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FBI gone nuts and invading privacy (Patriot Act abused)
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| shaolin_Z |
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FBI Use of Patriot Act Concerns Lawmakers
By HOPE YEN, Associated Press WriterSun Nov 6, 9:29 PM ET
Lawmakers expressed concern Sunday that the FBI was aggressively pushing the powers of the anti-terrorist USA Patriot Act to access private phone and financial records of ordinary people.
"We should be looking at that very closely," said Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record), D-Del., who is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "It appears to me that this is, if not abused, being close to abused."
Sen. Chuck Hagel (news, bio, voting record), R-Neb., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed, saying the government's expanded power highlights the risks of balancing national security against individual rights.
"It does point up how dangerous this can be," said Hagel, who appeared with Biden on ABC's "This Week."
Under the Patriot Act, the FBI issues more than 30,000 national security letters allowing the investigations each year, a hundred-fold increase over historic norms, The Washington Post reported Sunday, quoting unnamed government sources.
The security letters, which were first used in the 1970s, allow access to people's phone and e-mail records, as well as financial data and the Internet sites they surf. The 2001 Patriot Act removed the requirement that the records sought be those of someone under suspicion.
As a result, FBI agents can review the digital records of a citizen as long as the bureau can certify that the person's records are "relevant" to a terrorist investigation.
Calling the recent growth in the number of letters a "stunner," Biden said, "Thirty thousand seems like an awful, awful stretch to me."
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said Sunday that he could not immediately confirm or dispute the 30,000 figure, but he said the power to use the security letters was justified.
"The Department of Justice inspector general in August 2005 found no civil rights violations with respect to the Patriot Act," he said.
Issued by the FBI without review by a judge, the letters are used to obtain electronic records from "electronic communications service providers." Such providers include Internet service companies but also universities, public interest organizations and almost all libraries, because most provide access to the Internet.
Last September in an ACLU lawsuit, a federal judge in New York struck down this provision as unconstitutional on grounds that it restrains free speech and bars or deters judicial challenges to government searches.
That ruling has been suspended pending an appeal to the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In a hearing last week the court suggested it might require the government to permit libraries, major corporations and other groups to challenge FBI demands for records.
The Patriot Act provision involving national security letters was enacted permanently in 2001, so it was not part of Congress' debate last summer over extending some Patriot Act provisions.
As the Dec. 31 deadline has approached for Congress to renew provisions of the act, the House and Senate have voted to make noncompliance with a national security letter a criminal offense.
Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., both members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the expanded use of security letters was a "clear concern" and that information gathered on citizens should be destroyed if it does not lead to a criminal charge.
Coburn said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that he "certainly will" take steps to ensure that the documents are destroyed immediately.
A message left with the ACLU was not immediately returned on Sunday. |
This isn't really a surprise, the Patriot Act was messed up to begin with and should never have been passed.Source: Yahoo News |
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| occrider |
This isn’t some crap from commondreams and this isn’t another argument that the potential for abuse is present. The fact that they are issuing 30,000 NSLs a year is rather disturbing to me. This is a great article that provides some details about what exactly is going on with NSLs. It’s a very long read, and I tried to bold the more interesting and salient parts, but I encourage you to read the entire article. Realizing that people have short attention spans, here’s an executive summary:
The government was bound by executive order 12333 with regards to NSLs by restricting its use according to a “least obtrusive means” clause in domestic intelligence gathering. On three separate occasions Aschroft has pushed for more habitual use of NSLs by field operatives if they feel it would get their job done faster. Now, rather than using NSLs as a tool that should be used judiciously, it’s almost become a part of standard operating procedure in any investigation. Furthermore, Ashcroft rescinded a previous guideline that any data collected from an NSL was to be destroyed if that data was not related to the purpose of the investigation. All that data goes into one massive database and any information can be freely disseminated to ANY federal or state agency. Furthermore, the government is using consumer data providers such as LexisNexis to make its database more robust. So what does this mean for you? Probably nothing unless you’re a friend of a friend who inadvertently had contact with a terrorist suspect (who was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing) but you were still lucky enough to make it on that list of 30,000 people who get NSLs every year. Then all sorts of fun private information about the people you talk to, places you go on the internet, what you buy, etc., go into a government database and that data may be made available to the federal or state agency of your choosing.
