French Government to store personal information on people as young as 13
Source: msnbc.com
Opposition to a new security database is gaining momentum in France as people return to work after a summer break during which the government authorized the state to store personal information on people as young as 13.
The decree creating the “Edvige” electronic database appeared in the official gazette on July 1, when the country was winding down for the summer, but news of its content has been gradually filtering out and is now stirring fierce criticism.
“The Edvige database has no place in a democracy,” wrote Michel Pezet, a lawyer and former member of a body charged with protecting French citizens from electronic prying, in Thursday’s edition of the newspaper Le Monde.
…The decree says the aim is to centralize and analyze data on people aged 13 or above who are active in politics or labor unions, who play a significant institutional, economic, social or religious role, or who are “likely to breach public order.”
End Excerpt - Read The Full Story Here…
BREAKING: RNC 8 Charged with “Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism”
Source: indymedia.org
In what appears to be the first use of criminal charges under the 2002 Minnesota version of the Federal Patriot Act, Ramsey County Prosecutors have formally charged 8 alleged leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee with Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism. Monica Bicking, Eryn Trimmer, Luce Guillen Givins, Erik Oseland, Nathanael Secor, Robert Czernik, Garrett Fitzgerald, and Max Spector, face up to 7 1/2 years in prison under the terrorism enhancement charge which allows for a 50% increase in the maximum penalty.Affidavits released by law enforcement which were filed in support of the search warrants used in raids over the weekend, and used to support probable cause for the arrest warrants, are based on paid, confidential informants who infiltrated the RNCWC on behalf of law enforcement. They allege that members of the group sought to kidnap delegates to the RNC, assault police officers with firebombs and explosives, and sabotage airports in St. Paul. Evidence released to date does not corroborate these allegations with physical evidence or provide any other evidence for these allegations than the claims of the informants. Based on past abuses of such informants by law enforcement, the National Lawyers Guild is concerned that such police informants have incentives to lie and exaggerate threats of violence and to also act as provacateurs in raising and urging support for acts of violence.
“These charges are an effort to equate publicly stated plans to blockade traffic and disrupt the RNC as being the same as acts of terrorism. This both trivializes real violence and attempts to place the stated political views of the Defendants on trial,” said Bruce Nestor, President of the Minnesota Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. “The charges represent an abuse of the criminal justice system and seek to intimidate any person organizing large scale public demonstrations potentially involving civil disobedience, he said.”
End Excerpt - Read The Full Story Here…
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$1 million ’smart’ surveillance system to deter crime
Source: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Criminals beware: Allegheny County is planning to keep an electronic eye out for you.
County Emergency Services Chief Bob Full said Friday that $750,000 in a pending federal appropriations bill would help pay for as many as 40 remote-controlled cameras to watch for crimes and monitor emergencies.
“We want to keep (criminals) guessing, but we want them to also know that we are watching them in critical areas,” he said.
Cameras could be moved as needed and would be monitored and controlled from the department’s Point Breeze headquarters, Full said. Images could be relayed to police officers responding to an incident and shown on their in-car computers, he said.
The planned system will include 64 cameras the county already has, as well as 64 sensors that sniff the air for traces of chemicals and radioactive materials.
The closed-circuit wireless surveillance network could include microphones that detect the sound of a gunshot and alert dispatchers, said Sen. Arlen Specter. He said images caught by cameras would be an aid in prosecuting crimes.
“A picture is worth a thousand lawyers,” Specter said.
In all, the Senate Appropriations Committee has approved more than $2 million for police surveillance in Pennsylvania. Besides the county money, the funding bill includes $250,000 to put 53 cameras in Pittsburgh, and similar projects for cameras in Allentown, Williamsport and York.
The bill must pass the full Senate and be signed into law before any money is available. The county has budgeted $250,000 for the project, Full said, and he is seeking additional money to expand the system’s capabilities.
Philadelphia is building a $10 million surveillance network with 250 cameras that the city hopes to have operating by the end of the year.
A 2006 pilot project there led to a 13 percent reduction in crime overall in the areas under surveillance, according to a Temple University study.
The cameras work best when everyone knows they are being watched, said the study’s author, Jerry Ratcliffe.
“If you make (criminals) move to another location, it’s often a worse location for committing crime, so that’s a good thing,” Ratcliffe said.
Full said the planned surveillance system, to be built by August Systems of Morgantown, W.Va., eventually could include security cameras owned by universities, PennDOT and private companies.
“It is scalable, and it can grow. And this is what we need to do in the future: We need to use technology as our best defense,” Full said.
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Proposals in the UK to monitor all communications
Source: guardian.co.uk
In the Queen’s speech this autumn Gordon Brown’s government will announce a scheme to institute a database of every telephone call, email, and act of online usage by every resident of the UK. It will propose that this information will be gathered, stored, and “made accessible” to the security and law enforcement agencies, local councils, and “other public bodies”.
This fact should be in equal parts incredible and nauseating. It is certainly enraging and despicable. Not even George Orwell in his most febrile moments could have envisaged a world in which every citizen could be so thoroughly monitored every moment of the day, spied upon, eavesdropped, watched, tracked, followed by CCTV cameras, recorded and scrutinised. Our words and web searches, our messages and intimacies, are to be stored and made available to the police, the spooks, the local council – the local council! – and “other public bodies”.
