By STEVE VISSER

Former Detective Gregg Junnier told a Fulton County jury that detectives would tell judges that they had verified their informants had bought cocaine from dealers by searching them for drugs before the buy took place.

“I have never seen anyone searched before they go into the house I’ve never seen that done even though officers always swear to it,” Junnier said. “It’s done that way in 90 percent of the warrants that are written.”

But it wasn’t just lies to get the warrant to search Kathryn Johnston’s home that made Junnier uneasy, he said. He had an inkling something was wrong when he and Officer Jason R. Smith were leading the narcotics team to the front door. He said the northwest Atlanta house differed from the informant’s description.

“I said, ‘Man, this doesn’t look right,’ and he said, ‘I know,’ ” Junnier testified. ” ‘I said what do you want to do.’ He said, ‘Hit it.’”

A minute later, Johnston was lying on her floor, dying.

Junnier testified at the Superior Court trial of one of his former partners, Arthur Tesler, who was guarding the back of Johnston’s Neal Street home on that day, Nov. 21, 2006.

Junnier and Smith pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and face up to 10 and 12 years in prison, respectively, depending on their cooperation. Tesler faces 15 years on charges of lying in an official investigation, violating his oath as an officer and false imprisonment, a charge stemming from illegally surrounding Johnston’s house.

Junnier, whose confession unraveled the case, is to testify again today.

“I have already asked for forgiveness from God and everybody I can,” he said.

On the day of the raid, Junnier said he knew Smith had lied to a magistrate to get the no-knock warrant — which allows police to break in before identifying themselves — to seize the cocaine they had been told was in the house.

Junnier testified that Smith, who had sworn out the warrant, had lied about more than searching the informant for drugs. Smith swore that a reliable confidential informant had bought cocaine from the Johnston house, Junnier said. In actuality, he said, they relied on Fabian Sheats, a low-level dealer arrested earlier that day.

Junnier said they had confidence in Sheats’ descriptions, which detailed the drugs, location and a dealer named “Sam,” whom Sheats said worked from the house.

He said the chance to seize a kilo — 2.2 pounds — of cocaine also drove the officers, who normally made arrests for much smaller amounts.

In the raid, police fired 39 shots. Junnier was shot in the face, chest and leg. Two other officers were also wounded. Investigators determined Johnston had fired one round from a revolver; the officers were shot in their own crossfire.

Junnier described entering Johnston’s house: “She was still alive. She was gasping for air. I heard … the order to cuff her.”

Later that day, he said, the cover-up began.

That’s how I felt after 8 months of silence after labeling the credit crisis a “subcrime” scandal, lashing out at the fraudulent activity at its core and calling for the investigation and prosecution of wrongdoers. Almost no media outlets accepted this way of framing the problem, although as usual, the British press was ahead of its American cousins in putting the blame on the bankers, not the borrowers.

When the FBI announced a probe of 14 mortgage companies, I thought that finally some investigators were on the case. But then, word leaked that they were only going after small fish even as big banks reported losses in the billions.

Bank robberies have always been up the FBI’s alley, and after all, this is a bank heist case, perhaps one of the biggest in history. Only it was the banks that were doing the heisting.

The New York Times reported May 5th that a new criminal investigation was finally underway.

A G-Man explained anonymously: “The latest inquiry is broader and deeper. This is a look at the mortgage industry across the board, and it has gotten a lot more momentum in recent weeks because of the banks’ earnings shortfall.”

At last, institutional fraud may be on the agenda. At last, deeper questions are being asked. There have been some Congressional hearings but so far none have risen to a Watergate-type level prompting in-depth investigations fueled by subpoenas.

Slowly, oh so slowly, news outlets are recognizing this is a big crime story, one they missed for years, or at least since 2002 when subprime securities started being packaged for sale.

Reports the Washington Independent:

“As loans made to borrowers with decent credit begin to fail at a surprisingly rapid rate, it’s becoming clear that widespread fraud helped support the entire mortgage system — from borrowers who lied on their loans, to brokers who encouraged it, to lenders who misled some low-income borrowers, to the many lenders, investors and ratings agencies that conveniently and deliberately looked the other way as profits rolled in.

Despite its widespread role, fraud hasn’t yet been at the forefront of proposed rescue plans, which center on refinancing people out of loans now resetting to higher rates.”

Why would reputable bankers and respected investment houses engage in these dishonest activities? The short answer: money, and lots of it.

Sales from Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) jumped from $157 billion in 2004 to $559 billion in 2006 according to a study for the North Star Fund by Kevin Connor. Ten investment banks in all were underwriters for 70% of some $486 billion in securitizations in 2006.

The banks had a motto: “It’s all about capital.”

Subprime-related securities produced large multi-million dollar bonuses for traders and executives as well as high revenues for the firms. In the years when business was booming CEOs at big firms were making $10 to $50 million annually apiece. Collectively, in 2006, a year before their fall, the big banks earned a stunning $130 billion.

Even after these practices came to light, hefty bonuses continued. Wall Streeters walked away with $31 billion at the end of 2007, only one billion less than the year before. Executives who were fired still received multi-million dollar payoffs.

Most media outlets considered this business as usual, not shocking or illegal.

Not even when some of these loans were called “liars’ loans” in the industry as when loan orginators colluded with or advised borrowers on how to lie on their applications. It was all done with a wink and a nod, reported the Washington Independent. They interviewed many insiders and experts who contended that:

” … pervasive fraud was, indeed, a problem — on the lender’s side. At the peak of the housing boom, they say, the nation’s mortgage system was set up to promote and encourage outright fraud in order to close a loan — and everyone, from brokers to loan officers to Wall Street, looked the other way. Borrowers also were put into products like payment-option arms that were unsuitable — and lenders knew it. “They were pushed like Vioxx, with very little regard for their dangers,” said Kathleen Keest, senior policy counsel with the Center for Responsible Lending, a research group that investigates predatory lending.

Wall Street was not a passive player either because of all the money they made from “subcrime” transactions. In some cases they paid more for loans with predatory characteristics. Loan originators at the local level — as sleazy as many were — reported that it was the Wall Street firms that dictated the types of loans they wanted and their underwriting criteria. Thus the so-called “secondary market” was really in charge.

This is why I and others insist this was a Wall Street crime wave built around predatory practices. The people who had the most were deeply complicit in ripping off the people who had the least. What’s worse, they had no legal liability in these unscrupulous deals.

How did America’s leading business magazine respond after the credit crisis brought Wall Street to its knees? Fortune called the credit crisis “both totally shocking and utterly predictable.” For them it was shocking not because of the human devastation or the millions of families who were cheated and faced foreclosure or because of the rippling effects on our society, but because the “best minds in the business … managed to lose tens of billions.”

And “predictable?” Again, not due to the lack of regulation or the enabling of shoddy products by our government but “because whether it’s junk bonds or tech stocks or emerging-market debt, Wall Street always rides a wave until it crashes.” What a contrast to the usual celebratory coverage, but also what a cop-out to explain it all away.

Warren Buffet, perhaps America’s most successful investor, sounded disgusted:

“Wall Street is going to go where the money is and not worry about consequences; Wall Street is reaping what they’ve sown,” he shrugs. Said his vice chairman: “If this were an Alice in Wonderland fable, you’d say it’s too extreme. It wouldn’t work as satire. Adults are not going to behave this way.”

But adults did — and continue to. So far, they have been well rewarded as well. The question is: what are the rest of us, and our prosecutors, going to do about it?

Hellerstein said he reconsidered his ruling after hearing from both sides again on the subject. The CIA must turn the item over for review on Monday.

Rebekah Carmichael, a spokeswoman for government lawyers representing the CIA, said the government had no immediate comment.

