Obama Continues Bush's Illegal Drone Surveillance

[Rome]

I like Bush/Cheney declaring that more troops will be sent regardless what Congress or the American people want.  Yay fake democracy.

It's hard work installing a fake democracy in Iraq when you're busy trying to destroy a legitimate one at home, Dio.

[Diomedes]

Fair point.

[Butchers Bill]

This program has been discontinued:

Link

[Diomedes]

Yeah, and when that scumbag in charge decides he wants to start it up again, he will.  Because he thinks he's King of America, and no one has the balls to put him in a guillotine, where he belongs.

[Rome]

Bush has the greatest employment guarantee of any President in history.  Impossible as it may be to believe, the assclown standing behind him in the line of succession is infinitely worse.  Bush's enemies might hate him and his "base" might be lukewarm towards him at the moment, but both groups absolutely loathe Dick Cheney.

With good reason, too.  He's about as evil as it gets.

[Diomedes]

They're both on a par with Osama and Hussein. 

[Seabiscuit36]

They're both on a par with Osama and Hussein. 

[Geowhizzer]

I see them more like this:

[Diomedes]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/oneworld/45361453951169684424

U.S. Military Spied on Hundreds of Antiwar Demos

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 24 (OneWorld) - At least 186 antiwar protests in the United States have been monitored by the Pentagon's domestic surveillance program, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which also found that the Defense Department collected more than 2,800 reports involving Americans in a single anti-terrorism database.  The documents were obtained by the ACLU through a Freedom of Information Act request filed last February.

"It cannot be an accident or coincidence that nearly 200 antiwar protests ended up in a Pentagon threat database," Ann Beeson, associate legal director of the ACLU, said in a statement. "This unchecked surveillance is part of a broad pattern of the Bush administration using 'national security' as an excuse to run roughshod over the privacy and free speech rights of Americans."

The internal Defense Department documents show it is monitoring the activities of a wide swath of peace groups, including Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, Code Pink, the American Friends Service Committee, the War Resisters League, and the umbrella group United for Peace and Justice, which is spearheading what organizers hope will be a massive march on Washington this Saturday.

"This might have a chilling effect on some groups," United for Peace and Justice's Leslie Cagan told OneWorld, "particularly among high-risk communities like immigrants who don't have their papers yet and U.S. citizens or people with green cards who are of Muslim or South Asian or Middle Eastern descent. They've already been targeted by the government and they might feel like, with this, it's just too dangerous to come out and protest."

"It seems pretty par for the course," said Daniel Fearn of the group Veterans for Peace. The eight-year Marine Corps veteran is helping to organize an event in Washington Thursday ahead of the larger march January 27th.

"What do you expect from an administration that thinks torture is an accurate way to get accurate information?" he said. "It's the same thought process that says 'we're going to get good information from torturing somebody'--that same flawed process leads to spying on peace activists."

At Thursday's event in Washington, Fearn said veterans will read sections of the Constitution they believe the Bush administration is violating as it prosecutes the war in Iraq.

Fearn said veterans will also speak out against unwarranted surveillance and torture and argue for the repeal of laws they believe violate the Constitution, such as the Military Commissions Act, which prescribes secret tribunals for terrorism suspects.

The event appears similar to those the Pentagon has kept tabs on, according to the internal documents obtained by the ACLU.

"Veterans for Peace erected an antiwar display the week of 18 April 2005 at a local university," reads a report on a New Orleans protest from the Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) database. "A local army recruiter mistook the event as a memorial to fallen service members and arrived to view the display."

According to the TALON report, six individuals, who the report acknowledges may not have been associated with the Veterans for Peace group, shouted "war monger" and "baby killer" at the recruiter and a shoving match ensued.

"Veterans for Peace claim to be nonviolent," the report concludes. "This incident demonstrates a propensity for violence, and the Veterans for Peace should be viewed as a possible threat to Army and DoD [Defense Department] personnel."

For its part, Veterans for Peace describes itself as a non-profit educational and humanitarian organization committed to non-violence. "We draw on our personal experiences and perspectives gained as veterans to raise public awareness of the true costs and consequences of militarism and war--and to seek peaceful, effective alternatives," the group's Web site reads.

