Former FBI Agent Confirms the Surveillance State Is Real
Greenwald wants to make sure we understand the full meaning of Clemente’s comments. “ ‘[N]o digital communication is secure,’ ” Greenwald repeats, “by which [Clemente] means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications—meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like—are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact.
“To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is,” Greenwald adds.
CATO | A Grand Façade: How the Grand Jury Was Captured by Government
The grand jury is perhaps the most mysterious institution in the American criminal justice system. While most people are generally familiar with the function of the police officer, the prosecutor, the defense lawyer, the judge, and the trial jury, few have any idea about what the grand jury is supposed to do and its day-to-day operation. That ignorance largely explains how some over-reaching prosecutors have been able to pervert the grand jury, whose original purpose was to check prosecutorial power, into an inquisitorial bulldozer that enhances the power of government and now runs roughshod over the constitutional rights of citizens.
Like its more famous relative, the trial jury, the grand jury consists of laypeople who are summoned to the courthouse to fulfill a civic duty. However, the work of the grand jury takes place well before any trial. The primary function of the grand jury is to inquire into the commission of crimes within its jurisdiction and then determine whether an indictment should issue against any particular person. But, in sharp contrast to the trial setting, the jurors hear only one side of the story and there is no judge overseeing the process. With no judge or opposing counsel in the room, grand jurors naturally defer to the prosecutor since he is the most knowledgeable official on the scene. Indeed, the single most important fact to appreciate about the grand jury system is that it is the prosecutor who calls the shots and dominates the entire process. The grand jurors have become little more than window dressing.
At present, Congress seems to be interested only in proposals that will further expand the powers of the grand jury. Recent “anti-terrorism” proposals, for example, have sought to remove critical limitations on the dissemination of grand jury material. Because the grand jury can easily function as a stalking horse for prosecutors to bypass the constitutional rights of individuals and organizations, it is imperative that its powers be scaled back, not unleashed.
Read the Full Policy Analysis [PDF]
Border Residents Disappointed by Fence Provision in New Immigration Reform Bill, Residents Offered $100 For Land
The so-called “Gang of Eight,” a bipartisan group of U.S. senators, released their much-awaited comprehensive immigration reform bill late Tuesday. It’s thrilling to finally see a reform bill which looks like it has some momentum come out of Congress—until you see the first section devoted to border security, which is like a kick in the gut for border communities.
Get ready for more fences, more invasive surveillance and more “boots on the ground.”
The bill appropriates $1.5 billion for the “Southern Border Fencing Strategy” to identify where fencing, including double-layer fencing, infrastructure, and technology would be deployed along the Southern border.
Here we go again. For anyone who has closely followed the building of the border fence in Texas, this is an immediate red flag. Landowners like Brownsville resident Eloisa Tamez have been fighting the condemnation of their land since 2008. Much of the unfenced land left along the southern border is in Texas and it is owned by private landowners.
The proposed fencing means another round of land condemnations and costly court battles for landowners and business owners. Since 2007—when the Department of Homeland Security first started land condemnations under the 2006 Secure Fence Act in Texas—the agency has never adequately explained the decision-making process that determines where the fencing is built. And border residents say DHS seldom confers with communities before they start building.
Even worse, the immigration status of millions will hinge on the building of these border fences by the National Guard, as well as adding more drone surveillance to the border. And then finally a determination by a hyper-partisan Congress on whether the border is secure.
The bill creates a new class of immigrant called the “Registered Provisional Immigrant.” The bill says “RPIs” can travel outside of the country for up to 180 days a year and they can work. But it is a provisional status, presumably with even less rights than a Legal Permanent Resident status. According to the bill, immigrants cannot begin the process of becoming Legal Permanent Residents, (aka securing a green card) until the Homeland Security secretary submits a notice to Congress and the president that the Comprehensive Southern Border Security Strategy is “substantially deployed and substantially operational,” and that the Secure Fence Strategy is implemented and “substantially completed.”
This could take years. Government officials have been trying to form a coherent border security strategy ever since 9/11 with little success. The past decade is littered with ideas and technologies that were once touted as the latest and greatest only to be later scrapped because they didn’t work and cost taxpayers too much. For instance, the virtual fence project was canceled in 2011 because of cost overruns and technical glitches. The radar sometimes mistook desert brush for border crossers when it was windy. And when it rained, the radar often didn’t work at all. The whole experiment cost taxpayers $1 billion.