Hellerstein said he realized he did not give sufficient consideration to an earlier court ruling related to the legal issue and to ACLU evidence indicating all or parts of the memo may have been incorporated into or used to justify official practice and policy.

The ACLU praised the decision, saying the memo written by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel is critical to the public debate over treatment of detainees because it specified brutal interrogation techniques including waterboarding.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU National Security Project, said no Department of Defense memo made public so far has included a section addressing waterboarding.

“There are still significant gaps in the story of how U.S. interrogators came to use torture and this memo is a critical piece of this story,” Jaffer said.

“We think that the public has a right to see the documents that provided a basis for the CIA’s torture program,” he said. “We know that interrogators waterboarded prisoners and subjected prisoners to other forms of torture. There’s no legitimate reason why the basis for those interrogation practices should be withheld.”

The order came as a result of a lawsuit brought in October 2003 by the ACLU and other civil rights groups seeking to use the Freedom of Information Act to get records concerning the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody abroad. So far, more than 100,000 pages of government documents have been released as a result.

In New York, Kallstrom’s cases were often won on the basis of incriminating evidence surreptitiously snatched from the mouths of criminal defendants through their phone lines.

With a mere 203,000 Americans using mobile phones, people were still tied to the ground, and that gave Kallstrom’s world a certain comforting order.

On any given day, he could stand on a street corner in Manhattan, gaze up at an apartment building with its neat rows and columns of units stacked atop each other, and know that inside each one there was a telephone, tethered by thin copper wire to a single point, sometimes several miles away. In his mind’s eye, Kallstrom could have imagined shrinking himself to the size of an electron and traveling over the phone line, down to the bottom of the building, then shooting beneath the streets, until he ended up in the basement of the telephone company’s switching station. There, the wire emerged, pegged to a rack by a single copper lug nut. Acres of racks lined the walls, each holding rows and columns of lug nuts and their wires, neatly stacked atop each other — the city of New York in analog miniature.

With a warrant in hand, Kallstrom could tell the technicians at the phone office, with whom he had become friendly over the years, “Go up on RR326.” The tech would walk to the rack, find the wire, and clamp on a listening device. Instantly, Kallstrom became an invisible interloper.

FBI agents and federal prosecutors depended on these legal wiretaps to penetrate drug cartels, incriminate money launderers, and spy on mob families. And they needed to be absolutely certain that the line they were on belonged to the suspected dealer, or launderer, or capo named in the court-approved warrant. Not the guy in the apartment next door. Not someone down the block. This guy. This phone. RR326. Lest the agents violate a judge’s order, and perhaps land themselves in jail, this had to be the very same line that snaked back through the subterranean maze of Manhattan, through all those blocks of concrete caverns, back to that certain apartment building, up through the walls and out of the jack and into the phone that was in the hand and next to the mouth of Kallstrom’s target. It was, by design and necessity, a neat, specific system.

And then it all went sideways.

Kallstrom’s friends in the phone company put him on notice in 1985: Over the next few years, those racks and stacks of wires and lug nuts would be swept into the technological dustbin. The telephone network was going digital. Technicians would no longer stand at a rack; they would sit at a keyboard. In some parts of the country that had already made the change, phone calls were traveling as a stream of 1’s and 0’s. Thousands of lines commingled in a single computer. When New York went digital, the phone techs told Kallstrom, they would no longer be able to tap him directly into RR326. In fact, they couldn’t even tell him for sure where RR326 resided in this new engineering matrix.

At the same time that the phone companies were preparing for the transition to digital, the use of cellphones — which were inherently harder to tap because they used phone lines differently than analog devices — mushroomed. From 1985 to ‘86, the number of registered mobile-phone subscribers in the United States doubled to 500,000. Within two years after that, the number climbed to 1.6 million. By the end of the decade, the cellphone universe had skyrocketed past 4 million.

Organized crime was an early adopter of the mobile phone. In a communications technique presaging that of Islamic terrorists today, members of the Colombian Cali drug cartel operating in New York would briefly use a phone, toss it, and get a new one. To tap a mobile device, technicians had to install listening equipment on the new version of a lug nut — an “electronic port.” But in most switching stations in New York, there were only half a dozen or so ports available at any one time. Federal prosecutors and agents had to stand in line at phone company offices and fight with each other over whose investigation should take priority. Some prosecutors threatened to haul company employees into court on contempt charges so they could explain to a judge why the phone company was unwilling to execute a wiretap order.

Electronic surveillance, once such a dependable, relatively easy craft, was becoming inordinately difficult, Kallstrom thought. The phone companies, whose annual revenues from mobile subscriptions were cresting over $2 billion in the late 1980s, showed little willingness to make the FBI’s life easier. As the 1990s approached, with the promise of more digitization and more mobility, Kallstrom called his bosses in Washington: “If we don’t do something, we’ll be out of the wiretapping business.”

A Battle Begins

Kallstrom may have been the first to alert the FBI and the Justice Department to this new reality. The digital revolution generated a constant tension that exists to this day, a push and pull between the federal government in one camp and technology corporations and civil-liberties activists in the other to control the development of the global communications system, and so the balance of power in the Information Age.

This struggle’s latest manifestation is the intensely politicized effort to rewrite the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. At issue is nothing less than the government’s authority to broadly monitor communications networks to spot terrorists and other national security threats. The Bush administration finds itself across the battle lines from many of the same groups that more than a decade ago argued that the government was already extending its reach too far into personal conversations in the name of pursuing criminals.

While FISA governs wiretapping for intelligence-gathering purposes, as distinct from law enforcement, surveillance in both worlds follows the same essential philosophy — the best evidence in a court of law or in an intelligence operation is one’s own words. Today’s dispute is not very different from the one that occurred during the dawn of digitization in the 1990s. Indeed, both are part and parcel of the same long-running debate.

No one should believe that real-time government surveillance of the communications network is an idea born of the 9/11 attacks or that it results solely from the Bush administration’s aggrandizing of executive power. The legal arguments that the government has asserted to support increased surveillance of digital space were first put forth in 1994, under a Democratic president, and they had little to do with the threat of Islamic extremism.

Nor should anyone mistake the roots of the vociferous opposition to today’s wiretapping from civil libertarians and privacy advocates. Many of these groups and their allies have been battling to restrict the government’s use of new, potentially invasive technologies for a generation. The Bush White House is only their latest adversary, albeit the most formidable. These activists and their allies in the business world have been motivated by different but mutually supportive goals: to extend constitutional safeguards to the digital realm, and to keep the government from suffocating technological development with burdensome surveillance laws. Some in those ranks would have liked, and indeed tried, to make the digital network a wiretap-free zone.

But despite the occasionally extreme positions and deeply held convictions of all of these players, the most important laws governing wiretapping, electronic surveillance, and privacy have been the product of negotiation, of people gathering in a room, sitting at a table, and talking — sometimes screaming — until they reached a settlement. The current debate, however, is missing that crucial spirit. Whereas before, adversaries trusted each other enough at a basic level to make deals, however temporary, today’s opposing sides seem unwilling to compromise to pass new surveillance laws that the nation can live with. It’s not entirely clear where or why minds turned so stubborn. But to understand today’s political calcification, it helps to recall a simpler time.

The Art of Compromise

Jerry Berman was a veteran of the privacy wars, seemingly born for the role of liberal, dogmatic activist. In the early 1950s, his father, a labor leader, was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. A native of Hawaii, the younger Berman moved with his family to California, where he enrolled at the University of California (Berkeley). After earning his bachelor’s and master’s, and, in 1967, his law degree, Berman began lobbying for the American Civil Liberties Union. He became an authority on the intersection of national security and technology, schooled by the exposure of illegal FBI spying operations aimed at political organizations, war protesters, and leftist activists. In 1978, Berman helped to craft the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which set new restrictions on the government’s domestic intelligence-gathering. He was present at the creation of several important pieces of surveillance legislation, and he helped secure individual privacy protections.

