Walls and walls and walls and walls.

More walls going up than walls coming down. Walls of barbed wire and armed soldiers and flood lights. Cement walls. Walls that swallow up the mind. Walled up and gated communities with surveillance cameras, infrared sensors, motion detectors, armed guards, the overhead surveillance of helicopters, canine patrols, anti-terrorist bollards.

What the hell is an anti-terrorist bollard? I am at a loss for words to explain what it is.

But, thousands and thousands of miles away, in of all places, South Africa? A contretemps involving China, Zimbabwe, a plucky union?  A union erects a wall of unionists who stop a shipment of armaments to Zimbabwe from China? For freedom? For liberty? For, God forfend! Peace? An anti-authoritarian wall against the capitalistic authority of China? A wall that actually works?
http://www.dailykos.com/...

Mr. Yoo’s 2001 legal opinion was revealed last week thanks to a 2003 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the ACLU. The full memo, to which this is literally a footnote, is 81 pages in length and provides information on the detention and interrogation of prisoners in U.S. custody overseas. This footnote references a separate and still secret memo entitled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States." Read more about this little gem over at TPM and the Washington Post.

Suffice to say, it was an exciting week!

While I was expecting Olbermann and Maddow's report on April Fool's Day about Mukasey's verbal trainwreck to be a sick prank on my mind, the public glimmer of, and even if it was just a temporary mirage in the sea of election politics, of a Bush administration so incompetent it was criminally negligent for failing to prevent 9/11 served as a stark reminder to everyone that, if anything, this man is still in office!

Attorney General Michael Mukasey's trip to San Jose to speak to telecom leaders last week seems to have gone almost completely under the radar:

In the near future, hundreds of government-owned video cameras may record hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers a day as they maneuver the streets of Manhattan.

Is this some Orwellian Bush Administration plot?

No, it's the simple reality of the city's congestion pricing, which got the thumbs upfrom the New York City Council this week and now heads up to Albany.

Watch New York Civil Liberties Union Legislative Director Robert Perry describe how the congestion pricing proposal say violate New Yorkers' personal privacy rights.

Continue reading for more information on how New York's congestion pricing proposal may violate New Yorkers' civil liberties.

A review of The Commission by Philip Shenon. NY/Boston: Hachette Book Group/Twelve, 457 pp., $27.

"I don't want you to ever talk to me about al-Qaeda, about those threats.  I don't want to hear about al-Qaeda anymore."
--John Ashcroft, July 12, 2001 (p. 247)

In 1759, Ben Franklin may or may not have written "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." There's some dispute over whether he penned those lines or borrowed them for a publication. But there's no disputing that this concept of individual liberty balanced with collective security was at the very foundation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The balancing act between essential liberties and collective security has been more than put to the test in post-9/11 America, and the balance has most definitely shifted away from personal liberty. Consider this story told by a border agent at a meeting of 200 residents in Washington's San Juan Islands.

He was there to explain why the federal government is doing citizenship checks on domestic ferry runs. But near the end, while trying to convince the skeptical audience that the point is to root out terrorists, not fish for wrongdoing among the citizenry, deputy chief Joe Giuliano let loose with a tale straight out of "Dr. Strangelove."

It turns out the feds have been monitoring Interstate 5 for nuclear "dirty bombs." They do it with radiation detectors so sensitive it led to the following incident.

"Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour," Giuliano told the crowd. "Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car]."

The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot (near the Bow-Edison exit, 18 miles south of Bellingham). The agent questioned the driver, then did a cursory search of the car, Giuliano said.

Did he find a nuke?

"Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier" Giuliano said.

He added: "That's the type of technology we have that's going on in the background. You don't see it. If I hadn't told you about it, you'd never know it was there."

The border agent went on to point out that they've caught two would-be terrorists at the Blaine border region, one in 1997 and one in 1999. What wasn't highlighted in that exchange was that this was during the Clinton administration. That the pre-9/11, pre-PATRIOT Act security measures and protocols that were in effect then were perfectly adequate to detect and to apprehend these men.