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Connecticut case exposes Patriot Act
In the hunt for terrorists, FBI probes private lives
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post
WASHINGTON – The FBI came calling in Windsor, Conn., this summer with a document marked for delivery by hand. On Matianuk Avenue, across from the tennis courts, two special agents found their man. They gave George Christian the letter, which warned him to tell no one, ever, what it said.
Under the shield and stars of the FBI crest, the letter directed Christian to surrender “all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person” who used a specific computer at a library branch some distance away. Christian, who manages digital records for three dozen Connecticut libraries, said in an affidavit that he configures his system for privacy. But the vendors of the software he operates said their databases can reveal the Web sites that visitors browse, the e-mail accounts they open and the books they borrow.
Christian refused to hand over those records, and his employer, Library Connection Inc., filed suit for the right to protest the FBI demand in public. The Washington Post established their identities – still under seal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit – by comparing unsealed portions of the file with public records and information gleaned from people who had no knowledge of the FBI demand.
The Connecticut case affords a rare glimpse of an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act, which marked its fourth anniversary Oct. 26. “National security letters,” created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.
The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters – one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people – are extending the bureau’s reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.
Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.
The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks – and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond.
In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for “state, local and tribal” governments and for “appropriate private sector entities,” which are not defined.
National security letters offer a case study of the effect of the Patriot Act outside the spotlight of political debate. Drafted in haste after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the law’s 132 pages wrought scores of changes in the landscape of intelligence and law enforcement. Many received far more attention than the amendments to a seemingly pedestrian power to review “transactional records.” But few other provisions touch as many ordinary Americans without their knowledge.
Senior FBI officials acknowledge that the proliferation of national security letters results primarily from the bureau’s new authority to collect intimate facts about people who are not suspected of wrongdoing. Criticized for failure to detect the Sept. 11 plot, the bureau now casts a much wider net, using national security letters to generate leads as well as to pursue them. Casual or unwitting contact with a suspect – a single telephone call, for example – might subject a person to scrutiny about which he never learns.
A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to track the private affairs of a modern digital citizen. The records it gathers describe where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work.
As it wrote the Patriot Act four years ago, Congress bought time and leverage for oversight by placing an expiration date on 16 provisions. The changes involving national security letters were not among them. In fact, as the Dec. 31 deadline approaches and Congress prepares to renew or make permanent the expiring provisions, House and Senate conferees are poised again to amplify the FBI’s power to compel the secret production of private records.
The House and Senate have voted to make non-compliance with a national security letter a criminal offense. The House would also impose a prison term for breach of secrecy.
“The beef with the NSLs is that they don’t have even a pretense of judicial or impartial scrutiny,” said former Rep. Robert Barr Jr., R-Ga., who finds himself allied with the American Civil Liberties Union after a career as prosecutor, CIA analyst and conservative GOP stalwart. “There’s no checks and balances whatever on them. It is simply some bureaucrat’s decision that they want information, and they can basically just go and get it.”
New rules
Under the old legal test, the FBI had to have “specific and articulable” reasons to believe the records it gathered in secret belonged to a terrorist or a spy. Now the bureau needs only to certify that the records are “sought for” or “relevant to” an investigation “to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”
That standard enables investigators to look for conspirators by sifting the records of anyone who crosses a suspect’s path.
“If you have a list of, say, 20 telephone numbers that have come up ... on a bad guy’s telephone,” said Valerie Caproni, the FBI’s general counsel, “you want to find out who he’s in contact with.” Investigators will say, “ ‘OK, phone company, give us subscriber information and toll records on these 20 telephone numbers,’ and that can easily be 100.”
Bush administration officials compare national security letters to grand jury subpoenas, which are also based on “relevance” to an inquiry. There are differences. Grand juries tend to have a narrower focus because they investigate past conduct, not the speculative threat of unknown future attacks. Recipients of grand jury subpoenas are generally free to discuss the subpoenas publicly. And there are strict limits on sharing grand jury information with government agencies.
Since the Patriot Act, the FBI has dispersed the authority to sign national security letters to more than five dozen supervisors – the special agents in charge of field offices, the deputies in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, and a few senior headquarters officials. FBI rules established after the Patriot Act allow the letters to be issued long before a case is judged substantial enough for a “full field investigation.” Agents commonly use the letters now in preliminary investigations and in the “threat assessments” that precede a decision whether to launch an investigation.