In playing his role, Berman didn’t adhere to a hard-and-fast position but instead embraced his own brand of “principled pragmatism.” By his logic, the interests of privacy and national security were not incompatible. If all sides — government, industry, civil-liberties activists — could find ways to “maximize the good and minimize the harm,” as he liked to say, they could strike a satisfactory balance and create workable laws. This idea guided his work on FISA and other legislation, sometimes to the consternation of more-ideological activists who employed him to lobby Congress on their behalf.

Perhaps that was because principled pragmatism recognized an unsavory reality: In Washington, those who show up to play the game make the rules. Negotiation requires sacrifice. Sacrifice requires flexibility. Some people would rather break than bend. But compromise is how things get done, and Berman accepted it. As a colleague summarized Berman’s general approach to lawmaking, “You can stand on your principle and get your ass handed to you, or you can engage in the process and get a better deal.”

In the summer of 1994, the FBI and the Justice Department made a bold play to force the telecom carriers to help them conduct legal wiretaps. They put forth a proposal that would require the companies to build their networks so that law enforcement agents serving a warrant could access them in real time. The legality of wiretapping was not in question. The government wanted legal assurance that it could tap, at any time, and that the industry had an obligation under law to comply with the government’s proper authority.

No more computer-related hassles, no more standing in line to plug into mobile-phone ports. Law enforcement agents, federal spymasters, and prosecutors wanted a comprehensive remedy to what they called the “digital telephony” problem. Their chief advocates were Kallstrom and Louis Freeh, the recently appointed FBI director, a former special agent and federal prosecutor who had used wiretaps to secure convictions in some of the most complicated organized-crime investigations in history. Freeh personally pushed for the new law, showing up unannounced in reluctant lawmakers’ offices to press them for support and even sitting in on committee markups — an unprecedented move for an FBI director — to stare members down.

Clipper Chip

The 1994 proposal was only the latest in a series of government efforts to strengthen its control of the telecommunications network. In the late 1980s, Justice officials had gotten as far as placing language in an anti-crime bill that would have allowed the attorney general to set standards for telecommunications equipment, effectively making that federal official the network’s architect-in-chief. (The bill did not pass.)

In 1993, Bill Clinton, in one of his first presidential directives, announced that engineers at the National Security Agency, the intelligence community’s electronic surveillance arm, had developed a cutting-edge microcircuit, called the “Clipper” chip, to scramble telephone conversations. The administration intended to promote the installation of the Clipper technology in U.S. telephones, and planned to hold “in escrow” the digital keys to decrypt any conversation. In other words, the federal government would build the lock and keep the key, an idea that inspired a reaction somewhere between outrage and apoplexy among technologists and privacy advocates, who ultimately killed the idea.

In that atmosphere of hostility and skepticism, Berman went to work. Beginning in August 1994, he convened a series of meetings with senior law enforcement officials under the auspices of a privacy and security coalition he had formed with more than four dozen activist groups and technology companies — including the biggest telecom provider of all, AT&T — plus the U.S. Telephone Association, IBM, and software makers such as Microsoft. The goal was to resolve differences over the government’s proposal to ensure federal access to telecommunications networks. Berman also brought in two powerful Democratic lawmakers and noted civil libertarians, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and then-Rep. Don Edwards, whose district included California’s Silicon Valley. Everyone in the negotiating room had some familiarity with technology issues, and professional experience in law enforcement or Justice Department oversight.

The meetings featured intense, nitty-gritty debates over the technical aspects of the law. The FBI wanted guarantees that the telecom system would never mature beyond the reach of its wiretaps. Some companies saw this as heavy-handed regulation, and a number of telecom officials shared the activists’ belief that the government was in fact after a permanent covert backdoor into the phone system. The negotiations helped to somewhat dampen the suspicions, however, and the talks went forward because no one in the room disagreed with the fundamental premise that the government had the right to wiretap.

But outside of the meetings, divisions festered among the interest groups. Berman represented the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which champions the public interest in the digital realm, but its board couldn’t decide whether compromise was prudent or perilous. Berman felt he had to persuade his colleagues, in another series of heated meetings, to work in the middle. To him, that meant that the legislative negotiations would follow an inviolate principle: We will only craft solutions to known problems. No writing of laws aimed at encompassing future problems. If the FBI has difficultly accessing the public telephone network, then the law will address only that public telephone network.

In addition to identifying a philosophical guideline, this approach served a more strategic goal — to keep the FBI’s hands off the Internet, which was so new in 1994 as to be practically notional. Internet service providers such as America Online and Prodigy had only a handful of subscribers, and the first Web browser had been released that year, in a beta test version. Still, Berman and others knew that the FBI would never willingly agree to stay off the information superhighway, because Internet-based information held tremendous potential value for law enforcement.

During one meeting, David Johnson, a lawyer who had helped to craft the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in 1986, held up a glass jar full of rocks and asked, “How many of you would say this jar is full?” Most people agreed that it was. Johnson took a fistful of pebbles and dropped them into the jar. They tinkled down through the rocks, finding resting places in the empty spaces. Then he poured sand into the jar. As it cascaded into the empty spaces, Johnson told the onlookers that the sand was like the unseen, seemingly insignificant “transactional data” that traveled on the Internet. Transactional data includes the routing information for a text-based message — where it comes from, where it goes, and what path it follows — and the series of digits that make up an Internet address. This information would someday be of enormous value to the government, he said, just as phone call records, as opposed to actual conversations, already were. The transactional data were small but meaningful — like the tiny grains of sand that kept filling the volume of the jar.

During one meeting, David Johnson, a lawyer who had helped to craft the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in 1986, held up a glass jar full of rocks and asked, “How many of you would say this jar is full?” Most people agreed that it was. Johnson took a fistful of pebbles and dropped them into the jar. They tinkled down through the rocks, finding resting places in the empty spaces. Then he poured sand into the jar. As it cascaded into the empty spaces, Johnson told the onlookers that the sand was like the unseen, seemingly insignificant “transactional data” that traveled on the Internet. Transactional data includes the routing information for a text-based message — where it comes from, where it goes, and what path it follows — and the series of digits that make up an Internet address. This information would someday be of enormous value to the government, he said, just as phone call records, as opposed to actual conversations, already were. The transactional data were small but meaningful — like the tiny grains of sand that kept filling the volume of the jar.

CALEA

Johnson’s vivid illustration convinced many of the participants that the new law mustn’t extend too far. Again, the issue wasn’t whether law enforcement had a right to information but how much power the government should have over the means to get it. Leahy and Edwards, who formally introduced the legislation shortly thereafter, declared that it would apply solely to the public telephone network. The law specifically exempted “information services,” which the parties agreed included Internet companies and electronic-messaging technologies.

The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act passed in the closing days of the 103rd Congress, two weeks before Republicans won control of both chambers in November 1994. CALEA would let the industry set its own standards to meet the Justice Department’s needs. The department could list its surveillance requirements, but the act let companies decide how to build their equipment. Justice won the right to petition the Federal Communications Commission if its officials felt that the companies weren’t fulfilling their obligations. But civil-liberties groups also secured the right to challenge the government’s requirements in court.

It was a true compromise, hard won but workable. For Berman, principled pragmatism had carried the day. For others, however, the compromise had given away too much.

