Think Progress August 13, 2007

In his Thursday column, Philadelphia Daily News scribe Stu Bykofsky seemingly wished for the tragic death of 3000+ Americans when he wrote that “ another 9/11 would help America .”

A host of right-wing media outlets provided Bykofsky a national platform yesterday that largely served to give credence to the columnist's ghoulish suggestion.

Drudge gave the article a top row, center column link:

Radio host Mike Gallagher, who claims to have “over 3.75 million weekly listeners” across the country, hosted Bykofsky (on the very same day that he scored an interview with Rudy Giuliani):

Bykofsky's biggest booster, however, was Fox News. Yesterday morning's Fox and Friends did a segment on his column. Later in the afternoon, Bykofsky appeared on The Big Story, where host John Gibson agreed with and validated Bykofsky's thesis. “I think it's going to take a lot of dead people to wake America up,” said Gibson. Watch it:

The Bush administration used the events of 9/11 to launch an unnecessary war, curtail the rights of Americans, torture, illegally spy, and violate the Constitution. The right-wing can't wait for “another 9/11? so they can take it to the next level

Boston Globe August 13, 2007
Charlie Savage

The Department of Homeland Security is funneling millions of dollars to local governments nationwide for purchasing high-tech video camera networks, accelerating the rise of a "surveillance society" in which the sense of freedom that stems from being anonymous in public will be lost, privacy rights advocates warn.

Since 2003, the department has handed out some $23 billion in federal grants to local governments for equipment and training to help combat terrorism. Most of the money paid for emergency drills and upgrades to basic items, from radios to fences. But the department also has doled out millions on surveillance cameras, transforming city streets and parks into places under constant observation.

The department will not say how much of its taxpayer-funded grants have gone to cameras. But a Globe search of local newspapers and congressional press releases shows that a large number of new surveillance systems, costing at least tens and probably hundreds of millions of dollars, are being simultaneously installed around the country as part of homeland security grants.

In the last month, cities that have moved forward on plans for surveillance networks financed by the Homeland Security Department include St. Paul, which got a $1.2 million grant for 60 cameras for downtown; Madison, Wis., which is buying a 32-camera network with a $388,000 grant; and Pittsburgh, which is adding 83 cameras to its downtown with a $2.58 million grant.

Small towns are also getting their share of the federal money for surveillance to thwart crime and terrorism.

Recent examples include Liberty, Kan. (population 95), which accepted a federal grant to install a $5,000 G2 Sentinel camera in its park, and Scottsbluff, Neb. (population 14,000), where police used a $180,000 Homeland Security Department grant to purchase four closed-circuit digital cameras and two monitors, a system originally designed for Times Square in New York City.

"We certainly wouldn't have been able to purchase this system without those funds," police Captain Brian Wasson told the Scottsbluff Star-Herald.

Other large cities and small towns have also joined in since 2003. Federal money is helping New York, Baltimore, and Chicago build massive surveillance systems that may also link thousands of privately owned security cameras. Boston has installed about 500 cameras in the MBTA system, funded in part with homeland security funds.

Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said Homeland Security Department is the primary driver in spreading surveillance cameras, making their adoption more attractive by offering federal money to city and state leaders.

Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke said that it is difficult to say how much money has been spent on surveillance cameras because many grants awarded to states or cities contained money for cameras and other equipment. Knocke defended the funding of video networks as a valuable tool for protecting the nation. "We will encourage their use in the future," he added.

But privacy rights advocates say that the technology is putting at risk something that is hard to define but is core to personal autonomy. The proliferation of cameras could mean that Americans will feel less free because legal public behavior -- attending a political rally, entering a doctor's office, or even joking with friends in a park -- will leave a permanent record, retrievable by authorities at any time.

Businesses and government buildings have used closed-circuit cameras for decades, so it is nothing new to be videotaped at an ATM machine. But technology specialists say the growing surveillance networks are potentially more powerful than anything the public has experienced.

Until recently, most surveillance cameras produced only grainy analog feeds and had to be stored on bulky videotape cassettes. But the new, cutting-edge cameras produce clearer, more detailed images. Moreover, because these videos are digital, they can be easily transmitted, copied, and stored indefinitely on ever-cheaper hard-drive space.

In addition, police officers cannot be everywhere at once, and in the past someone had to watch a monitor, limiting how large or powerful a surveillance network could be.

But technicians are developing ways to use computers to process real-time and stored digital video, including license-plate readers, face-recognition scanners, and software that detects "anomalous behavior." Although still primitive, these technologies are improving, some with help from research grants by the Homeland Security Department's Science and Technology Directorate.

"Being able to collect this much data on people is going to be very powerful, and it opens people up for abuses of power," said Jennifer King, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies privacy and technology. "The problem with explaining this scenario is that today it's a little futuristic. [A major loss of privacy] is a low risk today, but five years from now it will present a higher risk."

As this technological capacity evolves, it will be far easier for individuals to attract police suspicion simply for acting differently and far easier for police to track that person's movement closely, including retracing their steps backwards in time. It will also create a greater risk that the officials who control the cameras could use them for personal or political gain, specialists said.

The expanded use of surveillance in the name of fighting terrorism has proved controversial in other arenas, as with the recent debate over President Bush's programs for eavesdropping on Americans' international phone calls and e-mails without a warrant.

But public support for installing more surveillance cameras in public places, both as a means of fighting terrorism and other crime, appears to be strong. Last month, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 71 percent of Americans favored increased use of surveillance cameras, while 25 percent opposed it.

