Strange days up here in Minnesota. A guy by the pseudonym Robert Erickson spoke to an anti-immigrant Tea Party rally at the State Capitol on Saturday. Turns out he punk'd them and demanded "Columbus Go Home" and the deportation of all these European immigrants. The videos were hits on YouTube. I got the reverse angle of the crowd in HD, now we've got a bit of a viral event unfolding!

Nick Baumann | Washington | November 13

Mother Jones - Defense Secretary Robert Gates has used powers granted to him by a controversial new law to block the court-ordered release of numerous photos of detainee abuse, government lawyers revealed in a court filing [PDF] Friday evening.

Gates' new authority comes from a law, signed by President Barack Obama last month, that gives the Secretary of Defense the power to rule that photos of detainees are exempt from release under the Freedom of Information Act. Gates' action on Friday was the first use of the new FOIA exemption since it passed Congress last month. The photos in question are the subject of a years-long legal fight by the American Civil Liberties Union, which first filed a FOIA request for records pertaining to detainee treatment, rendition, and death in May of 2005. The case is currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court.

Ken Kaye | Fort Lauderdale, FL | November 15

LAT - You might not see them. But they're watching you.

To identify dangerous people, the Transportation Security Administration stations behavior-detection officers at 161 U.S. airports, including ones in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Los Angeles. The officers can be anywhere, from the parking garage to the gate, looking for passengers who seem highly nervous or stressed.

Daniel Tencer | Nov 10

Raw Story - A Justice Department subpoena requesting all available information on all visitors to an independent news site is raising serious privacy concerns, and questions about how much information the US government is storing about its citizens' news reading habits.

Privacy watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation has released an extensive report on a "bogus" attempt by a US attorney in Indiana to get Indymedia.us, an independent left-leaning news site, to hand over all the data it had about all the users who visited the site on a particular day.

Further adding to civil libertarians' and privacy watchdogs' concerns is the fact that the Justice Department ordered Indymedia to keep silent about the request.

"This overbroad demand for internet records not only violated federal privacy law but also violated [Indymedia's] First Amendment rights, by ordering [it] not to disclose the existence of the subpoena without a US attorney’s permission," the EFF's Kevin Bankston wrote.

Last week the Washington Post printed two letters from different sources who had spent time on the ground in Afghanistan that came to very different conclusions about the American presence there.

First, there is the letter from Matthew Hoh, the former Marine captain who had fought in Iraq and had recently taken a temporary foreign service assignment in Zabul province. One State department official referred to this area as, “one of the five or six provinces always vying for the most difficult and neglected.” Hoh had developed great misgivings about the war and had become so disillusioned that he chose to resign. Hoh wote in his resignation letter,

Earlier this week, President Obama signed into law the $680 billion FY 2010 Defense Authorization Bill, the largest such budget since the end of World War II. If you missed that aspect of the story, you weren’t alone. Many news stories chose instead to focus on the hate crime provisions tacked onto the bill.

I’ve often quarreled with the inclusion of superfluous legislative riders, and the hate crime provision is more superfluous than most. (Indeed, as my Cato colleague David Rittgers has pointed out, it might be worse than superfluous.)

With the possible exception of Georgia-US-Russia, no US relationship in the former Soviet region is more fraught today than the US-Russia-Ukraine triangle. At a time when Washington and Moscow have variously committed to a relationship reset, a new operating system, and a rerun of the Clinton-Yeltsin strategic partnership, it is disappointing how little substance has followed rhetoric. Meanwhile, Central and Eastern Europe are still reeling from the US Administration’s abrupt and ill-timed reversal on missile defense deployment, and Team Obama is eager for opportunities to demonstrate its commitment to the new Europe, which received no shortage of love from the Bush Administration.

Robert Barnes | Washington | October 21

WaPo - Justices to consider whether judges can release them into U.S.

The Supreme Court set aside the objections of the Obama administration and said Tuesday that it will consider whether judges have the power to release Guantanamo Bay detainees into the United States if they have been deemed not to be "enemy combatants."

The case, involving a group of Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs, again thrusts the court into the jangle of policy decisions and constitutional principles involving the approximately 220 men still held at the base in Cuba. And the court's decision to hear it could further complicate plans to close the military prison in January, a deadline the Obama administration recently said it might be unable to meet.

Last year, the court ruled 5 to 4 that a Guantanamo detainee had the right to prove to a federal judge that he was being unlawfully held as an enemy combatant. The current case is a logical next step, determining what powers a judge has to release such a person, especially when sending him back to his home country is not an option.

October 20

AFP/BBC - Leading American scientist Stewart Nozette has been arrested and charged with attempted espionage.

The US Justice Department says he tried to pass on top secret information to a person he thought was an Israeli intelligence officer.

But the officer turned out to be an FBI agent involved in a sting.

The 52-year-old scientist had worked at the Department of Energy, the Pentagon and NASA, where he was the principal investigator in the team that found water on the moon.

He is accused of trying to communicate, deliver and transmit classified information relating to American national security.

