Mr. Droney

(Editorial cartoon by Jack Ohman / Sacramento Bee (February 14, 2013) and featured at McClatchy DC.  Click on image to enlarge and then please return.)

As I mentioned last week, President Obama's use of armed drones has had some unintended consequences, but all our senators were interested in talking about was their use against American citizens without some kind of check.  This week, the United Nations has decided to have a look-see and has issued a report on civilian deaths in Afghanistan caused by the use of drones.

The number of U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan jumped 72 percent in 2012, killing at least 16 civilians in a sharp increase from the previous year, the U.N. said Tuesday in a sign of the changing mission as international forces prepare to withdraw combat forces in less than two years. ...

The U.N. mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said 506 weapons were released by drones last year, compared with 294 in 2011. Five incidents resulted in casualties last year, with 16 civilians killed and three wounded, up from just one incident in 2011.

Even as drone attacks increased, the U.N. reported an overall decrease in civilian deaths by airstrikes with the U.S.-led coalition implementing stricter measures to prevent innocent people from being killed.

The U.N. said most of the civilian casualties from drone strikes appear to be the result of weapons aimed directly at insurgents but some may have been targeting errors.

It called for a review of tactical and operational policy on targeting to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law "with the expansion of the use of unmanned combat aerial vehicles" in Afghanistan. Drones are highly effective but have strained relations between the U.S. and Pakistan as well as other nations where the strikes are carried out because civilians are sometimes killed alongside targeted terrorists.    [Emphasis added]

Of course, we don't need no steenkin' interational humanitarian law.  We're the USA! USA! USA!

Also, of course, we are setting ourselves up for decades of retribution from those countries and/or groups who don't take kindly to being bombed from the sky at the whim and whimsy of our leaders.

And, also, of course, some of us don't particularly like the domestic use of drones for "surveillance".  Even those of us who are law-abiding find that a nasty attack on our right to privacy.

Making It Easy For The Man

(Editorial cartoon by Joel Pett / Lexington Herald-Leader (July 10, 2012) and featured at McClatchy DC. Click on image to enlarge and then please return.)

I admit it. I've become a real Luddite since I retired. I don't have an iPad, and have no intentions of buying one. I don't have satellite-delivered television or high speed internet. I don't even have a smart phone. I do have a cell phone, an old one by our current standards, but I keep it turned off and use it only in emergencies. I'm retired. I don't need to be "connected."

Still, I find this story more than a little troubling.

Mobile carriers responded to a staggering 1.3 million law enforcement requests last year for subscriber information, including text messages and phone location data, according to data provided to Congress. ...

The number of Americans affected each year by the growing use of mobile phone data by law enforcement could reach into the tens of millions, as a single request could ensnare dozens or even hundreds of people. Law enforcement has been asking for so-called “cell tower dumps” in which carriers disclose all phone numbers that connected to a given tower during a certain period of time.

So, for instance, if police wanted to try to find a person who broke a store window at an Occupy protest, it could get the phone numbers and identifying data of all protestors with mobile phones in the vicinity at the time — and use that data for other purposes. ...

...the Justice Department employs a covert internet and telephone surveillance method known as pen register and trap-and-trace capturing. Judges sign off on these telco orders when the authorities say the information is relevant to an investigation. No probable cause that the target committed a crime — the warrant standard — is necessary.

Pen registers obtain non-content information of outbound telephone and internet communications, such as phone numbers dialed, and the sender and recipient (and sometimes subject line) of an e-mail message. A trap-and-trace acquires the same information, but for inbound communications to a target. ... [Emphasis added]

In other words, even the lax "rules" of the FISA system need not be followed. The government can simply state that it needs the info and permission is granted, Fourth Amendment be damned.

There's something dreadfully wrong with this picture.

I know that if the government wants to track me, it can simply monitor my emails and internet usage, even if it is on an antiquated dial-up system. But I'll be damned if I'll make it any easier for the "monitoring."

And The Hits Just Keep Coming

The FBI has a new plan for intruding into our internet privacy. In an attempt to drum up support for a proposal to expand a 1994 law on law enforcement access to private communications on the internet, FBI Director Robert Mueller has been visiting with companies in Silicon Valley.

