David Edwards and Nick Juliano | RawStory.com

The post-9/11 airline watch list that is supposed to keep terrorists off of airplanes has swelled to more than 1 million names, including at least one investigative reporter who had been critical of the Transportation Security Agency, which maintains the watch list.CNN’s Drew Griffin reported on the bloating of the watch list, which an ACLU count pegged at 1,001,308 names Wednesday afternoon. Griffin’s is one of those names, he says.

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 Paul Joseph Watson | InfoWars.com

Presidential frontrunner Barack Obama has called for a “civilian national security force” as powerful as the U.S. military, comments that were ignored by the vast majority of the corporate media but compared by one journalist to the Nazi Hitler Youth.

“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded,” Obama told a Colorado Springs audience earlier this month.

World Net Daily editor Joseph Farah asked if he was the only journalist in America who found Obama’s statement troubling.

“If we’re going to create some kind of national police force as big, powerful and well-funded as our combined U.S. military forces, isn’t this rather a big deal?” wrote Farah.

“Are we talking about creating a police state here? The U.S. Army alone has nearly 500,000 troops. That doesn’t count reserves or National Guard. In 2007, the U.S. Defense budget was $439 billion. Is Obama serious about creating some kind of domestic security force bigger and more expensive than that? If not, why did he say it? What did he mean?”

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Obama - Aye
McCain - No Vote
Cantwell - Nay
Murray - Nay

The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly voted Wednesday to grant retroactive amnesty to the telecoms that aided the President Bush’s five-year secret, warrantless wiretapping of Americans, and to expand the government’s authority to sift through U.S. communications, handing a key victory to the Bush administration.

The Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee Barack Obama (D-Illinois) voted for the final bill, despite intense lobbying by supporters who used Obama’s own online organizing technology to try to hold him to his promise to fight any bill that included amnesty. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama’s former rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, voted against the bill.

The 68 to 29 vote puts an end to more than a year of debate over whether the government should be able to collect millions of e-mails and phone calls daily from U.S.-based communication switches without any probable cause.  It also answers whether Congress believes the nation’s telecoms and president had a duty to follow the rules set out in 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was passed after the abuses of the 1950s and 60s.

If the FISA Amendments Act survives constitutional challenge, it dooms the dozens of anti-wiretapping lawsuits filed against the nation’s telecoms, by ordering the judge in charge of the cases to dismiss them if the telecoms can prove the government asked them to help out.

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WashingtonTimes.com

Just when you thought you’ve heard it all…

A senior government official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has expressed great interest in a so-called safety bracelet that would serve as a stun device, similar to that of a police Taser®. According to this promotional video found at the Lamperd Less Lethal, Inc. website, the bracelet would be worn by all airline passengers.

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Ryan Singel | Wired.com Just days before the Senate will convene to give a final blessing to President Bush’s secret, warrantless wiretapping program, a federal court judge ruled that his legal justification for the surveillance has no legal merit.

He’s the same judge Congress is trying to save the nation’s telecoms, such as AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, from having to face in court.

Late Wednesday, U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker issued a ruling(.pdf) in a case against the government alleging illegal spying, finding that in 1978 Congress had clearly set out the rules for wiretapping inside the United States and that Bush’s claims to have inherent authority outside of those rules did not pass Constitutional muster.

Congress appears clearly to have intended to — and did — establish the exclusive  means for foreign intelligence surveillance activities to be conducted. Whatever power the executive may otherwise have had in this regard, FISA limits the power of the executive branch to conduct such activities and it limits the executive branch’s authority to assert the state secrets privilege in response to challenges to the legality of its foreign intelligence surveillance activities. 

Walker, the chief judge of the Northern District of California, affirmed that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the exclusive legal method for conducting surveillance inside the United States against suspected spies and terrorist. The Bush Administration argues that Congress’s vote to authorize military force against Al Qaeda and the president’s inherent war time powers were exceptions to the exclusivity provision.

Not so, according to Walker:

This provision and its legislative history left no doubt that Congress intended to displace entirely the various warrantless wiretapping and surveillance programs undertaken by the executive branch and to leave no room for the president to undertake warrantless surveillance in the domestic sphere in the future. 

