New World Order

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Real ID could mean real travel headaches

But starting on May 11, people may no longer be permitted to use their driver's license to fly out of the Portland International Jetport. Under the federal Real ID Act, which the Bush administration has touted as an antiterrorist measure, federal screeners could be required to reject it as invalid identification.

Airlines and travelers associations worry the May 11 deadline will herald chaos at airports unsurpassed by any other recent change to federal law. Liquids and gels can be discarded or placed in checked baggage. But travelers from non-Real ID states will have no choice but to undergo what Homeland Security delicately calls "delays" and "enhanced security screening" unless they happen to have a valid U.S. passport issued by the State Department.

And this is the best part of the whole story next. Slipped in quietly and undercover.

From DHS' perspective, the law is clear: Real ID was signed on May 11, 2005, by President Bush as part of an Iraq war and tsunami relief bill, and its edict is unambiguous. It says that "three years after the date of the enactment of this division, a federal agency may not accept, for any official purpose, a driver's license or identification card issued by a state to any person unless the state is meeting the requirements of this section

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff even went so far as to say that only criminals and terrorists should be "disappointed" with the Real ID rules.

This is fucking wrong. What does this have to do with the Iraq war or tsunami relief? Fucking nothing. These bastards are playing us all for a bunch of fools. And if we keep letting them get away with it, then I guess we are.

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Abracadabra! Bush Makes Privacy Board Vanish

The Bush administration has failed to nominate any candidates to a newly empowered privacy and civil-liberties commission. This leaves the board without any members, even as Congress prepares to give the Bush administration extraordinary powers to wiretap without warrants inside the United States.

"This board failed miserably in its mission of helping to protect Americans' privacy and instead acted mainly to help the White House whitewash programs like warrantless NSA wiretapping that violate Americans' civil liberties," Graves said. "Now that Congress has changed the board's rules to make it a little more independent, the White House appears to have no interest in appointing anyone to it"

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New Law Gives Government Six Months to Turn Internet and Phone Systems into Permanent Spying Architecture

A new law expanding the government's spying powers gives the Bush Administration a six-month window to install possibly permanent back doors in the nation's communication networks.  The legislation was passed hurriedly by Congress over the weekend and signed into law Sunday by President Bush.

The bill, known as the Protect America Act, removes the prohibition on warrantless spying on Americans abroad and gives the government wide powers to order communication service providers such as cell phone companies and ISPs to make their networks available to government eavesdroppers.

Now, those agencies are free to order services like Skype, cell phone companies and arguably even search engines to comply with secret spy orders to create back doors in domestic communication networks for the nation's spooks.

In short, the law gives the Administration the power to order the nation's communication service providers -- which range from Gmail, AOL IM, Twitter, Skype, traditional phone companies, ISPs, internet backbone providers, Federal Express, and social networks -- to create possibly permanent spying outposts  for the federal government.

These outposts need only to have a "significant" purpose of spying on foreigners, would be nearly immune to challenge by lawsuit, and have no court supervision over their extent or implementation.

In related international news, Zimbabwe's repressive dictator Robert Mugabe also won passage of a law allowing the government to turn that nation's communication infrastructure into a gigantic, secret microphone.

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Senate Authorizes Broad Expansion Of Surveillance Act

President Bush has called on Congress to rapidly renew the surveillance authority granted to the federal government in the Protect America Act approved last year. But he has vowed to veto any bill that does not shield the companies that helped the government carry out the warrantless wiretapping program he ordered after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"When companies break the law, they should be held accountable by our government -- not given a multimillion-dollar favor," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington Legislative Office. "The millions of Americans who are telecom customers deserve to know that their phone conversations are private."

In a statement, she charged that telecommunications companies "illegally turned over private customer call information to the government." But instead of "having faith in the U.S. court system to fairly handle these cases," she said, the Senate opted to "give the telecom providers a get-out-of-jail-free card."

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Senate Approves Telco Amnesty, Legalizes Bush's Secret Spy Program

The Senate overwhelming voted Tuesday evening to legalize President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program and grant amnesty to the phone companies that helped out with the domestic spying..

The 68 to 29 vote is a major step in radically re-configuring 30 year-old limits on how the nation's spying services operate inside America's borders. The vote also deals a severe blow to civil liberties groups that are suing companies such as AT&T and Verizon for turning over millions of American's phone records to the government, and for helping the government wiretap American's phone and internet communications without a court order.

Prior to this summer, the intelligence community was forbidden by law from wiretapping phone and internet switches inside the United States, unless they had a particular target in mind and applied for a court order from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Though the administration initially admitted that the existence of the wiretapping program after a December 2005 story in the New York Times, it has refused to disclose the extent of the operation. Officials have repeatedly denied the program is a "dragnet" that searches communications for keywords.

