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GAO Report Reveals Rampant Federal Data Mining
(Caron Carlson, eWeek, May 27, 2004)
Congress put the kibosh on the Pentagon's Terrorism Information Awareness electronic surveillance program in February, but data mining remains alive and thriving throughout the federal government. A General Accounting Office report released Thursday enumerates nearly 200 data mining initiatives in operation or in the works. . . . Scores of data-mining projects that collect and analyze U.S. citizens' personal information are in operation at dozens of federal agencies, the GAO found. Many of the nearly 200 projects planned or already under way rely on data purchased from the commercial sector. . . . Civil rights advocates have raised concerns that the government's use of commercial data—rather than data it collects itself—allows agencies to dodge laws protecting citizens' privacy. . . . initiatives draw from a variety of private-sector databases and personal information for the purpose of analyzing intelligence and detecting terrorist or criminal activity. The Department of Defense alone has 47 data-mining projects planned or already in place. . . . The Department of Homeland Security, the national clearinghouse for security-related data, draws the most extensively from personal and private-sector information for its data-mining initiatives. One DHS system in operation, called "Analyst Notebook 12," correlates people and events with other, unidentified information. . . . Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, civil rights advocates have raised concerns over the potential for blurring lines between the military and civilian law enforcement. . . . The report also illustrates the extent to which many federal agencies beyond the Department of Justice are involved in criminal investigation through data mining.

. . . Read more!

posted by LoZo 2:55 PM

 

U.S. ignores civil liberties in pursuit of terrorists
(Tomas Alex Tizon, Sebastian Rotella and Richard B. Schmitt, Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2004)
A federal judge's decision to release Muslim lawyer Brandon Mayfield rallied critics of the Justice Department on Friday, who decried his jailing in Oregon on dubious fingerprint evidence as a new example of government disregard for civil liberties. . . . The decision by U.S. District Judge Robert Jones in Portland coincided with Spanish authorities' determination that the print linked to the March 11 train bombings in Madrid belonged to an Algerian suspect. . . . The sudden turn in the case is "a huge embarrassment" for federal investigators . . . Mayfield, 37, a convert to Islam, maintains a small immigration and family-law practice in Portland. He was ordered released by Jones on Thursday. He had been held in a Portland jail since May 6, after the FBI said it had matched his fingerprint to one on a bag containing detonators that was found near a Madrid railway station. . . . He was never charged — his family said he had not left the U.S. in over a decade — but he was held under a law that permits the government to detain witnesses who are considered flight risks. . . . As Mayfield settled back into his home in a modest Portland suburb, receiving offers of free rent for his law office, criticism grew over the government's handling of his case. . . . The Mayfield case is just the latest and highest-profile of "a long line of mistaken detentions" that show how the material witness law can be abused, said Greenberger, the former Justice Department official. . . . The law was intended to hold witnesses for trials. Instead the government has used the law to hold suspects while investigators build cases against them. These suspects are usually held with the general prison population and subjected to constant interrogation. . . . "It was never, never intended to be used this way," said Greenberger. He suspects there are others still in detention who have not received the kind of publicity that Mayfield has received. . . . The Mayfield case reflects "incompetence" among FBI forensics experts, and a tendency among federal investigators to reach a conclusion first, and then make the evidence fit the conclusion, Cohen said. . . . "The FBI is now the political police of this government," Cohen said.

. . . Read more!

posted by LoZo 8:49 PM

 

FBI Attempts to Hide Public Records
(Eric Lichtblau, The New York Times, May 20, 2004)
The Justice Department has taken the unusual step of retroactively classifying information it gave to Congress nearly two years ago regarding a former F.B.I. translator who charged that the bureau had missed critical terrorist warnings . . . Congress and Congressional aides said they were troubled by the move, which comes as critics have accused the Bush administration of excessive secrecy. . . . "What the F.B.I. is up to here is ludicrous," Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said in an interview. "To classify something that's already been out in the public domain, what do you accomplish? It does harm to transparency in government, and it looks like an attempt to cover up the F.B.I.'s problems in translating intelligence." . . . But the F.B.I. now maintains that some of the information discussed was so potentially damaging if released publicly that it is now considered classified, according to a memorandum distributed last week within the Senate Judiciary Committee. The material could also play a part in pending lawsuits, including Ms. Edmonds's wrongful termination suit and a lawsuit brought by hundreds of families of Sept. 11 victims who have sought to take testimony from her. . . . The F.B.I. told Congressional officials that it was classifying topics including what languages Ms. Edmonds translated, what types of cases she handled, and what employees she worked with, officials said. Even routine and widely disseminated information - like where she worked - is now classified. . . . Ms. Edmonds, who is Turkish-American, began working for the F.B.I. shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks as a translator in the F.B.I.'s Washington field office with top-secret security clearance, but she was let go in the spring of 2002. She first gained wide public attention in October of that year when she appeared on "60 Minutes'' on CBS and charged that the F.B.I.'s translation services were plagued by incompetence and a lack of urgency and that the bureau had ignored her concerns. . . . Ms. Edmonds testified in a closed session this year before the Sept. 11 commission, and she has made increasingly vehement charges about the F.B.I.'s intelligence failures, saying the United States had advance warnings about the attacks. Families of the Sept. 11 victims - who are suing numerous corporate and Saudi interests whom they accuse of having links to the attacks - have sought to depose her as a witness, but the Justice Department has blocked the move by saying her testimony would violate "the state secret privilege.'' . . . "I have never heard of a retroactive classification two years back,'' said an aide who spoke on condition of anonymity because the subject is classified. . . . "It would be silly if it didn't have such serious implications,'' the aide said. "People are puzzled and, frankly, worried, because the effect here is to quash Congressional oversight. We don't even know what we can't talk about.'' . . . Senator Grassley said, "This is about as close to a gag order as you can get."

