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Bush says he’ll veto child health funding

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

President Bush vowed Wednesday to veto bipartisan legislation that would sharply increase funding for a popular health insurance program for poor children.

In a wide-ranging interview with economic reporters, Bush also shrugged off Wall Street volatility, discounted fears that credit is drying up in the U.S. economy, said the housing-sector’s problems still point to a “soft-landing” and opposed any bailout for homeowners or lenders.

Bush met with economic writers shortly after reading a statement in the Treasury Department’s ornate Cash Room, flanked by Vice President Dick Cheney and the administration’s entire economic team.

Bush was seeking to calm both consumers and investors rattled by several weeks of Wall Street volatility.

“The underpinnings of the economy are strong, 3.4 percent growth in the second quarter, strong unemployment numbers, low inflation, real wages are on the rise, there is a strong global economy that means it more likely that somebody will buy our goods, our services,” Bush said. “The basic fundamentals are good.”

Asked if he’d veto legislation that increases funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Reauthorization Act, called S-Chip, Bush answered while the question was still being asked.

“If S-Chip is used to expand the nationalization of health care, I will veto it,” he said. He said that he’d proposed increasing S-Chip funding in his budget, but by much less than Congress wants.

Bush proposed a $5 billion increase over five years. Last week the House voted 225-204 for a $50 billion increase over five years, and the Senate voted 68-31 for a $35 billion increase over five years. The Senate margin would override a veto, but the House’s wouldn’t. The two versions must be reconciled before Congress sends the measure to Bush for his signature or veto.

Bush also said Wednesday that he is considering a fresh plan to cut tax rates for U.S. corporations to make them more competitive around the world, an initiative that could further inflame a battle with Congress over spending and taxes and help define the remainder of his tenure.

Advisers presented Bush with a series of ideas to restructure corporate taxes, possibly eliminating narrowly targeted breaks to pay for a broader, across-the-board rate cut. Bush said he was “inclined” to send a corporate tax package to Congress, although he expressed uncertainty about its political viability.

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Firms bid for ID cards contracts

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

The bidding process for contracts worth up to £500m each to run the UK’s identity card scheme has been launched.

British citizens will have ID cards from 2009, the government plans Five firms will be chosen to supply computer equipment and manage the application and issuing of cards.

The government said it was an “important milestone” in delivering the £5.3bn scheme, which will see ID cards issued to UK residents in 2009.

The smallest contract will be for £50m, while two are expected to be worth up to £500m.

‘Institution’

These are thought to be some of the most expensive ever awarded by the government and will run for up to 10 years.

A host of firms, including IBM, Accenture, BT and Fujitsu services, are expected to bid for the contracts.

In June, Home Office minister Liam Byrne said the ID card scheme would become a “great British institution” on a par with the railways in the 19th century.

The government says the change is needed to fight terrorism, illegal immigration, people-smuggling and identity fraud.

But opponents, including the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, have questioned the cost and effectiveness of ID cards, and argue that they will damage civil liberties.

BBC

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NSA to spy on 38% of world telecom traffic

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

The US National Security Agency now has the legal right to monitor some 38% of the world’s telephone, data and internet traffic without requiring a judicial warrant.By Ian Grant

George W Bush signed the relevant legislation last Sunday.

According to Telegeography, a research firm that monitors telecommunications traffic flows, some 38% of the world’s total telecommunications traffic starts or finishes in the US. This is down slightly from 43% in 2003.

“In 2005 (the latest year for which we currently have voice traffic data), approximately 29% of non-US voice traffic transited through a US hub. This is up noticeably from the 20% share in 2002,” said Tim Stronge, a Telegeography spokesman.

“This only includes traditional, circuit-switched international voice traffic. If one includes voice traffic carried as Voice-over-IP (VoIP), the number would likely be around 33%,” he added.

Stronge said his firm does not collect data on satellite traffic, but said no more than 1% or 2% of telecoms traffic went over satellite links.

“Fibre-optic network infrastructure is, bit-for-bit, far cheaper than satellites, and is the dominant medium for international telecommunications,” he said.

“Taking into account that not all satellite constellations are US-owned, my guess is that less than 1% of the world’s international traffic transits over US-owned satellites.”

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CCTV runs risk of data protection breach

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

Code of practice consultation sparks debate whether use of surveillance cameras could create breaches of privacy and data laws.

By Miya Knights

CameraWatch has warned UK businesses risk breaching Data Protection Act (DPA) regulations with increased reliance on CCTV technology.

The UK-wide group welcomed last week’s launch of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) consultation on its redrafting of the CCTV code of practice.

Paul Mackie, CameraWatch’s CCTV compliance adviser and consultant for data protection specialist Datpro, told IT PRO that many businesses fail to realise the compliance requirements of installing CCTV systems.

“If you are captured by a CCTV camera, that is your personal information and subject to DPA regulation,” he said. But CameraWatch’s own research has found 90 per cent of CCTV installations are non-compliant.

“The main function of CCTV is often security, but many businesses are unaware of the compliance implications of using modern systems for things like footfall and staff monitoring,” added Mackie.

When CCTV imagery was incorporated into the Act in 2001, the introduction of the original ICO code of practice mandated each new installation be registered for its specific purpose.

But Mackie said often new digital surveillance technology, like systems that can mine data to find specific footage of suspect transactions for example, go beyond the use they were originally registered for.

He said companies risk having CCTV evidence deemed inadmissible under the law if the imagery used doesn’t comply with the use the system was originally registered for. “Many systems would be found in breach of the DPA for use to access excessive data,” said Mackie.

“A good example is signage,” he added. “Just as when you sign a form that says your data will be held securely and not transmitted to third parties under the DPA, signage essentially informs people of CCTV use. But many companies don’t have adequate signage, where staff and the public don’t know what the imagery is used for.”

In particular, he welcomed the ICO calls for greater powers and the introduction of impact assessments to evaluate the need for surveillance technology before budgets have been allocated on expensive new equipment.

“Often the legal team isn’t even involved,” he added, saying CameraWatch will be studying the draft Code in more detail, raising the issues with industry and users’ representative members of the CameraWatch Forum on 18 September in Edinburgh. “We will then respond to the ICO in full on the draft CCTV code of practice before the consultation period closes on 31 October 2007.”

CameraWatch, launched on 30 May, is an independent, not-for-profit, self-funding advisory body formed to increase awareness of CCTV and compliance data protection issues.