From the New York Times:

Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, traveled to Silicon Valley on Tuesday to meet with top executives of several technology firms about a proposal to make it easier to wiretap Internet users.

Mr. Mueller and the F.B.I.’s general counsel, Valerie Caproni, were scheduled to meet with senior managers of several major companies, including Google and Facebook, according to several people familiar with the discussions. How Mr. Mueller’s proposal was received was not clear. ...

Mr. Mueller wants to expand a 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, to impose regulations on Internet companies.

The law requires phone and broadband network access providers like Verizon and Comcast to make sure they can immediately comply when presented with a court wiretapping order.

Law enforcement officials want the 1994 law to also cover Internet companies because people increasingly communicate online. An interagency task force of Obama administration officials is trying to develop legislation for the plan, and submit it to Congress early next year. [Emphasis added]

Now, I understand the challenge which the new technologies present to law enforcement, and there are some good reasons for enabling law enforcement to meet those challenges as long as there are some safeguards in place. I'm not so certain that those safeguards are uppermost in the minds of the FBI and other law enforcement officials. After all, that "court wiretapping order" is quite often the rubberstamp edition issued by FISA, often after the wiretapping has already been done. The FBI, via its own internal audit, admits that the process was abused thousands of times during investigations. The FBI still loves those fishing expedition trips, and that is what concerns me.

It also concerns several other agencies within the government:

The Commerce Department and State Department have questioned whether it would inhibit innovation, as well as whether repressive regimes might harness the same capabilities to identify political dissidents, according to officials familiar with the discussions. [Emphasis added]

Those political dissidents need not be located in places like China, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, or North Korea. They just might be located in places like Houston, Texas or Topeka, Kansas or Temple City, California. Those political dissidents might be complaining about all the broken promises of an elected official and plotting to unseat the incumbent by putting up a primary challenger. Or they might be planning a demonstration in Washington, DC to protest the ongoing military activities in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. They might even be sharing plans for the construction of (gasp!) GIANT PUPPETS.

Unless any proposal to update the 1994 law also contains clear, unequivocal protections consistent with the Bill of Rights, it should be a non-starter. Should be, but somehow I doubt that will be the case.

Real ID: Not Dead Yet

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano gave the states a sort of Christmas present: the deadline for the implementation of Real ID has been extended from December 31, 2009 to May 11, 2010. The main reason for the extension is to avoid the extra scrutiny of those holiday travelers from states which will not be in compliance with the law by the end of this year. From the Washington Post:

Under a controversial 2005 domestic security program passed by Congress and known as Real ID, states were required to issue more secure licenses by the end of 2009. Those would be the only licenses accepted by federal officials for such purposes as boarding commercial aircraft. Instead, states now have until May 11, 2011, to comply with Real ID, Napolitano said.

"In order to ensure that the millions of Americans traveling this holiday season are not disrupted, DHS is extending the Dec. 31 REAL ID material compliance deadline," Napolitano said in a written statement.

Real ID has indeed been controversial, and for several reasons. Civil libertarians have pointed out that the program is just a fancy variation of a national identification card with all the intrusive collection of data on citizens that implies. States have objected to the requirements as involving a costly and unfunded mandate from the federal government at a time when states are having difficulty financing even the most basic of services.

In the face of these objections, President Obama has suggested a replacement for the original law:

After opponents fought the Bush administration to a standstill, Obama security officials and governors jointly asked Congress last spring to replace Real ID with a new program called Pass ID, which would cost half as much, be less stringent and come with federal grants.

That plan would give states five years to include in their IDs a digital photograph and machine-readable features such as a bar code. It would also require states to verify applicants' identities and legal status by checking federal immigration, Social Security and State Department databases and original birth certificate records.

It would add stronger privacy controls than contained in the Real ID program and drop a demand for new databases.

