The FBI used informants inside the groups, yet the charges are bogus. Thus the raids were clearly coming from the federal government and were meant as political intimidation.

So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do.

Twincities Indymedia has been doing a stellar job of reporting what’s happening with their Live Wire instantaneous news on the home page.

PS “Those in Twin Cities still going ahead with plans to stage massive civil disobedience on the 1st”, they say.

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“How I can be sure you’re not a member of al Qaida?
Now excuse my wand while I slide it up inside ya.”

Hilarious. NOT worksafe.

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Adam Curry blogs and podcasts about the new Orwellian “fear mongering campaign” in Britain, with the government running ads encouraging people to report those who, are you ready for this, take too many photos of buildings, behave suspiciously, or have too many cell phones.

You don’t have to know if they are doing any thing wrong, just call the anti-terrorism hotline
and we’ll determine that for you, they say.

Scary stuff. Britain already has way more surveillance cameras than other nations too.

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Danger Room on the government wanting to snoop on all Internet traffic.

Of more interest to observers of intelligence activities is the issue of quality vs. quantity and the slow creep towards doom that these efforts foretell. The fact that we are essentially attempting to gill-net bad guys is a fairly strong indicator that the intelligence community has yet to come up with an effective strategy against information-age threats.

This is precisely the same mistake the US made in when invading Vietnam and Iraq. They were sure the wars could be won from the air, no human contact needed. They couldn’t be. Nor can counter-intelligence be successful simply by slurping down massive amounts of data and neglecting to have people, lots of them, on the ground.

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U.S. at the bottom of global privacy rankings.

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The New York Times has the files of the NYPD surveillance of groups planning protests at the 2004 Republican convention. It appears they were “monitoring” virtually every group. WitnessVideo has a searchable version.

The Bloomberg administration allowed this probably illegal spying on antiwar groups to happen, and also made every attempt to block protests in Central Park, even though it’s a public venue

Now this multi-billionaire says he may spend a billion of his own money in an independent run for president. Whose class interests do you think he represents? Not ours, I’m guessing, even as his plans for the greening of NYC appear good ones indeed.

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Washington Post

The revelations, combined with protester accounts, provide the first public evidence that Washington-based FBI personnel used their intelligence-gathering powers in the District to collect purely political intelligence.

The Partnership for Civil Justice has more. They filed the lawsuit which forced the release of the police logs.

“It really is a secret police: This is an effort to suppress political dissent,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice. “If this was happening in another country that the U.S. was targeting, U.S. officials at the highest levels would be decrying this as a violation of human rights”

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Rumors that a shadowy White House task force known only as AFD has been investigating leftist organizations appear to be true. Massive COINTELPRO-like monitoring of antiwar groups has been occurring, with AFD intercepting and reading all email sent and received by organizers, as well as listening to their cell phone calls. Apparently the volume of email and phone calls being monitored is so large that supercomputers are needed to track it all and entire office buildings are being filled with these snoops, many of whom now specialize in one group or even just one person.

However, this has become problematic for them. Sources tell Polizeros that attempted surveillance on Not In Our Name had to be halted because no one could get a handle on that group’s revolving door of organizers. “This clearly is symptomatic of a deliberate attempt to obfuscate and non-delineate the inherent structuralization of their organizational capabilities,” said Dirk Hammerjaw, AFD NION ‘expert’, before lapsing into complete semantic incoherence.

Medea Benjamin of Code Pink came in for special attention too. Given her media visibility, she has several ex-FBI agents who now work for AFD tracking her. However, leaked records show that they’ve spent several months and thousands of hours trying to prove she is communist because, “how could she not be a pinko when the name is Code Pink.”

Two lead organizers for the ANSWER Coalition, long-time organizers and brothers Brian and Richard Becker, have a small department monitoring them. Yet investigators appear to not be able to tell the difference between the two brothers and routinely spend excessive amounts of taxpayer’s money trying to divine the secret plans of ANSWER instead of just going to that organization’s home page. “They couldn’t be hiding what they do on their website, so we’re analyzing every email, phone call they made, and every meeting they’ve been to in the past three years to accurately determine what the alleged antiwar aim of the ANSWER Coalition is really about,” said an unnamed AFD investigator. When asked why they kept confusing the two brothers, he appeared defensive and changed the subject.

