Laser Based Department Of Homeland Security Scanner Removes Any Hope Or Expectation Of Personal Privacy – Can Detect Anything, Including What You Had For Breakfast, From 160 Feet Away – Expect Your Local Police To Have The Same Thing Soon – Developed With Aid Of Our Tax Dollars And CIA

WASHINGTON, DC – The Department of Homeland Security will soon be using a laser at airports that can detect everything about you from over 160-feet away.

Gizmodo reports a scanner that could read people at the molecular level has been invented. This laser-based scanner – which can be used 164-feet away — could read everything from a person’s adrenaline levels, to traces of gun powder on a person’s clothes, to illegal substances — and it can all be done without a physical search. It also could be used on multiple people at a time, eliminating random searches at airports.

The laser-based scanner is expected to be used in airports as soon as 2013, Gizmodo reports.

The scanner is called the Picosecond Programmable Laser. The device works by blasting its target with lasers which vibrate molecules that are then read by the machine that determine what substances a person has been exposed to. This could be Semtex explosives to the bacon and egg sandwich they had for breakfast that morning.

The inventor of this invasive technology is Genia Photonics. Active since 2009, they hold 30 patents on laser technology designed for scanning. In 2011, they formed a partnership with In-Q-Tel, a company chartered by the CIA and Congress to build “a bridge between the Agency and a new set of technology innovators.”

Genia Photonics wouldn’t be the only ones with similar technology as George Washington University developed something similar in 2008, according to Gizmodo. The Russians also developed something akin to the Picosecond Programmable laser. The creators of that scanner claim that “it is even able to detect traces of explosives left by fingerprints.”

But what makes Genia Photonics’ version so special is that the machine is more compact compared to the other devices and can still maintain its incredible range.

Although the technology could be used by “Big Brother,” Genia Photonics states that the device could be far more beneficial being used for medical purposes to check for cancer in real time, lipids detection, and patient monitoring.

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Pennsylvania Judge John Cleland Won’t Protect Identities Of Child Rape Victims During Pedophile Jerry Sandusky’s Trial

PENNSYLVANIA – Jury selection in the trial of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach charged with child rape, is scheduled to start Tuesday in Pennsylvania.

A judge last week denied his attorneys’ latest bid for a delay, allowing the case to move forward.

Sandusky, 68, has been under house arrest since being charged with sexually abusing 10 boys over 14 years. Prosecutors allege he met some of his accusers through Second Mile, a charity he created for underprivileged children.

He has pleaded not guilty to the charges. According to a source close to the Sandusky family, he is expected to attend court Tuesday.

The allegations against Sandusky led to the firing of iconic Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno only months before he died of complications from lung cancer.

Several of the people whom prosecutors accuse Sandusky of abusing asked a judge to protect their identities at trial.

However, Judge John Cleland on Monday ruled the alleged victims’ identities may not be concealed during the trial, although they will be protected through the jury selection process.

“Courts are not customarily in the business of withholding information,” Cleland’s ruling said. “Secrecy is thought to be inconsistent with the openness required to assure the public that the law is being administered fairly and applied faithfully.”

Prosecutors in Sandusky case present new, graphic details

But, the judge noted, “It is also to be hoped that various news organizations that will report on the trial will use what has become their professional custom to protect the privacy of alleged victims.”

CNN generally does not identify alleged victims of sexual assault.

Those asking for their identities to be concealed included one man known simply as Victim 4. His attorney, Ben Andreozzi, said he believes his client, now 28, is the strongest witness for the prosecution and will be called to testify first.

“In society, sometimes we question why rape victims are reluctant to come forward,” Andreozzi said Monday after the ruling. “So now we have our answer. … We are disappointed.”

“We are not asking to close the courtroom, only to use a pseudonym,” he said.

His client will still testify, he said, “but at what expense to his emotional well-being?”

He said he expects the defense to attack his client on the basis of a meeting he had with Sandusky in the years after the alleged abuse.

“My client couldn’t break free,” said the attorney, describing the relationship between Victim 4 and Sandusky as “complex.”

Mike McQueary, a former graduate student considered to be another key witness in the Sandusky case, has testified that he alerted Paterno in 2002 that he’d seen what appeared to be Sandusky sexually assaulting a boy, an allegation authorities didn’t learn of until years later.

Psychologist flagged Sandusky as ‘likely pedophile’ in 1998 report

But prosecutors said later that the incident took place about a year earlier than what was originally alleged, causing defense attorneys for two former Penn State officials to argue that one of the charges should now be dropped.

Tim Curley, Penn State’s former athletic director, and Gary Schultz, a former university vice president who oversaw campus police, have been charged with perjury and failing to report the alleged sexual assault of a child. Both of them have pleaded not guilty, and their attorneys have said that prosecutors “charged this case before (they) knew the facts.”

After news of the scandal broke last year, The New York Times published an extensive interview in which Sandusky attempted to clarify his relationships with young people.

“If I say, ‘No, I’m not attracted to young boys,’ that’s not the truth,” he said, according to the story. “Because I’m attracted to young people — boys, girls — I …”

His lawyer, who was present at the interview, spoke up at that point to note that Sandusky is “not sexually” attracted to them.

“Right. I enjoy — that’s what I was trying to say — I enjoy spending time with young people. I enjoy spending time with people,” Sandusky continued. “I mean, my two favorite groups are the elderly and the young.”

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EPA Using Airborne Drones To Spy On Farmers In Nebraska And Iowa

WASHINGTON, DC – Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is using aerial drones to spy on farmers in Nebraska and Iowa. The surveillance came under scrutiny last week when Nebraska’s congressional delegation sent a joint letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

On Friday, EPA officialdom in “Region 7” responded to the letter.

“Courts, including the Supreme Court, have found similar types of flights to be legal (for example to take aerial photographs of a chemical manufacturing facility) and EPA would use such flights in appropriate instances to protect people and the environment from violations of the Clean Water Act,” the agency said in response to the letter.

“They are just way on the outer limits of any authority they’ve been granted,” said Mike Johanns, a Republican senator from Nebraska.

In fact, the EPA has absolutely zero authority and is an unconstitutional entity of an ever-expanding and rogue federal government. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution does not authorize Congress to legislate in the area of the environment. Under the Tenth Amendment, this authority is granted to the states and their legislatures, not the federal government.

The EPA has not addressed the constitutional question, including its wanton violation of probable cause under the Fourth Amendment. It merely states that it has authority to surveil the private property of farmers and ranchers. It defends its encroaching behavior as “cost-efficient.”

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Concern About Domestic Drones, Besides Privacy, Includes That They Will Be Armed For Use Against US Citizens

WASHINGTON, DC – With the use of domestic drones increasing, concern has not just come up over privacy issues, but also over the potential use of lethal force by the unmanned aircraft.

Drones have been used overseas to target and kill high-level terror leaders and are also being used along the U.S.-Mexico border in the battle against illegal immigration. But now, these drones are starting to be used domestically at an increasing rate.

The Federal Aviation Administration has allowed several police departments to use drones across the U.S. They are controlled from a remote location and use infrared sensors and high-resolution cameras.

Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Texas told The Daily that his department is considering using rubber bullets and tear gas on its drone.

“Those are things that law enforcement utilizes day in and day out and in certain situations it might be advantageous to have this type of system on the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle),” McDaniel told The Daily.

The use of potential force from drones has raised the ire of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“It’s simply not appropriate to use any of force, lethal or non-lethal, on a drone,” Catherine Crump, staff attorney for the ACLU, told CBSDC.

Crump feels one of the biggest problems with the use of drones is the remote location where they are operated from.

“When the officer is on the scene, they have full access to info about what has transpired there,” Crump explained to CBSDC. “An officer at a remote location far away does not have the same level of access.”

The ACLU is also worried about potential drones malfunctioning and falling from the sky, adding that they are keeping a close eye on the use of these unmanned aircraft by police departments.

“We don’t need a situation where Americans feel there is in an invisible eye in the sky,” Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at ACLU, told CBSDC.

Joshua Foust, fellow at the American Security Project, feels domestic drones should not be armed.

“I think from a legal perspective, there is nothing problematic about floating a drone over a city,” Foust told CBSDC. “In terms of getting armed drones, I would be very nervous about that happening right now.”

McDaniel says that his community should not be worried about the department using a drone.

“We’ve never gone into surveillance for sake of surveillance unless there is criminal activity afoot,” McDaniel told The Daily. “Just to see what you’re doing in your backyard pool — we don’t care.”

But the concern for the ACLU is just too great that an American’s constitutional rights will be trampled with the use of drones.

“The prospect of people out in public being Tased or targeted by force by flying drones where no officers is physically present on the scene,” Crump says, “raises the prospect of unconstitutional force being used on individuals.”

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FAA To Ease Rules For Domestic Use Of Surveillance Aircraft To Spy On US Citizens In America

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA — Surveillance aircraft used by the U.S. military overseas could soon be coming to the skies above Los Angeles County.

KNX 1070′s Charles Feldman reports the Federal Aviation Administration is making it easier for local law enforcement agencies to fly unmanned drones.

The FAA has streamlined the process that would allow agencies to fly smaller, unarmed versions of the drones that hunt down terrorists in places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan.

While the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has not yet applied for an application to fly drones over our skies, its Homeland Security chief Bob Osborne said drones could be in the department’s future — with some caveats.

“We have so much congestion in the skies that I would anticipate that there would be some pretty rigid safety standards,” said Osborne.

Drones are typically used over locations where helicopters and fixed wing aircraft are unable to fly, which Osborne said could have a myriad of applications here in the Southland.

“Mountain rescue, where you have a car over the side that’s a thousand feet down the cliff, oftentimes our aircraft can’t fly that low,” he said. “It would be wonderful to know what’s down there before we send a rescue crew.”

Federal officials already utilize drones to patrol a 1,200-mile wide swath of land east of San Diego near the southeast California border.

But the recent expansion of drones and other unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) above American cities has raised privacy concerns among some who believe the technology could be used for surveillance on U.S. citizens without their knowledge.

President Obama set a deadline in February for the FAA to draft legislation by May 14 that would determine how it will regulate the use of lightweight drones by police and other public safety agencies.

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US Air Force Doesn’t Have A Problem With Spying On Americans With Unmanned Drones

WASHINGTON, DC – A newly discovered Air Force intelligence brief states that should fleets of unmanned drones accidentally capture surveillance footage of Americans, the data can be stored and analyzed by the Pentagon for up to 90 days.

The instruction, dated April 23, admits that the Air Force cannot legally conduct “nonconsensual surveillance” on Americans, but also states that should the drones”incidentally” capture data while conducting other missions, military intelligence has the right to study it to determine whether the subjects are legitimate targets of domestic surveillance.

“Collected imagery may incidentally include US persons or private property without consent,” the instruction states.

The Air Force can take advantage of “a period not to exceed 90 days” to use the data to assess “whether that information may be collected under the provisions of Procedure 2, DoD 5240.1-R and permanently retained under the provisions of Procedure 3, DoD 5240.1-R.” it continues.

The Pentagon directives cited authorize limited domestic spying in certain scenarios such as natural disasters, environmental cases, and monitoring activity around military bases.

Should the drones capture data on Americans, the Air Force says that it should determine whether they are, among other things, “persons or organizations reasonably believed to be engaged or about to engage, in international terrorist or international narcotics activities.”

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

The instruction also states that the Pentagon can disseminate the data to other intelligence and government agencies, should it see fit.

“Even though information may not be collectible, it may be retained for the length of time necessary to transfer it to another DoD entity or government agency to whose function it pertains.” the document reads.

The document was discovered by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists.

As we reported in February, Over 30 prominent watchdog groups have banded together to petition the FAA on the proposed increase in the use of drones in US airspace.

The groups, including The American Civil Liberties Union, The Electronic Privacy Information Center and The Bill of Rights Defense Committee, are demanding that the FAA hold a rulemaking session to consider the privacy and safety threats.

Congress recently passed legislation paving the way for what the FAA predicts will be somewhere in the region of 30,000 drones in operation in US skies by 2020.

The ACLU noted that the FAA’s legislation “would push the nation willy-nilly toward an era of aerial surveillance without any steps to protect the traditional privacy that Americans have always enjoyed and expected.”

In addition to privacy concerns, the groups warned that the ability to link facial recognition technology to surveillance drones and patch the information through to active government databases would “increase the First Amendment risks for would be political dissidents.”

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Okaloosa County Florida Deputy Sheriff Harassed Walking Man Without Cause, Charged Him With BS Count After His Feelings Got Hurt

FORT WALTON BEACH, FLORIDA — A 47-year-old man was charged April 23 with misdemeanor resisting officer without violence.

According to the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s report, a deputy spotted the man walking in the middle of Tilden Avenue, which is known to be a high-crime area.

When the deputy stopped the man and asked for his identification, the man replied, “(Expletive) you, that’s for you to figure out.”

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Never Enough: Obama Administration Wants Even More Access To US Cellphone Records

WASHINGTON, DC – The U.S. Congress should pass a law to give investigators freer access to certain cellphone records, an Obama administration official said on Thursday, in remarks that raised concern among advocates of civil liberties and privacy.

Jason Weinstein, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s criminal division, argued that requirements for warrants at early stages of investigations would “cripple” prosecutors and law enforcement.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled this year that a warrant was needed to put a GPS satellite tracking device on a suspect’s vehicle, prompting questions about other instances where probable-cause warrants should be needed to obtain information in the rapidly changing world of mobile devices.

Federal courts around the country are split on whether to require warrants for records of phone usage collected at towers that transmit cellphone signals, Weinstein told a conference.

While prosecutors have been told to get warrants to put a tracking device on a vehicle or to track the precise GPS location of a person via their cellphone, they should not be needed to obtain data from the towers, Weinstein said.

“There really is no fairness and no justice when the law applies differently to different people depending on which courthouse you’re sitting in,” he said at the “State of the Mobile Net” conference sponsored by the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee.

“For that reason alone, we think Congress should clarify the legal standard,” he said.

One civil liberties advocate sought to challenge that assertion, saying the Obama administration had made the same argument during the Supreme Court GPS case and it had been soundly rejected.

“Not one justice accepted the Department of Justice’s argument in that case. It got zero votes,” Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said during the conference. “We’re all here, the criminals are not taking over the country.”

While some proposals have been made in Congress to address concerns and confusion about when a warrant is needed as new technologies emerge, the chances of legislation passing are considered slim because it is an election year and little legislation is expected to pass.

Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican House of Representatives member Jason Chaffetz of Utah proposed a bill last year trying to detail a legal framework, including requiring a warrant for acquiring location information for a person; however the legislation has not advanced.

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CISPA Cyber Billl Allows Warrantless Electronic Intelligence Gathering On American Citizens – Dozens Of Corporations Line Up And Pour Funds Into Bill Sponsor Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) Or His PAC

WASHINGTON, DC – With the body of SOPA still warm in the grave, Congress is making another run at a cyber-bill — and the battle over it is starting to look a little familiar.

This one’s not about piracy. Known as CISPA (the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) the bill would, among other things, allow private companies — internet service providers and others — to turn over information about users to law enforcement and security agencies without a court order. It has bipartisan support (there are 82 Republican co-sponsors and 25 Democratic ones, unusual these days) and a lot of backing from big tech companies. But it has infuriated advocates who claim it lacks protections for individual privacy.

A vote in the House is expected next week, which has privacy advocates scrambling — this week a coalition launched a Twitter campaign similar to the one that brought the SOPA bill to the public’s attention. This campaign has led quite a few people to OpenSecrets.org looking for information on the bill, who backs it in Congress and who supports those lawmakers. For instance, we dug in the data to find out who has been contributing to the bill’s original sponsor, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich).

It turns out that of the several dozen companies that have lobbied on CISPA, 12 have given Rogers or his leadership PAC (Majority Initiative To Keep Electing Republicans) at least $103,000 just in this election cycle. The single biggest contributor to Rogers that also lobbied on the bill was SAIC, a huge defense contractor that provides electronics and information systems to the Pentagon and other parts of the government. Here’s the company’s lobbying profile and here’s SAIC PAC’s list of contributions to candidates since the start of 2011.

