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Additives ‘a risk to children’s health’

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

Parents have been warned to remove food additives linked to hyperactive behaviour from children’s diets by the EU’s leading expert on the issue.

Dr John Larsen, who heads the European Food Safety Authority’s panel on additives, said the measure would be “prudent” to protect youngsters’ health.

His comments came as researchers at Southampton University warned that additives harm the “psychological health” of children, holding back their progress at school and their ability to learn to read at a young age.

The discovery has triggered calls from consumer and health groups for a total ban on additives.

At yesterday’s EFSA conference in Brussels, Dr Larsen, a member of the Danish National Food Institute, said: “It would be prudent to take these out of the diet. It seems they may have this ability to worsen something that is going on.

“If parents think there might be a problem - such as with behaviour - they should try removing these additives.”

Despite campaigners - including the Daily Mail - lobbying to have dangerous additives banned from foods, the Government has so far refused to do so.

However, the Foods Standards Agency has passed responsibility on a final decision to the EFSA and a panel headed by Dr Larsen.

But he has refused to say whether he would like a total ban, insisting his team would need to examine properly the Southampton research.

The study, which has been praised as the most thorough of its kind, was led by Professor Jim Stevenson.

It concluded that additives can cause “significant adverse effects” in children.

Professor Stevenson added: “I feel that the effects we are seeing here are sufficiently great to represent a threat to health.”

Source

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Japan opposition stands ground on Afghan mission

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

TOKYO (AFP) — Japan’s opposition stood firm Thursday against resuming a naval mission supporting the US-led “war on terror” in Afghanistan as a ship returned home from the Indian Ocean.

Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda made a new pitch to the opposition hours after returning from a two-nation trip which included a trip to Washington where he promised US President George W. Bush he would work to restart the deployment.

“He called for support for the Afghan refuelling mission… He pleaded over and over again,” main opposition leader Ichiro Ozawa told reporters after he met Fukuda.

Ozawa said he rejected Fukuda’s proposal to have consultations on resuming the naval mission, which provided fuel and other logistical support to troops in Afghanistan.

“We will pursue the policy of having debate in parliament,” he said, arguing his party’s view on how Japan’s troops should contribute to the global fight against terrorism was “fundamentally different” from that of the ruling party.

The opposition, which won control of the upper house of parliament in July 29 polls, opposed the mission arguing that it is against the nation’s pacifist constitution and Japan has been too close to the Bush administration.

Fukuda, whose predecessor quit in part over the row, discussed the Indian Ocean mission during a visit last week to the US to meet Bush. He returned to Japan early Thursday after taking part in an Asian summit in Singapore.

Fukuda argues that Japan must play a greater role in international security as the world’s second largest economy. But the government was forced to call the ships home on November 1 as legislation expired amid legislative deadlock.

The Kirisame destroyer, which had been at sea for four months, returned Thursday morning to Sasebo port in southwestern Nagasaki prefecture, television footage showed.

The other ship in the mission, the Tokiwa oiler, is due to return to Tokyo on Friday, a defence ministry official said.

The opposition’s refusal to cooperate with Fukuda raises the possibility that the ruling bloc’s bill to resume the Afghan mission may remain stuck in the opposition-led upper house as the current session expires on December 15.

Ozawa said “there is not enough time left” for full deliberation of the bill in the upper house.

He blamed the ruling camp for “wasting time” after the election setback.

“In the first place, the (ruling) Liberal Democratic Party failed to recognise what would happen after seeing the results on July 29,” he said.

The opposition has also said it would first probe a growing corruption scandal before considering Fukuda’s bill, which was sent by the lower house last week with an overwhelming majority by the ruling coalition.

The scandal has implicated Finance Minister Fukushiro Nukaga, who admitted playing golf with a defence contractor, former Yamada Corp. executive Motonobu Miyazaki, who has been arrested on embezzlement and document forgery charges.

Nukaga, who has also served as defence chief before, has denied any wrongdoing.

The defence ministry said Thursday it has suspended trade with Yamada and its US subsidiary as its president admitted padding bills on military supplies.

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Incompetence Shall Set Brits Free from Database Hell‏

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

The lesson of the Great Data Loss is not that the Brit government and the civil service are incompetent (although they are), but that in a market economy the government can’t hire competent IT people. That’s good for Brit freedom.

The scandal:

Searches were continuing for two CDs containing the names, addresses and bank details of 9.5million adults and the names, dates of birth and National Insurance numbers of all 15.5 million children in the country which went missing after being put in the post by HM Revenue and Customs.

It has since emerged that the National Audit Office, which had asked for the CDs, had specifically requested that bank details and other sensitive data be removed from them when it asked for other copies of the Child Benefit database in March, but a senior manager refused to do so on cost grounds.

On October 18 two unencrypted CDs were put in the post, unregistered and unrecorded, which never arrived at the NAO.

As a result the bank details of every parent in the country are now missing, and experts have warned that criminal gangs could use the information to commit fraud and identity theft for years to come if the information falls into the wrong hands.

Obviously culpability lies with the guy who exported & burned the data and mailed the disks insecurely, and responsibility lies with the management chain above him, including Brown.

But the real fault is with the design of the database, which any competent developer would have built so that only encrypted data could be exported.

A major government IT system has such an obvious fatal flaw because the people who designed, built, and maintain it are second rate.

The Brit government gets IT talent either through direct hires, or (more commonly) by subcontracting to big consultancies. But any first rate system designer or developer will avoid government work like the plague because:

1. The specification, rather than being rooted in the market realities of a commercial customer, will instead be set by pols, and they change with the wind, taking the spec with it. Spec changes make for bugs, low productivity, and frustration as good work has to be junked.

