‘Inventing terrorists’: New study reveals FBI set up terrorism-related prosecutions

RT
June 16, 2014 11:43

 

Nearly 95 per cent of terrorist arrests have been the result of FBI foiling its own entrapment plots as a part of the so-called post-9/11 War on Terror, a new study revealed.

According to the report entitled ‘Inventing Terrorists: The Lawfare of Preemptive Prosecution’, the majority of arrests involved the unjust prosecution of targeted Muslim Americans.

The 175-page study by Muslim advocacy group SALAM analyzes 399 individuals in cases included on the list of the US Department of Justice from 2001 to 2010.

“According to this study’s classification, the number of preemptive prosecution cases is 289 out of 399, or 72.4 percent. The number of elements of preemptive prosecution cases is 87 out of 399, or 21.8 percent. Combining preemptive prosecution cases and elements of preemptive prosecution cases, the total number of such cases on the DOJ list is 376, or 94.2 percent,” the report concluded.
 
The authors define ‘preemptive prosecution’ as “a law enforcement strategy adopted after 9/11, to target and prosecute individuals or organizations whose beliefs, ideology, or religious affiliations raise security concerns for the government.”
 

Nearly 25 percent of cases (99 of 399) contained material support charges. Another almost 30 per cent of cases consisted of conspiracy charges. More than 17 per cent of the analyzed cases (71 of 399 cases) involved sting operations. Over 16 percent of cases (65 of 399 cases) included false statement or perjury charges, and around six percent of cases involved immigration-related charges.

According to the report, since 9/11 only 11 cases posed “potentially significant” threat to the United States.

“Only three were successful (the [Tamerlan and Dzhokhar] Tsarnaev brothers and Major Nidal Hasan), accounting for 17 deaths and several hundred injuries,” the paper says.

One of the FBI’s strategies involved “using agents provocateur to actively entrap targets in criminal plots manufactured and controlled by the government.”
 
“The government uses agents provocateur to target individuals who express dissident ideologies and then provides those provocateurs 25 with fake (harmless) missiles, bombs, guns, money, encouragement, friendship, and the technical and strategic planning necessary to see if the targeted individual can be manipulated into planning violent or criminal action,” the report concluded.

The government could also choose to use “minor ‘technical’ crimes,” such as errors on immigration forms, an alleged false statement to a government official, gun possession, tax or financial issues, etc., to go after someone for their “ideology.”
 
“What they were trying to do is to convince the American public that there is this large army of potential terrorists that they should all be very-very scared about. They are very much engaged in world-wide surveillance and this surveillance is very valuable to them. They can learn a lot about all sorts of things and in a sense control issues to their advantage,” Steven Downs, an attorney for Project SALAM, which issued the report, told RT. “And the entire legal justification for that depends on there being a war on terror. Without a war on terror they have no right to do this. So they have to keep this war on terror going, they have to keep finding people and arresting them and locking them up and scarring everybody.”
 
In the conclusion, authors of the report offered the US government several recommendations that the DOJ "should employ" to change the present unfair terrorism laws. A total seven recommendations call on the US government to accurately identify people who offer material support for terrorism, strengthening the “entrapment” defense in the courts; abolish “terror-enhanced sentencing” that triples or quadruples jail time in cases linked to terrorist acts; disallow secret court proceedings, and immediately notifying defendants if any evidence in their case is derived from secret surveillance.

Weed to the Rescue in the Budget Crisis?

Congress Should Stop Blowing Smoke
by LINN WASHINGTON JR.


Imagine U.S. House Speaker John Boehner blasted on weed.

Given Boehner’s teary-eyed trait, he’d probably cry uncontrollably when high on pot alternating his crocodile tears with hysterical laughter…perhaps even laughing at some of that dumb shi-tuff he and his GOP colleagues constantly do on Capitol Hill.

With Boehner and his GOP congressional confederates battling the Obama White House over federal budget expenditures and debt ceiling limits, there could be value in putting pot legalization into this partisan wrangling if Boehner is honest when claiming these fiscal imbroglios are really about federal government expenditures exceeding revenue.

Putting an end to the federal government’s failed pot prohibition policies, now nearing the eighty-year mark, would provide tremendous sources of new revenue. The federal government could save the estimated $10-billion-plus now spent annually on just law enforcement. The federal government could reap additional billions from taxing what experts estimate is the now untaxed $113-billion per year illegal marijuana industry. Plus ending prohibition would save millions now spent on the anti-pot propaganda oozing from government agencies.

A prime example of the money wasted by the federal government on enforcement efforts is evident in the September 2012 invasion of a predominately Latino community in Santa Rosa, CA by dozens of combat-clad/assault-rifle-armed agents from Homeland Security, the FBI and the DEA. That massive raid, also involving state and local cops, did net a stack of just pot plants but some of those plants were lawfully grown under provisions of California’s state approved medical marijuana law. That invasion, however, did accomplish a mission to terrorize that community including the spectacle of handcuffing mothers in front of their young children.

Yes, the Latino community site of the raid evidenced the racially discriminatory targeting embedded in America’s War on Weed. Other evidence of racism in pot prohibition is evident in blacks being arrested for pot possession in the county encompassing Santa Rosa in excess of twice their percentage of that county’s population according to a 2010 study conducted for the Drug Policy Alliance.

Drug warriors and others quickly dismiss charges of racially discriminatory practices but is it just mere coincidence that of the 3,709 pot possession arrests in Philadelphia, Pa during 2012, only 629 whites were arrested compared to 3,052 blacks? More than 600 whites smoke pot daily on just college campuses in Philadelphia.

This year, as thousands of federal government employees endured having their paychecks slashed by the bi-partisan boondoggle called Sequestration, the National Park Service in Philadelphia wasted money paying park rangers and other police overtime specifically to arrest pot legalization activists who smoke marijuana during monthly protests near the iconic Liberty Bell. And adding insult to the insanity of wasting money arresting peaceful pro-pot protestors, federal prosecutors want to send two of those arrested activists to prison for six months each.

This vengeful antic by federal prosecutors sending ‘a message’ to prohibition opponents will snatch over $28,000 in just jail-cell costs from federal coffers that Boehner-&-Company claim is too empty to fund food stamps for hungry children.

Ending pot prohibition would end the need for expensive anti-pot propaganda from the federal government that still touts discredited rationales initially fashioned by federal anti-drug warriors in the late 1930s.

President Obama’s Office of National Drug Control Policy still contends that use of cannabis causes “cognitive impairment” – propaganda belied by the personal/professional accomplishments of Obama himself. The president admits that he smoked marijuana as a teen and that cannabis consumption didn’t impede him from graduating from two Ivy League institutions including Harvard’s Law School. If marijuana is as mentally destructive as ONDCP contends Obama could have never made it to the Oval Office.

Officials across America have historically exaggerated the so-called ‘pot problem’ ignoring solid evidence that pot is benign and is not a ‘gateway’ drug to harder drug addition. Do some people get whacked-out on weed? Yes! But some people get whacked-out on religion. And some get whacked-out on politics. Remember the craziness radiating from Capitol Hill is not caused by conservatives smoking Whacky-Weed.