President Obama's plan just added to the controversy. Now congressional Republicans are upset, claiming that the president's proposal weakens national security instead of bolstering it, the reason for the original bill, and Democrats don't like the natural tie-in with the overhaul of immigration laws. Fortunately for all of us who object to both Real ID and Pass ID for all sorts of reasons, Congress hasn't acted on the new bill, primarily because it has been far too busy playing "Let's Pretend" with health care reform.

Make no mistake, however: Real ID is not dead. It's just lying low. Unless and until Congress acknowledges that the program is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, it will once again arise, certainly no later than May 10, 2010. The camel has already taken up full residence in the tent.

Real ID Revisited

A small glimmer of good sense has been noted in Washington, DC: the national ID program initiated by the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11 is going to be tinkered with by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. As the governor of Arizona she fought hard against the federal plan, so it's no surprise that she is taking the stance that she is. Nearly a quarter of the states' governors objected to the "unfunded mandate" and the federal intrusion into what has traditionally been individual state's rights to determine just what adequate identification for that state should be.

From today's Washington Post:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano wants to repeal and replace the controversial, $4 billion domestic security initiative known as Real ID, which calls for placing more secure licenses in the hands of 245 million Americans by 2017. The new proposal, called Pass ID, would be cheaper, less rigorous and partly funded by federal grants, according to draft legislation that Napolitano's Senate allies plan to introduce as early as tomorrow. ...

The new plan keeps elements of Real ID, such as requiring a digital photograph, signature and machine-readable features such as a bar code. States also will still need to verify applicants' identities and legal status by checking federal immigration, Social Security and State Department databases.

But it eliminates demands for new databases -- linked through a national data hub -- that would allow all states to store and cross-check such information, and a requirement that motor vehicle departments verify birth certificates with originating agencies, a bid to fight identity theft.

Instead, it adds stronger privacy controls and limits such development to a pilot program in Mississippi. DHS would have nine months to write new regulations, and states would have five years to reissue all licenses, with completion expected in 2016. [Emphasis added]

While we're still going to have what one critic called "National ID lite", at least the new system will make it more difficult for the federal government to track the location of its citizens at any given moment (I think the elimination of that national data "hub" is crucial), and it will also take into consideration the right to privacy of each citizen carrying the new Real IDs.

The best part of this news, however, is that it provides another distraction to the mouth breathers in Congress who were about to run out of things to howl about.

The new plan would still let people get licenses with fake documents, said Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), who authored the 2005 legislation. "We go right back to where we were on Sept. 10, 2001," he said, "Maybe governors should have been in the Capitol when we knew a plane was on its way to Washington wanting to kill a few thousand more people."

When all else fails, all they have left from their bankrupt philosophy is "9/11!"

Oh, brave Sir Robin.

Something Else To Worry About

The federal government has been very busy monitoring our emails, telephone calls, bank deposits, and library borrowings. Now they've added to their collection efforts. From the NY Times:

Until now, the federal government genetically tracked only convicts. But starting this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will join 15 states that collect DNA samples from those awaiting trial and will also collect DNA from detained immigrants — the vanguard of a growing class of genetic registrants.

The F.B.I., with a DNA database of 6.7 million profiles, expects to accelerate its rate of growth from 80,000 new entries a year to 1.2 million by 2012 — a 17-fold increase. F.B.I. officials say they expect DNA processing backlogs — which now stand at more than 500,000 cases — to increase.

Yes, that's right: the feds are going to start collecting DNA from people who have not been convicted of a crime, or who have committed penny-ante crimes such as check bouncing, or who are suspected of being in the country illegally. Constitutional? Probably not, but with this Supreme Court it's hard to tell.

We're supposed to accept this intrusion because it will save lives, or something, and besides, why should law-abiding citizens object? After all, they shouldn't have anything to hide.

Rock Harmon, a former prosecutor for Alameda County, Calif., and an adviser to crime laboratories, said DNA demographics reflected the criminal population. Even if an innocent man’s DNA was included in a genetic database, he said, it would come to nothing without a crime scene sample to match it. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear,” he said.

Yeah, right. An innocent person whose DNA is collected has about as much chance of getting the entry deleted as he or she does in getting their name off the "no-fly" list: zero to none.