In this particular case, until recently data sharing between government departments was forbidden, but the Blair/Brown soft fascism reversed that, and now all sorts of private data gets sent between government departments - when I recently booked a flight with British Airways, they told me they had to pass all my booking data to the Brit Customs and Tax authorities, even though I don’t live in the UK.

So my guess is the export facility in this case was kludged on to an older system. But since data export is a hugely complex area, without first rate designers it was done wrong.

2. Good developers hate bureaucratic development methodologies, because they know they do much better and faster work in small tightly integrated teams. But governments prefer micromanagement and (apparent) risk-avoidance and mandate large teams of people, with each developer working on a tiny piece of functionality.

3. Still, money talks, and government would get quality if it paid good developers what it pays senior ministers. But of course it won’t.

So that’s why every Brit government IT project has been a disaster, and why the National ID system will quickly be compromised

More generally, this limitation blocks the Brit elite from ever getting the Orwellian control of citizens it so relentlessly seeks.

And when the Brits do finally decide to revolt, their government’s second rate IT systems will easily be subverted by a few smart hackers.

http://depleteduranium.wordpress.com/2007/11/22/incompetence-shall-set-brits-free/

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Time to break free

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

The Middle East’s oil exporters should end their currencies’ peg to the dollar
IN THE past week Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has damned it as a “worthless piece of paper” and China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, has moaned that it is causing his country “big pressure”. The dollar’s relentless decline—it hit a new low of $1.49 against the euro on November 21st—is prompting jibes from America’s critics, jangling investors’ nerves and giving policymakers headaches.

Nowhere are the dilemmas more acute than in the Gulf, where virtually all the oil-rich states peg their currencies to the greenback. The combination of soaring oil prices and the tumbling dollar is distorting their economies and fuelling inflation. When the Gulf states meet on December 3rd in Qatar, they should agree to loosen their ties to the dollar.

The argument for linking to the greenback was to provide an anchor for the region’s economies, many of which are small, open and financially immature. In effect, the Gulf states import America’s monetary policy. The trouble is that a fixed currency makes it hard for oil exporters to adjust to swings in the price of oil. And monetary policy in the world’s largest oil-importer is not always right for those who sell the stuff.

Soaring oil prices have brought the Gulf Arabs huge riches. Their real exchange rates, as a result, ought to rise. The simplest way to do that is for the currency to strengthen, but the peg prevents nominal appreciation. Worse, the dollar itself has been falling. The result is rising domestic inflation. Some smaller Gulf economies now have inflation rates of around 10%.

What is to be done? The two most widely discussed options are to revalue or to shift to a currency basket (which Kuwait has already done). By repegging their currencies to the dollar at a higher rate, the Gulf states would alleviate some of today’s inflationary pressure. But they would not address the underlying mismatch between any oil exporter and a dollar peg. Switching the peg to a basket of currencies that included, say, the euro and yen as well would give the Gulf states a bit more protection against oil-price swings, but it is hardly a perfect fit. Since most big currencies belong to oil importers, the Gulf States would still be linking their currencies to monetary conditions that may not suit them.

Eventually, the currency pegs should be abandoned. After all, developed economies that are big commodity exporters, such as Norway, allow their currencies to float. In recent years many emerging economies have shifted from exchange-rate pegs to a “managed float”. Instead of aiming for an exchange rate, their central banks have an inflation target. If the Gulf states move to a single currency, as they plan to in the next few years, that currency should surely float. But floating is not feasible in the short-term. These countries have no history of independent monetary policy and few institutions to conduct it.

Look beyond a basket

For the moment, the Gulf states are stuck with a currency peg. But they could do better than the dollar. One intriguing idea is to include the oil price as part of a basket that includes the leading currencies (see article). This would ensure their currencies absorbed some of the impact of oil-price swings.

A big uncertainty is what such a shift would mean for the dollar. In the short term, the effect on the Gulf states’ appetite for greenbacks would not be dramatic, since the dollar would have a big weight in any basket. And there should not be a sudden sale of the oil exporters’ dollar reserves. The worry is that the end of the Gulf states’ dollar peg would send jittery investors into a panic. That risk is real. But with oil prices rising and the dollar falling, the dangers of inaction are greater. The Gulf states need to get rid of their dollar peg now.

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10177927

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Depleted Uranium Dust May Kill You

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

DU May be Causing Global Contamination

There are those who believe that the widespread use of Depleted Uranium in weaponry is creating a cloud of low-level (but hazardous) radioactive particles around the world, causing a global epidemic of diabetes and cancer. (DU is used by the US and British military in coating tanks and shells.) One article on the global contamination theory is here: The Queen’s Death Star. And here’s the LATEST development:

They were told depleted uranium was not hazardous. Now, 23 years after a US arms plant closed, workers and residents have cancer - and experts say their suffering shows the use of such weapons may be a war crime. It is 50 years since Tony Ciarfello and his friends used the yard of a depleted uranium weapons factory as their playground in Colonie, a suburb of Albany in upstate New York state. . .Today there are lumps on Ciarfello’s chest - strange, round tumours that protrude about an inch. ‘No one seems to know what they are,’ he says. ‘I’ve also had a brain aneurysm caused by a suspected tumour. I’m constantly fatigued and for years I’ve had terrible pains, deep inside my leg bones. I fall over without warning and I’ve got a heart condition.’ Ciarfello’s illnesses have rendered him unable to work for years. Aged 57 and a father of five, he looks much older.

In a paper to be published in the next issue of the scientific journal Science of the Total Environment, a team led by Professor Randall Parrish of Leicester University reports the results of a three-year study of Colonie, funded by Britain’s Ministry of Defence.

