BREAKING: Discover How A Slacker Makes $100,000 A Year!

WEBMASTERS! Get Your Website To The Top Of Google

White House Can Keep Its Secrets - For Now

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

Bush Admin. May Keep Visitor Records Private While Appealing Court Decision To Open Files

AP 

A federal judge agreed Friday to let the Bush administration keep secret the lists of visitors to the White House until an appeals court decides whether the documents are public records.

U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth granted the White House request five days after ordering the Secret Service to turn over the records to a liberal watchdog group that sought them under the Freedom of Information Act.

The logs being sought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington relate to White House visits regarding nine conservative religious commentators, including James Dobson, Gary Bauer and the late Rev. Jerry Falwell.

Visitor records are created by the Secret Service, which is subject to the Freedom of Information Act. The Bush administration ordered the data be turned over to the White House, where it is treated as presidential records outside the scope of the public records law.

Lamberth ruled logs from the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney’s residence remain Secret Service documents and are subject to public records requests.

Have Your Say: White House Can Keep Its Secrets - For Now
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

US urges others to help shut Gitmo

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

US Secretary of State has urged countries that have nationals in Guantanamo Bay to help Washington close the detention center.

“We need some help in closing Guantanamo,” said Condoleezza Rice.

Rice added that since the freed inmates could go on to jeopardize international security, the countries should guarantee the “bad people” in custody would not be a danger when released.

She said the camp contained dangerous men who had been plotting against capitals in the US, Europe and South East Asia and had been caught during the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Hundreds of people are currently being held in US prisons at Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba after the invasion of Afghanistan in early 2002.

UN officials have strongly criticized the human rights violations at the US prison and have expressed concern at US treatment of the detainees, US military courts, and its interrogation techniques.

SBB/RA

Have Your Say: US urges others to help shut Gitmo
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

CIA ‘impeded 9/11 panel’s inquiry’

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

The CIA has purposely impeded the Sep. 11 Commission’s inquiry by withholding interrogation videos, say the two chairmen of the panel.

The CIA ‘clearly obstructed’ the Commission’s investigation, said Lee H. Hamilton.

“I don’t know whether that’s illegal or not, but it’s certainly wrong,” said Thomas H. Kean, other Chairman of the Commission.

A CIA spokesman has claimed that the commission staff members never specifically asked for the videos.

A seven-page memorandum prepared by Philip D. Zelicow, the panel’s former executive director, recounts a meeting on December 2003 between Hamilton and George Tenet, then the director of the agency.

In the meeting, Hamilton told Tenet that the CIA should provide all relevant documents even if the Commission had not specifically asked for them.

According to the memorandum, Tenet in response to Hamilton made no mention of the videotapes of interrogations.

The memorandum reiterates that federal law penalizes anyone who knowingly and willfully withholds or covers up a material fact from a federal inquiry or makes any false statement to investigators.

MHE/RE

Have Your Say: CIA ‘impeded 9/11 panel’s inquiry’
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

New High-Tech Cameras Are Watching You

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

In the era of computer-controlled surveillance, your every move could be captured by cameras, whether you’re shopping in the grocery store or driving on the freeway. Proponents say it will keep us safe, but at what cost?

A dome camera in Lyon, France. Intelligent surveillance networks are commonplace in European cities. Now, many American municipalities are building similar systems. (Photograph by Getty Images)

The ferry arrived, the gangway went down and 7-year-old Emma Powell rushed toward the Statue of Liberty. She climbed onto the grass around the star-shaped foundation. She put on a green foam crown with seven protruding rays. Turning so that her body was oriented just like Lady Liberty’s, Emma extended her right arm skyward with an imaginary torch. I snapped a picture. Then I took my niece’s hand, and we went off to buy some pretzels.

Other people were taking pictures, too, and not just the other tourists—Liberty Island, name notwithstanding, is one of the most heavily surveilled places in America. Dozens of cameras record hundreds of hours of video daily, a volume that strains the monitoring capability of guards. The National Park Service has enlisted extra help, and as Emma and I strolled around, we weren’t just being watched by people. We were being watched by machines.

Liberty Island’s video cameras all feed into a computer system. The park doesn’t disclose details, but fully equipped, the system is capable of running software that analyzes the imagery and automatically alerts human overseers to any suspicious events. The software can spot when somebody abandons a bag or backpack. It has the ability to discern between ferryboats, which are allowed to approach the island, and private vessels, which are not. And it can count bodies, detecting if somebody is trying to stay on the island after closing, or assessing when people are grouped too tightly together, which might indicate a fight or gang activity. “A camera with artificial intelligence can be there 24/7, doesn’t need a bathroom break, doesn’t need a lunch break and doesn’t go on vacation,” says Ian Ehrenberg, former vice president of Nice Systems, the program’s developer.