And about that "nothing to fear" comment? How about fearing that the genetic information in that data base will fall into other hands, say, life and health insurance companies? We've had several stories come down the pike in the last month showing just how insecure the government's various computer systems are. And we've also seen stories about unscrupulous government employees who have peeked into passport and other records not germane to their duties and shared them with others.

No, this is just another violation of our right to privacy, only this violation is more appalling because it violates our personal integrity. I don't know whose idea this was, but the fact that it is being instituted during President Obama's watch is deeply troubling.

Oh, Please

Yesterday, I posted on the news that the National Security Agency had been caught exceeding its mandate to electronically spy on US citizens. The NY Times article upon which that post was based apparently caught the eyes of a couple of senators, who now are calling for hearings into that unlawful and unconstitutional activity. Once again, from NY Times:

The head of the Senate intelligence committee said Thursday that she would hold a hearing to examine the National Security Agency’s interception of domestic communications after new reports that recent wiretapping went beyond what Congress has authorized.

“These are serious allegations, and we will make sure we get the facts,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who leads the Senate intelligence committee. “The committee is looking into this, and we will hold a hearing on this subject within one month.”

Getting the facts is one thing; doing something about them is an entirely different thing, and in this case it is doubtful that beyond some anguished posturing and mild rebukes anything will get done. First of all, because the issue involves an intelligence gathering agency, those hearings will no doubt be conducted in secret. The public will not ever be apprised of just how extensive the NSA violations of our rights were. Second, the hearings will be governed by the premise that warrantless electronic eavesdropping on citizens is acceptable. After all, Congress said it was acceptable in their last revision of FISA, they just put a few restrictions on it.

At least one senator, Russ Feingold, acknowledges the root problem, although even he is not directly challenging the concept of a government spying on its own citizens:

Senator Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who has been active in overseeing intelligence issues, said Thursday that the report of wiretapping problems was part of “a tragic retreat from the principles that had governed the sensitive area of government surveillance for the previous three decades.”

Mr. Feingold called for reforms in intelligence law as well as the public release of certain aspects of wiretapping operations “so that the American people can better understand their scope and impact.”

Unless and until the entire operation is shut down and the NSA's mandate to spy on us is quashed, our rights will be diminished even further. NSA overstepped its bounds because it could. It will always do so. Holding secret hearings is not going to stop that.

Return Of The Unitard

As the term of the 43rd President of the United States finally winds down, George W. Bush has managed yet another 'surprise!' for Congress: he's still playing around with his pet goat, the theory of the Unitary President. This time, however, he's gone beyond his favorite tactic, the signing statement. Now, he's taking the position that a bill he signed into law will not be enforced because it is a constitutional infringement on his executive powers. The NY Times has the story (albeit buried, according to the NYT website, on page A16 of the print edition):

The Bush administration has informed Congress that it is bypassing a law intended to forbid political interference with reports to lawmakers by the Department of Homeland Security.

The August 2007 law requires the agency’s chief privacy officer to report each year about Homeland Security activities that affect privacy, and requires that the reports be submitted directly to Congress “without any prior comment or amendment” by superiors at the department or the White House.

But newly disclosed documents show that the Justice Department issued a legal opinion last January questioning the basis for that restriction, and that Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, later advised Congress that the administration would not “apply this provision strictly” because it infringed on the president’s powers. [Emphasis added]

The Chief Privacy Officer (CPO) is supposed to review Homeland Security's policies for spying on Americans to make certain that those policies do not violate privacy rights guaranteed under the Constitution. The CPO is also required to keep track of complaints filed by citizens for privacy violations. Then, he is supposed to report directly to Congress without any interference by any of his "bosses" at DHS and the White House. In other words, this officer is supposed to be beyond politics, much as each executive agency's Inspector General is supposed to be.

Well, the Bush Administration is not having any of this, and summoned a legal opinion from the Department of Justice for cover. [Note: that opinion is published here in pdf format.] DOJ happily complied and gave the White House the opinion it wanted: the law is an intrusion on executive authority.