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Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

Race and the transformation of criminal justice

By Glenn C. Loury

The early 1990s were the age of drive-by shootings, drug deals gone bad, crack cocaine, and gangsta rap. Between 1960 and 1990, the annual number of murders in New Haven rose from six to 31, the number of rapes from four to 168, the number of robberies from 16 to 1,784—all this while the city’s population declined by 14 percent. Crime was concentrated in central cities: in 1990, two fifths of Pennsylvania’s violent crimes were committed in Philadelphia, home to one seventh of the state’s population. The subject of crime dominated American domestic-policy debates.

Most observers at the time expected things to get worse. Consulting demographic tables and extrapolating trends, scholars and pundits warned the public to prepare for an onslaught, and for a new kind of criminal—the anomic, vicious, irreligious, amoral juvenile “super-predator.” In 1996, one academic commentator predicted a “bloodbath” of juvenile homicides in 2005.

And so we prepared. Stoked by fear and political opportunism, but also by the need to address a very real social problem, we threw lots of people in jail, and when the old prisons were filled we built new ones.

But the onslaught never came. Crime rates peaked in 1992 and have dropped sharply since. Even as crime rates fell, however, imprisonment rates remained high and continued their upward march. The result, the current American prison system, is a leviathan unmatched in human history.

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.

How did it come to this? One argument is that the massive increase in incarceration reflects the success of a rational public policy: faced with a compelling social problem, we responded by imprisoning people and succeeded in lowering crime rates. This argument is not entirely misguided. Increased incarceration does appear to have reduced crime somewhat. But by how much? Estimates of the share of the 1990s reduction in violent crime that can be attributed to the prison boom range from five percent to 25 percent. Whatever the number, analysts of all political stripes now agree that we have long ago entered the zone of diminishing returns. The conservative scholar John DiIulio, who coined the term “super-predator” in the early 1990s, was by the end of that decade declaring in The Wall Street Journal that “Two Million Prisoners Are Enough.” But there was no political movement for getting America out of the mass-incarceration business. The throttle was stuck.

A more convincing argument is that imprisonment rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen because we have become progressively more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn’t), not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a collective decision to increase the rate of punishment.

One simple measure of punitiveness is the likelihood that a person who is arrested will be subsequently incarcerated. Between 1980 and 2001, there was no real change in the chances of being arrested in response to a complaint: the rate was just under 50 percent. But the likelihood that an arrest would result in imprisonment more than doubled, from 13 to 28 percent. And because the amount of time served and the rate of prison admission both increased, the incarceration rate for violent crime almost tripled, despite the decline in the level of violence. The incarceration rate for nonviolent and drug offenses increased at an even faster pace: between 1980 and 1997 the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent offenses tripled, and the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses increased by a factor of 11. Indeed, the criminal-justice researcher Alfred Blumstein has argued that none of the growth in incarceration between 1980 and 1996 can be attributed to more crime:

The growth was entirely attributable to a growth in punitiveness, about equally to growth in prison commitments per arrest (an indication of tougher prosecution or judicial sentencing) and to longer time served (an indication of longer sentences, elimination of parole or later parole release, or greater readiness to recommit parolees to prison for either technical violations or new crimes).

This growth in punitiveness was accompanied by a shift in thinking about the basic purpose of criminal justice. In the 1970s, the sociologist David Garland argues, the corrections system was commonly seen as a way to prepare offenders to rejoin society. Since then, the focus has shifted from rehabilitation to punishment and stayed there. Felons are no longer persons to be supported, but risks to be dealt with. And the way to deal with the risks is to keep them locked up. As of 2000, 33 states had abolished limited parole (up from 17 in 1980); 24 states had introduced three-strikes laws (up from zero); and 40 states had introduced truth-in-sentencing laws (up from three). The vast majority of these changes occurred in the 1990s, as crime rates fell.

This new system of punitive ideas is aided by a new relationship between the media, the politicians, and the public. A handful of cases—in which a predator does an awful thing to an innocent—get excessive media attention and engender public outrage. This attention typically bears no relation to the frequency of the particular type of crime, and yet laws—such as three-strikes laws that give mandatory life sentences to nonviolent drug offenders—and political careers are made on the basis of the public’s reaction to the media coverage of such crimes.

* * *

Despite a sharp national decline in crime, American criminal justice has become crueler and less caring than it has been at any other time in our modern history. Why?

The question has no simple answer, but the racial composition of prisons is a good place to start. The punitive turn in the nation’s social policy—intimately connected with public rhetoric about responsibility, dependency, social hygiene, and the reclamation of public order—can be fully grasped only when viewed against the backdrop of America’s often ugly and violent racial history: there is a reason why our inclination toward forgiveness and the extension of a second chance to those who have violated our behavioral strictures is so stunted, and why our mainstream political discourses are so bereft of self-examination and searching social criticism. This historical resonance between the stigma of race and the stigma of imprisonment serves to keep alive in our public culture the subordinating social meanings that have always been associated with blackness. Race helps to explain why the United States is exceptional among the democratic industrial societies in the severity and extent of its punitive policy and in the paucity of its social-welfare institutions.

Slavery ended a long time ago, but the institution of chattel slavery and the ideology of racial subordination that accompanied it have cast a long shadow. I speak here of the history of lynching throughout the country; the racially biased policing and judging in the South under Jim Crow and in the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West to which blacks migrated after the First and Second World Wars; and the history of racial apartheid that ended only as a matter of law with the civil-rights movement. It should come as no surprise that in the post–civil rights era, race, far from being peripheral, has been central to the evolution of American social policy.

The political scientist Vesla Mae Weaver, in a recently completed dissertation, examines policy history, public opinion, and media processes in an attempt to understand the role of race in this historic transformation of criminal justice. She argues—persuasively, I think—that the punitive turn represented a political response to the success of the civil-rights movement. Weaver describes a process of “frontlash” in which opponents of the civil-rights revolution sought to regain the upper hand by shifting to a new issue. Rather than reacting directly to civil-rights developments, and thus continuing to fight a battle they had lost, those opponents—consider George Wallace’s campaigns for the presidency, which drew so much support in states like Michigan and Wisconsin—shifted attention to a seemingly race-neutral concern over crime:

Once the clutch of Jim Crow had loosened, opponents of civil rights shifted the “locus of attack” by injecting crime onto the agenda. Through the process of frontlash, rivals of civil rights progress defined racial discord as criminal and argued that crime legislation would be a panacea to racial unrest. This strategy both imbued crime with race and depoliticized racial struggle, a formula which foreclosed earlier “root causes” alternatives. Fusing anxiety about crime to anxiety over racial change and riots, civil rights and racial disorder—initially defined as a problem of minority disenfranchisement—were defined as a crime problem, which helped shift debate from social reform to punishment.