Parrish’s team has found that DU contamination, which remains radioactive for millions of years, is in effect impossible to eradicate, not only from the environment but also from the bodies of humans. Twenty-three years after production ceased they tested the urine of five former workers. All are still contaminated with DU. . .

TV footage shot in Baghdad in 2003 shows children playing in the remains of tanks coated with thick, black DU oxide, while there have long been claims that the DU shells that destroyed Saddam Hussein’s tanks in the 1991 Gulf war were responsible for high rates of cancer in places such as Basra.

For a general article on DU see Nukes of the Gulf War by John Shirley.

http://signsofwitness.com/?p=1111

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Liar cop Blair survives no-confidence vote‏

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

Commissioner Sir Ian Blair has won a vote of confidence by members of the Metropolitan Police Authority. The UK’s most senior officer was facing censure after his force was found guilty of health and safety failures following the shooting of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes.

Fifteen members of the MPA supported Sir Ian, seven voted against him and there was one abstention.

After the vote Sir Ian said: “I’m going to go back and get on with my job.”

Pleased

He added: “I’m pleased to have the backing of the majority of the police authority. I don’t in any way minimise the tragedy that is the death of Jean Charles de Menezes. ”

MPA chairman Len Duvall said Sir Ian had the “overwhelming support” of the Police Authority.

He said: “I think it is appropriate he is allowed to get on with his job, which is about learning the lessons of this and making sure it never happens again in London.”

Mr Duvall said Sir Ian was not a “lame duck commissioner”.

He added that he expected Sir Ian to continue working for the rest of his contract, which continues for another two and a half years.

Despite the vote, the pressure remains on Sir Ian to resign. The Conservative candidate for London mayor, Boris Johnson, said he still thought the commissioner’s position was “very difficult”.

Speaking on the BBC’s World at One he said: “I did say from the very beginning that I thought he should go. I think it was absolutely unbelievable that nobody seemed willing to pay the price for the shooting of an innocent man in Stockwell Tube station.”

Mr de Menezes’s cousin, Erionaldo da Silva, said: “We believe Ian Blair’s position is untenable and we have no confidence in him. We do not believe that this vote resolves the main issues on this case.”

He called for an inquest into his cousin’s death “as soon as possible”.

During the meeting, Sir Ian’s supporters argued that the commissioner should be allowed to draw a line under the Stockwell shooting and concentrate on making London safer.

Silence

Sir Ian had sat in virtual silence during the four-hour meeting as members of the police authority argued whether he should keep his job.

One critic said Sir Ian should follow the example of the chairman of HM Revenue and Customs and resign.

But Mr Duvall said the watchdog body risked bringing itself into disrepute by the public and vitriolic attacks on Sir Ian.

He said they were entering “virtually unknown territory” as they met to make their most important decision since the authority was created seven years ago.

If the authority had failed to back Sir Ian, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith would have come under pressure to sack him.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7107631.stm

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Cellphone Tracking Powers on Request

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

By Ellen NakashimaFederal officials are routinely asking courts to order cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data so they can pinpoint the whereabouts of drug traffickers, fugitives and other criminal suspects, according to judges and industry lawyers.

In some cases, judges have granted the requests without requiring the government to demonstrate that there is probable cause to believe that a crime is taking place or that the inquiry will yield evidence of a crime. Privacy advocates fear such a practice may expose average Americans to a new level of government scrutiny of their daily lives.

Such requests run counter to the Justice Department’s internal recommendation that federal prosecutors seek warrants based on probable cause to obtain precise location data in private areas. The requests and orders are sealed at the government’s request, so it is difficult to know how often the orders are issued or denied.

The issue is taking on greater relevance as wireless carriers are racing to offer sleek services that allow cellphone users to know with the touch of a button where their friends or families are. The companies are hoping to recoup investments they have made to meet a federal mandate to provide enhanced 911 (E911) location tracking. Sprint Nextel, for instance, boasts that its “loopt” service even sends an alert when a friend is near, “putting an end to missed connections in the mall, at the movies or around town.”

With Verizon’s Chaperone service, parents can set up a “geofence” around, say, a few city blocks and receive an automatic text message if their child, holding the cellphone, travels outside that area.

“Most people don’t realize it, but they’re carrying a tracking device in their pocket,” said Kevin Bankston of the privacy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Cellphones can reveal very precise information about your location, and yet legal protections are very much up in the air.”

In a stinging opinion this month, a federal judge in Texas denied a request by a Drug Enforcement Administration agent for data that would identify a drug trafficker’s phone location by using the carrier’s E911 tracking capability. E911 tracking systems read signals sent to satellites from a phone’s Global Positioning System (GPS) chip or triangulated radio signals sent from phones to cell towers. Magistrate Judge Brian L. Owsley, of the Corpus Christi division of the Southern District of Texas, said the agent’s affidavit failed to focus on “specifics necessary to establish probable cause, such as relevant dates, names and places.”

Owsley decided to publish his opinion, which explained that the agent failed to provide “sufficient specific information to support the assertion” that the phone was being used in “criminal” activity. Instead, Owsley wrote, the agent simply alleged that the subject trafficked in narcotics and used the phone to do so. The agent stated that the DEA had ” ‘identified’ or ‘determined’ certain matters,” Owsley wrote, but “these identifications, determinations or revelations are not facts, but simply conclusions by the agency.”

Instead of seeking warrants based on probable cause, some federal prosecutors are applying for orders based on a standard lower than probable cause derived from two statutes: the Stored Communications Act and the Pen Register Statute, according to judges and industry lawyers. The orders are typically issued by magistrate judges in U.S. district courts, who often handle applications for search warrants.