A few years after the federal government’s formal prohibition of pot in 1937 the mayor of New York City ordered an extensive examination into the alleged pot problem in his city. That multi-layered examination spanning over four years reached conclusions that contradicted alarmist claims of federal pot police. The fed’s top cannabis cop, Harry “Reefer Madness” Anslinger, indignantly dismissed that NYC study as “unscientific” despite it having been conducted by the New York Academy of Medicine, hardly a cabal of cannabis consumers.

With federal, state and local governments in desperate need of new revenues legalizing pot would clearly offer a good source of currently untapped income. The legalization of medical marijuana in 19 states so far has produced tax revenues for governments while stimulating employment and other economic benefits.

Santa Rosa, the site of that September 2012 pot raid, is the seat of Sonoma County, a jurisdiction providing examples that stupid spending priorities are not exclusive to Capitol Hill.

Many Sonoma County residents wanted to tap that jurisdiction’s contingency fund to restore full-day operating hours in its century old public library system. County officials had cut library hours to shave expenditures, a policy stance that penalizes children heavily. Yet, the same Sonoma County Board of Supervisors that defiantly refused to use contingency funds to restore library hours quickly approved using $240,000 from that fund to retain a marijuana eradication officer when federal funding for that anti-pot position was eliminated.

Legalizing and taxing marijuana will not eliminate the federal budget deficit but it will end the absurdity of ruining lives with arrests for simple pot possession like the 658,231 persons nabbed nationwide in 2012 according to recently released FBI statistics.

FBI admits using surveillance drones to spy on Americans on US soil

Thom Hartmann, Truthout

You need to know this. As if the news of the NSA's phone and internet spying weren't enough to worry us, the FBI has just admitted to using surveillance drones to spy on Americans on US soil. During a Congressional hearing on telephone data collection, FBI director Robert Muller said the agency is in the "initial stages" of developing privacy guidelines, and has only used drones in a "very, very minimal way." However, Americans are skeptical of such a description after being told that sweeping data collection was only a "modest" invasion of our privacy. Democratic Senator Mark Udall, said he is "concerned the FBI is deploying drone technology while only being in the 'initial stages' of developing guidelines to protect Americans' privacy rights." Senator Udall explained that he understands drones have the potential to "more efficiently and effectively perform law enforcement duties," but promised to do everything in his power "to hold the FBI accountable and ensure its actions respect the US constitution." In keeping with the defense of NSA spying, Director Muller urged Congress to consider national security before placing any limits on drone surveillance and data collection. He said, "Are you going to take the dots off the table, make it unavailable to you when you're trying to prevent the next terrorist attack?" Our nation is at a crossroads in deciding how much privacy we are willing to give up in the name of security. As Benjamin Franklin said, "those who would give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?

A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims on CNN that this is the case
by Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 4 May 2013


The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.

Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN's Out Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by our Adversarial Press Corps, anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: "No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: "So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: "No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."

"All of that stuff" - meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant - "is being captured as we speak".

On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that "all digital communications in the past" are recorded and stored:

Let's repeat that last part: "no digital communication is secure", by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications - meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like - are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of their customers. Specifically, Klein explained "that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T" and that "contrary to the government's depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic." But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, when Congress retroactively immunized the nation's telecom giants for their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein's claims (by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.

That every single telephone call is recorded and stored would also explain this extraordinary revelation by the Washington Post in 2010:


Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official William Binney, who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has "assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens" (which counts only communications transactions and not financial and other transactions), and that "the data that's being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want."

Despite the extreme secrecy behind which these surveillance programs operate, there have been periodic reports of serious abuse. Two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been warning for years that Americans would be "stunned" to learn what the US government is doing in terms of secret surveillance.

Strangely, back in 2002 - when hysteria over the 9/11 attacks (and thus acquiescence to government power) was at its peak - the Pentagon's attempt to implement what it called the "Total Information Awareness" program (TIA) sparked so much public controversy that it had to be official scrapped. But it has been incrementally re-instituted - without the creepy (though honest) name and all-seeing-eye logo - with little controversy or even notice.

Back in 2010, worldwide controversy erupted when the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates banned the use of Blackberries because some communications were inaccessible to government intelligence agencies, and that could not be tolerated. The Obama administration condemned this move on the ground that it threatened core freedoms, only to turn around six weeks later and demand that all forms of digital communications allow the US government backdoor access to intercept them. Put another way, the US government embraced exactly the same rationale invoked by the UAE and Saudi agencies: that no communications can be off limits. Indeed, the UAE, when responding to condemnations from the Obama administration, noted that it was simply doing exactly that which the US government does:

"'In fact, the UAE is exercising its sovereign right and is asking for exactly the same regulatory compliance - and with the same principles of judicial and regulatory oversight - that Blackberry grants the US and other governments and nothing more,' [UAE Ambassador to the US Yousef Al] Otaiba said. 'Importantly, the UAE requires the same compliance as the US for the very same reasons: to protect national security and to assist in law enforcement.'"

That no human communications can be allowed to take place without the scrutinizing eye of the US government is indeed the animating principle of the US Surveillance State. Still, this revelation, made in passing on CNN, that every single telephone call made by and among Americans is recorded and stored is something which most people undoubtedly do not know, even if the small group of people who focus on surveillance issues believed it to be true (clearly, both Burnett and Costello were shocked to hear this).

Some new polling suggests that Americans, even after the Boston attack, are growing increasingly concerned about erosions of civil liberties in the name of Terrorism. Even those people who claim it does not matter instinctively understand the value of personal privacy: they put locks on their bedroom doors and vigilantly safeguard their email passwords. That's why the US government so desperately maintains a wall of secrecy around their surveillance capabilities: because they fear that people will find their behavior unacceptably intrusive and threatening, as they did even back in 2002 when John Poindexter's TIA was unveiled.

Mass surveillance is the hallmark of a tyrannical political culture. But whatever one's views on that, the more that is known about what the US government and its surveillance agencies are doing, the better. This admission by this former FBI agent on CNN gives a very good sense for just how limitless these activities are.

National security letters deemed unconstitutional

RT - March 15, 2013


A United States federal judge has declared that the super-secret national security letters that let the government garner info on Americans without their consent are unconstitutional.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has issued hundreds of thousands of NSLs to private businesses in order to obtain sensitive information on clients without waiting for a warrant or subpoena. Unlike those options, though, NSLs involve next to no oversight. Instead all that’s required is that a Special Agent in Charge signs off and says that the information is relevant to an investigation.

On Friday, though, US District Judge Susan Illston said she thought NSLs were illegal and ordered the government to stop issuing them.

“We are very pleased that the Court recognized the fatal constitutional shortcomings of the NSL statute,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman tells Wired. The EFF is currently representing a telecommunication company that’s fighting an NSL received back in 2011, but under Judge Illston’s ruling telecoms won’t be required to hand off intelligence to the government anymore.

“The government’s gags have truncated the public debate on these controversial surveillance tools. Our client looks forward to the day when it can publicly discuss its experience,” says Zimmerman.

Although NSLs are nowhere near as well-known as other types of orders used to obtain information, they are issued with relatively high frequency. Earlier this month, Google revealed that it receives anywhere from zero to 999 letters a year since 2009, but declined to give an actual figure since the Justice Department fears “releasing exact numbers might reveal information about investigations.”

