controversial technology that uses tiny microchips to transmit information at a distance. These RFID microchips have earned the nickname "spy chips" because the data they contain can be read silently and invisibly by radio waves without an individual's knowledge or consent. The technology has long been the target of criticism by privacy and civil liberties groups. "For these financial institutions to put RFID in credit cards, one of the most sensitive items we carry, is absolute lunacy," said Dr. Katherine Albrecht, founder and director of CASPIAN, a consumer group with over 12,000 members in 30 countries worldwide. Researchers are showing how a thief could skim information from the cards right through purses, backpacks and wallets. This information includes the cardholder's name, credit card number, expiration date and other data that would be sufficient to make unauthorized purchases. They say the information could even be used to identify and track people, a scenario Albrecht and co-author Liz McIntyre lay out in their book, "Spy chips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Purchase and Watch Your Every Move." Despite earlier assurances by the issuing companies that the data contained in the credit cards would be secure, researchers found that the majority of cards they tested did not use encryption or protect the data in any way. The information on them was readily available to unauthorized parties using equipment that could be assembled for as little as $50, the researchers said. "We cautioned companies against using item-level RFID, and they didn't heed us. Now the credit card industry is facing an unprecedented PR and financial disaster," says McIntyre, who is also a former bank examiner. She points to the astronomical cost to replace the cards, not to mention the potential financial losses, litigation expenses, and erosion of consumer trust. CASPIAN is advising consumers to
immediately remove the credit cards from their wallets and call
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/business/23card.html?ref=business RESEARCH REPORT DIRECTIVE SHOWS BUSH OKAYED TORTURE NY TIMES - The CIA has acknowledged for the first time the existence of two classified documents, including a directive signed by President George W. Bush, that have guided the agency's interrogation and detention of terror suspects. The CIA referred to the documents in a letter sent last Friday from the agency's associate general counsel, John McPherson, to lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union. The contents of the documents were not revealed, but one of them is "a directive signed by President Bush granting the CIA the authority to set up detention facilities outside the United States and outlining interrogation methods that may be used against detainees," the civil liberties union said, based on its review of published accounts. The second document, according to the group, is a Justice Department legal analysis "specifying interrogation methods that the CIA may use against top Al Qaeda members. . . http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/15/news/intel.php LEAHY TO TRY TO RESTORE HABEAS CORPUS CALIFORNIA DAILY JOURNAL - An effort to restore habeas corpus rights for enemy combatants could be the first test of the Democrats' resolve to change course in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who is expected to become chairman, confirmed Thursday that he is drafting a bill to undo portions of a recently passed law that prevent terrorism detainees from going to federal court to challenge the government's right to hold them indefinitely. "It was crazy," [Leahy] said during an interview broadcast Wednesday on National Public Radio. "After 200 years of habeas corpus, we threw it out after just a few hours of debate." He has also voiced concern that the bill allows the White House to determine what kinds of coercive interrogation procedures are off-limits. . . As for the "terrorist surveillance program," the fight isn't over. Leahy said to the Associated Press: "We have been asked to make sweeping and fundamental changes in law for reasons that we do not know and in order to legalize secret, unlawful actions that the administration has refused to fully divulge....If legislation is needed for judicial review, then we should write that legislation together, in a bipartisan and thoughtful way."... http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/11/11/181243/88 AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE - Almost half of Canadians and even more Americans feel security laws passed after the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington are "intrusive," according to a survey just published. The study by Queen's University researchers in Kingston, Ontario, examined the surveillance and privacy attitudes of 9,000 people from eight countries. . . "Fifty-seven percent of Americans and 47 percent of Canadians said that these laws are intrusive," he said. . . Sixty percent of Chinese, Hungarians, Brazilians, and Canadians, but only a third of Americans rejected extra airport security checks for visible minorities. A majority, except in the United States, also supported the implementation of national identification cards -- 78 percent were in favor in France, 77 percent in China, 53 percent in Canada, and 42 percent in the United States. OCTOBER 2006 AMERICA'S STASI MOST AMERICANS DON'T CARE ABOUT CIVIL LIBERTIES COLLAPSE CNN - Most Americans do not believe the Bush administration has gone too far in restricting civil liberties as part of the war on terror, a new CNN poll released Thursday suggests. While 39 percent of the 1,013 poll respondents said the Bush administration has gone too far, 34 percent said they believe the administration has been about right on the restrictions, according to the Opinion Research Corp. survey. Another 25 percent said the administration has not gone far enough. Asked whether Bush has more power than any other U.S. president, 65 percent of poll respondents said no. Thirty-three percent said yes. Of those who said yes, a quarter said that was bad for the country. http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/10/25/poll.bush/index.html ORWELL'S HOMELAND SHOWS US THE FUTURE JASON BENNETTO, INDEPENDENT, U K - Britain has sleepwalked into becoming a surveillance society that increasingly intrudes into our private lives and impacts on everyday activities, the head of the information watchdog warns. New technology and "invisible" techniques are being used to gather a growing amount of information about UK citizens. The level of surveillance will grow even further in the next 10 years, which could result in a growing number of people being discriminated against and excluded from society, says a report by the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas. . . The major surveillance techniques include: - Video cameras monitoring buildings, shopping streets and residential areas. Automatic systems can now recognise vehicle number plates and faces. - Software that analyses spending habits and the data sold to businesses. When we call service centres or apply for loans, insurance or mortgages, how quickly we are served and what we are offered can depend on what we spend, where we live and who we are. - Electronic tags to monitor offenders on probation. - DNA taken from those arrested by the police and placed on a database. - Information stored about foreign travel. - Smart cards in schools to determine where children are, what they eat or the books they borrow. - Taps on telephones, e-mails and internet use that can screened for key words and phrases by British and US intelligence services. . . The group of academics who compiled the report have also predicted future trends in surveillance in the next decade. The include: - Shoppers being scanned as they enter stores. This will be matched with loyalty card data to affect how they are handled, with big spenders given preferential treatment over others. - Cars linked to global satellite navigation systems which will provide the quickest route to avoid congestion and allow police to monitor speed and to track selected cars. - Employees subjected to biometric and psychometric tests plus lifestyle profiles with diagnostic health tests common place. Jobs are refused to those who are seen as a health risk. - Schools using card systems to allow parents to monitor what their children eat, their attendance, academic and drug test results - Facial recognition systems to monitor our movements using tiny cameras in lampposts and walls, and unmanned aircraft above. BRITAIN UNDER SURVEILLANCE - The national DNA database holds profiles on about 3.5 million people. - There are an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain: one for every 14 people. - Since 2002 there have been more than 8 million criminal records checks for jobs, of which around 400,000 contained convictions or police intelligence information. - There are plans to expand capacity to read vehicle number plates from 35 million reads per day to 50 million by 2008. - Some 216 catalogue companies in the UK are signed up to the Abacus data-sharing consortium, with information on 26 million individuals. - The database of fingerprints contains nearly 6 million sets of prints. - An individual can be captured on more than 300 cameras each day. - By the end of 2002 law enforcement bodies had made more than 400,000 requests for data from mobile network operators. - The number of motorists caught by speed cameras rose from 300,000 in 1996 to over 2 million in 2004. - In the year to April 2005 some 631 adults and 5,751 juveniles were electronically tagged. http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article1948209.ece BUSH SIGNS LAW GIVING HIMSELF
DICTATORIAL POWERS UNDER MARTIAL LAW NEW LAW SEC. 1076. USE OF THE ARMED FORCES IN MAJOR PUBLIC EMERGENCIES. (a) Use of the Armed Forces Authorized-