The AFD database program has cost millions of dollars to create. However, initial tests were disappointing. After hundreds of thousands of intercepted emails to antiwar organizers were fed into, then analyzed by the database, results said the organizers were clearly linked to subprime mortgage schemes, Nigeria bank scams, and Make Your Woody Bigger pills. Some investigators then replied to these emails, trying to uncover the supposed links. However the amount of spam, DOS attacks, spybots, and viruses they received in reply crashed governmental servers, as well as bankrupting some of the more gullible AFD agents, one of whom said, “this is no joke.”

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New postal law lets Bush read your mail. But Dubya says it has to be an “emergency” -whatever that means… But the biggest emergency this country faces is the freedom-hating Constitution-shredders in the White House.

Ok Democrats, you’ve just taken power in Congress. Do something about this. Now.

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Judge halts US eavesdropping program

A US federal judge has ordered the Bush administration to halt the National Security Agency’s (NSA) program of domestic eavesdropping, saying it violates the US Constitution.

Naturally, the Bushies whined that upholding the Constitution is a bad and evil thing to do.

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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office said Saturday he was ordering the release of dozens of intelligence reports prepared for the state Office of Homeland Security — a step that comes as lawmakers from both parties are denouncing a practice in which state intelligence agents compiled information about political and antiwar protests and rallies.

He only did this because negative publicity forced him to, piously saying this will show “the practice was not more widespread.” But that wasn’t what people were upset about. Rather, they quite rightfully are upset that it was happening at all.

“The governor believes that any inappropriate information gathering like this is totally unacceptable,” Adam Mendelsohn, Schwarzenegger’s communications director, said in an interview.

Oh spare me the bullshit. If he thought it was unacceptable, why did he allow it? As I recall, there’s a Democrat running for governor. Perhaps he could come out of his mouse hole and attack on this issue? Just a thought…

We shall see if ANSWER LA (or myself, for that matter) are in any of them.

No, that’s no paranoia…

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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office in charge of protecting California against terrorism has tracked demonstrations staged by political and antiwar groups, a practice that senior law enforcement officials say is an abuse of civil liberties.

This was done by a “53-person operation,” which certainly implies is a whole lot of spying on legal activities. They say they’ve stopped, I sure believe them, don’t you?

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Tony Blair keeps trying to out-do Bush in governmental monitoring of citizens. He may have succeeded this time. From BlairWatch.

The Government now wants to track all 12 million children in England and Wales in a new database due to become operational in two years and expected to cost £224 million. The idea of this scheme is the surveillance of all children from birth and will include information on whether or not they eat the required five portions of fruit and vegetables each day.

I thought that must be satire. It’s not. The British government really does want to know if children are eating their veggies, as well asking personal, subjective questions about the mental health of the parents, and much more.

With the Government’s less than brilliant record with computer systems, I wonder how long it will be before this latest intrusive project goes expensively pear-shaped.

Ah, someone will certainly be getting rich off this doomed Orwellian project, now won’t they?

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That’s what our Big Brother government wants you to think.

Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming “semantic web” championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

This of course, has little to do with their purported goal of finding the Evildoers and instead is another noxious attempt to spy on all of us. No, I don’t trust them to do the right thing with the data - and neither should you.

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Big Internet and telephone companies are girding to fight an unprecedented call by the Bush administration for them to keep detailed records of customers’ online activities for two years.

Well, I certainly trust them not to use this information to attack political enemies, don’t you? Yeah, right…

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Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? (”Who watches the watchers?”) and “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” Watch someone long enough, and you’ll find something to arrest — or just blackmail — with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies — whoever they happen to be at the time.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

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“Call connected thru the NSA. Complete transmission thru the NSA. Suspending your rights for the duration of the permanent war.”