In one case last month in a southwestern state, an FBI agent obtained precise location data with a court order based on the lower standard, citing “specific and articulable facts” showing reasonable grounds to believe the data are “relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation,” said Al Gidari, a partner at Perkins Coie in Seattle, who reviews data requests for carriers.

Another magistrate judge, who has denied about a dozen such requests in the past six months, said some agents attach affidavits to their applications that merely assert that the evidence offered is “consistent with the probable cause standard” of Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. The judge spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

“Law enforcement routinely now requests carriers to continuously ‘ping’ wireless devices of suspects to locate them when a call is not being made . . . so law enforcement can triangulate the precise location of a device and [seek] the location of all associates communicating with a target,” wrote Christopher Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulatory affairs for CTIA — the Wireless Association, in a July comment to the Federal Communications Commission. He said the “lack of a consistent legal standard for tracking a user’s location has made it difficult for carriers to comply” with law enforcement agencies’ demands.

Gidari, who also represents CTIA, said he has never seen such a request that was based on probable cause.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said field attorneys should follow the department’s policy. “We strongly recommend that prosecutors in the field obtain a warrant based on probable cause” to get location data “in a private area not accessible to the public,” he said. “When we become aware of situations where this has not occurred, we contact the field office and discuss the matter.”

The phone data can home in on a target to within about 30 feet, experts said.

Federal agents used exact real-time data in October 2006 to track a serial killer in Florida who was linked to at least six murders in four states, including that of a University of Virginia graduate student, whose body was found along the Blue Ridge Parkway. The killer died in a police shooting in Florida as he was attempting to flee.

“Law enforcement has absolutely no interest in tracking the locations of law-abiding citizens. None whatsoever,” Boyd said. “What we’re doing is going through the courts to lawfully obtain data that will help us locate criminal targets, sometimes in cases where lives are literally hanging in the balance, such as a child abduction or serial murderer on the loose.”

In many cases, orders are being issued for cell-tower site data, which are less precise than the data derived from E911 signals. While the E911 technology could possibly tell officers what building a suspect was in, cell-tower site data give an area that could range from about three to 300 square miles.

Since 2005, federal magistrate judges in at least 17 cases have denied federal requests for the less-precise cellphone tracking data absent a demonstration of probable cause that a crime is being committed. Some went out of their way to issue published opinions in these otherwise sealed cases.

“Permitting surreptitious conversion of a cellphone into a tracking device without probable cause raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns especially when the phone is in a house or other place where privacy is reasonably expected,” said Judge Stephen William Smith of the Southern District of Texas, whose 2005 opinion on the matter was among the first published.

But judges in a majority of districts have ruled otherwise on this issue, Boyd said. Shortly after Smith issued his decision, a magistrate judge in the same district approved a federal request for cell-tower data without requiring probable cause. And in December 2005, Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein of the Southern District of New York, approving a request for cell-site data, wrote that because the government did not install the “tracking device” and the user chose to carry the phone and permit transmission of its information to a carrier, no warrant was needed.

These judges are issuing orders based on the lower standard, requiring a showing of “specific and articulable facts” showing reasonable grounds to believe the data will be “relevant and material” to a criminal investigation.

Boyd said the government believes this standard is sufficient for cell-site data. “This type of location information, which even in the best case only narrows a suspect’s location to an area of several city blocks, is routinely generated, used and retained by wireless carriers in the normal course of business,” he said.

The trend’s secrecy is troubling, privacy advocates said. No government body tracks the number of cellphone location orders sought or obtained. Congressional oversight in this area is lacking, they said. And precise location data will be easier to get if the Federal Communication Commission adopts a Justice Department proposal to make the most detailed GPS data available automatically.

Often, Gidari said, federal agents tell a carrier they need real-time tracking data in an emergency but fail to follow up with the required court approval. Justice Department officials said to the best of their knowledge, agents are obtaining court approval unless the carriersprovide the data voluntarily.

To guard against abuse, Congress should require comprehensive reporting to the court and to Congress about how and how often the emergency authority is used, said John Morris, senior counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.

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Keating: US able to wage Iran war

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

Admiral Timothy J. Keating claims the US is more than prepared to wage war on Iran if Washington chooses to launch a military strike.

“I don’t think our capability has diminished at all,” Commander of US Pacific Command, Admiral Keating, told Reuters in Bahrain on Wednesday.

The admiral’s fire-back remarks were made in response to comments by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who was also in Bahrain last week. Ahmadinejad had said that Washington’s ’shabby’ army and its ‘rusty and disabled weapons’ pose no threat to the Islamic Republic.

Admiral Timothy, who claims that the US military’s capability remains undiminished even after four years of its siege on Iraq, maintains that because of the ‘continued presence’ of the US Army in the region, the Fifth Fleet and Central Command’s ability is ‘even better than before’.

The admiral, however, did not explain how military experience equates to overall readiness.

He also made no remarks about the low morale of US troops and how the US intends to launch another war in spite of the soaring suicide rate among American vets returning from the war-torn country.

The White House continues to threaten Iran over its nuclear energy program, saying Tehran pursues nuclear weapons.

This comes at a time that Iran says it seeks nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and the UN nuclear watchdog confirms Tehran’s peaceful nuclear intentions.

Iran has warned Washington and its allies of a ‘crushing response’ to any threats against the Iranian nation.

MD/AA/MG

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Socialist Firefighters To Spy for Feds

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

By EILEEN SULLIVAN

Firefighters in major cities are being trained to take on a new role as lookouts for terrorism, raising concerns of eroding their standing as American icons and infringing on people’s privacy.