If a telecom or Internet company is given an NSL, they are usually compelled to give the government account details about certain customers. Without relying on court approval, though, those requests can be issued with ease, raising concerns from many that the government is operating in secrecy to spy on Americans.

Speaking with RT last year, WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange said “hundreds of national security letters every day” are being issued by the US government.

“Once the FBI is able to do this snooping, to find out who Americans are communicating with and associating with, there’s no remedy that makes them whole after the fact. So there needs to be some process in place so the court has the ability ahead of time to step in,” Zimmerman told Wired last year.

After making her ruling on Friday, Judge Illston also granted a 90 day stay to ensure that the government has ample time to ask for an appeal.

The Return of COINTELPRO?

Time to Target the Real Terrorists
by TOM MCNAMARA

“Democracies die behind closed doors” – Judge Damon J. Keith

For 15 years (1956-1971) the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ran a broad and highly coordinated domestic intelligence / counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO (COunter INTELligence PROgrams). What was originally deemed as a justifiable effort to protect the US during the Cold War from Soviet and Communist threats and infiltration, soon devolved into a program for suppressing domestic dissent and spying on American citizens. Approximately 20,000 people were investigated by the FBI based only on their political views and beliefs. Most were never suspected of having committed any crime.

The reasoning behind the program, as detailed in a 1976 Senate report, was that the FBI had “the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order.” The fact that the “perceived threats” were usually American citizens engaging in constitutionally protected behaviour was apparently overlooked. The stated goal of COINTELPRO was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” any individual or group deemed to be subversive or a threat to the established power structure.

The FBI’s techniques were often extreme, with the agency being complicit in the murder and assassination of political dissidents, or having people sent away to prison for life. Some of the more “moderate” actions that were used were blackmail, spreading false rumors, intimidation and harassment. It has been argued that the US is unique in that it is the only Western industrialized democracy to have engaged in such a wide spread and well organized domestic surveillance program. It finally came to an end in 1971 when it was threatened with public exposure.

Or did it?

In a stunning revelation from the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), it appears that COINTELPRO is alive and well. Through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, PCJF was able to obtain documents showing how the FBI was treating the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, from its inception, as a potential criminal and domestic terrorist threat. This despite the FBI’s own acknowledgement that the OWS organizers themselves planned on engaging in peaceful and popular protest and did not “condone the use of violence.”

The documents, while heavily redacted, give a clear picture of how the FBI was using its offices and agents across the country as early as August 2011 to engage in a massive surveillance scheme against OWS. This was almost a month before any actual protests took place or encampments were set up (the most famous being the one in New York City’s Zuccotti Park).

The FBI’s documents show a government agency at its most paranoid. It considered all planned protests, and the individuals involved, as potential threats. Most disturbing of all, there is talk (p. 61) of the government being ready to “engage in sniper attacks against protesters in Houston, Texas, if deemed necessary” and perhaps needing to formulate a plan “to kill the leadership [of the protest groups] via suppressed sniper rifles.”

Furthermore, the documents reveal a close and intricate partnership between the federal government on one side and banks and private businesses on the other.

On August 19, 2011, the FBI met with representatives of the New York Stock Exchange in order to discuss OWS protests that wouldn’t happen for another four weeks. In September of that year, even before OWS got into full swing, the FBI was notifying local businesses that they might be affected by protests. It is not clear if, while on Wall Street, the FBI investigated the criminal and irresponsible behavior engaged in by some of the largest banks on the planet, behavior which led directly to the financial crisis of 2008.

We are also introduced to a creature named the “Domestic Security Alliance Council” which, according to the federal government, is “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector.” A DSAC report tells us that any information shared between US intelligence agencies and their corporate partners should not be released to “the media, the general public or other personnel.”

In a curious coincidence, nine days after the PCJF’s embarrassing release of FBI documents, the New York Post ran a story about how a 27 year old woman and her “Harvard grad and Occupy Wall Street” boyfriend, Aaron Greene, were arrested by officers from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) after an alleged cache of weapons and bomb making explosives were found in their Greenwich Village apartment.

And what exactly led the police to this apartment? Was it credible actionable intelligence gathered from the FBI’s massive domestic surveillance program? Did some agent acquire this information by bravely infiltrating the potential domestic terrorist group known as OWS? Hardly. The NYPD was simply executing a routine search warrant related to a credit card-theft case.

But in a story about the exact same event that appeared in the New York Times, it was reported that “police said they did not believe that Mr. Greene was active in any political movements” and that no “evidence of a planned terrorist attack” had been found . Furthermore, police hadn’t “made a connection to any known plot or any connection to any known terrorists.” No mention was made of the suspect’s alleged ties to the OWS movement, an item that had been prominently reported in the New York Post’s version of events.

Oddly, a more recent New York Post story stated that Mr. Greene was now a “Nazi-loving Harvard grad” and a reported “Adolf Hitler-wannabe.” No mention was made of his suspected ties to OWS. This author made several attempts to contact the New York Post, and the writers of the 2 articles, in an effort to find out how they knew that Mr. Greene was an OWS member and activist. Attempts were also made to try to find out if the New York Post still believed that Mr. Greene was an active OWS member, or if they now simply thought that he was just an “Adolf Hitler-wannabe.”

As of the writing of this article, no response has been received from the New York Post.

The FBI’s stated mission regarding America’s security is to “develop a comprehensive understanding of the threats and penetrate national and transnational networks that have a desire and capability to harm us.”

The American people would be far better served by their government if, instead of wasting millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours harassing peaceful protesters, it spent a fraction of that time and money investigating, and bringing to justice, the people responsible for the engineered destruction of the American economy, and by extension, American society.

You know. The real terrorists.

Sources

“COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Covert Action Programs Against American Citizens” Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Book III, Final report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate, April 23, 1976. Accessed at:
http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/churchfinalreportIIIa.htm
“COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story”, by Paul Wolf with contributions from Robert Boyle, Bob Brown, Tom Burghardt, Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill, Kathleen Cleaver, Bruce Ellison, Cynthia McKinney, Nkechi Taifa, Laura Whitehorn, Nicholas Wilson, and Howard Zinn. Presented to U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa by the members of the Congressional Black Caucus attending the conference: Donna Christianson, John Conyers, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Barbara Lee, Sheila Jackson Lee, Cynthia McKinney, and Diane Watson, September 1, 2001. Accessed at:
http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/coinwcar3.htm
“FBI Documents Reveal Secret Nationwide Occupy Monitoring” The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), December 22, 2012. Accessed at: http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/fbi-files-ows.html
“Greenwich Village couple busted with cache of weapons, bombmaking explosives: sources” by Jamie Schram, Antonio Antenucci and Matt McNulty, December 31, 2012, The New York Post.   Accessed at:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/bombmaking_in_the_village_LoRDqNzP02SDZyfC1pLVXN
“Manhattan Couple Stored Bomb-Making Items, Police Say” by Wendy Ruderman, December 31, 2012, The New York Times. Accessed at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/nyregion/manhattan-couple-stored-bomb-making-items-police-say.html?_r=2&%29&
“More About FBI Spying” The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), June 25, 2010. Accessed at:
http://www.aclu.org/spy-files/more-about-fbi-spying
“NYC couple arrested after explosive substance find” December 31, 2012, CBS/AP. Accessed at:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57561371/nyc-couple-arrested-after-explosive-substance-find/
“Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy” by Naomi Wolf, December 29, 2012, The Guardian. Accessed at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation – Mission” The Federal Bureau of Investigation. Accessed at:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/intelligence/mission
“Village ‘bomber’ planned to blow up Washington Sq. Arch with high-grade explosives: cops” by Jamie Schram and Jessica Simeone, January 10, 2013, The New York Post. Accessed at:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/village_bomber_planned_grade_blow_seiuSwWLlcAPyGvfDkPwDM