The NYT article makes it clear that the administration notified some members of Congress of its position on the issue a while back, and nobody that I know of quacked back until the Times discovered the ploy and began asking questions. Sen. Arlen Specter (R. Penn.), happily responded:

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the move “unconstitutional.” He said Mr. Bush should have vetoed the bill if he did not like the provision, and compared the situation to Mr. Bush’s frequent use of signing statements to reserve a right to bypass newly enacted laws.

“This is a dictatorial, after-the-fact pronouncement by him in line with a lot of other cherry-picking he’s done on the signing statements,” Mr. Specter said in a telephone interview. He added, “To put it differently, I don’t like it worth a damn.”

Now, that's the proper response except for the fact that it was delivered by Old Mr. Reliable who can be counted on to complain loudly just before he caves in to whatever the White House wants. I'm sure the fact that in just three months the next president might very well be a Democrat, and therefore not to be trusted with such awesome authority, has also registered with Sen. Specter.

So the dictatorship will continue right up until January 20, 2009, and all the secrets so assiduously hoarded will stay safely away from the light of day.

87 days.

Inquisition

One of the most remarkable and satisfying successes in the last ten years has been the Mars Rover project run out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Flintridge/La Canada, California. Two little robots designed to work for 90 days scuttling across the Mars landscape are still operating four years later, taking pictures and collecting samples. The remarkable part is that those rovers were designed and are being "driven" by scientists and engineers back here on earth. NASA should be proud of the work done by the hard-working folks at JPL. Instead, NASA is busy hounding them. From Tim Rutten's op-ed column in today's Los Angeles Times:

The problem began -- as so many have -- in the security mania that gripped the Bush administration after 9/11. Presidential Directive No. 12, issued by the Department of Homeland Security, directed federal agencies to adopt a uniform badge that could be used by employees and contractors to gain access to government facilities. Most agencies let the directive become a dead letter, too complex and expensive to implement.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, however, is one of the Bush administration's true believers, and his first reflex always is a crisp salute. He directed Caltech, which has a contract to run JPL for NASA, to make sure all of the lab's employees complied. The university initially resisted, then caved when NASA threatened to withdraw its contract. Worse, the government demanded that the scientists, in order to get the badges, fill out questionnaires on their personal lives and waive the privacy of their financial, medical and psychiatric records. The government also wanted permission to gather information about them by interviewing third parties.

In other words, as the price of keeping their jobs, many of America's finest space scientists were being asked to give the feds virtually blanket permission to snoop and spy and collect even malicious gossip about them from God knows who.

Investigators wanted license to seek information as to whether "there is any reason to question [applicants'] honesty or trustworthiness." At one point, JPL's internal website posted an "issue characterization chart" -- since taken down -- that indicated the snoops would be looking for "patterns of irresponsible behavior as reflected in credit history ... sodomy ... incest ... abusive language ... unlawful assembly ... homosexuality." (We'll leave it to others to explain a standard that links incest with unlawful assembly.) ... [Emphasis added]

Why on earth would NASA be so concerned with the private lives of the scientists at JPL? After all, less than 10% of the work done at the relatively small lab is classified. Well, Mr. Rutten and the scientists at JPL have a pretty good idea what's behind this witch-hunt.

Many at the lab believe that there's more than governmental overreaching at work here. They point out that Griffin is one of those who remain skeptical that human actions contribute to global warming, and that some of JPL's near-Earth science has played a critical role in establishing the empirical case to the contrary. They see the background checks as the first step toward establishing a system of intimidation that might be used to silence inconvenient science. [Emphasis added]

Inconvenient science: now there's a nasty phrase, but an apt one. There are still people who don't want the rest of the world to know that the sun doesn't actually revolve around the earth, and many of them have been hired by the Bush administration.

One year and three days to go.

Oh, Brave New World!

Happy New Year.

One of things that I would like to happen in 2008 is to see more pundits write columns like Adam Liptak did in yesterday's NY Times. His subject is the astonishing (and totally appropriate response) of the University of Oregon to a Recording Industry Association of America subpoena for information on students "stealing" music via peer-to-peer platforms. The University, via Oregon's State Attorney General, filed a blistering motion to quash that subpoena because it called upon the university to violate the students' privacy.