Unlike police, firefighters and emergency medical personnel don’t need warrants to access hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings each year, putting them in a position to spot behavior that could indicate terrorist activity or planning.

But there are fears that they could lose the faith of a skeptical public by becoming the eyes of the government, looking for suspicious items such as building blueprints or bomb-making manuals or materials.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Americans have given up some of their privacy rights in an effort to prevent future strikes. The government monitors phone calls and e-mails; people who fly have their belongings searched before boarding and are limited in what they can carry; and some people have trouble traveling because their names are similar to those on terrorist watch lists.

The American Civil Liberties Union says using firefighters to gather intelligence is another step in that direction. Mike German, a former FBI agent who is now national security policy counsel to the ACLU, said the concept is dangerously close to the Bush administration’s 2002 proposal to have workers with access to private homes — such as postal carriers and telephone repairmen — report suspicious behavior to the FBI.

“Americans universally abhorred that idea,” German said.

The Homeland Security Department is testing a program with the New York City fire department to share intelligence information so firefighters are better prepared when they respond to emergency calls. Homeland Security also trains the New York City fire service in how to identify material or behavior that may indicate terrorist activities. If it’s successful, the government intends to expand the program to other major metropolitan areas.

As part of the program, which started last December, Homeland Security gave secret clearances to nine New York fire chiefs, according to reports obtained by The Associated Press.

“They’re really doing technical inspections, and if perchance they find something like, you know, a bunch of RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) rounds in somebody’s basement, I think it’s a no-brainer,” said Jack Tomarchio, a senior official in Homeland Security’s intelligence division. “The police ought to know about that; the fire service ought to know about that; and potentially maybe somebody in the intelligence community should know about that.”

Even before the federal program began, New York firefighters and inspectors had been training to recognize materials and behavior the government identifies as “signs of planning and support for terrorism.”

When going to private residences, for example, they are told to be alert for a person who is hostile, uncooperative or expressing hate or discontent with the United States; unusual chemicals or other materials that seem out of place; ammunition, firearms or weapons boxes; surveillance equipment; still and video cameras; night-vision goggles; maps, photos, blueprints; police manuals, training manuals, flight manuals; and little or no furniture other than a bed or mattress.

The trial program with Homeland Security opens a clear information-sharing channel — which did not exist before — between the fire service and Homeland Security’s intelligence division.

“We’re there to help people, and by discovering these type of events, we’re helping people,” said New York City Fire Chief Salvatore Cassano. “There are many things that firefighters do that other law enforcement or other agents aren’t able to do.” He added, “A normal person that doesn’t have this training wouldn’t be looking for it.”

Cassano would not discuss specifics, but he did say that some terrorism-related information has been passed along to law enforcement since firefighters and officers began the training three years ago. “They’ve had some hits,” Cassano said. “It’s working.”

Separately, the fire services in Washington, D.C., Phoenix and Atlanta have also been receiving terrorism-related intelligence training. Los Angeles County provides intelligence training so firefighters and inspectors can spot dangerous chemicals or other materials that could be used in bombs. And the fire service is also represented in at least 13 state and regional intelligence “fusion” centers across the country — where local, state and federal agencies share information about terrorism and other crimes.

In Washington, the fire service made its first foray into the intelligence world about two years ago, and now D.C. Fire/EMS has access to the same terrorism-related intelligence as the police, said Larry Schultz, an assistant fire chief in charge of operations.

D.C. firefighters and EMS providers are in 170,000 homes and businesses each year on routine calls, Schultz said.

“So we see things and observe things that may be useful to law enforcement,” he said. “We can walk into your house. We don’t need a search warrant.” If an ambulance team shows up at a house and sees detailed maps of the District’s public transit system on the wall, that’s something the EMS provider would pass along, he said.

“It’s the evolution of the fire service,” said Bob Khan, the fire chief in Phoenix, which has created an information-sharing arrangement between the fire service and law enforcement through terrorism liaison officers.

Because firefighters are on the front lines, the fire service needs to know about intelligence that could somehow affect what they do, said Gregory Cade, who as head of the U.S. Fire Administration is the nation’s top fire chief.

If, for example, Washington is hosting an International Monetary Fund meeting where there will be a large group of protesters and a truckload of gasoline has been stolen in Baltimore, firefighters need to know about intelligence from overseas that terrorists are trying to make explosive devices out of gasoline, Schultz said.

“Getting appropriate, actionable intelligence is important for a fire chief in deciding what to do and how to allocate resources and to know what’s going on,” Cade said. “No one is expecting us to be the analyst person who is sitting down, trying to connect all of this stuff together and determining, ‘Oh, yes, this looks like a terrorist plot.’ ”

But Cade said that until recently, there’s been no mechanism for fire departments to share what they learn with law enforcement and intelligence analysts who could use it.

“If in the conduct of doing their jobs they come across evidence of a crime, of course they should report that to the police,” said the ACLU’s German. “But you don’t want them being intelligence agents.”

It’s of particular concern for communities already under law enforcement scrutiny. “Do we want them to fear the fire department as well as the police?” German asked.

The Detroit metropolitan area, which has one of the largest concentrations of Arab Americans in the country, does not conduct this type of intelligence training, nor does it plan to. “That’s a touchy area,” said Detroit’s deputy fire commissioner, Seth Doyle. Detroit firefighters do receive training about hazardous materials, but not the details that New York and D.C. firefighters are now on the lookout for.

A structural diagram of the Ambassador Bridge, which links Detroit to Canada, materials and literature to make a bomb and a bomb prototype are things firefighters should pay attention to, Doyle said. But the bridge diagram by itself might not be enough. “I don’t want our folks to be put in a position where they’re reporting something that creates a situation where there was really no real problem in the first place,” Doyle said.