“Congress has given us this tool to obtain basic telephone data, basic banking data, basic credit reports,” said Caproni, who is among those with signature authority. “The fact that a national security letter is a routine tool used, that doesn’t bother me.”
If agents had to wait for grounds to suspect a person of ill intent, said Joseph Billy, the FBI’s deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, they would already know what they want to find out with a national security letter. “It’s all chicken and egg,” he said. “We’re trying to determine if someone warrants scrutiny or doesn’t.”
Billy said he understands that “merely being in a government or FBI database ... gives everybody, you know, neck hair standing up.” Innocent Americans, he said, “should take comfort at least knowing that it is done under a great deal of investigative care, oversight, within the parameters of the law.”
“That’s not going to satisfy a majority of people, but ... I’ve had people say, you know, ‘Hey, I don’t care, I’ve done nothing to be concerned about,” he said. “You can have me in your files and that’s that.’ ”
Early caution
In Room 7975 of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the chief of the FBI’s national security law unit sat down at his keyboard about a month after the Patriot Act became law. Michael Woods had helped devise the FBI wish list for surveillance powers. Now he offered a caution.
“NSLs are powerful investigative tools, in that they can compel the production of substantial amounts of relevant information,” he wrote in a Nov. 28, 2001, “electronic communication” to the FBI’s 56 field offices. “However, they must be used judiciously.” Standing guidelines, he wrote, “require that the FBI accomplish its investigations through the ‘least intrusive’ means. ... The greater availability of NSLs does not mean that they should be used in every case.”
Woods, who left government service in 2002, added a practical consideration. Legislators granted the authority and could as easily take it back. When making that decision, he wrote, “Congress certainly will examine the manner in which the FBI exercised it.”
Looking back last month, Woods was struck by how starkly he misjudged the climate. The FBI disregarded his warning, and no one noticed.
“This is not something that should be automatically done because it’s easy,” he said. “We need to be sure ... we don’t go overboard.”
One thing Woods did not anticipate was then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft’s revision of Justice Department guidelines. On May 30, 2002, and Oct. 31, 2003, Ashcroft rewrote the playbooks for investigations of terrorist crimes and national security threats. He gave overriding priority to preventing attacks by any means available.
Ashcroft remained bound by Executive Order 12333, which requires the use of the “least intrusive means” in domestic intelligence investigations. Yet three times, Ashcroft wrote that the FBI “should consider ... less intrusive means” but “should not hesitate to use any lawful techniques ... even if intrusive” when investigators believe them to be more timely. “This point,” he added, “is to be particularly observed in investigations relating to terrorist activities.”
What national security letters give his agents the advantage of speed, said Michael Mason, who runs the Washington field office and has the rank of assistant FBI director.
“I have 675 terrorism cases,” he said. “Every one of these is a potential threat. And anything I can do to get to the bottom of any one of them more quickly gets me closer to neutralizing a potential threat.”Woods, the former FBI lawyer, said secrecy is essential when an investigation begins because “it would defeat the whole purpose” to tip off a suspected terrorist or spy, but national security seldom requires that the secret be kept forever.
Even mobster “John Gotti finds out eventually that he was wiretapped” in a criminal probe, said Peter Swire, the federal government’s chief privacy counselor until 2001. “Anyone caught up in an NSL investigation never gets notice.”
Those who favor the new rules maintain – as Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, put it in a prepared statement – that “there has not been one substantiated allegation of abuse of these lawful intelligence tools.”
What the Bush administration means by abuse is unauthorized use of surveillance data – for example, to blackmail an enemy or track an estranged spouse. Critics are focused elsewhere. What troubles them is not unofficial abuse but the official and routine intrusion into private lives.
To Jeffrey Breinholt, deputy chief of the Justice Department’s counterterrorism section, the civil liberties objections “are eccentric.” Data collection on the innocent, he said, does no harm unless “someone (decides) to act on the information, put you on a no-fly list or something.” Only a serious error, he said, could lead the government, based on nothing more than someone’s bank or phone records, “to freeze your assets or go after you criminally and you suffer consequences that are irreparable.” He added: “It’s a pretty small chance.”