. . . Read more!

posted by LoZo 11:29 AM

 

The Cult that's Running the Country
(Joseph Wilson, Salon.com, 03 May 2004)
The neoconservatives who have taken us down this path are actually very few in number. It is a small pack of zealots whose dedication has spanned decades, and that through years of selective recruitment has become a government cult with cells in most of the national security system. Among those cells are the secretive Office of Special Plans in the Department of Defense (reportedly now disbanded) and a similar operation in the State Department that is managed in the office of Under Secretary for Disarmament John Bolton. . . . Lang said that in later conversations with a number of uniformed officers, he learned that many of them had been auditioned as well and, like him, had been found wanting. However, one who did pass the test was former Navy Captain William J. Luti. In the Bush administration he holds the post of Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. Luti also supervised the Office of Special Plans, described in a seminal 2003 New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh as "a separate intelligence unit ... in the Pentagon's policy office." . . . It was through these special offices that so many of the rumors, gossip, and unsubstantiated intelligence about Iraq were passed directly to senior White House officials, notably Vice President Cheney, and were accepted without first being subjected to the rigorous analysis of the $30-billion-a-year intelligence community. American intelligence, which routinely sees and sifts thousands of bits of information daily, has had years of experience developing an analytical capability that can assess precisely whether the information we are receiving is fact or fiction. Short-circuiting this process -- or, in the vivid term Hersh adopted for the title of his disturbing article, "stovepiping" information directly into policy-makers' hands -- is dangerous. Addressing his investigation directly to Luti's enterprise, Hersh added: "This office, which circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency, stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials" in the administration. . . . President Bush could fundamentally change the direction of his administration by firing fewer than fifteen senior officials, beginning with those signatories of the Project for the New American Century and those currently holding government posts who signed a 1998 letter that urged President Clinton to wage war on Iraq. They are clustered at the National Security Council (NSC), in the Defense and State Departments, and within Vice President Cheney's own parallel national security office. That particular little-known organization -- not accountable to Congress and virtually unknown to the American people -- should be completely dismantled. Never in the history of our democracy has there been established such an influential and pervasive center of power with the ability to circumvent longstanding and accepted reporting structures and to skew decisionmaking practices. It has been described to me chillingly by a former senior government official as a coup d'etat within the State. That's all it would take -- firing fewer than fifteen officials, and the scuttling of Cheney's questionable office -- to alter this administration's radical course. . . . But President Bush would have to want to make these changes. The fact that he has utterly failed to do so suggests that one popular notion about this president -- that he has delegated foreign policy to his "prime minister," Dick Cheney, and that the president is somehow manipulated by him -- is doubtful. Even as the criticism mounts and the failure of the war policy becomes ever more evident with every attack on American interests in Iraq, the president refuses to make changes in his lineup. In fact, as one former intelligence officer suggested to me, President Bush may himself be a neoconservative "recruit," and now an active leader of the radical movement rather than a passive follower unable to block it. . . . He is responsible for what has been wrought in his name. . . . From everything I have heard, the truth may be found at the nexus between policy and politics in the White House. Whoever made the decision to disclose Valerie's undercover status occupies a position where he -- and I believe it is a "he" because Robert Novak's own statements employ the male pronoun exclusively -- has access to the most sensitive secrets in our government, and a political agenda to advance or defend. In gumshoe parlance, he's got the means and he's got the motive. Only a few administration officials meet both of these criteria, and they are clustered in the upper reaches of the National Security Council, the Office of the Vice President, and the Office of the President. . . . The man attacking my integrity and reputation -- and, I believe, quite possibly the person who exposed my wife's identity -- was the same Scooter Libby who, before he came into the new administration, was one of the principal attorneys for Marc Rich, ex-fugitive. Rich is the commodities trader who was convicted of having traded petroleum with Iran in violation of sanctions imposed on that country by the United States after the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran and the taking of more than a hundred American hostages by supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini. Libby is a consummate Republican insider who has bounced back and forth between government posts and his international law practice. He first worked on the Rich case in the mid-1980s, after a stint in the State Department. From 1989 to 1993, Libby worked for Paul Wolfowitz in the Pentagon, before returning to the task of trying to obtain a legal settlement for his fugitive client. . . . In the late nineties, Libby also participated in the preparation of the Project for the New American Century's seminal document, "Rebuilding American Defenses," which became the neoconservative blueprint for national security policy, much of which has been implemented in the aftermath of 9/11. This ardent neoconservative is a leading participant in the network of hidden cells that funneled so much disinformation to our political decision makers outside normal channels. He is one of a handful of senior officials in the administration with both the means and the motive to conduct the covert inquiry that allowed some in the White House to learn my wife's name and status, and then disclose that information to the press. . . . Apparently, according to two journalist sources of mine, when Rove learned that he might have violated the law, he turned on Cheney and Libby and made it clear that he held them responsible for the problem they had created for the administration. The protracted silence on this topic from the White House masks considerable tension between the Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President. . . . But as with all cover-ups, such as Watergate and Iran-Contra, the revelation of the whole truth in this matter will likely be a long time coming, and have repercussions none of us can anticipate.

. . . Read more!

posted by LoZo 7:38 PM