Suspicious behavior at hotels is terrorism indicator; Hidden cameras used by Cops on Private Property w/o warrants

DHS-FBI bulletin on suspicious behavior at hotels adds to already long list of terrorism indicators

Madison Ruppert | Activist Post

According to the United States government, just about every single thing one can do is an indicator of terrorism. Everything from complaining about bias and believing in government conspiracies to ordinary bodily movements to bumper stickers to traveling long distances can be considered an indicator of terrorist activity.

That list can be expanded even further thanks to a joint Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) bulletin dated July 26, 2010 (PDF courtesy of Public Intelligence).

According to the bulletin, there are a wide range of activities and behaviors that can be construed to be an indicator of terrorist activity, many of which are completely innocuous.

Most of the supposedly suspicious behaviors surround privacy, such as “Not providing professional or personal details on hotel registrations—such as place of employment, contact information, or place of residence.”

According to the FBI and DHS, “Refusal of housekeeping services for extended periods” is suspicious, along with “extended stays with little baggage or unpacked luggage.”

In other words, if you’d rather not run the risk of having your personal belongings rifled through by housekeeping staff or if you travel light, you just might be a terrorist.

“Non-VIPs who request that their presence at a hotel not be divulged,” are also apparently suspicious, although one must wonder who makes the decision about who is a VIP and non-VIP.

Some of the points clearly involve a great deal of assumptions on the part of the observer.

“Using payphones for outgoing calls or making front desk requests in person to avoid using the room telephone,” is apparently suspicious as well, although it is unclear how someone working at a hotel would know why exactly someone chooses to make calls on one phone instead of another.

On that same note, “Interest in using Internet cafes, despite hotel Internet availability,” is seen as suspicious. This completely ignores the fact that some people might not actually have a computer with them on vacation, thus requiring the hardware provided at an Internet café.

Apparently, choosing not to lug one’s computer around on vacation is a sign of “possible terrorist behaviors at hotels,” an assertion which is patently absurd.

Also suspicious, according to the FBI and DHS, is the “use of cash for large transactions or a credit card in someone else’s name.” This means that if you choose to use cash whenever possible, as many people do, you just might be a terrorist. On the other hand, if you use your spouse’s credit card to pay for your room, you also might be a terrorist.

“Requests for specific rooms, floors, or other locations in the hotel” is also seen as suspicious since apparently requesting to have a room that doesn’t overlook a parking lot means you might be a terrorist.

The FBI and DHS also seem to believe that using a travel agent could mean you’re a terrorist since “use of a third party to register” is listed as a potential indicator of terrorist activity.

Among other absurd indicators is, “Abandoning a room and leaving behind clothing, toiletries, or other items,” or in other words, forgetting something in your room.

That being said, some of the listed indicators could indeed be seen as suspicious, such as, “Unusual interest in hotel staff operating procedures, shift changes, closed-circuit TV systems, fire alarms, and security systems.”

Yet the sad reality is that the vast majority of the supposedly suspicious activities can hardly be characterized as such by any thinking person.

The truly suspicious activities are far outweighed by the completely laughable potential indicators listed in bulletins such as these, which is in no way constructive and just serves to create an irrational culture of paranoia.

##############

Federal court approves use of hidden surveillance cameras on private property without warrants

Madison Ruppert | Activist Post

Yet again, a federal judge undermined the Constitution in a wholly disturbing fashion, this time by allowing police to install hidden surveillance cameras on private property without obtaining a search warrant.

This is especially troubling since the federal government has conducted more warrantless surveillance over the past two years than the entire previous decade. This court decision can only be expected to increase that already troubling number.

Let us not forget that the Obama administration has fought vigorously to hold on to their ability to conduct warrantless wiretapping while also claiming that cell phone location data is not protected by the Constitution and the Supreme Court recently refused to review a lawsuit challenging the warrantless surveillance program of the National Security Agency (NSA).

According to CNET, U.S. District Judge William Griesbach ruled “that it was reasonable for Drug Enforcement Administration agents to enter rural property without permission — and without a warrant — to install multiple “covert digital surveillance cameras” in hopes of uncovering evidence that 30 to 40 marijuana [plants] were being grown.”

Griesbach’s decision was actually based on a recommendation issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge William Callahan on October 9.

Callahan’s recommendation claimed that the DEA actually did not violate the Fourth Amendment by conducting warrantless surveillance.

“The Supreme Court has upheld the use of technology as a substitute for ordinary police surveillance,” wrote Callahan in his recommendation.

The case surrounds Manuel Mendoza and Marco Magana of Green Bay, Wis. Both Mendoza and Magana have been charged with federal drug crimes that carry potential fines of up to $10 million along with life in prison.

Steven Curran, a DEA agent, claimed he discovered over 1,000 marijuana plants on a 22-acre heavily wooded property owned by Magana. The defendants called on Callahan to throw out the video evidence collected by the DEA based on the fact that there were “No Trespassing” signs posted throughout the property along with a locked gate, thus making the evidence collected a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Around four days after the DEA installed the surveillance cameras on Magana’s property without a warrant, a magistrate judge granted a warrant for surveillance. Mendoza and Magana’s attorneys rightfully pointed out that the surveillance took place long before the warrant was actually granted.

Callahan made his recommendation based on Oliver v. United States, a 1984 Supreme Court case in which the majority of justices ruled that “open fields” could indeed be searched without obtaining a warrant. They based this decision on their claim that open fields are not actually covered by the Fourth Amendment.

If the land is immediately surrounding a residence, on the other hand, it has greater privacy protections based on a legal concept known as curtilage.

“Placing a video camera in a location that allows law enforcement to record activities outside of a home and beyond protected curtilage does not violate the Fourth Amendment,” Department of Justice prosecutors James Santelle and William Lipscomb told Callahan.

“That one’s actions could be recorded on their own property, even if the property is not within the curtilage, is contrary to society’s concept of privacy,” argued Magana’s attorney Brett Reetz in a legal filing.

“The owner and his guest… had reason to believe that their activities on the property were not subject to video surveillance as it would constitute a violation of privacy,” Reetz added in last month’s legal filing.

Writing for CNET, Declan McCullagh paints a quite disturbing picture of where this precedent could lead.

“As digital sensors become cheaper and wireless connections become more powerful, the Justice Department’s argument would allow police to install cameras on private property without court oversight — subject only to budgetary limits and political pressure,” McCullagh writes.

