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Senate Hears Testimony On Torture Policy

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

A key Senate subcommittee is set to hear testimony today on the torture policies of the Bush administration. The hearing, to be held by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, will feature testimony from former FBI agent Ali Soufan and former Bush administration State Department official Philip Zelikow, both of whom have voiced serious concerns about Bush administration interrogation policies. It is the first congressional hearing focusing specifically on torture since the American Civil Liberties Union obtained four memos produced by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) outlining the Bush administration’s legal framework for its torture policies.

“Torture is a crime and we can no longer pretend there is any doubt these crimes were committed,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “The policies of torture originated on Pennsylvania Avenue and were endorsed by the highest ranking government officials. We’ve known that for too long not to have held any high-level officials accountable. Attorney General Holder must appoint an independent prosecutor so our country can move towards restoring the rule of law.”

Zelikow, also the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, wrote a memo in 2005 opposing the legal reasoning behind the OLC torture memos while at the State Department. After the memo was circulated, the White House collected and destroyed most of the copies. The ACLU currently has a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request pending for that memo.

Soufan was an FBI agent who was present during interrogations of detainee Abu Zubaydah from March to June 2002, and was described by a pseudonym in a report last year by the Justice Department’s Inspector General as one of two FBI agents who reported observing interrogation tactics that were “borderline torture” and comparable to U.S. Army Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) tactics that were central to the government’s torture program.

The ACLU has been calling for years for an independent criminal investigation into the interrogation techniques used by the federal government against detainees held by the United States. Based on documents obtained through FOIA litigation brought by the ACLU, several congressional hearings and a report released last month by the Senate Armed Services Committee, it is clear that important decisions on the use of torture and abuse were made in the White House, at the Pentagon, and at the headquarters of the CIA and the Justice Department.

The Department of Defense has also committed to make public by May 28 a “substantial number” of photos depicting the abuse of prisoners by U.S. personnel. The photos, which are being released in response to the ACLU’s FOIA litigation, include images from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan at locations other than Abu Ghraib.

“Congress needs to keep asking tough questions on torture,” said Christopher Anders, ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel. “Having the Senate hear from an eyewitness to the start of the government’s torture program and an official who objected to a torture memo is a good step towards accountability. But the only way to make clear that no one is above the law is for Congress to step up its oversight and for attorney general to appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate torture crimes.”

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Populism is Not a Style, It’s a People’s Rebellion Against Corporate Power

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

When I lived in Washington, DC, in the 1970s, I got a call from a friend of mine who worked for the Congressional Research Service–a legislative agency that digs up facts, prepares briefing papers, and otherwise does research on any topic requested by members of Congress.

My friend could barely speak, because he was hooting, howling, and guffawing over a research question he’d just received. It was from the office of Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, the aloof and patrician Texas Democrat who was known on Capitol Hill primarily as a faithful emissary for Wall Street interests. At the time, Bentsen was contemplating a run for the presidency, and apparently he was searching for a suitable political identity. “What is a populist?” read the research query. “The senator thinks he might be one.”

Uh…no sir, you are not.

Bentsen was closer to being “The Man in the Moon” than he was to being a populist. Yet, he was hardly alone in trying to cloak himself as “The People’s Champion” while remaining faithful to the plutocratic powers. These days, there’s a whole flock of politicos and pundits doing this–from Sarah Palin to Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich to Glenn Beck.

They are abetted by a media establishment that carelessly (and lazily) misapplies the populist label to anyone who claims to be a maverick and tends to bark a lot. Although the targets they’re usually barking at are poor people, teachers, minorities, unions, liberals, protestors, environmentalists, gays, immigrants, or other demonized groups that generally reside far outside the center of the power structure–the barkers are indiscriminately tagged as populist voices.

First of all, populism is not a style, nor is it a synonym for “popular outrage.” It is a historically grounded political doctrine (and movement) that supports ordinary folks in their ongoing democratic fight against the moneyed elites.