This Orwellian nightmare, additionally, is proposed for a world in which leading soi-disant liberal democracies run, and/or permit rendition flights to, Guantanamo Bay. How many steps separate an innocent British citizen from some misinterpretation or interference or error in the collected and ‘made accessible’ data of text messages and emails, and a forthcoming home-grown version of Guantanamo Bay for people whose pattern of phone calls does not fit the police definition of acceptable?
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100 Already arrested in Denver
Source: huffingtonpost.com
The Associated Press reports that, as of early Tuesday, about 100 people have been arrested following the breakup of a protest by Denver police.
The confrontation erupted Monday night as police in riot gear tried to disperse a crowd of about 300 people that was disrupting traffic near the Denver City and County Building.
Police said they were forced to use pepper spray when members of the crowd, some carrying rocks, rushed a police safety line. But one protester said officers charged the protesters with no warning.
Those arrested faced charges for violating city ordinances including failure to obey a lawful order, obstructing a public roadway and interference.
…
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Security Makes U.S. Conventions Virtual Fortresses
Source: Bloomberg.com
Two U.S. cities will become virtual fortresses during the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions, protected by airplanes, helicopters, barriers, fences and thousands of police officers, National Guard troops and Secret Service agents.In Denver, where Democrats assemble next week, police are spending $18 million on equipment alone and will be bolstered by National Guard troops and hundreds of officers from surrounding suburbs. In St. Paul, Minnesota, site of the Sept. 1-4 Republican nominating convention, police are calling on 80 law- enforcement agencies to provide 3,000 officers to supplement the city’s 500-person force.
Congress earmarked $100 million for security at the two meetings, where federal and local authorities are trying to guard against any dangers to candidates or convention-goers.
“We are constantly looking at what threats could harm us,” said Malcolm Wiley, a spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service, which is overseeing security operations.
Safeguarding the quadrennial gatherings is difficult, in part because so many public officials are among the thousands of people in attendance, said Andrew O’Connell, a former Secret Service agent who runs the Washington office of New York-based Fortress Global Investigations & Security. “It will be a challenge,” he said.
The average Briton is being recorded 3,000 times a week
Full story at: How Big Brother watches your every move - Telegraph
With every telephone call, swipe of a card and click of a mouse, information is being recorded, compiled and stored about Britain’s citizens.An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has now uncovered just how much personal data is being collected about individuals by the Government, law enforcement agencies and private companies each day.
In one week, the average person living in Britain has 3,254 pieces of personal information stored about him or her, most of which is kept in databases for years and in some cases indefinitely.
The data include details about shopping habits, mobile phone use, emails, locations during the day, journeys and internet searches.
In many cases this information is kept by companies such as banks and shops, but in certain circumstances they can be asked to hand it over to a range of legal authorities.
Britain’s information watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, has called for tighter regulation of the amount of data held about citizens and urged the public to restrict the information they allow organisations to hold on them.
This newspaper’s findings come days after the Government published plans to grant local authorities and other public bodies access to the email and internet records of millions. Phone companies already retain data about their customers and give it to 650 public bodies on request.
The loss of data by Government departments, including an incident where HM Revenue and Customs mislaid computer disks containing the personal details of 25 million people, has heightened concerns about the amount of information being stored.
David Smith, deputy information commissioner, said: “As more and more information is collected and kept on all of us, we are very concerned that appropriate safeguards go along with that.
“People should know what is happening with their information and have a choice.
“Our concern is that what is kept with the justification of preventing and detecting terrorism, can then be used for minor purposes such as pursuing people for parking fines.”
Earlier this year the Commons home affairs select committee recommended new controls and regulations on the accumulation of information by the state.
San Francisco hold mock terrorism drill 8/16/08
The first order of business will be to protect property, business….money. Victims are lower on the priority list.
Source: abc7news.com
Police and firefighters are testing the city’s response time in a theoretical weapons attack.Several blocks in San Francisco’s financial district were closed down for the day.
The fire department was calling this a real public-private partnership as they got the owners of the downtown building at 555 California Street to allow them to let it fall victim to a mock emergency.
The scene was the aftermath of a chemical attack in a downtown high rise- luckily this was only a drill.
“Each time we do this the better off all of us are,” said San Francisco Fire Department Chief Joanne Hayes-White.
About 500 emergency responders from San Francisco, surrounding cities, the FBI and the Army are participating in this mock release of weapons of mass destruction.
There was also drama at 1 Post Street. A mock shooter went on a rampage where another unidentified chemical had been released.
“It’s truly taxing the resources here in San Francisco, but that’s what it’s all about,” said Hayes-White.
It all started at 10 this morning and from some outsider’s perspectives things were moving slowly. Students playing victims were left lying there for hours.
“We know that things start out at a low level in these exercises today,” said S.F. Police Chief Heather Fong.