The ugly reality is that legal precedents such as these serve to reinforce the constant erosion of our most essential rights. So long as judges continue to support the consistent undermining of our Constitutional rights, this disturbing trend will undoubtedly continue and will likely get significantly worse.

FBI Entrapment Is Inventing 'Terrorists' - and Letting Bad Guys Off the Hook

May 15, 2012 | By Rick Perlstein
Rolling Stone

This past October, at an Occupy encampment in Cleveland, Ohio, "suspicious males with walkie-talkies around their necks" and "scarves or towels around their heads" were heard grumbling at the protesters' unwillingness to act violently. At meetings a few months later, one of them, a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as "Cyco," explained to his anarchist colleagues how "you can make plastic explosives with bleach," and the group of five men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco suggested a small bridge. One of the others thought they’d have a better chance of not hurting people if they blew up a cargo ship. A third, however, argued for a big bridge – "Gotta slow the traffic that's going to make them money" – and won. He then led them to a connection who sold them C-4 explosives for $450. Then, the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they allegedly put the plan into motion – and just as the would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610 vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them.

Right in the nick of time, just like in the movies. The authorities couldn’t have more effectively made the Occupy movement look like a danger to the republic if they had scripted it. Maybe that's because, more or less, they did.

The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the team to the bomb site was an FBI informant. The merchant was an FBI agent. The bomb, of course, was a dud. And the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by federal law enforcement since September 11, 2001, not of terrorist suspects, but of young men federal agents have had to talk into embracing violence in the first place. One of the Cleveland arrestees, Connor Stevens, complained to his sister of feeling "very pressured" by the guy who turned out to be an informant and was recorded in 2011 rejecting property destruction: "We're in it for the long haul and those kind of tactics just don't cut it," he said. "And it's actually harder to be non-violent than it is to do stuff like that." Though when Cleveland's NEWS Channel 5  broadcast that footage, they headlined it "Accused Bomb Plot Suspect Caught on Camera Talking Violence."

In all these law enforcement schemes the alleged terrorists masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage. ("They teach you how to make all this stuff out of simple household items," one of the kids says on a recording quoted in the FBI affidavit about a book he has just discovered, The Anarchist Cookbook. Someone asks him how much it says explosives cost. "I'm not sure," he responds, "I just downloaded it last night.") It’s a perfect example of how post-9/11 fear made law enforcement tactics seem acceptable that were previously beyond the pale. Previously, however, the targets have been Muslims; now they’re white kids from Ohio. And maybe you could argue that this is acceptable, if the feds were actually acting out of a good-faith assessment of what threats are imminent and which are not. But that's not what they're doing at all. Instead, they are arrogating to themselves a downright Orwellian power – the power to deploy the might of the State to shape a fundamental narrative about which ideas Americans must be most scared of, and which ones they should not fear much at all, independent of the relative objective dangerousness of the people who hold those ideas.

To see how, travel with me to rural Florida, and another arrest that occurred at almost exactly the same time. On April 28, members of American Front, a white-supremacist group labeled "a known terrorist organization" in the affidavit justifying the arrest, took a break from training with machine guns for a race war in order to fashion weapons out of fake "Occupy" signs which they planned to use to assault May Day protesters in Melbourne, Florida. No script, no choreography for maximal impact on sensation-hungry news broadcasts, no melodramatic press conference with a U.S. attorney and FBI Special Agent in Charge; this arrest only went down after an informant working with state law enforcement fled in fear for his or her life after being threatened by the group's leader Marcus Faella with a 9mm pistol. And though the media reported the involvement of a "joint terrorism task force of FBI and local law enforcement" the arresting affidavit does not even mention federal law enforcement; the charges filed were state, not federal. A circuit court judge scrawled a bail amount of $51,250; that was accidentally knocked down to $500. The Cleveland anarchists were held without bond.

The contrasts are extraordinarily instructive. When federal law enforcement agencies take an affirmative role in staging the crimes, the U.S. Justice Department then prosecutes, leaving more clear-and-present dangers relatively unbothered, the State is singling out ideological enemies. Violent white supremacists are not one of these enemies, apparently – because, as David Neiwert, probably the nation’s top journalist on the subject, told me, the federal government has much less often sought to entrap them, even though they are actually the biggest home-grown terrorism threat.  That is unconstitutional, because law enforcement’s criterion for attention has been revealed as the ideas the alleged plotters hold – not their observed violent potential.

Who else are we supposed to be afraid of? Certainly animal-rights and environmental radicals. In 2006, when FBI Director Robert Mueller announced the indictments of Animal Liberal Front activists who burned down a horse-rendering plant in 1997, harming no humans, he called such property destruction one of the agency's "highest domestic terrorism priorities." We're supposed to be afraid of Muslims, of course – though not even necessarily Muslim militants. In a sting stunningly anatomized on a Pulitzer-worthy This American Life episode from 2005 the target, British citizen Hemant Lakhami, known as "Habib," was an Indian-born Willy Loman, so dumb he referred to night-vision goggles, which he’d never heard of, as "sunglasses" and so broken down and desperate for attention he told the federal informant he had full-sized submarines to sell. He was egged by the informant into selling him Stinger missiles (Lakhami had approached him hoping to sell him mangoes). Upon Lakhami's terrorism conviction then-U.S. Attorney Chris Christie stepped up to the press conference microphones to announce, "Today is a triumph for the Justice Department in the war against terror. I don't know that anyone can say that the state of New Jersey, and this country, is not a safer place without Hemant Lakhani trotting around the globe attempting to broker arms deals."

But don't worry your pretty little heads over the epidemic of far-right insurrectionism that followed the election of Barack Obama: all told, according to a forthcoming data analysis by Neiwert, there have been 55 cases of right-wing extremists being arrested for plotting or committing alleged terrorists acts compared to 26 by Islamic militants during the same period. The right-wing plots include the bombing of a 2011 Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane and the assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller in 2009. Neither of their perpetrators, it goes without saying, had been arrested before they attempted their vile acts; neither required law enforcement entrapment to conceive and carry them out. It's just too bad for their victims they did not fit the story federal law enforcement seeks to tell.

I use the word "story" advisedly. Entrapment is the most literary of abuses of power: Investigators and prosecutors become as unto little Stephen Kings, feeding into, and feeding, the fear centers of our lizard brains in order to manipulate their audience. Unsurprisingly, the tactic crops up whenever the powers that be are themselves most frightened for their power, such as during the 1960s, when instigation of criminal acts by agents provacateurs infiltrating the anti-war movement became extremely prevalent. When one of the accused Chicago 7 left the courtroom just as a witness for the prosecution left the stand, the other six became horrified when it became clear that the guy who had just got up (actually to go to the bathroom) was a plant about to testify against them.