And this is the list of companies that both lobbied on the bill and contributed to Rogers or his PAC:

Organization Individual PAC Totals
SAIC Inc – $20,000 $20,000
Lockheed Martin – $15,000 $15,000
AT&T Inc $1,000 $11,000 $12,000
CMS Energy – $12,000 $12,000
Northrop Grumman – $11,000 $11,000
General Dynamics – $8,000 $8,000
National Rural Electric Cooperative Assn – $6,000 $6,000
National Cable & Telecommunications Assn – $5,000 $5,000
Time Warner Cable – $5,000 $5,000
US Telecom Assn – $3,000 $3,000
Cellular Telecom & Internet Assn – $3,000 $3,000
Exxon Mobil – $3,000 $3,000

TOTAL $103,000

You can read our profile of the bill (H.R. 3523) here. You’ll be able to see both a list of companies that have lobbied on it (which will be updated this coming week) and the list of all co-sponsors of the bill. With these tools, you’ll be set to start exploring this bill’s supporters (and who their financial backers are) but keep in mind these few things:

Lobbying disclosure reports show who lobbied on a bill and how much they spent on lobbying overall, not just on that bill. And spending on lobbying is different from spending on campaign contributions. But we also have campaign contribution information for the lobbyists themselves and the companies that hire them.
Just because a lawmaker has taken a stance on or cosponsored a bill and he or she has received campaign money from a company or lobbyist with an interest in the legislation doesn’t mean there was a quid pro quo. Most of the companies that have lobbied on the bill have many different interests in Washington. For instance, General Dynamics, which has a keen interest in this new bill, also lobbied on 51 other pieces of legislation, and spent $11.4 million on lobbying altogether.

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Undercover TSA Agents To Ride Houston Texas Buses, Conduct Warrantless Searches, Interrogate Passengers, And Look For “Suspicious Activity”

HOUSTON, TEXAS – A new program in Houston will place undercover TSA agents and police officers on buses whose job it will be to perform bag searches, watch for “suspicious activity” and interrogate passengers in order to ‘curb crime and terrorism’.

Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee unveiled the program, labeled Bus Safe, during a press conference on Friday. According to a Metropolitan Transit Authority of Houston (METRO) press release, agencies involved in the scheme will, “ride buses, perform random bag checks, and conduct K-9 sweeps, as well as place uniformed and plainclothes officers at Transit Centers and rail platforms to detect, prevent and address latent criminal activity or behavior.”

“While local law enforcement agencies focus on overall safety measures noted above, representatives with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will also be on hand, lending their counter-terrorism expertise and support during the exercise,” states the press release.

“If you think you’re going to be a bad actor on buses, get ready. You are going to have a short-lived time frame,” Jackson Lee said during the press conference. The Congresswoman is a staunch advocate of the TSA, having recently chastised the passage of a new law that allows airports to evict TSA agents and replace them with private screeners by claiming it would lead to a new 9/11-style attack.

According to KPRC 2 News, METRO refused to disclose on what dates or bus routes the program would be operational. As well as TSA agents, police officers from the Harris County Constable’s Office Precinct 7 will be involved.

According to Phillip Levine of the Houston Free Thinkers blog, shortly after Lee gave her press conference the operation went straight into effect, with DHS and Metro Police officers questioning passengers who were exiting buses about their destinations and their reasons for riding the bus.

“When I arrived at Wheeler I got off the stage and instantly noticed the massive police presence. The police presence consisted of DHS, metro police, HPD, TSA, and Harris county police officers. They were going on to buses searching and stopping people for questions. Apparently Sheila Jackson Lee was there pushing for more security like what I was viewing. I asked the TSA agent if there was gonna be a bigger presence of metro or TSA. He said both,” Levine said in an email.

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

This is a wake-up call for Americans who had hoped to avoid being harassed by TSA agents by not using airports.

TSA agents are now being used to literally occupy America with an expansion of the 9,000 plus checkpoints that were already operational last year. 12 more TSA VIPR teams (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response) will be added to the 25 who are already present at transportation hubs throughout the country.

Back in October we reported on how Tennessee’s Homeland Security Commissioner announced that a raft of new “security checkpoints” would be in place over the Halloween period to “keep roadways safe for trick-or-treaters”. Earlier that same month it was announced that Transportation Security Administration officials would be manning highway checkpoints in Tennessee targeting truck drivers.

TSA agents have been deployed to shake down Americans at everywhere from bus depots, to ferry terminals, to train stations, in one instance conducting pat downs of passengers, including children, who had already completed their journey when arriving in Savannah.

If the mass rollout of the TSA’s occupying army of minimum wage morons is not abated, Americans will have to get used to being interrogated, frisked and treated like criminals by TSA goons on a regular basis, meaning the United States’ transformation into a Soviet-style police state festooned with internal checkpoints will be complete.

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Tracking Cellphones By Local US Police Departments Now Routine

WASHINGTON, DC — Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.

The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.

With cellphones ubiquitous, the police call phone tracing a valuable weapon in emergencies like child abductions and suicide calls and investigations in drug cases and murders. One police training manual describes cellphones as “the virtual biographer of our daily activities,” providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.

But civil liberties advocates say the wider use of cell tracking raises legal and constitutional questions, particularly when the police act without judicial orders. While many departments require warrants to use phone tracking in nonemergencies, others claim broad discretion to get the records on their own, according to 5,500 pages of internal records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union from 205 police departments nationwide.

The internal documents, which were provided to The New York Times, open a window into a cloak-and-dagger practice that police officials are wary about discussing publicly. While cell tracking by local police departments has received some limited public attention in the last few years, the A.C.L.U. documents show that the practice is in much wider use — with far looser safeguards — than officials have previously acknowledged.

The issue has taken on new legal urgency in light of a Supreme Court ruling in January finding that a Global Positioning System tracking device placed on a drug suspect’s car violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches. While the ruling did not directly involve cellphones — many of which also include GPS locators — it raised questions about the standards for cellphone tracking, lawyers say.

The police records show many departments struggling to understand and abide by the legal complexities of cellphone tracking, even as they work to exploit the technology.

In cities in Nevada, North Carolina and other states, police departments have gotten wireless carriers to track cellphone signals back to cell towers as part of nonemergency investigations to identify all the callers using a particular tower, records show.

In California, state prosecutors advised local police departments on ways to get carriers to “clone” a phone and download text messages while it is turned off.

In Ogden, Utah, when the Sheriff’s Department wants information on a cellphone, it leaves it up to the carrier to determine what the sheriff must provide. “Some companies ask that when we have time to do so, we obtain court approval for the tracking request,” the Sheriff’s Department said in a written response to the A.C.L.U.

And in Arizona, even small police departments found cell surveillance so valuable that they acquired their own tracking equipment to avoid the time and expense of having the phone companies carry out the operations for them. The police in the town of Gilbert, for one, spent $244,000 on such equipment.

Cell carriers, staffed with special law enforcement liaison teams, charge police departments from a few hundred dollars for locating a phone to more than $2,200 for a full-scale wiretap of a suspect, records show.

Most of the police departments cited in the records did not return calls seeking comment. But other law enforcement officials said the legal questions were outweighed by real-life benefits.

The police in Grand Rapids, Mich., for instance, used a cell locator in February to find a stabbing victim who was in a basement hiding from his attacker.

“It’s pretty valuable, simply because there are so many people who have cellphones,” said Roxann Ryan, a criminal analyst with Iowa’s state intelligence branch. “We find people,” she said, “and it saves lives.”

Many departments try to keep cell tracking secret, the documents show, because of possible backlash from the public and legal problems. Although there is no evidence that the police have listened to phone calls without warrants, some defense lawyers have challenged other kinds of evidence gained through warrantless cell tracking.

“Do not mention to the public or the media the use of cellphone technology or equipment used to locate the targeted subject,” the Iowa City Police Department warned officers in one training manual. It should also be kept out of police reports, it advised.

In Nevada, a training manual warned officers that using cell tracing to locate someone without a warrant “IS ONLY AUTHORIZED FOR LIFE-THREATENING EMERGENCIES!!” The practice, it said, had been “misused” in some standard investigations to collect information the police did not have the authority to collect.

“Some cell carriers have been complying with such requests, but they cannot be expected to continue to do so as it is outside the scope of the law,” the advisory said. “Continued misuse by law enforcement agencies will undoubtedly backfire.”

Another training manual prepared by California prosecutors in 2010 advises police officials on “how to get the good stuff” using cell technology.

The presentation said that since the Supreme Court first ruled on wiretapping law in 1928 in a Prohibition-era case involving a bootlegger, “subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the government.”

Technological breakthroughs, it continued, have made it possible for the government “to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet.”

In interviews, lawyers and law enforcement officials agreed that there was uncertainty over what information the police are entitled to get legally from cell companies, what standards of evidence they must meet and when courts must get involved.

A number of judges have come to conflicting decisions in balancing cellphone users’ constitutional privacy rights with law enforcement’s need for information.

In a 2010 ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, said a judge could require the authorities to obtain a warrant based on probable cause before demanding cellphone records or location information from a provider. (A similar case from Texas is pending in the Fifth Circuit.)

“It’s terribly confusing, and it’s understandable, when even the federal courts can’t agree,” said Michael Sussman, a Washington lawyer who represents cell carriers. The carriers “push back a lot” when the police urgently seek out cell locations or other information in what are purported to be life-or-death situations, he said. “Not every emergency is really an emergency.”

Congress and about a dozen states are considering legislative proposals to tighten restrictions on the use of cell tracking.

While cell tracing allows the police to get records and locations of users, the A.C.L.U. documents give no indication that departments have conducted actual wiretapping operations — listening to phone calls — without court warrants required under federal law.

Much of the debate over phone surveillance in recent years has focused on the federal government and counterterrorism operations, particularly a once-secret program authorized by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks. It allowed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on phone calls of terrorism suspects and monitor huge amounts of phone and e-mail traffic without court-approved intelligence warrants.

Clashes over the program’s legality led Congress to broaden the government’s eavesdropping powers in 2008. As part of the law, the Bush administration insisted that phone companies helping in the program be given immunity against lawsuits.

Since then, the wide use of cell surveillance has seeped down to even small, rural police departments in investigations unrelated to national security.

“It’s become run of the mill,” said Catherine Crump, an A.C.L.U. lawyer who coordinated the group’s gathering of police records. “And the advances in technology are rapidly outpacing the state of the law.”

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U.S. Credit Card Security? – No Much…

US – Four giant card-payment processors and large U.S. banks that issue debit and credit cards were hit by a data-security breach after third-party services provider Global Payments Inc discovered its systems were compromised by unauthorized access.

It was not immediately clear how many cardholders became victims of the breach, which affected MasterCard Inc, Visa Inc, American Express Co and Discover Financial Services, as well as banks and other franchises that issue cards bearing their logos.

U.S. law enforcement authorities including the Secret Service are investigating and MasterCard said it has hired an independent data-security organization to review the incident.

The shares of Atlanta-based Global Payments, which acts as a credit-checking middleman between merchants and card processors, were halted on Friday afternoon after dropping more than 9 percent on the news.

MasterCard shares fell 1.8 percent to close at $420.54, Visa shares dropped 0.8 percent to $118, American Express shares fell 0.1 percent to $57.86, while Discover rose 1.2 percent to $33.34.

Analysts said any financial losses from the data breach would be shouldered by merchants, card issuers and Global Payments rather than Visa or Mastercard, which operate payment networks.

Global Payments said it determined that an unauthorized entity had accessed its systems and possible customer card data in early March. Krebs on Security, a blog that first reported the incident on Friday, said accounts had been compromised for over a month, between January 21, 2012 and February 25, 2012.

Global Payments is holding an investor conference call Monday morning to discuss the issue.

This Global Payments breach is just the latest in a long string of incidents that have put the personal information of millions of credit and debit cardholders at risk.

Individual banks and processors said they had not yet determined the full extent of the breach, but Krebs on Security described it as a “massive” breach that may affect more than 10 million cardholders.

Some industry experts suggested the figure might be much less, perhaps on the order of tens of thousands. Bernstein Research analyst Rod Bourgeois noted that Global Payments is a relatively small player in the transactions services industry, servicing 800,000 merchants with a 3.5 percent market share. By contrast, the largest competitor, First Data, services millions of merchants, with 22.6 percent of the market.

JPMorgan Chase & Co, as well as American Express and Discover, which issue their own cards, said they are monitoring customers’ accounts and would issue new cards to anyone whose information may have been compromised.

Citigroup Inc said it has been notified by processors of the breach. Bank of America Corp declined to comment on the matter and Wells Fargo & Co said it was too early to comment on the impact.

Banks and processors emphasized customers would not be held liable for any fraudulent charges that may occur.

Mike Simonsen, the Chief Executive of real-estate research company Altos Research, said he may have been a victim.

Simonsen said he was contacted by his bank, Bank of America Corp, last week about his Visa card. Although there were no unauthorized transactions, the representative told him a vendor or law enforcement agency had flagged his account as compromised and so he would receive a new one.

“It was very unusual,” he said.

PROCESSING PIPELINE

Global Payments, which has about 3,700 employees, was spun off from information-services firm National Data Corp in 2001. For the fiscal year ended May 31, Global Payment reported revenue of $1.9 billion, an increase of 13 percent from the year-earlier period. According to a company presentation in January, the company was projected to report fiscal 2012 revenue in the range of $2.15 billion.

The company is scheduled to report fiscal third-quarter results on Wednesday and there had been the expectation Global Payments would report improving results. On Wednesday, Sterne Agee raised its price target for Global Payments to $65 a share from $58.

Global Payments is one of dozens of companies that operate along the payment-processing chain, between the time a person swipes a card to pay and the time the payment is delivered.

The account number, expiration date and possibly the cardholder’s name is sent from the point of payment to a processor, which then connects to Visa, MasterCard, American Express or Discover. Information is then sent to the card issuer — often a bank — which ultimately authorizes the transaction.

The actual transfer of money occurs later.

Processing companies, which perform millions of authorizations each day, are supposed to encrypt card information. But a breach could occur if someone gains access to the system and identifies a gap in the encryption.

The information that was likely collected illegally from Global Payments is called Track 1 and Track 2 data. A person improperly using the information can transfer the account number and expiration date to a magnetic strip on a card and then try to use the card on a website.

Thousands of U.S. banks that issue credit and debit cards receive daily alerts regarding breaches through a system referred to as CAMS, said Thomas McCrohan, an analyst with Janney Capital Markets.

The illegal use of the data could be stymied if an online merchant asks for the three or four digits printed on a card known as the “CVV code.”

“The systems can all be made tighter, but if they’re too tight no transactions would ever be approved,” said Edward Lawrence, a director at Auriemma Consulting Group, a payment systems consultant. “You still have to allow commerce to occur.”

Rep. Mary Bono, a California Republican who chairs the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, condemned the Global Payments breach and urged Congress to adopt stronger data-security legislation this year.

“You shouldn’t have to cross your fingers and whisper a prayer when you type in a credit card number on your computer and hit ‘enter,'” she said in a statement.

RIPPLE EFFECTS

The Visa-Mastercard-Discover breach is the first major instance this year of consumer information put at risk by technological flaws or hacking, but there are plenty of examples of massive data breaches in recent years affecting banks, retailers, technology companies and payment processors.

Last June, Citigroup said computer hackers breached the bank’s network and accessed data of about 200,000 cardholders in North America.

Sony Corp also reported several recent attacks, including one last year in which hackers accessed the personal information on 77 million PlayStation Network accounts.

Google Inc suffered a major attack on its Gmail accounts in 2011 that it said appeared to originate in China. Attacks against Gmail users involved direct attempts to compromise accounts by tricking users into revealing information – so-called “phishing” – or by gathering their passwords from other websites, rather than compromising Google systems, according to the company.

Separately, TJX Companies Inc and Heartland Payment Systems Inc have had their systems compromised.

On Friday, retailers were already beginning to look for fraudulent purchases from the compromised card accounts stemming from the Global Payments breach. They will bear the financial brunt of those crimes under rules worked out with the card associations and issuers, analysts said.

“Our merchant community is sitting here girding itself and looking at their own fraud-prevention strategies and bracing for the influx of bad transactions,” said Tom Donlea, managing director for the Americas at the nonprofit Merchant Risk Council. “After Heartland and after the Sony breach, there was an increase in fraud activity.”