The board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation had seen the proverbial legislative sausage being made and found it distasteful. Even though the directors had agreed to every aspect of the law, which Berman explained to them, within weeks after its passage he left the EFF and formed his own outfit, the Center for Democracy and Technology, to continue his brand of lobbying. The EFF pulled up stakes in Washington the following year and moved to San Francisco, where it continues to play a leading role in supporting lawsuits against telecommunications companies — most notably AT&T, its former ally — for their role in assisting the government with warrantless wiretapping after the 9/11 attacks.

At the time, Berman confided to Kallstrom, whom he thought had always acted in good faith for the FBI, “My work on CALEA got me fired.”

Kallstrom was apparently happy to see his more idealistic opponents leave town. “You didn’t get fired, Jerry,” he replied. “You got promoted.”

Making Demands

Had the FBI and the Justice Department stopped there, had the government settled for secure access to phone networks, the history of Internet privacy and civil liberties might have turned out differently. But just weeks after President Clinton signed CALEA in January 1995, conflict erupted between the government and the phone carriers over the kind of network access the law provided. The raft of compromise that had carried the deal sprung a leak.

FBI officials knew in 1994 that they were making a mistake by leaving cyberspace out of CALEA. They understood the Internet’s potential as a communications device and an intelligence tool — that is, after all, why CALEA’s authors exempted “information services.”

“Did we know that it was idiotic to carve that out?” Kallstrom asks now. “Yes, we did.” Criminals have always been among the first to embrace new technology. It was foolish to think that they wouldn’t turn to the Internet for any number of nefarious gambits. But, Kallstrom says, government officials opted “to fight another day” over Internet access. Privacy advocates were dragging their feet in the negotiations. Delay would invite more debate, probably more hearings, and possibly a less favorable outcome. The political decision was made: “Let’s take what we can get here.”

In early 1995, the Justice Department issued its list of requirements for wiretapping, known as the punch list. Not surprisingly, many telecom executives and their attorneys viewed the demands as unreasonable. Al Gidari, a lawyer representing the wireless industry, was among the first to see the FBI’s requirements, during the initial meeting to develop standards for CALEA, which was held that spring in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Justice Department’s wish list, he said, amounted to “the Cadillac of wiretaps.”

“Everything they could ever think of to gold plate and put on the Cadillac was in that document,” Gidari recalls. Meeting its expectations represented “an exponential increase in complexity, not a linear increase…. They were very dictatorial … technical requirements — the very thing that Congress said it wasn’t up to [the FBI] to figure out.”

The standards meeting was tense and awkward, and the sides were unevenly matched. Gidari recalls a dozen or more FBI agents, in neat blue suits, all buttoned down and looking ready to roll over anyone who stood in their way. Arrayed on the opposite side of the table was a group of laid-back and casually dressed network engineers from all the major telecom equipment manufacturers and carriers that was tasked with the unenviable job of telling the bureau that the industry planned to build a much less complex system. It wasn’t what the FBI agents wanted to hear.

Over the next few years, the Justice Department continued to seek increasingly sophisticated surveillance capabilities, including real-time geographical tracking of mobile phones; the ability to monitor all parties in a conference call regardless of whether they are on hold or participating; and “dialed digit extraction,” a record of any numbers that a subject under surveillance punched in during a call, such as a credit card or bank account number. The government got a lot of what it wanted, but not all.

To be sure, criminals’ use of new technologies helped drive the law enforcement demands. But telecom carriers worried that the cost of compliance was too high and that the FBI’s technical requirements were illegally broad. CALEA, they argued, had forbidden the government from requiring specific system designs or technologies.

The FCC’s Turn

Justice, frustrated by its inability to get all the demands on the punch list, finally asked the FCC to step in. In 1997, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, which then represented mobile carriers, and the Center for Democracy and Technology complained to the commission that the negotiations had deadlocked because of “unreasonable demands by law enforcement for more surveillance features than either CALEA or the wiretap laws allow.” The FCC, however, sided with the Justice Department on a host of requirements that privacy groups found overly broad. The tussle dragged on for two more years and ended up in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which overruled the FCC. After the commission took up matters again, it granted some of the FBI’s requests, and the CALEA standards were amended.

When Justice Department officials reported to Congress on CALEA implementation in January 1998, no manufacturer of telecom equipment said that the FBI’s demands were impossible to meet, but they did say that complying would be difficult and very expensive. (Although Congress had set aside $500 million to reimburse companies for retrofitting their networks, the law required the carriers to bear the cost of compliance on any equipment put in place after CALEA was enacted. Several experts believe that the final cost for compliance on telephone networks has been two to eight times the amount originally allotted.)

The level of government surveillance was so low at that time that some questioned why the FBI wanted such multifaceted access at all. In 1994, federal and state authorities were running 1,154 wiretaps nationwide, mostly for drug investigations, at an average cost of $50,000. The government was asking carriers to “design a nuclear rocket ship” for a rarely used tool, Gidari thought. “In [the FBI’s] view, there was no limit to the expense the carrier should spare in order to save a life.”

CALEA continued to evolve, shaped by the ongoing arguments over the terms of its birth. Activists and carriers thought that the FBI was reneging on its bargain, asking for more than the law allowed. The FBI believed that carriers were stalling when they failed to meet compliance deadlines. As all sides dug in, the meetings on implementation turned bitter. FBI and Justice officials slammed their hands on tables and screamed at carrier representatives, Gidari recalls. “You’re unpatriotic! What do you want to do, help the criminals?”

The government asked those same questions after September 11, 2001. And this time, telecommunications carriers responded. Outside the normal FISA warrant process, which covers intelligence-gathering, carriers opened access to their networks, their customer call data, and their valuable transactional information — the kind that CALEA had intended to exclude. President Bush and his administration believed that the extraordinary nature of the terrorist attacks demanded emergency actions that FISA couldn’t accommodate, and the carriers answered the call from law enforcement and intelligence agencies. But government officials also seized on the post-9/11 mentality to change other surveillance laws and procedures, which they believed — just as their predecessors did in 1994 — were out of step with technology and reality. About three years after 9/11, officials set their sights on rewriting CALEA.

Claiming the Internet

In August 2004, in response to a petition by the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FCC expanded CALEA to cover Internet communications, including voice calls and instant messages. The Electronic Frontier Foundation sued, along with industry, civil-liberties, and academic groups. In 2005, the Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to defer to the FCC’s reading of the law.

Many of those who had helped craft CALEA believed that the commission had misread the law and acted on a post-9/11 impulse to give the government more, not less, access to information. But to the FCC, new Internet technologies that operate a lot like telephones blurred the distinction between “information services” and the kinds of technology that CALEA was meant to cover.

After 9/11, law enforcement and intelligence agencies took a variety of measures, apart from wiretaps, to collect and mine potentially valuable information from the Internet. With the cooperation of telecom companies, government accumulated lots of transactional data — including e-mail header information and lists of websites visited by targeted individuals — to support counter-terrorism operations. Viewed solely as a reaction to the terrorist attacks of 2001, this kind of collection might seem extraordinary. But through the longer lens of history, the government’s steady march into cyberspace is not surprising.

Law enforcement agencies have never suffered for lack of access to the phone network. Kallstrom recalls only a few instances in which agents were unable to execute a wiretap order because of new technology. But as digital, mobile technology has proliferated, the copper lug nuts that Kallstrom remembers from the 1980s have disappeared. Today, state and federal agents spend most of their tap time on mobile devices. In 1994, most wiretaps, by far, targeted private residences. There were few taps on mobile devices. Ten years later, 88 percent of the 1,710 wiretaps were on mobile devices. Only 5 percent were on residential lines. Without CALEA, some experts believe that Kallstrom’s initial fears would have come true and the federal government would have been shut out of the wiretapping business.