“Initially where you’d want to go right in, you see victims on the ground, we need to make sure that we take a step back, pause for a moment and decide what our entry is going to be like,” said Hayes-White.As the mock decontamination went on this afternoon, a local businessman said his company could help stop the situation before it got to this point.
Mike Welden of Building Protection Systems stated “We have a break-through system that’s designated by the Department of Homeland Security that will detect and identify the toxin in seconds and then automatically shut down the HVAC system so the toxins are no longer circulating through the building.” This product was just released earlier this year, another idea at a time when the government is being criticized about the availability of materials that could be used to make a dirty bomb.
The Government Accountability Office released a report last month saying that advances in security were moving too slowly and that customs officials don’t have enough equipment to detect radiation.
In the meantime FEMA is spending a quarter of a million dollars on today’s drill.
“The money is absolutely worth it because if we don’t spend it now it’s going to cost us so much more later on,” said Tom Saragoosa of the S.F. Fire Department.
Crime-ridden Arkansas town expands 24-hour curfew
Source: The Associated Press
Officers armed with military rifles have been stopping and questioning passers-by in a neighborhood plagued by violence that’s been under a 24-hour curfew for a week.On Tuesday, the Helena-West Helena City Council voted 9-0 to allow police to expand that program into any area of the city, despite a warning from a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas that the police stops were unconstitutional.
Police Chief Fred Fielder said the patrols have netted 32 arrests since they began last week in a 10-block neighborhood in this small town on the banks of the Mississippi River long troubled by poverty. The council said those living in the city want the random shootings and drug-fueled violence to stop, no matter what the cost.
“Now if somebody wants to sue us, they have an option to sue, but I’m fairly certain that a judge will see it the way the way the citizens see it here,” Mayor James Valley said. “The citizens deserve peace, that some infringement on constitutional rights is OK and we have not violated anything as far as the Constitution.”
The area under curfew, in what used to be a West Helena neighborhood, sits among abandoned homes and occupied residences in disrepair.
White signs on large blue barrels warn those passing by that the area remains under curfew by order of Mayor James Valley. The order was scheduled to end at 3 p.m. Tuesday, but Valley said the city council’s vote would allow police to have the same powers across Helena-West Helena.
Media Censorship at Olympics in China Mirrors FDA Censorship of Health Product Claims in America
This is rather interesting, we think…
Via: NaturalNews
by Mike Adams The U.S. media is loudly protesting the censorship of their reporters at the Olympics in Beijing. Betraying its promise to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), China has blocked reporters’ access to “sensitive” websites, including those that mention human rights violations, the suppression of the Falun Gong religious group, the Tiananman Square uprising and other similar topics the Chinese government would like to imagine never happened. In response to these restrictions, U.S. reporters are crying foul, insisting that they should have full access to information without government censorship. By implication, they are also stating that the U.S. is a “free society” where information is never censored by the government.Perhaps these reporters have never actually opened their eyes in their own country. While China’s censorship of news websites is deplorable, the U.S. is engaged in a far more restrictive, freedom-crush brand of censorship in the health industry: The censorship of truthful descriptions of health products by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Like China’s government at the Olympics, the FDA has outlawed free speech by nutritional supplement companies, threatening them with fines, business interruptions and even jail time for their founders if they don’t remove all text from their websites and product packaging that seeks to inform consumers about the genuine health benefits provided by their products.
The FDA’s campaign of intimidation against food and supplement companies
For example, last year the FDA sent threatening letters to 29 growers of cherries, warning that they could not place links on their websites linking to scientific studies documenting the health benefits of cherries. Allowing consumers to be informed of the scientific truth about cherries, it seems, was simply intolerable by the FDA. Any company that linked to a scientific, peer-reviewed study showing cherries to be natural anti-inflammatory foods would be sued by the FDA and put out of business, the letters warned.And that’s just the beginning. Over the last several decades, the FDA has seized imports of herbs from South America, threatened honest supplement companies to remove accurate information from their labels, and pursued a campaign of intimidation and tyranny against virtually the entire natural products industry. In fact, the FDA has even ordered the destruction of recipe books containing dessert recipes using stevia (you thought book burnings only happened in China? Think again…).
Why China and America both use censorship to protect the powerful
In all, the actions of the FDA makes China’s government look downright Libertarian. In the United States, the FDA has made sure that consumers have virtually zero access to truthful information about the benefits of nutritional supplements in much the same way the Chinese government blocks its citizens from having access to truthful information about human rights websites. These campaigns of censorship also happen for much the same reason: To protect the status quo and prevent a revolution from taking place (in China, it would be a social revolution. In the U.S., it would be a health care revolution).You see, when it comes to real freedom, it makes no difference that China is a Communist government and America claims to be a Democracy: America blocks its citizens from accessing all sorts of crucial information about health freedom, just like China censors its internet to prevent people from learning about political freedom. In fact, both China and the FDA use many of the same online technologies to search for “offending” websites that they can shut down, intimidate or threaten with legal action. Those technologies, of course, were created by American companies like Google. And it is American companies like Yahoo that gladly hand over free speech protestors to tyrannical governments, betraying the privacy of their users and colluding with the thought police of various nations.