 SEPTEMBER 2006 ID PROGRAM WILL COST STATES $11 BILLION DARRYL FEARS WASHINGTON - The cost to consumers for helping to secure America became clearer yesterday as a coalition of state groups tallied the bill for implementing the Real ID Act and federal officials divulged the price that some of its workers must pay for new smart cards. In a report released by the National Governors Association, the National Conference of State Legislatures and the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, state motor vehicle officials estimated it would cost more than $11 billion over five years to implement the technology required by the Real ID Act. . . Under the law, states must start to re-enroll about 250 million holders of U.S. driver's licenses after May 2008. The states must train workers to verify copies of original birth certificates, Social Security cards, marriage certificates and various identification documents. "The days of going to the DMV and getting your license on the same day are probably over," said David Quam, director of federal relations for the National Governors Association. "You'll have to take all your documents as if you were applying for the first time. What this comes down to is that more people will be in DMV offices spending more time to get an ID." DAVID LYKKEN AND THE POLYGRAPH MYTH SECRECY NEWS - David T. Lykken, a psychologist who did pioneering research and public education on the limits and abuses of polygraph testing, died last week at age 78. With exceptional clarity he demonstrated that the polygraph is not a "lie detector" but simply a recorder of physiological responses to verbal stimuli. And, he explained, there is no set of physiological responses that corresponds uniquely to deception. That does not mean the polygraph is worthless. There is empirical evidence to support its use in the investigation of specific incidents, where "guilty knowledge" of particular details may be usefully revealed by the polygraph. "The use of the [polygraph] by the police as an investigative tool, while subject to abuse like any other tool, is not inherently objectionable," Lykken wrote. (Not only that, "It seems reasonable to conclude that whether O.J. Simpson did or did not kill his wife could have been determined with high confidence using a Guilty Knowledge Test administered within hours after he was first in police custody.") On the other hand, he said, the use of the polygraph for security screening of personnel, as is commonly done by U.S. intelligence agencies, cannot reliably achieve its purported goal of identifying spies or traitors and in many cases becomes counterproductive. . . It is a sign of our times that the scientific critique of polygraph testing has gained almost no traction on government policy. To the contrary, the use of the polygraph to perform the sort of screening that Lykken termed a "menace in American life" is actually on the rise. "From FY 2002 through 2005, the FBI, DEA, and ATF conducted approximately 28,000 pre-employment polygraph examinations" as well as tens of thousands more for other purposes, according to a major new report from the Justice Department Inspector General. http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/polygraph/dojpoly.pdf COMMUNITY BASED JUSTICE COMES TO THE BRONX AUBREY FOX, BRONX COMMUNITY SOLUTIONS - After decades of cynicism about rehabilitative approaches in the criminal justice system, in the last fifteen years there's been a remarkable resurgence of creative court experiments to address problems like drug addiction, mental illness, juvenile delinquency and quality-of-life crime, as well as a new focus on improving court-community relationships. . . Problem-solving courts have been around since 1989 (when the first drug court was created in Dade County, Florida), and they've reached a particularly interesting crossroads: the approach is starting to attract the attention of the traditional court system. That's where Bronx Community Solutions comes in - it's an attempt to take the best of problem-solving experiments and see if they can work in a traditional court setting, as opposed to a stand-alone problem-solving court. . . So what have we learned after 18 months of implementing Bronx Community Solutions? I think the good news for other jurisdictions interested in adopting problem-solving approaches in a traditional court setting (as opposed to creating stand-alone specialty courts) is how much bang for your buck you can get from relatively modest changes. Most jurisdictions use community service as a sentencing alternative: what we've done is add social service to the mix. Most jurisdictions need to get through their arraignment calendar quickly: our method for screening cases doesn't effect the speed at which the court gets its work done. We also don't ask court players to abandon the adversarial model, which means that the legal rights or defendants aren't being sacrificed in the name of rehabilitation. The two areas where we've dramatically changed (or are trying to change) practice in the Bronx is by creating an in-house social service clinic, staffed by a team of social workers making connections to community-based agencies in the Bronx, and attempting to forge new links between the courts and the community though a Community Advisory Board. These are areas that require an up-front investment of time and money to get right. One final note: it's important to note that problem-solving court projects like Bronx Community Solutions are not only about helping low-level offenders. They are also about punishing them appropriately and ensuring some accountability for communities hit hardest by quality-of-life crime. The ability to appeal to both sides of the ideological spectrum is another advantage of problem-solving courts, but it also means we cut against the grain of popular depictions of the criminal justice system as too punitive. When you work in a large urban criminal court like the Bronx, it's easy to be shocked by how little low-level crime gets punished, not the opposite. We think it's appropriate to expect that low-level offenders, particularly those who are getting arrested again and again, can change their behavior (with a little help from us) or at least "pay back" the community through a court obligation like community service. http://changingthecourt.blogspot.com/2006/06/introduction-to-bronx-community.html - All judges in the Bronx will have a broad set of sentencing options at their disposal, including drug treatment, job training, family services and mental health counseling. - Offenders will be assigned to community service work in neighborhoods throughout the Bronx. Project staff will work with residents and community groups to create community service options that respond to local problems (for example, trash in a local park or walls marred by graffiti). -By quickly assigning offenders to social service and community service sentences, and rigorously monitoring their compliance, Bronx Community Solutions will send the message that community-based sanctions are taken seriously. - Bronx Community Solutions invites community groups and local residents to play a number of concrete roles in ongoing operations, including identifying hot spots and eye sores for community service projects, and participating in a neighborhood advisory board. Since the project began pilot operations in January 2005, nearly 4,000 individuals have been assigned to perform community restitution and receive social services through Bronx Community Solutions. It is expected that the program will handle upwards of 10,000 cases annually when fully operational. BENJAMIN SMITH, BRONX COMMUNITY SOLUTIONS - The Bronx Community Solutions community service crew was about to embark on its toughest challenge yet: helping the Mount Hope Housing Corporation haul a dumpster's worth of garbage out of an heavily overgrown, formerly abandoned lot. . . While Mount Hope was excited to get our help, we were equally excited to have the opportunity to experiment with a different model of community service. For the first time in the Bronx, we were partnering with a local non-profit to assist in visible and tangible efforts to improve safety and neighborhood quality of life. . . But to our clients, this was a day of court-ordered community service. They weren't sure what to expect, and mostly they were just hoping to get their mandate done. A typical day of community service is light work: mostly sweeping and picking up litter in public parks, sidewalks, and streets. Today, we would be cleaning a formerly abandoned lot piled high with trash. . . After bagging a huge amount of trash and hauling it off the site, it was obvious to everyone that we had really accomplished something. Although they'd been skeptical at first, our clients were saying things like, "I'm going to come back a year from now and make sure they finish this project." "This is my neighborhood. I can't believe how much trash people dump here. It doesn't feel right." Many of the clients who worked the hardest also sought information about job training and job placement programs like Urban Youth Alliance and FEGS and we made sure to escort them to our clinic after the day was over. We've learned that clients who show up and take their mandate seriously are often good candidates for these programs. Rejuvenating neglected and abandoned public space in the Bronx has a special history. In the aftermath of wholesale disinvestment, the Bronx has been rebuilt lot-by-lot and block-by-block, often by small community-based organizations and groups of neighbors. . http://changingthecourt.blogspot.com/2006/06/making-difference.html CENTER FOR COURT INNOVATION GOOD COURTS PRISON LABOR: THE NEW SLAVERY CHRIS LEVISTER, NEW AMERICA MEDIA - As a child Ayana Cole dreamed of becoming a world class fashion designer. Today she is among hundreds of inmates crowded in an Oregon prison factory cranking out designer jeans. For her labor she is paid 45 cents an hour. At a chic Beverly Hills boutique some of the beaded creations carry a $350 price tag. In fact the jeans labeled "Prison Blues" -- proved so popular last year that prison factories couldn't keep up with demand. At a San Diego private-run prison factory Donovan Thomas earns 21 cents an hour manufacturing office equipment used in some of LA's plushest office towers. In Chino Gary's prison sewn T- shirts are a fashion hit. Hundreds of prison generated products end up attached to trendy and nationally known labels like No Fear, Lee Jeans, Trinidad Tees, and other well known U.S. companies. After deductions, many prisoners like Cole and Thomas earn about $60 for an entire month of nine-hour days. In short, hiring out prisoners has become big business. And it's booming. . . For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don't have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment, health or worker's comp insurance, vacation or comp time. All of their workers are full time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if prisoners refuse to work, they are moved to disciplinary housing and lose canteen privileges. Most importantly, they lose "good time" credit that reduces their sentence. . . Critics argue that inmate labor is both a potential human rights abuse and a threat to workers outside prison walls claiming, inmates have no bargaining power, are easily exploited and once released are frequently barred from gainful employment because of a felony conviction. In one California lawsuit, for example, two prisoners have sued both their employer and the prison, saying they were put in solitary confinement after refusing to labor in unsafe working conditions. In a nutshell John Fleckner of Operation Prison Reform labels the growing trend "capitalist punishment -- slavery re-envisioned." http://www.alternet.org/story/41481/ COPS HARASSING PHOTOGRAPHERS CITING NON-EXISTENT RESTRICTIONS NEAL MATTHEWS, POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY - Both amateur and professional photographers all over the country are being stopped and harassed with no