So how does finding a radioactive cat at 70 mph and from 80 feet away make us safer? And what exactly else is "going on in the background" that we don't see and don't know about? Last week, I wrote about the government's implementation of the Total Information Awareness program, a program that had been banned by Congress, but that the Pentagon implemented anyway.

Huge amounts of data--e-mail information (sender, recipient, subject line, time stamp), Internet searches (both conducted searches and sites visited), both wired and wireless phone calls (incoming and outgoing, as well as location and duration), financial records (credit card activity, wire transfers, bank account information), and tracking information from the TSA--are being swept up by the NSA and monitored for suspicious patterns.

The good news since last week, as smintheus reported, is that on one facet in this Total Information Awareness Surveillance Society, Gov. Brian Schweitzer made the feds blink. Key to their plans to keep track of us was Real ID, the state government-issued ID card that would replace our driver's license with a national ID card that would have a chip including, at a minimum, name, birth date, sex, ID number, a digital photograph, address, and a "common machine-readable technology" that would allow the data to be shared in federal databases--the ones that already store all that other data being picked up by the TIA programs. Schweitzer said "no," the feds said, "ok."

Expect Montana's victory on Real ID to encourage the other hold-out states, including Maine, South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma to flat-out reject the program, and other states to join the movement. Idaho has already made steps in that direction with the state House unanimously rejecting the program. Now states like Alaska and the powerhouse state of California to join in.

Maybe the states can do what our Congress has failed at in the past seven years--say "no" to an administration that would happily sacrifice our Essential Liberty's for the illusion of safety.

Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador:

The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) [...] has in recent months again received threatening communications from the U.S. Department of Justice. Citing the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, a letter sent to CISPES in January questions the organization’s relationship with the leftist Salvadoran political party known as the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation, or FMLN. [...] The letter cites the organization’s website and an article published in the Washington Post – which does not mention CISPES – following the December 2007 visit of the FMLN’s presidential candidate Mauricio Funes. It states that, "it has come to our attention... that the FMLN, and/or possibly its candidate for El Salvador’s 2009 presidential election, Mauricio Funes, hired your organization for the purposes of conducting a public relations media campaign to include political fundraising..." The Department of Justice gave no other evidence to back up the claim.

Through the recently announced Eliot Spitzer Investigation and the Encyclopedia of Illegal Surveillance published in the Wall Street Journal, along with further disclosures about the degree and depth of surveillance that has been accomplished, it no longer is viable to imagine this information, obtained illegally, has not been put to illegal use.  The question is not if but what illegal use has been made of this information.

Let your imagination go; consider, for example, the following scenario ..
By now, the Administration has shared its illegal surveillance "Eliot Spitzer"-style DVDs of each of our Representatives in the House, with each of them; presumably tonight will be the first chance they have to view "The Complete House of Representatives Surveillance DVD Box Set", together; coupled with incentives for going along with the Administration's wishes, this will likely be a formidable package.

Let your imagination unfold ..

With recent disclosures of how extensive and wanton is the federal government's illegal spying on virtually everything we do that uses an electronic device, I thought now would be a good time to offer a primer on how you can reclaim at least a portion of your 4th and 5th Amendment rights and your absolute privacy.  This diary provides information on how to obtain truly anonymous email accounts and, furthermore, how you can keep that anonymity and protect your privacy from the illegal prying eyes of Big Brother (be he the federal government or corporate Little Big Brothers).

Though primarily focused on email, the information/tools I discuss below can also be used to gain anonymity in IRC chats and even suggests a means of obtaining privacy, though not anonymity, with VOIP softphones on your computer.

NB:  This diary entry turns out to be an internet urban legend that I did not check before posting.  I've left it up so no one thinks I'm hiding anything.  My apologies to the community.