Most Americans would probably welcome such technology at what clearly is a marquee terrorist target. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in July 2007 found that 71 percent of Americans favor increased video surveillance. What people may not realize, however, is that advanced monitoring systems such as the one at the Statue of Liberty are proliferating around the country. High-profile national security efforts make the news—wiretapping phone conversations, Internet moni­toring—but state-of-the-art surveillance is increasingly being used in more every-day settings. By local police and businesses. In banks, schools and stores. There are an estimated 30 million surveillance cameras now deployed in the United States shooting 4 billion hours of footage a week. Americans are being watched, all of us, almost everywhere.

We have arrived at a unique moment in the history of surveillance. The price of both megapixels and gigabytes has plummeted, making it possible to collect a previously unimaginable quantity and quality of data. Advances in processing power and software, meanwhile, are beginning to allow computers to surmount the greatest limitation of traditional surveillance—the ability of eyeballs to effectively observe the activity on dozens of video screens simultaneously. Computers can’t do all the work by themselves, but they can expand the capabilities of humans exponentially.

Security expert Bruce Schneier says that it is naive to think that we can stop these technological advances, especially as they become more affordable and are hard-wired into everyday businesses. (I know of a local pizzeria that warns customers with a posted sign: “Stop stealing the spice shakers! We know who you are, we have 24-hour surveillance!”) But it is also reckless to let the advances proceed without a discussion of safeguards against privacy abuses. “Society is fundamentally changing and we aren’t having a conversation about it,” Schneier says. “We are entering the era of wholesale surveillance.”

A Face in the Crowd Used by banks, hotels and retail stores, 3VR’s “searchable surveillance” systems automatically create a template of every face that passes in front of security cameras (it caught our author here at a Chicago hotel check-in counter). The system creates a mathematical model based on the geometry of each person’s face that can be compared to a central list of known suspects for instant alerts. The technology can also automatically log events based on an automated object recognition analysis of an entire scene—for example, Frank Jones met with Doris Meeker at 12:45 pm; Meeker arrived in a blue sedan. Because all events are cataloged, several months’ worth of data can be analyzed in minutes.

Earlier this year, on a hot summer afternoon, I left my Brooklyn apartment to do some shoplifting.

I cruised the aisles of the neighborhood grocery store, a Pathmark, tossing items into my cart like a normal shopper would—Frosted Mini-Wheats, Pledge Wipes, a bag of carrots. Then I put them on the belt at checkout. My secret was on the lower level of the cart: a 12-pack of beer, concealed and undetectable. Or so I thought. Midway through checkout the cashier addressed me, no malice in her voice, but no doubt either. “Do you want to ring up that beer?”

My heist had been condoned by Pedro Ramos, Pathmark’s vice president of loss prevention, though he didn’t know precisely when or where I was going to attempt it. The beer was identified by an object-recognition scanner at ankle level—a LaneHawk, manufactured by Evolution Robotics—which prompted the cashier’s question. Overhead, a camera recorded the incident and an alert was triggered in Ramos’s office miles away on Staten Island. He immediately pulled up digital video and later relayed what he saw. “You concealed a 12-pack of Coronas on the bottom of the cart by strategically placing newspaper circulars so as to obstruct the view of the cashier.”

Busted.

Pathmark uses StoreVision, a powerful video analytic and data-mining system. There are as many as 120 cameras in some stores, and employees with high-level security clearances can log on via the Web and see what any one of them is recording in real time. An executive on vacation in Brussels could spy on the frozen-food aisle in Brooklyn.

In 2006 theft and fraud cost American stores $41.6 billion, an all-time high. Employee theft accounted for nearly half of the total (shoplifting was only a third), so much of the surveillance aims to catch in-house crooks. If the cashier had given me the beer for free—employees often work with an outside accomplice—the system would know by automatically comparing what the video recorded with what the register logged. The technol­ogies employed by Pathmark don’t stop crime but they make a dent; weekly losses are reduced by an average of 15 percent.