(This version of the story corrects paragraph 29 to delete statement Google systems were compromised and adds that Gmail users were targets of a “phishing” scam)

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UK Police To Monitor Every Internet User – In Real Time – Every Web Site Visited, Every Text Message, Every Phone Call…

UK – Under legislation expected in next month’s Queen’s Speech, internet companies will be instructed to install hardware enabling GCHQ – the Government’s electronic “listening” agency – to examine “on demand” any phone call made, text message and email sent, and website accessed in “real time”, The Sunday Times reported.

A previous attempt to introduce a similar law was abandoned by the former Labour government in 2006 in the face of fierce opposition.

However ministers believe it is essential that the police and security services have access to such communications data in order to tackle terrorism and protect the public.

Although GCHQ would not be able to access the content of such communications without a warrant, the legislation would enable it to trace people individuals or groups are in contact with, and how often and for how long they are in communication.

The Home Office confirmed that ministers were intending to legislate “as soon as parliamentary time allows”.

“It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public. We need to take action to maintain the continued availability of communications data as technology changes,” a spokesman said.

“Communications data includes time, duration and dialling numbers of a phone call, or an email address. It does not include the content of any phone call or email and it is not the intention of Government to make changes to the existing legal basis for the interception of communications.”

Nick Pickles, director of the Big Brother Watch campaign group, said: “This is an unprecedented step that will see Britain adopt the same kind of surveillance seen in China and Iran.

“This is an absolute attack on privacy online and it is far from clear this will actually improve public safety, while adding significant costs to internet businesses.

“If this was such a serious security issue why has the Home Office not ensured these powers were in place before the Olympics?”

Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights group Liberty, said that both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats had resisted the plan when they were in opposition.

“There is an element of whoever you vote for the empire strikes back,” she told Sky News’s Murnaghan programme.

“This is more ambitious than anything that has been done before. It is a pretty drastic step in a democracy.

“It was resisted under the last government. The coalition bound itself together in the language of civil liberties. Do they still mean it?”

Conservative backbencher Margot James said ministers would come under pressure to water down the proposals as the legislation passed through Parliament.

“I am sure there will be considerable pressure brought to bear as the proposals are debated for protections to be built in to protect people’s privacy,” she told the Murnaghan programme.

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71 Year Old Woman Shot And Arrested For Defending Herself During Warrantless Home Invasion By Lee County Florida Deputies

LEE COUNTY, FLORIDA – A 71-year-old woman stood at her bedroom doorway pointing a .45 caliber handgun and warned the visitors in her home that she would shoot.

Patricia Mapes stood her ground. It didn’t matter that the visitors were Lee County deputies, according to arrest reports.

“I don’t care who you are. I’ll shoot you,” Mapes told deputies last Friday night (March 23) after they entered her home, called out for the woman and identified themselves.

Mapes fired at the three deputies and they fired back. During the exchange, Mapes was struck and fell to the ground, according to the arrest report. She was taken to Lee Memorial Hospital with undisclosed injuries.

On Thursday, at the hospital, Mapes was arrested and is facing charges of two counts of aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer.

The deputies had responded to Mapes’ home on the 16000 block of Briarcliff Lane in Lee County after her daughter called authorities, concerned her mother was suicidal, according to reports. Mapes had received bad news earlier in the day and said she “couldn’t take it anymore.”

Deputies say they knocked several times on Mapes’ front door and received no response. The front door was unlocked and Mapes’ car was in the garage, according to reports.

When Mapes confronted them with a gun the deputies started backing off. And after she started shooting the deputies said they “thought they were going to die,” according to the arrest report

Sheriff Mike Scott said last week the deputies were at Mapes’ home for “a little more than a welfare check.” The sheriff also defended the deputies for shooting the elderly woman.

“When someone is shooting at us, we don’t ask them how old they are,” Scott said.

The deputies, whose names have not been released, are on paid administrative leave until the investigation is turned over state, agency spokesman Tony Schall said. Mapes was released on bond on Friday.

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New York City Police Spy And Keep Records On Americans Based On Their Religion – Jews (Of Course) Excluded From Monitoring…

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — The New York Police Department kept secret files on businesses owned by second- and third-generation Americans specifically because they were Muslims, according to newly obtained documents that spell out in the clearest terms yet that police were monitoring people based on religion.

The NYPD has faced intense criticism from Muslims, lawmakers and even the FBI for widespread spying operations that put entire neighborhoods under surveillance. Police put the names of innocent people in secret files and monitored the mosques, student groups and businesses that make up the Muslim landscape of the northeastern U.S.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has defended his department’s efforts, saying they have kept the city safe, were completely legal and were not based on religion.

VIEW THE DOCUMENTS

“We don’t stop to think about the religion,” Bloomberg said at a news conference in August after The Associated Press began revealing the spying. “We stop to think about the threats and focus our efforts there.”

In late 2007, however, plainclothes officers in the department’s secretive Demographics Unit were assigned to investigate the region’s Syrian population. Police photographed businesses and eavesdropped at lunch counters and inside grocery stores and pastry shops. The resulting document listed no threat. And though most people of Syrian heritage living in the area were Jewish, Jews were excluded from the monitoring.

“This report will focus on the smaller Muslim community,” the report said.

Similarly, police excluded the city’s sizable Coptic Christian population when photographing, monitoring and eavesdropping on Egyptian businesses in 2007, according to the police files.

“This report does not represent the Coptic Egyptian community and is merely an insight into the Muslim Egyptian community of New York City,” the NYPD wrote.

Many of those under surveillance were American-born citizens whose families have been here for the better part of a century.

“The majority of Syrians encountered by members of the Demographics Unit are second- or even third-generation Syrian Americans,” the Syrian report said. “It is unusual to encounter a first generation or new arrival Syrian in New York City.”

The Demographics Unit was conceived in secret years ago as a way to identify communities where terrorists might hide and spot potential problems early. If the plainclothes officers, known as “rakers,” overheard anti-American sentiment or violent rhetoric, they flagged it for follow-up investigation.

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So Much For The US Constitution Nutcase 7th Circuit Court Of Appeals Judges Say Warrantless Searches By Police Of Private Information In Cellphones Is Okay

DALLAS, TEXAS – Think about all the personal information we keep in our cell phones: It’s something to consider after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled it is now legal for police to search cell phones without a warrant.

Former Dallas FBI Agent Danny Defenbaugh said the ruling gives law enforcement a leg up. “I think not only will it help them, but it could be life saving,” said the former Special Agent, who was based in Dallas.

The decision stems from an Indiana case where police arrested a man for dealing drugs. An officer searched the suspect’s cell phone without warrant.

The judge in the appeal case, Judge Richard Posner, agreed that the officer had to search the phone immediately or risk losing valuable evidence. Judge Posner ruled it was a matter of urgency, arguing it was possible for an accomplice to wipe the phone clean using a computer or other remote device.

Defenbaugh says the ruling takes into account exigent or time-sensitive circumstances that could be life saving in more urgent cases, such as child abduction. ”If the child is alive and you’re only minutes behind, that could be critical to recovering that child alive,” added Defenbaugh.

Judge Posner ruled that the search was legal because the officer conducted a limited search and only looked for phone numbers associated with the alleged drug deal. The judge argued it was similar to flipping through a diary to search for basic information such as addresses and phone numbers.

Paul Coggins is the former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas. Coggins says the court’s ruling pushes the envelope on privacy issues and wonders if it opens the door to more extensive searches down the road. “Does that mean officers now have the right to search through your phone, search through your search history, your photographs, your e-mails and the rest, because it could all be wiped clean,” Coggins asked.

Many critics are asking the same question. They call the ruling an invasion of privacy that far outweighs the needs of law enforcement.

Both Defenbaugh and Coggins agree that the case is likely to go to the U.S. Supreme court.

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New York City Police Efforts To Spy On Students In The Northeast Called “Disgusting”

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – At Columbia University and elsewhere, the fear that the New York Police Department might secretly be infiltrating Muslim students’ lives has spread beyond them to others who find the reported tactics “disgusting,” as one teenager put it.

The NYPD surveillance of Muslims on a dozen college campuses in the Northeast is a surprising and disappointing violation, students said Saturday in reaction to Associated Press reports that revealed the intelligence-gathering at Columbia and elsewhere.

“If this is happening to innocent Muslim students, who’s next?” asked freshman Dina Morris, 18, of Amherst, Mass. “I’m the child of an immigrant, and I was just blown away by the news; it’s disgusting.”

Documents obtained by the AP show that the NYPD used undercover officers and informants to infiltrate Muslim student groups. An officer even went whitewater rafting with students and reported on how many times they prayed and what they discussed. Police also trawled college websites and blogs, compiling daily reports on the activities of Muslim students and academics.

It was all part of the NYPD’s efforts to keep tabs on Muslims throughout the region as part of the department’s anti-terrorism efforts. Police built databases of where Muslims lived and worked, where they prayed, even where they watched sports.

In the past week, Muslims and non-Muslims alike held a town hall meeting on the Manhattan campus of the Ivy League college to discuss the police surveillance. Concerned members of many school groups attended.

On Friday, some of their counterparts at New York University choked up as they gathered to voice their outrage at the notion that even students’ religious habits were being tracked by the NYPD.

“Why is the number of times that we pray per day – whether or not I come in this space and put my forehead on the floor in worship of my Lord – why does that have anything to do with somebody trying to keep this country safe?” said Elizabeth Dann, 29, an NYU law student.

At first, when it was revealed last weekend that Muslim students were targets of police surveillance, “people were distressed and frazzled,” Mona Abdullah, a member of Columbia’s Muslim Students Association, told the AP.

But by Saturday, she said, a different mood descended on the campus.

“We’re now feeling a sense of unity, because this is not an issue that affects only Muslims,” said Abdullah, 20, who is majoring in political science and Middle Eastern studies. “We’re still worried, but there’s also a sense of solidarity over an issue that has to be taken seriously by everyone.”

Students are also feeling empathy for those outside the university community who are being subjected to the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” policy targeting anyone who seems suspicious, mainly blacks and Hispanics.

“We’re not the first and we’re definitely not going to be the last,” Abdullah said.

Police were interested in Muslim student groups because they attracted young men, a demographic that terrorist groups have tapped. The NYPD defended the effort, citing a dozen accused or convicted terrorists worldwide who had once been affiliated with Muslim student groups.

But students say that unfairly categorizes them all as potential terrorists.

The Muslim students “are just as American as anyone, and to make them feel unsafe and unwanted is really unfair!” said Morris, who attends Barnard College, which is affiliated with Columbia.

“There was a lot of police blowback after 9/11; they were not respecting civil liberties,” said Leo Schwartz, 19, a political science major and columnist for Columbia’s student newspaper, the Daily Spectator.

Anmol Gupta, 22, an engineering student, said that in a city like New York, which prides itself on ethnic diversity, “the idea of the surveillance of Muslims does surprise me, it’s disturbing.”

Sitting on a bench, he glanced across the university’s quad at the students of many races and faiths who were walking around on a chilly winter day.

Gupta said he didn’t feel students could do anything to stop the surveillance.

They certainly shouldn’t do anything to change how they live from day to day – even if they’re afraid they’re being watched, Abdullah said. “We’re saying, `Don’t change the way you act, don’t change anything you do, because we’re not doing anything wrong.'”

Still, many on the campus of more than 25,000 students craved reassurance.

University President Lee Bollinger plans to host a fireside chat on Monday evening to discuss the secret monitoring.

He said in a statement Friday: “We should all be able to appreciate the deeply personal concerns of the Muslim members of our community in learning that their activities were being monitored – and the chilling effect such governmental efforts have on any of us in a university devoted to the foundational values of free speech and association.”

On Saturday, the unanswered question among Columbia students remained: Is the NYPD still conducting surveillance on students?

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Friday: “We’re going to continue to do what we have to do to protect the city.”

He did not elaborate.

And Mayor Michael Bloomberg said his police department’s monitoring of Muslims – even outside the city at colleges in Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and upstate New York – was “legal,” “appropriate” and “constitutional.”

Authorities left open what students most wanted answered – “if and when the surveillance ended,” Abdullah said.

“I don’t think it has ended.”

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Warrantless Searches Of Pedestrians Reaches All Time High In New York City

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – The number of so-called “stop and frisks” is rising.

City police officers stopped and questioned 684,330 people on the street last year, a record since the NYPD began yearly tallies of the tactic in 2002 and a 14 percent increase over 2010.

It couldn’t be determined how many people were patted down during the encounters, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Typically, half of the potential suspects who are stopped are frisked or searched.
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Of those stopped last year, about 12 percent were arrested or received summonses. The rest were not charged.

Civil-rights advocates claim the practice unfairly targets innocent blacks and other people of color, and that many stops are made without proper cause.

The department calls the tactic an essential crime-fighting tool.

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Fort Lauderdale Police “Peacemaker” Intimidates And Harasses Residents

FORT LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA – Tania Ouaknine is convinced the police are watching her.

She’s not paranoid — it says as much on the red sign painted along the side on the hulking armored truck that’s been parked in front of her eight-room Parisian Motel for several days.

“Warning: You are under video surveillance,” reads the bold message on the side of the truck.

From the front bumper of the menacing vehicle, another sign taunts: “Whatcha gonna do when we come for you?”

The truck is a new weapon for the Fort Lauderdale Police Department in the fight against drugs and neighborhood nuisances, and it looks like a Winnebago on steroids. They call it “The Peacemaker,” and it may be a first in South Florida.

Mixing high tech with simplicity, the in-your-face strategy is straightforward: load an out-of-service armored truck with some of the latest surveillance equipment available and decorate it with police emblems. Then, simply leave it parked in front of trouble spots.

“Make no mistakes about it,” said Detective Travis Mandell. “We want people to know that we are watching the bad guys.”

In August, police got the first of their two Peacemakers after paying the Brinks company $10 for a discontinued armored bank truck. They retrofitted the vehicle with cameras that can stream live video back to headquarters. With its cameras hoisted on each bullet-proof window, the truck can gather panoramic footage for up to 700 hours.

Last month the department added a second truck to its arsenal, converting a former SWAT vehicle into the second Peacemaker. Police park the unmanned trucks in front of the homes of suspected drug dealers and at crime-plagued street corners.

On a recent afternoon, a Peacemaker had at least one of its eight cameras trained on Ouaknine’s one-story establishment.

“They say I am running a whorehouse,” said the 60-year-old innkeeper. “I run a motel. The only thing that I don’t have is the five stars.”

Police wouldn’t say why they parked the Peacemaker last week in an abandoned lot directly across Ouaknine’s Parisian Motel in the 500 block of Northwest 23rd Avenue.

Police and city records show Ouaknine and her motel had been the subject of an undercover operation targeting prostitution starting in September. Ouaknine was arrested on Oct. 28 on three counts of renting rooms to prostitutes for $20 an hour. Her case is pending.

The city’s nuisance abatement board sent her a warning letter and summoned her to appear for a hearing in February based on the investigation. It’s the second time since 2008 that the board has targeted the motel, city records show.

She says she’s doing nothing illegal.

“They’ve tried everything to shut me down and have failed,” she said. “Now they bring this truck to intimidate me and my customers.”

Some neighbors surrounding the Parisian Motel say the truck is another form of constant police harassment.

On a recent afternoon, Leo Cooper watched as two undercover street-crime officers jumped out of an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria just yards from the Peacemaker. They began questioning a group of men gathered at the corner. Within minutes, one of the men ran away. A second man was charged with loitering.

“This is what happens here every day. We can’t sit outside without being harassed,” said Cooper, 27. “Now we have that truck. Most of us are not doing anything wrong. We can’t be outside?”

The police department has met the allegations of harassment with skepticism.

“People who are abiding by the law should have no problems with this,” said Mandell. “People may feel that their privacy is being infringed on, but when you think about it, every day you walk down the street you are being watched by 20 to 30 cameras from private businesses and homes.”

The feedback is much different in a neighborhood less than a mile east of the motel, close to where Sistrunk Boulevard is undergoing a major refurbishing project. In December, residents rallied at city meetings to get more police presence after a rash of daytime home burglaries, including one on New Year’s Day, said Anthony Lucicero, a neighborhood leader.

“We had all sorts of people walking up and down this street at all hours,” he said. “Prostitutes, junkies, everyone.”

In early January, police parked the Peacemaker at an empty lot on Northwest Fifth Court between 10th and 11th avenues. Neighbors say it’s already making a difference.

“Before the truck, we were afraid to go to work knowing your house might be robbed in the middle of the afternoon,” said Lucicero’s neighbor, Tangerine Davis. “Now we go to work in peace.”

