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Australians Fear Cities Becoming Like Great ‘Orwellian’ Britain

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

Melbourne residents are becoming increasingly concerned about the growing level of surveillance on their day to day business and have likened the increase of CCTV cameras to the worlds’ number one surveillance society, Great Britain.

Britain has set a terrifying example to the rest of the world for how state sponsored surveillance can be introduced despite massive opposition, in true dictatorial type fashion.

Liberty Victoria president Brian Walters, who is calling for a public register of all spy cameras operating in Melbourne has stated: “There is a feeling that somehow, by having a piece of technology hanging off a wall somewhere, we are made safer.

“It’s one thing to go about our business, it’s another to have people who we don’t know in a room somewhere looking at us. To have this kind of Big Brother approach can be justified but we need to know how it’s justified, who’s justifying it, who’s looking at the material and for what purpose,” Mr Walters said.

At least 40,000 CCTV cameras are in operation in Melbourne, but nobody really knows how many for sure as there is no list of where the thousands of cameras are operating and no regulations or guidelines exist to state where and how cameras can be used.

The figure means that there is one camera for every 100 people, slightly lower than current average in the UK where there is one camera for every 14 people.

Although this number is set to rise as $13.6 million is about to be spent on a public security transport package, adding to the $11.5 million that has already been spent on surveillance in Melbourne.

$5 million will be used to upgrade CCTV cameras, and the remaining $8.6 million will replace analogue CCTV recording equipment at all metropolitan train stations and the overall cost of 24/7 surveillance takes around $608,000 a year from taxpayer funds.

90 per cent of Victoria’s taxis already house CCTV cameras and there is concern that the government plan to launch UK style spy drones to monitor civilians. However Marika Fengler, a Victoria Police spokeswoman, said there are currently no plans to introduce spy drones.

Yet.

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Bush domestic spying program flawed

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

By Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers

The former chief judge of a secret national security court took a swipe Saturday at the administration’s recently halted domestic spying program and said he insisted from the outset that the information gleaned must not be co-mingled with intelligence gathered under court warrants.

Because of that precaution, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said, he never had to rule on whether President Bush had the power to launch the separate, warrantless spying program in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Lamberth’s seven-year term on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ended in May 2002.

In a rare public appearance, at the American Library Association’s annual conference and a brief chat afterward with reporters, Lamberth also said that the FBI could have avoided a huge flap over its mishandling of thousands of letter demands for phone, email, bank and other private records with a more centralized procedure. If FBI Director Robert Mueller had required that a supervisor at bureau headquarters approve each of those National Security Letters, he said, uniform standards could have been applied and mistakes eliminated.

He also assured librarians that members of the secret court are sensitive to civil liberties. “The judges understand that the war has to be fought, but not at all costs,” he said.

Lamberth declined to say whether he believes the National Security Agency’s wiretap program was illegal.

But he said he has “never seen a better way” to conduct domestic spying than under the national security court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The court secretly approves warrants for wiretaps and searches in counterterrorism and espionage investigations.

“I’ve seen a proposal for a worse way,” Lamberth said. “That’s what the president did with the NSA program.”

When the NSA program to monitor overseas calls was first proposed in late 2001, Lamberth said, he had “many discussions” with Attorney General John Ashcroft and John Yoo, a Justice Department lawyer whose legal opinions argued that the president has expansive emergency powers during wartime.

“My primary motivation was, if the president was going to assert this authority … that it be done totally separately,” he said. “If anything was presented to the FISA court that came from that program, the FISA court had to be told about it. Then we had to rule on whether it was illegally obtained or not.”

In January, partly in response to an outcry from civil rights groups that challenged the program’s legality, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales disclosed that the NSA program would be put under the auspices of the FISA court.

Lamberth said he would not be surprised if Congress also requires the court to approve all National Security Letters sent by the FBI requesting phone, email or financial records.

“I can’t say it would be a great burden on the FISA court,” he said.

Recent internal audits found that FBI agents had violated the law or agency rules in sending letter requests in national security investigations, including instances in which agents sought information to which the bureau was not entitled.

Lamberth attributed the problems to “bureaucratic bumbling,” which he blamed partly on policies requiring special agents who head FBI field offices to approve the letters, rather than a central office at headquarters.

But he heaped praise on FBI Director Mueller, who has taken personal responsibility for the privacy breaches, saying he is “absolutely top notch … an absolutely phenomenally qualified lawyer and a master at running government agencies.”

“There’s no question about integrity, no question about competence, no question that he’s trying to do the right thing,” Lamberth said.

Asked his view of Gonzales, who is under fire amid a furor over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys and allegations of partisanship in the Justice Department, Lamberth declined comment.

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E-vote ‘threat’ to UK democracy

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

British democracy could be undermined by moves to use electronic voting in elections, warns a report. The risks involved in swapping paper ballots for touch screens far outweigh any benefits they may have, says the Open Rights Group report.

It based its conclusions on reports from observers who watched e-voting trials in May’s local elections.

The group called for a halt to e-voting until it is reliable, easy to oversee and has proven its integrity.