No one should shed tears for people who steal music and have to face the consequences. But it is nonetheless heartening to see a university decline to become the industry’s police officer and instead to defend the privacy of its students.

The recording industry may not be selling as much music these days, but it has built a pretty impressive and innovative litigation subsidiary.

In the past four years, record companies have sued tens of thousands of people for violating the copyright laws by sharing music on the Internet. The people it sues tend to settle, paying the industry a few thousand dollars rather than risking a potentially ruinous judgment by fighting in court. ...

In February, the association [Recording Industry Association of America] started asking universities to identify students suspected of file sharing and to pass along “prelitigation letters” to them. The association says it has provided some 4,000 such letters to more than 150 colleges and universities. The letters offer the students what they call bargain settlements of about $3,000 if they act fast, by punching in a credit card number at www.p2plawsuits.com.

“The ‘reduced’ settlement amount, in other words, represents the record companies’ savings from cutting out the middleman — our justice system,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a recent report. [Emphasis added]

Nice scam the RIAA has working: get colleges and universities to do their discovery for them and then scare students who have (and even those who haven't) illegally downloaded music settle for $3,000 to $4,500 out of fear that litigation costs will be far greater than the suggested settlement amount.

I think it significant that the University of Oregon refused to play its role in this warping of justice. While that subpoena may not be quashed, at least the public, thanks to Mr. Liptak, now gets a view of how the big money people game the system and win.

The University of Oregon could teach the telecoms a few lessons about standing up to the bullies; that is, it could if the telecoms were genuinely interested in doing so.

No, Thank You

It isn't enough that the government is spying on its own citizens. Now, the government doesn't want us to mind. That's the impression I got from this AP news report.

A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, a deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information.

Kerr's comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act.

I don't think so.

It is not the government's concern what I buy with my money, what books I read, what I say on the phone or in emails. If the government is worried that I might be plotting a terrorist attack or fomenting insurrection, let them go before a judge, show probable cause, and obtain a warrant.

And it is even less the concern of corporations how I spend my money, what books I read, what I say on the phone or in emails. If I want them to know, I'll use one of their silly club cards. Otherwise, they should just back off.

And as to the doublespeak implied in Mr. Kerr's new and improved definition of "privacy," I would suggest he return to his fourth grade grammar class and open his dictionary. Nowhere does it say anything about government getting info and then "safeguarding" it. NOWHERE.

And another thing, why should I trust either the government or businesses that keep having their systems hacked (or stolen, or lost)? The track records of both in "safeguarding" any information is abysmal.

No. I will not change my definition of privacy.

And if Congress tries to do it for me with the new and improved FISA bill, then I will give serious consideration to fomenting a different kind of insurrection: one that calls on citizens fed up with having their civil liberties trampled to hit the streets in every town in the nation, including Washington, DC.

Enough, God Damn It. Enough.

Back To Justice

This administration really is incapable of telling the truth. About anything. It appears that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been caught up in one of those lies, this one made before US Senators. From MSNBC:

As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse," Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005.

Six days earlier, the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. [Emphasis added]

Lying under oath about the unconstitutional behavior is bad enough, but here's the short list of just what activities were being reported to the AG:

The acts recounted in the FBI reports included unauthorized surveillance, an illegal property search and a case in which an Internet firm improperly turned over a compact disc with data that the FBI was not entitled to collect, the documents show. Gonzales was copied on each report that said administrative rules or laws protecting civil liberties and privacy had been violated. [Emphasis added]

The administration's spin meisters are already at work, claiming that the AG's comments were appropriate when the context of the testimony is considered, and besides, there doesn't appear to be any proof that the AG actually read the reports he was copied on.

Either/or, I think Mr. Gonzales is going to find himself before another Senate committee, the one he's appeared before several times in the past six months. I also don't think Sen. Leahy is going to be too kind to him this time, at least I hope not.

When Citizenship Isn't Enough

This administration swears it's not profiling Arabs and Middle Easterners who cross American borders, but at least one Arab American finds that hard to believe. From today's NY Times:

Abe Dabdoub calls the day he was sworn in as an American citizen last year the proudest moment of his life, little suspecting that his new identity would set off a bureaucratic nightmare at the hands of the Department of Homeland Security.