Kathleen Campbell Walker, an El Paso immigration attorney with the law firm Cox Smith, says she was disappointed to see the fence provision in the bill. “A lot of communities—like El Paso where I live—have found the border fence to be a very offensive symbol,” says “I’m sorry to see the building of a fence used as a prerequisite for immigration reform.”
Rio Grande Valley resident Scott Nicol, chair of the Sierra Club Borderlands Team, has been a steadfast opponent of building more fence, which he sees as environmentally destructive and an ultimately ineffective security tool. “If they’re talking about basing immigrant adjustment on the completion of the wall it’s going to take years because of the condemnations that will have to take place,” says Nicol. “The walls have already been built where it’s easy to condemn properties. They can destroy nature refuges without blinking because they’re on federal lands. But what’s left now is private property and most of it is in Texas.”
Even worse, he says, is that the walls are often ineffective. They clog with debris and flood communities or they fall over in flash floods. People can scale them with relative ease. “When the Gang of Eight was visiting Nogales they watched a woman climb the fence,” says Nicol.
For those already weary from fighting the U.S. government for their land for the past five years, the specter of another round of land condemnations is frightening. “My sense is that the government is plowing ahead on a security plan and the indigenous people in this community are still in the dark,” says Dr. Margo Tamez, daughter of Eloisa Tamez, who are of members of the Lipan Apache tribe.
As we spoke Tuesday, Margo said her mother was in federal court in Brownsville, still fighting to hold onto their property in El Calaboz, a tiny border community outside of Brownsville. The U.S. government is trying to take the land underneath the 18-foot border fence it already built in the middle of her property. They are offering the family $100. “We are subjected to decisions made from far away and not consulted about the things being done to our land,” says Margo, who now works as an assistant professor in Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia.
The comprehensive immigration reform bill is a hefty 844 pages. Many border residents are anxious to examine it in greater depth and weigh its impacts on their communities. “I’m still digesting this,” says Campbell Walker of the bill. “It’s going to be controversial and it still has a long way to go before it’s signed by the president.”
WHY LIBERALS NEED GUN CONTROL:
The Left hates guns because they empower the individual over the collective. A man with a gun does not need the protection of the State but can deal with violations of his rights by himself. The man with a gun can, if need be, do without the collective.
This chafes at liberal sensibilities, as they are absolute in their determination to make us all not just our brother’s keeper but his master. There can be no right to self-defense in a world where one does not own even himself. The State is master and it is a usurpation, an act of rebellion, to defend yourself. It is even more an act of treason to defend yourself against the State.
This is why there is such anger in the Progressive community against “bitter clingers” holding onto their guns; what right does any individual have to take the power of the State?
(via quesodemono)
Selection of Vermont Guard base for F-35 jets was based on flawed data, raising questions of political influence
The Air Force says it carefully sorted through 83 military bases around the country before deciding where to assign a coveted prize, the first Air National Guard squadron of F-35s, the next fighter jet in America’s arsenal.
In the end, it picked Vermont for the honor, home state of one of the National Guard’s most powerful political allies in Washington, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy.
But state pride in the award to the “Green Mountain Boys,’’ as the Vermont Air National Guard calls itself, has been clouded by the Air Force’s failure to fully take into account the thunderous noise the F-35s would generate in densely populated communities around its base at Burlington International Airport.
That failure and other flaws in its selection process are raising questions about whether the Air Force deliberately sought to reward a key friend in Congress with a squadron of advanced fighter jets for his state, and whether residents near the airfield might fall victim to Washington’s system of political spoils.
Projected sound levels around the airport are so high with the F-35s that local officials predict several thousand nearby homes would fall within a zone designated “incompatible for residential use,’’ negatively affecting the lives and property values of as many as 7,000 citizens.
A Globe examination of records, and interviews with Pentagon officials directly involved with the review, show the Air Force — in selecting Vermont over competing locations — relied on inaccurate, excessively low estimates of the impact of the jet blast on the local population.
One of the Pentagon officials said in an interview that the lengthy base-selection process was deliberately “fudged’’ by military brass so that Leahy’s home state would win.
“Unfortunately Burlington was selected even before the scoring process began,” said the official, who asked that he not to be identified for fear of reprisals from his superiors. “I wish it wasn’t true, but unfortunately that is the way it is. The numbers were fudged for Burlington to come out on top. If the scoring had been done correctly Burlington would not have been rated higher.”