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Ryan Singel | Wired.com

Mark Klein, the retired AT&T engineer who stepped forward with the technical documents at the heart of the anti-wiretapping case against AT&T, is furious at the Senate’s vote on Wednesday night to hold a vote on a bill intended to put an end to that lawsuit and more than 30 others.

[Wednesday]’s vote by Congress effectively gives retroactive immunity to the telecom companies and  endorses an all-powerful president. It’s a Congressional coup against the Constitution.

The Democratic leadership is touting the deal as a “compromise,” but in fact they have endorsed the infamous Nuremberg defense: “Just following orders.” The judge can only check their paperwork. This cynical deal is a Democratic exercise in deceit and cowardice.

Klein saw a network monitoring room being built in AT&T’s internet switching center that only NSA-approved techs had access to. He squirreled away documents and then presented them to the press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation after news of the government’s warrantless wiretapping program broke.

Wired.com independently acquired a copy of the documents (.pdf) — which were under court seal — andpublished the wiring documents in May 2006 so that they could be evaluated.

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Ryan Singel | Wired.com 

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google’s liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.

Viacom filed suit against Google in March 2007, seeking more than $1 billion in damages for allowing users to upload clips of Viacom’s copyright material. Google argues that the law provides a safe harbor for online services so long as they comply with copyright takedown requests.

Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the judge’s ruling (.pdf) described that argument as “speculative” and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives.

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Paul Joseph Watson | PrisonPlanet.com

Hundreds of police, firefighters, paramedics and utility workers have been trained and recently dispatched as “Terrorism Liaison Officers” in Colorado, Arizona and California to watch for “suspicious activity” which is later fed into a secret government database.

According to a Denver Post report, “It’s a tactic intended to feed better data into terrorism early-warning systems and uncover intelligence that could help fight anti-U.S. forces. But the vague nature of the TLOs’ mission, and their focus on reporting both legal and illegal activity, has generated objections from privacy advocates and civil libertarians.

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Daniel Martin | DailyMail.co.uk 

American intelligence agencies may soon be able to access the most private and personal details of British citizens.

Under an agreement being negotiated between the EU and Washington., U.S. agencies including the CIA will be allowed to view details of bank accounts, travel plans and even the sites individuals visit on the internet.

A secret document giving details of the agreement has been leaked to the New York

The deal will make it easier for American law enforcement organisations to obtain private information from banks, credit card firms and other companies - as well as from government offices.

In the past, companies handing over such details ran the risk of breaching European data protection laws. But these laws are expected to be relaxed under the new agreement.

American security organisations insist the information is necessary to prevent further atrocities such as 9/11.
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Alex Kingsbury | U.S.News.com

Returning from a vacation to Germany in February, freelance journalist Bill Hogan was selected for additional screening by customs officials at Dulles International Airport outside Washington. Agents searched his luggage, he said, “then they told me that they were impounding my laptop.”

Shaken by the encounter, Hogan examined his bags and found the agents had also inspected the memory card from his camera. “It was fortunate that I didn’t use [the laptop] for work,” he said, “or I would have had to call up all my sources and tell them that the government had just seized their information.” When customs offered to return the computer nearly two weeks later, Hogan had it shipped to his lawyer.

How common Hogan’s experience is remains unclear. But an April ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Customs and Border Protection, does have full authority to search any electronic devices without suspicion in the same way that it can inspect briefcases.

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Randy Furst | StarTribune.com  

Suicide bombers. Chemical or biological attacks. Lone gunmen. Terrorist attacks. Riots. Blockades that could shut down the Republican National Convention.

In its most explicit arguments to date, the St. Paul city attorney’s office on Friday outlined the “calamitous” potential of granting a request by antiwar demonstrators to change the route and time of a Sept. 1 march outside the Xcel Energy Center.

Protest organizers accused the city of scare tactics designed to legitimize the denial of free speech.

The dire warnings by the city came in a legal brief it filed to support the permit restrictions it is placing on the antiwar group.

The city warned of “immeasurable risks to public safety and security” if protesters were allowed a march route that could total 100,000 and encircle the Xcel, site of the Sept. 1-4 convention.

