Firefighters take on terror role - Critics cite privacy concerns as workers don’t need warrants to access areas Fri., Nov. 23, 2007
WASHINGTON - Firefighters in major cities are being trained to take on a new role as lookouts for terrorism, raising concerns of eroding their standing as American icons and infringing on people’s privacy.

Unlike police, firefighters and emergency medical personnel don’t need warrants to access hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings each year, putting them in a position to spot behavior that could indicate terrorist activity or planning.

But there are fears that they could lose the faith of a skeptical public by becoming the eyes of the government, looking for suspicious items such as building blueprints or bomb-making manuals or materials...

Keith Olbermann gets it. With a not insignificant dose of irony he narrates the protesters being led off the stage at Alberto Gonzales' speech at UF. First, civil liberties were led off the stage w/o noticeable reaction from Gonzo. Second, Habeas Corpus was dragged away to the same lack of effect...

Here come the thought police
By Ralph E. Shaffer and R. William Robinson
November 19, 2007

With overwhelming bipartisan support, Rep. Jane Harman's "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act" passed the House 404-6 late last month and now rests in Sen. Joe Lieberman's Homeland Security Committee. Swift Senate passage appears certain.

Not since the "Patriot Act" of 2001 has any bill so threatened our constitutionally guaranteed rights.

The historian Henry Steele Commager, denouncing President John Adams' suppression of free speech in the 1790s, argued that the Bill of Rights was not written to protect government from dissenters but to provide a legal means for citizens to oppose a government they didn't trust. Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence not only proclaimed the right to dissent but declared it a people's duty, under certain conditions, to alter or abolish their government.

In that vein, diverse groups vigorously oppose Ms. Harman's effort to stifle dissent. Unfortunately, the mainstream press and leading presidential candidates remain silent...

Does anyone else think it's time to take away thier tasers?

Taser video shows RCMP shocked immigrant within 25 seconds of their arrival Last Updated: Thursday, November 15, 2007 | 12:52 PM ET CBC News

An eyewitness's video recording of a man dying after being stunned with a Taser by police on Oct. 14 at Vancouver International Airport has been released to the public.

The 10-minute video recording clearly shows four RCMP officers talking to Robert Dziekanski while he is standing with his back to a counter and with his arms lowered by his sides, but his hands are not visible.

About 25 seconds after police enter the secure area where he is, there is a loud crack that sounds like a Taser shot, followed by Dziekanski screaming and convulsing as he stumbles and falls to the floor.

Another loud crack can be heard as an officer appears to fire one more Taser shot into Dziekanski.

As the officers kneel on top of Dziekanski and handcuff him, he continues to scream and convulse on the floor....

Justice Dept. Reopens Surveillance Probe By Dan Eggen Wednesday, November 14, 2007

The Justice Department said yesterday that it has reopened an internal investigation of the role played by its lawyers in the administration's warrantless surveillance program, marking a notable policy shift just days into the tenure of new Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey.

The investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility was abandoned in July 2006 after President Bush refused to give security clearances to the OPR lawyers conducting the investigation, according to documents and congressional testimony...

Elliot D. Cohen: Senate Judiciary Poised to Pass Total Information Awareness Bill Mon, 2007-11-12 A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION by Elliot D. Cohen
Amid public outcry, in 2003, Congress defunded the Bush Administration's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project, a massive Orwellian technology-driven surveillance and data mining initiative. Now, it is attempting to pass through the FISA Amendments Act of 2007 (S. 2248), a bill that would affectively give legal standing and retroactive legal immunity to a major component of this project...

Ain't this a BUNCH of TOTAL BS?

U.S. official: Privacy must be redefined - Residents need to adjust to loss of anonymity, government leader says updated 7:41 p.m. ET, Sun., Nov. 11, 2007
WASHINGTON - As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.

Kerr’s comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act...

We don't need "Torturer General Part Deux", shame on these two for their capitulation on torture...

Justice Nominee Gets 2 Key Votes From Democrats
By PHILIP SHENON and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN November 3, 2007
WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 — The confirmation of Michael B. Mukasey as attorney general appeared to be all but certain on Friday after two key Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee announced they would support the nomination despite complaints over Mr. Mukasey’s refusal to clarify his views on what amounts to torture.

The announcements by the senators, Dianne Feinstein of California and Charles E. Schumer of New York, came after Mr. Schumer met with the nominee on Friday afternoon and said he had obtained Mr. Mukasey’s promise to enforce laws that banned any of the harsh interrogation methods known to have been used on Qaeda terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks...