The very essence of populism is its unrelenting focus on breaking the iron grip that big corporations have on our country–including on our economy, government, media, and environment. It is unabashedly a class movement. Try to squeeze Lord Limbaugh into that philosophical suit of clothes! He’s just another right-wing, corporate-hugging, silk-tie elitist–an apologist for plutocracy, not a populist.

Fully embracing the egalitarian ideals and rebellious spirit of the American Revolution, populists have always been out to challenge the orthodoxy of the corporate order and to empower workaday Americans so they can control their own economic and political destinies. This approach distinguishes the movement from classic liberalism, which seeks to live in harmony with concentrated corporate power by trying to regulate its excesses.

We’re seeing liberalism at work today in Washington’s Wall Street bailout. Both parties tell us that AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, and the rest are “too big to fail,” so taxpayers simply “must” rescue the management, stockholders, and bondholders of the financial giants in order to save the system. Populists, on the other hand, note that it is this very system that has caused the failure-so structural reform is required. Let’s reorganize the clumsy, inept, ungovernable, and corrupt financial system by ousting those who wrecked it, splitting up its component parts (banking, investment, and insurance), and establishing decentralized, manageable-sized financial institutions operating on the locallycontrolled models of credit unions, co-ops, and community banks.

A movement

Not only is American populism a powerful and vibrant idea, but it also has a phenomenal history that has largely been hidden from our people. The Powers That Be are not keen to promote the story of a mass movement that did–and still could–challenge the corporate structure. Thus, the rich history of this grassroots force, which first arose in the late 1870s, tends to be ignored entirely or trivialized as a quirky pitchfork rebellion by rubes and racists who had some arcane quibble involving the free coinage of silver.

The true portrait of populism is rarely on public display. History teachers usually hustle students right past this unique moment in the evolution of our democracy. You never see a movie or a television presentation about the movement’s innovative thinkers, powerful orators, and dramatic events. National museums offer no exhibits of its stunning inventions and accomplishments. And there is no “populist trail of history” winding through the various states in which farmers and workers created the People’s Party (also known as the Populist Party), reshaped the national political debate, forced progressive reforms, delivered a million votes (and four states) to the party’s 1892 presidential candidate, and elected 10 populist governors, six U.S. senators, and three dozen House members.

This was a serious, thoughtful, determined effort by hundreds of thousands of common folks to do something uncommon: organize themselves so–collectively and cooperatively–they could remake both commerce and government to serve the common good rather than the selfish interests of the barons of industry and finance.

While the big media of that day portrayed the movement as an incoherent bunch of conspiracy-minded bumpkins, the populists were in fact guided by a sophisticated network of big thinkers, organizers, and communicators who had a thorough grasp of exactly how the system worked and why. Most significantly, they were problem solvers–their aim was not protest, but to provide real mechanisms that could decentralize and democratize power in our country. The movement was able to rally a huge following of hard-scrabble farmers and put-upon workers because it did not pussyfoot around. Its leaders dared to go right at the core problem of an overreaching corporate state controlled by robber barons. Populist organizers spoke bluntly about the need to restructure the corporate system that was undermining America’s democratic promise.

“Wall Street owns the country,” declared Mary Ellen Lease at an 1890 populist convention in Topeka, Kansas. A powerhouse orator who took to the stump and wowed crowds at a time women were not even allowed to vote, Lease laid out a message her audiences knew to be true, for they were living what she was so colorfully describing. “It’s no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street,” she roared. “Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags….The people are at bay, let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us beware.”

These populist voices tapped directly into people’s anger. But, still, how could common farmers and laborers–largely impoverished and powerless folks–possibly take on Wall Street, the railroad cartels, corporate trusts, and lobbyists, as well as the politicians that these powers owned? Well, even the smallest dog can lift its leg on the tallest building, and–after all sorts of starts-and-stops–populists found five ways to organize the movement and make their mark.

ECONOMIC. In 1877, before populism even had a name, it had a mission, which was to do something–anything–about the spreading economic plight of farmers all over the country. They faced not only the usual disasters of weather and bugs, but also the unnatural disasters of rampant gouging by bankers, crop-lien merchants, commodity combines, railroad monopolies, and others. Government was worse than unresponsive; it sided with the gougers.