So reporters can protest all they want at China’s censorship of the internet, but when they return home from the Olympics, they will return to nations that practice the same brand of crushing censorship… the kind of censorship that keeps consumers ignorant and uninformed, protecting the profits of drug companies and cancer centers, all while interfering with the distributing of truthful information about the astounding ability of foods, superfoods, herbs and nutritional supplements to prevent cancer, halt heart disease, reverse diabetes, dissolve kidney stones, end depression and greatly extend lifespan (among other benefits).
They will talk about how China’s citizens don’t have access to a free press, and then they’ll turn right around and execute the very same censorship they are criticizing by refusing to print stories about the fraud of modern medicine; the quackery of chemotherapy; the monopoly price controls of Big Pharma and the outright criminal actions of the FDA.
The U.S. media mirrors China’s media censors
In fact, it is the mainstream media — the very group whining about freedom at the Olympics — that fully cooperates with the FDA by focusing its reporting on pharmaceuticals while ignoring the wealth of important information about natural remedies that could revolutionize health care and save the U.S. more than $40 trillion over the next few decades.Really? $40 trillion? Absolutely: According to the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, a 1% reduction in cancer mortality is worth about $500 billion to the U.S. economy over the long term. We have nutrients right now that can slash cancer rates by nearly 80 percent, across the entire population (vitamin D being the simplest one). That comes to $40 trillion in economic abundance from preventing cancer alone. (That’s enough money to rebuild every school, bridge, highway, park, library, airport and seaport in the entire country, by the way, but again, you’re not supposed to know that…)
The FDA doesn’t want anybody to know that Vitamin D prevents cancer, you see. That’s why no Vitamin D supplement company can make any statements at all about cancer. If they tried, they’d be arrested at gunpoint and dragged into prison like a Falun Gong member in Beijing. In China, of course, you might be sentenced to death and have your organs harvested and sold on the black market. In America, you might have your children kidnapped by state officials and watch in horror as their organs are destroyed by state-mandated chemotherapy chemicals that you are then obliged to pay for (at monopoly prices, no less). Don’t believe this actually happens in the United States? Think again. Read the story of Abraham Cherrix: http://www.naturalnews.com/019617.html
Don’t believe for a minute that you are free in America. You are merely a subject that’s exploited by powerful corporations and corrupt government regulators working in collusion with a media institution engaged in all-out censorship of stories that threaten the status quo: Health freedom, the truth about 9/11, voting fraud, the mass fluoridation of public water supplies, the real story behind the fractional reserve banking system and other similar topics. While every American citizens is TOLD they are free, if you look at the man behind the curtain, you’ll realize it’s all just smoke and mirrors (and bombs and bullets).Censorship is a tool that protects the powerful
Every government, you see, has its power base to protect, and in the U.S., the power base is the corporations. If you threaten the corporations by telling the truth about nutritional supplements or natural healing modalities, you will be arrested, imprisoned or run out of the country. It happens in America every day. That’s why all the really effective cancer clinics are in Mexico and South America — they’ve all had to flee the “health police” in the U.S. that run around arresting people like Communist China Secret Police! Read my article documenting the true history of armed FDA raids on health clinics: http://www.naturalnews.com/021791.htmlThe thought police aren’t limited to China
I hope this latest fiasco at the Olympics in Beijing will serve as a reminder that China isn’t the only country that isn’t free: The U.S., U.K., Australia and most other western nations practice their own forms of censorship, and much of it is carried out at gunpoint. (Many health clinic raids in the U.S., for example, are carried out with SWAT teams armed with assault rifles and body armor.)When it comes to accessing accurate information about health and supplements, U.S. citizens are no more free than China’s citizens, and they’re nowhere near as free as the citizens of Ecuador, for example, where a package of the Chanca Piedra herb just openly says, “Eliminates kidney stones.” Try to put that text on your bottle of herbs in the U.S. and you’ll find your product inventory confiscated by the FDA, which has become the “Ministry of Truth” on anything related to health.
While many reporters might be hoping for freedom in China right now, I’m hoping for freedom at home first. Let’s reclaim our own freedom of speech right here at home before we go worrying about how other countries censor their news.
Words and ideas banned in China:
Falun Gong
Tiananmen Square
Religious worship (including Christianity)
Voting rights
Workers’ rights
Civil libertiesWords and ideas banned in America:
Curing cancer with herbs
Saying no to vaccinations
Reversing heart disease with nutrition
Curing diabetes with vegetable juices
Eliminating depression with supplements
“Treating” any disease at all with herbs
Disagreeing with the “official” explanation of 9/11 and the WTC7 building… and more. And while some skeptics might say that China’s censorship is far more severe because it deals with human rights violations, I say the FDA’s censorship of truthful health information IS a human rights violation!
What could be more important to human rights than the right of an individual to protect and preserve their own life by learning the truth about nourishing foods? To deny a population access to truthful information about the life-protecting properties of common nutrients is, all by itself, a crime against humanity and a damning violation of human rights!