Their biggest worry now, they say, is what happens when the Peacemaker drives away and the police are no longer watching.

“I wish they had another one out here,” Lucicero said. “I have an empty lot right there they can use.”

A check with the region’s major law enforcement agencies indicate Fort Lauderdale’s Peacemakers may be the first in South Florida, but not the first in the nation. News reports show that agencies in Green Bay, Wis., Lafayette, La. and St. Louis, Mo., have been using them for at least a year.

“We are definitely not doing something like that right now,” said Deputy Eric Davis, a spokesman for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. “I would love to see this for myself. Sounds pretty novel.”

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FBI Wants Lots More Stuff To Use To Spy On American Citizens

WASHINGTON, DC – The US Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking for a tool to mine social media for intelligence tips.

The US domestic law enforcement agency is asking information technology contractors about the feasibility of building a tool that would “enhance its techniques for collecting and sharing ‘open source’ actionable intelligence.”

The January 19 open request was published on a website offering federal business opportunities and was first reported by New Scientist magazine.

The FBI said it is seeking an “open source and social media alert, mapping and analysis application solution” for its Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC).

“Social media has become a primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events and the primal alert to possible developing situations,” the FBI request said.

“Intelligence analysts will often use social media to receive the first tip-off that a crisis has occurred,” it said.

The FBI said the tool “must have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identity, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents and emerging threats.”

It would need to be able to “instantly search and monitor key words and strings in all ‘publicly available’ tweets across the Twitter site and any other ‘publicly available’ social networking sites/forums.”

It would also need the ability to “search the data across a myriad of parameters and view terrorist activities by location, terrorist group, and type of attack and see trends and analytics.”

In addition, it would have to be able “to immediately translate into English, tweets and any other open forum publically available social media captured in a foreign language.”

Interested parties have until February 10 to respond to the FBI request.

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Police Illegally Tracked US Citizens With GPS Trackers And Without Warrant – Supreme Court

WASHINGTON, DC – The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that police must get a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects.

The GPS device helped authorities link Washington, D.C., nightclub owner Antoine Jones to a suburban house used to stash money and drugs. He was sentenced to life in prison before the appeals court overturned the conviction.

Associate Justice Antonin Scalia said that the government’s installation of a GPS device, and its use to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a search, meaning that a warrant is required.

“By attaching the device to the Jeep” that Jones was using, “officers encroached on a protected area,” Scalia wrote.

All nine justices agreed that the placement of the GPS on the Jeep violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

Scalia wrote the main opinion of three in the case. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor.

Sotomayor also wrote one of the two concurring opinions that agreed with the outcome in the Jones case for different reasons.

Justice Samuel Alito also wrote a concurring opinion in which he said the court should have gone further and dealt with GPS tracking of wireless devices, like mobile phones. He was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

A federal appeals court in Washington had overturned Jones’s drug conspiracy conviction because police did not have a warrant when they installed a GPS device on his vehicle and then tracked his movements for a month. The Supreme Court agreed with the appeals court.

The case is U.S. v. Jones, 10-1259.

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TSA Apologizes After Humiliating Strip Searches Of Sick Elderly Women At Kennedy Airport

NEW YORK – In an about-face, the feds have admitted wrongdoing in the cases of two elderly women who say they were strip-searched at Kennedy Airport by overzealous screeners.

Federal officials had initially insisted that all “screening procedures were followed” after Ruth Sherman, 89, and Lenore Zimmerman, 85, went public with separate accounts of humiliating strip searches.

But in a letter obtained by the Daily News, the Homeland Security Department acknowledges that screeners violated standard practice in their treatment of the ailing octogenarians last November.

Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Betsy Markey concedes to state Sen. Michael Gianaris (D-Queens) that Sherman was forced to show security agents her colostomy bag — a violation of policy.

“It is not standard operating procedure for colostomy devices to be visually inspected, and [the Transportation Security Administration\] apologizes for this employee’s action,” Markey wrote.

The letter says that Sherman, who uses a wheelchair, was escorted into a private area after she voluntarily lowered her pants to show screeners the device.

In the private room, she was patted down and told to show agents the colostomy bag, the letter says.

Markey still maintained that the Florida-based Sherman was never asked to remove her clothing.

“They asked me to pull my sweatpants down, and now they’re not telling you the truth,” Sherman fumed Monday.

Markey also denied that Zimmerman had been strip-searched, but did apologize for the conduct of a TSA agent who violated policy by scanning the Long Island granny’s back brace.

Zimmerman had told The News two female agents removed her clothes — instead of just patting her down — after she revealed that she was wearing a defibrillator.

“They’re lying,” said Zimmerman. “I don’t have a problem with [screeners checking\] the back brace. I have a problem with being strip-searched.”

Gianaris, who wrote to the TSA requesting a full investigation, said the feds’ account is still full of holes.

“It’s obvious that something went wrong, so its nice to see the TSA admit that their procedures were violated,” Gianaris said, “but they’re still falling short of admitting that these women’s dignity was violated by asking them to remove their clothes.”

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Washington DC Police Track Motorists In Real-Time With Cameras, Then Store In Massive Database

WASHINGTON, DC – An armed robber burst into a Northeast Washington market, scuffled with the cashier, and then shot him and the clerk’s father, who also owned the store. The killer sped off in a silver Pontiac, but a witness was able to write down the license plate number.

Police figured out the name of the suspect very quickly. But locating and arresting him took a little-known investigative tool: a vast system that tracks the comings and goings of anyone driving around the District.

Scores of cameras across the city capture 1,800 images a minute and download the information into a rapidly expanding archive that can pinpoint people’s movements all over town.

Police entered the suspect’s license plate number into that database and learned that the Pontiac was on a street in Southeast. Police soon arrested Christian Taylor, who had been staying at a friend’s home, and charged him with two counts of first-degree murder. His trial is set for January.

More than 250 cameras in the District and its suburbs scan license plates in real time, helping police pinpoint stolen cars and fleeing killers. But the program quietly has expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago.

With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles.

Nowhere is that more prevalent than in the District, which has more than one plate-reader per square mile, the highest concentration in the nation. Police in the Washington suburbs have dozens of them as well, and local agencies plan to add many more in coming months, creating a comprehensive dragnet that will include all the approaches into the District.

“It never stops,” said Capt. Kevin Reardon, who runs Arlington County’s plate reader program. “It just gobbles up tag information. One of the big questions is, what do we do with the information?”

Police departments are grappling with how long to store the information and how to balance privacy concerns against the value the data provide to investigators. The data are kept for three years in the District, two years in Alexandria, a year in Prince George’s County and a Maryland state database, and about a month in many other suburban areas.

“That’s quite a large database of innocent people’s comings and goings,” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union’s technology and liberty program. “The government has no business collecting that kind of information on people without a warrant.”

But police say the tag readers can give them a critical jump on a child abductor, information about when a vehicle left — or entered — a crime scene, and the ability to quickly identify a suspected terrorist’s vehicle as it speeds down the highway, perhaps to an intended target.

Having the technology during the Washington area sniper shootings in 2002 might have stopped the attacks sooner, detectives said, because police could have checked whether any particular car was showing up at each of the shooting sites.

“It’s a perfect example of how they’d be useful,” said Lt. T.J. Rogers, who is responsible for the 26 tag readers maintained by the Fairfax County police. “We see a lot of potential in it.”

The plate readers are different from red-light or speed cameras, which issue traffic tickets and are tools for deterrence and enforcement. The readers are an investigative tool, capturing a picture of every license plate that passes by and instantly analyzing them against a database filled with cars wanted by police.

Police can also plug any license plate number into the database and, as long as it passed a camera, determine where that vehicle has been and when. Detectives also can enter a be-on-the-lookout into the database, and the moment that license plate passes a detector, they get an alert.

It’s that precision and the growing ubiquity of the technology that has libertarians worried. In Northern Virginia recently, a man reported his wife missing, prompting police to enter her plate number into the system.

They got a hit at an apartment complex, and when they got there, officers spotted her car and a note on her windshield that said, in essence, “Don’t tow, I’m visiting apartment 3C.” Officers knocked on the door of that apartment, and she came out of the bedroom. They advised her to call her husband.

A new tool in the arsenal

Even though they are relatively new, the tag readers, which cost about $20,000 each, are now as widely used as other high-tech tools police employ to prevent and solve crimes, including surveillance cameras, gunshot recognition sensors and mobile finger­print scanners.

License plate readers can capture numbers across four lanes of traffic on cars zooming up to 150 mph.

“The new technology makes our job a lot easier and the bad guys’ job a lot harder,” said D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier.

The technology first was used by the postal service to sort letters. Units consist of two cameras — one that snaps digital photographs and another that uses an optical infrared sensor to decipher the numbers and letters. The camera captures a color image of the vehicle while the sensor “reads” the license plate and transfers the data to a computer.

When stored over time, the collected data can be used instantaneously or can help with complex analysis, such as whether a car appears to have been followed by another car or if cars are traveling in a convoy.

Police also have begun using them as a tool to prevent crime. By positioning them in nightclub parking lots, for example, police can collect information about who is there. If members of rival gangs appear at a club, police can send patrol cars there to squelch any flare-ups before they turn violent. After a crime, police can gather a list of potential witnesses in seconds.

“It’s such a valuable tool, it’s hard not to jump on it and explore all the things it can do for law enforcement,” said Kevin Davis, assistant chief of police in Prince George’s County.

The readers have been used across the country for several years, but the program is far more sophisticated in the Washington region. The District has 73 readers; 38 of them sit stationary and the rest are attached to police cars. D.C. officials say every police car will have one some day.

The District’s license plate cameras gather more than a million data points a month, and officers make an average of an arrest a day directly from the plate readers, said Tom Wilkins, executive director of the D.C. police department’s intelligence fusion division, which oversees the plate reader program. Between June and September, police found 51 stolen cars using the technology.

Police do not publicly disclose the locations of the readers. And while D.C. law requires that the footage on crime surveillance cameras be deleted after 10 days unless there’s an investigative reason to keep it, there are no laws governing how or when Washington area police can use the tag reader technology. The only rule is that it be used for law enforcement purposes.

“That’s typical with any emerging technology,” Wilkins said. “Even though it’s a tool we’ve had for five years, as it becomes more apparent and widely used and more relied upon, people will begin to scrutinize it.”

Legal concerns

Such scrutiny is happening now at the U.S. Supreme Court with a related technology: GPS surveillance. At issue is whether police can track an individual vehicle with an attached GPS device.

Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University who has been closely watching the Supreme Court case, said the license plate technology probably would pass constitutional muster because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy on public streets.

But, Kerr said, the technology’s silent expansion has allowed the government to know things it couldn’t possibly know before and that the use of such massive amounts of data needs safeguards.

“It’s big brother, and the question is, is it big brother we want, or big brother that we don’t want?” Kerr said. “This technology could be used for good and it could be used for bad. I think we need a conversation about whether and how this technology is used. Who gets the information and when? How long before the information is deleted? All those questions need scrutiny.”

Should someone access the database for something other than a criminal investigation, they could track people doing legal but private things. Having a comprehensive database could mean government access to information about who attended a political event, visited a medical clinic, or went to Alcoholics Anonymous or Planned Parenthood.

Maryland and Virginia police departments are expanding their tag reader programs and by the end of the year expect to have every major entry and exit point to the District covered.

“We’re putting fixed sites up in the capital area,” said Sgt. Julio Valcarcel, who runs the Maryland State Police’s program, which now has 19 mobile units and one fixed unit along a major highway, capturing roughly 27 million reads per year. “Several sites are going online over the winter.”

Some jurisdictions store the information in a large networked database; others retain it only in the memory of each individual reader’s computer, then delete it after several weeks as new data overwrite it.

A George Mason University study last year found that 37 percent of large police agencies in the United States now use license plate reader technology and that a significant number of other agencies planned to have it by the end of 2011. But the survey found that fewer than 30 percent of the agencies using the tool had researched any legal implications.

There also has been scant legal precedent. In Takoma Park, police have two tag readers that they have been using for two years. Police Chief Ronald A. Ricucci said he was amazed at how quickly the units could find stolen cars. When his department first got them, he looked around at other departments to see what kind of rules and regulations they had.

“There wasn’t much,” Ricucci said. “A lot of people were using them and didn’t have policies on them yet.”

Finding stolen cars faster

The technology first came to the Washington region in 2004 as a pilot program. During an early test, members of the Washington Area Vehicle Enforcement Unit recovered eight cars, found 12 stolen license plates and made three arrests in a single shift. Prince George’s police bought several units to help combat the county’s crippling car theft and carjacking problem. It worked.

“We recover cars very quickly now. In previous times that was not the case,” said Prince George’s Capt. Edward Davey, who is in charge of the county’s program. “Before, they’d be dumped on the side of the road somewhere for a while.”

Now Prince George’s has 45 units and is likely to get more soon.

“The more we use them, the more we realize there’s a whole lot more on the investigative end of them,” Davey said. “We are starting to evolve. Investigators are starting to realize how to use them.”

Arlington police cars equipped with the readers regularly drive through the parking garage at the Pentagon City mall looking for stolen cars, checking hundreds of them in a matter of minutes as they cruise up and down the aisles. In Prince William County, where there are 12 mobile readers, the units have been used to locate missing people and recover stolen cars.

Unlike in the District, in most suburban jurisdictions, the units are only attached to police cars on patrol, and there aren’t enough of them to create a comprehensive net.

Virginia State Police have 42 units for the entire state, most of them focused on Northern Virginia, Richmond and the Tidewater area, and as of now have no fixed locations. There is also no central database, so each unit collects information on its own and compares it against a daily download of wanted vehicles from the FBI and the state.

But the state police are looking into fixed locations that could capture as many as 100 times more vehicles, 24 hours a day, with the potential to blanket the interstates.

“Now, we’re not getting everything — we’re fishing,” said Sgt. Robert Alessi, a 23-year veteran who runs the state police’s program. “Fixed cameras will help us use a net instead of one fishing pole with one line in the water waiting to get a nibble.”

Beyond the technology’s ability to track suspects and non-criminals alike, it has expanded beyond police work. Tax collectors in Arlington bought their own units and use the readers to help collect money owed to the county. Chesterfield County, in Virginia, uses a reader it purchased to collect millions of dollars in delinquent car taxes each year, comparing the cars on the road against the tax rolls.

Police across the region say that they are careful with the information and that they are entrusted with many pieces of sensitive information about citizens, including arrest records and Social Security numbers.

“If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re not driving a stolen car, you’re not committing a crime,” Alessi said, “then you don’t have anything to worry about.”

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Department Of Homeland Security Steps Up Monitoring Of Social Networks For “Social Unrest” – Plans To Use US Military To “Restore Order” (Combat US Citizens)

WASHINGTON, DC – The wave of civil unrest that has swept the globe over the past year has prompted the Department of Homeland Security to step up its monitoring of Twitter and other social networks in a bid to pre-empt any sign of social dislocation within the United States.
Twitter User

“Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary Caryn Wagner said the use of such technology in uprisings that started in December in Tunisia shocked some officials into attention and prompted questions of whether the U.S. needs to do a better job of monitoring domestic social networking activity,” reports the Associated Press.

Wagner announced that the federal agency would implement new guidelines that would focus on “gleaning information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook for law enforcement purposes.”

Under the new framework, when the department receives information about a “potential threat,” it will then ask its contractors to look for relevant search references using “open source” information.

Although it’s somewhat naive to think that Homeland Security wasn’t already scanning the likes of Facebook and Twitter for social trends and signs of civil unrest, the fact that its now being announced publicly illustrates the increasing concern that riots which have hit the Middle East and Europe over the last 18 months will soon manifest themselves inside the United States.

Indeed, US law enforcement bodies are already scanning Twitter and Facebook for signs of unrest. Having launched a specialized unit to focus on gleaning clues from social media websites, the NYPD Disorder Control Unit recently brought together police from all five of the city’s boroughs to rehearse what the response would be “should out-of-control riots break out here”.

Social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter came in for harsh condemnation following the UK riots, with Prime Minister David Cameron advocating authorities have the power to shut down access during times of public disorder, mimicking the Communist Chinese system of Internet censorship, which is used to curtail political protests.