legal basis. As digital cameras proliferate wildly, so do attempts to restrict what you can shoot and how you can use the picture. And not all attempts to quash photography have to do with national security concerns. Some invoke copyright and trademark protection, others the privacy both of celebrities and ordinary people. . . On escalating tension between police and photographers, a New York City Police Department spokesperson explains, "We live in a world where everyone is suspicious of photography. Generally, anything in a public place can be photographed. But there's a difference between taking a picture and taking surveillance, and our officers have to determine where that line is.". . . "This is one of the biggest myths with the law of taking photographs," explains Bert Krages, a Portland, OR-based copyright attorney who has written books on photographers' rights and techniques. "There is no general prohibition against photographing federal buildings. There are statutes that prohibit photographing areas of military and nuclear facilities. But there are no laws against photographing other federal facilities, other than the right of all property owners to restrict activities that take place on their property. A federal office building manager cannot restrict photography when the photographer is situated outside the federal property boundary." In fall 2005, Pop Photo Senior Editor Peter Kolonia was shooting small architectural details near the Mall in Washington, D.C. Stopping by the stairs of the Department of Agriculture to shoot the base of a column, with a fairly mainstream camera-a Fujifilm FinePix S3 Pro with a normal lens and no flash-he put one foot on the bottom step, and… "Two people, a security guard in a generic uniform and a SWAT-type guy, dressed all in black with a big gun, came out the front and asked what I was doing." They looked at his pictures, then took the memory card and his driver's license inside to run a check on him. "They were clearly trying to scare me," he says. "They knew I was just a tourist. When they came out the second time they got very lecturey with me: 'Haven't you heard there's a war on? Do you know about the threat of terrorism?'" They threatened to confiscate his camera (which requires a court order), and he had to talk them out of keeping his memory card. How far does the zealotry extend? All the way to the flags at the county courthouse. That's what recently got Ben Hider, a 27-year-old British citizen working (legally, with a green card) as a photographer, into trouble. On March 17, he stopped on a public thoroughfare at the Westchester County courthouse in White Plains, NY, to snap a few pictures of the wind-whipped flags out front. Three court police officers quickly surrounded him and started firing questions, then told him he was being detained for shooting pictures of an official government building. He was taken inside, where he was frisked, interrogated, photographed, lectured on terrorism, told he was going to be picked up by the "terrorism task force," and threatened with deportation. After being held for two hours, he was released. "People should know that police are using fear and intimidation," says Hider. "For what? I don't know what they gain." http://www.popphoto.com/popularphotographyfeatures/2668/the-war-on-photographers.html AUGUST 2006 BROOKLYN'S UNIQUE COMMUNITY COURT [One of the architects of this court is Greg Berman, director of the Center for Court Innovation and former Progressive Review intern] MICHAEL WILSON, NY TIMES - Now six years old, the court in Red Hook is one of a kind, the nation's first multi-jurisdictional community court. It combines elements of criminal, family and housing courts not only under the same roof, but also before the same judge, Alex M. Calabrese. It follows similar courts started in Midtown Manhattan, in 1993, and later in Harlem, but those projects did not combine all three courts. Many of the cases Judge Calabrese hears are of the sort common in any courthouse, involving drugs, prostitution or vandalism. But he and the court have garnered wide attention for what is considered a groundbreaking crossover role: a court linking criminal sentences with social services, like substance abuse counseling and youth programs, all in the same building. The city is exploring a similar project in the Bronx. One morning a week, the courthouse fills - the line for the metal detectors snaking out onto the sidewalk - with people who have been issued summonses in Red Hook and its surrounding neighborhoods, including Sunset Park and Park Slope. . . To sit through a few Tuesdays in the court is not only to see and experience the million little details and moments that make this courthouse unique in New York City, but also to return to a simpler time, to an array of affronts to a collective sensibility. Riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. Playing music too loud. Drinking in public. Urinating in public. Being in a park after-hours. Some cases are pleaded down or thrown out. Others bring a fine or a lecture in a "quality-of-life class," which is just that, a class that seeks to instruct on how to live a better life, a life without alcoholics in parks and urinators in alleys. "It's a small-town court in a big city. Just like in a small town, the judge actually knows who's doing what," said David Bookstaver, a spokesman for the state's Office of Court Administration. "You have to face that same judge every time you screw up." The court, and its sole judge to date, have heard almost 12,000 summonses - the type of violations that include quality-of-life cases - since opening in 2000, far more than any other kind of case, and more than five times the number of criminal cases. . . The court's crossover role continues outside, as the judge, prosecutors and police officers regularly visit community meetings. This month, Judge Calabrese and the court were given the 2006 "Organizational Lawyer as Problem Solver Award" by the American Bar Association at a meeting in Hawaii. . . The quality-of-life classes, where many defendants are sent to clear their summonses, were conceived as something of a community accounting, with offenders facing a panel of three people who live or work in the neighborhood, said Greg Berman, director of the Center for Court Innovation and an architect of the Red Hook court. . . BROOKLYN'S MENTAL HEALTH COURT CENTER FOR COURT INNOVATION STOPPING ALL THOSE TERRORIST VIOLISTS MARK SAVAGE, BBC - Strict security measures at UK airports are having a "devastating impact" on musicians, says the Musicians' Union. It says its members "are reporting significant lost earnings" because they are unable to take their instruments on board aircraft as hand luggage. Many instruments are too fragile to be placed in the hold of an airliner, the union told the BBC News website. But the Department for Transport says the security regulations will "be in place for as long as they need to be. . . A spokeswoman at the Department for Transport said instruments would have to be checked into the hold until the security situation was downgraded. US violin duo Marc Ramirez and Olivia Hajioff, who play together as Marcolivia, contacted the BBC to tell how they had been affected by the restrictions. . . "We are planning to return to the States on 27 August, but have been informed by the airline and by the Department for Transport that we will not be able to take our violins with us into the cabin http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5273576.stm FEDERAL COURT RULES POLICE CAN SEIZE CASH FROM DRIVERS WITHOUT CAUSE THE NEWSPAPER - A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that if a motorist is carrying large sums of money, it is automatically subject to confiscation. In the case entitled, "United States of America v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency," the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit took that amount of cash away from Emiliano Gomez Gonzolez, a man with a "lack of significant criminal history" neither accused nor convicted of any crime. On May 28, 2003, a Nebraska state trooper signaled Gonzolez to pull over his rented Ford Taurus on Interstate 80. The trooper intended to issue a speeding ticket, but noticed the Gonzolez's name was not on the rental contract. The trooper then proceeded to question Gonzolez -- who did not speak English well -- and search the car. The trooper found a cooler containing $124,700 in cash, which he confiscated. A trained drug sniffing dog barked at the rental car and the cash. For the police, this was all the evidence needed to establish a drug crime that allows the force to keep the seized money. Associates of Gonzolez testified in court that they had pooled their life savings to purchase a refrigerated truck to start a produce business. Gonzolez flew on a one-way ticket to Chicago to buy a truck, but it had sold by the time he had arrived. Without a credit card of his own, he had a third-party rent one for him. Gonzolez hid the money in a cooler to keep it from being noticed and stolen. He was scared when the troopers began questioning him about it. There was no evidence disputing Gonzolez's story. Yesterday the Eighth Circuit summarily dismissed Gonzolez's story. It overturned a lower court ruling that had found no evidence of drug activity, stating, "We respectfully disagree and reach a different conclusion... Possession of a large sum of cash is 'strong evidence' of a connection to drug activity." Judge Donald Lay found the majority's reasoning faulty and issued a strong dissent. "Notwithstanding the fact that claimants seemingly suspicious activities were reasoned away with plausible, and thus presumptively trustworthy, explanations which the government failed to contradict or rebut, I note that no drugs, drug paraphernalia, or drug records were recovered in connection with the seized money," Judge Lay wrote. "There is no evidence claimants were ever convicted of any drug-related crime, nor is there any indication the manner in which the currency was bundled was indicative of drug use or distribution." "Finally, the mere fact that the canine alerted officers to the presence of drug residue in a rental car, no doubt driven by dozens, perhaps scores, of patrons during the course of a given year, coupled with the fact that the alert came from the same location where the currency was discovered, does little to connect the money to a controlled substance offense," Judge Lay Concluded. http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/12/1296.asp FBI WAS OBSESSED WITH ARTHUR MILLER CANADIAN BROADCASTING - The FBI files of great American playwright Arthur Miller show he was under suspicion of being a Communist almost from the staging of his first play in 1944. Arthur Miller was under surveillance by the FBI for his left-of-centre political views. The files include a 34-page FBI report, compiled in 1951, that states Miller was "under Communist party discipline" in the 1930s