moonbuggy

`So the Memory Hole has posted a list of movies made or used by the CIA. Some have titles you’d expect: “Ear Wiretapping — Bugging Devices,” “Investigation of US Bacteriological Warfare.” Others seem out of place, like “Animal Farm,” the animated version of the Orwell classic.

animal_farm_cover.jpgBut, as Nick reminded me the other day, no one should be surprised to find “Animal Farm” on the list. After all, the Agency bought the movie rights to the book, a long time back.’

`Sandra Day O’Connor, a Republican-appointed judge who retired last month after 24 years on the supreme court, has said the US is in danger of edging towards dictatorship if the party’s rightwingers continue to attack the judiciary.

In a strongly worded speech at Georgetown University, reported by National Public Radio and the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, Ms O’Connor took aim at Republican leaders whose repeated denunciations of the courts for alleged liberal bias could, she said, be contributing to a climate of violence against judges.’

`Reporters who write about government surveillance could be prosecuted under proposed legislation that would solidify the administration’s eavesdropping authority, according to some legal analysts who are concerned about dramatic changes in U.S. law. [..]

The draft would add to the criminal penalties for anyone who “intentionally discloses information identifying or describing” the Bush administration’s terrorist surveillance program or any other eavesdropping program conducted under a 1978 surveillance law.

Under the boosted penalties, those found guilty could face fines of up to $1 million, 15 years in jail or both.

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the measure is broader than any existing laws. She said, for example, the language does not specify that the information has to be harmful to national security or classified.’

`The war on terror will not have a definitive end, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told about 200 people gathered Thursday night for Mercer University’s Executive Forum.

“We’re not going to have a ‘VT Day’ over terrorism because terrorism has been around for centuries,” Ridge said.

But that does not mean the United States will be defeated, he said.

“We’ll prevail for one basic reason,” said the former two-term governor of Pennsylvania. “Because America is an idea, not a place. And that idea is freedom.”‘

`I had to sign a tedious business contract the other day. They wanted my corporation number — fair enough — plus my Social Security number — well, if you insist — and also my driver’s license number — hang on, what’s the deal with that?

Well, we e-mailed over a query and they e-mailed back that it was a requirement of the Patriot Act. So we asked where exactly in the Patriot Act could this particular requirement be found and, after a bit of a delay, we got an answer.

And on discovering that there was no mention of driver’s licenses in that particular subsection [..]

[..] A couple of weeks earlier, I went to the bank to deposit a U.S. dollar check drawn on a Canadian financial institution, and the clerk announced that for security reasons checks drawn on Canadian banks now had to be sent away for collection and I’d have access to the funds in a couple of weeks. This was, she explained, a requirement of — ta-da — the Patriot Act. And, amazingly, that turned out not to be anywhere in the act either.’

`[..] He was alluding to databases maintained at an AT&T data center in Kansas, which now contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, has asserted in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system, a giant storehouse of calling records and Internet message routing information, was the foundation of the N.S.A.’s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.

An AT&T spokeswoman said the company would not comment on the claim, or generally on matters of national security or customer privacy.’

`About 150 high school students walked out of class to protest a decision to put a teacher on leave while administrators investigate remarks he made about President Bush in class, including that some people compare Bush to Adolf Hitler.

The protest came Thursday as school administrators began investigating whether Overland High School teacher Jay Bennish violated a policy requiring balancing viewpoints in the classroom, Cherry Creek School District spokeswoman Tustin Amole said.’

`A Kuwaiti man being held at Guantanamo Bay has told the BBC in a rare interview that the force-feeding of hunger strikers amounts to torture.

Fawzi al-Odah said hunger strikers were strapped to a chair and force-fed through a tube three times a day.

A senior US official denied the use of torture in Guantanamo Bay.

Mr Odah’s comments, relayed by his lawyer in answer to BBC questions, came as another inmate launched a legal challenge to the force-feeding policy.’

`They paid down some debt. The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522.

And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges’ behavior was found questionable.

And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn’t call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn’t try to sneak a machine gun through customs.

They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast. [..]

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn’t move until the threat alert is lifted.’

`i was just on the bus. doing typical travel things. you know, listening to my ipod, staring out the window, day dreaming about ice cream and puppy dogs. a few stops before mine, a sheriff’s car pulls in front of the bus with its lights on. he gets on, moves to the back and an undercover informs a woman that she’s being cited for wearing headphones. apparently, having both headphones on while in a bus is a crime. they take her info. they are about to leave when the undercover notices me with my ipod. do you have your id, he rudely asked. i asked why. he informs me that what i’m doing is illegal. that i can only have one earphone in at a time. i was looking at him completely dumbfounded. shaking, i looked through my bag for my id then he took down all of my info. when he saw that my id was from canada, he asked why i was in the country.’

`Morrissey was questioned by the FBI and British intelligence after speaking out against Bush and Blair, the singer has revealed.