Although the Occupy Wall Street movement has been the only real expression of civil unrest in the United States thus far, a worsening economic climate almost guarantees the prospect of an increase in social disorder across the globe.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO), a prominent UN agency, warned yesterday that the world faces an imminent “dramatic downturn” in employment, and a new recession which in turn would lead to greater social unrest, particularly in European countries.

In preparation for potential riots inside the United States, the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Institute issued a report in November 2008 entitled Known Unknowns: Unconventional Strategic Shocks in Defense Strategy Development.

The report lays out the strategy for how authorities would respond to “purposeful domestic resistance,” wherein U.S. troops would be deployed domestically to counter civil unrest. The report was issued weeks after the onset of the 2008 financial crisis, and included a potential “economic collapse” as one of the scenarios under which troops would be used inside the U.S. to restore order.

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US Government Web Site Exposed Students Personal Financial Data

WASHINGTON, DC – The personal financial details of as many as 5,000 college students were temporarily laid bare for other students to view on the Education Department’s direct loan website earlier this month, an education official testified Tuesday.

The students’ information was available during a six or seven minute window as officials were making a reconfiguration involving 11.5 million borrowers, said James Runcie, the Education Department’s federal student aid chief operating officer. The change was designed to improve the website’s performance times.

Runcie said students who logged on during the trouble period saw the personal details of other students.

Those whose information was exposed have been notified and offered credit monitoring services, Runcie said. The department shut down the website while the problem was resolved. “We responded as quickly as we could,” he said.

Runcie’s testimony came before a House Education and the Workforce subcommittee, which has been reviewing the Education Department’s transition to directly issuing all student loans.

Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., the subcommittee chairwoman, said the transition has meant more customer service problems and mistakes, including the recent security problem with the website.

“The implications of this kind of website malfunction are severe, particularly when it affects millions of borrows nationwide,” Foxx said.

In a statement released after the hearing, Justin Hamilton, an Education Department spokesman, said the problem occurred on Oct. 12 and the department has no reason to believe students’ information was misused or accessed by anyone with “malicious intent.”

Congress changed the way student loans are issued last year as part of the law overhauling the nation’s health care system. It essentially stripped banks of their role as middlemen in issuing the loans. All loans are now directly issued by the government. The expectation at the time was that the measure would result in $61 billion in savings over a decade. The billions saved are to pay for Pell Grants, provide resources to community and historically black colleges, help reduce the deficit and offset expenses from the health care legislation.

Runcie said the department uses rigorous security standards but is looking to soon roll out an additional safeguard. He also said the department appreciates suggestions on ways to make its website more user friendly, and plans to make changes.

Overall, Runcie said the transition to the direct loan program has been a success.

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NO PRIVACY: Obama’s Health Care Law Gives The U.S. Government Everyone’s Confidential Medical Records

WASHINGTON, DC – It’s been said a thousand times: Congress had to pass President Obama’s health care law in order to find out what’s in it. But, despite the repetitiveness, the level of shock from each new discovery never seems to recede.

This time, America is learning about the federal government’s plan to collect and aggregate confidential patient records for every one of us.

In a proposed rule from Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the federal government is demanding insurance companies submit detailed health care information about their patients.

(See Proposed Rule: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act; Standards Related to Reinsurance, Risk Corridors and Risk Adjustment, Volume 76, page 41930. Proposed rule docket ID is HHS-OS-2011-0022 http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2011-07-15/pdf/2011-17609.pdf)

The HHS has proposed the federal government pursue one of three paths to obtain this sensitive information: A “centralized approach” wherein insurers’ data go directly to Washington; an “intermediate state-level approach” in which insurers give the information to the 50 states; or a “distributed approach” in which health insurance companies crunch the numbers according to federal bureaucrat edict.

It’s par for the course with the federal government, but abstract terms are used to distract from the real objectives of this idea: no matter which “option” is chosen, government bureaucrats would have access to the health records of every American – including you.

There are major problems with any one of these three “options.” First is the obvious breach of patient confidentiality. The federal government does not exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to managing private information about its citizens.

Why should we trust that the federal government would somehow keep all patient records confidential? In one case, a government employee’s laptop containing information about 26.5 million veterans and their spouses was stolen from the employee’s home.

There’s also the HHS contractor who lost a laptop containing medical information about nearly 50,000 Medicare beneficiaries. And, we cannot forget when the USDA’s computer system was compromised and information and photos of 26,000 employees, contractors, and retirees potentially accessed.

The second concern is the government compulsion to seize details about private business practices. Certainly many health insurance companies defended and advocated for the president’s health care law, but they likely did not know this was part of the bargain.

They are being asked to provide proprietary information to governments for purposes that will undermine their competitiveness. Obama and Sebelius made such a big deal about Americans being able to keep the coverage they have under ObamaCare; with these provisions, such private insurance may cease to exist if insurers are required to divulge their business models.

Certainly businesses have lost confidential data like the federal government has, but the power of the market can punish the private sector. A victim can fire a health insurance company; he cannot fire a bureaucrat.

What happens to the federal government if it loses a laptop full of patient data or business information? What recourse do individual citizens have against an inept bureaucrat who leaves the computer unlocked? Imagine a Wikileaks-sized disclosure of every Americans’ health histories. The results could be devastating – embarrassing – even Orwellian.

With its extensive rule-making decrees, ObamaCare has been an exercise in creating authority out of thin air at the expense of individuals’ rights, freedoms, and liberties.

The ability of the federal government to spy on, review, and approve individuals’ private patient-doctor interactions is an excessive power-grab.

Like other discoveries that have occurred since the law’s passage, this one leaves us scratching our heads as to the necessity not just of this provision, but the entire law.

The HHS attempts to justify its proposal on the grounds that it has to be able to compare performance. No matter what the explanation is, however, this type of data collection is an egregious violation of patient-doctor confidentiality and business privacy. It is like J. Edgar Hoover in a lab coat.

And, no matter what assurances Obama, Sebelius and their unelected and unaccountable HHS bureaucrats make about protections and safeguards of data, too many people already know what can result when their confidential information gets into the wrong hands, either intentionally or unintentionally.

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Crazed California State Lawmakers Propose Spending $10 Million On Internet Police To Closely Monitor Residents Web Activities For Out Of State Purchases

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA – With California deep in debt, a controversial plan has emerged that calls for private vendors to monitor what you buy on the Internet.

The Board of Equalization (BOE) says it could raise a billion dollars a year in previously uncollected use taxes, but critics call it haunting to hire “Internet Police”.

One of those critics is Monique Bell, who started My Kid Sister Clothing Company, three years ago in Stockton.

“If you wear it, we sell it,” Bell told CBS 13 inside her Stockton home.

Bell is the owner of My Kid Sister Clothing Company, an Internet portal that allows her customers to find clothes for kids – and the whole family at a discount. She’s concerned by the BOE plan – a staff proposal to identify Internet buyers who use her site and others, to purchase things from out-of-state vendors.

“I think it’s like Big Brother. It’s definitely very chilling,” said Bell. The Internet entrepreneur told CBS 13, “I think our customers are just going to stop buying from us. We’re going to see a dramatic drop in sales.”

Under state law, if you buy something online from an out-of-state company with no physical presence here – since you are not paying sales tax, you are supposed to pay a use tax to the State of California, but many people never do.

That could change however, under the BOE proposal, which would authorize California to spend up to $10 million to hire private vendors to track down what you purchase over the Internet.

“This is just a fishing expedition as far as I’m concerned,” said George Runner, an elected member of the Board of Equalization.

Runner is fighting the Board’s staff proposal. CBS 13 asked him to explain how it was pitched to the Board:

“One of the ideas is well, we think there might be some people who will sell us data,” Runner warned about the proposal. “That will tell us what kind of credit card transactions or private transactions that a Californian may have made in purchasing something out of state,” he told CBS 13.

Under the plan, California could generate up to $1.1 billion in uncollected taxes by monitoring what you buy online. Anyone purchasing more than $5,000 a year would be fair game. But active Internet users like Dan and Amber Campbell of Sacramento worry about government watching over their shoulders.

“I just really think it’s an invasion of privacy and it should be back in the hands of the retailer, not the consumer,” Amber Campbell told CBS 13. Her husband Dan Campbell has similar concerns.

“It would kind of be more of a Big Brother type scenario,” Campbell told CBS 13 “And I really don’t feel like we need one more person watching what we do online or what we purchase.”

Keeping tabs on Internet purchases is so controversial the Board of Equalization has pulled the proposal from the calendar for now – and asked for further study.

“This item was pulled from the calendar for further review,” said BOE Spokesperson Anita Gore via e-mail. “It was not ready for discussion at the time it was pulled from the agenda and is not ready for discussion at this time. There is no one available from BOE for an on-camera interview at this time,” she told CBS 13 in the statement.

California’s Use Tax law has been on the books since 1935.

Last year, the state took in more than $3 billion – but there’s still more than a billion dollars that go uncollected.

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Millions Spent By U.S. Homeland Security Department To Secretly Track And Scan Pedestrians

WASHINGTON, DC – The Homeland Security Department paid contractors millions of dollars to develop and study surveillance systems that could covertly track pedestrians and check under people’s clothing with airport-style body scanners as they enter train stations, bus depots or major events, newly released documents show.

Two contracts the department signed in 2005 and 2006 were part of its effort to acquire technology to find suicide bombers in a crowd of moving people, according to documents given to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a privacy-rights group that is suing Homeland Security.

The department dropped the projects in a “very early” phase after testing showed flaws, Homeland Security spokesman Bobby Whithorne says.

EPIC lawyer Ginger McCall says the project is disturbing nonetheless because it shows the department “obviously believed that this level of surveillance is acceptable when in fact it is not at all acceptable.”

A $1.9 million contract with Rapiscan Systems, which makes airport body scanners, asked the company to develop similar machines for “covert inspection of moving subjects” and to find explosives on suicide bombers “through clothing, backpacks and other packages.” The contract was signed in 2005.

Rapiscan’s airport body scanners require subjects to stand still while the machines create an image of passengers underneath their clothing to reveal hidden weapons. EPIC has sued the department to stop their use, saying the machines violate privacy.

Rapiscan Vice President Peter Kant says the company gave Homeland Security a prototype machine designed “primarily for non-aviation settings” because it could scan people while they were moving.

Lab tests of the prototype resulted in the project being dropped, Whithorne says.

In 2006, the department signed a $1.3 million contract with Northeastern University in Boston to test systems that could potentially “monitor and track individuals in a crowd.” Northeastern studied video cameras, imaging equipment similar to body scanners and radar, which can spot people at a distance.

After receiving Northeastern’s reports, Homeland Security decided against trying to develop a prototype machine, Whithorne says.

Using systems to covertly scan pedestrians “would be a clear violation” of laws against unreasonable searches, McCall says. “If you are walking down the street, this allows them to digitally strip-search you and rifle through your belongings without any sort of justification,” she says.

Homeland Security studies privacy implications of technologies before they are used on the public. The department dropped the two projects “before we even got to the privacy assessment phase,” Whithorne says.

Homeland Security has sought for several years to develop technology that can scan moving people, and has publicly tested equipment at a New Jersey rail station and at airports in Denver and Minneapolis.

Body scanners typically require a controlled environment that eliminates outside light, security consultant Rich Roth says.

Homeland Security has spent billions of dollars to develop systems that detect everything from airborne pathogens to people illegally crossing into the U.S. from Mexico.

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Crazed Marion County Indiana Judge S.K. Reid Orders Newspaper To Disclose Identity Of Anonymous Web Commenters

MARION COUNTY, INDIANA – A Marion County judge has ruled, for the first time in Indiana, that news media outlets can be ordered by the court to reveal identifying information about posters to their online forums.

In rulings this week and last week, Marion Superior Court Judge S.K. Reid became the first judge in Indiana to rule on whether the state journalism shield law protects media outlets from being forced to disclose names of anonymous posters on their websites or other identifying information about those posters, said Kevin Betz, an attorney for Jeffrey Miller, former chief executive of Junior Achievement of Central Indiana.

The rulings came in a defamation lawsuit Miller filed last year. He is seeking to broaden the list of defendants in his case to include people who criticized him anonymously last year on websites run by The Indianapolis Star, Indianapolis Business Journal and WRTV (Channel 6).

The case is among a growing number of defamation claims nationally that target anonymous Internet posters to websites operated by news media and other owners.

“We are seeing more and more defamation lawsuits being filed, that’s clear,” said David Hudson, a First Amendment scholar at the First Amendment Center, affiliated with Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. Hudson said the public should be concerned if anonymous comments on public websites begin drying up because of the fear of lawsuits. “If this happens, then people will be less likely to comment” on public issues, he said.

All three Indianapolis media outlets fought the subpoenas served on them to turn over identifying information about posters to their sites.

The judge ruled that The Star and IBJ must turn over the identifying information, which typically tells a poster’s Internet protocol address or Internet provider. Using that, an attorney can subpoena the Internet provider for the poster’s real name.

The Star had fought the disclosure, saying in its 15-page motion that the shield law protects it from being forced to disclose names of anonymous posters on its IndyStar.com website, as does the Constitution and its guarantees of freedom of speech.

“Our practice is not to reveal the names” of people who post anonymously on The Star’s website, said Star Editor and Vice President Dennis Ryerson. “We’ve long had a practice of protecting sources at all levels.”

Ryerson wouldn’t comment on the judge’s ruling, except to say, “We now are reviewing our legal options.”

The judge’s ruling on whether WRTV also must turn over information about its posters is expected this week.

The IBJ has already turned over the information Miller sought, Betz said.

The posters identified include Kelsey Hanlon, described as a former staffer at Junior Achievement; James Leagre, who is called a friend of Junior Achievement’s current chief executive; and Dave Wilson, vice president of corporate sponsorship for the 500 Festival Associates.

500 Festival Associates also was added as a defendant in the defamation claim, on the grounds that the defamatory comments supposedly traced to Wilson were sent on one of its computers.

Miller, whose wife, Cynthia, is a co-plaintiff in the case, initially sued Jennifer Burk, who is the current chief executive of Junior Achievement of Central Indiana; Brian Payne, who is president of Central Indiana Community Foundation; and both of their organizations.

The amended complaint adds as many as nine other people. They are listed in the lawsuit as “John Does.”

Betz said he doesn’t see the judge’s recent rulings as weakening the state’s shield law, which gives broad protections to news reporters from having to disclose names of sources who provide information used in news stories.

“This is not an assault on the shield law,” Betz said. “In fact, it is well within the bounds of the traditional terms of the shield law. I don’t think the media should be interested . . . in protecting the identities of cyberbullies. I don’t think these people are advancing any cause of democracy or purposeful free speech.

“All it is is cyberbullying. And these kind of individuals need to understand there is accountability for that kind of behavior.”

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Federal Civil Rights Suit – FBI Targeted Innocent College Student With Warrantless GPS Tracking Device On His Car

WASHINGTON, DC – A community college student who says he’s never done anything that should attract the interest of federal law enforcement officials filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the FBI for secretly putting a GPS tracking device on his car.

Yasir Afifi, 20, says a mechanic doing an oil change on his car in October discovered the device stuck with magnets between his right rear wheel and exhaust. They weren’t sure what it was, but Afifi had the mechanic remove it and a friend posted photos of it online to see whether anyone could identify it. Two days later, Afifi says, agents wearing bullet-proof vests pulled him over as he drove away from his apartment in San Jose, Calif., and demanded their property back.

Afifi’s lawsuit, filed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, claims the FBI violated his civil rights by putting the device on his car without a warrant. His lawyers say Afifi, who was born in the United States, was targeted because of his extensive ties to the Middle East – he travels there frequently, helps support two brothers who live in Egypt, and his father was a well-known Islamic-American community leader who died last year in Egypt.

FBI Spokesman Michael Kortan declined to discuss the lawsuit or the agency’s investigation into Afifi, but said, “The FBI conducts investigations under well-established Department of Justice and FBI guidelines that determine what investigative steps or techniques are appropriate. Those guidelines also ensure the protection of civil and constitutional rights.”

(AP) In this Jan. 5, 2011 photo shows Yasir Afifi with his car at his home in San Jose, Calif. Afifi…
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Afifi, who is a business marketing major at Mission College and works as a computer salesman, said at a news conference to announce the suit that the agents never gave him a clear answer as to why he was being monitored.

“I’m sure I have done nothing wrong to provoke anyone’s interest,” Afifi said, although he noted that his family is from Egypt, he’s a young man and he makes a lot of calls overseas. “So I’m sure I fit their profile.”