Pathmark archives every transaction of every customer, and the grocery chain is hardly alone. Amazon knows what you read; Netflix, your taste in movies. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo retain your queries for months, and can identify searches by IP address—sometimes by individual computer. Many corporations log your every transaction with a stated goal of reducing fraud and improving marketing efforts. Until fairly recently it was impractical to retain all this data. But now the low cost of digital storage—you can get a terabyte hard drive for less than $350—makes nearly limitless archiving possible.

So what’s the problem? “The concern is that information collected for one purpose is used for something entirely different down the road,” says Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

This may sound like a privacy wonk’s paranoia. But examples abound. Take E-ZPass. Drivers signed up for the system to speed up toll collection. But 11 states now supply E-ZPass records—when and where a toll was paid, and by whom—in response to court orders in criminal cases. Seven of those states provide information in civil cases such as divorce, proving, for instance, that a husband who claimed he was at a meeting in Pennsylvania was actually heading to his lover’s house in New Jersey. (New York divorce lawyer Jacalyn Barnett has called E-ZPass the “easy way to show you took the offramp to adultery.”)

On a case-by-case basis, the collection of surveillance footage and customer data is usually justifiable and benign. But the totality of information being amassed combined with the relatively fluid flow of that data can be troubling. Corporations often share what they know about customers with government agencies and vice versa. AT&T, for example, is being sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group, for allowing the National Security Agency almost unlimited access to monitor customers’ e-mails, phone calls and Internet browsing activity.

“We are heading toward a total surveillance society in which your every move, your every transaction, is duly registered and recorded by some computer,” says Jay Stanley, a privacy expert with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Clean Plate Club License-plate readers from companies such as Remington-Elsag use high-intensity infrared cameras that are mounted on the outside of police patrol cars (or even helicopters) or set up in static locations. On patrol cars, the system operates independ-ently while the officer drives, automatically checking plates from up to four lanes of traffic against an on-board “hot list” of wanted vehicles. It uses optical character recognition to differentiate letters and digits from background noise such as images and grime. It reads up to 900 plates per minute from up to 50 ft. away with greater than 95 percent accuracy.

In the late 18th century, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham dreamed up a new type of prison: the panopticon. It would be built so that guards could see all of the prisoners at all times without their knowing they were being watched, creating “the sentiment of an invisible omniscience,” Bentham wrote. America is starting to resemble a giant panopticon, according to surveillance critics like Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman from Georgia. “Were Bentham alive today, he probably would be the most sought-after consultant on the planet,” he recently wrote in a Washington Times op-ed.

One of the most popular new technologies in law enforcement is the license-plate reader, or LPR. The leading manufacturer is Remington-Elsag, based in Madison, N.C. Its Mobile Plate Hunter 900 consists of cameras mounted on the outside of a squad car and connected to a computer database in the vehicle. The plate hunter employs optical-character-recognition technology originally developed for high-speed mail sorting. LPRs automate the process of “running a plate” to check if a vehicle is stolen or if the driver has any outstanding warrants. The sensors work whether the police car is parked or doing 75 mph. An officer working the old-fashioned way might check a couple dozen plates a shift. The LPR can check 10,000.

New York’s Long Beach Police Department is one of more than 200 agencies around the country that use LPRs, and I rode in a squad car with Sgt. Bill Dodge to see the technology at work. A computer screen mounted in front of the glovebox flashed black-and-white images of every photographed plate; low alarms, like the sounds of your character dying in an ’80s video game, droned for the problem cars. Over the course of a couple of hours we didn’t net any car thieves or kidnappers, but Dodge’s LPR identified dozens of cars with suspended or revoked registrations. He said that the system doesn’t violate anyone’s privacy—”there’s no magic technology that lets it see inside a garage”—and praised its fairness. “It doesn’t matter if you’re black, white, old, young, a man or a woman, the system cannot discriminate. It looks at everyone and everything.”

Continue…

Have Your Say: New High-Tech Cameras Are Watching You
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Privacy Fast Becoming Obsolete

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

Almost every move you make is being watched - and privacy is fast becoming obsolete, writes Gerard Wright.

If Hollywood and its movies are America thinking aloud, then a very interesting thought bubble has just appeared over the map of the United States.

The bubble appears, naturally, in the form of a film, Look, which opened in US cinemas this month. It weaves a range of stories with entwining themes of sex, blackmail, crime and alienation, with a twist: every scene of the film is shot from the perspective of a surveillance camera, from the bubble lens above an ATM, to the elevated perspective of the security cameras that are ubiquitous and sometimes invisible, across the US.