Guard Uses Taser on Man Holding Newborn By JUAN A. LOZANO Tue Aug 14
HOUSTON - In a confrontation captured on videotape, a hospital security guard fired a stun gun to stop a defiant father from taking home his newborn, sending both man and child crashing to the floor. Now William Lewis says his baby girl suffers from head trauma because she was dropped.

"I've got to wonder what kind of moron would Tase an adult holding a baby," said George Kirkham, a former police officer and criminologist at Florida State University. "It doesn't take rocket science to realize the baby is going to fall."...

Help Us Run the "Congress as Sheep" Ads
Ever since a new Congress got elected last November, we’ve been waiting for it to end the violations of the Constitution and the lawless behavior of the Bush administration. Members of Congress acted, but instead of restoring our freedoms, they actually handed the Bush administration vast new powers to invade our privacy with no meaningful oversight from the courts or Congress...

Bush Signs Law to Widen Legal Reach for Wiretapping By JAMES RISEN Published: August 6, 2007
WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 — President Bush signed into law on Sunday legislation that broadly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without warrants.

Congressional aides and others familiar with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed to gather information about foreign terrorists. They said seemingly subtle changes in legislative language would sharply alter the legal limits on the government’s ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States.

They also said that the new law for the first time provided a legal framework for much of the surveillance without warrants that was being conducted in secret by the National Security Agency and outside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that is supposed to regulate the way the government can listen to the private communications of American citizens...

Welocme to FascismUSA! The old Catch-22, eh? Plaintiffs can't proceed because they can't prove harm done by the "SECRET" spying....

Court throws out spying lawsuit - 3-judge panel splits along party lines over Bush’s surveillance program Updated: July 6, 2007
CINCINNATI - A divided federal appeals court rejected a lawsuit Friday challenging President Bush’s domestic spying program without ruling on the issue of whether warrantless wiretapping is legal.

In a 2-1 decision with Republican-appointed judges in the majority, a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the plaintiffs had no standing to sue because they couldn’t prove their communications had been monitored by the government....

emptywheel lays out the latest evidence of military spying on US citizens, and the cover-up by the Pentagon IG...

More Funny Business with Record-Keeping? by emptywheel July 02, 2007
Holy Shit. Remember TALON and CIFA? Here's a description I wrote in April:

It was designed to gather intelligence on threats to defense installments in the United States - to try to collect information (in the TALON database) on threatening people scoping out domestic bases. But it ended up focusing on peace activists and the lefty blogosphere's own Jesus' General....

It Can Happen Here By Marie Cocco
Posted on Jun 12, 2007
WASHINGTON—There was a time when the dark, political drama was my preferred weekend movie. That was before kids and suburbs and serial viewings of “Shrek.”

The films were almost always about some exotic country gripped in a vise of poverty and dictatorship, where human life is cheap and strongmen unaccountable for crimes that shock the conscience. The genre was popularized in the 1982 film “Missing,” by the master director Costa-Gavras. It was a fictionalized account of the kidnapping and murder of a young American journalist in Chile, and the political awakening that his conservative father and the journalist ‘s wife undergo when they come to understand that the American government refuses to aide their search and somehow appears complicit in the horrors they see unfolding around them.

No matter where these dramas were set—in Latin America or in Africa or the Soviet Union or Northern Ireland—you would leave the theater stunned and silent, for a time. But safe, it seemed, in the knowledge that it could not happen here. Now it has...

Friendly Fire - Raising questions about 9/11 gets an Army sergeant demoted for 'disloyalty' By STEPHEN C. WEBSTER
These days, Donald Buswell’s job is not as exciting or dangerous as it once was. For the past few months, his working hours have been spent taking care of some 40-plus wounded soldiers at San Antonio’s Fort Sam Houston medical center. The work is sometimes menial, even janitorial, but he doesn’t mind. After all, Buswell has been where these men are — three years ago, he too was recovering from wounds received in a battle zone in Iraq.

“I truly consider this an honor,” Buswell told his dad not long ago. Still, it’s not exactly where Buswell expected to be after 20 years of well-respected service in the Army.

Since joining the Army in 1987, he had risen to the rank of sergeant first class, serving in both Gulf Wars, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Korea. He ended up with shrapnel scars and a Purple Heart and, back in the U.S. after his last tour in Iraq, a job as intelligence analyst at Fort Sam Houston.

He couldn’t have foreseen that one e-mail could derail his career and put him on his way out of the Army. One e-mail, speculating about events that millions of people have questioned for the last six years, was all it took...