It’s always easy to fool the sheeple with TV propaganda
The most astonishing thing about all of this is that China’s citizens think they are free! And if you live in the U.S., I’m willing to bet you think you’re free, too.Remember this: Tyranny is always, always, always sold to the People as freedom. Every government lies to its People, as it is a necessary component of creating the illusion of freedom. But there is no such thing as real freedom in a society that restricts the Peoples’ access to the very information they need in order to make informed decisions about their own lives. America, then, is no more “the Land of the Free” than China.
Want to make America free? You’ll have to take it back from those who stole it from you. Remember the words of Thomas Jefferson:
And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that the people preserve the spirit of resistance? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
U.S. agents can seize travelers’ laptops: report
Truecrypt, hidden volume…
U.S. federal agents have been given new powers to seize travelers’ laptops and other electronic devices at the border and hold then for unspecified periods the Washington Post reported on Friday.Under recently disclosed Department of Homeland Security policies, such seizures may be carried out without suspicion of wrongdoing, the newspaper said, quoting policies issued on July 16 by two DHS agencies.
Agents are empowered to share the contents of seized computers with other agencies and private entities for data decryption and other reasons, the newspaper said.
DHS officials said the policies applied to anyone entering the country, including U.S. citizens, and were needed to prevent terrorism.
The measures have long been in place but were only disclosed in July, under pressure from civil liberties and business travel groups acting on reports that increasing numbers of international travelers had had their laptops, cellphones and other digital devices removed and examined.
The policies cover hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes — as well as books, pamphlets and other written materials, the report said.
The policies require federal agents to take measures to protect business information and attorney-client privileged material. They stipulate that any copies of the data must be destroyed when a review is completed and no probable cause exists to keep the information.
HR 3289 and HR 2343
We will be watching this closely.
Source: Infowars
Two bills now in the House of Representatives provide further evidence the government wants to tell you how to raise your children. The Pre-K Act (HR 3289) and the Education Begins at Home Act (HR 2343) aim to micromanage families in the military and those that fall below the poverty line.According to Chelsea Schilling, writing for WorldNetDaily, the two bills “could give the federal government unprecedented control over the way parents raise their children – even providing funds for state workers to come into homes and screen babies for emotional and developmental problems.” The proposed legislation supposedly aims to prevent child abuse, evaluate medical conditions, and “close the achievement gap in education between poor and minority infants versus middle-class children.”
Of course, only the government is capable of determining the “emotional and developmental problems” of children, not parents. Under this program, ready for debate in the House, the government will decide the “cultural awareness” of children, not parents. “There’s some blather in the language of the bill about having cultural awareness of the differences in parenting practices, but it seems like that never applies to Christian parents,” pediatrician Karen Effrem told WND. In other words, the state will decide what sort of “education” children receive and that process will now start before kids enter a state inculcation camp, otherwise known as a public school. In fact, the language of HR 3289 — lovingly called the “Pre-K Act” — suggests children are to be steered into a preschool or daycare that follows state standards while mothers are to be moved into the “workforce,” that is to say disassociated from the education of their children.
Exposing Bush’s historic abuse of power
Read the full article at: Salon.com
The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s.While reporting on domestic surveillance under Bush, Salon obtained a detailed memo proposing such an inquiry, and spoke with several sources involved in recent discussions around it on Capitol Hill. The memo was written by a former senior member of the original Church Committee; the discussions have included aides to top House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, and until now have not been disclosed publicly.
Salon has also uncovered further indications of far-reaching and possibly illegal surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency inside the United States under President Bush. That includes the alleged use of a top-secret, sophisticated database system for monitoring people considered to be a threat to national security. It also includes signs of the NSA’s working closely with other U.S. government agencies to track financial transactions domestically as well as globally.
The proposal for a Church Committee-style investigation emerged from talks between civil liberties advocates and aides to Democratic leaders in Congress, according to sources involved. (Pelosi’s and Conyers’ offices both declined to comment.) Looking forward to 2009, when both Congress and the White House may well be controlled by Democrats, the idea is to have Congress appoint an investigative body to discover the full extent of what the Bush White House did in the war on terror to undermine the Constitution and U.S. and international laws. The goal would be to implement government reforms aimed at preventing future abuses — and perhaps to bring accountability for wrongdoing by Bush officials.
“If we know this much about torture, rendition, secret prisons and warrantless wiretapping despite the administration’s attempts to stonewall, then imagine what we don’t know,” says a senior Democratic congressional aide who is familiar with the proposal and has been involved in several high-profile congressional investigations.
“You have to go back to the McCarthy era to find this level of abuse,” says Barry Steinhardt, the director of the Program on Technology and Liberty for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Because the Bush administration has been so opaque, we don’t know [the extent of] what laws have been violated.”
The parameters for an investigation were outlined in a seven-page memo, written after the former member of the Church Committee met for discussions with the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Common Cause and other watchdog groups. Key issues to investigate, those involved say, would include the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance activities; the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of extraordinary rendition and torture against terrorist suspects; and the U.S. government’s extensive use of military assets — including satellites, Pentagon intelligence agencies and U2 surveillance planes — for a vast spying apparatus that could be used against the American people.