—They Might Be Giants mp3

PS You can get it as a ringtone off their site for $1.50.

via Chris Pirillo

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USA TODAY/Gallup poll

Disapprove 51 / approve 43

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Federal agents raid home of CIA’s former No. 3 boss

Federal agents Friday morning raided the home of Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who stepped down this week from the No. 3 post at the CIA amid accusations of improper ties to a defense contractor named as a co-conspirator in the bribery case of former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

I’m convinced there’s a war going on between the CIA and White House. This is just one more round. Oh sure, the allegations may well be true. But why now? Ditto for the NSA phone monitoring. The story has been around for months but just broke nationally after the CIA got attacked by the White House. I doubt this is coincidence.

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More on why the NSA spying is Orwellian, intrusive - and won’t work - if indeed the actual reason for it is to catch terrorists and not create a database to be used against political enemies.

Crypto and security expert Bruce Schneier says

Unchecked police and military power is a security threat — just as important a threat as unchecked terrorism. There is no reason to sacrifice the former to obtain the latter, and there are very good reasons not to.

What the data is really for

This data as a means to track al Qaeda is too polluted to make any sense. No one I know who wants to discuss something truly confidential does so over the phone. Why think any terrorist would? Evil is not synonymous with stupid.

Unlike use for a terrorist search, where almost everyone picked up is useless to the purpose and a waste of finite resources, all data IS useful if it were collected to compile a political-network database … every hit will fall into one of three categories: friend, foe or apolitcal (or good fish, bad fish, throw-back-in-the-pond-and-check-later fish, in a continuing program, and this program may have really started in late 2000.)

FBI: NSA data lead to thousands of dead ends

That’s right. It doesn’t work. Instead it provides garbage data which wastes countless hours trying to verify.

John Robb weighs in

IF we knew who the terrorist is, they would be under surveillance and all the calls they made would be tracked. This program is being built because we DON’T know who the terrorist is. It is attempting to tease potential terrorists out of the data on patterns of behavior where no link to a known entity exists. In short: a very harmful boondoggle.

My money is on the cop, trained in counter-terrorism (like NYC and LA is going to), that works the beat.

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NSA spying on domestic phone calls is not only evil, anti-democratic, and Orwellian, it also won’t work. Outrage against this noxious governmental monitoring on citizens for no discernable reason has been huge and from both parties. Good.
From Global Guerillas

Noah, at DefenseTech, tapped Valdis Krebs for his analysis of the problems with the slowly leaked details on the NSAs domestic surveillance efforts. Valdis makes the absolutely correct observation that:

The right thing to do is to look for the best haystack, not the biggest haystack. We knew exactly which haystack to look at in the year 2000 [before the 9/11 attacks]. We just didn’t do it...

To me, it’s pretty clear that the people working on this program aren’t as smart as they think they are. Some top level thinking indicates that this will quickly become a rat hole for federal funds (due to wasted effort) and a major source of infringement of personal freedom. Here’s some detail:

* It will generate oodles of false positives.
* It will be expanded to include to monitor domestic groups other than al Qaeda.
* The database and associated information will be used for purposes other than tracking groups.

Not to mention the presumed billions of dollars it will cost. Who is the contractor for this monster database? Might be quite revealing to discover precisely who is getting wealthy off this. Or who in goverment quietly resigns and then gets a cushy job with those same contractors.

Bush of course said the spying wasn’t infringing on anyone’s rights. Goodness, no, why would a program to track every phone call made in the US be considered an invasion of privacy? Is Bush is so deluded he actually believes what he says? More probably, he’s lied so much and so often that he no longer knows, or cares about, the difference.

From AmericaBlog, “We don’t even remotely have the entire story about this new phone-records domestic spying scandal”, with a multitude of comments. They’re wondering, just how big is this database and precisely what is in it.

More from Kos, How 1984 works in 2006 - Wiretapping unveiled

The ACLU is suing NSA and a raft of class action lawsuits against the phone companies who turned over the records without a whimper are expected.

This could be a death knell for the Bush Administration. Indeed, his popularity has now dropped to 29%, and that poll was before this story broke.

And no, this didn’t start with Bush. It’s been going on for decades. The Bushies are just greedier, less careful, and far less competent. That’s why most everything they do eventually blows up in their faces. But the real problem is systemic. The rulers believe they are not beholden to the people. That’s what must change.