and was a member of the party in the 1940s. The FBI was relying on information from informants. . . In an essay published in 1999, Miller recalled that "practically everyone I knew stood within the conventions of the political left of centre; one or two were Communist party members... and most had had a brush with Marxist ideas or organizations. "I have never been able to believe in the reality of these people being actual or putative traitors any more than I could be," he wrote. . . In later essays, Miller dismissed allegations he had been "under Communist discipline" and said he was never a member of the party. His FBI file, stretching from 1944 to 1956, showed he was under close surveillance through press clippings and informants. The FBI studied his plays to detect Communist sympathy and noted who in the cast had left-wing connections. . . In 1956, the House Un-American Activities Committee asked him to give names of alleged communist writers with whom he had attended meetings in the 1940s. Miller refused and was convicted of contempt of Congress, a decision eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. When he married screen idol Marilyn Monroe in 1956, the FBI had an informant at the scene. The report at the time says "an anonymous telephone call" disclosed that the Jewish wedding was an obvious "cover-up" for Miller, who "had been and still was a member of the CP (Communist party), and was their cultural front man." http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2006/06/20/miller-fbi.html AUGUST 2004 GREAT MOMENTS IN HOMELAND SECURITY MEPHRON - Last night, on a whim, I looked up the NJ and NY phone numbers for the ACLU and put them in my phone. This morning, they're doing bag searches again to get on the ferry. And the guy doing the searches pulls me aside and says, "Sir, I feel that I need to confiscate this book." I pause and say, in that tone of voice that most people would recognize as meaning, "have you lost your grip completely, chuckles?": "You need to confiscate... a book." "Yes. I feel it's inappropriate for the other people on the ferry to be exposed to it." Now, I had the book in my bag. It was not open. And while the Maiden of the Mirthless Smile is displayed as improbably proportioned, well, this is not, as far as I know, illegal to have. I mean, there was a guy carrying a copy of Maxim, and some of the women in that are improbably proportion. (All right, I admit: they're not wielding a huge sword and dressed in a bustier studded with human finger bones. But really.) My response: "Well, let me call the ACLU and have them come down here, and see what they think about your attempt to confiscate a book that was not in the plain sight of others due to your feeling it's not appropriate." And I pull out my cell and start scrolling down the list - ACLU-NJ is at the top, actually, before 'Amanda' and 'ardaniel' since it sorts alphabetically. He gets all pissy at me and says, "Don't you understand this is for your safety?" "Confiscating someone's gun or bomb is for my safety. Perhaps confiscating someone's pocketknife or nail file may be for my safety. What's so damn dangerous about my book?" "It's inappropriate!" "That's not your decision! I could be carrying a copy of Hustler in here, and it's still not your decision! You're looking for bombs and knifes and guns and things that hurt people, and a book that is in my bag is not going to leap out of its own damn accord and hit someone!" The rest of the people waiting for the ferry are watching our exchange. He realizes that they're all looking at him, and that I'm winning this one in their eyes. He lets me go on the boat. I'm pretty sure he made notes about me, and I'll probably get more hassling later, and if I run into him again he'll probably be more of an asshole. But I don't care. I won this one. I'll win the next one if I have to fight it. Today I print out the Fourth Amendment and keep a copy of it in my bag. BIG BUSINESS BECOMING BIG BROTHER WIRED - The government is increasingly using corporations to do its surveillance work, allowing it to get around restrictions that protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, according to a report released Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that works to protect civil liberties. Data aggregators -- companies that aggregate information from numerous private and public databases -- and private companies that collect information about their customers are increasingly giving or selling data to the government to augment its surveillance capabilities and help it track the activities of people. Because
laws that restrict government data collection don't apply to
private industry, the government is able to bypass restrictions
on domestic surveillance. Congress needs to close such loopholes,
the ACLU said, before the exchange of information gets out of
hand. "Americans would really be shocked to discover the
extent of the practices that are now common in both industry
and government," said the ACLU's Jay Stanley, author of
the report. "Industry and government know that, so they
have a strong incentive to not publicize a lot of what's going
on." MICHAEL ISIKOFF AND MARK HOSENBALL, NEWSWEEK - Rep. Porter Goss, President Bush's nominee to head the CIA, recently introduced legislation that would give the president new authority to direct CIA agents to conduct law-enforcement operations inside the United States-including arresting American citizens. . . In language
that until now has not gotten any public attention, the Goss
bill would also redefine the authority of the DCI in such a way
as to substantially alter-if not overturn-a 57-year-old ban on
the CIA conducting operations inside the United States. "This language on its face would have allowed President Nixon to authorize the CIA to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters," Jeffrey H. Smith, who served as general counsel of the CIA between 1995 and 1996, told Newsweek. "I can't imagine what Porter had in mind." FEDERALLY BACKED CHARITIES FORCED TO PLAY TERROR GAME JACQUELINE L. SALMON, WASHINGTON POST - When Capital Hospice, a nonprofit that provides care to about 4,000 terminally ill patients and their families in the Washington area each year, hires an employee or takes on a new volunteer, its background checks are extensive, as required by state and federal law and health care accrediting organizations. But next week, it will add one more check: screening its 600 workers and volunteers against voluminous government lists of suspected terrorists. . . If it doesn't undertake the checks, it risks being dropped from the Combined Federal Campaign, the fundraising drive among federal workers who jointly contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to Capital Hospice through the CFC each year. . . According to the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the CFC, the rule is required by an executive order President Bush signed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Under the order, organizations must ensure that no private or public money is diverted to terrorist groups. A coalition of 16 national nonprofits led by the American Civil Liberties Union vowed this week to fight the rule, which affects the thousands of national and local nonprofits across the country that will take part in the fundraising starting Oct. 1. ACLU BLASTS FBI HARASSMENT OF PROTESTERS NEW YORK-The American Civil Liberties Union today denounced the FBI's use of the Joint Terrorism Task Force to monitor, interrogate and suppress anti-war and other political protesters and called on individuals who have been targeted for investigation to come forward. "The FBI's intimidation and interrogation of peaceful protesters brings back eerie echoes of the days of J. Edgar Hoover," said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU Executive Director. In Missouri, three young men in their early 20's were subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury on July 29, the same day they planned on protesting the Democratic convention. The men, who planned to drive to Boston with an activist group based in St. Louis, first realized they were being targeted by the FBI when agents visited the homes of their parents a week before the subpoenas. In addition to asking about easily accessible information such as current addresses, the agents also asked the parents for information on their sons' political activities. The very next day, agents visited the three men directly and asked them if they had any knowledge of individuals planning "criminally disorderly behavior" at the national conventions, the presidential debates, the election or any other event. According to the men, the surveillance increased after the visits, and conditions did not improve until after they contacted the ACLU. JTTF officials conducted similar investigations on individuals in Denver and Fort Collins, Colorado, including 21-year-old Sarah Bardwell. Bardwell, an intern with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group dedicated to nonviolence, was approached at her home by four FBI agents and two Denver police officers asking questions consistent with those in Missouri: Are you planning to be involved in any criminal acts at the national conventions? Do you know anybody who is? Are you aware that if you assist or know anybody planning any criminal acts and do not report them, it's a crime? According to Bardwell, the officials at first jokingly told her and her housemates that they were there to do "community outreach," but then clarified they were "doing some preventive measures and investigating." Bardwell and her housemates believe they were targeted because of their past participation in protests, including anti-war demonstrations. Last year, the Denver Police Department agreed to stop its practice of monitoring and recording the peaceful protest activities of local residents in a settlement reached in the ACLU's landmark "Spy Files" lawsuit. Despite the settlement, Denver's intelligence unit contributes two fulltime officers to the JTTF. FBI MEMORANDUM ON TARGETING PROTESTORS
JULY 2004 CANWEST - An influential organization representing U.S. and Canadian drivers' licence bureaus is developing a proposal for a de facto North American identity card: a biometric license for 300 million people that could be fed through law enforcement databases to nab holders of multiple forged licenses. Such a card would require the creation of the largest database of biometric data in the world - potentially to include digital images of a person's face or eye, or electronic fingerprints. . . The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, a quasi-governmental body whose members are mainly state and provincial ministries of transportation, has finished the first stage of a multi-year evaluation to gauge whether a common biometric licence could be applied across association jurisdictions, including Canadian provinces. . . Although
a decision would ultimately rest with lawmakers in the U.S. and