Specifically, the ACLU and other groups want to know how the NSA’s use of databases and data mining may have meshed with other domestic intelligence activities, such as the U.S. government’s extensive use of no-fly lists and the Treasury Department’s list of “specially designated global terrorists” to identify potential suspects. As of mid-July, says Steinhardt, the no-fly list includes more than 1 million records corresponding to more than 400,000 names. If those people really represent terrorist threats, he says, “our cities would be ablaze.” A deeper investigation into intelligence abuses should focus on how these lists feed on each other, Steinhardt says, as well as the government’s “inexorable trend towards treating everyone as a suspect.”
OBAMA WILL ESTABLISH A “CIVILIAN NATIONAL SECURITY FORCE”
The Hitle…errr, Obama Youth Brigade
From:
chicagotribune.com
…Roosevelt formed the Civilian Conservation Corps and Kennedy created the Peace Corps with strong support and participation, while Clinton’s AmeriCorps has never fully realized its potential, hampered by continuing funding struggles since its 1994 inception.
Still, as Sen. Barack Obama called for greater public service Wednesday, some experts predict the potential now exists for programs seeking an expansion of volunteerism to succeed, despite a slumping economy and the nation being at war.
“This may be a moment in time that is different from when earlier calls did not prove that effective,” said Stephen Goldsmith, a former Indianapolis mayor and chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service.
Goldsmith, a Republican and professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said bipartisan support, serious societal problems and heightened interest in service among young people could offer new or expanded service programs the ability for growth not seen in decades
…“Loving your country shouldn’t just mean watching fireworks on the 4th of July,” Obama said. “Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it. If you do, your life will be richer, our country will be stronger.”
In his speech at a University of Colorado campus, he pledged that enhanced public service and active citizenship would be a central cause of his presidency.
“We will ask Americans to serve,” the Illinois Democrat said. “We will create new opportunities for Americans to serve.”
Obama’s draw to youth
For supporters, Obama’s credibility on the topic is enhanced because he proved during the primary campaign that he could captivate and then mobilize young voters. His campaign argues they might also follow him into community service.Clinton had a similar, though not quite as powerful, pull among youth. But his AmeriCorps program, which recruits workers in exchange for an education stipend, has never caught on the way the Peace Corps did in the 1960s and ’70s.
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Presumptive GOP nominee John McCain of Arizona also supports an expansion of both programs and has stressed public service, including in the military, during campaign appearances.
Obama repeated his pledge to boost the size of the active military. But he said the nation’s future and safety depends on more than just additional service members.
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Goals set for students
“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set,” he said Wednesday. “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”He said he would make federal assistance conditional on school districts establishing service programs and set the goal of 50 hours of service a year for middle school and high school students.
For college students, Obama would set the goal at 100 hours of service a year and create a $4,000 annual tax credit for college students tied to that level of service.
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Court Backs Bush on Military Detentions
From: NYTimes.com
President Bush has the legal power to order the indefinite military detentions of civilians captured in the United States, the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled on Tuesday in a fractured 5-to-4 decision.But a second, overlapping 5-to-4 majority of the court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, ruled that Ali al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar now in military custody in Charleston, S.C., must be given an additional opportunity to challenge his detention in federal court there. An earlier court proceeding, in which the government had presented only a sworn statement from a defense intelligence official, was inadequate, the second majority ruled.
The decision was a victory for the Bush administration, which had maintained that a 2001 Congressional authorization to use military force after the Sept. 11 attacks granted the president the power to detain people living in the United States.
The court effectively reversed a divided three-judge panel of its own members, which ruled last year that the government lacked the power to detain civilians legally in the United States as enemy combatants. That panel ordered the government either to charge Mr. Marri or to release him. The case is likely to reach the Supreme Court.
Understanding Recent Changes to FISA — A Visual Guide (Flowchart) |
Nice work, from: Ketchup and Caviar
What you’ll see below are two diagrams comparing Old and New FISA. You can click on these thumbnails to see larger images.
I Used the Following resources for these charts:
* The new FISA compromise: it’s worse than you think (by Timothy B. Lee on ars technica)
* A Guide to the New FISA Bill, Parts I, II, III (by David Kris guest blogging on Balkinization)
* FISA Fix Follow-Ups and The Key Questions About the New FISA Bill (by Marty Lederman on Balkinization)
* H.R. 6304: FISA Amendments Act of 2008
* Interview with the ACLU re: constitutional challenge to new FISA law
* See Additional Resources, belowI wanted to know what combinations of the following factors triggered a FISA Warrant requirement under the old and new laws, and which didn’t:
1. Is the Communications Domestic, Foreign-to-Foreign, or Foreign-to-U.S.?
2. What technology is involved in these communications?
3. Is the target located inside or outside the United States?
4. Is the intelligence collected inside or outside the United StatesI’m sure I’ve got some of this wrong (let me know), but I think I’ve go the big picture. (I’m leaving out the soon-to-expire Protect America Act, which this bill modifies).
Bush Signs Spy Bill, ACLU Sues
Via: Wired.com
The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit Thursday over a controversial wiretapping law, challenging the constitutionality of the expanded spy powers Congress granted to the president on Wednesday.The federal lawsuit was filed with the court just hours after Bush signed the bill into law.