Judges have disagreed over whether search warrants should be required for GPS tracking. Afifi’s lawyers say they are filing this lawsuit in hopes of a decision saying that any use of tracking devices without a warrant in the United States is unconstitutional.

The federal appeals court in the Washington circuit where Afifi’s case was filed ruled in August that the collection of GPS data amounts to a government “search” that required a warrant. The Obama administration asked the court to change its ruling, calling the decision “vague and unworkable” and arguing that investigators will lose access to a tool they now use “with great frequency.”

The lawsuit says the agents who showed up to collect the device were “hostile,” threatening to charge Afifi if he didn’t immediately cooperate and refusing his request to have a lawyer present. The suit also says agents showed they knew private details about his life, such as which restaurants he dined at, the new job he’d just obtained and his plans to travel abroad.

“At first I was really confused,” Afifi said at the news conference, adding that he finally decided to turn over the GPS. “I did give it back to them after a lot of pressure.”

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Documents Reveal TSA Plans To Body Scan Pedestrians

WASHINGTON, DC – Giving Transportation Security Administration agents a peek under your clothes may soon be a practice that goes well beyond airport checkpoints. Newly uncovered documents show that as early as 2006, the Department of Homeland Security has been planning pilot programs to deploy mobile scanning units that can be set up at public events and in train stations, along with mobile x-ray vans capable of scanning pedestrians on city streets.

The non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) on Wednesday published documents it obtained from the Department of Homeland Security showing that from 2006 to 2008 the agency planned a study of of new anti-terrorism technologies that EPIC believes raise serious privacy concerns. The projects range from what the DHS describes as “a walk through x-ray screening system that could be deployed at entrances to special events or other points of interest” to “covert inspection of moving subjects” employing the same backscatter imaging technology currently used in American airports.

The 173-page collection of contracts and reports, acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request, includes contracts with Siemens Corporations, Northeastern University, and Rapiscan Systems. The study was expected to cost more than $3.5 million.

One project allocated to Northeastern University and Siemens would mount backscatter x-ray scanners and video cameras on roving vans, along with other cameras on buildings and utility poles, to monitor groups of pedestrians, assess what they carried, and even track their eye movements. In another program, the researchers were asked to develop a system of long range x-ray scanning to determine what metal objects an individual might have on his or her body at distances up to thirty feet.

“This would allow them to take these technologies out of the airport and into other contexts like public streets, special events and ground transit,” says Ginger McCall, an attorney with EPIC. “It’s a clear violation of the fourth amendment that’s very invasive, not necessarily effective, and poses all the same radiation risks as the airport scans.”

It’s not clear to what degree the technologies outlined in the DHS documents have been implemented. Multiple contacts at the DHS public affairs office didn’t respond to a request for comment Wednesday afternoon. A privacy assessment included in the documents for one aspect of the plans that focused on train security suggests that images wouldn’t be tied to any personally identifiable information such as a subject’s name. Any images shared outside the project or used for training purposes would have faces blurred, and employees using the system would be trained to avoid privacy violations, the document says. If the scanners were to adopt privacy enhancements deployed in new versions of the airport full body scanners currently being tested by the TSA, they would also use nondescript outlines of people rather than defined images, only showing items of interest on the subject’s body.

But EPIC’s McCall says that those safeguards are irrelevant: If scanners are deployed in public settings, it doesn’t matter if they show full naked images or merely the objects in a user’s pockets. “When you’re out walking on the street, it’s not acceptable for an officer to come up and search your bag without probable cause or consent.,” she says. “This is the digital equivalent.”

In August of last year, Joe Reiss, the vice president of marketing of security contractor American Sciences & Engineering told me in an interview that the company had sold more than 500 of its backscatter x-ray vans to governments around the world, including some deployed in the U.S. Those vans are capable of scanning people, the inside of cars and even the internals of some buildings while rolling down public streets. The company claims that its systems’ “primary purpose is to image vehicles and their contents,” and that “the system cannot be used to identify an individual, or the race, sex or age of the person.” But Reiss admitted that the van scans do penetrate clothing, and EPIC president Marc Rotenberg called them “one of the most intrusive technologies conceivable.”

On top of exposing research into possible expansion of the scanner program, EPIC has also filed a lawsuit against the DHS that fights the use of the scanners in airports. The group is arguing its case in a D.C. appellate court next week, though some expect the scanners to be ruled constitutional.

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U.S. Federal Government Spied On New York Times Reporter

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – Federal investigators trying to find out who leaked information about a CIA attempt to disrupt Iran’s
nuclear program obtained a New York Times reporter’s three private
credit reports, examined his personal bank records and obtained
information about his phone calls and travel, according to a new court
filing.

The scope and intrusiveness of the government’s efforts to uncover reporter James Risen’s sources surfaced Thursday in the criminal case of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer facing federal criminal charges
for allegedly disclosing classified information. Sterling is accused of
giving Risen details about what Risen describes as the CIA’s plan to
give Iran faulty nuclear blueprints, hoping to temporarily thwart the
regime’s ambitions to build an atomic bomb.

In a motion filed in federal court in Alexandria, Sterling’s defense
lawyers, Ed MacMahon Jr. and Barry Pollack, reveal that the prosecution
has turned over “various telephone records showing calls made by the
author James Risen. It has provided three credit reports—Equifax,
TransUnion and Experian—for Mr. Risen. It has produced Mr. Risen’s
credit card and bank records and certain records of his airline travel.”

The revelation alarmed First Amendment advocates, particularly in light of Justice Department
rules requiring the attorney general to sign off on subpoenas directed
to members of the media and on requests for their phone records. And
Risen told POLITICO that the disclosures, while not shocking, made him
feel “like a target of spying.”

“We’ve argued that I was a victim of harassment by the government. This
seems to bolster that,” Risen said. “Maybe I should ask them what my
credit score is.”

Sterling’s attorneys and a Justice Department spokeswoman declined POLITICO’s request for comment.

The government’s interest in Risen’s sources for his 2006 book, “State of War,” has been known since 2008.
In particular, investigators have zeroed in on a chapter which details
what Risen describes as a botched CIA effort to trip up Iran’s nuclear
program. The scheme involved using a Russian
defector to deliver the faulty blueprints to the Iranians, but the
defector blew the CIA’s plot by alerting the Iranians to the flaws —
negating the value of the program, and perhaps even advancing Iran’s
nuclear ambitions.

Risen was twice subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury to testify
about his sources, but the first grand jury dissolved before a judge
acted on Risen’s motion to quash the subpoena. Last year, U.S. District
Court Judge Leonie Brinkema sided with Risen and quashed the second
subpoena, though details of her reasoning haven’t been made public.

Soon after that decision, Sterling was indicted.

First Amendment advocates said the Justice Department’s use of business
records to find out about Risen’s sources was troubling. Those records,
they argue, could potentially expose a wide array of Risen’s sources and
confidential contacts — information that might fall beyond the initial
investigation that led to Sterling’s indictment.

“To me, in many ways, it’s worse than a direct subpoena,” said Jane
Kirtley, a University of Minnesota law professor and former director of
the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “Third-party subpoenas
are really, really invidious…. Even if it is targeted, even if they’re
trying to just look at the relevant stuff, they’re inevitably going to
get material that exposes other things.”

Kirtley also said journalists often aren’t notified when the government
asks telecom companies, banks or other service providers for their
records.

Asked how journalists could credibly complain about such techniques when
most also refuse more direct demands for information about their
sources, Kirtley said reporters who become the focus of determined
investigators face a “Hobson’s choice.”

“It’s
the same thing as if the cops go to someone’s office with a search
warrant and say, ‘Give us the information we want and we won’t tear the
place apart,’” she said. “If you say ‘tear the place apart,’ all kinds
of confidential information that you don’t think the police should have
is going to end up in their hands.”

Lawyers tracking the case believed that both former Attorney General
Michael Mukasey, who was part of the Bush administration, and current
Attorney General Eric Holder gave the go-ahead to subpoena Risen. Under
Justice Department rules, the attorney general must approve a subpoena
for a journalist and grant permission to obtain “telephone toll records
of a member of the news media.”

It’s unclear whether the records investigators obtained about Risen’s
phone calls came from his billing records or from records of incoming
calls to Sterling or others. The Justice Department guidelines for
investigations affecting journalists don’t appear to address travel,
bank or credit card records.

Risen said the government never notified him that they were seeking his
phone records. But he said he got an inkling in 2008 that investigators
had collected some information about his calls.

“We heard from several people who had been forced to testify to the
grand jury that prosecutors had shown them phone records between me and
those people—not the content of calls but the records of calls,” he
said. “As a result of what they told us, my lawyers filed a motion with
the court as asking how the Justice Department got these phone records
and whether or not they had gotten my phone records.”

“We wanted the court to help us decide whether they had abided by the
attorney general’s guidelines,” Risen said. “We never got an answer from
the court or the government.”

The new defense filings also offer the first official confirmation that
Risen’s work was the focus of the investigation that led to the charges
against Sterling. In addition to the phone, travel and financial
records, Sterling’s defense said the prosecution handed over a copy of
the cover of Risen’s book along with receipts and shipping records
showing it was sold in Virginia.

While those familiar with the case immediately concluded that Sterling
was a source for Risen, the journalist who got classified information
from Sterling was referred to simply as “Author A” in the indictment,
and was not named. Justice Department policy generally bars naming
unindicted individuals in an indictment.

From 2004 to 2006, the New York Times fought a court battle to keep
federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald from obtaining the telephone
records of Times reporters Judith Miller and Philip Shenon. Fitzgerald
wanted the information to help find out who leaked information that
tipped off Islamic charities about federal raids on their offices.

A district judge ruled in the Times’ favor, but a federal appellate
court overturned that decision. Fitzgerald ultimately obtained the
records when the Supreme Court declined to step in; no one was ever
charged for the leak.

Sterling’s indictment suggests that Risen urged the Times to publish
details about the CIA’s attempt to stop Iran’s nuclear program, but
Times editors declined after senior U.S. government officials warned
that the disclosure could harm national security and endanger the life
of the Russian intermediary. The information later appeared in Risen’s
book.

The new details about the FBI’s investigation of Risen came in a motion
that called on the government to provide more details about what
specific information Sterling allegedly disclosed. Sterling’s lawyers
also filed a series of other motions challenging several counts of the
indictment as duplicative. Some also sought to punish Sterling for acts
he did not commit, such as Risen’s publication of the book, the defense
argued.

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UK Government To Track Every Phone Call, eMail, And Web Site Visit

UK – It will allow security services and the police to spy on the activities of
every Briton who uses a phone or the internet.

Moves to make every communications provider store details for at least a year
will be unveiled later this year sparking fresh fears over a return of the
surveillance state.

The plans were shelved by the Labour Government last December but the Home
Office is now ready to revive them.

It comes despite the Coalition Agreement promised to “end the storage of
internet and email records without good reason”.

Any suggestion of a central “super database” has been ruled out but
the plans are expected to involve service providers storing all users
details for a set period of time.

That will allow the security and police authorities to track every phone call,
email, text message and website visit made by the public if they argue it is
needed to tackle crime or terrorism.

The information will include who is contacting whom, when and where and which
websites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages.

The move was buried in the Government’s Strategic Defence and Security Review, which revealed: “We will introduce
a programme to preserve the ability of the security, intelligence and law
enforcement agencies to obtain communication data and to intercept
communications within the appropriate legal framework.

“This programme is required to keep up with changing technology and to
maintain capabilities that are vital to the work these agencies do to
protect the public.

“Communications data provides evidence in court to secure convictions of
those engaged in activities that cause serious harm. It has played a role in
every major Security Service counter­terrorism operation and in 95 per cent
of all serious organised crime investigations.

“We will legislate to put in place the necessary regulations and
safeguards to ensure that our response to this technology challenge is
compatible with the Government’s approach to information storage and civil
liberties.”

But Isabella Sankey, director of policy at Liberty, said: “One of the
early and welcome promises of the new Government was to ‘end the blanket
storage of internet and email records’.

“Any move to amass more of our sensitive data and increase powers for
processing would amount to a significant U-turn. The terrifying ambitions of
a group of senior Whitehall technocrats must not trump the personal privacy
of law abiding Britons.”

Guy Herbert, general secretary of the No2ID campaign group, said: “We
should not be surprised that the interests of bureaucratic empires outrank
liberty.

“It is disappointing that the new ministers seem to be continuing their
predecessors’ tradition of credulousness.”

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President Obama Expected To Do Away With Much Of Our 4th Ammendment Privacy Rights Next Year

WASHINGTON, DC – Before his forced resignation, President Richard Nixon declared, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” Our current chief executive, however, speaking this year at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, said of our terrorist enemies: “They may seek to exploit our freedoms, but we will not sacrifice the liberties we cherish or hunker down behind walls of suspicion and distrust.”

By contrast, on Sept. 27, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie Savage, the press’ Paul Revere guardian of those cherished liberties, broke a story in the New York Times that next year President Obama will send Congress “sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is ‘going dark’ as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.”

And this is how our individual privacy, already on life support, is going to be further violated, not only on the Internet, as former constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald reports (Salon.com, Sept. 27), relying on Savage’s disclosure:

Commander Obama “would require all communications, including ones over the Internet, to be built so as to enable the U.S. government to intercept and monitor them at any time when the law permits.”

Keep in mind that next year after the midterm elections, it will be Congress determining what the law is.

Witness the birth of self-government in this inspiring portrayal of the Constitution’s genesis, “A More Perfect Union”

If Obama’s lockstep Democrats are still in control next year, Glenn Greenwald continues, “Internet services could legally exist only insofar as there would be no such thing as truly private communications; all must contain a ‘back door’ to enable government officials to eavesdrop.”

Would this still be America?

There’s more to Obama’s euthanizing of the Fourth Amendment in Charlie Savage’s reporting: “Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services (ALL services) that enable communications – including encrypted e-mail transmitters like Blackberry, social-networking sites like Facebook, and software that allows direct ‘peer-to-peer’ messaging like Skype – to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap. The mandate would include (the government) being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.”

As Sen. Frank Church said long ago when he was the first to discover the omnipresent spying on us of the National Security Agency (NSA), eventually, “no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything. … There would be no place to hide.”

Not at all surprisingly, President Obama has extended the reach – and just about total lack of accountability – of the NSA.

But if the Republicans take control of Congress after the midterm elections – and then under a new Republican president in 2012 – is there any certainty that we may begin to be under the protection of the Fourth Amendment again?

Insofar as the tea partiers will continue to be an influence on the Republicans – having already been instrumental this year in re-electing some – I have not, as I’ve reported, seen much concern among them about our vanishing privacy (though I admire the tea partiers declared devotion to the Constitution).

As of this writing, I have no idea who will be the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, but I’m not aware that any of the potential leading Republican candidates are impassioned about the Fourth Amendment.

Even if she’s not a candidate, the perennial newsmaker Sarah Palin will be an influence on the 2012 elections. She probably doesn’t remember, but I was the first national columnist to recommend to John McCain that she be on his ticket, having read of her independence of party orthodoxy in Michael Barone’s invaluable “Almanac of American Politics,” as governor of Alaska. Anyway, I strongly recommend to firebrand Palin what Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in his dissent in the first Supreme Court wiretapping case, Olmstead vs. United States (1928):

“Discovery and invention have made it possible for the government, with means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet. … The progress of science in furnishing the Government with means of espionage (on American citizens) is not likely to stop with wiretapping.”

Was he ever right!

“Ways may some day be developed,” Brandeis continued, “by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court.” (He didn’t foresee the Patriot Act’s giving the FBI permission to sneak into our homes when we aren’t there and photograph those papers.)

The time did come, as Brandeis prophesied, when the government “will be enabled to expose to a jury the intimate occurrences of the home” – and any of our communications in almost any form, if this Obama legislation becomes and remains law.

What Brandeis also warned – and this should be remembered during the midterm and 2012 elections: “The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect. … They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone – the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

And must be deemed as being at the core of what Barack Obama continuously subverts in “the liberties we cherish.”

I deeply hope the tea partiers will add Justice Louis Brandeis to their reading as they work to restore the Constitution’s separation of powers. Consider the effect on new generations growing up under government insisting on back doors into what we say, feel and think. Sending Obama – and any Democrat or Republican who supports his “big brother” mentality – back into private life is the change we must believe in to get our basic freedoms back.