An economic alternative was needed, and it came out of Texas. Known as the Farmers Alliance, it created a network of cooperative enterprises that could both buy supplies for farmers in bulk and pool their crops to sell in bulk, bypassing the monopolists, getting better prices, and giving farmers a modicum of control over their destinies. It was an idea that worked.

The first Texas Alliance quickly spawned 2,000 sub-alliances around the state with a total of 100,000 members. Alliances were soon being formed throughout the South, in all of the Plains states, in the upper Midwest, and all across the West to California, bringing more than a million farmers into a common economy. This was a vast, multi-sectional structure of radical economic reform, creating a new possibility that its leaders called a “cooperative commonwealth.”

CULTURAL. The Alliance gave the movement a solid structure, as well as essential credibility, through its delivery of tangible benefits to members. But it also created something much larger and more important: the means for ordinary people to learn what a democratic culture really is and to implement a vision of an alternative way to live.

These were working-class families of very modest means. They had little formal education, lived in isolated communities, and were treated as nobodies by the influentials who ran things. But–whoa!–now these outcasts were running something, and they mattered, both individually and as a group.

It was transformative for them. Lawrence Goodwyn, author of Democratic Promise, the definitive book on the populist phenomenon, sees this cultural awakening as the key triumph of the Alliance: “[The cooperative experience] imparted a sense of self worth to individual people and provided them with the instruments of self-education about the world they lived in. The movement gave them hope–a shared hope–that they were not impersonal victims of a gigantic industrial engine ruled by others but that they were, instead, people who could perform specific political acts of self-determination.”

It was not all about business, either. Parades of farm wagons and colorful floats, day-long picnics, brass bands, song fests (Mary Ellen Lease was a renowned singer, as well as an orator), dances, poetry, and other social/cultural events enlivened and deepened the Alliance community, creating what Goodwyn calls a “mass folk movement.” In addition, the Alliance ran a massive grassroots education program throughout rural America, providing everything from literature networks to adult-ed classes.

MEDIA. To stay connected and provide a steady flow of energy, the movement relied on a concerted program of education and communication–not only to enlighten and invigorate its widely dispersed members, but also to bring in new recruits. This required the Alliance to create its own media, for the establishment outlets offered only scorn and ridicule for the populist cause.

Books, over a thousand populist magazines, newspapers, and hundreds of popular songs and poems flowed from the movement. The communication lynchpin, however, was the Alliance Lecture Bureau, a stable of trained, articulate speakers–40,000 strong!–who regularly traversed the country from New York to California, bringing information, insight, and inspiration to all corners of Populist Nation. Goodwyn notes that this amazing system of reliable messengers was “the most massive organizing drive by any citizen institution of nineteenth century America.”

COALITIONS. Though it created serious tensions in various Alliance chapters, the movement kept trying to broaden its base by joining hands with other groups that were also confronting corporate power. Early on, its leaders reached out to the emerging labor movement. While there were Alliance leaders who thought of farmers as Jeffersonian, small-scale capitalists, many others (and many more rank-and-file members) viewed farmers essentially as working stiffs battling the same robber barons that labor was confronting. In 1885, the Knights of Labor were on strike against two companies in Texas, and several county alliances in that state voted to boycott the companies. This stand was a defining moment for the Alliance, for it heralded the co-op movement’s shift into a more radical political phase.

By 1892, the Alliance’s political arm, the Populist Party, fully embraced the relationship with industrial workers. Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota electrified the national delegates to the party convention that year with a speech pointing directly to a shared cause with the union movement: “The urban workmen are denied the right of organization for self-protection; imported pauperized labor beats down their wages; a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down….The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes….From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two great classes-paupers and millionaires.”