The antiwar movement soon learned whom to be afraid of: people who don’t quite fit in, who always seemed ready to volunteer for anything (if you’re on the FBI payroll, you don’t need a job), people pressing violence when everyone else in the room preferred peace. In the 1972 "Camden 28" trial of Catholic left conspirators who tried to steal and destroy registration records from a local draft board, the star witness got his breaking-and-entering training from the FBI and swore in court that the accused never would have raided the building absent his leadership.  Although the people the FBI preferred to recruit were the sort who had trouble keeping jobs anyway. They were frequently mentally unstable: the agent provocateur whose recordings got twenty-three members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War indicted for supposedly conspiring to attack the 1972 Republican National Convention with "lead weights, 'fried' marbles, ball bearings, cherry bombs ... wrist rockets, slingshots, and cross bows" had received a psychological discharge from the Army. And they were usually criminals. In the Harrisburg 7 trial of in 1972 (in which the feds fantastically claimed that a pacifist priest, some nuns, and their confreres intended to blow up the steam tunnels beneath Washington, D.C.) the prosecution's star witness had offered himself to the FBI as an undercover New Lefty from the jail cell where he was serving time for so many crimes the U.S. Attorney had classified him as a "menace to society."

The entrapment game still works the same. In the case documented on This American Life, informant "Habib" was such a notorious liar, thief, and con man that the feds deactivated him – until after September 11, when suddenly "different FBI bureaus were fighting" for his services. The key informant in the Animal Liberation Front arrests was a truck thief and heroin addict. The dude in the Cleveland anarchist case, identified by thesmokinggun.com as a Donald Trump fan named Shaqil Azir, had convictions for cocaine possession, robbery, and passing bad checks – and was also under a current check-fraud indictment the FBI covered up in its affidavit. They also neglected to mention his frequent appearances in bankruptcy court.

Such choices are a feature, not a bug: Criminals with cases pending are able to act more convincingly as, well, criminals, and will do anything the government asks to reduce their sentences; sociopaths are better able to manipulate the emotions of macho young men. The play's the thing. Although sometimes the play becomes too convincing: In the Watergate hearings in 1973, some of the witnesses testified that hearing about VVAW's violent plans to disrupt the Republican convention were what convinced them it was OK to break laws on behalf of their president.

Not everything is the same since the 1970s, of course. The media has changed: Newsday editorialized in 1972 of the Camden case, "We have come to expect such tactics from totalitarian nations that have no respect for individual rights permitting dissent. They have no place in American and those who advocate them have no place in this government." You don’t see that sort of language much any more. Indeed, Newsday appears not to have covered the arrest and trial of Hemant Lakhami at all. "Such tactics" are just not a very big deal any more.
You know what else has changed? You and I – to our shame. Entraptment is illegal  – but the question of whether law enforcement set up a legal sting or illegal entrapment is for a jury to decide. Entrapment was why juries acquitted the defendants in the Camden, VVAW, and Harrisburg cases. "How stupid did those people in Washington think we were?" a Harrisburg juror told a reporter. The feds don’t have to worry about folks like that any more. Not a single "terrorism" indictment has been thrown out for entrapment since 9/11 – not the Liberty City goofballs supposedly planning to blow up the Sears Tower who had no weapons and refused them with offered; not the Newburgh, New York outfit whose numbers included a schizophrenic who saved his own urine in bottles. (Even the judge who sentenced them said "the government made them terrorists.")

The civil liberties of the Florida white supremacist Marcus Faella, at least, have been honored. He was out on bail the day he was arrested. There’s no police informant to monitor his activities any more, but not to fear. His experiments in attempting to produce the deadly toxin ricin, according to the Florida affidavit, have not so far been successful. And Connor Stevens, heard on the menacing video shown on Cleveland news saying that his favorite part of Occupy protests " is meeting people walking down the street, average people, talking to them, hearing about how they're affected by the economy, by the justice system, things like that"? He is safely behind bars. So, for the rest of his life, is Hemant Lakhami, the hapless Stinger missile salesman. The man who put him there, Chris Christie, is now the celebrated governor of New Jersey, and was all but begged by his fellow to run for president. Republicans think he tells a good story.

***

The moral of the story: when you're the agency that fucked up so bad that it led to the deaths of 3000 US citizens in  one attack because your command core dropped the ball and ignored hundreds of reports from agents in the field claiming that terrorists were learning how to fly jumbo jets  and not learning how to land them...well, I guess you attempt to save face by setting up complete dumbasses, naming them as terrorists and busting them so you can claim to have foiled 55 potential terrorist attacks in the last year...instead of the big attack you should have and could stopped. Pathetic.

Facebook Backdoor Interception: FBI wants P2P and social media wiretap-friendly

RT - Published: 05 May, 2012

The US is preparing to face FBI-drafted legislation enabling it to monitor any personal communication activities in the web. It aims to use preset backdoors in social networks, online messaging, internet telephony and even Xbox gaming servers.

­Tech media website CNet.com has obtained information that the FBI is already in talks with internet giants on an unprecedented surveillance program, having the legislation approved by the Department of Justice.

The FBI intends surreptitiously to rush a law obliging companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to install government surveillance options into their software on default.

The agency confesses that it faces considerable difficulties in wiretapping suspects since more and more people are shifting their communications from phones to internet.

­

Surveillance: From broadband to Skype

­When the CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) was adopted back in 1994, the US government obliged only telecommunications providers to cooperate with its agencies, totally forgetting about the emerging internet capabilities.

In 2004, the Federal Communications Commission extended CALEA to cover broadband networks.

In 2012, it appears the turn has come for all the American web companies to lie under the government altogether.

The FBI wants everything that can be used for communicating to fall under the new amendment to CALEA. This means that social networking, emails, instant messaging and VoIP (anything resembling Skype and ICQ) will have an “extra coding” to strip those who use them of all of their secrets at any given time. And the companies providing those services will not be even asked for permission.

­

FBI struggles with the world ‘going dark’

­An unnamed FBI representative told CNet.com that there are “significant challenges posed to the FBI” in the accomplishment of its “diverse mission”, and the rapidly changing technology influences that result a lot.

“A growing gap exists between the statutory authority of law enforcement to intercept electronic communications pursuant to court order and our practical ability to intercept those communications. The FBI believes that if this gap continues to grow, there is a very real risk of the government 'going dark,' resulting in an increased risk to national security and public safety,” the source told CNet.com.

In February 2011 the FBI acknowledged the agency’s inability to keep up its surveillance capabilities with communications technological development calling it the “going dark” problem. Having admitted the bitter fact of technological non-compliance, the agency initiated this new comprehensive web surveillance program.

An obvious solution to the problem was adopting legislation to the needs of the government which the FBI is busy realizing right now.

The FBI calls the program the National Electronic Surveillance Strategy. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that as early as in 2006 the FBI was already concerned with “going dark” and established a special division developing the "latest and greatest investigative technologies to catch terrorists and criminals." In 2009 the division employed 107 full-time specialists.
­

Another battle for human rights and privacy

­Internet companies might be not happy with the new legislation at all, righteously considering that the law will most probably spark a public revolt similar to unsuccessful attempts to push through notorious SOPA, PIPA and ACTA anti-pirate legislation, and the current CISPA passed by the US House of Representatives. Moreover, clients’ privacy an integral part of IT products and by trading it off, software companies might ruin their business.

"If you create a service, product, or app that allows a user to communicate, you get the privilege of adding that extra coding," the IT industry representative familiar with the FBI's draft legislation told CNET.

The draft law also implies that IT companies will be allowed to supply the government with proprietary information to decode information obtained through a wiretap or other type of lawful interception.