“I don’t necessarily want somebody knowing what videos I rent or the fact that I like cartoons,” said Mason, the Washington field office chief. But if those records “are never used against a person, if they’re never used to put him in jail, or deprive him of a vote, etc., then what is the argument?”
Barr, the former congressman, said that “the abuse is in the power itself.”
“As a conservative,” he said, “I really resent an administration that calls itself conservative taking the position that the burden is on the citizen to show the government has abused power, and otherwise shut up and comply.”
At the ACLU, staff attorney Jameel Jaffer spoke of “the profound chilling effect” of this kind of surveillance: “If the government monitors the Web sites that people visit and the books that they read, people will stop visiting disfavored Web sites and stop reading disfavored books. The FBI should not have unchecked authority to keep track of who visits (al-Jazeera’s Web site) or who visits the Web site of the Federalist Society.”
Looking for links
Two years ago, Ashcroft rescinded a 1995 guideline directing that information obtained through a national security letter about a U.S. citizen or resident “shall be destroyed by the FBI and not further disseminated” if it proves “not relevant to the purposes for which it was collected.” Ashcroft’s new order was that “the FBI shall retain” all records it collects and “may disseminate” them freely among federal agencies.
The same order directed the FBI to develop “data mining” technology to probe for hidden links among the people in its growing cache of electronic files. According to an FBI status report, the bureau’s office of intelligence began operating in January 2004 a new Investigative Data Warehouse, based on the same Oracle technology used by the CIA. The CIA is generally forbidden to keep such files on Americans.
Data mining intensifies the effect of national security letters, because anyone’s personal files can be scrutinized again and again without a fresh need to establish relevance.
“The composite picture of a person which emerges from transactional information is more telling than the direct content of your speech,” said Woods, the former FBI lawyer. “That’s certainly not been lost on the intelligence community and the FBI.”
Ashcroft’s new guidelines allowed the FBI for the first time to add to government files consumer data from commercial providers such as LexisNexis and ChoicePoint Inc. Previous attorneys general had decided that such a move would violate the Privacy Act.
What national security letters add to government data banks is information that no commercial service can lawfully possess. Strict privacy laws, for example, govern financial and communications records. National security letters – along with the more powerful but much less frequently used secret subpoenas from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court – override them.
At about the time the FBI found George Christian in Connecticut, agents from the bureau’s Charlotte field office paid an urgent call on the chemical engineering department at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. They were looking for information about a former student named Magdy Nashar, then suspected in the July 7 London subway bombing but since cleared of suspicion.
University officials said in interviews late last month that the FBI tried to use a national security letter to demand more information than the law allows.
David Drooz, the university’s senior associate counsel, said special authority is required for records protected by educational and medical privacy. The FBI’s first request, a July 14 grand jury subpoena, did not appear to supply that authority, Drooz said, and the university did not honor it.
Referring to notes he took that day, Drooz said Eric Davis, the FBI’s top lawyer in Charlotte, “was focused very much on the urgency” and “he even indicated the case was of interest to President Bush.”
The next day, July 15, FBI agents arrived with a national security letter. Drooz said it demanded all records of Nashar’s admission, housing, emergency contacts, use of health services and extracurricular activities. University lawyers “looked up what law we could on the fly,” he said. They discovered that the FBI was demanding files that national security letters have no power to obtain. The statute the FBI cited that day covers only telephone and Internet records.
“We’re very eager to comply with the authorities in this regard, but we needed to have what we felt was a legally valid procedure,” said Larry Neilsen, the university provost.
Soon after, the FBI returned with a new subpoena. It was the same as the first one, Drooz said, and the university still had doubts about its legal sufficiency. This time, however, it came from New York and summoned Drooz to appear personally. The tactic was “a bit heavy-handed,” Drooz said, “the implication being you’re subject to contempt of court.” Drooz surrendered the records.
A high-ranking FBI official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that the field office erred in attempting to use a national security letter. Investigators, he said, “were in a big hurry for obvious reasons” and did not approach the university “in the exact right way.”
Facts remain opaque
The electronic docket in the Connecticut case, as the New York Times first reported, briefly titled the lawsuit Library Connection Inc. v. Gonzales. Because identifying details were not supposed to be left in the public file, the court replaced the plaintiff’s name with “John Doe.”
Christian, Library Connection’s executive director, is identified as “John Doe 2.” In his affidavit, he said people often come to libraries for information that is “highly sensitive, embarrassing or personal.” He wanted to fight the FBI but feared calling a lawyer because the letter said he could not disclose its existence to “any person.”