Most of his family members live in Canada, and on each of Mr. Dabdoub’s 14 trips to visit them since last August, on his way back across the Ambassador Bridge into Michigan, the Customs and Border Patrol agents have sent him through a security gantlet, he says.

He has been fingerprinted 14 times, his body searched 9 times, been handcuffed 4 times and isolated in a separate detention room 13 times. On the fourth trip, the border patrol agents started subjecting his wife to similar scrutiny.

...the problem continues unabated and, typical of such cases, no one in the federal government nor his elected representatives will tell him why he is being singled out. [Emphasis added]

Mr. Dabdoub was born in Saudi Arabia of Palestinian parents and moved to Canada at age five. His work took him to Michigan where he currently lives. He's an American citizen now, yet he has gotten stopped at the border each and every time since he's gotten his citizenship, and no one will tell him why, presumably because that is some kind of state secret.

This fellow citizen has made it onto one of the many government "lists" and the chances are he won't be able to get off that list.

A Government Accountability Office report issued last September said that just 31 individuals whose names were mistakenly on the watch list had them taken off in 2005. Thousands of such redress queries have been submitted, most of them from people who are misidentified. But their names cannot be removed because they are not the person on the list, the report said. [Emphasis added]

How's that for a Catch-22?

September 11 should be remembered, but only as the date our civil liberties were stripped from us.

Please, Enough Of Licking Their Lips

It was bandied about in a few panels of talking heads yesterday, and dismissed in what may have been a reflexive dignity following the meltdown of Imus' exit. But here it is again. Let's go after the woman in the Duke Lacrosse wild sex story.

Howard Kurtz wakes up this morning, and suggests there's more here to shovel. Why waste all those notes he's taken on the racial divisions in Durham and the black women working as strippers to support their families on the other side of town from Duke fratboys?

The three players were not choir boys -- the team had, after all, invited a pair of strippers to a midnight party -- but they hardly deserved the national scorn of being loudly trumpeted as accused rapists.

The accuser got to make her charges from behind a curtain of anonymity, which is entirely proper in sexual assault cases. But I'm not so sure the media should continue to shield her now that investigators have determined her to be a liar. The New York Post, Washington Times, and Raleigh News & Observer have all identified the woman.

What Imus said was indefensible, and he lost his job in part because passionate complaints by African Americans at CBS and NBC tipped the scales at those networks. And it is true that he had a history of making insensitive cracks, and that the politicians and journalists who appeared on his show, including me, were too willing to look the other way.
(snip)
I heard worse growing up on the streets of Brooklyn, where Don Rickles was a role model. I always made the distinction that Imus was operating out of humor, not malice. In retrospect, I failed to appreciate how the cruder bits sounded to those who were not part of the white guys' club.

There you go, fellows, a chance to use that female anatomy lesson you learned from the earlier descriptions of damage to the whatever is your language for vagina, more discussions of what kind of rough trade was indicated. The girls are guilty of something, let's get some more drooling going and write some more great lines about strippers making stuff up. That will do no end of good for the white guys' club. They've probably all got axes or other pieces of anatomy to grind on that score.

If there aren't any editors out there heading off the wolves, I'd like to put in a word here and now for it. False accusations are sick enough, but more licking of lips over descriptions of sexual injuries is sicker. Replacing the guys gone wild theme with the gook under the nails from the golddigging stripper one isn't making the news game a winning one. Time to call foul, and leave it alone.

More Data Collection

Never underestimate this government's insatiable desire for information on citizens. There is no agency or department that hasn't been told to collect data in whatever way possible, including making the access to such information a condition of employment. Sometimes the policy makes sense (as when an individual is applying for a sensitive job with the Defense Department or the Department of Homeland Security) and sometimes it doesn't (as when applying for a job with the Education Department). Today's NY Times has an article on what the Education Department requires even when the job applicant will not be working in a federal building and will not have access to specific information.