But statements from administration figures over the past year suggest the program is closer to a vacuum cleaner that sucks in communications and stores them in bulk. Those statements suggest many of the sucked-in communications aren't ever looked at but are available for data-mining and social networking analysis -- and inspection by NSA analysts based on that analysis or other evidence.

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Future of social networking explored in UW's computer science building

...wirelessly monitoring people and things in a closed environment. Beginning in March, volunteer students, engineers and staff will wear electronic tags on their clothing and belongings to sense their location every five seconds throughout much of the six-story building. The information will be saved to a database, published to Web pages and used in various custom tools. The project is one of the largest experiments looking at wireless tags in a social setting.

The project explores the use of radio-frequency identification, or RFID, tags in a social environment. The team has installed some 200 antennas in the Paul Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering. Early next month researchers will begin recruiting 50 volunteers from about 400 people who regularly use the building.

The new U.S. passports incorporate RFID tags. Technology experts predict that RFID tags will soon be incorporated in consumer devices, such as cell phones, laptops and music players.

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The Supreme Court dealt a setback Tuesday to civil rights and privacy advocates who oppose the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. The justices, without comment, turned down an appeal from the American Civil Liberties Union to let it pursue a lawsuit against the program that began shortly after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The action underscored the difficulty of mounting a challenge to the eavesdropping, which remains classified and was confirmed by President Bush only after a newspaper article revealed its existence.

"It's very disturbing that the president's actions will go unremarked upon by the court," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's national security project. "In our view, it shouldn't be left to executive branch officials alone to determine the limits."

It should probably be noted that it dealt a setback to the free people of the United States also, but nobody ever talks about that.

A federal judge in Detroit largely agreed, but the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the suit, saying the plaintiffs could not prove their communications had been monitored and thus could not prove they had been harmed by the program.

The government has refused to turn over information about the closely guarded program that could reveal who has been under surveillance.

ACLU officials described the situation as a "Catch-22" because the government says the identities of people whose communications have been intercepted is secret. But only people who know they have been wiretapped can sue over the program.

Full Story

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Feds Have a Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier

A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems, exposing customers' voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003.

According to his affidavit, Pasdar tumbled to the surveillance superhighway in September 2003, when he led a "Rapid Deployment" team hired to revamp security on the carrier's internal network. He noticed that the carrier's officials got squirrelly when he asked about a mysterious "Quantico Circuit" -- a 45 megabit/second DS-3 line linking its most sensitive network to an unnamed third party.

"The circuit was tied to the organization's core network," Pasdar writes in his affidavit. "It had access to the billing system, text messaging, fraud detection, web site, and pretty much all the systems in the data center without apparent restrictions."

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oops! We were accidentally spying on you. LMAO

The FBI acknowledged Wednesday it improperly accessed Americans' telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies.

An audit by the inspector general last year found the FBI demanded personal records without official authorization or otherwise collected more data than allowed in dozens of cases between 2003 and 2005. Additionally, last year's audit found that the FBI had underreported to Congress how many national security letters were requested by more than 4,600.

Several Justice Department and FBI officials familiar with the upcoming 2006 findings have said privately the new audit will show national security letters were used incorrectly at a similar rate as during the previous three years.

"We are committed to ensuring that we not only get this right, but maintain the vital trust of the American people," Mueller said.

It's a little too late for that. Or maybe he means vital blindness of the American people.

Full Story

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FBI Tried to Cover Patriot Act Abuses With Flawed, Retroactive Subpoenas, Audit Finds

FBI headquarters officials sought to cover their informal and possibly illegal acquisition of phone records on thousands of Americans from 2003 to 2005 by issuing 11 improper, retroactive "blanket" administrative subpoenas in 2006 to three phone companies that are under contract to the FBI, according to an audit  released Thursday.

The revelations come in a follow-up report to Fine's 2007 finding that the FBI abused a key Patriot Act power, known as a National Security Letter. That first reports showed that FBI agents were routinely sloppy in using the self-issued subpoenas and issued hundreds that claimed fake emergencies.

With the flawed follow-up letters, the Counterterrorism division attempted to provide retroactive legal justification for telephone data the division had gotten on 3,860 phone numbers, gotten either through verbal requests to the companies or false emergency requests.

The letters are related to still-secret contracts the FBI's Communication Analysis Unit has with AT&T, Verizon and MCI. The contracts pay the companies to store subscribers' phone records for longer periods of time and to provide faster service for FBI subpoenas. Those contracts began in May 2003, but the FBI refuses to release them.

Additionally, some of those retroactive NSLs sought records that the FBI was not authorized to obtain, and failed to explain -- as required by policy -- what investigation the records pertained to. Fine found that all were "issued in violation of internal FBI policy."

In his 2007 report on the FBI's use of that Patriot Act power during 2003 to 2005, Fine disclosed that officials at the counter-terrorism division had issued more than 700 emergency requests for data to telephone companies -- so-called exigent letters -- most with false promises that a court order was in the works and would be delivered after the fact. Those letters prompted a further investigation of those letters, including a reported criminal probe of counter-terrorism officials, and Thursday's report says an in depth report on that office is forthcoming.