Canada, the initiative is being fast-tracked at the highest levels
of the association, according to a second report produced by
Fischer Consulting Inc., which offers a detailed blueprint for
further action. The association's board of directors has voted
to continue canvassing biometrics vendors for detailed technical
advice on scaling a database so it could dwarf existing warehouses
of personal information without sacrificing accuracy, according
to the Fischer report. JUNE 2004 ON LINE ATHENS - Military and
security forces will be authorized to shoot to kill while policing
Sea Island and its surrounding waters during next month's G-8
summit. . . MAY 2004 BOSTON TRANSIT RIDERS TO BE RANDOMLY STOPPED BOSTON GLOBE: - MBTA transit police confirmed yesterday they will begin stopping passengers for identification checks at various T locations, apparently as part of new national rail security measures following the deadly terrorist train bombings in Spain. Although officials would release few details about the initiative, the identity checks will mark the first time local rail and subway passengers will be asked to produce identification and be questioned about their activities. Officers have been training for the security checks since May 11, transit officials said. MBTA Police Deputy Chief John Martino confirmed via e-mail yesterday that officers have been training with State Police at South Station this week. HOW DO YOU EXPECT PRIVATES TO
BEHAVE PAUL STAROBIN, ATLANTIC MONTHLY - In the wake of Madrid, in the wake of 9/11, in the wake of suicide bombings in Moscow subway stations and Jerusalem cafés, the state is impelled to become even more intrusive and muscular than it already is. How well today's leaders meet this obligation to construct more-vigilant states is very likely to stand as one of history's most important criteria for assessing their stewardship. An authoritarian push is often seen as coming from above, forced on an unsuspecting public by would-be autocrats. But today's global trend toward what might be called the Daddy State is propelled by the anxious demands of majority blocs of citizens. . . In short, we are at the dawn of a popularly sanctioned movement toward greater authoritarianism in the domain of what is now fashionably called "homeland security." . . . To say that we are at the beginning of an authoritarian age is not, of course, to end the conversation but to begin it. The challenge is to get authoritarianism right, and it's important to identify what could go wrong as we try to meet the demands of this new era. . . Homeland security in the United States probably isn't going to improve unless those responsible for formulating and administering protection policies are insulated from the legislature. That was the painful lesson taught by a wave of bombings in France and other European countries in the 1980s; after the bombings France improved its counterterrorism capabilities by endowing an elite group of Paris-based magistrates with investigative powers that far outstrip those given to John Ashcroft's Justice Department in the Patriot Act. .' [The article to which Blumenthal refers was discussed by the Review in 1996. Soon after your editor was quoted on the matter by a Washington Post columnist, the Post ran two major articles on how wonderful generals were in functioning in civilian roles] SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL, GUARDIAN - In 1992, General Colin Powell, chairman of the joint chiefs, awarded the prize for his strategy essay competition at the National Defense University to Lieutenant Colonel Charles Dunlap for The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012. His cautionary tale imagined an incapable civilian government creating a vacuum that drew a competent military into a coup disastrous for democracy. The military, of course, is bound to uphold the constitution. But Dunlap wrote: "The catastrophe that occurred on our watch took place because we failed to speak out against policies we knew were wrong. It's too late for me to do any more. But it's not for you." The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012 is today circulating among top US military strategists. JAMES MANN, ATLANTIC MONTHLY - At least once a year during the 1980s Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was working diligently on Capitol Hill, as a congressman rising through the ranks of the Republican leadership. Rumsfeld, who had served as Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense, was a hard-driving business executive in the Chicago area-where, as the head of G. D. Searle & Co., he dedicated time and energy to the success of such commercial products as Nutra-Sweet, Equal, and Metamucil. Yet for periods of three or four days at a time no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld. Even their wives were in the dark; they were handed only a mysterious Washington phone number to use in case of emergency. . . Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal actors in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan Administration. Under it U.S. officials furtively carried out detailed planning exercises for keeping the federal government running during and after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The program called for setting aside the legal rules for presidential succession in some circumstances, in favor of a secret procedure for putting in place a new "President" and his staff. The idea was to concentrate on speed, to preserve "continuity of government," and to avoid cumbersome procedures; the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the rest of Congress would play a greatly diminished role. . . "One of the awkward questions we faced," one participant in the planning of the program explains, "was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them." For one thing, it was felt that reconvening Congress, and replacing members who had been killed, would take too long. Moreover, if Congress did reconvene, it might elect a new speaker of the House, whose claim to the presidency might have greater legitimacy than that of a Secretary of Agriculture or Commerce who had been set up as President under Reagan's secret program. The election of a new House speaker would not only take time but also create the potential for confusion. EVEN CHOICE POINT WANTS OUT OF CAPPS II GOV EXEC - The CEO of a leading commercial database company said that his company has opted out of the government's proposed method of screening airline passengers because the system uses a probability-based system instead of evaluating known risks. At a press conference to promote two new books he wrote, Choice Point CEO Derek Smith addressed what he views as the weaknesses of the Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II), a project of the Transportation Security Administration. "Choice Point opted out of CAPPS II," Smith said. "We have not been involved in CAPPS II" because of disagreements with the government. "We respect the government's ability to do it a different way." Smith said CAPPS II is too much like the Terrorism Information Awareness program once proposed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to mine commercial data because CAPPS II attempts to ferret out data about 280 million individual Americans. Smith termed that approach "probabilistic theory" and said law enforcement and private businesses seeking to verify individuals' identities should instead take advantage of "link analysis." The latter approach concentrates first on suspected terrorists and seeks information about anyone who might be connected to them. "Today, we are looking for small groups of people, or needles in a haystack," he said. "The last thing you want to do is put more hay on the haystacks." DOES GEORGE BUSH HAVE THE POWER TO JAIL YOU FOREVER WITHOUT TRIAL? GENE HEALY, CATO INSTITUTE - Does the president have the power to order the military to seize an American citizen on American soil, declare him an outlaw to the Constitution, and lock him up for the duration of the war on terror -- in other words, forever? That's the stark question the Supreme Court will be examining today, April 28, when it hears oral argument in Padilla v. Rumsfeld. . . . There's little in Padilla's background to suggest he's an innocent man wrongly accused -- he's a violent ex-con with apparent ties to Al Qaeda. But "the innocent have nothing to fear" is cold comfort and poor constitutional argument. The very principle that imprisons the guilty can be used to seize the innocent. . . It amounts to the assertion that the executive branch can serve as judge, jury, and jailer in cases involving terrorist suspects. Of all the powers claimed by the president since September 11, that power is the one most to be feared -- not least because, due to the nature of the war on terrorism, it's a power unlikely ever to be relinquished. Moreover, it's a power that cannot be found in the Constitution. The Bill of Rights does not come with an asterisk reading "unenforceable during time of war." As the Supreme Court declared in Ex Parte Milligan (1866), rejecting the military trial of a civilian during the Civil War, "The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times." Congress can suspend the writ of habeas corpus under very narrow circumstances "when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." But Congress has made no such attempt here -- instead the president has unilaterally stripped Padilla of his rights, holding him without even a semblance of due process. . . The government justifies its confinement of Padilla by citing a five-and-a-half-page "Declaration" by Michael Mobbs, an obscure Pentagon bureaucrat who has never been cross-examined by Padilla's attorneys. A look at the Mobbs Declaration reveals just how far down the rabbit hole we've traveled. Of the confidential informants who fingered Padilla, the declaration notes: "Some information provided by the sources remains uncorroborated and may be part of an effort to mislead or confuse U.S. officials.... In addition, at the time of being interviewed by U.S. officials, one of the sources was being treated with various types of drugs to treat medical conditions." Again, that's not to suggest that Padilla is innocent. It's to highlight the starkly extra-constitutional nature of these proceedings -- in which Padilla is not permitted to test the government's evidence in open court. . . Arguing before the Supreme Court in the Milligan case, James Garfield, who would later serve as 20th president of the United States, declared that a decision to uphold the constitutional limits on executive power would show the world "that a republic can wield the vast enginery of war without breaking down the safeguards of liberty." A decision that denies Padilla his day in court will have the opposite effect. It will declare that the articles in the Bill of Rights are mere peace provisions in an era of permanent war. That's a