As a condition of his work for the federal government, Andrew A. Zucker was willing to be fingerprinted and provide an employment history. But then he was asked to let federal investigators examine his financial and medical records, and interview his doctors.

Dr. Zucker was not tracking terrorists or even emptying the trash at the Pentagon. He was studying how to best teach science to middle school students. He was stunned at the breadth of the request for information.

“To me, personally, it’s shocking,” said Dr. Zucker, who worked for a contractor doing research for the Education Department. He withdrew from the job.

For about a year, contractors say, the department has been requiring employees of the thousands of contractors it hires — many of them academic researchers like Dr. Zucker — to go through a level of security screening usually reserved for those working with very sensitive information. [Emphasis added]

Education Department officials offered the standard excuse: workers have potential access to the names and social security numbers of millions of students. Yet when challenged on the need for such information as medical or financial records from job applicants, the Department often backed down:

Many employees asked for information by the Education Department were academics like Dr. Zucker. In some instances, the agency has backed down when its policy was challenged. When Dr. Zucker protested, he said the department excused him from providing access to his medical and financial records.

Such a reversal can only mean that the Department knows its policy is out of line and fears any formal challenge in the courts.

Congress needs to examine such free-wheeling data collection by the federal government and needs to put a stop to it. Now.

Outrageous!

Real ID Needs To Be Real Gone

Among the various stupid laws (and there are a whole bunch of them)passed in response to 9/11, the Real ID law which mandates a nationally uniform driver's license is one that states are finally beginning to resist. The primary reason for the state rejection is that Congress required the states to provide the new licenses with all the 'security' bells and whistles without providing any funding for them. From today's NY Times:

Maine legislators started off the rebellion late last month by passing a nonbinding resolution that rejected the law, called the Real ID Act, which Congress passed in 2005. They said that it would cost the state $185 million to put into place and that instead of making Maine’s residents more secure, it would leave them more vulnerable to identity theft.

Since then, legislatures in five states — Georgia, Montana, New Mexico, Washington and Wyoming — have voted in committee or on the floor of one chamber to move similar legislation ahead. The bill adopted in a 99-to-1 vote by the Montana House of Representatives would go furthest, ordering state officials there to ignore the federal law.

More than cost should be considered, however. The new licenses will contain a great deal of data about the holders, in effect making them national identification cards. Without the cards, Americans have no effective and nationally recognized means to prove their identity. A bonus to all of this is that the cards may very well make identity theft even easier than it is right now.

...Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union said the states were raising legitimate issues. The law sets a national standard for machine-readability, most likely using bar-code-like strips where information about the owner can be scanned. This may tempt merchants to collect the data and use it for marketing purposes, Mr. Steinhardt said. The linked national database of all licensing information will also be a target for identity theft, he said.

The 110th Congress needs to pay attention to the states' complaints and undo the 2005 law completely. We don't need 'papers' controlling where we can and cannot go. This was a bad idea to begin with, and it's only getting worse.

The Overlook Board

Apparently there is a board whose job is to provide oversight of the NSA illegal domestic spying program. Who knew? Certainly not me, but at least the NY Times has been keeping tabs.

The wondrously named Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board held its first public hearing the other day on the National Security Agency’s illegal eavesdropping program. If you expected it to discover any truths about the secret program, you can forget it. The board spent its time explaining why it was more important to work from within the administration than to challenge it. Thus wags the tail of a watchdog with neither bark nor bite. [Emphasis added]

The whole point of the board was, as its name suggests, to oversee the various post-9/11 security organizations to make certain that privacy and First Amendment rights were not sacrificed at the altar of "national security." Well, ideally that was the point, but the current administration is obviously having none of that. The make-up and structure of the board ensures that.

The board was created two years ago by the White House and the Republican Congress as a pale substitute for the independent monitor recommended by the Sept. 11 commission. Its members (four Republicans and one lone Democrat) serve at the pleasure of the administration. It has a paltry budget and no subpoena power, and any requests for documents can be vetoed by the attorney general. [Emphasis added]

In other words, it is an Orwellian newspeak program, a mere sham. Not even the most minimal oversight can be accomplished under such a charter.

Add this to the list of issues the 110th Congress must address.