As entertainment, the jury will return a verdict by the end of the year. As a statement of the American and world zeitgeist, Look is impeccable in its timing.

The US, like Australia and Britain, has taken fear as a guiding principle, and used it to introduce or justify wide-ranging security and surveillance programs as a means of preventing terrorist attacks such as those in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, in Bali in October 2002, and London in July 2005.

In the US the focus has been on preventing another attack, and protecting the “homeland”. It was the justification for the invasion of Iraq, and for the process known as “data-mining” where tens of millions of phone call records are scoured, and billions of calls and emails are monitored.

On a localised level, there is what Yvonne Cager, a video surveillance marketing manager at Texas Instruments, called the “drive to have more eyes everywhere”. An IBM report last year estimated there were 26 million surveillance cameras in the US, while the iSuppli research company forecasts that international sales of surveillance systems will more than double to 66 million units by 2011.

One of these cameras caught Look’s director, Adam Rifkin, singing along to a song in his car as he passed through an intersection, triggering a red light camera. The image Rifkin saw with the fine that arrived in the mail a week or so later was astonishingly sharp and unflattering.

“I felt violated,” he says, but also inspired. Rifkin began looking for surveillance cameras, and the laws that govern their use. The cameras were everywhere and saw everyone. By Rifkin’s assessment, the average American could expect to be filmed 200 times a day. The laws governing that coverage were surprisingly lax.

“In 37 states it’s legal for hidden cameras to be in dressing rooms and bathrooms,” Rifkin says. “I wanted to throw a bucket of cold water onto the public’s obliviousness about these cameras.”

Continue…

Have Your Say: Privacy Fast Becoming Obsolete
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

IPCC Menezes decision a ’scandal’

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

No-one is to be punished for police failings that led to an innocent man being shot dead on a Tube train.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said four senior officers, including Deputy Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick, should not face disciplinary action over the shooting of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes.

But the 27-year-old electrician’s family branded the decision - which brings a series of police watchdog reviews into the tragedy to a close - a “scandal”.

Campaigners criticised the IPCC’s decision to conclude the case before an inquest - expected to take place next year - and accused the watchdog of trying to bury bad news. But Scotland Yard said the decision was a “move forward” which would finally end uncertainty hanging over the four officers and their families.

Eleven other Metropolitan Police officers originally questioned under caution over the killing had already been told they would not face disciplinary action. That left Ms Dick and three other senior officers - known only by the codenames Silver, Trojan 84 and Trojan 80 - still facing possible action.

No individual faced criminal charges but the force itself was convicted on a general health and safety count at the Old Bailey last month.

Mr Menezes was gunned down at close range in a Tube carriage at Stockwell station in south London on July 22 2005. Police had mistaken him for failed suicide bomber Hussain Osman, part of the gang which tried and failed to blow up passengers on Tube trains across the capital the previous day.

The Metropolitan Police was eventually fined £175,000 and ordered to pay £385,000 costs after being convicted of exposing the public to risk at the Old Bailey trial. But the jury took the unusual step of adding a rider to its verdict saying that “no personal culpability” should be attached to the Deputy Assistant Commissioner.

They concluded that Ms Dick, who was the gold commander in charge of the operation that day, had been fed “inaccurate information”. That proved crucial in determining the IPCC decision. The commission became convinced that no disciplinary panel would be likely to come to a different conclusion from that of the jurors who sat through weeks of evidence.

“The IPCC cannot foresee any circumstances in which new evidence might emerge which would cause any disciplinary tribunal to disregard the jury’s rider,” the commission said in a statement announcing the decision.

Media Wales Ltd. icWales™

Have Your Say: IPCC Menezes decision a ’scandal’
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Intel: Israel to attack Iran ultimately

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

A former senior US intelligence official says Israel will ultimately attack Iran in order ‘to defend its nuclear monopoly’ in the region.

“I came back from a trip to Israel in November convinced that Israel would attack Iran,” said Bruce Riedel, the former CIA official and senior adviser to three US presidents, including George W. Bush, on Thursday.

Riedel said his conversations with Israeli officials and Mossad proved to him that Tel Aviv is planning to strike Iran’s nuclear sites.

“And that was before the NIE [US National Intelligence Estimate]. This makes it even more likely,” Newsweek quoted Riedel as saying.

Political pundits believe the Israelis consider the recent US intelligence assessment as a signal of Washington’s reluctance to follow the Zionist regime’s hawkish policies towards Iran.