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The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime.

Then why are they doing it?

This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations.

Oh right, I sure believe that, don’t you?

But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.

How will tracking every phone calls that granny makes aid in stopping terrorism? Answer, it won’t. Nor can that volume of data be put into a database accurately, on a daily basis, and be retrievable and searchable as needed and quickly. This is just more of the US government’s predilection for attempting to solve problems by massive use of technology rather than on-the-ground intel and footwork.

The same great minds that said the US could win in Vietnam and Iraq with airpower alone are the same minds that decided a super whizz-bang computer tracking phone calls is a substitute for the dangerous gruntwork of actually finding out what ‘terrorists’ might be doing.  (Some might say they’d just need to look in a mirror to find terrorists, but I digress.)

A system like this is ripe for abuse and can of course be used to slime and destroy political opponents. Checks and balances? There aren’t any.

Via Left i on the News

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FBI officer speaks at law school, lists Indymedia, Food Not Bombs, Communist Party of Texas on “Terrorist Watch List.”

It’s difficult to understand such cluelessness. But given this, it’s no wonder FBI hasn’t found any actual terrorists.

Indymedia has an open publishing policy - and FBI officials reading this should write this down - to determine what IndyMedia is doing, FBI should go to their websites and read them. Nope, no terrorists here. The genuinely scary thing though is, in addition to their blundering surveillance, that FBI clearly doesn’t understand the territory it is monitoring.

Foods not Bombs gives away food for free to whoever wants it. Were this the 60’s, they’d have been hippies. Here’s a tip for the FBI: Vegetarian peaceniks practicing non-violent civil disobedience are not generally known to be terrorists.

The Communist Party USA has backed the Democrat presidential candidate for decades against any third party candidate, which doesn’t sound real radical or revolutionary to me. Again, not a terrorist threat.

Orwellian incompetence is a bad mixture indeed.

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Feingold blames stalled censure motion on ‘cowering’ Democrats

“I’m amazed at Democrats … cowering with this president’s numbers so low,” said Feingold, D-Wis. “The administration … just has to raise the specter of the War on Terror, and Democrats run and hide.”

With just a few exceptions, like Feingold, Congressional Democrats are gutless, complicit, and deliberately oblivious to what those who elected them want. Polls show Americans clearly opposed to the illegal spying on citizens, yet when Feingold  does something about it, his own party backstabs him.

Democrats: Why do you continue to support this party? Your support is what allows them to continue. Stop giving them money. Stop supporting candidates who ignore the will of their constituents, who vote for illegal invasions, torture, and decimation of civil rights. Because that’s precisely what the vast bulk of  Congressional Dems are doing.

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From the Rock and Rap Confidential newsletter, one more reason to get in the streets on March 18 for the nationwide antiwar protests. Be there.

On Thursday, the Senate voted 89-10 to make 14 of the 16 provisions of the Patriot Act permanent (they were allegedly “temporary” when first passed). 35 of the 44 Democrats in the Senate voted for making the Patriot Act permanent. “Yes” voters included such liberals as Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama.

How progressive are the nine Democrats who voted against the Patriot Act? Consider that last May 10 every single one of them voted to approve the Bush Administration’s request for funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pathetic, aren’t they? Congressional Democrats aren’t even pretending to object to the neocon agenda any more. When even alleged liberals like Boxer and Kennedy vote for the freedom-hating Patriot Act, well, it’s time to replace all of them with those who will genuinely represent the people. The people clearly are opposed to the war, the spying, and the erosion of liberties while the multimillionaires in Congress are not. It’s a class thing.

The ruling class is moving sharply rightward while the people continue to move to the left. The pendulum is swinging leftwards again, a new period of radicalization has just started in the country.

In six months or a year, Democratic leadership will pretend they were for the changes all along and try to co-opt the movement. Remember this vote. Remember their complicity.

Be one of the tens of thousands protesting on March 18. Not only does it send a message (yes, they most certainly are listening), it’s fun and exhilarating to be with thousands of others marching for the same cause. Makes you feel better too, when you see how many of us there really are.

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