Cost counting

Observers acting for the ORG scrutinised local elections in England which tried out e-voting as well as Scottish elections using electronic counting systems to tally votes.

What the observers saw led the ORG to express “serious concerns” about e-voting and whether it should be used local and national elections. In England, e-voting systems using kiosks, laptops, touch screens and mobile phones have been tried.

The ORG’s main objection was that e-voting was currently a “black box” system which stopped voters seeing how their votes were recorded or counted.

This, said the ORG, made oversight of elections “impossible” and left them open to “error and fraud”.

The report criticised the lack of a rigorous certification scheme to ensure that the hardware and software used in e-voting schemes were free from vulnerabilities and protected the integrity of the voting system.

It also called for usability testing to ensure that those who e-voting schemes were designed to serve - the elderly and housebound - could use them easily.

The report said more work was also needed on the e-counting systems used in the elections and said in some cases the new systems were abandoned in favour of a manual count.

The counts by machine or hand sometimes produced very different results, pointed out the report.

The problems with e-counting systems overturned the initial support that many voting officers had for the new hardware, said the report.

The Group said it was a serious mistake to accept the conveniences of e-voting while ignoring how they might undermine confidence in voting as a whole.

In light of the problems it uncovered, the ORG said a halt should be called to e-voting trials to ensure that their shortcomings are addressed before they are more widely used.

The “significant lack of agreement” among computer scientists about how secure and reliable voting is via the net or mobile led the group to say: “considerable academic research and debate must be pursued before further e-voting trials can be considered”.

In response to the ORG report, the Ministry of Justice said: “We welcome input to the debate on electoral pilot schemes, and electoral modernisation in general.

“However, it is the Electoral Commission’s statutory responsibility to evaluate and report on electoral pilot schemes and we look forward to the publication of their official reports in August, to which we will respond.”

BBC

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Ashcroft Tells of Surveillance Disputes

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

By Paul Kane
washingtonpost.com

Former attorney general John D. Ashcroft told the House intelligence committee yesterday about disputes in the Bush administration over aspects of its domestic surveillance program, which peaked in the March 2004 visit to his hospital bedside by White House officials seeking his change of heart.

House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.) said the two-hour closed-door hearing covered Ashcroft’s “whole tenure as attorney general.” The hearing, Reyes said, examined how the administration viewed the use of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act provisions requiring a special court to issue warrants for domestic eavesdropping.

The panel heard last week from former deputy attorney general James B. Comey, whose mid-May testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the 2004 hospital episode sparked an outcry among congressional Democrats. Next month, Reyes said, the committee will hear private testimony from Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, with the goal of holding public hearings in the fall.

Reyes declined to detail the specifics of Ashcroft’s testimony but said the former attorney general, now in private practice, gave the panel “very candid advice” as it considers drafting new legislation that could rewrite FISA. There was “robust and enormous debate” within the Bush administration about the post-Sept. 11, 2001, program, he said.

But another member of the panel, Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), said that Ashcroft did not give detailed explanations of what he was so concerned about in 2004, more than two years after the program’s inception. “He gave long, rambling, nonspecific answers,” Holt said.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, frustrated by what Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) called “stonewalling” of its requests for information about the dispute by the Bush administration, approved subpoenas yesterday for documents from the Justice Department and the White House related to the authorization and legal justifications for the surveillance program.

Following the committee’s practice, it withheld issuing the subpoenas pending further negotiations with the administration. In a demonstration of lawmakers’ bipartisan concerns, three Republicans joined Democrats in the 13 to 3 vote to authorize the subpoenas. “We are asking not for intimate operational details but for the legal justifications and analysis underlying these programs that affect the rights of every American,” Leahy said.

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Pentagon sends another detainee to Guantanamo

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

Kristin Roberts
Reuters

The Pentagon said on Friday it sent a suspected commander of an al Qaeda-affiliated group to the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, increasing detainee ranks at the facility as some U.S. officials in Washington weigh closing it.

The Pentagon said it transferred Haroon al-Afghani from a U.S. military facility in Afghanistan to the detention center at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba this week. Al-Afghani was captured in Afghanistan but Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said he did not know when. According to the Pentagon, al-Afghani admitted serving as a courier for senior al Qaeda leadership. The Defense Department said al-Afghani also served as a senior commander of Hezb-i-Islami, a group run by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and associated with al Qaeda in Afghanistan. It said he commanded cells that used improvised explosive devices, the roadside bombs that have proved deadly to U.S. and coalition troops. “He is a person with significant knowledge … and may have additional information with respect to ongoing al Qaeda operations and may have information that is useful to us in thwarting future attacks,” Whitman said. Whitman would not say who had captured al-Afghani. The United States has faced international criticism over its continued detention of about 375 suspected al Qaeda and Taliban members at the Guantanamo Bay prison. Human rights groups and other critics have demanded the Bush administration close Guantanamo and that detainees be charged with crimes or released. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has suggested Congress explore with the White House ways to close the prison while keeping the most dangerous detainees imprisoned. Senior administration officials had been scheduled to discuss the issue on Friday but canceled the meeting after news reports that the administration was close to agreement on closing the facility. (Additional reporting by Andrew Gray and Caren Bohan)

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