At the Minneapolis offices of the Coalition to March on the RNC and Stop the War, Jessica Sundin, one of the group’s leaders, accused authorities of exaggerating the threats.

“There are no experiences in recent history of conventions being targeted by the kind of violence they are describing in their brief,” said Sundin, who has taken a leave from her clerical job at the University of Minnesota.

“They are raising a specter of terrorism that is absolutely unfounded, and they are using it to prevent us from speaking out against terrorism being inflicted on the Iraqi people every day by U.S. occupation forces,” said Sundin, who took the leave to work on the protest.
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Cato@Liberty.org 
Mickey McCarter at Homeland Security Today has the scoop on REAL ID grants that the Department of Homeland Security is doling out today.Yes, REAL ID grants. Ten states have passed legislation to bar themselves from participating. (Arizona was the most recent.) And many more have registered their objections to the national ID law. But the Department of Homeland Security is still trying to revive it — this time, by spreading a little money around.What’s “a little money”? The estimated $85 million in grants is about 0.5% of the $17 billion that it would cost to implement REAL ID, so it’s just a little. But that’s $85 million that taxpayers won’t be getting back.It’s interesting to see where the money is going, of course.

The breakdown of awards, obtained by HSToday.us, signifies thatAAMVA effectively gains a no-bid contract under the awards, as DHS designates it the sole national centralized database of driver’s license information under REAL ID through a grant award to the state of Missouri. . . . . A competitive grant process could have resulted in multiple hub awards instead of a sole-source contract to AAMVA, sources argue, decentralizing REAL ID information somewhat and encouraging the rise of the most effective database solution between competing vendors.

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Ryan Singel | Wired.com 

Breaking months of acrimonious deadlock, House and Senate leaders from both parties have agreed to a bill that gives the nation’s spy agencies the power to turn a wide swath of domestic communication companies into intelligence-gathering operations, and that puts an end to court challenges to telecoms such as AT&T that aided the government’s secret, five-year warrantless wiretapping program.

Civil liberties proponents quickly blasted the deal.

“The proposed FISA deal is not a compromise; it is a capitulation,” said Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, the only senator who voted against the Patriot Act in 2001. “The House and Senate should not be taking up this bill, which effectively guarantees immunity for telecom companies alleged to have participated in the President’s illegal program, and which fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home.”

The deal marks a huge, though belated, victory for a lame-duck White House, which fought a pitched, hyperbolic battle to expand its legal wiretapping powers after being busted targeting Americans without warrants.

Despite that desire for expanded spying powers, the president threatened to veto any bill that did not give amnesty to the telecoms that helped with program, which has been declared illegal by a secretive U.S. surveillance court.

The bill (.pdf) could be voted on as soon as Friday in the House, given its backing by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who in February organized a high-stakes showdown with the president over a substantially similar bill. The Senate would likely also quickly pass the bill, despite already vocal opposition from the ACLU, left-leaning bloggers, as well as Sens. Christopher Dodd (D-Connecticut) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont).

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ACLU.org
RFIDs in Mandatory Student ID Badges Violate Privacy Rights, Groups Charge

Parents in a northern California public school district and civil liberties groups are urging the district to terminate the use of Radio Frequency Identification tags (RFIDs) in mandatory ID badges that track students’ movements.

In a letter sent today, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center called on the Brittan School District to immediately end the use of RFIDs in student IDs. According to the groups, the RFID device transmits private information to a computer on campus whenever a student passes under one of the scanners. The ID badges, which students are required to wear around their necks at all times, also include the student’s name, photo, grade, school name, class year and the four-digit school ID number.

“Forcing our child to be tracked with a RFID device — without our consent or knowledge — is a complete invasion of our privacy,” parents Michael and Dawn Cantrall said in a statement.

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NaturalNews.com

A Rhode Island school district has announced a pilot program to monitor student movements by means of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips implanted in their schoolbags.