Jerry Berman never wanted that to happen. Although he cannot accept that the law that was meant to minimize the government’s influence over the Internet is now being used to facilitate it, he is willing to negotiate on CALEA again, if that is what’s necessary to satisfy all parties.

That willingness to talk extends to FISA, as well, and Berman’s Center for Democracy and Technology has been actively involved in the current agitations over the law. But whenever he and his cohorts have extended the hand of compromise to Congress or the administration, he says, they have been disappointed. Any attempt to revamp FISA, or to clarify CALEA, “is impossible in the current climate,” Berman says. “There is no sense that you could get the kind of negotiation we got in 1994.”

FISA and CALEA

One has to wonder how strong that spirit of compromise really was in 1994, and whether it was already ebbing. If the FBI was willing to take what it could get on CALEA and go on to fight another day, did the government really “settle” at all? Literally weeks after CALEA was signed the Justice Department and the FBI came roaring back with new demands. What killed the penchant for negotiation? Was it the moderates’ loss of power in both political parties after the 1994 Republican revolution? Was it the entrenchment of civil-liberties activists? Was it the Bush White House’s extravagant interpretation of executive power? Was it 9/11?

Berman spends a lot of time pondering these questions and thinking about next moves. He divides his time between Washington, where he chairs his group’s board of directors, and a home he built on the Cacapon River near Berkeley Springs, W.Va. “We just have people in bunkers now,” Berman says ruefully.

The FISA debate is currently hung up on whether companies that assisted warrantless surveillance after 9/11 should have retroactive legal immunity for any laws they may have broken. CALEA has something to say about that, too. The law requires that carriers be able to deliver call identification information to the government remotely. According to Beryl Howell, Sen. Leahy’s lead CALEA staffer, that provision was meant to keep government agents from sitting in the phone companies’ offices to execute their wiretaps.

It is a basic tenet of wiretapping law, whether for intelligence or law enforcement, that the communications companies act as a buffer between their customers and the government, she says, and that telecom carriers must make their own determination whether official requests are, in fact, legal. That the companies would now assert, in defense of their cooperation, that the government determined that post-9/11 requests were legal, strikes Howell as outrageous.

If ever there was a time for the bare-knuckled negotiations of the past, it’s now. It’s not at all clear, though, who could play the role of Jerry Berman, the one to bring people into the room to scream and yell at each other and emerge feeling better for it — and possibly even coming to a compromise. As things stand, Congress appears more likely to punt the FISA debate to the new administration, and has shown little interest in revisiting CALEA.

The constant tension that once kept this system in balance has reached a breaking point. There is no push and pull. Maybe the stakes are too high for compromise. But until that spirit returns, Berman says, “there will be no peace.”

This reliance on troops found medically “non-deployable” is another sign of stress placed on a military that has sent 1.6 million servicemembers to the war zones, soldier advocacy groups say.

“It is a consequence of the consistent churning of our troops,” said Bobby Muller, president of Veterans For America. “They are repeatedly exposed to high-intensity combat with insufficient time at home to rest and heal before redeploying.”

The numbers of non-deployable soldiers are based on health assessment forms filled out by medical personnel at each military installation before a servicemember’s deployment.

According to those statistics, the number of troops that doctors found non-deployable, but who were still sent to Iraq or Afghanistan fluctuated from 10,854 in 2003, down to 5,397 in 2005, and back up to 9,140 in 2007.

The Pentagon records do not list what — or how serious — the health issues are, nor whether they were corrected before deployment, said Michael Kilpatrick, a deputy director for the Pentagon’s Force Health Protection and Readiness Programs.

A Pentagon staffer examined 10,000 individual health records last year to determine causes for the non-deployable ratings, Kilpatrick said. Some reasons included a need for eyeglasses, dental work or allergy medicine and a small number of mental health cases, he said.

This is the first war in which this health screening process has been used, the Pentagon said.

Most of the non-deployable servicemembers are in the Army, which is doing most of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Between 5% and 7% of all active-duty, National Guard and Reserve soldiers slated for combat were found medically unfit due to health problems each year since 2003, according to statistics provided to USA TODAY.

Unit commanders make the final decision about whether a servicemember is sent into combat, although doctors can recommend against deployment because of a medical issue, Army spokeswoman Kim Waldron said.

“The commander consults with health care professionals to determine whether the treatment a soldier needs is available in theater,” said Army Col. Steven Braverman of the Army Medical Command.

At Fort Carson, Colo., Maj. Gen. Mark Graham ordered an investigation into deployment procedures for a brigade deployed to Iraq late last year. At least 36 soldiers were found medically unfit but were still deployed, Graham told USA TODAY.

For at least seven soldiers, treatment in the war zone was inadequate and the soldiers were sent home, he said, and at least two of them should never have been deployed.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February, the panel’s chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked Army leaders about an e-mail from the surgeon for the Fort Carson brigade that said medically “borderline” soldiers went to war because “we have been having issues reaching deployable strength.”

“That should not be happening,” Army Secretary Pete Geren told the committee. “I can’t tell you that it’s not, but it certainly should not be happening.”

Meanwhile, soldiers with medical problems have also deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan from Fort Drum in New York and Fort Stewart and Fort Benning, both in Georgia, according to Brenda Farrell, who is leading an investigation into the practice for the Government Accountability Office.

A report from that investigation sought by members of the House Armed Services Committee is due in June.

“We’re going to have to shut down our very small airlift operation until we get guarantees from the authorities,” Tony Banbury, a WFP regional director, said.

The impounded food aid, totalling 38 tonnes of high-energy biscuits, was enough to feed 95,000 people.

“It should be on trucks headed to the victims. You’ve seen the conditions they are in. That food is now sitting on tarmac, doing no good,” Banbury added.

The impounding of the food aid came after the announcement of a ban on foreign aid workers entering Burma.

Burmese foreign ministry officials said the country would accept supplies from overseas but would control their distribution.

“Myanmar [Burma] is giving priority to receiving relief aid and distributing them to the storm-hit regions with its own resources,” the government-run New Light of Myanmar newspaper said.

“Myanmar is not in a position to receive rescue and information teams from
foreign countries at the moment.”

Frustration is mounting over Burma’s response to one of the worst disasters in its history.

A UN spokesman said the restrictions on foreign workers were “unprecedented” in the history of humanitarian work.

The Thai prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, cancelled a trip to meet members of the ruling military junta as delays in giving visas to aid workers and landing rights for relief flights continued.

A plane loaded with UN aid was allowed to land yesterday, but it represented only a fraction of what Burma needs. Two other planes have languished in Rangoon for two days.

Sundaravej had offered to undertake his own humanitarian mission to break the impasse. He has been in contact with the Burmese prime minister, Thein Sein, to ask that UN staff be allowed to distribute relief supplies.

However, he today said the visit now appeared futile, adding: “After they said today they would not welcome foreign staff, there is no point of me going there.”

The authorities yesterday turned back a plane carrying specialist disaster rescuers and aid. The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, is still seeking talks with the junta.

The Burmese embassy in Thailand is now closed until Tuesday, putting any hopes of a climbdown on visas on hold until next week.

Villages have been submerged in the worst-hit Irrawaddy delta, and the UN now believes that more than 100,000 people have been killed.

Bodies are floating in the floodwater, and aid agencies warned that outbreaks of disease could result in the death toll increasing further.

With roads blocked, hundreds of thousands of survivors are beyond the reach of clean water, food and shelter.

Aid agencies said their expertise and experience in tackling similar disasters, such as the Asian tsunami in 2004, would help get emergency relief to the afflicted areas quickly.

Despite the disaster, the junta said it was pressing ahead with a vote on a new constitution designed to maintain its grip on power. All but the worst affected regions will be balloted tomorrow.