The ACLU is suing on behalf of journalist and human rights groups, asking the court put a halt to Congress’s legalization of Bush’s formerly secret warrantless wiretapping program. The ACLU contends (.pdf) the expanded spying power violates the Constitution’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.
On Wednesday, the Senate gave final congressional approval to a massive expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, finishing a year of debate over how far the U.S. government should be able to conduct blanket surveillance using telecom facilities inside the United States.
In passing the FISA Amendments Act, Congress gave the executive branch the power to order Google, AT&T and Yahoo to forward to the government all e-mails, phone calls and text messages where one party to the conversation is thought to be overseas. President Bush signed the bill into law Thursday morning, describing it as a bill that “protect[s] the liberties of our citizens while maintaining the vital flow of intelligence.”
The ACLU contends those blanket powers to grab international communications of Americans without specific court orders violate the Fourth Amendment and would stymie journalists who often speak to confidential sources outside the country.
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Army looking for Companies to provide “INTERNET AWARENESS SERVICES”
Look at the companies listed on the “Interested Vendors List” tab.
Via: Federal Business Opportunities
STATEMENT OF WORKThe contractor shall conduct internet awareness services in support of the Governments activities to include Indications and Warning, Force Protection, and situational awareness.
The purpose of the services will be to identify and assess stated and implied threat, antipathy, unrest, and other contextual data relating to selected internet domains. The contractor will prioritize foreign language domains that relate to specific areas of concern.
The contractor will analyze various web pages, chat rooms, blogs and other internet domains to aggregate and assess data of interest to the Government. It will also identify new internet domains that directly relate to the Governments specific local requirements.
The contractor will include a principle cyber investigator, a locally specialized threat analyst, a foreign speaking analyst with cyber investigative skills, and a constant watch team. It will organize additional native language translations at the direction of the Governments designated Contracting Officers Representative (COR), following mutual agreement.
The deliverable product will consist of a written report, delivered weekly to the COR. The report will contain raw data and supporting analysis to add value to raw materials. The contractors sources will be captioned under alias to preserve access, but upon request, the contractor will consider releasing specific URLs on an as needed basis based on the Governments request, if explicit threat materials or imminent threat to personnel or facilities are discovered.
The contractor shall immediately contact via telephone and/or email the designated COR upon receipt of any and all stated or implied threats that contain timing and/or targeting information relating to personnel, facilities or activities, and to specifically designated areas of concern.
As part of this alerting, if the contractor identifies a stated or implied threat that contains timing, targeting or both, it will deliver the raw URL and any supporting URLs relating to the threat materials. It will also make an investigator available within 8 hours of request for analytic discussions regarding the threat.
If the Government receives a deliverable report and believe the materials contain threat information, the COR may make a request for the URL release 24 hours a day to the contractor. The contractor will consider the ad hoc request for URL and respond within 12 hours. On cases where someone other than the COR makes a request, the contractor will notify the COR and will inform him or her of its decision.
Senate Approves Telecom Amnesty, Expands Domestic Spying Powers
From: Wired.com
The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly voted Wednesday to grant retroactive amnesty to the telecoms that aided the President Bush’s five-year secret, warrantless wiretapping of Americans, and to expand the government’s authority to sift through U.S. communications, handing a key victory to the Bush administration.The Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee Barack Obama (D-Illinois) voted for the final bill, despite intense lobbying by supporters who used Obama’s own online organizing technology to try to hold him to his promise to fight any bill that included amnesty. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama’s former rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, voted against the bill.
The 68 to 29 vote puts an end to more than a year of debate over whether the government should be able to collect millions of e-mails and phone calls daily from U.S.-based communication switches without any probable cause. It also answers whether Congress believes the nation’s telecoms and president had a duty to follow the rules set out in 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was passed after the abuses of the 1950s and 60s.
If the FISA Amendments Act survives constitutional challenge, it dooms the dozens of anti-wiretapping lawsuits filed against the nation’s telecoms, by ordering the judge in charge of the cases to dismiss them if the telecoms can prove the government asked them to help out.
Do US Internment Camps Really Exist?
Full article at: Vorchester.com
Unlike a lot of conspiracy theories floating around on the Internet this one appears to be well grounded in truth. There is an enormous amount of evidence that support the fact that the camps exist and really no denial by the government. So the question quickly changes from ‘Do they exist?’ to ‘why?’ Why does the government need to have internment camps?Interment camps are not without precedent in US history. During World War II, out of fear, our government rounded up nearly 110,000 Japanese people and placed them in camps around the country. That period in history is looked upon as a dark moment in our past. Why would we repeat a past mistake?
What Every American Needs to Know (and Do) About FISA Before Tuesday
Read the full article and watch the video here: Antiwar.com
Tomorrow, July 8th, could mark the beginning of official condoning of warrantless surveillance of law-abiding citizens in the US, not to mention foreign nationals. Much of this information has been covered by Glenn Greenwald in the past week.In the video below, I talk about what every American needs to know — and do in the next 24 hours — about the new FISA (Federal Information and Surveillance Act) amendments. The interview, and below partial transcription, answers questions like…
-I don’t have anything to hide. How does this affect me?