According to this website [original link removed], at least one computer manufacturer (Dell) is embedding hardware keyloggers (a chip that records every keystroke) in their laptop computers, apparently at the behest of the Department of Homeland Security.  Moreover, the DHS will not disclose why, stating the information is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

I have two questions for the community.

1.  How widespread is this?

2.  Is this legal?

Update:  a commenter asked that I warn visitors that the above linked website is not workplace friendly.  The page I linked to is fine, but the main page contains some profanity.

Update 2:  Argh.  I've been had--a belated check at snopes revealed that this is a hoax, and I bought it hook, line, and sinker.  My apologies to the community.  Please consider this entry withdrawn.

"Watergate and a lot of things around Watergate and Vietnam... served, I think, to erode the authority ... the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area" – Vice President and Former Nixon Staffer Dick Cheney

Imagine White House operatives were caught illegally wiretapping Democratic National Committee headquarters during the coming Presidential election. That according to the head of the DNC, those listening in had overheard the conversations of what the Chairman speculated to be "perhaps every prominent Democrat in America." Imagine senior White House staff with the help of current and former U.S. intelligence agency personnel conducted illegal break-ins, wiretapping, and espionage against ordinary citizens, journalists, Democratic Party candidates, and even members of its own administration for the purposes of political dominance and electoral victory. Now imagine the President justified it all and sought to conceal its existence with a claim of national security and executive privilege.

The title is derived from an apocryphal saying that has many variations: "The Air Force builds weapons; the Navy builds targets".  That's a restatement of a dilemma which has confronted military strategists since Sun Tzu, and probably before: will something built for offense be turned into a defensive liability by the adversary?

We're now witnessing the latest incarnation of this problem: the feds are busy trying to build massive data acquisition and analysis mechanisms, putatively in order to defend the country.  There are Cyber Strike Command this and Anti-Terror Task Force that and all of them are getting their hands on email, voice, fax and other communications data -- with, as we now know, the illegal assistance of the telecom industry.

But put aside for a moment the whole FISA debacle and turn your attention, if you will, to another question: even if we optimistically presume that they have the very best of intentions and the highest standards of integrity, are they building a weapon or a target?

The answer, sadly, very much appears to be the latter.  Which means that not only are American taxpayers funding the chilling invasion of privacy that all this represents, they're funding it for other governments.

Originally posted at CrossLeft

One of the foundational principles that allows democracy to function ethically is transparency.  The current administration has already done far too much to compromise this principle in the name of national security.  Now we are witnessing a pitched battle over legislation in Congress that would seem to have more to do with protecting monied special interests than the individual citizen.  The Senate and the House of Representatives have each passed a bill to renew authorization for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but they differ on one critical point; immunity for possible illegalities on the part of telecommunication corporations.  The Senate bill includes immunity that House rejects.

If you read the DailyKos last week, you know I have tried repeatedly to talk to my Senator Jim Webb or his legal staff to get an explanation as to why Webb voted the way he did on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) bill. See Last Week's Diary.  Well, I got an "answer."

Webb had stated he was against giving President Bush amnesty for all of Bush's illegal and unconstitutional violations of the Fourth Amendment in demanding telecommunications companies secretly surveil without a warrant millions of American citizens who had committed no crime.

Webb had also said he wanted "exclusivity," i.e. a requirement that the new surveillance law actually bind the President, as the current FISA law does.

Yet Webb did exactly the opposite.  He voted for a bill that pardons the President for his past crimes, hides those crimes so that Americans can never discover them, and makes clear that the President is NOT BOUND BY ANY LAW in this field.

Via Crooks and Liars, comes this article:

"The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.

   Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law."

Wherein our intrepid investigator shares further tales of how private industry mixed with covert government programs, illegal surveillance of American citizens, and greedy bloodsucking business consultants, uses and abuses its stupid, selfish, shortsighted technerds who eventually get what's coming to them.

They always want more.  It's quite simple and the reason for our 4th Amendment: the government wants information about citizens for "security."  But as we've pushed into the information age, our privacy has slipped farther by the wayside.