terrifying concept indeed. MAJOR AIRLINES HELPED FBI SPY ON PASSENGERS SARA KEHAULANI GOO, WASHINGTON POST - The nation's largest airlines said yesterday that they provided passenger records to the Federal Bureau of Investigation after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, in an acknowledgement that data sharing between the industry and government had been more widespread than previously known. The FBI requested as much as one year's worth of passenger records from American, United, Delta and Northwest airlines in the days after the attacks, those airlines said yesterday. That could amount to millions of individual records. The airlines said they were willing to comply with the request because the FBI issued subpoenas and because they felt a sense of duty to assist the investigation. APRIL 2004 BALTIMORE INDY MEDIA - The [Nightline] segment began with congenial chatter between the past and present government officials. As if he is hosting a dinner party Koppel smoothly has his guests reminisce fondly about past drills performed by high-level government officials to test their emergency preparedness. Koppel then imagines an attack that decimates the US Congress. They break for a timely commercial. After the break Koppel immediately launches into the key part of their script: ". . . Aren't [we] left for at least the foreseeable future with some sort of martial law anyway?" Duberstein agrees with Koppel, adding "You have to suspend rights." Koppel continues by saying: ". . . And during that period, then, and given the sense of panic that is inevitable under circumstances like this, the executive branch of government takes on extraordinary power, doesn't it?" [Richard] Clarke agrees by saying: "I think in any war where Washington were [sic] destroyed, inevitably, there would be a period of, for lack of a better term, something like martial law. The key here is, though, that the plans all call for going back to a normal three-branch system, as rapidly as possible." Koppel reacts to Clarke's ideas by suggesting what he has said is a new idea to many leaders in Washington. Sure it is, Ted. The conversation quickly winds down. [As we have pointed out, in such a situation power constitutionally would devolve to the governors, but since they don't have as many troops as the Pentagon, the Constitution would likely be ignored, no doubt with Ted Koppel's approval] MARCH 2004 CHENEY AND RUMSFELD INVOLVED
EISENHOWER ALSO HAD SECRET PLANS FOR UNCONSTITUTIONAL TAKEOVER DARPA’S LATEST PLAN TO SPY ON YOU DEFENSE TECH - Darpa may have publicly abandoned its creepiest programs, like Total Information Awareness. But the agency, holding its every-18-months conference this week in Anaheim, still has a project to make you run full speed into your bunker. DARPA is starting the planning for a blimp, three times the size of Goodyear's, that would keep watch over an entire city. Sitting at 70,000 feet above ground, the ISIS (short for "Integrated Sensor is Structure") airship would use a giant, flexible radar antennae to give, in the words of Darpa program manager Larry Correy, a "dynamic, detailed, real-time picture of all movement on or above the battlefield: friendly, neutral or enemy." "We will apply this technology to track people emerging from buildings of interest and follow them as they move to new locations," added DARPA’s Paul Benda. "Imagine the impact it will have if ISIS tracks the movement of individuals for months. Hidden webs of connections between people and facilities will be revealed." FEBRUARY 2004 POST
CONSTITUTIONAL AMERICA ADAM LIPTAK, NY TIMES - Writers often grumble about the criminal things editors do to their prose. The federal government has recently weighed in on the same issue - literally. It has warned publishers they may face grave legal consequences for editing manuscripts from Iran and other disfavored nations, on the ground that such tinkering amounts to trading with the enemy. Anyone who publishes material from a country under a trade embargo is forbidden to reorder paragraphs or sentences, correct syntax or grammar, or replace "inappropriate words," according to several advisory letters from the Treasury Department in recent months. Adding illustrations is prohibited, too. To the baffled dismay of publishers, editors and translators who have been briefed about the policy, only publication of "camera-ready copies of manuscripts" is allowed. . . "It is against the principles of scholarship and freedom of expression, as well as the interests of science, to require publishers to get U.S. government permission to publish the works of scholars and researchers who happen to live in countries with oppressive regimes," said Eric A. Swanson, a senior vice president at John Wiley & Sons, which publishes scientific, technical and medical books and journals. THE ELEPHANT IN THE TRANSIT LOUNGE LETTER TO POLITECH - Why is everyone ignoring the elephant in the transit lounge? People complain that CAPPS-2 might enable the government to prevent you -- or you -- or you -- from traveling, perhaps with inaccurate databases, political targeting, or bureaucratic ineptness. But the government does not have the power to prohibit travel. Citizens and lawfully admitted foreigners have a fundamental right to travel anywhere they want inside the US. E.g. Justice Potter Stewart wrote in 1969, "[T]he right to travel freely from State to State ... is a right broadly assertable against private interference as well as governmental action. Like the right of association, it is a virtually unconditional personal right, guaranteed by the Constitution to us all." To take away our right of free movement, TSA would have to arrest us, which requires them to charge us with a crime. It's no crime to travel without filling a mess of databases with your life particulars. Watch the Supreme Court closely to see if it makes the right decision after hearing Hiibel v. Nevada on March 22. That case asks them to reaffirm that it is also no crime to not have an ID, or to refuse to produce ID papers on demand by a government agent. BTN ONLINE - Shaken by data dishonesty at Northwest Airlines and a burglary at ARC, corporate travel buyers are disturbed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's planned revision this spring of the computer assisted passenger prescreening system. Meanwhile, the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, events that initiated CAPPS II is questioning the efficacy of passenger screening. According to results of a poll last week by the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, 129 of 150 corporate buyer members "support the concept of a passenger screening process, but not this one, as it leaves too many questions unanswered." Only 6 percent agreed that CAPPS II "will get the job done and needs to be implemented." ... The Business Travel Coalition last week sent a letter signed by more than 30 corporate travel buyers to the Senate Commerce and the House Transportation and Infrastructure committees urging "hearings on CAPPS II and the growing data privacy problems." RECOVERED HISTORY EISENHOWER WAS READY TO STAGE A COUP [These remarkable documents show that President Eisenhower was ready to turn the country over to ten secretly named people of his choice in the event of what he considered to be a national emergency. There is absolutely no constitutional basis for such a move; in the worst case the government should devolve to the governors of the various states. What is more disturbing is that the head of one the country's major media corporations was in on the plot] Dear Mr. Stanton: It is always possible that the United States might need suddenly to mobilize resources for a maximum national effort. Although it is my devout hope that this will never happen, the national interest requires that against that possibility we achieve and maintain a high state of readiness. I am delighted to know of your willingness to serve as Administrator of the Emergency Communications Agency in the event that a national emergency would compel its formation, and, accordingly, I hereby appoint you such Administrator effective upon activation of the agency. As Administrator, you will, in the performance of your duties, be subject to the direction, control and coordination of the Director of the Office of Emergency Resources, and you will receive such compensation as the President may hereafter specify. Your tenure as Administrator-designate or as Administrator shall be at the pleasure of the President. In the event of an emergency, as soon as you have assured yourself, by any means at your disposal, that an Emergency Communications Agency has been activated, you shall immediately assume active direction of that agency and its function. This letter will constitute your authority. I have requested the Director of the Office of Defense Mobilization to communicate with you regarding any planning activities in connection with the creation of and activation of an Emergency Communications Agency. Until such time as an Emergency Communications Agency may be created, I am certain that you will treat your designation as Administrator as classified information and that you will impress upon any staff you select to assist you that their designations are to be treated similarly as classified information. You have my deep appreciation of your acceptance of this vitally important assignment. Sincerely, Dwight D. Eisenhower Mr. Frank
Stanton ANTI-TERROR POLICIES THAT DON’T WORK FOREIGN JOURNALIST BEING MISTREATED COMING TO U.S. BUSH'S WAR ON CANADIAN TOURISTS ALISON LANGLEY, NIAGRA FALLS REVIEW - Traffic congestion on area highways and byways due to long lineups of transport trucks waiting to cross the border is taxing police resources, says one law enforcement official. . .Police officers from both services are working around the clock these days to maintain road safety as convoys of transport trucks wait in long lines along the U.S.-bound lanes of the Queen Elizabeth Way at Fort Erie and Highway 405 at the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge. . . As of 3 p.m. Wednesday, the Canada Customs site reported a four-hour delay to cross into the U.S. at the Peace Bridge and a two-hour wait to cross the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge. BUSH'S WAR ON FOREIGN ARTISTS FINANCIAL TIMES - According to many involved, the new security checks [on foreign artists] are downright Orwellian - delays last up to six months, applicants must appeal to a congressman to get an update during the process and there are no avenues of appeal. Moreover, administrators are overwhelmed by some 70,000 to 200,000 applications per year, with most of the backlog occurring at the FBI. The sweeping reorganization of government branches under the Department of Homeland Security has also meant bureaucratic growing pains. KIM ZETTER, WIRED - While the nation was distracted last month by images of Saddam Hussein's spider hole and dental exam, President George W. Bush quietly signed into law a new bill that gives the FBI increased surveillance powers and dramatically expands the reach of the USA Patriot Act. The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 grants the FBI unprecedented power to obtain records from financial institutions without requiring permission from a judge. Previously, under the Patriot Act, the FBI had to submit subpoena requests to a federal judge. Intelligence agencies and the Treasury Department, however, could obtain some financial data from banks, credit unions and other financial institutions without a court order or grand jury subpoena if they had the approval of a senior government official. The new law, however, lets the FBI acquire these records through an administrative procedure whereby an FBI field agent simply drafts a so-called national security letter stating the information is relevant to a national security investigation. And the law broadens the definition of "financial institution" to include such businesses as insurance companies, travel agencies, real estate agents, stockbrokers, the U.S. Postal Service and even jewelry stores, casinos and car dealerships. The law also prohibits subpoenaed businesses from revealing to anyone, including customers who may be under investigation, that the government has requested records of their transactions. JANUARY 2004 SIX
