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FBI Seeks To Stifle Political Speech
(New York Times, August 17, 2004)
For several weeks, starting before the Democratic convention, F.B.I. officers have been questioning potential political demonstrators, and their friends and families, about their plans to protest at the two national conventions. These heavy-handed inquiries are intimidating, and they threaten to chill freedom of expression. They also appear to be a spectacularly poor use of limited law-enforcement resources. The F.B.I. should redirect its efforts to focus more directly on real threats. . . . Six investigators recently descended on Sarah Bardwell, a 21-year-old intern with a Denver antiwar group, who quite reasonably took away the message that the government was watching her closely. In Missouri, three men in their early 20's said they had been followed by federal investigators for days, then subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury. They ended up canceling their plans to show up for the Democratic and Republican conventions. . . . The F.B.I. is going forward with the blessing of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel - the same outfit that recently approved the use of torture against terrorism suspects. In the Justice Department's opinion, the chilling effect of the investigations is "quite minimal," and "substantially outweighed by the public interest in maintaining safety and order." But this analysis gets the balance wrong. When protesters are made to feel like criminal suspects, the chilling effect is potentially quite serious. And the chances of gaining any information that would be useful in stopping violence are quite small. . . . The knock on the door from government investigators asking about political activities is the stuff of totalitarian regimes. It is intimidating to be visited by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, particularly by investigators who warn that withholding information about anyone with plans to create a disruption is a crime. . . . And few people would want the F.B.I. to cross-examine their friends and family about them. If engaging in constitutionally protected speech means subjecting yourself to this kind of government monitoring, many Americans may decide - as the men from Missouri did - that the cost is too high. . . . As became clear in the 1960's, F.B.I. monitoring of youthful dissenters is notoriously unreliable. The files that were created in the past often proved to be laughably inaccurate. . . . The F.B.I.'s questioning of protesters is part of a larger campaign against political dissent that has increased sharply since the start of the war on terror. [COMMENT: Remember Germany in the 1930s? Fascism is once again on the move, this time in the USA.] . . . At the Democratic convention, protesters were sent to a depressing barbed-wire camp under the subway tracks. And at a recent Bush-Cheney campaign event, audience members were required to sign a pledge to support President Bush before they were admitted. . . . F.B.I. officials insist that the people they interview are free to "close the door in our faces," but by then the damage may already have been done. The government must not be allowed to turn a war against foreign enemies into a campaign against critics at home.

[COMMENT: Remember, you are under absolutely no legal obligation to answer questions or in other way cooperate with the F.B.I. or any other law enforcement person who doesn't have a warrant. Don't let these fascist terrorists into your homes!]

. . . Read more!

posted by LoZo 11:43 AM

 