Of course, this argument (for which Weaver adduces considerable circumstantial evidence) is speculative. But something interesting seems to have been going on in the late 1960s regarding the relationship between attitudes on race and social policy.

Before 1965, public attitudes on the welfare state and on race, as measured by the annually administered General Social Survey, varied year to year independently of one another: you could not predict much about a person’s attitudes on welfare politics by knowing their attitudes about race. After 1965, the attitudes moved in tandem, as welfare came to be seen as a race issue. Indeed, the year-to-year correlation between an index measuring liberalism of racial attitudes and attitudes toward the welfare state over the interval 1950–1965 was .03. These same two series had a correlation of .68 over the period 1966–1996. The association in the American mind of race with welfare, and of race with crime, has been achieved at a common historical moment. Crime-control institutions are part of a larger social-policy complex—they relate to and interact with the labor market, family-welfare efforts, and health and social-work activities. Indeed, Garland argues that the ideological approaches to welfare and crime control have marched rightward to a common beat: “The institutional and cultural changes that have occurred in the crime control field are analogous to those that have occurred in the welfare state more generally.” Just as the welfare state came to be seen as a race issue, so, too, crime came to be seen as a race issue, and policies have been shaped by this perception.

Consider the tortured racial history of the War on Drugs. Blacks were twice as likely as whites to be arrested for a drug offense in 1975 but four times as likely by 1989. Throughout the 1990s, drug-arrest rates remained at historically unprecedented levels. Yet according to the National Survey on Drug Abuse, drug use among adults fell from 20 percent in 1979 to 11 percent in 2000. A similar trend occurred among adolescents. In the age groups 12–17 and 18–25, use of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin all peaked in the late 1970s and began a steady decline thereafter. Thus, a decline in drug use across the board had begun a decade before the draconian anti-drug efforts of the 1990s were initiated.

Of course, most drug arrests are for trafficking, not possession, so usage rates and arrest rates needn’t be expected to be identical. Still, we do well to bear in mind that the social problem of illicit drug use is endemic to our whole society. Significantly, throughout the period 1979–2000, white high-school seniors reported using drugs at a significantly higher rate than black high-school seniors. High drug-usage rates in white, middle-class American communities in the early 1980s accounts for the urgency many citizens felt to mount a national attack on the problem. But how successful has the effort been, and at what cost?

Think of the cost this way: to save middle-class kids from the threat of a drug epidemic that might not have even existed by the time that drug incarceration began its rapid increase in the 1980s, we criminalized underclass kids. Arrests went up, but drug prices have fallen sharply over the past 20 years—suggesting that the ratcheting up of enforcement has not made drugs harder to get on the street. The strategy clearly wasn’t keeping drugs away from those who sought them. Not only are prices down, but the data show that drug-related visits to emergency rooms also rose steadily throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

An interesting case in point is New York City. Analyzing arrests by residential neighborhood and police precinct, the criminologist Jeffrey Fagan and his colleagues Valerie West and Jan Holland found that incarceration was highest in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, though these were often not the neighborhoods in which crime rates were the highest. Moreover, they discovered a perverse effect of incarceration on crime: higher incarceration in a given neighborhood in one year seemed to predict higher crime rates in that same neighborhood one year later. This growth and persistence of incarceration over time, the authors concluded, was due primarily to the drug enforcement practices of police and to sentencing laws that require imprisonment for repeat felons. Police scrutiny was more intensive and less forgiving in high-incarceration neighborhoods, and parolees returning to such neighborhoods were more closely monitored. Thus, discretionary and spatially discriminatory police behavior led to a high and increasing rate of repeat prison admissions in the designated neighborhoods, even as crime rates fell.

Fagan, West, and Holland explain the effects of spatially concentrated urban anti-drug-law enforcement in the contemporary American metropolis. Buyers may come from any neighborhood and any social stratum. But the sellers—at least the ones who can be readily found hawking their wares on street corners and in public vestibules—come predominantly from the poorest, most non-white parts of the city. The police, with arrest quotas to meet, know precisely where to find them. The researchers conclude:

Incarceration begets more incarceration, and incarceration also begets more crime, which in turn invites more aggressive enforcement, which then re-supplies incarceration . . . three mechanisms . . . contribute to and reinforce incarceration in neighborhoods: the declining economic fortunes of former inmates and the effects on neighborhoods where they tend to reside, resource and relationship strains on families of prisoners that weaken the family’s ability to supervise children, and voter disenfranchisement that weakens the political economy of neighborhoods.

The effects of imprisonment on life chances are profound. For incarcerated black men, hourly wages are ten percent lower after prison than before. For all incarcerated men, the number of weeks worked per year falls by at least a third after their release.

So consider the nearly 60 percent of black male high-school dropouts born in the late 1960s who are imprisoned before their 40th year. While locked up, these felons are stigmatized—they are regarded as fit subjects for shaming. Their links to family are disrupted; their opportunities for work are diminished; their voting rights may be permanently revoked. They suffer civic excommunication. Our zeal for social discipline consigns these men to a permanent nether caste. And yet, since these men—whatever their shortcomings—have emotional and sexual and family needs, including the need to be fathers and lovers and husbands, we are creating a situation where the children of this nether caste are likely to join a new generation of untouchables. This cycle will continue so long as incarceration is viewed as the primary path to social hygiene.

* * *

I have been exploring the issue of causes: of why we took the punitive turn that has resulted in mass incarceration. But even if the racial argument about causes is inconclusive, the racial consequences are clear. To be sure, in the United States, as in any society, public order is maintained by the threat and use of force. We enjoy our good lives only because we are shielded by the forces of law and order, which keep the unruly at bay. Yet in this society, to a degree virtually unmatched in any other, those bearing the brunt of order enforcement belong in vastly disproportionate numbers to historically marginalized racial groups. Crime and punishment in America has a color.