In a television message, citizens were urged to do their patriotic duty and vote. The message did not mention the suffering caused by the cyclone.

In the latest scandal to hit the television industry over phone-ins, the BBC also admitted that viewers of Making Your Mind Up, the BBC1 show that chose last year’s UK entry for the Eurovision song contest, Scooch, were misled into voting before phone lines had opened. In that case, the BBC made £6,000 from ineligible calls that has also gone to charity.

The BBC Trust chairman, Sir Michael Lyons, today said that the money had now been repaid to charity, including interest totalling £123,000.

The trust has also ordered the BBC to make an onscreen apology - the first time the corporation’s governance and regulatory body has imposed such a sanction.

Lyons said the issue involved the BBC Worldwide subsidiary Audiocall, which provides premium-rate phone lines to many BBC shows.

He added that about two dozen shows had been affected between October 2005 and September 2007, although he refused to name them.

Lyons said new technology had since been introduced which meant the problem had been resolved.

The trust has asked the BBC director general, Mark Thompson, to look at disciplining a “handful” of staff.

Lyons made it clear that senior staff within BBC Worldwide and the corporation did not know about the problem and nor did staff who worked on the affected programmes.

He added that he did not know why staff at Audiocall did not report the issue.

Lyons said: “There is no legal impropriety but it is a failure in the behaviour of these staff and the BBC’s own systems.

“It was a matter of serious misjudgment by a small number of people and a serious failing in how the BBC controls its PRS [premium-rate phone services] and its relationship with viewers and voters.

“These problems can’t continue into the future and there are lessons to be learned and disciplinary action may take place amongst staff.”

He added: “There is no room for complacency here. This is an organisation intent on living by the highest standards in the industry.”

These latest TV deception revelations follow the record £5.675m fine imposed on ITV yesterday by Ofcom over the commercial broadcaster’s phone-in scandal.

In an email to staff, Thompson described the situation as a “serious oversight”.

But he said there was “no evidence” of any “impropriety or intention to defraud”, adding that the £106,000 represented only 1.3% of the approximately £8m raised for charity through BBC telephone votes during the relevant period.

“All the money has been paid to the charities involved, with interest,” Thompson added. “The oversight has been remedied. Clearly, this must never be allowed to happen again.”

He said that while the new incidents were “disappointing”, they were both “historical’.

“We’re confident that the measures we’ve put in place mean they won’t happen again,” Thompson added.

“The whole BBC has made enormous progress on the topic of trust over the past nine months, a fact backed up by all of our surveys of the public themselves.

“We need to go on doing everything possible to restore fully the public’s trust in us. But we’ve made real progress on that score, while delivering some spectacular creative successes and starting to make our vision of the BBC’s future a reality.”The BBC today apologised for keeping £106,000 made from premium-rate phone calls on about two dozen shows that should have been given to charity.

In the latest scandal to hit the television industry over phone-ins, the BBC also admitted that viewers of Making Your Mind Up, the BBC1 show that chose last year’s UK entry for the Eurovision song contest, Scooch, were misled into voting before phone lines had opened. In that case, the BBC made £6,000 from ineligible calls that has also gone to charity.

The BBC Trust chairman, Sir Michael Lyons, today said that the money had now been repaid to charity, including interest totalling £123,000.

The trust has also ordered the BBC to make an onscreen apology - the first time the corporation’s governance and regulatory body has imposed such a sanction.

Lyons said the issue involved the BBC Worldwide subsidiary Audiocall, which provides premium-rate phone lines to many BBC shows.

He added that about two dozen shows had been affected between October 2005 and September 2007, although he refused to name them.

Lyons said new technology had since been introduced which meant the problem had been resolved.

The trust has asked the BBC director general, Mark Thompson, to look at disciplining a “handful” of staff.

Lyons made it clear that senior staff within BBC Worldwide and the corporation did not know about the problem and nor did staff who worked on the affected programmes.

He added that he did not know why staff at Audiocall did not report the issue.

Lyons said: “There is no legal impropriety but it is a failure in the behaviour of these staff and the BBC’s own systems.

“It was a matter of serious misjudgment by a small number of people and a serious failing in how the BBC controls its PRS [premium-rate phone services] and its relationship with viewers and voters.

“These problems can’t continue into the future and there are lessons to be learned and disciplinary action may take place amongst staff.”

He added: “There is no room for complacency here. This is an organisation intent on living by the highest standards in the industry.”

These latest TV deception revelations follow the record £5.675m fine imposed on ITV yesterday by Ofcom over the commercial broadcaster’s phone-in scandal.

In an email to staff, Thompson described the situation as a “serious oversight”.

But he said there was “no evidence” of any “impropriety or intention to defraud”, adding that the £106,000 represented only 1.3% of the approximately £8m raised for charity through BBC telephone votes during the relevant period.

“All the money has been paid to the charities involved, with interest,” Thompson added. “The oversight has been remedied. Clearly, this must never be allowed to happen again.”

He said that while the new incidents were “disappointing”, they were both “historical’.

“We’re confident that the measures we’ve put in place mean they won’t happen again,” Thompson added.

“The whole BBC has made enormous progress on the topic of trust over the past nine months, a fact backed up by all of our surveys of the public themselves.

“We need to go on doing everything possible to restore fully the public’s trust in us. But we’ve made real progress on that score, while delivering some spectacular creative successes and starting to make our vision of the BBC’s future a reality.”The BBC today apologised for keeping £106,000 made from premium-rate phone calls on about two dozen shows that should have been given to charity.

In the latest scandal to hit the television industry over phone-ins, the BBC also admitted that viewers of Making Your Mind Up, the BBC1 show that chose last year’s UK entry for the Eurovision song contest, Scooch, were misled into voting before phone lines had opened. In that case, the BBC made £6,000 from ineligible calls that has also gone to charity.

The BBC Trust chairman, Sir Michael Lyons, today said that the money had now been repaid to charity, including interest totalling £123,000.

The trust has also ordered the BBC to make an onscreen apology - the first time the corporation’s governance and regulatory body has imposed such a sanction.

Lyons said the issue involved the BBC Worldwide subsidiary Audiocall, which provides premium-rate phone lines to many BBC shows.

He added that about two dozen shows had been affected between October 2005 and September 2007, although he refused to name them.

Lyons said new technology had since been introduced which meant the problem had been resolved.

The trust has asked the BBC director general, Mark Thompson, to look at disciplining a “handful” of staff.

Lyons made it clear that senior staff within BBC Worldwide and the corporation did not know about the problem and nor did staff who worked on the affected programmes.

He added that he did not know why staff at Audiocall did not report the issue.

Lyons said: “There is no legal impropriety but it is a failure in the behaviour of these staff and the BBC’s own systems.

“It was a matter of serious misjudgment by a small number of people and a serious failing in how the BBC controls its PRS [premium-rate phone services] and its relationship with viewers and voters.

“These problems can’t continue into the future and there are lessons to be learned and disciplinary action may take place amongst staff.”

He added: “There is no room for complacency here. This is an organisation intent on living by the highest standards in the industry.”

These latest TV deception revelations follow the record £5.675m fine imposed on ITV yesterday by Ofcom over the commercial broadcaster’s phone-in scandal.

In an email to staff, Thompson described the situation as a “serious oversight”.

But he said there was “no evidence” of any “impropriety or intention to defraud”, adding that the £106,000 represented only 1.3% of the approximately £8m raised for charity through BBC telephone votes during the relevant period.

“All the money has been paid to the charities involved, with interest,” Thompson added. “The oversight has been remedied. Clearly, this must never be allowed to happen again.”

He said that while the new incidents were “disappointing”, they were both “historical’.