Mozza, a famous critic of the war in Iraq, has previously branded the US President a “terrorist”. He said: “The FBI and the Special Branch have investigated me and I’ve been interviewed and taped and so forth. They were trying to determine if I was a threat to the government, and similarly in England. But it didn’t take them very long to realise that I’m not.’

`Our government tells us the prisoners at Guantanamo are “the worst of the worst,” to use Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s phrase. “They’re terrorists. They’re bomb-makers, they’re facilitators of terror. They’re members of al-Qaida and the Taliban” is the description from the ever-reliable lips of Vice President Dick Cheney.

“They were there to kill,” the President has asserted. [..]

What do the official findings of the U.S. military show?

More than half of the so-called enemy combatants at Guantanamo were determined to have committed no hostile act against U.S. or coalition forces. This was so even though the definition of a “hostile act” was loose enough to include fleeing a camp that had been bombed, or being picked up in an area of Pakistan where others believed to be fighters had fled.’

`The internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night.

Black Box Voting successfully sued former Palm Beach County (FL) Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore to get the audit records for the 2004 presidential election.

After investing over $7,000 and waiting nine months for the records, Black Box Voting discovered that the voting machine logs contained approximately 100,000 errors. According to voting machine assignment logs, Palm Beach County used 4,313 machines in the Nov. 2004 election. During election day, 1,475 voting system calibrations were performed while the polls were open, providing documentation to substantiate reports from citizens indicating the wrong candidate was selected when they tried to vote.

Another disturbing find was several dozen voting machines with votes for the Nov. 2, 2004 election cast on dates like Oct. 16, 15, 19, 13, 25, 28 2004 and one tape dated in 2010. These machines did not contain any votes date-stamped on Nov. 2, 2004.’

`Two uniformed men strolled into the main room of the Little Falls library in Bethesda one day last week and demanded the attention of all patrons using the computers. Then they made their announcement: The viewing of Internet pornography was forbidden.

The men looked stern and wore baseball caps emblazoned with the words “Homeland Security.” The bizarre scene unfolded Feb. 9, leaving some residents confused and forcing county officials to explain how employees assigned to protect county buildings against terrorists came to see it as their job to police the viewing of pornography.

After the two men made their announcement, one of them challenged an Internet user’s choice of viewing material and asked him to step outside, according to a witness. A librarian intervened, and the two men went into the library’s work area to discuss the matter. A police officer arrived. In the end, no one had to step outside except the uniformed men.’

`Google called the Bush administration’s request for data on Web searches as “so uninformed as to be nonsensical” in papers filed in San Jose federal court Friday, arguing that turning over the information would expose its trade secrets and violate the privacy of its users.

The 21-page brief filed by the Mountain View search giant angrily dissected the government’s claim that the search results would produce useful evidence regarding child pornography. [..]

Google’s struggle with the Justice Department has focused worldwide attention on the risk that Internet technologies will be used by governments for surveillance purposes — and that the privacy of users could be compromised without their ever knowing it.

In justification of its demand of data from Google, the Justice Department revealed that it had requested — and received — similar data from Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL.’

`The age of the telescreen is upon us as surveillance cameras that festoon our streets, shopping malls and airports are now moving into our private homes as the panopticon prison is erected.

The Associated Press reports,

“HOUSTON Houston’s police chief is suggesting putting surveillance cameras in apartment complexes, downtown streets and even private homes.”

“Chief Harold Hurtt today said it’s another way of combatting crime amid a shortage of officers. [..]

In the meantime, Homeland Security grants are being used to blanket major cities and even small sleepy communities with arsenals of spy cameras.’

`A former NSA employee said Tuesday there is another ongoing top-secret surveillance program that might have violated millions of Americans’ Constitutional rights.

Russell D. Tice told the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations he has concerns about a “special access” electronic surveillance program that he characterized as far more wide-ranging than the warrentless wiretapping recently exposed by the New York Times but he is forbidden from discussing the program with Congress.

Tice said he believes it violates the Constitution’s protection against unlawful search and seizures but has no way of sharing the information without breaking classification laws. He is not even allowed to tell the congressional intelligence committees – members or their staff – because they lack high enough clearance.’

`Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) has asked Veterans Affairs Secretary James Nicholson for a thorough inquiry of his agency’s investigation into whether a V.A. nurse’s letter to the editor criticizing the Bush administration amounted to “sedition.” [..]

Laura Berg, a clinical nurse specialist for 15 years, wrote a letter in September to a weekly Albuquerque newspaper criticizing how the administration handled Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq Wwr. She urged people to “act forcefully” by bringing criminal charges against top administration officials, including the president, to remove them from power because they played games of “vicious deceit.” She added: “This country needs to get out of Iraq now and return to our original vision and priorities of caring for land and people and resources rather than killing for oil….Otherwise, many more of us will be facing living hell in these times.”

The agency seized her office computer and launched an investigation. Berg is not talking to the press, but reportedly fears losing her job.’

`The CIA’s top counter-terrorism official was fired last week because he opposed detaining Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons abroad, sending them to other countries for interrogation and using forms of torture such as “water boarding”, intelligence sources have claimed. [..]

Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counter-terrorism at the agency, said: “It is not that Grenier wasn’t aggressive enough, it is that he wasn’t ‘with the programme’. He expressed misgivings about the secret prisons in Europe and the rendition of terrorists.”

Grenier also opposed “excessive” interrogation, such as strapping suspects to boards and dunking them in water, according to Cannistraro.’

`A 12-year-old Aurora boy who said he brought powdered sugar to school for a science project this week has been charged with a felony for possessing a look-alike drug, Aurora police have confirmed.

The sixth-grade student at Waldo Middle School was also suspended for two weeks from school after showing the bag of powdered sugar to his friends.

The boy, who is not being identified because he is a juvenile, said he brought the bag to school to ask his science teacher if he could run an experiment using sugar.’

`Using cartoons, games and kid-friendly websites, the federal intelligence community is seeking to win the hearts and minds of America’s children.

Move over, McGruff. The trench-coated canine mascot of the National Crime Prevention Council has some youthful competition in the battle for the hearts and minds of America’s children. Now in virtual training on the website of the National Security Agency are the CryptoKids, the code-makers and code-breakers of America’s future. [..]

This Toys ‘R’ Us approach to spying is nothing new for the fifteen agencies that comprise the “intelligence community” of the US government, including the CIA, the NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office. In 1997 President Bill Clinton mandated that all government agencies set aside virtual space on their websites for child-friendly material. Today, these sites serve as recruiting portals for America’s youth.’

`The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity. [..]

The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old “Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment” portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year.’

`Through my own investigations I have just discovered that George Deutsch, the Bush political appointee at the heart of administration efforts to censor NASA scientists (most notably to prevent James Hansen from speaking out about global warming), did not actually graduate from Texas A&M University. This should come as a surprise, since the media has implied otherwise, with even The New York Times describing the 24-year-old NASA public affairs officer, as “a 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M.” Although Deutsch did attend Texas A&M University, where he majored in journalism and was scheduled to graduate in 2003, he left in 2004 without a degree, a revelation that I was tipped off to by one of his former coworkers at A&M’s student newspaper The Battalion.’

`In the latest twist in the debate over presidential powers, a Justice Department official suggested that in certain circumstances, the president might have the power to order the killing of terrorist suspects inside the United States. Steven Bradbury, acting head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, went to a closed-door Senate intelligence committee meeting last week to defend President George W. Bush’s surveillance program. [..]

A Justice Department official, who asked not to be ID’d because of the sensitive subject, said Bradbury’s remarks were made during an “academic discussion” of theoretical contingencies. In real life, the official said, the highest priority of those hunting a terrorist on U.S. soil would be to capture that person alive and interrogate him.’

`U.S. intelligence officials told Congress Thursday that disclosure of once-secret projects like President George W. Bush’s no-warrant eavesdropping program have undermined their work.

“The damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission,” CIA Director Porter Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee, citing disclosures about a variety of CIA programs that he suggested might have been compromised.

Goss said a federal grand jury should be impaneled to determine “who is leaking this information.” ‘

`The recent revelations about illegal eavesdropping on American citizens by the U.S. National Security Agency have raised many questions about just what the agency is doing. Although the facts are just beginning to emerge, information that has come to light about the NSA’s activities and capabilities over the years, as well as the recent reporting by the New York Times and others, allows us to discern the outlines of what they are likely doing and how they are doing it.

The NSA is not only the world’s largest spy agency (far larger than the CIA, for example), but it possesses the most advanced technology for intercepting communications. [..]’

`Minnesota high school student David Riehm submitted graphic essays in his creative writing class, prompting his teacher, Ann Mershon, to alert authorities. Not only was Riehm suspended from school, but authorities took him into custody and committed him to a psychiatric ward. A physician later determined David was neither mentally ill nor dangerous, and he was released. He and his mother filed a civil suit against school and county officials.’

`A seventh-grader who wrote an essay saying his perfect day would involve doing violence to President George W. Bush is being investigated by the Secret Service.

The unidentified boy from West Warwick turned in the essay on Tuesday, and his teacher alerted school officials. The assignment was to write about what he would do on a perfect day.

Thomas M. Powers, Secret Service resident agent in charge in Providence, said the investigation is ongoing but the essay may have been a “cry for help.” Threatening the president is a felony, he said.’

`A new provision tucked into the Patriot Act bill now before Congress would allow authorities to haul demonstrators at any “special event of national significance” away to jail on felony charges if they are caught breaching a security perimeter. [..]

The measure has civil libertarians protesting what they say is yet another power grab for the executive branch and one more loss for free speech. [..]

But not everyone agrees that rights are being trampled on by the additional provision. In fact, some say the ACLU is the problem when it comes to protecting national security.’

`Thinks the federal government is too intrusive? You ain’t seen nothing yet. An FCC mandate will require that all hardware and software have a wiretap backdoor that allows the government to tap into all your communications.

The mandate expands the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), and requires that every piece of hardware and software sold include the backdoor.’