In his fine study Punishment and Inequality in America (2006), the Princeton University sociologist Bruce Western powerfully describes the scope, nature, and consequences of contemporary imprisonment. He finds that the extent of racial disparity in imprisonment rates is greater than in any other major arena of American social life: at eight to one, the black–white ratio of incarceration rates dwarfs the two-to-one ratio of unemployment rates, the three-to-one ration of non-marital childbearing, the two-to-one ratio of infant-mortality rates and one-to-five ratio of net worth. While three out of 200 young whites were incarcerated in 2000, the rate for young blacks was one in nine. A black male resident of the state of California is more likely to go to a state prison than a state college.

The scandalous truth is that the police and penal apparatus are now the primary contact between adult black American men and the American state. Among black male high-school dropouts aged 20 to 40, a third were locked up on any given day in 2000, fewer than three percent belonged to a union, and less than one quarter were enrolled in any kind of social program. Coercion is the most salient meaning of government for these young men.¬†Western estimates that nearly 60 percent of black male dropouts born between 1965 and 1969 were sent to prison on a felony conviction at least once before they reached the age of 35.

One cannot reckon the world-historic American prison build-up over the past 35 years without calculating the enormous costs imposed upon the persons imprisoned, their families, and their communities. (Of course, this has not stopped many social scientists from pronouncing on the net benefits of incarceration without doing so.) Deciding on the weight to give to a “thug’s” well-being—or to that of his wife or daughter or son—is a question of social morality, not social science. Nor can social science tell us how much additional cost borne by the offending class is justified in order to obtain a given increment of security or property or peace of mind for the rest of us. These are questions about the nature of the American state and its relationship to its people that transcend the categories of benefits and costs.

Yet the discourse surrounding punishment policy invariably discounts the humanity of the thieves, drug sellers, prostitutes, rapists, and, yes, those whom we put to death. It gives insufficient weight to the welfare, to the humanity, of those who are knitted together with offenders in webs of social and psychic affiliation. What is more, institutional arrangements for dealing with criminal offenders in the United States have evolved to serve expressive as well as instrumental ends. We have wanted to “send a message,” and we have done so with a vengeance. In the process, we have created facts. We have answered the question, who is to blame for the domestic maladies that beset us? We have constructed a national narrative. We have created scapegoats, indulged our need to feel virtuous, and assuaged our fears. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is them.

Incarceration keeps them away from us. Thus Garland: “The prison is used today as a kind of reservation, a quarantine zone in which purportedly dangerous individuals are segregated in the name of public safety.” The boundary between prison and community, Garland continues, is “heavily patrolled and carefully monitored to prevent risks leaking out from one to the other. Those offenders who are released ‘into the community’ are subject to much tighter control than previously, and frequently find themselves returned to custody for failure to comply with the conditions that continue to restrict their freedom. For many of these parolees and ex-convicts, the ‘community’ into which they are released is actually a closely monitored terrain, a supervised space, lacking much of the liberty that one associates with ‘normal life’.”

Deciding how citizens of varied social rank within a common polity ought to relate to one another is a more fundamental consideration than deciding which crime-control policy is most efficient. The question of relationship, of solidarity, of who belongs to the body politic and who deserves exclusion—these are philosophical concerns of the highest order. A decent society will on occasion resist the efficient course of action, for the simple reason that to follow it would be to act as though we were not the people we have determined ourselves to be: a people conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that we all are created equal. Assessing the propriety of creating a racially defined pariah class in the middle of our great cities at the start of the 21st century presents us with just such a case.

My recitation of the brutal facts about punishment in today’s America may sound to some like a primal scream at this monstrous social machine that is grinding poor black communities to dust. And I confess that these brutal facts do at times incline me to cry out in despair. But my argument is analytical, not existential. Its principal thesis is this: we law-abiding, middle-class Americans have made decisions about social policy and incarceration, and we benefit from those decisions, and that means from a system of suffering, rooted in state violence, meted out at our request. We had choices and we decided to be more punitive. Our society—the society we have made—creates criminogenic conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.

This situation raises a moral problem that we cannot avoid. We cannot pretend that there are more important problems in our society, or that this circumstance is the necessary solution to other, more pressing problems—unless we are also prepared to say that we have turned our backs on the ideal of equality for all citizens and abandoned the principles of justice. We ought to ask ourselves two questions: Just what manner of people are we Americans? And in light of this, what are our obligations to our fellow citizens—even those who break our laws?

* * *

To address these questions, we need to think about the evaluation of our prison system as a problem in the theory of distributive justice—not the purely procedural idea of ensuring equal treatment before the law and thereafter letting the chips fall where they may, but the rather more demanding ideal of substantive racial justice. The goal is to bring about through conventional social policy and far-reaching institutional reforms a situation in which the history of racial oppression is no longer so evident in the disparate life experiences of those who descend from slaves.

And I suggest we approach that problem from the perspective of John Rawls’s theory of justice: first, that we think about justice from an “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance” that obstructs from view our own situation, including our class, race, gender, and talents. We need to ask what rules we would pick if we seriously imagined that we could turn out to be anyone in the society. Second, following Rawls’s “difference principle,” we should permit inequalities only if they work to improve the circumstances of the least advantaged members of society. But here, the object of moral inquiry is not the distribution among individuals of wealth and income, but instead the distribution of a negative good, punishment, among individuals and, importantly, racial groups.

So put yourself in John Rawls’s original position and imagine that you could occupy any rank in the social hierarchy. Let me be more concrete: imagine that you could be born a black American male outcast shuffling between prison and the labor market on his way to an early death to the chorus of nigger or criminal or dummy. Suppose we had to stop thinking of us and them. What social rules would we pick if we actually thought that they could be us? I expect that we would still pick some set of punishment institutions to contain bad behavior and protect society. But wouldn’t we pick arrangements that respected the humanity of each individual and of those they are connected to through bonds of social and psychic affiliation? If any one of us had a real chance of being one of those faces looking up from the bottom of the well—of being the least among us¬—then how would we talk publicly about those who break our laws? What would we do with juveniles who go awry, who roam the streets with guns and sometimes commit acts of violence? What weight would we give to various elements in the deterrence-retribution-incapacitation-rehabilitation calculus, if we thought that calculus could end up being applied to our own children, or to us? How would we apportion blame and affix responsibility for the cultural and social pathologies evident in some quarters of our society if we envisioned that we ourselves might well have been born into the social margins where such pathology flourishes?