An even tougher match-up for the leadership was with black farmers, who had organized their own Colored Farmers National Alliance with about a million members. Aside from the obvious barrier that entrenched racism presented to this possible coalition, there was another degree of separation: white Alliance members tended to be farm owners (albeit heavily-mortgaged owners), and black Alliance members were mostly field hands, renters, or sharecroppers. Yet, there was such a strong feeling of a shared fight that real and successful efforts were made to join together.

In A People’s History of the United States, author Howard Zinn writes, “When the Texas People’s Party was founded in Dallas in the summer of 1891, it was interracial and radical.” A white leader at that meeting demanded that each district in the state include a black delegate, pointing out that, “They are in the ditch just like we are.” Two black Alliance members were then elected to the party’s executive committee. Alliances in Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina also made notable advances in interracial actions, and eminent historian C. Vann Woodward has said flatly that, “Never before or since have the two races in the South come so close together as they did during the Populist struggles.”

The Alliance also included what was, at the time, a remarkable number of women activists. They made up roughly one-quarter of the membership and held many key posts.

POLITICS. By the mid-1880s, the Alliance reached a point where it had to abandon its original stance of non-partisanship and start flexing its political muscle. The big commodity brokers and railroad barons were brutalizing the co-ops with predatory pricing and other monopoly tactics, and bankers were squeezing the Alliance’s marketing co-ops by refusing to provide loans. The major political parties, which were in harness to these moneyed interests, offered no relief from the corporate assault, while also refusing to advance any of the Alliance’s broader reform agenda.

For about six years, Alliance members held countless local meetings, debates, and consultations on how to proceed politically. Finally, Alliance delegates met in Omaha on July 4, 1892, for the founding convention of the People’s Party of America, proudly branding themselves “The Populists.”

Now, they could run their own people for offices up and down the ballot, campaigning on a broad platform to counter the “corporations, national banks, rings, trusts…and the oppression of usurers” in order to advance the common interests of the “plain people.” The Knights of Labor were a part of this founding, and the preamble to the party’s 1892 platform declared that “The interests of rural and civil labor are the same; their enemies are identical.”

Yes, the Populists called for the “free and unlimited coinage of silver” to provide both debt relief and economic stimulus for small enterprise, but the snickering cynics who try to marginalize populism by defining it in terms of this narrow (though important) issue ignore the party’s broader and amazingly progressive agenda, including these provisions:

• The first party to call for women’s suffrage.
• An eight-hour day for labor, plus wage protections.
• The abolition of the standing army of mercenaries, known as the “Pinkerton system,” which violently suppressed union organizers.
• The direct election by the people of U.S. senators (who were chosen by state legislatures at the time).
• A graduated income tax.
• Legislation by popular initiative and referendum.
• Public ownership of railroads, telephones, and telegraphs.
• No subsidy of private corporations for any purpose.
• Prohibition of speculation on and foreign ownership of our public lands and natural resources.
• A free ballot and fair count in all elections.
• Civil-service laws to prevent the politicalization of government employees.
• Pensions for veterans.
• Measures to break the corrupting power of corporate lobbyists.

What happened?

Ultimately, the Populists were undone, not by their boldness, but by leaders who urged them to compromise and to merge their aspirations into the Democratic Party. In the presidential election of 1896, they nominated the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan, whose “cross of gold” campaign focused on the monetary issue, avoiding the much more appealing structural radicalism of Populism. Outspent five to one, Bryan lost a close race to William McKinley, the Republican who was financed and owned by Wall Street.

The People’s Party, having surrendered its independence and soul at a time the Alliance was being gutted by the money interests and the press, lost favor with its own faithful–and withered into a parody of itself.

Nonetheless, the Populists had successfully energized, organized, educated, and mobilized one of America’s few genuine mass movements, striking fear in the flinty hearts of such barons as J.P. Morgan, who railed against that “awful democracy.”

The party was killed off, but not the Populist spirit. Persevering in separate political forms, the constituent components of populism–including unionists, suffragists, anti-trusters, socialists, cooperativists, and rural organizers–continued the struggle against America’s economic and political aristocracy. Indeed, populists defined the content of national politics for the first third of the 20th century, forcing the Democratic Party to adopt populist positions, spawning the Progressive Party, elevating two Roosevelts to the presidency, and enacting major chunks of the agenda first drawn up by the People’s Party.