YEAR OLD DIVISION MARK FRAUENFELDER - When we got to the Burbank Airport, the skycap asked for our IDs. He noticed that my wife driver's license had expired. He excused himself and came back about five minutes later, and said we could fly, but that Carla would have to undergo "secondary screening," which meant she had to take her shoes off and have all her carry-on luggage searched. It was a hassle, especially since we had a lot of carry-on stuff for our six-year-old and infant daughter, but at least they let us fly to Denver. A week later, we got to the Denver Airport to go home. Carla showed the agent her ID, and the woman didn't say anything about it being expired. I thought we had gotten lucky. But when we got to the security screening area, the woman working there looked at our tickets and said "Who is Sarina?" I pointed to my six-year-old. "She's been marked for secondary screening," she said. "She has to go over there. One of you can go with her." Carla went with Sarina and I went through the normal line with Jane. While Carla was escorting Sarina through the extra security check, she asked for an explanation. A man working there told her Sarina was on a list that required the extra search, and that he couldn't tell her anything more about it. My daughter was scared and shaken up by the ordeal and told us that she "hated it." At least the security people were polite to her. But they were like polite robots, unable to laugh at the fact that someone had mistakenly pegged a little girl as a potential terrorist. ARMY WAR COLLEGE REPORT CRITICIZES WAR ON TERROR CENSUS DATA USED TO SPY ON CITIZENS AUDREY HUDSON, WASHINGTON TIMES - U.S. census information provided by millions of Americans was used in a government study to profile airline passengers as terrorist risks. . . Bill Scannell, president of the group Dont Spy On Us, called the inclusion of census information "absolutely appalling." "Information given by American citizens for reasonable demographics information has been turned around and used to spy on people. This sounds like East Berlin, circa '74," said Mr. Scannell, a privacy advocate. "There is a certain amount of fumbling around going on," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty program. "NASA is supposed to be engaged in space exploration." The NASA study used the airline records of 439,381 passengers and concluded that researchers were able to "mine data sets with millions of examples and many features" to detect threats. Data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau came from respondents to the 1990 census and included "information on both households and individuals," the NASA study said. The NASA experiment used 5 million census records from each of two data sets it created, "one that stores household records and another that stores person records." The Census Bureau's Web site says it protects confidentiality "through disclosure-information techniques." However, Mr. Steinhardt, who sits on the Census Advisory Committee, said releasing information on households and individuals is "a major breach of trust." [Researchers at MIT recently published a highly technical research paper that demonstrates why CAPPS II actually makes flying more dangerous, not less. Here's a simplified explanation] RUSSELL L. BRAND, DON'T SPY ON US - Imagine a world where you knew who all the terrorists were in advance. It is a much simpler world than the one we have. There would be no waiting in airport security lines. While we don't have that, some people think we are in a world where we know who the terrorists ARE NOT. And in that world, we can avoid searching the people we know are safe and devote all (or most of) our effort just to the people were aren't sure of. It sounds good. Some of us avoid being hassled and the system moves faster for everyone. BUT... What if we are occasionally wrong? Just a few of these SEEMINGLY SAFE people are really terrorists. They'd slip by with us good upstanding citizens. And what if the terrorist organizations sent all their folks on a few test trips? After a few trips, they would know which ones got searched each time and which ones never got searched. Then they would use the ones that had never gotten searched on their mission, knowing that these SEEMINGLY SAFE people (who were really terrorists) could more easily get onto the planes. Unfortunately, the efforts to target our searching attention, rather than better protecting us and more efficiently using our resources, instead telegraphs what we know and allows the bad guys to have a better chance of out maneuvering us.
GENERAL FRANKS SEES LOSS OF CONSTITUTION
NEWSMAX - Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government. Franks, who successfully led the U.S. military operation to liberate Iraq, expressed his worries in an extensive interview he gave to the men's lifestyle magazine Cigar Aficionado. . . Discussing the hypothetical dangers posed to the U.S. in the wake of Sept. 11, Franks said that "the worst thing that could happen" is if terrorists acquire and then use a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon that inflicts heavy casualties. If that happens, Franks said, "... the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy." Franks then offered "in a practical sense" what he thinks would happen in the aftermath of such an attack. "It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world - it may be in the United States of America - that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important." CRYPTOME - Cryptome received a visit today from FBI Special Agents Todd Renner and Christopher Kelly from the FBI Counterterrorism Office in New York, 26 Federal Plaza, telephone (212) 384-1000. Both agents presented official ID and business cards. SA Renner said that a person had reported Cryptome as a source of information that could be used to harm the United States. He said Cryptome website had been examined and nothing on the site was illegal but information there might be used for harmful purposes. He noted that information in the Cryptome CDs might wind up in the wrong hands. SA Renner said there is no investigation of Cryptome, that the purpose of the visit was to ask Cryptome to report to the FBI any information which Cryptome "had a gut feeling" could be a threat to the nation. There was a discussion of the purpose of Cryptome, freedom of information, the need for more public information on threats to the nation and what citizens can do to protect themselves, the need for more public information about how the FBI functions in the field and the intention of visits like the one today. SA Kelly said such visits are increasingly common as the FBI works to improve the reporting of information about threats to the US. Asked what will happen as a result of the visit. SA Renner said he will write a report of the visit. Cryptome said it will publish a report of the visit, including naming the agents. Both agents expressed concern about their names being published for that might lead to a threat against them and/or their families -- one saying that due to copious personal databases any name can be traced. Cryptome said the reason for publishing names of agents is so that anyone can verify that a contact has been made, and that more public information is needed on how FBI agents function and who they are. Cryptome noted that on a previous occasion FBI agents had protested publication of their names by Cryptome. Cryptome did not agree to report anything to the FBI that is not available on the website. GUANTANAMO INMATE SUES US OVER GITMO TORTURE ZAFFAR ABBAS BBC - A man who was imprisoned by the US military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is suing the Pakistani and US governments for damages worth over $10m. Pakistani cleric Mohammed Sagheer was seized by US troops fighting in Afghanistan in 2001. He spent roughly a year with other suspected al-Qaeda and Taleban operatives in the US military prison. His lawyers say he is suing for the mental and physical torture he endured at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay. In the first case of its kind, Mr Sagheer described his arrest by American authorities as illegal and his treatment at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay as extremely inhuman. He says he was kept for more than a year in a prison cell that was like a cage meant for animals. During this period he says he was treated in the worst possible manner and was repeatedly interrogated about his links to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. SPY