If we take these questions as seriously as we should, then we would, I expect, reject a pure ethic of personal responsibility as the basis for distributing punishment. Issues about responsibility are complex, and involve a kind of division of labor—what John Rawls called a “social division of responsibility” between “citizens as a collective body” and individuals: when we hold a person responsible for his or her conduct—by establishing laws, investing in their enforcement, and consigning some persons to prisons—we need also to think about whether we have done our share in ensuring that each person faces a decent set of opportunities for a good life. We need to ask whether we as a society have fulfilled our collective responsibility to ensure fair conditions for each person—for each life that might turn out to be our life.

We would, in short, recognize a kind of social responsibility, even for the wrongful acts freely chosen by individual persons. I am not arguing that people commit crimes because they have no choices, and that in this sense the “root causes” of crime are social; individuals always have choices. My point is that responsibility is a matter of ethics, not social science. Society at large is implicated in an individual person’s choices because we have acquiesced in—perhaps actively supported, through our taxes and votes, words and deeds—social arrangements that work to our benefit and his detriment, and which shape his consciousness and sense of identity in such a way that the choices he makes, which we may condemn, are nevertheless compelling to him—an entirely understandable response to circumstance. Closed and bounded social structures—like racially homogeneous urban ghettos—create contexts where “pathological” and “dysfunctional” cultural forms emerge; but these forms are neither intrinsic to the people caught in these structures nor independent of the behavior of people who stand outside them.

Thus, a central reality of our time is the fact that there has opened a wide racial gap in the acquisition of cognitive skills, the extent of law-abidingness, the stability of family relations, the attachment to the work force, and the like. This disparity in human development is, as a historical matter, rooted in political, economic, social, and cultural factors peculiar to this society and reflective of its unlovely racial history: it is a societal, not communal or personal, achievement. At the level of the individual case we must, of course, act as if this were not so. There could be no law, no civilization, without the imputation to particular persons of responsibility for their wrongful acts. But the sum of a million cases, each one rightly judged on its merits to be individually fair, may nevertheless constitute a great historic wrong. The state does not only deal with individual cases. It also makes policies in the aggregate, and the consequences of these policies are more or less knowable. And who can honestly say—who can look in the mirror and say with a straight face—that we now have laws and policies that we would endorse if we did not know our own situation and genuinely considered the possibility that we might be the least advantaged?

Even if the current racial disparity in punishment in our country gave evidence of no overt racial discrimination—and, perhaps needless to say, I view that as a wildly optimistic supposition—it would still be true that powerful forces are at work to perpetuate the consequences of a universally acknowledged wrongful past. This is in the first instance a matter of interpretation—of the narrative overlay that we impose upon the facts.

The tacit association in the American public’s imagination of “blackness” with “unworthiness” or “dangerousness” has obscured a fundamental ethical point about responsibility, both collective and individual, and promoted essentialist causal misattributions: when confronted by the facts of racially disparate achievement, racially disproportionate crime rates, and racially unequal school achievement, observers will have difficulty identifying with the plight of a group of people whom they (mistakenly) think are simply “reaping what they have sown.” Thus, the enormous racial disparity in the imposition of social exclusion, civic ex-communication, and lifelong disgrace has come to seem legitimate, even necessary: we fail to see how our failures as a collective body are implicated in this disparity. We shift all the responsibility onto their shoulders, only by irresponsibly—indeed, immorally—denying our own. And yet, this entire dynamic has its roots in past unjust acts that were perpetrated on the basis of race.

Given our history, producing a racially defined nether caste through the ostensibly neutral application of law should be profoundly offensive to our ethical sensibilities—to the principles we proudly assert as our own. Mass incarceration has now become a principal vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchy in our society. Our country’s policymakers need to do something about it. And all of us are ultimately responsible for making sure that they do.

Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the department of economics at Brown University. He is the author of The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, and he was a 2002 Carnegie Scholar.

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Pearl Jam Censored For Anti-Bush Lyrics

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

By Conor McKay

According to Pearl Jam’s website, portions of the band’s Sunday night set at Lollapalooza were missing from the AT&T Blue Room live webcast. Fans alerted the band to the missing material after the show. Reportedly absent from the webcast were segments of the band’s performance of “Daughter,” including the sung lines “George Bush, leave this world alone” and “George Bush find yourself another home.”

After questioning AT&T about the incident, Lollapalooza was informed that material was indeed missing from the webcast, and that it was mistakenly cut by AT&T’s content monitor. Tiffany Nels of AT&T told CMJ that they are working the matter out with the band. “We regret the mistake,” she explains. “This was not intended and was an unfortunate mistake made by a webcast editor.” She went on to explain that AT&T has a policy for any excessive language, and that it was set up because of its all-ages audience.

“This, of course, troubles us as artists but also as citizens concerned with the issue of censorship and the increasingly consolidated control of the media,” the band wrote on their website. “AT&T’s actions strike at the heart of the public’s concerns over the power that corporations have when it comes to determining what the public sees and hears through communications media.” The band went on to point out that “most telecommunications companies oppose ‘net neutrality’ and argue that the public can trust them not to censor.”

The full version of Pearl Jam’s performance of “Daughter” at Lollapalooza will be available on the band’s website in the near future.

www.pearljam.com

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Face scans planned for NZ airports

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

By COLIN ESPINER

New Zealanders flying home from overseas will be required to have their face digitally scanned at airports under proposed legislation aimed at cracking down on illegal immigrants.

Immigration Minister David Cunliffe tabled a 350-page Immigration Bill in Parliament yesterday, describing it as the biggest rewrite of immigration law for two decades.

The bill all but guts the 1987 Immigration Act, slicing the appeals system for would-be refugees and other migrants seeking residency in New Zealand from four tiers to just one.

It provides tough new powers for Immigration New Zealand to imprison for up to six months those who refuse to sign deportation orders, to use classified information held by the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) in assessing applications for entry, and to collect biometric data on all visitors to New Zealand.

New Zealand citizens will be exempt from the requirement to provide biometric data such as fingerprinting and iris scans but will have to submit to a digital scan of their face, which will be compared by computer with an image stored on a microchip in their passport.

Cunliffe said pictures of New Zealanders who were verified would then be deleted.

Only where there was a discrepancy or fraud was suspected would the picture be stored.

Late last year, Cunliffe pledged not to subject Kiwis to iris scans at airports, but he did not mention a digital photograph.

He said yesterday the changes were necessary to strengthen border security and tighten the law against “those who pose a risk to New Zealand’s wellbeing”.

