background preloader

GOVN'T LYING, SPYING AND, COVER-UP

Facebook Twitter

Serious Eats: New York: Tags: A Sandwich A Day - (Private Browsing) Serious Eats: New York - The New York City Food and Restaurant Blog - (Private Browsing) Cultures of Resistance -- Feature Trailer. U.S.-Mexico border crossings plunge, agents are bored. In my morning L.A. Times, there was a story about plummeting border crossings about which I haven't heard a peep anywhere else. There has been such a steep drop in illegal entries, in fact, that border agents are getting bored, falling asleep, and getting fired or disciplined for their inability to keep their eyes open. That's right, illegal crossings have sunk to record low levels, so the U.S.

Border Patrol is dozing off. This is not to say the problem has gone away, there are still about 450,00 people (down from 1.6 million) who get through, but the numbers have gone way down since the year 2000, by about two-thirds. [B]eefed-up enforcement and the job-killing effects of the great recession have combined to reduce the flood of immigrants in many former hot spots to a trickle. [...]From 2005 to 2010, apprehensions of immigrants dropped 95%, from 138,460 to 7,116.

That is some major drop. You can read the entire article here. US Department of Homeland Security developing system to predict criminal intent. A Report Card for Homeland Security - Daveed Gartenstein-Ross - National. Are our intelligence analysts really keeping us safer? Or are they wasting money and providing "Google-deep" information? A new amendment promises to find out.

Reuters While the U.S. faces severely constrained resources, the threat posed by violent non-state actors is unlikely to disappear soon. America is shackled by an economy that's in shambles and over $14 trillion in national debt; one of al Qaeda's recent adaptations has been to leverage this weakened state, executing smaller but more frequent attacks designed to drive up the costs of providing security, and thus grind down the U.S. economy.

Co-sponsored by Senators Scott Brown (R. A key question about the massive expansion of the intelligence community that occurred after 9/11 is whether we are truly better off because of it. All four questions that Sen. One problem is that contractors are simply more expensive, on average, than are federal employees. The second question posed by Sen. The third question that Sen. Secrecy About Secrecy: Making Sure the FBI Is Following the Rules on Surveillance Gag Orders. Every year, the FBI sends about 50,000 "national security letters" (NSLs) to Internet service providers and others requesting information about their customers. Today we filed a lawsuit aiming to make sure that the government is following the rules when it uses this controversial tool.

NSLs allow the FBI to collect information that's extremely sensitive — e.g. the names of websites that a person has visited, or the email addresses with which she has corresponded — and to do so without judicial oversight. Unsurprisingly, government reports have detailed significant abuses. Several years ago, the ACLU challenged one particularly troubling aspect of NSLs: the government's ability to silence recipients of NSLs using gag orders. By imposing these gag orders, the FBI cloaked the use (and abuse) of its NSL authority in near-blanket secrecy. In a landmark ruling, a federal appellate court held in 2008 that the gag order provisions were unconstitutional.

More People Waking Up To The Troubling Implications Of The Gov't Taking $500 Million From Google. Last week when it was confirmed that, via a "nonprosecution agreement," the government would forfeit $500 million from Google, because of some Canadian pharmacies, we were worried about the kind of message this sent to the tech community. While there are no specific safe harbors on secondary liability for criminal activity, the US judicial system generally does recognize the fact it's wrong to blame third parties for actions they were not specifically responsible for.

There are, of course, some safe harbor rules (mainly 512 in the DMCA and 230 in the CDA) which clearly protect third parties from liability in specific instances, but even outside of those safe harbors, the courts have recognized how wrong it is to blame third parties for the actions of others, even if they occur on that third party's platform (for example: in the Tiffany/eBay case, where there are no safe harbors for trademark infringement, but eBay was still deemed not responsible). Anonymous Corporation Watch: Canon’s Devious Little Tool.

Insider Tells Why Obama Chose Not to Prosecute Torture. Two Years Ago Obama Decided Not to Prosecute Torturers Now We Get An Account of Why By David Swanson If you can think back all the way to January 2009, back when wars were ending, Guantanamo was closing, the Pentagon was getting oversight, employees were going to have free choice, the rich would start paying taxes, the air would be getting cleaner, and so forth, you’ll recall that the Obama transition team was acting super populist and high-tech. They had questions from ordinary people for the President Elect submitted on their website and voted up or down. The top question at the end of the voting had come from Bob Fertik of Democrats.com and it was this: “Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor – ideally Patrick Fitzgerald – to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?” -Bob Fertik, New York City Not only was the answer no, but it had to be inferred because President Change U.