Riedel added that the Bush administration’s failure to discuss the NIE report with Israeli intelligence agencies before its release on Dec. 3 only complicated the problem for Israel.

The prevailing view among Israeli intelligence officials is that the NIE has isolated the Zionist regime in its attempts to portray Tehran’s nuclear program as a threat.

MD/HGH/RE

Have Your Say: Intel: Israel to attack Iran ultimately
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

VIDEO: How many times can you vote?

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

TV news investigation about public officials illegally voting multiple times in the Senate.

Have Your Say: VIDEO: How many times can you vote?
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Police officers cleared in De Menezes case

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

Fred Attewill and agencies

The family of Jean Charles de Menezes have bitterly criticised the decision of the police watchdog that no disciplinary action will be taken against four Metropolitan police officers for their roles in events leading to his fatal shooting.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) decision closes the last of the watchdog’s reviews into the shooting of the innocent Brazilian electrician in July 2005 at Stockwell underground station in south London. An inquest is expected to take place next year.

The Met’s deputy assistant commissioner, Cressida Dick (pictured) who was in charge of the control room, has been cleared, along with three officers on the ground identified only as Silver, Trojan 84 and Trojan 80.

The IPCC ruling means the guilty verdict in the healthy and safety trial at the Old Bailey last month, which saw the Met fined £175,000 for “catastrophic” errors, did not amount to personal misconduct.

In May, the watchdog cleared 11 other officers involved in the shooting.

De Menezes’ cousin, Vivian Figuierdo, called the decision a “scandal” and said it was “entirely premature” to have made the announcement before the inquest.

She said: “If the jury at the health and safety trial found the police guilty of catastrophic errors - why is it that no police officer is being held individually accountable?”

The Menezes family solicitor, Harriet Wistrich, said: “We fear that if new evidence emerges at the inquest, it may be harder to bring disciplinary decisions in the future as officers could argue abuse of process.”

The victim’s family are already taking their case against the decision not to prosecute individuals to the European court of human rights.

Delivering their guilty verdict in the health and safety trial, the jury made clear that Dick bore “no personal culpability” even though she led the operation.

The IPCC said it had considered whether Dick was responsible for planning or management failures that led to the force’s conviction, but found the jury’s rider “unequivocal”.

A spokesman said: “The IPCC cannot foresee any circumstances in which new evidence might emerge which would cause any disciplinary tribunal to disregard the jury’s rider.

“The responsibilities of DAC Dick and Silver, Trojan 84 and Trojan 80 were intertwined. The IPCC cannot see how any disciplinary tribunal could conclude that although no personal blame is attached to DAC Dick, it could attach to the other three officers.”

The Met welcomed the decision as a “move forward”. A spokesman said: “The shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes is a matter of deep regret to the Metropolitan police service and our continued thoughts are with his family.

“We acknowledge and welcome today’s recommendation by the IPCC that the remaining four officers should not face disciplinary proceedings for their part in the events of July 22 2005.

“We are pleased by this move forward and for these officers and their families who have faced much uncertainty.”

In a report released after the trial, the IPCC said a string of failings led to the innocent man being shot dead after being mistaken for a suicide bomber.

The report criticised Dick for failing to make it clear that her instruction to “stop” De Menezes did not mean that she wanted him shot. It was revealed that she missed part of a briefing because she was sent to the wrong room and she had been unaware how far out of position a firearms team vital to the operation had been.

De Menezes was followed from a south London address police believed was used by a terrorist suspect. He was supposed to be stopped by elite armed officers, but despite being ordered to get to the scene at 5am, they took more than four hours and were out of position and unable to stop De Menezes until he entered the underground station.

Last week, the IPCC concluded that Andy Hayman, the former Met chief counter-terrorism officer, should be reprimanded for breaking “code five of the police code of conduct that says officers should be conscientious and diligent in the performance of their duties” because of his actions following the shooting.

The Met commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, was criticised for delaying the IPCC’s investigation into the shooting but has refused to resign and retains the support of the Metropolitan police authority and the government.

Have Your Say: Police officers cleared in De Menezes case
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

VIDEO: Thousands surrendered but still killed by US

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

A Genocide. Thousands of Taliban that had surrendered were killed by US forces.

Have Your Say: VIDEO: Thousands surrendered but still killed by US
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Related News

• What are they hiding?
• Obama should do what he says about secrecy
• Bush Administration Has Double-Secret Private Communication System
• The ‘uncensored’ history of the 9/11 Commission
• Bush goes back on his word

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Political News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.