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Crazed North Carolina Cops Want Access To Your Medical Records

CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA – Sheriff’s offices across North Carolina say they want access to records that identify people with prescriptions for powerful painkillers. They say the access can help them fight the growing problem of prescription drug abuse but others say it’s a violation of privacy.

Brad Keller was run over by a car 15 years ago. The accident crushed all the nerves in his left foot and left him with a condition called reflex sympathetic dystrophy, or RSD.

In order to simply function, Keller was placed on a variety of medications from percocet to oxycodone. He took the drugs for 14 years, until he said he had had enough.

Keller is now virtually pain free because his condition made him a good candidate for a spinal cord stimulator. But he’s still fighting for the thousands of Americans who suffer everyday.

“The people who take this medication don’t take it because they want to; they take it because they have to,” Keller said.

Keller is now a volunteer advocate for the American Pain Foundation. His newest battle is on the homefront.

On Tuesday, the North Carolina Sheriff’s Association went to a legislative health committee asking for access to state computer records that ID people with prescriptions for certain drugs.

Association president Sam Page said it will help them combat a growing problem.

“We take that information, we could go and check against that database and see if that person, in fact, appears to be doctor shopping and obtaining prescriptions for the purpose of resell, which is illegal,” he said.

While well intended, Keller feels this move violates a person’s right to privacy.

“You’re talking about accessing my private records for what purpose? You certainly aren’t medical professionals,” he said.

At this time, Page says the proposal is just that and hopes it will start a dialogue on how to better assist law enforcement in finding the criminals abusing the system.

In response to the proposal, William Bronson with the state Department of Health and Human Services, is offering a compromise. He suggests the state allow drug investigators to request information from the database related to a specific investigation.

Currently, investigators with the SBI use a similar process.

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US Government Tracking US Citizens Via. GPS Without Warrants

WASHINGTON, DC – Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant. (See a TIME photoessay on Cannabis Culture.)

It is a dangerous decision — one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.

This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle’s underside.

After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA’s actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)

In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno’s privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the “curtilage,” a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government’s intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.

The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno’s driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited. (See the misadventures of the CIA.)

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month’s decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people’s. The court’s ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. “There’s been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there’s one kind of diversity that doesn’t exist,” he wrote. “No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter.” The judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of “cultural elitism.” (Read about one man’s efforts to escape the surveillance state.)

The court went on to make a second terrible decision about privacy: that once a GPS device has been planted, the government is free to use it to track people without getting a warrant. There is a major battle under way in the federal and state courts over this issue, and the stakes are high. After all, if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police state — with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi.

Fortunately, other courts are coming to a different conclusion from the Ninth Circuit’s — including the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That court ruled, also this month, that tracking for an extended period of time with GPS is an invasion of privacy that requires a warrant. The issue is likely to end up in the Supreme Court.

In these highly partisan times, GPS monitoring is a subject that has both conservatives and liberals worried. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s pro-privacy ruling was unanimous — decided by judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. (Comment on this story.)

Plenty of liberals have objected to this kind of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge Kozinski who has done so most passionately. “1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last,” he lamented in his dissent. And invoking Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia where privacy is essentially nonexistent, he warned: “Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we’re living in Oceania.”

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Tennessee Wants To Begin Fingerprinting Motorists During Traffic Stops

Motorists stopped for traffic violations in Tennessee could be fingerprinted if state lawmakers approve a bill pending in the legislature.

Currently, when drivers are cited during traffic stops, police officers ask for the driver’s signature on the ticket, but the proposed bill would allow police departments to eliminate signatures and collect fingerprints.

Supporters say collecting fingerprints would save money and help police determine whether the driver is wanted for a criminal offense, but opponents worry that it allows the government to tread on individual privacy rights.

“The way I see it, if they take your fingerprint, they have access to your history and that’s an invasion of privacy,” said Martha Simms, 27, a mother of two who recently got a speeding ticket in Davidson County.

State Sen. Joe Haynes and State Rep. Mike Stewart co-sponsored the bill, which gives police departments the choice of collecting a signature or a fingerprint, or collecting a signature and a fingerprint. The bill has been approved by the state House of Representatives, and senators will vote on the measure Wednesday.

The bill, if passed, will take effect on July 1. At that time, any police department within the state could require fingerprinting as a means of identification, said Haynes, a Goodlettsville Democrat. “It’s their discretion,” he said.

Legislator is skeptical

“As long as the police department is ensuring that it will not create a database using the fingerprints collected on traffic citations and that those fingerprints will be used only to identify the person being stopped and for no other purposes,” Weinberg said, “then the police department appears to be using the technology appropriately.”

But Rep. Stacey Campfield, a Knoxville Republican, is skeptical and takes issue with the legislation. “If someone said this 15 to 20 years ago, people would be rioting about it. Now it just seems like a lot of people are giving up and giving away their freedoms,” Campfield said. “It’s scary. I really think that these fingerprints will be used to create a database eventually, if not right away. If you don’t think it is, then you’re just kidding yourself.”

If the bill passes, Tennessee would join other states and cities that have adopted fingerprinting for traffic citations.

The police department in Green Bay, Wis., has been fingerprinting traffic offenders for two years, said Lt. Mark Hellman. Some citizens were concerned at first, he said.

“I think they saw that it wasn’t that big of deal, and that the ones who were most worried about it were likely the ones who were doing something wrong,” Hellmann said. “What they didn’t understand was that a routine traffic stop on the street is an arrest, technically, even if you aren’t taken into physical custody, and during an arrest, you are fingerprinted.”

Police in Phoenix have been collecting fingerprints since 1995, using them to prevent identity theft and to identify immigrants who are in the country illegally.

Appeared Here

Tennessee Wants To Begin Fingerprinting Motorists During Traffic Stops

Motorists stopped for traffic violations in Tennessee could be fingerprinted if state lawmakers approve a bill pending in the legislature.

Currently, when drivers are cited during traffic stops, police officers ask for the driver’s signature on the ticket, but the proposed bill would allow police departments to eliminate signatures and collect fingerprints.

Supporters say collecting fingerprints would save money and help police determine whether the driver is wanted for a criminal offense, but opponents worry that it allows the government to tread on individual privacy rights.

“The way I see it, if they take your fingerprint, they have access to your history and that’s an invasion of privacy,” said Martha Simms, 27, a mother of two who recently got a speeding ticket in Davidson County.

State Sen. Joe Haynes and State Rep. Mike Stewart co-sponsored the bill, which gives police departments the choice of collecting a signature or a fingerprint, or collecting a signature and a fingerprint. The bill has been approved by the state House of Representatives, and senators will vote on the measure Wednesday.

The bill, if passed, will take effect on July 1. At that time, any police department within the state could require fingerprinting as a means of identification, said Haynes, a Goodlettsville Democrat. “It’s their discretion,” he said.

Legislator is skeptical

“As long as the police department is ensuring that it will not create a database using the fingerprints collected on traffic citations and that those fingerprints will be used only to identify the person being stopped and for no other purposes,” Weinberg said, “then the police department appears to be using the technology appropriately.”

But Rep. Stacey Campfield, a Knoxville Republican, is skeptical and takes issue with the legislation. “If someone said this 15 to 20 years ago, people would be rioting about it. Now it just seems like a lot of people are giving up and giving away their freedoms,” Campfield said. “It’s scary. I really think that these fingerprints will be used to create a database eventually, if not right away. If you don’t think it is, then you’re just kidding yourself.”

If the bill passes, Tennessee would join other states and cities that have adopted fingerprinting for traffic citations.

The police department in Green Bay, Wis., has been fingerprinting traffic offenders for two years, said Lt. Mark Hellman. Some citizens were concerned at first, he said.

“I think they saw that it wasn’t that big of deal, and that the ones who were most worried about it were likely the ones who were doing something wrong,” Hellmann said. “What they didn’t understand was that a routine traffic stop on the street is an arrest, technically, even if you aren’t taken into physical custody, and during an arrest, you are fingerprinted.”

Police in Phoenix have been collecting fingerprints since 1995, using them to prevent identity theft and to identify immigrants who are in the country illegally.

Appeared Here

Crazed Wisconsin Appeals Court Judges Okay Warrantless GPS Tracking Of Private Citizens

MADISON, WISCONSIN – Wisconsin police can attach GPS to cars to secretly track anybody’s movements without obtaining search warrants, an appeals court ruled Thursday.

However, the District 4 Court of Appeals said it was “more than a little troubled” by that conclusion and asked Wisconsin lawmakers to regulate GPS use to protect against abuse by police and private individuals.

As the law currently stands, the court said police can mount GPS on cars to track people without violating their constitutional rights — even if the drivers aren’t suspects.

Officers do not need to get warrants beforehand because GPS tracking does not involve a search or a seizure, Judge Paul Lundsten wrote for the unanimous three-judge panel based in Madison.

That means “police are seemingly free to secretly track anyone’s public movements with a GPS device,” he wrote.

One privacy advocate said the decision opened the door for greater government surveillance of citizens. Meanwhile, law enforcement officials called the decision a victory for public safety because tracking devices are an increasingly important tool in investigating criminal behavior.

The ruling came in a 2003 case involving Michael Sveum, a Madison man who was under investigation for stalking. Police got a warrant to put a GPS on his car and secretly attached it while the vehicle was parked in Sveum’s driveway. The device recorded his car’s movements for five weeks before police retrieved it and downloaded the information.

The information suggested Sveum was stalking the woman, who had gone to police earlier with suspicions. Police got a second warrant to search his car and home, found more evidence and arrested him. He was convicted of stalking and sentenced to prison.

Sveum, 41, argued the tracking violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. He argued the device followed him into areas out of public view, such as his garage.

The court disagreed. The tracking did not violate constitutional protections because the device only gave police information that could have been obtained through visual surveillance, Lundsten wrote.

Even though the device followed Sveum’s car to private places, an officer tracking Sveum could have seen when his car entered or exited a garage, Lundsten reasoned. Attaching the device was not a violation, he wrote, because Sveum’s driveway is a public place.

“We discern no privacy interest protected by the Fourth Amendment that is invaded when police attach a device to the outside of a vehicle, as long as the information obtained is the same as could be gained by the use of other techniques that do not require a warrant,” he wrote.

Although police obtained a warrant in this case, it wasn’t needed, he added.

Larry Dupuis, legal director of the ACLU of Wisconsin, said using GPS to track someone’s car goes beyond observing them in public and should require a warrant.

“The idea that you can go and attach anything you want to somebody else’s property without any court supervision, that’s wrong,” he said. “Without a warrant, they can do this on anybody they want.”

Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen’s office, which argued in favor of the warrantless GPS tracking, praised the ruling but would not elaborate on its use in Wisconsin.

David Banaszynski, president of the Wisconsin Chiefs of Police Association, said his department in the Milwaukee suburb of Shorewood does not use GPS. But other departments might use it to track drug dealers, burglars and stalkers, he said.

A state law already requires the Department of Corrections to track the state’s most dangerous sex offenders using GPS. The author of that law, Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, said the decision shows “GPS tracking is an effective means of protecting public safety.”

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Crazed Wisconsin Appeals Court Judges Okay Warrantless GPS Tracking Of Private Citizens

MADISON, WISCONSIN – Wisconsin police can attach GPS to cars to secretly track anybody’s movements without obtaining search warrants, an appeals court ruled Thursday.

However, the District 4 Court of Appeals said it was “more than a little troubled” by that conclusion and asked Wisconsin lawmakers to regulate GPS use to protect against abuse by police and private individuals.

As the law currently stands, the court said police can mount GPS on cars to track people without violating their constitutional rights — even if the drivers aren’t suspects.

Officers do not need to get warrants beforehand because GPS tracking does not involve a search or a seizure, Judge Paul Lundsten wrote for the unanimous three-judge panel based in Madison.

That means “police are seemingly free to secretly track anyone’s public movements with a GPS device,” he wrote.

One privacy advocate said the decision opened the door for greater government surveillance of citizens. Meanwhile, law enforcement officials called the decision a victory for public safety because tracking devices are an increasingly important tool in investigating criminal behavior.

The ruling came in a 2003 case involving Michael Sveum, a Madison man who was under investigation for stalking. Police got a warrant to put a GPS on his car and secretly attached it while the vehicle was parked in Sveum’s driveway. The device recorded his car’s movements for five weeks before police retrieved it and downloaded the information.

The information suggested Sveum was stalking the woman, who had gone to police earlier with suspicions. Police got a second warrant to search his car and home, found more evidence and arrested him. He was convicted of stalking and sentenced to prison.

Sveum, 41, argued the tracking violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. He argued the device followed him into areas out of public view, such as his garage.

The court disagreed. The tracking did not violate constitutional protections because the device only gave police information that could have been obtained through visual surveillance, Lundsten wrote.

Even though the device followed Sveum’s car to private places, an officer tracking Sveum could have seen when his car entered or exited a garage, Lundsten reasoned. Attaching the device was not a violation, he wrote, because Sveum’s driveway is a public place.

“We discern no privacy interest protected by the Fourth Amendment that is invaded when police attach a device to the outside of a vehicle, as long as the information obtained is the same as could be gained by the use of other techniques that do not require a warrant,” he wrote.

Although police obtained a warrant in this case, it wasn’t needed, he added.

Larry Dupuis, legal director of the ACLU of Wisconsin, said using GPS to track someone’s car goes beyond observing them in public and should require a warrant.

“The idea that you can go and attach anything you want to somebody else’s property without any court supervision, that’s wrong,” he said. “Without a warrant, they can do this on anybody they want.”

Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen’s office, which argued in favor of the warrantless GPS tracking, praised the ruling but would not elaborate on its use in Wisconsin.

David Banaszynski, president of the Wisconsin Chiefs of Police Association, said his department in the Milwaukee suburb of Shorewood does not use GPS. But other departments might use it to track drug dealers, burglars and stalkers, he said.

A state law already requires the Department of Corrections to track the state’s most dangerous sex offenders using GPS. The author of that law, Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, said the decision shows “GPS tracking is an effective means of protecting public safety.”

Appeared Here

Massachusetts Police Departments Use State Database To Pry Into The Lives Of Celebrities And "High Profile Citizens"

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS – Police from communities across the state have repeatedly tapped into the state’s criminal records system to improperly access information on celebrities and “high-profile citizens,” according to a scathing audit released yesterday that also branded the system as obsolete and flawed.

Law enforcement personnel looked up personal information on Patriots star Tom Brady 968 times – seeking anything from his driver’s license photo and home address, to whether he had purchased a gun – and auditors discovered “repeated searches and queries” on dozens of other celebrities such as Matt Damon, James Taylor, Celtics star Paul Pierce, and Red Sox owner John Henry, said two state officials familiar with the audit.

The Criminal Offender Record Information system, with its massive databases of criminal records, driving histories, car ownership, and Social Security numbers, is intended to provide police and prosecutors with complete portraits of individuals who have been arrested or brought into the court system. Reports are available to other users such as landlords and some employers conducting background checks on prospective tenants and job seekers. Access is supposed to be restricted to authorized law enforcement users, who are specially trained.

But the yearlong review by state Auditor A. Joseph DeNucci depicts a system repeatedly accessed by users “without any apparent work-related justification.”

Such unauthorized use could be considered fraud under federal law, and “disciplinary action, up to and including dismissal and/or criminal prosecution” could follow misuse of the system, DeNucci’s audit said.

Curtis Wood, executive director of the Criminal History Systems Board, acknowledged that inappropriate searches have been made over the years, but said the number is small.

“Compared to the 13 million transactions in the system a month, the number is a small representation of our user community,” he said. “I’m fairly comfortable in saying that 99 percent do not misuse the system.”

Wood said the agency is able to determine where the queries originated and will take action where necessary. He said he believes that many of the searches were legitimate, with officers looking up individuals who happen to have the same names as celebrities.

DeNucci’s audit condemned the decades-old system as antiquated, highly vulnerable to mistakes, and easily accessed by unauthorized users. With terminals in many locations that allowed anyone to look up information, the system permitted law enforcement officials access without fear of being identified and detected.

“Consequently, potential unethical activities” such as searches for celebrity information escaped more or less undetected, the audit said.

Thomas Nee, president of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, said he was stunned by the misuse of the system.