Big Business Is Becoming Big Brother
(Kim Zetter, Information Clearinghouse, August 9, 2004)
The government is increasingly using corporations to do its surveillance work, allowing it to get around restrictions that protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans . . . Data aggregators -- companies that aggregate information from numerous private and public databases -- and private companies that collect information about their customers are increasingly giving or selling data to the government to augment its surveillance capabilities and help it track the activities of people. . . . Because laws that restrict government data collection don't apply to private industry, the government is able to bypass restrictions on domestic surveillance. . . . "Americans would really be shocked to discover the extent of the practices that are now common in both industry and government," said the ACLU's Jay Stanley, author of the report. "Industry and government know that, so they have a strong incentive to not publicize a lot of what's going on." . . . Last year, JetBlue Airways acknowledged that it secretly gave defense contractor Torch Concepts 5 million passenger itineraries for a government project on passenger profiling without the consent of the passengers. The contractor augmented the data with passengers' Social Security numbers, income information and other personal data to test the feasibility of a screening system called CAPPS II. That project was slated to launch later this year until the government scrapped it . Other airlines also contributed data to the project. . . . The ACLU released the Surveillance-Industrial Complex report in conjunction with a new website designed to educate the public about how information collected from them is being used. . . . The report listed three ways in which government agencies obtain data from the private sector: by purchasing the data, by obtaining a court order or simply by asking for it. Corporations freely share information with government agencies because they don't want to appear to be unpatriotic, they hope to obtain future lucrative Homeland Security contracts with the government or they fear increased government scrutiny of their business practices if they don't share. . . . Collaborative surveillance between government and the private sector is not new. For three decades during the Cold War, for example, telegraph companies like Western Union, RCA Global and International Telephone and Telegraph gave the National Security Agency, or NSA, all cables that went to or from the United States. Operation Shamrock, which ran from 1945 to 1975, helped the NSA compile 75,000 files on individuals and organizations, many of them involved in peace movements and civil disobedience. . . . These days, the increasing amount of electronic data that is collected and stored, along with developments in software technology, make it easy for the government to sort through mounds of data quickly to profile individuals through their connections and activities. . . . Corporations are not subject to congressional oversight or Freedom of Information Act requests -- two methods for monitoring government activities and exposing abuses. And no laws prevent companies from voluntarily sharing most data with the government. . . . "The government is increasingly ... turning to private companies, which are not subject to the law, and buying or compelling the transfer of private data that it could not collect itself," the report states. . . . By using corporations, the report said, the government can set up a system of "distributed surveillance" to create a bigger picture than it could create with its own limited resources and at the same time "insulate surveillance and information-handling practices from privacy laws or public scrutiny." . . . Most of the transactions people make are with the private sector, not the government. So the amount of data available through the private sector is much greater. . . . Every time people withdraw money from an ATM, buy books or CDs, fill prescriptions or rent cars, someone else, somewhere, is collecting information about them and their transactions. On its own, each bit of information says little about the person being tracked. But combined with health and insurance records, bank loans, divorce records, election contributions and political activities, corporations can create a detailed dossier. . . . After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI circulated a watch list to corporations that contained hundreds of names of people the FBI was interested in talking to, although the people were not under investigation or wanted by the FBI. Companies were more than happy to check the list against the names of their customers. And if they used the list for other purposes, it's difficult to know. The report notes that there is no way to determine how many job applicants might have been denied work because their names appeared on the list. . . . "It turns companies into sheriff's deputies, responsible not just for feeding information to the government, but for actually enforcing the government's wishes, for example by effectively blacklisting anyone who has been labeled as a suspect under the government's less-than-rigorous procedures for identifying risks," the report states.

. . . Read more!

posted by LoZo 3:42 PM

 