The Middletown School District, in partnership with MAP Information Technology Corp., has launched a pilot program to implant RFID chips into the schoolbags of 80 children at the Aquidneck School. Each chip would be programmed with a student identification number, and would be read by an external device installed in one of two school buses. The buses would also be fitted with global positioning system (GPS) devices.
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Pain compliance device used to disperse crowd as military-industrial complex tools up to deal with dissenters

Paul Joseph Watson | PrisonPlanet.com 

The Pentagon proudly displayed what it has in store for anti-war protesters last night during a CBS 60 minutes feature which depicted the use of the army’s “Active Denial System” against peace demonstrators at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia.

The Active Denial System is a giant raygun that directs a sizzling hot beam at its target, causing instant pain and forcing the subject(s) to disperse.

Similar to the Taser, the machine acts as a form of pain compliance or torture. It was designed in secret for 10 years before being unveiled in 2001.

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In preparation for the Republican National Convention, the FBI is soliciting informants to keep tabs on local protest groups

Matt Snyders | CityPages Minneapolis

Paul Carroll was riding his bike when his cell phone vibrated.

Once he arrived home from the Hennepin County Courthouse, where he’d been served a gross misdemeanor for spray-painting the interior of a campus elevator, the lanky, wavy-haired University of Minnesota sophomore flipped open his phone and checked his messages. He was greeted by a voice he recognized immediately. It belonged to U of M Police Sgt. Erik Swanson, the officer to whom Carroll had turned himself in just three weeks earlier. When Carroll called back, Swanson asked him to meet at a coffee shop later that day, going on to assure a wary Carroll that he wasn’t in trouble.

Carroll, who requested that his real name not be used, showed up early and waited anxiously for Swanson’s arrival. Ten minutes later, he says, a casually dressed Swanson showed up, flanked by a woman whom he introduced as FBI Special Agent Maureen E. Mazzola. For the next 20 minutes, Mazzola would do most of the talking.

“She told me that I had the perfect ‘look,’” recalls Carroll. “And that I had the perfect personality—they kept saying I was friendly and personable—for what they were looking for.”

What they were looking for, Carroll says, was an informant—someone to show up at “vegan potlucks” throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protestors, schmoozing his way into their inner circles, then reporting back to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership between multiple federal agencies and state and local law enforcement. The effort’s primary mission, according to the Minneapolis division’s website, is to “investigate terrorist acts carried out by groups or organizations which fall within the definition of terrorist groups as set forth in the current United States Attorney General Guidelines.”

Carroll would be compensated for his efforts, but only if his involvement yielded an arrest. No exact dollar figure was offered.
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Signals given off by phones allow shopping centres to monitor how long people stay and which stores they visit

Jonathan Richards | TimesOnline.co.uk

Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their mobile phones.

The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around.

The device cannot access personal details about a person’s identity or contacts, but privacy campaigners expressed concern about potential intrusion should the data fall into the wrong hands.

The surveillance mechanism works by monitoring the signals produced by mobile handsets and then locating the phone by triangulation – measuring the phone’s distance from three receivers.

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ThinkProgress.com

Last year, former deputy attorney general James Comey revealed that in 2004, he refused to “certify” the legality of certain aspects of the National Security Agency (NSA) spy program. Comey witnessed Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card try to force a bed-ridden John Ashcroft to approve the program. Comey, however, did not publicly give specifics as to what program he opposed.

CAP’s Peter Swire wrote on ThinkProgress at the time that Comey’s testimony implied that “other programs exist for domestic spying” outside of the NSA program. Radar’s Christopher Ketcham suggests that another spy program does exist: “Main Core,” a program that authorizes “computer searches through massive [unspecified] electronic databases” in order to discover “potential threats” in the event of a “national emergency”:

According to a senior government official…”There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” … One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

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Under pretext of immigration control, government building “family detention centers”

Steve Watson & Paul Watson | InfoWars.com

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) plans to build three new internment camps on both coasts and on the Southwestern border, each of which will house up to 50 men and women in addition to 150 children involved in immigration cases.

The federal government is accepting bids on the contracts from county governments or private companies to build and run the “family detention centers”.

The LA Times reports:

The agency calls for minimum-security residential facilities that would provide a “least restrictive, nonsecure setting” and provide schooling for children, recreational activities and access to religious services.

The proposal… says the contractor should structure programs “designed to prevent escapes” and should provide a plan that “monitors resident movement and physically counts residents.”

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