“Anyone caught socially surfing that important law enforcement asset should be stripped of their right to use it,” he said. “It’s outrageous.”

DeNucci’s review also found lengthy lag times between updates of criminal records, leading to more than 38,000 cases where convictions, some for murder, rape, and failing to register as a sex offender, did not appear in the records. Nearly 19,000 offenders had multiple records, meaning criminal checks were probably incomplete.

The system was highly vulnerable to mistakes, either through human error or offenders providing false names and birthdates, because it is the only criminal records database in the country that does not require fingerprint verification before making changes.

“I am deeply concerned that the lack of a modern, state-of-the-art criminal history information system could pose a threat to public safety,” DeNucci said. “These are serious public safety concerns that must be addressed.”

The criticism comes as activists call for legislative changes to the controversial Criminal Offender Record Information law. Critics, who say it unfairly prevents ex-convicts from landing jobs and leading productive lives, seized on the audit as evidence for their cause.

“The current database system is broken,” said Wilnelia Rivera, campaign director for Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts, a grass-roots political group pushing for changes to the criminal records law. “This only substantiates what we’ve already known. To protect employers, the public, and people with CORI records, we need to act quickly.”

Governor Deval Patrick, who has called for reducing the time limits on criminal records to give ex-convicts a better chance at employment, is slated to announce his plans to change the law tomorrow.

The governor’s plan, according to a summary obtained by the Globe, would allow prospective employers, landlords, and some others to pay for criminal records information on the Internet. They could access information about all sex crimes and homicide convictions as well as felony convictions, which would remain on a defendant’s record for 10 years. Misdemeanor convictions would remain for five years.

The state expects to collect $20 million a year in revenue from the program, some of which would be used to create a fingerprint-based criminal record system and for educating employers regarding hiring former offenders, according to the summary. DeNucci said he is alarmed that law enforcement authorities may lack the latest information on court proceedings and that background checks of individuals may not include recent acquittals. Incomplete criminal histories could also influence police investigations, decisions on filing charges, and sentencing, the audit found.

Without an overhaul, the system “cannot guarantee the reliability of law enforcement decisions that depend on this information,” he said. Of the more than 176,000 records that auditors reviewed, more than 21 percent were not current.

Appeared Here

Massachusetts Police Departments Use State Database To Pry Into The Lives Of Celebrities And "High Profile Citizens"

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS – Police from communities across the state have repeatedly tapped into the state’s criminal records system to improperly access information on celebrities and “high-profile citizens,” according to a scathing audit released yesterday that also branded the system as obsolete and flawed.

Law enforcement personnel looked up personal information on Patriots star Tom Brady 968 times – seeking anything from his driver’s license photo and home address, to whether he had purchased a gun – and auditors discovered “repeated searches and queries” on dozens of other celebrities such as Matt Damon, James Taylor, Celtics star Paul Pierce, and Red Sox owner John Henry, said two state officials familiar with the audit.

The Criminal Offender Record Information system, with its massive databases of criminal records, driving histories, car ownership, and Social Security numbers, is intended to provide police and prosecutors with complete portraits of individuals who have been arrested or brought into the court system. Reports are available to other users such as landlords and some employers conducting background checks on prospective tenants and job seekers. Access is supposed to be restricted to authorized law enforcement users, who are specially trained.

But the yearlong review by state Auditor A. Joseph DeNucci depicts a system repeatedly accessed by users “without any apparent work-related justification.”

Such unauthorized use could be considered fraud under federal law, and “disciplinary action, up to and including dismissal and/or criminal prosecution” could follow misuse of the system, DeNucci’s audit said.

Curtis Wood, executive director of the Criminal History Systems Board, acknowledged that inappropriate searches have been made over the years, but said the number is small.

“Compared to the 13 million transactions in the system a month, the number is a small representation of our user community,” he said. “I’m fairly comfortable in saying that 99 percent do not misuse the system.”

Wood said the agency is able to determine where the queries originated and will take action where necessary. He said he believes that many of the searches were legitimate, with officers looking up individuals who happen to have the same names as celebrities.

DeNucci’s audit condemned the decades-old system as antiquated, highly vulnerable to mistakes, and easily accessed by unauthorized users. With terminals in many locations that allowed anyone to look up information, the system permitted law enforcement officials access without fear of being identified and detected.

“Consequently, potential unethical activities” such as searches for celebrity information escaped more or less undetected, the audit said.

Thomas Nee, president of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, said he was stunned by the misuse of the system.

“Anyone caught socially surfing that important law enforcement asset should be stripped of their right to use it,” he said. “It’s outrageous.”

DeNucci’s review also found lengthy lag times between updates of criminal records, leading to more than 38,000 cases where convictions, some for murder, rape, and failing to register as a sex offender, did not appear in the records. Nearly 19,000 offenders had multiple records, meaning criminal checks were probably incomplete.

The system was highly vulnerable to mistakes, either through human error or offenders providing false names and birthdates, because it is the only criminal records database in the country that does not require fingerprint verification before making changes.

“I am deeply concerned that the lack of a modern, state-of-the-art criminal history information system could pose a threat to public safety,” DeNucci said. “These are serious public safety concerns that must be addressed.”

The criticism comes as activists call for legislative changes to the controversial Criminal Offender Record Information law. Critics, who say it unfairly prevents ex-convicts from landing jobs and leading productive lives, seized on the audit as evidence for their cause.

“The current database system is broken,” said Wilnelia Rivera, campaign director for Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts, a grass-roots political group pushing for changes to the criminal records law. “This only substantiates what we’ve already known. To protect employers, the public, and people with CORI records, we need to act quickly.”

Governor Deval Patrick, who has called for reducing the time limits on criminal records to give ex-convicts a better chance at employment, is slated to announce his plans to change the law tomorrow.

The governor’s plan, according to a summary obtained by the Globe, would allow prospective employers, landlords, and some others to pay for criminal records information on the Internet. They could access information about all sex crimes and homicide convictions as well as felony convictions, which would remain on a defendant’s record for 10 years. Misdemeanor convictions would remain for five years.

The state expects to collect $20 million a year in revenue from the program, some of which would be used to create a fingerprint-based criminal record system and for educating employers regarding hiring former offenders, according to the summary. DeNucci said he is alarmed that law enforcement authorities may lack the latest information on court proceedings and that background checks of individuals may not include recent acquittals. Incomplete criminal histories could also influence police investigations, decisions on filing charges, and sentencing, the audit found.

Without an overhaul, the system “cannot guarantee the reliability of law enforcement decisions that depend on this information,” he said. Of the more than 176,000 records that auditors reviewed, more than 21 percent were not current.

Appeared Here

Our Tax Dollars At Work: Crazed Chicago Illinois Mayor Wants A Camera On Every Street Corner

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS – Mayor Daley has argued that security and terrorism won’t be an issue if his Olympic dreams come true because, by 2016, there will be a surveillance camera on every street corner in Chicago.

But even before that blanket coverage begins, the “Big Brother’’ network is being put to better use.

Call takers and dispatchers now see real-time video if there is a surveillance cameras within 150 feet of a 911 call, thanks to a $6 million upgrade to the city’s “computer-aided dispatch” system.

When live video appears, call takers can pan, tilt and zoom those cameras to get the best possible view of a crime or disaster scene.

“As a first responder, I can’t tell you how important it is to have a set of eyes on an emergency scene prior to your arrival. The valuable information they provide from the camera network can ultimately mean the difference between life and death,” said Ray Orozco, executive director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications.

“Whether you send one ambulance or three, two squad cars or four, it all depends upon the information we are able to gather from the 911 caller,” said Orozco, a former fire commissioner.

During a December test, live video was used to catch a petty thief in the act of sticking his hand in a Salvation Army kettle outside Macy’s on State Street.

But, the crime-fighting potential is “limitless,” said Police Superintendent Jody Weis.

“You know what the suspect’s vehicle might be. It can give us instant leads. . . . We may get some information from that where we may not even respond to that location. We could actually get ahead of it and go to a place where that vehicle maybe was last seen or the individual might be running to,” Weis said.

And, “If we can warn our officers of any dangers they’re facing ahead of time, it’s a tremendous advantage.”

Although the city’s vast surveillance network includes cameras installed at private businesses, universities and homes, Orozco said civil libertarians have nothing to fear.

“We do not and we will not take access to any camera inside of a building,’’ he said. When the city accesses private cameras, workers only see “what you would see if you were sitting on a park bench in front of that building,” he said.

In 2004, City Hall used a $5.1 million federal homeland security grant to install 250 cameras at locations thought to be at high risk of a terrorist attack and link them and 2,000 existing city cameras to the 911 center.

Chicago then launched “Operation Virtual Shield,’’ by linking 1,000 miles of fiber cable to a unified “homeland security grid’’ — complete with hundreds of additional cameras and sensors to monitor the city’s water supply and detect chemical and biological weapons.

On Thursday, Orozco refused to say how many cameras are currently linked to the 911 center. But, he reiterated Daley’s earlier promise.

“We’re going to grow the system until we eventually cover one end of the city to the other,” he said.

Appeared Here

Our Tax Dollars At Work: Crazed Chicago Illinois Mayor Wants A Camera On Every Street Corner

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS – Mayor Daley has argued that security and terrorism won’t be an issue if his Olympic dreams come true because, by 2016, there will be a surveillance camera on every street corner in Chicago.

But even before that blanket coverage begins, the “Big Brother’’ network is being put to better use.

Call takers and dispatchers now see real-time video if there is a surveillance cameras within 150 feet of a 911 call, thanks to a $6 million upgrade to the city’s “computer-aided dispatch” system.

When live video appears, call takers can pan, tilt and zoom those cameras to get the best possible view of a crime or disaster scene.

“As a first responder, I can’t tell you how important it is to have a set of eyes on an emergency scene prior to your arrival. The valuable information they provide from the camera network can ultimately mean the difference between life and death,” said Ray Orozco, executive director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications.

“Whether you send one ambulance or three, two squad cars or four, it all depends upon the information we are able to gather from the 911 caller,” said Orozco, a former fire commissioner.

During a December test, live video was used to catch a petty thief in the act of sticking his hand in a Salvation Army kettle outside Macy’s on State Street.

But, the crime-fighting potential is “limitless,” said Police Superintendent Jody Weis.

“You know what the suspect’s vehicle might be. It can give us instant leads. . . . We may get some information from that where we may not even respond to that location. We could actually get ahead of it and go to a place where that vehicle maybe was last seen or the individual might be running to,” Weis said.

And, “If we can warn our officers of any dangers they’re facing ahead of time, it’s a tremendous advantage.”

Although the city’s vast surveillance network includes cameras installed at private businesses, universities and homes, Orozco said civil libertarians have nothing to fear.

“We do not and we will not take access to any camera inside of a building,’’ he said. When the city accesses private cameras, workers only see “what you would see if you were sitting on a park bench in front of that building,” he said.

In 2004, City Hall used a $5.1 million federal homeland security grant to install 250 cameras at locations thought to be at high risk of a terrorist attack and link them and 2,000 existing city cameras to the 911 center.

Chicago then launched “Operation Virtual Shield,’’ by linking 1,000 miles of fiber cable to a unified “homeland security grid’’ — complete with hundreds of additional cameras and sensors to monitor the city’s water supply and detect chemical and biological weapons.

On Thursday, Orozco refused to say how many cameras are currently linked to the 911 center. But, he reiterated Daley’s earlier promise.

“We’re going to grow the system until we eventually cover one end of the city to the other,” he said.

Appeared Here

Star’s Domestic Violence Photo Leaked To TMZ By Los Angeles California Police Department

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – A photo that appears to be Rihanna’s face with bruises, scratches and swelling from an attack allegedly at the hands of boyfriend Chris Brown was posted Thursday night by the celebrity Web site TMZ.

The close-up image shows a welt above each of the woman’s eyebrows, marks on her cheek and around her lips, and general swelling. TMZ did not say how it obtained the photo, when it was taken or by whom.

Hours after the photo was posted, the Los Angeles Police Department launched an internal investigation and asked for the public’s help in finding the person who leaked it. A police news release said the image “has the appearance” of one taken during a domestic violence investigation, and classified its release as a case of serious misconduct that could result in termination.

Asked earlier Thursday whether he could confirm the photo’s origin, LAPD Officer Jason Lee said only that the department had not released images of the woman who accused Brown, and would not release evidence photos. A spokeswoman for the district attorney said all evidence related to the case was still with police.

Brown was arrested Feb. 8 and booked on suspicion of making felony criminal threats to a woman that authorities have not publicly identified. A person familiar with the situation, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter and requested anonymity, confirmed that the woman was Rihanna, whose real name is Robyn Fenty.

The person said some of the injuries shown in the photo – specifically the marks on the woman’s forehead – were consistent with the injuries Rihanna sustained.

Prosecutors have asked police to provide more information before deciding what charges, if any, to pursue against Brown. Police have said the 19-year-old singer could face domestic violence charges if prosecutors think they are appropriate.

An Associated Press photo of Rihanna, taken before the party on the night of the incident, shows her with a tattoo of Roman numerals on her left shoulder; the TMZ photo shows the same numerals on the same shoulder. TMZ had previously used its site to debunk a manipulated image that depicted Rihanna with a black eye.

No public statement has been issued on behalf of Rihanna, who turns 21 on Friday. Email and telephone messages left late Thursday with representatives for both Brown and Rihanna were not immediately returned.

Brown released a statement on Sunday, which read in part, “Words cannot begin to express how sorry and saddened I am over what transpired.” The statement, which did not mention Rihanna, said Brown was consulting with loved ones, his mother and pastor.

Brown’s arrest came roughly 18 hours after he and Rihanna left a pre-Grammy party honoring music mogul Clive Davis. According to police, Brown and a woman were involved in an altercation in a car traveling through the upscale Hancock Park neighborhood shortly after midnight. Police have said the woman had visible injuries, and that Brown was gone from the scene when they arrived.

Appeared Here

Star’s Domestic Violence Photo Leaked To TMZ By Los Angeles California Police Department

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – A photo that appears to be Rihanna’s face with bruises, scratches and swelling from an attack allegedly at the hands of boyfriend Chris Brown was posted Thursday night by the celebrity Web site TMZ.

The close-up image shows a welt above each of the woman’s eyebrows, marks on her cheek and around her lips, and general swelling. TMZ did not say how it obtained the photo, when it was taken or by whom.

Hours after the photo was posted, the Los Angeles Police Department launched an internal investigation and asked for the public’s help in finding the person who leaked it. A police news release said the image “has the appearance” of one taken during a domestic violence investigation, and classified its release as a case of serious misconduct that could result in termination.

Asked earlier Thursday whether he could confirm the photo’s origin, LAPD Officer Jason Lee said only that the department had not released images of the woman who accused Brown, and would not release evidence photos. A spokeswoman for the district attorney said all evidence related to the case was still with police.

Brown was arrested Feb. 8 and booked on suspicion of making felony criminal threats to a woman that authorities have not publicly identified. A person familiar with the situation, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter and requested anonymity, confirmed that the woman was Rihanna, whose real name is Robyn Fenty.

The person said some of the injuries shown in the photo – specifically the marks on the woman’s forehead – were consistent with the injuries Rihanna sustained.

Prosecutors have asked police to provide more information before deciding what charges, if any, to pursue against Brown. Police have said the 19-year-old singer could face domestic violence charges if prosecutors think they are appropriate.

An Associated Press photo of Rihanna, taken before the party on the night of the incident, shows her with a tattoo of Roman numerals on her left shoulder; the TMZ photo shows the same numerals on the same shoulder. TMZ had previously used its site to debunk a manipulated image that depicted Rihanna with a black eye.

No public statement has been issued on behalf of Rihanna, who turns 21 on Friday. Email and telephone messages left late Thursday with representatives for both Brown and Rihanna were not immediately returned.

Brown released a statement on Sunday, which read in part, “Words cannot begin to express how sorry and saddened I am over what transpired.” The statement, which did not mention Rihanna, said Brown was consulting with loved ones, his mother and pastor.

Brown’s arrest came roughly 18 hours after he and Rihanna left a pre-Grammy party honoring music mogul Clive Davis. According to police, Brown and a woman were involved in an altercation in a car traveling through the upscale Hancock Park neighborhood shortly after midnight. Police have said the woman had visible injuries, and that Brown was gone from the scene when they arrived.

Appeared Here