IT companies cannot say “no” to the government right off the bat, therefore consultations between the FBI officials and internet company CEOs and top lawyers are already being held.
Reportedly, the FBI's draft legislation mentions some sort of “compliance costs” of internet companies.

Internet giants utilize lobbyist resources to try to protect their businesses interests in Washington, but the issue of mass control might be too hot for them to handle.

The situation strikingly resembles the one with the music and web content industry, which fails to adapt to new realities of free access to almost anything, including goodies that fall under the copyright laws. The entertainment industry, too, is using its lobbyists to push through punitive legislation to guarantee high profits without evolutionary changes to itself.

In the case with the web backdoor surveillance though, the FBI intends to violate basic human rights on such a high mass-involvement level that a 1984-scenario might appear almost no exaggeration.

If the FBI obtains the legislation it asks for, Lord forbid you should play on the terrorists’ side on an Xbox server, because your game console will report your terrorist sympathies. And this valuable information will definitely find a decent place in a personal dossier of yours somewhere in an underground FBI data center.

13 Ways the Government Tracks You

Surveillance Nation
by BILL QUIGLEY

Privacy is eroding fast as technology offers government increasing ways to track and spy on citizens.  The Washington Post reported there are 3,984 federal, state and local organizations working on domestic counterterrorism.  Most collect information on people in the US.  Here are thirteen examples of how some of the biggest government agencies and programs track people.

One.  The National Security Agency (NSA) collects hundreds of millions of emails, texts and phone calls every day and has the ability to collect and sift through billions more.  WIRED just reported NSA is building an immense new data center which will intercept, analyze and store even more electronic communications from satellites and cables across the nation and the world.  Though NSA is not supposed to focus on US citizens, it does.

Two.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) has more than 1.5 billion government and private sector records about US citizens collected from commercial databases, government information, and criminal probes.

Three.  The American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times recently reported that cellphones of private individuals in the US are being tracked without warrants by state and local law enforcement all across the country.  With more than 300 million cellphones in the US connected to more than 200,000 cell phone towers, cellphone tracking software can pinpoint the location of a phone and document the places the cellphone user visits over the course of a day, week, month or longer.

Four.  More than 62 million people in the US have their fingerprints on file with the FBI, state and local governments.  This system, called the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), shares information with 43 states and 5 federal agencies.   This system conducts more than 168,000 checks each day.

Five.  Over 126 million people have their fingerprints, photographs and biographical information accessible on the US Department of Homeland Security Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT).  This system conducts about 250,000 biometric transactions each day.  The goal of this system is to provide information for national security, law enforcement, immigration, intelligence and other Homeland Security Functions.

Six.  More than 110 million people have their visas and more than 90 million have their photographs entered into the US Department of State Consular Consolidated Database (CCD).   This system grows by adding about 35,000 people a day.  This system serves as a gateway to the Department of State Facial Recognition system, IDENT and IAFSIS.

Seven.  DNA profiles on more than 10 million people are available in the FBI coordinated Combined DNA index System (CODIS) National DNA Index.

Eight.  Information on more than 2 million people is kept in the Intelligence Community Security Clearance Repository, commonly known as Scattered Castles.  Most of the people in this database are employees of the Department of Defense (DOD) and other intelligence agencies.

Nine.  The DOD also has an automated biometric identification system (ABIS) to support military operations overseas.  This database incorporates fingerprint, palm print, face and iris matching on 6 million people and is adding 20,000 more people each day.

Ten.  Information on over 740,000 people is included in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) of the National Counterterrorism Center.  TIDE is the US government central repository of information on international terrorist identities.  The government says that less than 2 percent of the people on file are US citizens or legal permanent residents.  They were just given permission to keep their non-terrorism information on US citizens for a period of five years, up from 180 days.

Eleven.  Tens of thousands of people are subjects of facial recognition software.  The FBI has been working with North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles and other state and local law enforcement on facial recognition software in a project called “Face Mask.”  For example, the FBI has provided thousands of photos and names to the North Carolina DMV which runs those against their photos of North Carolina drivers.  The Maricopa Arizona County Sheriff’s Office alone records 9,000 biometric mug shots a month.

Twelve.  The FBI operates the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (SAR) that collects and analyzes observations or reports of suspicious activities by local law enforcement.   With over 160,000 suspicious activity files, SAR stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime but who are alleged to have acted suspiciously.

Thirteen.  The FBI admits it has about 3,000 GPS tracking devices on cars of unsuspecting people in the US right now, even after the US Supreme Court decision authorizing these only after a warrant for probable cause has been issued.

The Future 

The technology for tracking and identifying people is exploding as is the government appetite for it.

Soon, police everywhere will be equipped with handheld devices to collect fingerprint, face, iris and even DNA information on the spot and have it instantly sent to national databases for comparison and storage.

Bloomberg News reports the newest surveillance products “can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices,” change the contents of written emails mid-transmission, and use voice recognition to scan phone networks.

The advanced technology of the war on terrorism, combined with deferential courts and legislators, have endangered both the right to privacy and the right of people to be free from government snooping and tracking.  Only the people can stop this.

DHS Terror Document Lists Yawning, Goose Bumps As Suspicious Behavior

Pretty soon, we'll all be defined as terrorists...for waking up in the morning or something else just as stupid.--jef

The guide encourages participants to “look for signs of nervousness in the people you come in contact with.” “Signs will become particularly evident in a person’s eyes, face, next and body movements.”

The document then lists examples of suspicious behavior indicative of terrorism, which include, “Exaggerated yawning when engaged in conversation,” “glances,” “cold penetrating stare,” “rigid posture,” and “goose bumps”.

Of course, any of these behaviors could be explained by a million other circumstances and the likelihood that they are indications of terrorist activity is virtually zero.

The document was obtained from the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security & Preparedness that lists banal bodily activities such as yawning, staring and goose pumps as “suspicious activity” indicative of terrorism.

link

Peaceful Anti-Fracking Activists Pursued by FBI as 'Eco-Terrorists'

Sunday, March 11, 2012 by Common Dreams
Continued FBI surveillance of environmental activism amidst expanding definitions of 'eco-terrorism'

In recent years, the broad definition of 'eco-terrorism' has come to include environmentalist activities ranging from arson to setting mink free at fur farms to protests in front of the homes of corporate executives. Environmental activists have seen increased imprisonment (including maximum security sentences) for non-violent crimes.

Now, as the FBI suggests that 'eco-terrorism' is in decline, the Washington Post reports hat the FBI has increased heavy surveillance of environmentalists including anti-fracking protesters.
Will Potter, who's work exposes the growing expansion of governmental prosecution of environmental activists, comments, among others.

Juliet Eilperin at TheWashington Post reports:

Ben Kessler, a student at the University of North Texas and an environmental activist, was more than a little surprised that an FBI agent questioned his philosophy professor and acquaintances about his whereabouts and his sign-waving activities aimed at influencing local gas drilling rules. 

“It was scary,” said Kessler, who is a national organizer for the nonviolent environmental group Rising Tide North America. He said the agent approached him this past fall and said that the FBI had received an anonymous complaint and were looking into his opposition to hydraulic fracturing, also known as “fracking.” The bureau respected free speech, the agent told him, but was “worried about things being taken to an extreme level.” 