“We’re confident that the measures we’ve put in place mean they won’t happen again,” Thompson added.

“The whole BBC has made enormous progress on the topic of trust over the past nine months, a fact backed up by all of our surveys of the public themselves.

“We need to go on doing everything possible to restore fully the public’s trust in us. But we’ve made real progress on that score, while delivering some spectacular creative successes and starting to make our vision of the BBC’s future a reality.”

In today’s Independent we see an eye-opening article revealing that amidst what is described as a series of “global food shortages”, a new “government-backed report” shows that “the British public” annually throws away “4.4 million apples, 1.6 million bananas, 1.3 million yoghurt pots, 660,000 eggs, 550,000 chickens, 300,000 packs of crisps and 440,000 ready meals. And for the first time government researchers have established that most of the food waste is made up of completely untouched food products – whole chickens and chocolate gateaux that lie uneaten in cupboards and fridges before being discarded” — adding up to “a record £10b” every year.

And that’s just us Brits. Imagine what the totals are for the Western world combined: Scary and revealing stuff that makes the word “overconsumption” seem like a gross understatement.

But despite the shock value of such important revelations, I’m increasingly concerned at the way in which the food crisis is being portrayed. The Independent goes on to explain the causes of the food crisis as follows: “… millions of the world’s poor face food shortages caused by rising populations, droughts and increased demand for land for biofuels, which have sparked riots and protests from Haiti to Mauritania, and from Yemen to the Philippines.”

So the food crisis comes down to three things:

1) rising populations (presumably not us in the advanced West, but rather those Third World crazies breeding like rabbits despite being so poor)

2) droughts (which may be exacerbated by climate change but in any case often occur naturally and therefore we purportedly can’t do much about)

3) and the drive from energy corporations for investment in biofuels.

Indeed, according to the British government’s new chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington speaking at a government conference two months ago:

“price rises in staples such as rice, maize and wheat would continue because of increased demand caused by population growth and increasing wealth in developing nations. He also said that climate change would lead to pressure on food supplies because of decreased rainfall in many areas and crop failures related to climate. ‘The agriculture industry needs to
double its food production, using less water than today.’”

So again, population and economic growth in the ‘developing nations’, plus climate change, are to blame, and can only be addressed by doubling food production using less water (technologically impossible for all intents and purposes, but we’ll come back to that). It’s Them again — too many of Them, wanting More.

As if to emphasise the point, we hear in the same piece that:

“Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, said at the conference that the world’s population was expected to grow from 6.2bn today to 9.5bn in less than 50 years’ time. ‘How are we going to feed everybody?’ he asked.”

Only a rhetorical question of course. Sorry to break it t’ya folks, but ‘feeding everybody’ has never really been one of the state’s major concerns. That’s why “Each tonne of wheat and sugar from the UK is sold on international markets at an average price of 40% and 60% below the cost of production respectively (ie, it is dumped)”, thus undercutting local farmers across the South, who thus lose any semblance of agricultural-independence they may have once had (i.e. the ability to feed their own people), thus becoming subject to the whims of the global food market, manipulated through speculation in the interests of Northern investors and consumers.

But the important point for now is that as far as Hilary Benn is concerned, it’s clear that the cause of the problem is “their” population growth.

Later in the article, Professor Beddington is cited pointing out that global grain stores are currently at the lowest levels ever, just 40 days from running out. He again emphasises the question of food production: “I am only nine weeks into the job, so don’t yet have all the answers, but it is clear that science and research to increase the efficiency of agricultural production per unit of land is critical.”

According to Beddington, food security is the “elephant in the room” that politicians must face up to quickly. In reality, the “elephant in the room” goes far deeper than the surface issues scratched at lamely by the government, and sits in the heart of global food production. Some of Beddington’s observations show that he is dimly aware of this problem. He understands that production needs to be increased drastically. But his solution is a technological one, “science and research” in order to maximise “efficiency” so we can produce faster and better to meet escalating global demand. This is unlikely to happen. Beddington knows it. Benn knows it. The supermarket chains know it.

From this conventional analysis of the food crisis, we are not left with many solutions. We may, however, pick among the following: 1) the proliferation and prolongation of droughts due to climate change means that we need to slow down our CO2 emissions by introducing ‘market incentives’ (i.e. big taxes) targeted largely at consumers, who are blamed for having no regard for the size of their individual carbon footprints. transfering to alternative renewable energies is, for some odd reason, irrelevant. 2) reducing population growth in developing countries to decrease demand for food (nothing at all to do with NSSM 200, of course). 3) go easy on the biofuels (but fail to propose investment in other viable alternative energy sources). 4) pray day and night that Science will somehow generate a technological miracle of agricultural production.

Obviously, none of these ’solutions’ seems to really offer a way out for the food crisis — and that’s because the analysis is fundamentally flawed. It’s not completely wrong, it just misses out half the picture, and so comes up with a false diagnosis of what’s actually gone wrong. The result is that the institutions that require urgent re-structuring are being absolved. The government, the state, and the network of giant multinational corporations that govern global agribusiness, are excused of any culpability. The cause of the crisis, we keep hearing is, WE, THE PEOPLE! It’s the developing nations, who just won’t stop breeding, dammit. It’s us Western consumers, who won’t stop eating and throwing a third of our food away. It’s everyone except the state-corporate complex that controls the food industry.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that you and I are NOT culpable. Of course we are. We do throw away tonnes, literally, of food. We do, each of us, have large carbon footprints that we should try to reduce in our own ways. Populations are increasing. But the question is this: are these factors the fundamental causes of the current global food crisis? Or are they exacerbating factors that are accentuating and intensifying the impact of the food crisis? Following mainstream news coverage of food shortages, one would be forgiven for believing that rising food prices are all because of you and me, the public, the general consumer. We have been thoroughly pathologised. And the British government, with its eye-opening study of how much food the British consumer chucks away without thinking, is complicit in this pathologisation.

Why is that the government-backed report discussed in today’s Independent, says nothing about the institutions who are primarily responsible for food wastage, the supermarkets, the multinational food chains? If the government is genuinely concerned about food wastage in this country, why won’t they do something about the fact reported by the same newspaper in February, that:

“Retailers generate 1.6 million tonnes of food waste each year… An influential watchdog, the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), will condemn targets set by the Government’s waste-reduction programme as ‘unambitious and lacking urgency’. It will also say multi-buy promotions are helping to fuel waste and obesity in Britain. Speaking to The Independent on Sunday ahead of the report’s publication on Saturday, Tim Lang, SDC commissioner, said it was ‘ludicrous’ that the Government had not pressured retailers into setting tougher targets to cut waste.

Three years ago, the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) left it up to supermarkets to find voluntary ’solutions to food waste’ in an agreement dubbed the Courtauld Commitment. ‘The Government is frankly not using its leverage adequately. It really should toughen up on Courtauld, which must be enforced because this is ludicrous,’ said Mr Lang, who is also professor of food policy at City University, London.

The 18-month study, which found that ‘too many supermarket practices are still unhealthy, unjust and unsustainable’, said Wrap should adopt a ‘more aspirational approach to reducing waste in food retail by setting longer-term targets and [supporting] a culture of zero waste’…

A separate study by Imperial College for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, found that supermarkets preferred to throw away food that was approaching its sell-by date rather than mark it down in price.”

So three months after being hit over the head by the Sustainable Development Commission, the government’s waste reduction programme completely ignores the warnings that supermarket profit-maximisation policies are not only directly generating billions of pounds of waste by dumping good food, they are encouraging consumers through excessive advertising, multi-buy offers, and refusal to slash prices on older foods, to also buy excess food they don’t need, a third of which they dump in turn. Instead, the government simply blames consumers. Period.