Jeff Zack, a spokesman for the International Association of Fire Fighters, said the union does not know enough about the training programs to say whether it’s a good idea for the country, but the union is concerned that the training be done properly and that this new development does not take away people’s rights.

Advocates of the fire service’s intelligence role say privacy will not be violated. Homeland Security said if its program with New York is expanded across the country, civil rights and civil liberties training would be included.

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Thanksgiving Reflections of an Anti-Capitalist

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

Institutionalized Glorification of our Greed and Gluttony: Thanksgiving Reflections of an Anti-Capitalist

Gluttony and greed kill more than the sword.

—Italian proverb

Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving.

~Charles Lamb, 1821

Another propaganda-driven greed-fest has nearly passed in the land of the corporatized and the home of the subservient. Obedient little wage slaves and consumers that most of us are (to varying degrees of course), we have once again dutifully greased the wheels of the monstrous capitalist machine and made our proper sacrifices at the altar of Mammon. Between our voracious inhalation of all manner of edibles to our obscene spree of rapacious spending using money eagerly fronted by the usurious kings of finance capital, Thanksgiving and Black Friday are celebratory days indeed for the moneyed elite comprising the allegedly non-existent ruling class in our “egalitarian” and “democratic” nation.

I celebrated Thanksgiving. However, I wasn’t bowing my head and expressing gratitude to the Calvinist God in which I am “supposed to” believe for the things for which I “should” be grateful. There was an interesting duality to my day as I contemplated that for which I feel a deep ingratitude and celebrated that which sparks my feelings of sincere gratitude.

The components of my “Thanklessgiving” included:

1. The trillions of OUR tax dollars OUR government spends each year attempting to attain global hegemony through nearly ubiquitous military bases, a nuclear arsenal large enough to obliterate the universe, and numerous ecocidal, genocidal invasions of ridiculously weaker nations which, fortunately, usually give us a bit of what we deserve by sending us home limping.

2. The US American Gulag, a penal system populated by over two million human beings. The “land of the free” has the largest number of incarcerated people in the world, even surpassing China, the most populous and allegedly most repressive nation in the world. Criminalizing select forms of self-medicating (those that predominate in the urban core Bantustans to which we have relegated much of our black population) has proven to be an efficient means of “legally” repressing black males. Meanwhile, alcohol, a drug which severely impairs judgment, lowers inhibitions, causes the bloody demise of over 16,000 innocents on our highways each year, and tends to increase the belligerence factor exponentially, remains quite legal and practically flows from the spigots of our homes. And we’re imprisoning people for the possession of marijuana?

3. Factory farms and the fast food industry that necessitated their genesis. Speciesism is a cancer that has long infected our collective thinking with the notion that we can selectively inflict wanton cruelty on non-human animals. Pigs are as intelligent as dogs (imagine the mass outrage if we began large-scale torture, mutilation, and consumption of family canines) yet we imprison them in such tight quarters for such extended periods that they go insane, treat sows as breeding machines, rip out their teeth without anesthetizing them, sometimes disembowel them with hooks through their anuses while they are alive, and at other times boil them to death while they are still conscious. Recently, the turkeys who suffered unimaginably painful lives and deaths (so their flesh could help expand the midriffs of scores of millions of human animals) experienced their own “thanksgiving” when their agonized existences finally came to an end. Instead of using the monster military (which We the Taxpayers have paid to create) as a means to murder untold millions of civilians who “are in the wrong place at the wrong time,” perhaps we would be better served to evacuate the human and non-human animals from the murderous slaughterhouses and thus finally facilitate the smart use of “smart bombs.”

4. The crypto-racism that continues to mar our sociocultural landscape like cesspools of toxic sludge. Aside from the aforementioned “War on Drugs” that targets black males and enables us to justify arming and supporting Latin American Right Wing dictators who foster an environment which allows our corporations to rape their nations, there is still a chasm of inequality between blacks and whites in terms of income, wealth, health, and education. The root causes of this gross injustice are myriad but include rampant covert racism (Jim Crow is not dead; he has simply gone incognito) and epidemic intergenerational poverty perpetuated by deplorable public education in predominately black schools and various other nearly insurmountable systemic impediments to climbing the socioeconomic ladder. And let’s not forget Lou Dobbs’ crusade against the Mexican migration to the US forced by neoliberal economic policies born of savage capitalism.

5. The War on Terror. A more appropriate name for this abomination would be “The War on Islamic People because many of their nations possess much of the oil that capitalism needs to continue fueling the engines of profit and endless growth and because many Muslims are furious that the Zionists stole Palestine.” I guess they went with the War on Terror because the true name is too cumbersome. If we stopped bankrolling the terrorist state of Israel, launching imperial invasions, installing and supporting ruthless regimes, and wielding our economic power like a cudgel, we would stop pissing off so many people and wouldn’t have the constant concern of angry victims employing asymmetric warfare against us.

6. The evisceration of our Constitution and steady march toward fascism. Bush’s signing statements, the Patriot Act and subsequent Orwellian legislation, the trend toward privatization of the military, the increasingly incestuous relationship between the public and private sectors, two consecutive stolen Presidential elections, Islamophobia, pathological nativism, and an ever-increasing obsession with militarism are the obvious symptoms of a nation plunging into an abyss not unlike that experienced by the Germans under the Nazi regime. While we are not there yet, we are certainly experiencing the prefigurements of “capitalism in decay.” Remember that Hitler and his cabal did not fully initiate the machinations of fascism overnight either.