Though the Powers That Be don’t want us connecting with this stunning “Populist Moment” in our democratic history, a majority of folks today hold within them the live spark of populism–which is an innate distrust of corporate tycoons and Wall Street titans and an instinct to rebel against them. The moment can come again. As Goodwyn tells us, “the triumph of Populism…was the belief in possibility it injected into American political consciousness.”

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How Americans Came to Support Torture, in Five Steps

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

By Roy Eidelson |

In recent weeks, new revelations about the harsh interrogation and torture of detainees during the Bush administration years have made headlines and stirred controversy. The positions of prominent advocates and opponents on each side are clear. But what do we know about how the American people in general have come to view the use of torture by the U.S. government?

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has been polling Americans on this key question for almost five years. Since 2004, representative samples have been asked, “Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?” The results over this time period have shown only minor fluctuations. The most recent numbers, from last month, reveal that 15% of Americans believe torture is often justified, 34% think it is sometimes justified, 22% consider it rarely justified, and 25% believe torture is never justified. So not only do 49% consider torture justified at least some of the time, fully 71% refuse to rule it out entirely.

Further insight into these numbers can be garnered from a different poll conducted a few months ago, in January 2009. Fox News/Opinion Dynamics asked a national sample of Americans, “Do you think the use of harsh interrogation techniques, including torture, has ever saved American lives since the September 11 (2001) terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?” The results: 45% “Yes” and 41% “No” (with 14% responding ‘Don’t Know”). In other words, almost half of Americans think torture “works.”

Polling data on how Americans view specific interrogation techniques that were part of the Bush era arsenal are harder to find. But a national Gallup poll in January 2005, about eight months after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, sheds some light here. The following question was posed: “Here is a list of possible interrogation techniques that can be used on prisoners. Do you think it is right or wrong for the U.S. government to use them on prisoners suspected of having information about possible terrorist attacks against the United States?” In order of approval percentages, the survey found that 50% approved of depriving prisoners of sleep for several days; 36% approved of threatening to transfer prisoners to a country known for using torture; 29% approved of threatening prisoners with dogs; 18 % approved of forcing prisoners to remain naked and chained in uncomfortable positions in cold rooms for several hours; 14% approved of strapping prisoners on boards and forcing their heads underwater until they think they are drowning; and 13% approved of having female interrogators make physical contact with Muslim men during religious observances that prohibit such contact.

Based on this sampling of polling results, it is easy at first to be surprised and troubled by the degree to which Americans have expressed support for the inhumane treatment and torture of detainees. But public sentiment on such matters does not emerge in a vacuum. Rather, it often reflects the influence of carefully orchestrated marketing campaigns by powerful vested interests eager to shape opinion in support of a specific agenda or facts on the ground. Certainly it is now well known that the Bush administration embraced the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” in national security settings. It is therefore instructive to carefully consider the five-pronged message that they and their backers promoted to create a citizenry supportive of torture.

The first component involved fostering a “war on terror” environment of pervasive fear in which the prospect of massive, catastrophic harm was repeatedly given center stage. Spurred on by improbable ticking time-bomb scenarios where every second matters, perceptions of an urgent need to protect the country from looming disaster created a “whatever it takes” mentality in which efforts to extract crucial information through harsh interrogations and torture became a “no brainer.”

The second element advanced the view that we need not be helpless against this threat because through torture-and torture alone-we can learn what we need to foil the plans of evildoers. Unsubstantiated evidentiary claims, hidden from inspection by veils of secrecy, were used to argue that specific interrogation techniques — regardless of how they might repulse us - were ultimately the only way we could protect ourselves.

Third was the frequent assurance that those we subjected to torture were themselves guilty of having participated in heinous acts of injustice that caused the loss of many innocent lives. This argument served to diminish concerns the public might have felt over the treatment these individuals received while in custody. Even in the absence of legal proceedings, the detainees could be deemed deserving of the physical and psychological pain inflicted upon them - they were responsible for their own suffering.