Council of Civil Liberties chairman Michael Bott called the proposed legislation “a disgrace” and said it ushered in “Stalinist” powers for the state, and the Minister of Immigration in particular, to decide who could reside in New Zealand.

The process used to detain one of New Zealand’s best-known refugees, Ahmed Zaoui, is being thrown out under the changes.

The controversial Security Risk Certificate, slapped on Zaoui by the SIS, is being repealed.

The bill strengthens deportation provisions, allowing non-residents to be deported for a wide range of breaches of the law, from identity fraud and breaching visa conditions to previous criminal convictions and being deemed “a risk to national security”.

The bill’s passage through Parliament seems assured, with National yesterday welcoming the legislation.

Immigration spokesman Lockwood Smith said it reflected the changing needs of the 21st century.

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Ex-CIA officer Slams US Allegations against Iran as Sham

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

In an alarming exposure of the acceleration and urgency of the American war party’s push towards catastrophic war with Iran, Philip Giraldi, former CIA counter terrorism officer, in an interview [1] on 24th July with Anti War Radio debunked the NeoCons’ repeated myth of Iran’s support for AlQaeda as a pretext for war. Whilst acknowledging Iran’s helpfulness in trying to establish security in both Afghanistan and Iraq, Giraldi spoke of the United States’ hypocritical and illegal support for terrorist separatists groups inside Iran, and various plans and scenarios which have been drawn up to destroy Iran’s military and economic infrastructure by massive bombardment, with the use of nuclear bombs a real and stated possibility.

Giraldi refuted the assumption that sharing hostilities towards the US, placed Iran and AlQaeda in the same camp and sharing similar agenda, arguing that Iran followed a very different agenda in its dealings with the US. He emphasised both the fact of Iranians’ helpfulness in Iraq, in terms of pushing for greater stability, and also their help and cooperation in Afghanistan, as well as the reality of the deep hostilities between Shiia Iran and Sunni extremism of AlQaeda. Giraldi recalled the major attack against the Iranian consulate general in Afghanistan by the Taliban, a close ally of AlQaeda, in which 11 Iranian diplomats were killed, and the regular AlQaeda violent attacks against Shiia population in Iraq, and concluded that a Shiia Iranian-AlQaeda alliance was not a plausible possibility.

He described the recent New York Sun’s allegation [2] that AlQaeda prisoners in Iran led terrorist operations inside Iraq under the advice of the Iranian government, as one of many propaganda pieces making a case for war. He said how in 2003, the Iranian government, through the Swiss embassy, had offered to hand over the six AlQaeda prisoners kept in Iran, which includes Osama Bin Laden’s son, in exchange for the US ceasing its support for the MEK, and how this offer was rejected by the US. He said of the MEK that it was sheltered and armed by Saddam against Iran, and now supported and armed by Pentagon against Iran.

Highlighting what he called American “ultimate hypocrisy”, Giraldi explained how the US government is supporting terrorist groups and ethnic division in Iran and charging the Iranians in Iraq for what the US was doing in Iran itself and with a lot more evidence. Giraldi talked of US’s support for Jundollah which he described as a Sunni Baluchi separatist group in eastern Iran that has launched deadly terrorist attacks inside Iran. He also spoke of US support for separatists amongst the Arab minority which is closer to the border with Iraq.

Giraldi repeated the alarm call he first made in his revelations in the American Conservative Magazine in 2005 that Dick Cheney, who has no authority under the constitution, had ordered the air force to draw up plans for air strike against Iran that even included the use of nuclear weapons. He said he thought there was a lot of evidence since then to suggest that nuclear weapons are still very much on the table and named Republican Senators such as McCain, Gilliani and Romney who had not “flinched at all” in the debate about the prospect of using nuclear weapons against Iran.

He spoke of various war scenarios cooked up by the war party. One scenario was of the automatic use of the nuclear weapons in order to reach and destroy the Iranian nuclear sites buried under ground. Another scenario was to use the nuclear threat if the “Iranians continue to fight back after we staged our attack”, the idea being “that’s what the nukes are for, our nukes that everybody knows that we in fact do have, is to tell them, listen, you are going to sit there and take it while we bomb you for a week or two and you are not going to fight back and if you do fight back then we will use nuclear weapons on you”, and he cited the example scenario of Iranians resisting by staging attack in the Strait of Hormouz or destabilising Afghanistan.

Setting out the horrifying context of the possibility of the US using nuclear strikes against Iran, under the pretext of destroying Iranian nuclear bombs which do not exist and Iran’s cooperation with AlQaeda, another propaganda fabrication, Giraldi drew attention to the recent warning to Iran and the threat of war issued by AlQaeda for Iran’s support for the Shiia government in Iraq, as well as AlQaeda’s constant horrific attacks inside Iraq targeting Shiia population and mosques.

Prof. Abbas Edalat of CASMII said today: “Giraldi’s revelations is consistent with and confirms the emergence of a shift in the dynamics of the American foreign policy decision making away from dialogue and in favour of war. The reality of the shared strategic interests between Iran and the US in stabilising Iraq and the possibility and great benefits for both countries in reaching a rapprochement in their bilateral relationship, based on mutual respect and cooperation rather than threat and coercion, is persistently obscured and sabotaged by the fanatical warmongers of Cheney camp and the Israeli lobby, who are relentlessly pushing for war”.

It is incumbent upon the media and journalists to give active voice to informed and conscientious individuals like Giraldi who have well-established connections within the intelligence community and are warning the international community about the impending catastrophic war against Iran.

For more information please contact CASMII or visit http://www.campaigniran.org

Notes

[1] http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2007/07/24/philip-giraldi-5/
[2] http://www.nysun.com/article/58599

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Open government records to the public, legislator says

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

By Kori Walter

Giving the public greater access to government records would restore trust in state government, state Rep. Tim Mahoney, D-Fayette County, said Tuesday at a hearing on strengthening Pennsylvania’s open-records law.

Mahoney is the main sponsor of legislation that would give residents the right to obtain almost all government documents, ranging from township records to expenditures of state lawmakers.

“For a long time in Pennsylvania, we as legislators played shell games with the public, the newspapers and everybody else by not letting them know where the money is being spent,” Mahoney told the House State Government Committee. “I believe this bill will let the sunshine in. This is a bill that would put trust back in this House that we desperately need.”

Rep. Jaret Gibbons, D-10, Ellwood City, said he will back the bill as long as it safeguards personal information of state officials and public employees.