In response to the documents' release, Pentagon officials said the material on antiwar groups should not have been collected.

"I don't want it, we shouldn't have had it, not interested in it," Daniel Baur, the acting director of the Defense Department's counterintelligence field activity unit, told the New York Times. "I don't want to deal with it."

Baur told the Times his agency is no longer monitoring peace groups.

Experts on government spying caution not to take the Pentagon at its word, however. The ACLU notes the Defense Department documents reveal that other government agencies were also involved in the spying.

In one report, a Department of Homeland Security agent warned after a peaceful protest by the War Resisters League at a military recruiting station that the group may favor "civil disobedience and vandalism." The report indicates that the
FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces in Atlanta and New York were briefed on planned protests.

"We have only the Pentagon's word that the errors and misjudgments that led to widespread surveillance of U.S. citizens have been corrected," the ACLU said in a statement last week.

"Congress should not let this president off the hook for inappropriate surveillance by the Pentagon," the group's Caroline Fredrickson said. "Americans must once again be confident we can exercise our constitutionally protected right to protest without becoming the subject of a secret government file."

Better watch out for those Quakers.  Dangerous dudes.

[Event Horizon]

Enough with the bullcrap! This Congressional action is nothing more than a jazzed up press stunt. It means nothing. If these chumps had the courage of their convictions, they'd vote to withhold funding for the Iraq war. Instead, they just send a signal of weakness to our troops in the field and the watching enemies of the Country. If you want to stop the war then stop it. You have the freaking power. Use it. This isn't a freaking parliament, you dumbasses!

[Seabiscuit36]

Event Horizon = Since75 

[MURP]

FBI turns to broad new wiretap method

Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords.

Such a technique is broader and potentially more intrusive than the FBI's Carnivore surveillance system, later renamed DCS1000. It raises concerns similar to those stirred by widespread Internet monitoring that the National Security Agency is said to have done, according to documents that have surfaced in one federal lawsuit, and may stretch the bounds of what's legally permissible.

Call it the vacuum-cleaner approach. It's employed when police have obtained a court order and an Internet service provider can't "isolate the particular person or IP address" because of technical constraints, says Paul Ohm, a former trial attorney at the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. (An Internet Protocol address is a series of digits that can identify an individual computer.)

That kind of full-pipe surveillance can record all Internet traffic, including Web browsing--or, optionally, only certain subsets such as all e-mail messages flowing through the network. Interception typically takes place inside an Internet provider's network at the junction point of a router or network switch.

The technique came to light at the Search & Seizure in the Digital Age symposium held at Stanford University's law school on Friday. Ohm, who is now a law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Richard Downing, a CCIPS assistant deputy chief, discussed it during the symposium.

In a telephone conversation afterward, Ohm said that full-pipe recording has become federal agents' default method for Internet surveillance. "You collect wherever you can on the (network) segment," he said. "If it happens to be the segment that has a lot of IP addresses, you don't throw away the other IP addresses. You do that after the fact."

"You intercept first and you use whatever filtering, data mining to get at the information about the person you're trying to monitor," he added.

On Monday, a Justice Department representative would not immediately answer questions about this kind of surveillance technique.

"What they're doing is even worse than Carnivore," said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who attended the Stanford event. "What they're doing is intercepting everyone and then choosing their targets."

When the FBI announced two years ago it had abandoned Carnivore, news reports said that the bureau would increasingly rely on Internet providers to conduct the surveillance and reimburse them for costs. While Carnivore was the subject of congressional scrutiny and outside audits, the FBI's current Internet eavesdropping techniques have received little attention.

Carnivore apparently did not perform full-pipe recording. A technical report (PDF: "Independent Technical Review of the Carnivore System") from December 2000 prepared for the Justice Department said that Carnivore "accumulates no data other than that which passes its filters" and that it saves packets "for later analysis only after they are positively linked by the filter settings to a target."


One reason why the full-pipe technique raises novel legal questions is that under federal law, the FBI must perform what's called "minimization."