The report shows the need for Congress to narrow the FBI's powers and strengthen privacy laws, according to Mike German, a longtime FBI agent who now works for the ACLU, who says it's clear the FBI has been breaking the law.

"The FBI has flagrantly put aside the rule of law and its internal guidelines time and again," German said "This is the kind of abuse that is inevitable when we broaden the government's surveillance power and do not attempt to modernize privacy standards. Both the House and Senate have bills waiting to be marked up that will greatly limit this authority. Congress needs to act on this now.?

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Pentagon plans propaganda war

The Pentagon is toying with the idea of black propaganda.

As part of George Bush's war on terrorism, the military is thinking of planting propaganda and misleading stories in the international media.

A new department has been set up inside the Pentagon with the Orwellian title of the Office of Strategic Influence.

It has been canvassing opinion within the Pentagon on what it should do.

The options range from the standard public relations stuff - doing more to explain the Pentagon's role - to more underhand tactics such as e-mailing journalists and community leaders abroad with information that undermines governments hostile to the United States.

These e-mails would come from a .com return address rather than .mil to hide the Pentagon's role.

The most controversial suggestion is the covert planting of disinformation in foreign media, a process known as black propaganda.

Some generals are worried that even a suggestion of disinformation would undermine the Pentagon's credibility and America's attempts to portray herself as the beacon of liberty and democratic values.

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US Department of Justice banned from Wikipedia

US Department of Justice banned from Wikipedia:

Wikipedia has temporarily blocked edits from the US Department of Justice after someone inside the government agency tried to erase references to a particularly-controversial Wiki-scandal.

Early last week, the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) was accused of organizing a secret campaign to influence certain articles on the "free encyclopedia anyone can edit". Just days later, the DoJ's IP range was used to edit the site's entry on the Pro-Israel "media-monitoring group," lifting a new section that detailed the controversy.

This Wikipedia editor, known as "Zeq," and several others involved with the CAMERA emails were subsequently sanctioned. Some were barred from editing topics involving the Arab-Israeli conflict, and at least one - "Gni," believed to be Ini - was banned from the site entirely.

In the wake of these sanctions, a paragraph on the scandal was added to Wikipedia's CAMERA article, and on two separate occasions, someone inside the DoJ tried to remove it. The user also made a few questionable edits to other articles, and the DoJ's entire IP was banned for four days.

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Government in secret

...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 (FISA). 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.

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Celebration Of Americans Turning In Their Neighbors, Family Members

Southwest Florida Crime Stoppers and the New York Times are heartily celebrating the fact that an increasing number of Americans are becoming informants and turning in their neighbors and family members to the authorities in return for cash rewards.

Citing gas prices, foreclosure rates and runaway food price inflation, The Times lauds the fact that citizens are reporting on each other, ensuring "a substantial increase in Crime Stopper-related arrests and recovered property, as callers turn in neighbors, grandchildren or former boyfriends in exchange for a little cash."

The fact that people turning in their own neighbors and family members for payoffs is one of the hallmarks of a Stasi-like police state doesn’t seem to register with reporters Shaila Dewan, Brenda Goodman, or Crime Stoppers U.S.A President Elaine Cloyd, who hails the snitches for getting "creative" to offset a rough economy.

Forget Orwell’s 1984, this purebred tyranny is about as sophisticated as the wacky dictatorship portrayed in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 movie The Running Man, where citizens are reminded by huge TV screens that they can "earn a double bonus for reporting on a family member!"

It’s difficult to judge the most disturbing aspect of this story - the fact that people would slavishly turn in their grandchildren and neighbors for instant cash - or the horrible spectacle of having to endure the the New York Times celebrating it.

Enthusiastic spies are assured that they can earn as much as $700, $750 per week for information leading to two or three arrests, more money than a minimum wage job. The tattle-tales’ identity is kept anonymous and they can even report people by text message.

Crime Stoppers coordinator Trish Routte described the ability to make a living from reporting friends and family members to the authorities as "wonderful".

Since authorities now define mundane activities like buying baby formula, beer, wearing Levi jeans, carrying identifying documents like a drivers license and traveling with women or children or mentioning the U.S. constitution as the behavior of potential terrorists, the bounty for the American Stasi to turn in political dissidents is sure to be too tempting to resist.

As any budding dictator will tell you, the creation of an informant society where individuals self-regulate their behavior in fear of being turned in by a citizen spy is one of the key stepping stones to tyranny. To have the media celebrate the fact that people are reporting on their neighbors and grandchildren puts the icing on the cake.

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We Are Change Vancouver vs. Colin Powell and Depleted Uranium (Video)

This is what happens to you if you ask the wrong questions.