SYSTEM LIVES DESPITE CONGRESSIONAL VETO The American Civil Liberties Union today filed simultaneous state "Freedom of Information Act" requests in Connecticut, Michigan, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania about those states' participation in the new "MATRIX" database surveillance system. "Congress killed the Pentagon's 'Total Information Awareness' data mining program, but now the federal government is trying to build up a state-run equivalent," said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program. "In essence, the government is replacing an unpopular Big Brother initiative with a lot of Little Brothers," he added, noting that the program is receiving $12 million from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. "What does it take for the message to get through that government spying on the activities of innocent Americans will not be tolerated?" According to Congressional testimony and news reports, The Matrix (which stands for "Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange") creates dossiers about individuals from government databases and private-sector information companies that compile files on Americans' activities for profit. It then makes those dossiers available for search by federal and state law enforcement officers. In addition, Matrix workers comb through the millions of files in a search for "anomalies" that may be indicative of terrorist or other criminal activity. While company officials have refused to disclose details of the program, according to news reports the kind of information to be searched includes credit histories, driver's license photographs, marriage and divorce records, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and the names and addresses of family members, neighbors and business associates. Raising even more issues, the Matrix is operated by a private company, Seisint Inc. of Boca Raton, Florida. Ironically, the company's founder was forced to resign after information about his own past came to light: according to Florida police, he was formerly a drug smuggler who had piloted multiple planeloads of cocaine from Colombia to the U.S. "Members of Congress who voted to close down TIA in the belief that they were ending this kind of data mining surveillance must demand more information about The Matrix," said Steinhardt. "And then they should shut it down too." OCTOBER 2003 POST
CONSTITUTIONAL AMERICA TECHNOLOGY DAILY - The chairman of the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee on Wednesday said he backs the creation of an anti-terrorism center beyond the reach of public scrutiny. "There are certain dark secrets we have to protect," Harold Rogers, R-KY., told a homeland security conference sponsored by Equity International. The Terrorist Threat Integration Center established earlier this year by presidential order "is designed to do ... what I am saying." [Gene
E. Franchini is retired chief justice of the New Mexico Supreme
Court] The USA Patriots Act is an acronym for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism." The way that government is going to be provided with these "appropriate tools" is to "temporarily" suspend or eliminate as much of our Constitution and its Bill of Rights as it can, without court oversight or intervention, so that we will not be at a disadvantage in the war against terrorism. . . Think about that for a minute, and then ask yourself: Why in the world would we voluntarily do to ourselves that which our enemies over the last 200-plus years have not been able to do to us by force? Why would we be so willing to give up our God-given rights that have been verbalized in our Constitution, when we have fought so hard to preserve them?. . . If the present situation lasts for a generation, as well it may, together with its formidable and direct attempt to restrict or eliminate the Bill of Rights in the name of security, then the next generation may not remember what their rights were. There won't be anyone around to remember them or remind the next generation what they were. GREAT MOMENTS IN ANTI-TERRORISM MATTHEW L. WALD, NY TIMES - When two Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials found a security guard asleep at his post at the Indian Point 2 nuclear reactor last year, the agency decided not to issue a notice of violation because there was no terrorist attack on the plant during the half-hour or so that the guard was sleeping, a Congressional audit has found. . . The auditors said that nationwide, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission tended not to issue formal citations and to minimize the significance of problems it found if the problems did not cause actual damage. . . The report also says the commission did not treat the incident more seriously because no guards had been found sleeping "more than twice during the past year." SEPTEMBER 2003 THE CREEPING COUP: BUSH'S PLAN TO BYPASS GRAND JURIES MEDIA LOSES ACCESS TO INFORMATION IN CLAMP-DOWN POST
CONSTITUTIONAL AMERICA SARA KEHAULANI GOO, WASHINGTON POST - In the most aggressive -- and, some say, invasive -- step yet to protect air travelers, the federal government and the airlines will phase in a computer system next year to measure the risk posed by every passenger on every flight in the United States. The new Transportation Security Administration system seeks to probe deeper into each passenger's identity than is currently possible, comparing personal information against criminal records and intelligence information. Passengers will be assigned a color code -- green, yellow or red -- based in part on their city of departure, destination, traveling companions and date of ticket purchase. Most people will be coded green and sail through. But up to 8 percent of passengers who board the nation's 26,000 daily flights will be coded "yellow" and will undergo additional screening at the checkpoint, according to people familiar with the program. An estimated 1 to 2 percent will be labeled "red" and will be prohibited from boarding. These passengers also will face police questioning and may be arrested. . . ONE OUT OF EVERY 12 CIVILIAN FEDS WORKS FOR HOMELAND SECURITY One out of every twelve civilian employees currently working for the federal government is on the payroll of the Department of Homeland Security, according to a special study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. The study also pinpointed the work stations where the 160,201 employees of this very new agency are based. About 90 percent of them are concentrated in just 166 of the nation's 3,000-plus counties. 'NATIONAL SECURITY' USED TO GUT CIVIL SERVICES HELEN THOMAS - The Bush administration is evoking "national security" as a powerful weapon to accomplish its twin goals of privatizing thousands of federal jobs and taking a whack at government unions. . . Congress passed the Civil Service Act in 1883 to end the spoils system, which based federal employment on nepotism and cronyism. The bad old days may be returning. I note the lack of competitive bids on some government contracts to rebuild Iraq and the appearance of favoritism in the administration's decisions to award contracts to politically influential companies. John Gage, President of the AFL-CIO's American Federation of Government Employees, sees a trend. He predicts "a return to the spoils system for politically connected corporations and campaign contributors." . . . The White House Office of Management and Budget has given federal agencies until Oct. 31 to designate 15 percent of their jobs as "not inherently governmental" and, therefore, available for competitive outside contracts. The number of Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act requests to federal government agencies reached a record high in 2002, according to a new report from the Justice Department Office of Information and Privacy. The total number of requests increased by seven percent over the previous year to a new high of 2,402,938. The Department of Veterans Affairs received the most requests (1,496,191); something called the Inter-American Foundation received the least (one). Agencies invoked 142 different nondisclosure statutes to withhold information under FOIA exemption Personal privacy was the most frequently cited single exemption. STAR CHAMBER JUDGES IDENTIFIED REPORTERS COMMITTEE ON FREEDOM OF THE PRESS - The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. But very little information about it has been readily available in the public domain -- not even a complete list of its members. The FISA Court is responsible for authorizing government applications for clandestine search and surveillance in counterintelligence and counter-terrorism investigations. In 2002, the Court reviewed and approved 1228 such applications, an all-time high. . . But who are the current members of the FISA Court? It's not an official secret, but neither has it been published. Until now. The Federation of American Scientists filed a freedom of information act request with the Justice Department on behalf of its publication, "Secrecy News."
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Authoritarianism WHERE DO AUTHORITARIANS COME FROM? The biggest threat to America: ourselves Blacks HOW AMERICA'S CITIES TURNED BLACK Civil liberties HOW MUCH DO WE LEARN FROM EVIL HOW TO STAY FREE: An excerpt from Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual OF PINK SUITS, GOLF BALLS & CIVIL LIBERTIES - A talk to an upper school assembly CRASH OF AMERICA - In 1995, the author saw trouble coming. Creeping coup FEMA and "The X Files" -- The strange and scary history of America's disaster relief agency and its role in "continuity in government." MISSION CREEP We foretold the militarization of America more than a decade ago THE CRASH OF AMERICA - In 1995, the author saw trouble coming EXTREMISM OF THE CENTER: Most extremism in American politics comes not from left or right but from the center in power. A FEW SIGNS OF A DEMOCRACY IN DEEP TROUBLE MARTIAL LAW Excerpts from an an article in a defense journal, Parameters Drugs Fascism FASCISM, CORPORATISM & CAPITALISM: While much attention has been paid to the horrific results of German and Italian fascism, the actual origins of fascism as a political and economic ideology are not well known. As a result disturbing parallels in today's American politics are ignored THE WANSEE CONFERENCE: WHERE THE FINAL SOLUTION BEGAN CLUES YOUR COUNTRY MAY BE TURNING INTO A FASCIST STATE GIULIANI ON ART, HITLER ON ART  Free speech FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE: A Biography of the First Amendment by Anthony Lewis. Gay Guns History BUCKING THE SYSTEM: A chart that provides a crash course on how Americans have won and kept their freedoms Immigration WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME A MEXICAN CUT YOUR PENSION? WHY THERE ARE MUCH BETTER THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT THAN IMMIGRATION POLICY Juries Patriotism WHOSE LAND IS IT, ANYWAY? Reflections on patriotism Police Prisons An easy way to cut budgets: stop sending to many people to prison Rebellion Spying Torture Zero tolerance FOOLS' GOAL: ZERO TOLERANCE: How infinite intolerance of some things -- but not others -- is damaging our land 
BEYOND THE LAW, Jordan J Paust THE CUNNING OF HISTORY by Richard Rubenstein RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer FRIENDLY FASCISM : The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Myron Gross THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE FREE: The Germans, 1933-35 by Milton Sanford Mayer FROM THE PALMER RAIDS TO THE PATRIOT ACT STATE TERRORISM & THE UNITED STATES: From Counterinsurgency to the War on Terrorism
CAPITAL
PUNISHMENT CENSORSHIP CENSORWARE CIVIL
LIBERTIES COMMUNITY
DEMOCRACY CONSTITUTION CORPORATIONS DISPUTE
SETTLEMENT DRUGS IDEAS INFORMATION INTELLIGENCE INTERNET JUSTICE
CRITICAL RESISTANCE PRO-DEMOCRACY POLITICS Campaign
financing Green Libertarian Populist Socialist Voting
General REFERENCE RELIGION MEDIA SPYING YOUTH |
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NOVEMBER 2003