Nathan Hodge | Washington | October 13

Wired - For several years, the U.S. military has been working on a 30,000-pound superbomb that can penetrate and destroy what the military calls “hardened targets“: Command bunkers or WMD facilities shielded by concrete and buried deep underground.

Now it looks as if the Pentagon is speeding delivery of the bomb, formally known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP. The Associated Press’ Anne Gearan reports today that the Defense Department awarded a contract worth around $52 million to speed up integration of the bomb aboard the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. According to the story, the MOP could be ready for B-2 delivery as early as next summer.

New York | October 15

RT - Families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks will continue to push for a new probe into the tragedy, despite a recent court decision not to put the issue on a referendum.

Around 80,000 campaigners in New York have called for a referendum on a new investigation into the 9/11 attacks back in September 2001, but the New York State Supreme Court has ruled it out.

Spencer S. Hsu | Washington | October 16

WaPo - A controversial federal program that deputizes state and local law enforcement agents to catch illegal immigrants is expanding under the Obama administration, despite changes announced this summer intended to curb alleged racial profiling and other police abuses.

The Department of Homeland Security reported Friday that only four of 66 participating agencies have dropped out because of the new federal requirements. And those losses are offset by the addition of five police, sheriff's and corrections departments, while six more are nearing approval, according to the department.

In the Washington area, sheriff's offices in Frederick, Loudoun and Prince William counties continue to participate.

The Texas Observer has an excellent, in-depth account of two massive prison riots in a private, for-profit facility housing immigrants swept up for border crossing violations. Here's the context in which the riots occurred:

...the Bush administration piloted a “zero-tolerance” policy in Texas that eventually spread across the border: All illegal border crossers would be arrested, detained and, if possible, prosecuted in federal court. Prosecutions surged, as did the need for detention centers, jails and prisons to hold the tens of thousands of newly minted criminals. The Obama administration has more than embraced the policy. The number of prosecutions for immigration crimes—almost 68,000—during the first nine months of 2009 is on track for a 14 percent increase over 2008. More than half of those prosecutions took place in Texas.

The result has been a system swamped with low-level immigration cases and prisons bursting at the seams with illegal immigrants. Rather than build and run the facilities themselves, federal agencies have turned in large part to private prison companies, such as Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group. In 2008, GEO reported more than $1 billion in revenue, an 80 percent increase over 2005.

On a related note, TPM has been investigating the many scams run by private prisons as well and how they implant themselves inside local communities like parasitic wasps:

...a well-organized consortium of private companies headquartered around the country, which specializes in pitching speculative and risky prison projects to local governments desperate for jobs.

The projects have generated multi-million dollar profits for the companies involved, but often haven't created the anticipated payoff for the communities, and have left a string of failed or failing prisons in their wake.

The whole concept of a private for-profit prison makes my skin crawl, especially in our current political environment where money buys legislation. It's very much America Eats Its Own.

Daniel Tencer | Oct 10

Raw Story - The US government doesn't have to reveal information about phone companies that may have spied illegally on Americans because those phone companies are an "arm of the government," the US Justice Department argued in a recent court case.

In a lawsuit over the Bush administration's decision to give immunity to telecom companies over its warrantless wiretapping program, the Justice Department argued that it doesn't have to publicly reveal what it discussed with the phone companies because those discussions were "inter-agency communications," explains Ryan Singel at Wired.

He cites a passage from a court document in which the department argues that "the communications between the agencies and telecommunications companies regarding the immunity provisions of the proposed legislation have been regarded as intra-agency...."

Singel was reporting on privacy watchdog group Electronic Frontier Foundation's two-year-long legal battle with the DoJ over access to those communications. In 2008, the Bush administration passed a law granting reotroactive immunity to phone companies that had participated in the administration's warrantless wiretapping program.

After news reports in 2007 suggested that the phone companies had lobbied the government to have those protections put in place, the EFF launched a freedom-of-information request to have discussions between the Justice Department and the phone companies made public. When the government refused, the EFF took the matter to court.

On September 24, a US District Court judge sided with the EFF and ordered the government to "release more records about the lobbying campaign to provide immunity to the telecommunications giants that participated in the NSA's warrantless surveillance program," the EFF stated.

The judge gave the Justice Department until last Friday to hand over the documents. But, late on Thursday, the government appealed for a 30-day stay of the judge's order. That order was refused, but the judge has delayed any further decisions on the case for another week.

Great video showing illegal sales that take place at gun shows, due to the gun-show loophole. Watch as one gun seller laughs when told the buyer couldn't pass a background check, and offers that he couldn't either. And you wonder how criminals get their hands on guns....

David Edwards & Daniel Tencer | Oct 6

Raw Story - A Department of Homeland Security program that tries to detect air passengers who are "up to no good" is raising privacy concerns, says a CNN report which aired Tuesday.

CNN's Jeanne Meserve described DHS's Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) as "marrying a lot of existing technology, some of it medical," to measure breathing, heart rate, blinking, fidgeting, and other bodily functions of passengers at airports.

The idea is essentially to create a remote lie detector, where sensors placed at airport security screening areas would be able to monitor a passenger's physical reaction to questions being asked by screeners.