That’s the plan. Orwell's Armchair by Derek Bambauer. University of Arizona - James E. Rogers College of Law 79 University of Chicago Law Review 863 (2012) Brooklyn Law School Research Paper No. 247 Abstract: America has begun to censor the Internet. Defying conventional scholarly wisdom that Supreme Court precedent bars Internet censorship, federal and state governments are increasingly using indirect methods to engage in “soft” blocking of on-line material. This Article assesses these methods and makes a controversial claim: hard censorship, such as the PROTECT IP Act, is normatively preferable to indirect restrictions.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 76 Keywords: internet, censorship, filtering, first amendment, constitutional law, network neutrality, domain name, cyberlaw, PROTECT IP Act, intermediaries, prior restraint, intellectual property, copyright, telecommunications, 1984 JEL Classification: K10, K19, K42, O33, O34, O38 Accepted Paper Series Suggested Citation. MURDER, SPIES & VOTING LIES — ReThink Review. Leak Offers Look at Efforts by U.S. to Spy on Israel. Inside Criminal Justice. Photo via tsa.gov Boston’s Logan Airport is testing a new approach to airline security aimed at making life easier for passengers. But will it make us safer? As the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks approaches, the much-maligned Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is experimenting with a plan to supplement high-tech screening measures with what might be considered a more intuitive yet rational strategy.

The experiment, implemented last month in Terminal A at Boston’s Logan Airport, could be called a “No Lie Zone.” On a 60-day trial basis, passengers are to be screened for hints of deception as an indicator of risk. For periods of four hours every day, about one dozen so-called “Behavior Detection Officers” interview all passengers as they move from the boarding pass identification checkpoint to the electronic body scanners. When they find one, the passenger is subjected to a more intensive screening and questioning. A More Systematic Approach “Where are you from?” The DOJ's escalating criminalization of speech | Committee to Stop FBI Repression. NSFOCUS a security company you might not have met. Just when I thought that I had spoken with just about every security company, I am introduced to a new one. In this case, Steve Friedburg, an old friend, called me to introduce me to a new client, NSFOCUS. The company, he informed me, was founded in 2000 and has made great strides in creating a family of network security appliances.

After going back and forth a number of times, a time for my conversation with the NSFOCUS team was finally selected. After reading through their presentation materials and thinking about what they had to say, I've come to the conclusion that they are offering good technology, but face the challenge of being recognized on the world stage. Background In the past, many security challenges were presented by disgruntled employees or students having a great deal of knowledge and out for a bit of sport. Furthermore, the targets have changes from the target's websites to the infrastructure servers that support the target's network.

What does NSFOCUS do? Exclusive: The Intern Who Opened an Anthrax Letter | The Anthrax Files | FRONTLINE. For years, she hid her strange place in American history. “I didn’t want to be known as Grant Leslie, the girl who got anthrax.” On Oct. 15, 2001, Senate intern Grant Leslie opened a letter addressed to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).

White powder poured onto her lap, her shoes and the floor. Eventually, the entire building would have to be shut down. Leslie and her colleagues were given Cipro and vaccinated. It would be the most high-profile of the series of biological attacks that terrorized the country. Leslie spoke about the experience for the first time to FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore. It started when, on the Friday before the attacks, a hand-delivered gift to Senator Daschle’s office sparked a scare. The scare rattled the office, and held up mail delivery that Friday afternoon. In the mail pile, one particular envelope got her attention. Leslie and her colleagues were quickly tested. Leslie didn’t have much confidence in the investigation into the attacks. U.S. classification of documents as secret is out of hand.

Every 6-year-old knows what a secret is. But apparently our nation's national security establishment does not. Consider this strange case from earlier this year. On June 8, the National Security Agency, a top-secret government spy agency, heralded the "declassification" of a 200-year-old publication, translated from the original German, on cryptography. It turns out, however, as reported by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists on his blog Secrecy News, that the 1809 study had long been publicly available and had even been digitized and published online through Google Books several years earlier. In fact, the 19th century study had not met the government's own standards for classification in the first place. The day after this odd "declassification," the government's four-year prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake under the Espionage Act collapsed when the government withdrew charges.