“The key part of this legislation is opening the financial records of our state, including the Legislature,” Gibbons said. “I am almost certain that sometime this session we will pass a stronger Right to Know Law.”

Mahoney said he will push for a vote on the bill shortly after lawmakers return from their summer break on Sept. 17.

The committee spent nearly five hours reviewing the bill and listening to testimony from newspaper editors, government watchdog groups, advocates for victims of domestic violence and others.

Teri Henning, general counsel for the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, said the bill needs some fine-tuning.

Henning said the bill should not exempt public officials’ e-mail messages from the list of records available to the public.

“It invites agencies, so inclined, to communicate via e-mail about matters they don’t wish to disclose publicly,” Henning told the panel.

Other concerns focused on a provision that would create a state agency to process all records requests and decide whether documents meet the definition of a public record.

That could delay the release of records, Henning said.

Elam Herr, assistant executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of Township Supervisors, said requests for municipal records should be made locally.

Herr and others said lawmakers must be careful to shield personal information, such as birth dates, Social Security numbers and addresses of crime victims, which could be contained in documents.

Mahoney said after the hearing that the testimony did not reveal any fatal flaws in the legislation.

“I think we found out today that we have more support for this bill than I thought we had,” Mahoney said. “I have a commitment from leadership that this is on the top of their agenda.”

Rep. Paul Clymer, R-Bucks County, agreed the bill had strong bipartisan support in the House.

“The more information that we can provide to the public through the media and other forms strengthens government,” Clymer said. “I think this bill is a step in the right direction.”

But Clymer disagreed with Mahoney’s strategy for getting the bill through the House.

Mahoney urged the committee to vote on the current version and let the full House revise the language during floor debate.

Clymer warned that’s a blueprint for disaster.

Lawmakers could insert language on the House floor that could peel off support for the bill and eventually sink it, Clymer said.

“You have to work out all the problems with the bill in the committee, and then go forward,” he said.

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UK data watchdog issues Big Brother warning

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

By Andrew Thomas

THE UK INFORMATION COMMISSIONER’S OFFICE (ICO) has warned that bureaucrats share citizens’ data with each other willy-nilly and citizens probably don’t even hava clue that it’s going on.

The body has published new guidance to help individuals understand how and why their personal information may be shared by organisations, and to explain their rights under the Data Protection Act.

The ICO is an independent organisation set up to enforce and oversee the Data Protection Act, the Freedom of Information Act, the Environmental Information Regulations, and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations.

Iain Bourne, Head of Data Protection Projects at the ICO, said: “More and more information is being shared about us, often for useful and wholly legitimate purposes. It is important that individuals are aware of their rights under the Data Protection Act.

“Information about an individual is sometimes shared within the same organisation or between several different organisations for a number of reasons. For example, a local authority may use information supplied on a council tax form to help other departments update their records; the police may share information with a local authority to help counter anti-social behaviour in the area; or a teacher might share information about a child with a social worker and health professional so that the child’s needs can be addressed.”

The ICO warns that, while information sharing is often expected and reasonable, it can also take place without an individual’s consent and that if an individual is asked to consent to information sharing they should have a genuine free choice.

Under the Data Protection Act individuals have the right to access the information which organisations hold about them. The guidance states that organisations sharing information should be able to tell the public what the information is, who it is being shared with and why it is being shared.

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ID Card Prints Flawed

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

THOUSANDS of people will be unable to use the new ID cards to prove who they are, an expert has warned.

Speaking as the Government publish a report on using biometric data on visas, passports and ID cards, Professor John Daugman has warned the failure rate will be massive.

The Cambridge expert said plans to use just fingerprints on the cards to check identities will lead to one in 1000 giving a “false match”.

It will mean when people try to prove their identities to police or border control staff the details of someone else will flash up on the screen.

Shadow home secretary David Davis said: “Gordon Brown pretends ID cards will secure our identities but tens of thousands of people could be falsely accused of not being who they are.”

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There’s is still time to fight data sharing

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

Geraint Bevan
NO2ID

The Information Commissioner is right to be concerned about the proliferation of data sharing. Unfortunately, the idea that the risks can be mitigated if only people are aware of their rights is misplaced. The biggest danger is the notion of “transformational government”. This is the driving force behind the national identity scheme that will entail the creation of a vast National Identity Register, specifically designed to help spread data more widely.

New passport applicants are being summoned to attend the interrogation centre in Blythswood House where, as well as facing the prospect of having biometric data scanned and recorded, they are confronted with personal dossiers compiled from a host of databases. The main purpose of these interrogations is to tidy up existing databases to aid the creation of a national register.

It is not sufficient that we know our rights. As far as the government is concerned, we have none. The Data Protection Act does not prevent the government from sharing data whenever it believes that to be in the public interest. What government department ever believes any of its actions are not in the public interest? We must all take responsibility for protecting our personal data, but that requires that we learn to say no when asked for too much information unnecessarily. We should prepare to say no when summoned to participate in national identity registration. We can start by writing to our elected representatives and telling them that we intend to refuse to participate.

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Facebook - the CIA conspiracy

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

By Matt Greenop

Facebook has 20 million users worldwide, is worth billions of dollars and, if internet sources are to be believed, was started by the CIA.

The social networking phenomenon started as a way of American college students to keep in touch. It is rapidly catching up with MySpace, and has left others like Bebo in its wake.

But there is a dark side to the success story that’s been spreading across the blogosphere. A complex but riveting Big Brother-type conspiracy theory which links Facebook to the CIA and the US Department of Defence.

The CIA is, though, using a Facebook group to recruit staff for its very sexy sounding National Clandestine Service.

Checking out the job ads does require a Facebook login, so if you haven’t joined the site - or are worried that CIA spooks will start following you home from work -check them out on the agency’s own site.

The story starts once Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had launched, after the dorm room drama that’s led to the current court case.

Facebook’s first round of venture capital funding ($US500,000) came from former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome ‘The Diversity Myth’, he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC.

The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company’s key areas of expertise are in “data mining technologies”.

Breyer also served on the board of R&D firm BBN Technologies, which was one of those companies responsible for the rise of the internet.

Dr Anita Jones joined the firm, which included Gilman Louie. She had also served on the In-Q-Tel’s board, and had been director of Defence Research and Engineering for the US Department of Defence.

She was also an adviser to the Secretary of Defence and overseeing the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is responsible for high-tech, high-end development.