He consulted Peter Chase, vice president of Library Connection and chairman of a state intellectual freedom committee. Chase (“John Doe 1”) in his affidavit – advised Christian to call the ACLU. Both declined to be interviewed for this story.
U.S. District Judge Janet Hall ruled in September that the FBI gag order violates Christian and Library Connection’s First Amendment rights. A three-judge panel heard oral argument Wednesday in the government’s appeal.
The central facts remain opaque, even to the judges, because the FBI is not obliged to describe what it is looking for, or why. During oral argument in open court Aug. 31, Hall said one government explanation was so vague that “if I were to say it out loud, I would get quite a laugh here.” After the government elaborated in a classified brief delivered for her eyes only, she wrote in her decision that it offered “nothing specific.”
Resistance to national security letters is rare. Most of them are served on large companies in highly regulated industries, with business interests that favor cooperation. The in-house lawyers who handle such cases, said Jim Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, “are often former prosecutors – instinctively pro-government but also instinctively by-the-books.” National security letters give them a shield against liability to their customers.
The volume of government information demands has provoked a backlash. Several major business groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, complained in an Oct. 4 letter to senators that customer records can “too easily be obtained and disseminated” around the government. National security letters, they wrote, have begun to impose an “expensive and time-consuming burden” on business.
The House and Senate bills renewing the Patriot Act do not tighten privacy protections, but they offer a concession to business interests. In both bills, a judge may modify a national security letter if it imposes an “unreasonable” or “oppressive” burden on the company that is asked for information.
In the executive branch, no FBI or Justice Department official audits the use of national security letters to assess whether they are appropriately targeted, lawfully applied or contribute important facts to an investigation.
Justice Department officials noted frequently this year that Inspector General Glenn Fine reports twice a year on abuses of the Patriot Act and has yet to substantiate any complaint. (One investigation is pending.)
Fine advertises his role, but there is a puzzle built into the mandate. Under what scenario could a person protest a search of his personal records if he is never notified?
“We do rely upon complaints coming in,” Fine said in House testimony in May. He added: “To the extent that people do not know of anything happening to them, there is an issue about whether they can complain. So, I think that’s a legitimate question.”
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journa...on/13102778.htm
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I'm so happy that our "conservative" leaders are making government such an integral part of our every day lives. |
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| Fir3start3r |
This government certainly is confusing...
Scary for sure... :nervous:
I'd image all the paranoid schizophrenics are laughing at us now. |
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| ogvh5150 |
Sneak and Peek
NSL's seem to be similar in nature to unsigned or "fake" warrants.
The Patriot Act allows for "sneak and peek" searches anyway.
What no one here is arguing is that the sunset has come and gone. That even the very existence of the act goes unquestioned in political circles.
Foxes guarding the henhouse....
Even with the Act in place there is no security. I can find a bag of weed faster than I can find CIA asset Tim Osman aka Osama. |
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| ali92 |
| quote: | Originally posted by ogvh5150
Sneak and Peek
NSL's seem to be similar in nature to unsigned or "fake" warrants.
The Patriot Act allows for "sneak and peek" searches anyway.
What no one here is arguing is that the sunset has come and gone. That even the very existence of the act goes unquestioned in political circles.
Foxes guarding the henhouse....
Even with the Act in place there is no security. I can find a bag of weed faster than I can find CIA asset Tim Osman aka Osama. |
I thought 'sunset' was 2005-12-31... |
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| occrider |
| quote: | Originally posted by Fir3start3r
This government certainly is confusing...
Scary for sure... :nervous:
I'd image all the paranoid schizophrenics are laughing at us now. |
Yes. like this most certainly hurts the cause of rational skepticism. But what do you expect when you have an administration in power that is as unprincipled as this one when it comes to both conservative and liberal issues? The only principle that this administration has consistently adhered to is to grow government as fast as possible and consolidate as much power as it can on the federal level ... regardless of any ancillary principles that are at stake. |
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| occrider |
Yea let's bump this with new news:
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New 'NY Times' Shocker: FBI Spied on Activist Groups
By E&P Staff
Published: December 20, 2005 12:30 AM ET
NEW YORK Following up on its revelations about a National Security Agency domestic spy program approved by President Bush, The New York Times reports Tuesday that counterterrorism agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation "have conducted numerous surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations that involved, at least indirectly, groups active in causes as diverse as the environment, animal cruelty and poverty relief, newly disclosed agency records show."