The charges stem from Drake's leaking of information to a journalist. J. Leak Offers Look at Efforts by U.S. to Spy on Israel. Our Vanished Civil Liberties. The Obama administration may not employ lawyers advocating for extreme abrogations of constitutional protections, but it frequently ends up acquiescing to the political right. Caricatures created by politics never fit comfortably into the Oval Office. Eisenhower was less deferential to the military than he seemed likely to be, Kennedy was not at all beholden to the pope, George W. Bush was smarter than portrayed and Barack Obama has not led a charge from the left—least of all on behalf of the civil liberties that have eroded since September 11, 2001.

About the Author David K. David K. Also by the Author Public knowledge and legal opinion have yet to catch up to the massive state spying enabled by new technologies. There are many measures the president could take to restore civil liberties—if he wanted to. In pursuit of both terrorists and common criminals, Obama has perpetuated so many of the Bush administration’s policies that even Republicans might take heart. It is already getting late. Hosted2.ap. The Most Important Chart About the Patriot Act You'll See - Politics. Judge refuses to hold CIA in contempt of court for destroying torture tapes. Reporters Without Borders continues to be perplexed by the impunity enjoyed by senior US officials responsible for a serious freedom of information violation.

A federal judge this week refused to hold the CIA in contempt of court for destroying 92 videotapes depicting the torture of two prisoners in the course of the “war on terror.” The ruling was issued on August 1st by Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the US district court for the southern district of New York, in response to a motion by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that dates back to 2007. Hellerstein did ask the CIA to publish its forthcoming document-destruction policies and ordered the CIA to pay all of the ACLU’s attorney fees. The judge also praised the ACLU for managing to get the federal authorities to release documents about detainee treatment.

“What you and your colleagues have done in getting this story to the American public has been extraordinary,” the judge told the ACLU. State-sponsored spies collaborate with crimeware gang. High performance access to file storage Hackers sponsored by the Chinese government and other nations are collaborating with profit-driven malware gangs to infiltrate corporate networks storing government secrets and other sensitive data, researchers say. In many ways, the relationship between state-sponsored actors and organized crime groups that target online bank accounts resembles the kind of mutually benefiting alliances found in nature everyday.

Just as human intestines create the ideal environment for certain types of bacteria – and in turn receive crucial nutrients and digestive assistance – crimeware operators often cooperate with government-backed spies perpetrating the kinds of APTs, or advanced persistent threats, that have pillaged Google, RSA Security, and other US companies. The same machines, however, can be a goldmine to spies hoping to plant APTs that steal weapons blueprints or other sensitive government data from adversaries. The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis. Secrecy is the freedom that zealots dream of; no watchman to check the door, no accountant to check the books, no judge to check the law. The secret government has no constitution. The rules it follows are the rules it makes up. This is the full length 90 min. version of Bill Moyer's 1987 scathing critique of the criminal subterfuge carried out by the Executive Branch of the United States Government to carry out operations which are clearly contrary to the wishes and values of the American people.

The ability to exercise this power with impunity is facilitated by the National Security Act of 1947. The significance of the documentary is probably greater today in 2007 than it was when it was made. Watch the full documentary now. The Global Patriot Act. From the end of World War II to the start of the "global war on terror," international law provided crucial support for the promotion of human rights around the world. But the response to the September 11 attacks has had a profound and little-appreciated impact on international law with devastating global consequences for human rights, democracy, and constitutionalism. The Bush administration did not just persuade Congress to pass the USA Patriot Act, eliminating critical civil-liberties protections against excessive governmental powers.

U.S. officials also mobilized the United Nations Security Council to require all U.N. member states to enact their own domestic versions of the Patriot Act, and many of those governments have used the new globally mandated security program to restrict rights, concentrate power, and suppress political dissent. George W. Bush was certainly no fan of international law. Whenever it became inconvenient, his administration lawyered around it. Advertisement. That Islamophobic FBI Training Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg. DuPont wins $900m Kevlar trade spy case | Business. NIS admits to packet tapping Gmail : National. Spooks never kept us safe | Peter Preston. A Plan to Limit Dishonesty in Congress. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano: Cyber, domestic threats are a priority. Canon’s Devious Little Tool « anoncorpwatch.

TSA fires 28 Honolulu bag screeners after probe - Travel. It's time to end the war on terror: How you can watch—and participate in—the live Intelligence Squared/Slate debate on Sept. 7 at NYU. -