It was when a journalist lifted the lid on the DARPA’s
Information Awareness Office that the public began to show concern at its information mining projects.

Wikipedia’s IAO page says: “the IAO has the stated mission to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralised location, for easy perusal by the United States government, including (though not limited to) internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver’s licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data.”.

Not surprisingly, the backlash from civil libertarians led to a Congressional investigation into DARPA’s activity, the Information Awareness Office lost its funding.

Now the internet conspiracy theorists are citing Facebook as the IAO’s new mask.

Parts of the IAO’s technology round-up included ‘human network analysis and behaviour model building engines’, which Facebook’s massive volume of neatly-targeted data gathering allows for.

Facebook’s own Terms of use state: “by posting Member Content to any part of the Web site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, reformat, translate, excerpt and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorpoate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorise sublicenses of the foregoing.

And in its equally interesting privacy policy: “Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg. photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalised experience. By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States.”

Is the CIA really providing the impetus and the funding behind the monster growth of this year’s biggest dot com success story? Maybe only the men with the nice suits and ear pieces can answer that.

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CIA Spy Comes Out Of The Shadows

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

Top Clandestine Official, Head Of The Agency’s National Clandestine Service, To Retire

One of the CIA’s top spies has come out of the shadows.

(AP) With little fanfare, Jose Rodriguez, who heads the National Clandestine Service, had his cover lifted about a month ago. CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said the driving factor was his interest in publicly participating in minority recruitment events. He is also retiring later this year after more than three decades with the agency.

Rodriguez is the most important man in the U.S. spy game whose name you probably never knew. When he was mentioned publicly before now, he was referred to only as “Jose.”

Rodriguez became head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine service in November 2004. With the creation of the National Clandestine Service the following year as part of an intelligence reorganization, Rodriguez rose to be chief of “human intelligence” operations, overseeing the classic spycraft that takes place at a variety of U.S. spy agencies.

Unlike his recent predecessors, Rodriguez elected to stay undercover as he ordered some of the CIA’s most sensitive cloak-and-dagger operations. These efforts got little publicity because Rodriguez believed the head of the clandestine service shouldn’t have a high profile.

In national security circles, however, Rodriguez’s identity was not a well-kept secret. Wikipedia users even created an entry about him last year, although the page contains inaccuracies.

This much is known: Rodriguez, a native of Puerto Rico, spent much of his career in Latin America, including in Mexico.

Some officials, who spoke on condition that they not be identified while discussing Rodriguez’s past, have said he got into trouble during the 1990s while trying to help a friend who was arrested for narcotics in the Dominican Republic. The Justice Department looked into Rodriguez’s actions, but never brought charges.

Although the incident led to his removal as head of the CIA’s Latin America Division, his espionage career continued. He served overseas and took over as head of the CIA’s counterterror center less than a year after Sept. 11, 2001.

“Jose built a reputation for leadership in the field and here at headquarters, and he guided some of the agency’s greatest counterterror victories,” CIA Director Michael Hayden said in a statement.

“He has done much to protect our country by strengthening its Clandestine Service,” Hayden added.

Next week, Rodriguez will make his first public appearance when he speaks about diversity at a border security conference in El Paso, Texas, the hometown of the gathering’s Democratic host, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes.

Rodriguez has not set a firm date for his retirement, and a replacement has not yet been announced.

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Security firms working on devices to spot would-be terrorists in crowd

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

· Move to analyse behaviour and physiology from afar
· British expert warns of Minority Report scenario

By Ian Sample

Counter-terrorism experts have drawn up plans to develop an array of advanced technologies capable of spotting would-be terrorists in a crowd before they have time to strike.

Scientists and engineers have been asked to devise ways of analysing people’s behaviour and physiology from afar, in the hope they may reveal clues about their mental state and even their future intentions.

Under Project Hostile Intent, scientists will aim to build devices that can pick up tell-tale signs of hostile intent or deception from people’s heart rates, perspiration and tiny shifts in facial expressions.

The project was launched by the US department of homeland security with a call to security companies and government laboratories for assistance.

According to the timetable set out, the new devices are expected to be trialled at a handful of airports, borders and ports of entry by 2012.

The plans describe how systems based on video cameras, laserlight, infra-red, audio recordings and eye tracking technology are expected to scour crowds looking for unusual behaviour, with the aim of identifying people who should be approached and quizzed by security staff, New Scientist magazine reports.

The project hopes to advance a security system already employed by the US transportation security administration that monitors people for unintentional facial twitches, called “micro-expressions”, that can suggest someone is lying or trying to conceal information.

Studies by Paul Ekman, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, have revealed that involuntary expressions can often betray someone’s true intentions. If you flash your teeth, lower your eyebrows and wrinkle your nose for a fraction of a second while trying to smile, you have just demonstrated the micro-expression for disgust.

A major hurdle will be developing technology that can make correct decisions quickly. “Right now, screeners have typically less than one minute to examine a traveller’s documents and assess whether they are a threat,” said Larry Orluskie, of the department of homeland security.

The project is also expected to investigate developing a lie detector-type test that can be used remotely - an advantage because it would not interfere with the flow of a crowd and it could be used without the target’s knowledge.

Experts yesterday were sceptical that today’s technology will be able to predict hostile intent accurately enough to be useful. Dr Ekman said a terrorist might confound security measures by showing a range of expressions from fear of being caught to distress at the possibility of dying. “I don’t know. No one knows,” he told New Scientist.

Anthony Richards, a counter-terrorism expert at St Andrews University who has worked on Britain’s ability to pre-empt a major terrorist attack, agreed that the project faced substantial hurdles.

“There could be all kinds of reasons that might make people behave in certain ways that have nothing to do with terrorism. If you have heightened security and there are a lot of police around, it could be possible that you can feel and look guilty even when you haven’t done anything wrong.

“We need to reduce the motivation for people doing these kinds of things. We shouldn’t just accept that terrorism will remain as it is or worsen over the next 20 or 30 years and then just put all the technological solutions in place. Technology is certainly important in the fight against terrorism but that shouldn’t detract from the crucially important challenge of finding out what is driving terrorism. We need to have a sensible and honest appraisal as to what is radicalising young people.”

Peter McOwan, a computer scientist who is developing sensors to detect people’s moods at Queen Mary, University of London, said: “It’s just like something from Minority Report. They have been watching too many Tom Cruise movies.”

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