Leahy, in an e-mailed statement, reiterated his support for the planes but did not respond to allegations of political influence. The Air Force denied the fix was in for Vermont, even though it now says it is reassessing residential impacts and other factors using updated information — a review that could end in a reversal of its preliminary decision.
Infowars: Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
Glenn Greenwald
The Guardian
May 5, 2013The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.
Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN’s Out Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by our Adversarial Press Corps, anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.
On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:
BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?
CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.
CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”
Source: FBI looking at wife’s phone call
Axed Russian Winter Olympics official 'poisoned'
A former Olympic official who fled Russia after President Vladimir Putin criticised him for delays and cost overruns before the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi claims he has been poisoned.
Akhmed Bilalov, fired as deputy head of the Russian Olympic Committee in February, said on Saturday that doctors had discovered elevated mercury levels in his blood. He is receiving treatment in Germany.
“They have found elevated levels of mercury in my body,” Bilalov told the Interfax news agency, confirming Russian press reports. “I didn’t want to announce this before, but now that the press has found out, I’m forced to confirm it.”
Bilalov was axed after Putin toured Olympic sites in the southern city of Sochi a year before the launch of the Games. Amid widespread reports of construction delays and cost overruns, the president singled out Bilalov for a public dressing down over an unfinished ski jump at Roza Khutor, the cost of which had ballooned from 1.2bn to 8bn roubles (£24.8m to £165m). Video footage of Putin ridiculing Bilalov quickly went viral.
Bilalov, a native of the republic of Dagestan, was subsequently stripped of his positions, including as head of a state-owned company building ski resorts across the Caucasus region. He fled the country shortly after.
In April, a criminal case was opened against Bilalov for allegedly misspending more than £60,000 from the state company, including for travel to London during the 2012 Olympics. Prosecutors are also investigating him for allegedly embezzling £1.7m from the company.
The former Olympic official said he believed the source of the mercury was his office in central Moscow. He told Interfax he “began to feel bad in the middle of autumn last year”, adding that he felt satisfactory after receiving treatment.
According to Gazeta.ru, an online news portal that saw a copy of Bilalov’s medical report, the former official is at a clinic in Baden-Baden. Doctors found four times the normal amount of mercury in his blood. A source close to Bilalov told Gazeta that other employees at his Moscow office were being tested. “Everyone is in shock,” the source said.
Bilalov said: “I don’t want to blame anyone or speculate on how the mercury appeared in my Moscow office. I have no idea. Upon returning to Moscow, I plan to approach law enforcement agencies so they can help sort out this situation.”
Secrets of the NYPD: Report Finds 1/3 of FOIA Requests Were Basically Ignored
The New York Police Department has come under fire for the potentially unconstitutional execution of its stop-and-frisk policy, and surveillance of Muslims. But if you think that the taxpayer-funded agency should be accountable to the public and forthcoming about what it’s doing, the story gets worse: It regularly flouts transparency laws, in an effort to make the records of how it perform its duties and the crimes it responds to next to impossible for the average citizen to obtain.
The NYPD’s roughly 34,500 officers serve a population of 8.2 million people, but multiple interviews with reporters who cover the police department, as well as organizations dedicated to transparency, reveal a police department stunning in its disregard for the information requests of citizens, advocacy groups and news organizations.
The city’s Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who is running for mayor, recently released a report asserting that a third of all Freedom of Information records requests to the police department were ignored. The numbers are no surprise to journalists who cover the department, such as Leonard Levitt, a veteran cops reporter who now writes at NYPD Confidential.
“All I can tell you is that the NYPD does whatever it wants to regarding FOI requests,” Levitt said. “Which means they never turn anything over, at least not to me. The only time they did respond was after I got the NY Civil Liberties Union involved.”
The civil liberties group filed suit on behalf of Levitt to obtain Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly’s daily calendar. The department said the commissioner’s whereabouts were secret for security reasons, which is a novel line of argument, given that President Barack Obama’s daily schedule is public.
In the past several years, the NYCLU has also sued the department to get data on the notorious stop-and-frisk program, as well as details on the race of people shot by officers. The NYCLU, currently wrapped up in a court case against the city’s stop-and-frisk program, was not available for comment.
Remapping the Debate, a public policy organization, filed a lawsuit against the NYPD in late April for withholding documents on protest permits. The group waited 11 months with no response before filing the suit.