Don’t penalise Profit, nor Power. Pathologise People.

The corporate-biased law doesn’t help either, because: “The scale of the wastage from supermarkets, food processors, wholesalers and restaurants is not known, because many companies refuse to make their data public, citing commercial confidentiality.” In other words, we don’t even know the real scale of corporate food wastage. Worse, the government regularly does the same thing — here’s an example: “In the past 10 months, the government’s food intervention board dumped almost 30,000 tonnes of fresh vegetables and fruit which had been withdrawn from the market to guarantee farm prices.”

So the problem is far more complex, rooted in a consumerist culture that is tied to a political economy being deliberately sustained by those institutions with the most to gain from this entrenched structure. The government has no interest in transforming that political economy. So the result is an insistence on inspecting only half the picture, ignoring the role of the global corporate food industry.

Driven by capitalist imperatives for short-term profit maximisation and long-term cost-minimisation, global agribusiness has established an international food production system that is, basically, dying.

Most of the Earth’s fertile land is already now being used for food production. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005 reported that “there is now little room for further agricultural expansion.” One of the scientists, Dr Navin Ramankutty, points out: “The real question is, how can we continue to produce food from the land while preventing negative environmental consequences such as deforestation, water pollution and soil erosion?” Or, more bluntly, how are we going to keep producing food if our production-system continues to destroy the very means to produce food?

It’s not that the Earth can’t produce the food. Its that corporate agribusiness can’t produce the food. In fact, as I’ve warned previously, it has been failing to produce the food since the 1990s, during which grain production has increasingly slowed. The frenzied application of fertilisers and other modern agricultural practices served to temporarily escalate production, but simultaneously have intensified soil erosion, destroying in years essential nutrients for crop-growth that take centuries to replace. The imminent peak of world oil production, oil being the chief underpinning for industrial agricultural methods, which is either just round the corner in 2010-ish (or worse, passed in 2005) means that the global corporate food production system is up against its own physical limits.

For us to keep eating, it’s true, we have to put an end to our insane overconsumption and wastefulness. But there are real limits to what the consumer can do within the existing global corporate food system. So we need to turn our attention to that system, and demand that it changes fundamentally, which means, of course, a wholesale transformation of our political economies in ways which rely on renewable energy resources and localised less-intensive but no less successful traditional agricultural practices. We need some kind of grassroots action, which makes our voices impossible to ignore. It will take time to develop, to become strong, to gather momentum. But it needs to be done, and now. Because at current rates of declining food production and rising prices, fuelled by unscrupulous market speculation, many, many people are likely to die, not just in the South, but here too. And while this death escalates, a few at the helm of the global corporate food industry will reap unprecedented windfall profits from their deaths. That’s why real solutions aren’t being put on the table. Death is regrettable, but when it comes wrapped in £££$$$, it’s not so bad…

The cocoa we drink while reading the newspaper or watching the morning news shows may come from the Ivory Coast, which supplies half the world market. Children and adolescents from even poorer neighboring countries, such as Mali, trek all the way to the cocoa plantations to earn a subsistence salary. Often, they end up working as slaves in remote farms. “Nineteen-year-old Drissa was one such young man. When he was freed in 2000, he had just gone through a ‘breaking-in’ period as his master accustomed him to enslavement. His back was laced with scars and wounds from being whipped.”

Almost every product we consume has a hidden dark history, from slave labor to piracy, from counterfeit to fraud, from theft to money laundering. We know very little about these economic secrets because modern consumers live inside the market matrix.

The first thought that comes to mind when we discover that our hot chocolate comes directly from slave labor suggests that we boycott Ivory Coast cocoa. But this decision would not help free thousands of young slaves like Drissa. On the contrary, it could make their lives much worse and harm honest farmers as well. “Africa is like a body infested with parasites. One has to be careful not to kill the body to get rid of the parasites,” summarized Rico Carish. Millions of people depend for their sustenance on this parasitic rogue economy. The alternative could impoverish them further, if it does not put them at risk of death.

Often, western intervention, even when willing and well intentioned, achieves very little. In the case of many African commodities, Western companies have no direct contact with farmers. Trade occurs through local intermediaries, middlemen, and shippers. The profits of slavery are collected at the farm gate, a practice that effectively incorporates them in the price of the product. Often the intermediaries do not even know or care that slave labor is involved in the production of the goods they trade. This explains why halting imports from the Ivory Coast will not end slavery but force thousands of honest farmers and their families into poverty. To eradicate the problem, one must attack the root causes, a task that only local governments can accomplish. But good governance also proves a rare commodity on the African continent.

Even more shocking is the discovery that in the twenty-first century, slavery is booming on a global scale. According to the United Nations, slavery is growing at an unprecedented rate. Figures put global slavery at 27 million persons, a generation of modern slaves that, according to the International Labor Organization, produces yearly profits of around $31 billion. Population explosion and great migrations coupled with globalization have boosted the slave trade. “The increase in slavery is linked to globalization,” concurs Kevin Bales, author of Ending Slavery: How We Will Free Today’s Slaves. “But this is not about sweat-shop workers existing on misery wages. Slaves are under the complete, violent control of another person; they are economically exploited and get only enough food and shelter to stay alive. For millions of victims, their experience differs little in hardship from that of slaves hundreds of years ago.”

Slavery’s resurgence exerts a direct effect on its cost, which has now fallen for decades. Bates calculated that, while over the past 3,000 years the average price of a slave has ranged from $20,000 to $80,000 (adjusted to current dollar value) now people can be bought and sold for a tenth of these prices. After World War II, we witnessed a sudden surge in the supply of slave labor, pushing prices down. Ironically, this phenomenon began as a consequence of decolonization, which shifted slave ownership from colonizers to countrymen. Today’s slaves are predominantly enslaved by their national peers and not by foreign powers. Like other commodity markets, slavery operates by the law of supply and demand, and today supply proves plentiful among the millions living on a dollar to two dollars a day.

Consumers remain blissfully ignorant of these facts. The market matrix, a complex maze of smoke and mirrors, hides the exploitative nature of trade and commerce. The shelves of Western supermarkets are stacked with items produced by people in developing countries who earn a miniscule fraction of their value. Consumers, if they ever chose to think about it, might be shocked to learn who pockets most of the profits of their daily grocery shopping.

Loretta Napoleoni: An expert on financing of terrorism, Loretta advises several governments on counter-terrorism. She is senior partner of G Risk, a London based risk agency. - She is a Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC. and a Rotary Scholar at the London School of Economics..

To review further articles and listen to podcasts by Loretta Napoleoni, you are invited to visit her website: http://www.lorettanapoleoni.org

BBC News

The Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and many Labour MPs oppose the change.

Dame Stella Rimington called it “a huge pity” the debate had become a political issue, saying security “was too serious a thing to play party politics with”.

For this reason, she told BBC Radio Nottingham, she would not express an opinion on the present limit, or proposed extensions to 42 or even 60 days.

“But I do think they should try and achieve some kind of consensus,” she added.

Police ‘backing’

A Commons vote is expected in mid-June on the matter, with Prime Minister Gordon Brown favouring a 42-day period.

He has said the change was needed to accommodate questioning after any “substantial terrorist incident” on British soil.

He has argued that this extension was backed by Sir Ian Blair, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London and the most senior policeman in the UK.

But Conservative leader David Cameron has accused Mr Brown of trying to push through the extension to appear “tough on terror”, rather than because he believes in it.

Last week Mr Cameron claimed he had been sent a report which detailed the concerns of some Labour MPs on the issue, and suggested there might be a backbench rebellion when the vote was held.

The Liberal Democrats also oppose extending the 28 day limit. Enough Labour MPs appear to oppose the extension to suggest the government could be defeated.