7. The soul (and human and animal and Earth) murdering socioeconomic construct of capitalism. While it is true that selfishness, greed, narcissism, and the tendency to exploit are intrinsic to each human being, we choose to glorify, embrace, amplify and perpetuate a system that demands that we hone these characteristics like weapons in order to “succeed” within our malignant means of economic organization. Tragically, even those who recognize the infinite toxicity of such practices still need to employ them to some extent simply to survive.

8. The mainstream media and Madison Avenue. These entities are deeply complicit in crimes of the highest order, including the ongoing genocide in Iraq that has killed millions of people dating back to the Gulf War and the insatiable desire we US Americans have to acquire more “stuff” (also known as consumerism—a practice that is literally killing our planet). Crypto-fascist media outlets like Fox News and the endless stream of advertising blasted at us 24/7 serve the interests of our depraved moneyed elite well as they shepherd the masses to support and glorify the malevolent American Empire with sanguine enthusiasm.

9. The myth that “America doesn’t torture.” Sorry folks, but we have been doing it for quite some time. Abu Ghraib was no anomaly. MK-ULTRA was not about mind control. The CIA used the results of the horrifying abuse Dr. Ewen Cameron inflicted on his psychiatric patients to write Kubark, their manual on employing psychological torture. During the Vietnam War, the US employed Operation Phoenix, which included the routine use of torture and resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 Vietnamese. The School of Americas (now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) at Fort Benning in Georgia has churned out over 60,000 Latin American Right Wing thugs trained to torture and murder any who dare challenge the sacred right of capitalists to rape and exploit our neighbors to the south, including saintly men like Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was gunned down for having the fortitude to stand up for the impoverished victims of US-sanctioned and financed death squads in El Salvador.

10. The existence of over one million homeless human beings in a nation awash in abundance. Our perverse system spends trillions of PUBLIC dollars on our leviathan killing apparatus yet we apply asinine palliatives, like the privately-funded Christian homeless shelter where I helped prepare and serve Thanksgiving dinner again this year, to feed and shelter our indigent and hungry brethren (many of whom are veterans who were brain-washed into serving in our imperial conquests and then kicked to the curb like yesterday’s garbage).

As I reveled in my role of ingrate to the Empire, I gave sincere thanks for:

1. Family and true friends.

2. Chandra

3. Patrice Greanville, the editor in chief of Cyrano’s Journal, who is also my friend, ally, and mentor.

4. My intellect, moral stamina and profound life experiences which have enabled me to shed my false consciousness and begin waging a sustained struggle against the many ravages of the cancer of capitalism and the American Empire.

5. The numerous anti-capitalist individuals, websites, publications, and groups with which I have become allied and affiliated.

6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, for providing us with the knowledge and tools to battle the exploitative, murderous abomination that is destroying the Earth.

7. Radicals throughout history, including Thomas Paine, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, MLK, Malcolm X, Archbishop Romero, and many others.

8. The numerous brilliant and intellectually courageous contributors to Cyrano’s Journal and Thomas Paine’s Corner.

9. The Earth, its infinite beauty, and its capacity to sustain life.

10. Groups like PETA and the Animal Liberation Front. While I don’t formally militate with a specific group, I am a passionate animal liberationist. Collectively, we horrifically torture and slaughter billions of animals each year. While too far ahead of the consciousness curve to effect sweeping changes to the prevailing paradigm, “terrorist groups” like the ALF serve the movement well and their efforts are laudable.

11. Hamas, for the social service work it does on behalf of its horribly oppressed people and for its relentless struggle against US/Israeli efforts to eradicate the Palestinians.

12. Hugo Chavez, for catalyzing and perpetuating the Bolivarian Revolution as an alternative to the deeply entrenched Washington Consensus and for the huge strides he has made towards egalitarianism in Venezuela.

13. Fidel Castro, despite his imperfections (which have been ridiculously over-exaggerated by both the capitalist propaganda networks and the reactionary Gusanos), has remained steadfast in his defiance against US and capitalist domination of the Western Hemisphere and has launched numerous invasions of other nations with his army of physicians. Small wonder he invokes such fear in the tiny, shriveled hearts of capitalists and petite-bourgeoisie the world over.

14. The Internet, for providing a means for people of conscience to connect, network, and strive to give the masses an education to supplant their capitalist mind-fuck. Underestimating the importance of winning hearts and minds would be a gross miscalculation indeed for those of us who want to evoke significant social and political change for the better.

Yes, our social indoctrination to immerse ourselves in the “traditional activities” of Thanksgiving and Black Friday is premised on filthy lies, the torture of hundreds of millions of innocent birds, a celebration of the initiation of the Native American Genocide, an unconscionable waste of resources, and the insatiable greed of those atop the capitalist hierarchy. More nauseating than eating too much turkey, isn’t it?

Yet that doesn’t mean that we can’t opt out of “the great American tradition,” use the time to experience gratitude for those aspects of our existence which are truly meaningful, and commit ourselves to the struggle against the beast that is devouring them.

Jason Miller is a recovering US American middle class suburbanite who strives to remain intellectually free. He is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s associate editor (http://www.bestcyrano.org/) and publishes Thomas Paine’s Corner within Cyrano’s at http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/. You can reach him at JMiller@bestcyrano.com

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Rumsfeld Torture Case Dropped in France

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

PARIS (AP) - A Paris prosecutor has thrown out a complaint against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for torture in Iraq and at the U.S. military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, a lawyer for one of the four groups that filed the case said Friday.

The prosecutor dismissed the case on the grounds that Rumsfeld benefits from immunity, said attorney Patrick Baudoin, president of the International Federation of Human Rights. The organizations that brought the complaint have asked the prosecutor to reconsider.