Even as environmental and animal rights extremism in the United States is on the wane, officials at the federal, state and local level are continuing to target groups they have labeled a threat to national security, according to interviews with numerous activists, internal FBI documents and a survey of legislative initiatives across the country.

Iowa Gov. Terry Brandstad (R) signed a law this month, backed by the farm lobby, that makes it a crime to pose as an employee or use other methods of misrepresentation to get access to operations in an attempt to expose animal cruelty. Utah passed a similar bill, nicknamed an “ag-gag” law, on Wednesday. Last month, Victor VanOrden, an activist in his mid-20s, received the maximum sentence of five years in prison under a separate Iowa law for attempting to free minks from one of the state’s fur farms. [...] 

“There’s been very little change under the Obama administration,” said Will Potter, author of the book “Green is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Movement Under Siege.” After factoring in several state initiatives on top of federal enforcement, Potter said, “The political climate as a whole has gotten a lot worse.” 

In the past few years FBI agents have suggested District police monitor animal rights protests outside the Vanguard Group’s offices downtown because of its investment in a controversial animal testing facility, and they have mined a Web site, the North American Animal Liberation Press Office, for hints on upcoming activities, according to FBI documents obtained by Ryan Shapiro, an animal rights activist, through a series of Freedom of Information Act requests and other contacts. [...] 

The FBI agent, David Rogers, told Kessler he started looking into him after receiving an anonymous tip. Rogers, along with a Dallas police officer, also approached Kessler’s philosophy professor, Adam Briggle, last month. Briggle, who chairs a citizens advisory group aimed at imposing new restrictions on rules governing gas drilling in the Denton area, said the two men spoke to him for half an hour about subjects including his course syllabus and the line between civil disobedience and terrorism. 

“I don’t know how law enforcement works, but it seemed like a total fishing expedition to me,” Briggle said, adding that when they discussed the controversy surrounding fracking, “they pointed to the Pacific Northwest and how there’s a culture up there of eco-terrorism, and they wanted to keep it from spreading down here. . . . To have the FBI come in here and interrogate me as an academic, it was pretty off-putting.” [...] 

[Ryan Shapiro, an animal rights activist] questioned this surveillance. He and four others are suing the federal government on the grounds that the American Enterprise Terrorism Act has a chilling effect on free speech, since they are now intimidated from “documenting conditions on factory farms so [consumers] can make informed choices about if they want to continue to pay people to abuse animals on their behalf.”

FBI WARNING: People Paying With Cash Are Potential Terrorists

FBI to blackout Trojan-infected servers on March 8

February 11, 2012-GMA Network

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will unplug on March 8 the Domain Name System servers it set up to replace rogue DNS servers that sent victims to malicious sites.

A report on Infoworld said the removal of this temporary fix may affect "a substantial number" of users, as half of Fortune 500 companies and government agencies are infected with the malware.

But it also cited an article by Krebs on Security hintig the FBI's DNSChanger Working Group is "weighing its options," including requesting a court order to extend the March 8 deadline.

Last November, the FBI took down the DNSChanger botnet network, which a cyber criminal gang used to redirect Internet traffic to fake websites that served ads.

But to prevent Internet traffic from being disrupted and to trace the DNSChanger traffic, the FBI replaced the criminals' servers with clean ones that would push along traffic to its intended destination.

"Without the surrogate servers in place, infected PCs would have continued trying to send requests to aimed at the now-unplugged rogue servers, resulting in DNS errors," Infoworld said.

On March 8, when the FBI's server network is unplugged, computers infected with DNSChanger cannot access the Internet anymore, since the malware still in the machines will send requests to servers that are effectively offline.

Slow cleanup

Infoworld quoted security company IID (Internet Identity) as saying the cleanup has been slow.

It said IID claims at least 250 of Fortune 500 companies and 27 out of 55 major government entities had at least one computer or router infected with DNSChanger in early 2012.

But Infoworld said companies and users need to clean their systems soonest.

Another drawback to keeping the surrogate network online is that it requires taxpayers' money, it said.

"Given the uncertainty of what the feds will decide, organizations and home users alike would be well served to tackle the problem now, whether than playing the ever-risky waiting game," it said. — TJD, GMA News

FBI says: Paying Cash For a Cup of Coffee a ‘Potential Indicator of Terrorist Activity’

Paul Joseph Watson
Tuesday, February 7, 2012

An FBI advisory aimed at Internet Cafe owners instructs businesses to report people who regularly use cash to pay for their coffee as potential terrorists.

The flyer, issued under the FBI’s Communities Against Terrorism (CAT) program, lists examples of “suspicious activity” and then encourages businesses to gather information about individuals and report them to the authorities.

“Each flyer is designed for a particular kind of business,”writes Linda Lewis, a former policy analyst and planner for the U.S. government. “For example, this list was prepared for owners of internet cafes. Unquestionably, someone planning a terrorist attack has engaged in one or more of the “suspicious” activities on that list. But so, too, have most of the estimated 289 million computer users in this country.”

Indeed, the flyer aimed at Internet Cafe owners characterizes customers who “always pay cash” as potential terrorists.

Of course, the vast majority of people who visit Internet Cafes use cash to pay their bill. Who uses a credit card to buy a $2 dollar cup of coffee? A lot of smaller establishments don’t even accept credit cards for amounts less than $10 dollars.

Other examples of suspicious behavior include using a “residential based Internet provider” such as AOL or Comcast, the use of “anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address” (these are routinely used by mobile web users to bypass public Internet filters), “Suspicious communications using VOIP,” and “Preoccupation with press coverage of terrorist attack” (this would apply to the vast majority of people who work in the news or political blogging industry).

Searching for information about “police” or “government” is also listed as a potential indication of terrorism, as is using a computer to “obtain photos, maps or diagrams of transportation, sporting venues, or populated locations,” which would apply to virtually anyone who uses Google Maps or Google Earth.

People who may wish to keep private the contents of a personal email or an online credit card purchase by attempting to”shield the screen from view of others” are also characterized as potential terrorists.

Business owners who spot patrons engaging in these types of activities are encouraged to call the FBI’s Joint Regional Intelligence Center (JRIC), after first gathering information on license plates, names, ethnicity, and languages spoken.

In total, there are 25 different CAT flyers aimed at businesses from across the spectrum – everything from hobby shops to tattoo parlors. (Check the link and download them yourself--jef)

As we have documented on numerous occasions, the federal government routinely characterizes mundane behavior as extremist activity or a potential indicator of terrorist intent. As part of its ‘See Something, Say Something’ campaign, the Department of Homeland Security educates the public that generic activities performed by millions of people every day, including using a video camera, talking to police officers, wearing hoodies, driving vans, writing on a piece of paper, and using a cell phone recording application,” are potential signs of terrorist activity.

The CAT program again underscores how federal authorities are empowering poorly trained citizens to become terrorist hunters, stoking fears that America is sinking deeper into a Stasi-style informant society. Last week we reported on how the DHS had trained hot dog sellers and other vendors to spot terrorists at this past weekend’s Super Bowl event.

Read the FBI flyer in full below (click for enlargement).