Witness to the Great Unraveling of America
(Paul Krugman, BuzzFlash Interview, August 6, 2004)
BuzzFlash: In the preface to the hardcover edition of The Great Unraveling: Losing our Way in the New Century, you make ironic use of Henry Kissinger's Ph.D. thesis at Harvard as a way to understand the radicalism of the Bush Administration. Could you explain that a bit more? . . . Paul Krugman: Well, it's really good for explaining how reasonable people can’t bring themselves to see that they’re actually facing a threat from a radical movement. Kissinger talked about the time of the French Revolution, and pretty obviously he also was thinking about the 1930s. He argued that, when you have a revolutionary power, somebody who really wants to tear apart the system -- doesn't believe in any of the rules -- reasonable people who've been accustomed to stability just say, "Oh, you know, they may say that, but they don’t really mean it." And, "This is just tactical, and let’s not get too excited." Anyone who claims that these guys really are as radical as their own statements suggest is, you know, "shrill." Kissinger suggests they'd be considered alarmists. And those who say, "Don’t worry. It’s not a big deal," are considered sane and reasonable. . . . Well, that's exactly what's been happening. For four years now, some of us have been saying, whether or not you think they're bad guys, they're certainly radical. They don't play by the rules. You can't take anything that you’ve regarded as normal from previous U.S. political experience as applying to Bush and the people around him. They will say things and do things that would not previously have made any sense -- you know, would have been previously considered out of bounds. And for all of that period, the critics have been told: "Oh, you know, you’re overreacting, and there’s something wrong with you." . . . We just saw it with the increased level of terror alerts. Among those of us who had made a judgment about what kind of people we’re dealing with, the reaction was, this timing was awfully convenient. After all, they've done this sort of thing before. Of course, this was criticized as completely unreasonable to say -- after all, this time we've got "specifics." But here we are with this morning's headlines: Oh, it's all three-year-old information. . . . BuzzFlash: There was an article, as you know, in The New Republic, which said the Bush Administration had put pressure on the Pakistani government to come up with a "high-profile al Qaeda target" in the last two weeks of July, and preferably during the Democratic Convention. That article was met with a lot of skepticism, although it was quite detailed and written by three people for a prestigious publication. And indeed, what has happened is it has been announced that a high-target al Qaeda individual was arrested by the Pakistanis. He had actually been arrested the Saturday before the Democratic Convention, but it was only announced, I believe, on Wednesday or Thursday. . . . Paul Krugman: It was Thursday, a few hours before Kerry's speech. . . . BuzzFlash: So exactly what had been foretold, but dismissed by some as a conspiratorial theory, was proven to be true. On top of that,it was three-year-old information, the pre-9/11 information, that was the primary basis, even the Administration admits, for the so-called specific terror alerts. The information came from the computer of this high-target al Qaeda figure who was captured by the Pakistanis at the request of the Bush Administration, basically, to drown out the message of the Democratic Convention. . . . The stakes are very high for the Bushies, because we all know that there are terrible suppressed scandals. And that was before we even had any hint about Abu Ghraib. They will do anything to win. You have to expect that it’s going to be the dirtiest campaign in American history, and so it’s proving. We probably ain’t seen nothing yet. Over and over again, the people who made a judgment about the motives of the Administration, and assessed the facts on the basis of that judgment, have proved again and again to be getting it right in interpreting the latest story. People who keep on clinging to the belief that these are reasonable people who behave like a conventional government have been snookered. . . . Reporters and producers know very well that if they do anything that can be construed as an unfavorable misrepresentation of Republican positions, there will be hell to pay, while misrepresenting what Democrats say is cost-free. Historically, there has been no punishment. Specific examples are not all necessarily cases of deliberate slanting of the news, but they sometimes are. . . . We've got an alliance between the religious right and the accumulators of great wealth. Those are the people who are running things. And then the question would be, how is it that these things go together so well? What happened to the streak in Christianity that is reveling and populist? Why has that been completely eliminated? George Lakoff has written about a conservative world view that you can kind of make sense of. It doesn’t work by the numbers, but it does work, sort of, emotionally. There's a focus on self-reliance, and therefore letting the wealthy get wealthier, with this world view. . . . But I think a lot of it is a marriage of convenience. The corporate insiders and the figures of the religious right have found each other mutually useful. The thing about the religious right is that it's actually relatively centralized. There are people who can take their flock where they want to go. And they have, in effect, made a deal with the people with multi-million-dollar incomes. "I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine." If this coalition gets the kind of lock on power that it wants, the next phase is the struggle between those two sides. As for Tom DeLay, he is a fanatically religious person because that’s who he is, and he’s a fanatical supporter of the interests of the money, because that’s where the money is -- the money and the political support. . . . BuzzFlash: The neo-cons have the foreign policy radicalism, of which Dick Cheney is a part. And they seem impervious to facts. Facts come up to contradict their ideological assumptions, and they continue to proceed with the ideological assumptions, just adapting their excuses. But let’s say Bush were reelected. Doesn’t this have to hit the wall at some point? . . . Paul Krugman: Yes. You could say that we’ve hit a number of walls already. The thing is the United States is a huge, wealthy, extremely powerful country, which means that you can screw up very badly, and the consequences take awhile before they become obvious. . . . If we weren't America, those budget deficits would already have led to a financial crisis. But, you know, the markets say: Well, it's America. They'll get their act together. And so we, the people, are still lending money. If we weren't the world loan superpower, the ongoing disaster in Iraq would have been catastrophic already. The army is coming apart at the seams -- but slowly. This group of people have had the good luck, or maybe the bad luck in the longer run, to seize control of an institution that is capable of taking a lot of punishment before it really disintegrates. . . . If you think about how far down we've come in this short time, it's actually pretty amazing. But I don't know what happens if they manage to hold on, one way or another, in November. So far, every real-world thing they turned their hands to, every real-world issue, as opposed to politics, has turned to crud. Afghanistan's a mess. Iraq's a mess. The economy's a mess. The budget's a mess. Homeland Security is a mess. Four more years of this, and I don’t know. It’s going to be a pretty grim prospect. . . . You know, Nixon was a "bad guy," but, what he did was actually quite pragmatic in actual policies. . . . This is something completely new. We don't have a lot of experience with it. But it is amazing, if you look at some of the ways they are willing to change policy, not in fundamental ways, but in ways that help them politically. If you read closely the reporting from Iraq, what's pretty clear is that our army has been told to basically cede control of large swaths of the country to the insurgents in order to hold the casualty figures down until November. I guess you could call that pragmatic, although what happens afterwards, I don't know. It was pretty clear that Bush's initial decision was to send the troops in and level Fallujah. But after that didn't work out too well, the next reaction was, okay, let's just try and keep the troops on their bases, and see if we can taper this off until the election.

. . . Read more!

posted by LoZo 4:50 PM