The complaint was filed Oct. 25 during a visit by Rumsfeld to Paris.

Prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin said Rumsfeld is covered by the immunity accorded to heads of state or government and foreign ministers for acts during their time in office, according to a letter seen by The Associated Press. The French Foreign Ministry advised the prosecutor’s office in the matter, the letter said.

Rumsfeld’s one-day visit last month was enough time for the European and American human rights groups to take advantage of a French disposition by which people suspected of torture can be prosecuted in France if they are on French soil.

The complaint said that Rumsfeld, in his former position as U.S. defense secretary, “authorized and ordered crimes of torture to be carried out … as well as other war crimes.”

It cited documents including memos from Rumsfeld, internal reports and testimony from former U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski - the one-time commander of U.S. military prisons in Iraq.

The Bush administration has repeatedly denied the government tortures people.

The complaint was filed by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights and two Paris-based groups, the International Federation of Human Rights and the League of Human Rights.

The International Federation for Human Rights cited cases it claimed had set a precedent for a new interpretation of immunity. Those included Chile’s late dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who was pursued in Europe in 1990s and, more recently, former Chad President Hissene Habre, indicted by a Belgian court last year for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

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Loose Change Final Cut Press Conference

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

This is the official press launch for Loose Change Final Cut. The film is the third and final version of the most downloaded and watched movie in Internet history. The movie explores the events of September 11th, 2001 challenging the official story as put forward by the Bush administration and the mainstream media.

It was hosted by Emily Buchanan of BBC World Affairs and features both the director of the film, Dylan Avery, and the UK distributor Tim Sparke, of Mercury Media. It also features guest speaker Gordon Ross, a mechanical engineer who features in the new version of the film.

The Press Launch video was filmed, edited and produced by myself and planetfrog.

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Now for ID cards - and the biometric blues

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

Ben Goldacre

Sometimes just throwing a few long words about can make people think you know what you’re talking about. Words like “biometric”. When Alistair Darling was asked if the government will ditch ID cards in the light of this week’s data cock-up, he replied: “The key thing about identity cards is, of course, that information is protected by personal biometric information. The problem at present is that, because we do not have that protection, information is much more vulnerable than it should be.”

Yes, that’s the problem. We need biometric identification. Fingerprints. Iris scans. Gordon Brown says so too: “What we must ensure is that identity fraud is avoided, and the way to avoid identity fraud is to say that for passport information we will have the biometric support that is necessary.”

Tsutomu Matsumoto is a Japanese mathematician, a cryptographer who works on security, and he decided to see if he could fool the machines which identify you by your fingerprint. This home science project costs about £20. Take a finger and make a cast with the moulding plastic sold in hobby shops. Then pour some liquid gelatin (ordinary food gelatin) into that mould and let it harden. Stick this over your finger pad: it fools fingerprint detectors about 80% of the time. The joy is, once you’ve fooled the machine, your fake fingerprint is made of the same stuff as fruit pastilles, so you can simply eat the evidence.

But what if you can’t get the finger? Well, you can chop one off, of course - another risk with biometrics. But there is an easier way. Find a fingerprint on glass. Sorry, I should have pointed out that every time you touch something, if your security systems rely on biometric ID, then you’re essentially leaving your pin number on a post-it note.

You can make a fingerprint image on glass more visible by painting over it with some cyanoacrylate adhesive. That’s a posh word for superglue. Photograph that with a digital camera. Improve the contrast in a picture editing program, and print the image on to a transparency sheet, then use that to etch the fingerprint on to a copper-plated printed circuit board (it sounds difficult, but you can buy a beginner’s etching set at Maplin for £10.67). This gives an image with some three-dimensional relief. You can now make your gelatin fingerpad using this as a mould.

Should I have told you all that, or am I very naughty? Yes to both.

It’s well known that security systems which rely on secret methods are less secure than open systems, because the greater the number of people who know about the system, the more people there are to spot holes in it, and it is important that there are no holes. If someone tells you their system is perfect and secret, that’s like quacks who tell you their machine cures cancer but they can’t tell you how: it’s cobblers.

Open the box, quack. In fact you might sense that the whole field of biometrics and ID is rather like medical quackery: as usual, on the one hand we have snake oil salesmen promising the earth, and on the other a bunch of humanities graduates who don’t understand technology, science or even human behaviour. Buying it. Bigging it up. Thinking it’s a magic wand.

But it’s not. The leak last week wasn’t because of unauthorised access, it couldn’t have been stopped with biometrics; it happened because of authorised access which was managed with a contemptible, cavalier incompetence. The damaging repercussions for 25 million people will not be ameliorated by biometrics.

So will biometrics prevent ID theft? Well, it might make it more difficult for you to prove your innocence. And once your fingerprints are stolen, they are harder to replace than your pin number. But here’s the final nail in the coffin. Your fingerprint data will be stored in your passport or ID card as a series of numbers, called the “minutiae template”. In the new biometric passport with its wireless chip, remember, all your data can be read and decrypted with a device near you, but not touching you.

What good would the data be, if someone lifted it? Not much, insisted Jim Knight, the minister for schools and learners, in July: “It is not possible to recreate a fingerprint using the numbers that are stored. The algorithm generates a unique number, producing no information of any use to identity thieves.” Crystal clear, Jim.

Unfortunately, a team of mathematicians published a paper in April this year, showing that they could reconstruct a fingerprint from this data alone. In fact, they printed out the images they made, and then - crucially, completing the circle - used them to fool fingerprint readers.

Ah biometrics. Such a soothingly technical word. Repeat it to yourself.

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