$37 Billion Navy Ships Can’t Meet Mission, Internal U.S. Report Finds
U.S. Navy leaders were warned last year that a $37 billion program to build Littoral Combat Ships can’t meet its promised mission because the vessels are too lightly manned and armed, according to a confidential report.
“This review highlights the gap between ship capabilities and the missions the Navy will need LCS to execute,” said the report prepared last year for the Navy by Rear Admiral Samuel Perez. “Failure to adequately address LCS requirements and capabilities will result in a large number of ships that are ill-suited to execute” regional commanders’ warfighting needs.
The 36-page report obtained by Bloomberg News is at odds with assurances from Navy leaders that their project is on course to deliver a small, speedy and adaptable ship intended to patrol waters close to shore.
The review, requested by Admiral Jonathan Greenert, the chief of naval operations, echoes findings by critics inside the Pentagon who deride the vessel. The report, stamped “confidential draft,” found that the plans to swap equipment needed for different missions are impractical, the vessel’s width may prevent it from docking in some ports, and the decision to proceed with two versions complicates logistics and maintenance.
A steel-hulled version of the vessel is being made in Marinette, Wisconsin, by a team led by Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT), and an aluminum trimaran is being built in Mobile, Alabama, by a group led by Austal Ltd. (ASB)
Feds spend at least $890,000 on fees for empty accounts
If you are a federal worker on furlough this week — or an airline passenger delayed by federal furloughs — you might want to save your blood pressure and go read another story.
This one is about all the money the U.S. government spends on . . . nothing.
It is one of the oddest spending habits in Washington: This year, the government will spend at least $890,000 on service fees for bank accounts that are empty. At last count, Uncle Sam has 13,712 such accounts with a balance of zero.
They are supposed to be closed. But nobody has done the paperwork yet.
So even as the sequester budget cuts have begun idling workers and frustrating travelers, the government is required to pay $65 per year, per account to keep them on the books.
In this time of austerity, the accounts are a reminder of something that makes austerity hard: expensive habits, built into the bureaucracy in times of plenty. The Obama administration has spent the past year trying to close these accounts, with only some success.
Mexico: Border schools adjust to influx of English-speaking students
Elementary students at Lamberto Hernández School in this northern Mexican city were long gone by the time teachers sat down recently to learn about the growing population of English-speaking students in their classrooms.
At the teacher training workshop, facilitator Laura Guadalupe Zatarain asked the educators in English to fill out a simple form written in German. The teachers looked at her, puzzled.
“This gives you an idea how these children feel when we start speaking too fast and they have trouble understanding,” Ms. Zatarain says, switching to Spanish. “Especially about a subject like math, or history, or President Benito Juárez, someone they have never heard about.”
State education officials point to Lamberto Hernández, a school named after a late educator from the region, as a model for working to create an environment that embraces students and parents arriving from the United States with little or no knowledge about Mexico’s school system. Thousands of school children have arrived in Mexican schools from the US in the past several years amid a record number of deportations and a foundering US economy. [Read The Christian Science Monitor’s story on US-educated kids adjusting to school in Mexico.]
“The school’s response has been excellent,” says Jesús Eduardo Ramírez Cordoba, who oversees international affairs for the state’s Secretariat of Education and Culture (SEC).
Lamberto Hernández School principal Hugo Efrén Molina says his hope is to turn the school into a magnet for those students arriving from the US. In addition to offering professional development to teachers, plans are underway to extend school hours and build a cafeteria, which students who attended US campuses sorely miss. The school only has a snack bar.
TALLAHASSEE: Florida lawmakers reject Miami Dolphins stadium referendum bill - Florida - MiamiHerald.com
The Miami Dolphins failed to reach a deal for a taxpayer-supported stadium upgrade on the last day of Florida’s legislative session.“The Dolphins were seeking up to $289 million in taxpayer support from an increase in the Miami-Dade hotel tax, from 6 to 7 percent. The proposal also offered the team a shot at up to $90 million in state sales tax rebates. The bill allowed other sports organizations to compete for state tax dollars as well.”
It’s inappropriate that sports teams should be able to “compete” for tax payer dollars. Why should people be forced to fund such initiatives? They should be allowed to invest their hard-earned money into things that they value, which may or may not be a sports team. Not to mention how profitable the sports industry already is. They should be able to easily fund their own renovations, like any other business venture in the world ought to be expected to.