Fourth was the repeated assertion that the United States has a finely tuned moral compass and engages in torture only with regret and discomfort, only as a last resort, and only in the service of a far greater good. Sharp contrasts were drawn between “them” and “us”-between the detainees’ innate evilness and our inherent goodness, between their vile aims and our righteous purpose. In this context, the interrogators were presented as courageous and heroic, worthy of praise rather than criticism.

The fifth and final component was a concerted effort to stifle open debate when questions about the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” arose. Standard strategy here involved painting skeptics and critics-including human rights leaders and organizations-as untrustworthy, irresponsible, misinformed, weak, or unpatriotic. In so doing, the public was encouraged to discount, ignore, or condemn these voices of concern, and important words of warning therefore went unheeded.

In sum, this seemingly successful campaign of mass persuasion depended upon convincing the public to believe five things: (1) our country is in great danger, (2) torture is the only thing that can keep us safe, (3) the people we torture are monstrous wrongdoers, (4) our decision to torture is moral and for the greater good, and (5) critics of our torture policy should not be trusted. And all the while, the marketers painstakingly avoided using the actual word “torture”-and contested the word’s use by anyone else. Of course, this strategy is by no means unique to the selling of torture. A similar approach, designed for hawking war, was used with devastating and tragic effect in building public support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Admittedly, we cannot be sure that torture would be less popular with Americans today if the Bush administration had not worked so hard to promote it. But there is good reason to think this might be the case. After all, the combination of an outsized public relations budget, an overly accommodating mainstream media, and an unwary audience of millions is every marketer’s dream. In similar fashion, we cannot really know whether there would now be even greater public support for torture if not for the efforts of those who have steadfastly spoken out against our country’s interrogation abuses. Looking ahead, as still more information emerges through declassification of documents, high-level investigations, or congressional hearings, we should expect to hear this five-part sales pitch over and over again from Bush-era torture advocates. But hopefully this next time around, far fewer of us will still be buying.

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Freedom of information not as it should be

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

THERE ARE serious problems in the law regarding the freedom to access documents at the Public Records Office (PRO), the House Human Rights Committee heard yesterday.

Speaking after the session, the Justice Ministry’s Permanent Secretary Andys Tryphonides explained that closed documents and archives belong to the PRO, while files that are still open and active are kept at the various state departments and services.

“As legislation stands today, there is access to the documents held at the Public Records Office, but there is no access to archives that are still active; meaning those that are kept in the Departments, Ministries and other Public Services,” said Tryphonides.

He added: “In contrast, public officers are prohibited from publicising documents, which they obtain while executing their duties. Therefore, there is a problem here, which has to do with the freedom of access to public records”.

The Ministry, said Tryphonides, is solely in charge of the PRO, so the matter remains open over how active records should be handled and the issue regulated.

Asked how easy it was to access active records, he said it was a “complicated matter”

“It is not simple and it will be expensive, but also hard to explain the conditions and regulations that need to be made in order for the public to have satisfactory access to the state’s records,” he said.

Tryphonides added that the issue could soon be discussed by the Cabinet and if new regulations needed to be made, the relevant ministry would be given the job.

According to the law now, a period of 30 years needs to have passed in order for the public to have free access to it.

“However, the same law includes provisions, based on which if the period of 30 years hasn’t yet elapsed, a member of the public can request access to a record or document and be given approval, provided it doesn’t raise issues of public safety or other issues, which prevent access,” said Tryphonides.

According to Committee Chairman Sophocles Fyttis of DIKO, the PRO is facing serious problems in serving members of the public who request access to public records. These difficulties are mainly due to the dire conditions of the office building, as well as lack of staff.

These problems, said Fyttis, can be overcome if the government accepts the Committee’s request to immediately release the already-approved budgetary fund of around €1 million, which will help build the new PRO next to the Attorney-general’s offices in Nicosia.