-What if this type of surveillance is what has prevented another 9/11 from happening?
-What are common inaccuracies about FISA reported in the media?Find below how you can make a real impact in less than 60 seconds. Every person counts — the Senators who will vote are watching the numbers. 41 Senators can block the bill, and it’s not too late.
Please do the following: How I ask you to spend 60 seconds
1. ALL AMERICANS: Go to the EFF website here and put in your zipcode to find your Senator’s phone number. Call them and read the short script on the same page. If no answer, click the link at the bottom of the page to e-mail them.
(Tell others verbally to go to “www.eff.org” and click “take action”)2. OBAMA SUPPORTERS: Go to My.BarackObama.com here and join the group requesting he oppose (as he did earlier) the amendment. This takes about 30 seconds. I suggest changing “ListServ” in the bottom right to “Do not receive e-mails.” (Tell others verbally to search “obama please vote no” on Google and My.BarackObama.com will be in the top 3 results, currently #1)
‘Public’ online spaces don’t carry speech, rights
Via: My Way News
NEW YORK (AP) - Rant all you want in a public park. A police officer generally won’t eject you for your remarks alone, however unpopular or provocative.
Say it on the Internet, and you’ll find that free speech and other constitutional rights are anything but guaranteed.
Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that’s controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.
The governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services - from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video - become more central to public discourse around the world. It’s a fallout of the Internet’s market-driven growth, but possible remedies, including government regulation, can be worse than the symptoms.
Dutch photographer Maarten Dors met the limits of free speech at Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) (YHOO)’s photo-sharing service, Flickr, when he posted an image of an early-adolescent boy with disheveled hair and a ragged T-shirt, staring blankly with a lit cigarette in his mouth.
Without prior notice, Yahoo deleted the photo on grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking. Dors eventually convinced a Yahoo manager that - far from promoting smoking - the photo had value as a statement on poverty and street life in Romania. Yet another employee deleted it again a few months later.
“I never thought of it as a photo of a smoking kid,” Dors said. “It was just of a kid in Romania and how his life is. You can never make a serious documentary if you always have to think about what Flickr will delete.”
Civil liberties group criticizes new FBI authority
Full story at: The Associated Press
Nearly 40 years ago, the FBI was roundly criticized for investigating Americans without evidence they had broken any laws. Now, critics fear the FBI may be gearing up to do it again.Tentative Justice Department guidelines, to be released later this summer, would let agents investigate people whose backgrounds — and potentially their race or ethnicity — match the traits of terrorists.
Such profiling faintly echoes the FBI’s now-defunct COINTELPRO, an operation under Director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1950s and 1960s to monitor and disrupt groups with communist and socialist ties.
Before it was shut down in 1971, the domestic spying operation — formally known as Counterintelligence Programs — had expanded to include civil rights groups, anti-war activists, the Ku Klux Klan, state legislators and journalists.
Police arrest 1,200 in London knife crackdown
They will eventually need to outlaw lead pipes, candlesticks, pencils, rope, and medium sized stones, since people who commit such crimes will always find a way to achieve their objective.
Via: Reuters
Police have arrested 1,214 people in London during a six-week crackdown on knife crime, Scotland Yard said on Wednesday.Officers found 528 knives after conducting nearly 27,000 searches during Operation Blunt 2, launched after Boris Johnson was elected London Mayor in May pledging to tackle knife crime in the capital.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair announced the figures alongside Johnson at a briefing at the Mayor’s offices in City Hall.
The figures were released as police continued to search for the killers of 16-year-old Ben Kinsella, stabbed to death in Islington, north London, on Sunday.
U.K. to Begin Microchipping Prisoners
Via: naturalnews.com
The British government is developing a plan to track current and former prisoners by means of microchips implanted under the skin, drawing intense criticism from probation officers and civil rights groups.As a way to reduce prison crowding, many British prisoners are currently released under electronic monitoring, carried out by means of an ankle bracelet that transmits signals like those used by mobile phones.
Now the Ministry of Justice is exploring the possibility of injecting prisoners in the back of the arm with a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip that contains information about their name, address and criminal record. Such chips, which contain a built-in antenna, could be scanned by special readers. The implantation of RFID chips in luggage, pets and livestock has become increasingly popular in recent years.
In addition to monitoring incarcerated prisoners, the ministry hopes to use the chips on those who are on probation or other conditional release. By including a satellite uplink system in the chip, police would be able to use global positioning system (GPS) technology to track subjects’ exact locations at all times. According to advocates of such a measure, this could help keep sex offenders away from “forbidden” zones like schools.
Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers, blasted the measure as degrading to the people chipped and of no benefit to probation officers.
“Knowing where offenders like pedophiles are does not mean you know what they are doing,” Fletcher said. “Treating people like pieces of meat does not seem to represent an improvement in the system to me.”
Shami Chakrabarti of the civil rights group Liberty had even stronger words:
“If the Home Office doesn’t understand why implanting a chip in someone is worse than an ankle bracelet, they don’t need a human-rights lawyer; they need a common-sense bypass.”