The reporter, Eric Lichtblau, was also co-author of last week's spy bombshell, with James Risen.
Documents were provided to The New York Times over the past week as part of a series of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. For more than a year, it said, the ACLU has sought information in F.B.I. files on about 150 protest and social groups that it says may have been improperly monitored.
"One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a Vegan Community Project," the Times reveals. " Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group's 'semi-communistic ideology.' A third indicates the bureau's interest in determining the location of a protest over llama fur planned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
"A.C.L.U officials said the latest batch of documents released by the F.B.I. indicated the agency's interest in a broader array of activist and protest groups than they had previously thought," Lichtblau writes. "In light of other recent disclosures about domestic surveillance activities by the National Security Agency and military intelligence units, the A.C.L.U. said the documents reflected a pattern of overreaching by the Bush administration.
"'It's clear that this administration has engaged every possible agency, from the Pentagon to N.S.A. to the F.B.I., to engage in spying on Americans," said Ann Beeson, associate legal director for the A.C.L.U.
"'You look at these documents," Ms. Beeson said, "and you think, wow, we have really returned to the days of J. Edgar Hoover, when you see in F.B.I. files that they're talking about a group like the Catholic Workers league as having a communist ideology."
http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news...t_id=1001700934
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Congressman denounces Pentagon spying at UCSC
By Jondi Gumz
Sentinel staff writer
Congressman Sam Farr said Friday he is "shocked" and "appalled" by television news reports of the Pentagon spying on students at UC Santa Cruz and other college campuses, and promised to grill Defense Department officials when their budget comes up for review.
As lawmakers look to cut federal spending, "this ought to be first on the list," Farr said in a phone interview from Washington, D.C. "It's obviously a waste of taxpayer money."
A Democrat from Carmel, Farr faulted Republican colleagues for refusing to question the administration's activities in the name of fighting terrorism.
"I don't think anybody in Congress knew about this until the NBC report," he said. "We're relying on the media."
This week, NBC News aired a series of reports based on a secret 400-page document that listed more than 1,500 "suspicious incidents" over a 10-month period.
The document includes a complicated spreadsheet that includes a column for "Incident Type," with incidents being described as "threat," "suspicious activity" or "anti-DOD vandalism."
Among the incidents researched and described as a threat to U.S. security: an April 5 protest against military recruiters at a UCSC job fair. The noisy sit-in temporarily shut down the job fair and resulted in an injury to a UCSC staffer and the departure of the military recruiters whose presence triggered the protest.
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The incident is one of dozens of anti-war protests and counter-recruitment planning meetings listed on the document and posted on the NBC News Web site. Experts interviewed by NBC contended the U.S. military had gone too far to collect information in the wake of the terrorists attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Pentagon officials said Wednesday that Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, had ordered a review of the system for handling such information and on Thursday said guidelines require deleting information on Americans from a counterterrorism database after three months if they pose no threat.
Representatives of Students Against War, which organized the UCSC protest on the surveillance list, denounced the military actions.
"The notion of the Pentagon spying on peaceful protesters is a major threat to the freedoms that they claim to protect," said UCSC junior Jen Low.
Low, along with UCSC students Josh Sonnenfeld and Kot Hordynski, said the campus has one of the largest anti-war movements in the nation. Campus police initially tried to break up the April 5 demonstration at UCSC, which involved more than 200 students, then backed off.
Elsewhere, protests have been met with more force. Students who handed out anti-Bush fliers without permission at Hampton University were threatened with expulsion, and police used Taser guns and pepper spray to break up a protest at a military recruiting center near the University of Pittsburgh.
Farr called the surveillance of anti-war protesters at UCSC outrageous, given the university's reputation as a "bastion of peace activities" since it was founded 40 years ago.
"It must make the military nervous to see so many smart people go into the Peace Corps," he said, referring to the large number of UCSC graduates who choose to serve that way. "If their surveillance was any good, they would know Santa Cruz protests a lot of other foreign governments as well. It's normal to have a demonstration du jour downtown."