Critics have likened the concept to the "Department of Pre-Crime" in the 2001 film Minority Report, which describes a future where persons are caught and convicted of crimes before they occur.

Originally entitled Project Hostile Intent, the program was revealed by the science magazine NewScientist in 2007. According to a report at the time in the UK's Guardian, "the new devices are expected to be trialled at a handful of airports, borders and ports of entry by 2012." (more with links)

Philadelphia Enquirer, Sept. 30, 2009

Massive Force Routed Cherished Constitutional Values

By Steve Hallock

The world economy may or may not have emerged stronger from last week's G-20 summit in Pittsburgh. And the first non-capital city to host the summit enjoyed the public-relations boon of showcasing its Phoenix-like rise from the ashes of the steel industry. But the Constitution took a hit.

via IntelDaily

Tom Burghardt | San Francisco | September 25

IntelDaily - Speaking at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club September 15, Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis C. Blair, disclosed that the current annual budget for the 16 agency U.S. "Intelligence Community" (IC) clocks-in at $75 billion and employs some 200,000 operatives world-wide, including private contractors.

In unveiling an unclassified version of the National Intelligence Strategy (NIS), Blair asserts he is seeking to break down "this old distinction between military and nonmilitary intelligence," stating that the "traditional fault line" separating secretive military programs from overall intelligence activities "is no longer relevant."

Big Brother is watching you.

John Byrne | Sept 24

Raw Story -

President Barack Obama has quietly decided to bypass Congress and allow the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects without charges.

The move, which was controversial when the idea was first floated in The Washington Post in May, has sparked serious concern among civil liberties advocates. Such a decision allows the president to unilaterally hold "combatants" without habeas corpus -- a legal term literally meaning "you shall have the body" -- which forces prosecutors to charge a suspect with a crime to justify the suspect's detention.

Obama's decision was buried on page A 23 of The New York Times' New York edition on Thursday. It didn't appear on that page in the national edition. (Meanwhile, the front page was graced with the story, "Richest Russian's Newest Toy: An N.B.A. Team.")

Rather than seek approval from Congress to hold some 50 Guantanamo detainees indefinitely, the administration has decided that it has the authority to hold the prisoners under broad-ranging legislation passed in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001. Former President George W. Bush frequently invoked this legislation as the justification for controversial legal actions -- including the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program.

Washington | Sept 20

LA Times - Federal authorities arrested a Denver-area airport shuttle driver, his father and another man late Saturday in connection with a suspected plot to launch a terrorist attack within the United States, the Justice Department said early today.

Najibullah Zazi, 24, and his father, Wali Mohammed Zazi, 53, were taken into custody at their home in Aurora, Colo., and charged with "knowingly and willfully making false statements to the FBI in a matter involving international and domestic terrorism" during several days of questioning, according to a federal complaint.

FBI agents in New York arrested Ahmad Wais Afzali, 37, of Flushing, N.Y., on similar charges. Authorities say Afzali is a New York Police Department informant who may have tried to warn the younger Zazi about the FBI's interest in him.

In court filings, FBI agents said authorities are investigating Zazi, Afzali and others "in the United States, Pakistan and elsewhere, relating to a plot to detonate improvised explosive devices" in the U.S.

Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston | September 17

CNN - The Department of Homeland Security had announced it was spending $31 million to enhance and upgrade two remote border crossings -- just 12 miles apart -- on the border between Montana and the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. The spending was lauded by Montana's two senators, even though only an average of 22 cars a day traveled through these border posts.

Hilarious. Why not just give the area's 22 car owners a million bux each to stay home, for a cost benefit of 9 million US taxpayers dollars?

September 10

ABCNews - Undercover Operative 'One Million Percent Positive' Attacks Could Have Been Prevented -

Assaad, who posed as "Mohammed" – a personal representative of Osama bin Laden, says he's a "million percent positive" the 9/11 attacks could have been stopped if the FBI had gone after Atta and Shukrujumah. But because Atta and his men were suspicious of the FBI undercover operative, and secretive, Assaad says his FBI agent handlers sent him after the easier target – two wannabe terrorists whose cases were easy to crack and who were both eventually convicted and sent to prison.

Carol J. Williams | Seattle, WA | September 5

LAT - A 9th Circuit panel says the ex-attorney general violated the rights of citizens held as material witnesses without cause after 9/11. Rights advocates praise the ruling in Abdullah Kidd's case.

Then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft violated the rights of U.S. citizens in the fevered wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by ordering arrests on material witness warrants when the government lacked probable cause, a federal appeals court said in a scathing opinion Friday.

In a ruling [PDF] that said Ashcroft could be sued for prosecutorial abuses, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied the former attorney general immunity from liability for how he used the material witness warrants in national security investigations.

At New Paradigms Forum, Christopher Ford writes that an attack on our military and commercial satellites "would be no less an act of war than attacking one of our naval vessels on the high seas." This past spring, he explains, the Obama administration "agreed to Chinese and Russian demands that the U.N. begin discussions on preventing an 'arms race in outer space' [by enacting] 'a worldwide ban on weapons that interfere with military and commercial satellites.'"