The Committee, he added, is now awaiting replies from the relevant state services before deciding whether to table the issue again in the next couple of months.

Copyright © Cyprus Mail 2009

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Google’s Street View rejected in Greece over privacy

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

A privacy watchdog has banned Google Inc. from gathering detailed, street-level images in Greece for a planned expansion of its panoramic Street View mapping service until the company provides additional privacy safeguards.

In rejecting Google’s bid to roam Greek streets with cameras mounted on vehicles, Greece’s Data Protection Authority, or DPA, said it wanted clarification from the U.S. Internet company on how it will store and process the original images and safeguard them from privacy abuses.

The decision, announced Monday, comes despite Google’s assurances that it would blur faces and vehicle license plates when displaying the images online and that it would promptly respond to removal requests.

The DPA also sought clarification on how Google plans to inform the public that its vehicles with mounted cameras are being used to take photographs.

“Simply marking the car is not considered an adequate form of notification,” a DPA statement said. “The authority has reserved judgment on the legality of the service pending the submission of additional information, and until that time will not allow (Google) to start gathering photographs.”

Since launching in 2007, Street View has expanded to more than 100 cities worldwide but has faced privacy complaints from many individuals and institutions that have been photographed.

Residents of a small English village formed a human chain last month to stop one of Google’s camera vans. And last year the Pentagon barred Google from photographing U.S. military bases for Street View.

But in most cases, particularly in the United States, Google has been able to proceed on grounds that the images it takes are no different from what someone walking down a public street can see and snap.

And last month, Britain’s privacy watchdog dismissed concerns that Street View was too invasive, saying it was satisfied with such safeguards as obscuring individuals’ faces and car license plates.

The World Privacy Forum, a U.S.-based nonprofit research and advisory group, said the Greek decision could raise the standard for other countries and help challenge that argument.

“It only takes one country to express a dissenting opinion,” Pam Dixon, the group’s executive director, said in a phone interview from the United States. “If Greece gets better privacy than the rest of the world then we can demand it for ourselves. That’s why it’s very important.”

Google spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo said the Mountain View, Calif.-based company would be happy to provide the Greek DPA with further clarifications.

“Google takes privacy very seriously, and that’s why we have put in place a number of features, including the blurring of faces and license plates, to ensure that Street View will respect local norms when it launches in Greece,” Filadelfo said Tuesday.

Filadelfo said expanding the service to Greece would help local residents and tourists alike. Those unable to visit Greece in person would be able to see the Acropolis and other ancient sites from their living rooms, similar to how the service already lets users take virtual tours of the Colosseum in Rome and the Eiffel Tour in Paris.

Greece has strict privacy laws, giving the DPA broad powers of enforcement.

The authority has repeatedly ruled against Greece’s conservative government and banned the use of street cameras for fighting crime. The cameras were set up as part of elaborate security preparations for the 2004 Olympics in Athens.

It also clashed with the Greek Orthodox Church after it ruled that recording Greek citizens’ religion on state ID cards was illegal.

The DPA on Monday also ordered a Greek mapping site, kapou.gr, to suspend a similar street-level image service until it provides further privacy clarifications and uses face-blurring on its online images. The Greek site on Tuesday said it had stopped posting photographs while it was upgrading its service.

Google has, on occasion, voluntarily limited images in response to complaints.

Before unveiling Street View, it removed images of shelters for battered women because it could show in detail who’s coming and leaving.

The company also removed detailed Israeli street images from its separate Google Earth software after the government there raised concerns that Hamas used online satellite photos to aim rockets.

___

AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke contributed to this story from San Francisco.

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National Identity Cards Scheme creep - 4 Draft Orders laid before Parliament under the Identity Cards Act 2006

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

Have Your Say: National Identity Cards Scheme creep - 4 Draft Orders laid before Parliament under the Identity Cards Act 2006
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• New Evidence Of CIA Torture Program
• Groups File Legal Papers Renewing Call For Release of NSA Wiretap Records

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 5:41 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.