Federal law says that agents must "minimize the interception of communications not otherwise subject to interception" and keep the supervising judge informed of what's happening. Minimization is designed to provide at least a modicum of privacy by limiting police eavesdropping on innocuous conversations.

Prosecutors routinely hold presurveillance "minimization meetings" with investigators to discuss ground rules. Common investigatory rules permit agents to listen in on a phone call for two minutes at a time, with at least one minute elapsing between the spot-monitoring sessions.

That section of federal law mentions only real-time interception--and does not explicitly authorize the creation of a database with information on thousands of innocent targets.

But a nearby sentence adds: "In the event the intercepted communication is in a code or foreign language, and an expert in that foreign language or code is not reasonably available during the interception period, minimization may be accomplished as soon as practicable after such interception."

Downing, the assistant deputy chief at the Justice Department's computer crime section, pointed to that language on Friday. Because digital communications amount to a foreign language or code, he said, federal agents are legally permitted to record everything and sort through it later. (Downing stressed that he was not speaking on behalf of the Justice Department.)

"Take a look at the legislative history from the mid '90s," Downing said. "It's pretty clear from that that Congress very much intended it to apply to electronic types of wiretapping."

EFF's Bankston disagrees. He said that the FBI is "collecting and apparently storing indefinitely the communications of thousands--if not hundreds of thousands--of innocent Americans in violation of the Wiretap Act and the 4th Amendment to the Constitution."

Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., said a reasonable approach would be to require that federal agents only receive information that's explicitly permitted by the court order. "The obligation should be on both the (Internet provider) and the government to make sure that only the information responsive to the warrant is disclosed to the government," he said.

Courts have been wrestling with minimization requirements for over a generation. In a 1978 Supreme Court decision, Scott v. United States, the justices upheld police wiretaps of people suspected of selling illegal drugs.

But in his majority opinion, Justice William Rehnquist said that broad monitoring to nab one suspect might go too far. "If the agents are permitted to tap a public telephone because one individual is thought to be placing bets over the phone, substantial doubts as to minimization may arise if the agents listen to every call which goes out over that phone regardless of who places the call," he wrote.

Another unanswered question is whether a database of recorded Internet communications can legally be mined for information about unrelated criminal offenses such as drug use, copyright infringement or tax crimes. One 1978 case, U.S. v. Pine, said that investigators could continue to listen in on a telephone line when other illegal activities--not specified in the original wiretap order--were being discussed. Those discussions could then be used against a defendant in a criminal prosecution.

Ohm, the former Justice Department attorney who presented a paper on the Fourth Amendment, said he has doubts about the constitutionality of full-pipe recording. "The question that's interesting, although I don't know whether it's so clear, is whether this is illegal, whether it's constitutional," he said. "Is Congress even aware they're doing this? I don't know the answers."

[ice grillin you]

In a telephone conversation afterward, Ohm said that full-pipe recording has become federal agents' default method for Internet surveillance. "You collect wherever you can on the (network) segment," he said. "If it happens to be the segment that has a lot of IP addresses, you don't throw away the other IP addresses. You do that after the fact."

"You intercept first and you use whatever filtering, data mining to get at the information about the person you're trying to monitor," he added.


hmmmm.....

[Diomedes]

[sheep]The wolves are here to protect us.[/sheep]

[Diomedes]

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/02/06/europe/EU-GEN-France-UN-Disappeared.php

PARIS: Nearly 60 countries signed a treaty on Tuesday banning forced disappearances, capping a quarter-century of efforts by families of people who have vanished at the hands of governments.

The United States was notably absent among the signatories. U.S. President George W. Bush's administration opposed an early draft of the treaty, which bars governments from holding people in secret detention.

no why would the land of the free and the home of the brave oppose a ban on "disappearing" people?  oh..right..because it's neither

Latin America, once an epicenter for such disappearances, is now owning up to much of the violence that left hundreds of thousands dead or "disappeared" during wars and under dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s. Disappearances were also a common Nazi tactic in World War II.

huh...so let's see...U.S. supported death squads and right wing South American regimes behaved like Nazis behaved like...Bush's America.

yay secret government.  yay disappearances. 

go shopping America