UCSC psychology professor Faye Crosby chided both the Pentagon and anti-war protesters.
"True education is the best antidote to terrorism," said Crosby, who chairs the faculty governing body, the Academic Senate. "True education involves pluralism and diversity, including diversity of ideas. UCSC needs to be open to the idea that the military plays an important role in society; and the Pentagon needs to be open to the idea that educational institutions such as UCSC pose a credible threat — but only to ignorance and oppression."
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2005/December/17/local/stories/01local.htm
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Student Gets Surprise From Mao's Book
What do you get when you try to check out Mao Tse-Tung's infamous "The Little Red Book" from the library?
A visit from Homeland Security agents.
At least that's what happened to a senior at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, according to the Standard-Times newspaper of New Bedford, Mass.
The college student was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao's tome on communism. Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the college library's interlibrary loan program. The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Pontbriand's class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number.
He was later visited at his parents' home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors told the Standard-Times. The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a "watch list," and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.
Although the Standard-Times knows the name of the student, the paper declined to name him because he is not coming forward because he fears repercussions should his name become public. He has not spoken to The Standard-Times.
The student told Pontbriand and Williams that the Homeland Security agents told him the book was on a "watch list." They brought the book with them, but did not leave it with the student, the professors said. Williams said in his research, he regularly contacts people in Afghanistan, Chechnya and other Muslim hot spots, and suspects that some of his calls are monitored. "My instinct is that there is a lot more monitoring than we think," he said. Williams said he had been planning to offer a course on terrorism next semester, but is reconsidering, because it might put his students at risk.
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And who reported that last story??? NEWSMAX!! Of all freaking sources, it's newsmax (shame on all of you who don't know what type of rag newsmax is):
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/...17/213003.shtml
But really, college students, the Catholic workers league, and vegean groups? This question is no joke ... why do bush supporters hate freedom? Even better: why do you all hate the freedom from government? |
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| MisterOpus1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by occrider
Yea let's bump this with new news:
And who reported that last story??? NEWSMAX!! Of all freaking sources, it's newsmax (shame on all of you who don't know what type of rag newsmax is):
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/...17/213003.shtml
But really, college students, the Catholic workers league, and vegean groups? This question is no joke ... why do bush supporters hate freedom? Even better: why do you all hate the freedom from government? |
It doesn't end there, my dear true Libertarian, although a different branch of gov't, Pentagon anti-terror investigators labeled gay law school groups as a "credible threat" of terrorism.
I'm so not ing joking:
| quote: | A secret Pentagon document obtained by NBC News reveals that the military has been spying on what they call "suspicious" civilian meetings - including many "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" protests.
Only eight pages from the four-hundred page document have been released so far. But on those eight pages, Sirius OutQ News discovered that the Defense Department has been keeping tabs NOT just on anti-war protests, but also on seemingly non-threatening protests against the military's ban on gay servicemembers. According to those first eight pages, Pentagon investigators kept tabs on April protests at UC-Santa Cruz, State University of New York at Albany, and William Patterson College in New Jersey. A February protest at NYU was also listed, along with the law school's gay advocacy group "OUTlaw," and was classified as "possibly violent."
All of these protests were against the military's policy excluding gay personnel, and against the presence of military recruiters on campus. The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network says the Pentagon needs to explain why "don't ask, don't tell" protesters are considered a threat.
http://www.sldn.org/templates/press...n=5&record=2548 |
So PETA, environmentalists, "don't ask, don't tell" gay groups, and anti-poverty Catholic groups are being monitored closely for terrorist activities.
Anyone actually seen bin Laden lately?
Does anyone else ing realize that we're spending time and money spying on anti-poverty groups, probably more than actually ing fighting poverty itself?
Occ has consistently stood up for civil liberties, just as a true Libertarian should. The rest of you folks who call yourselves Libertarians (and incidentally support Bush at nearly every beck and call) should be equally ing pissed off as Occ.
Where are you? |
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| ogvh5150 |
| quote: | Originally posted by MisterOpus1
Does anyone else ing realize that we're spending time and money spying on anti-poverty groups, probably more than actually ing fighting poverty itself? |
+1 |
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| SuspicionVandit |
| everyone is a terrorist. just some of us are, how would Bush say it...terrortistier than others |
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| LazFX |
| quote: | Originally posted by ogvh5150
+1 |
+1 |
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