Still, some homeland security specialists point to studies showing that cameras are not effective in deterring crime or terrorism. Although video can be useful in apprehending suspects after a crime or attack, the specialists say that the money used to buy and maintain cameras would be better spent on hiring more police.

That view is not universal. David Heyman, the homeland security policy director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, pointed out that cameras can help catch terrorists before they have time to launch a second attack. Several recent failed terrorist attacks in England were followed by quick arrests due in part to surveillance video.

Earlier this month, Senator Joe Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, proposed an amendment that would require the Homeland Security Department to develop a "national strategy" for the use of surveillance cameras, from more effectively using them to thwart terrorism to establishing rules to protect civil liberties.

"A national strategy for [surveillance cameras] use would help officials at the federal, state, and local levels use [surveillance] systems effectively to protect citizens, while at the same time making sure that appropriate civil liberties protections are implemented for the use of cameras and recorded data," Lieberman said.

FT.com Augsut 13, 2007

Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's long-standing political adviser, has announced he is to resign at the end of this month.

The decision to step down comes as poll ratings for Mr Bush remain at the lowest level since his election in 2000.

Mr Rove, a long time political ally of the president, was the architect of Mr Bush's controversial victory in 2000 and his re-election three years ago.

But in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr Rove said he was resigning to return to his home state of Texas and spend more time with his family.

Mr Rove said he first floated the idea of leaving the White House a year ago but delayed his departure because of the Democrats victory in Congressional elections at the end of last year.

He also said developments in Iraq, where more than 3,600 US soldiers have lost their lives, and growing unease about the level of immigration in the US delayed his decision to go.

But in Monday's interview he said: ”There's always something that can keep you here, and as much as I'd like to be here, I've got to do this for the sake of my family.”

Mr Rove played a key role in one of the biggest controversies to hit the Bush presidency after the identity Valerie Plame, a CIA operative, was leaked to the press. Ms Plame implicated Mr Rove as a factor in the leak and White House involvement.

Although critics called for Mr Rove's resignation over the case, the White House and Dick Cheney, the vice president, backed his decision to stay.

In the interview in which he indicated his desire to step down after 7 years in Washington, Mr Rove predicted that Hillary Clinton would win the Democratic presidential nomination and called her ”a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate”.

Mr Rove has been a political adviser to Mr Bush for more than a decade. He worked with him closely before he became governor of Texas in 1993.

Before joining the White House, Mr Rove was president of Karl Rove & Company, the Austin, Texas-based public affairs firm he founded.

Coalition Protests Exclusion from Security and Prosperity Partnership meeting.

Ottawa, Canada- Prominent conservative leaders and politicians opposing a North American Union with the United States, Canada, and Mexico will hold a News Conference in Ottawa Canada.

Event: News Conference to protest secret summit of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, being conducted by President George Bush of the United States, Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada, and President Felipe Calderon of Mexico. The summit of the three world leaders is being held in Montebello, Quebec, from August 20-21, to plan a "North American Union" - an EU-type merger of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico

Date and Time: Monday, August 20, 2007 at 10 a.m.

Location: Ottawa Marriott Hotel, 100 Kent Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Sponsor: Coalition to Block the North American Union

Coalition Spokesmen:

- Howard Phillips, Chairman of The Conservative Caucus, a leading nationwide conservative organization

- Jerome Corsi, Ph.D., author, The Late Great USA; reporter for WorldNetDaily

- Tom DeWeese, President of the American Policy Center, a leading American grassroots foundation devoted to free enterprise and limited government

- Jack McManus, President of the John Birch Society

- Bob Park, Founder, Veterans for Secure Borders; Board Chairman, ProEnglish

- others to be confirmed

WEBSITE: www.conservativeusa.org

Secure Our Border Now! No Amnesty! Send YOUR blast faxes to ALL 535 Congressman
NOW. To Fax Blast Washington D.C. click here: http://faxdc.com/fence.htm

The Bush administration plans to respond to critics of its immigration policy and
proposals with new initiatives that will be announced today at a joint press
conference by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and
Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez.

The 25 initiatives, which make no mention of the border fence emphasized by
critics, include adding more border personnel, funding additional detention beds,
requiring most arrivals at ports-of-entry to use passports and training more
state and local law-enforcement officers to identify and detain immigration
offenders.

In June, a procedural vote in the Senate killed a controversial immigration
reform bill crafted by the White House, Democrats and key Republican leaders.

The plan would have provided a path to legal status for the estimated 30 million
illegal aliens now in the U.S.

This provision would allow illegals to acquire a "probationary" visa after only a
quick, 24-hour background check. The White House contended the carefully crafted
compromise would focus first on enforcement, allowing for more Border Patrol
agents, more cameras and other technologies.

Administrative Immigration Reforms:

BORDER SECURITY

1. The Administration will add more border personnel and infrastructure, going
beyond previously announced targets to adopt the metrics proposed by Senator
Gregg during the immigration debate earlier this year.

INTERIOR ENFORCEMENT

2. The Administration will train growing numbers of state and local
law-enforcement officers to identify and detain immigration offenders whom they
encounter in the course of daily law enforcement.

WORKSITE ENFORCEMENT

3. On the day of this announcement, the Department of Homeland Security will
issue a "No-Match" regulation which clarifies the responsibilities of employers
who receive notice that employees' names and corresponding Social Security
numbers do not match the records at the Social Security Administration.

FIXING EXISTING IMMIGRATION

4. The Administration will reduce processing times for immigration background
checks
by adding agents and converting paper documentation into electronic forms.

ASSIMILATION

5. The Office of Citizenship will unveil in September a revised naturalization
test that emphasizes fundamentals of American democracy, and the rights and
responsibilities of citizens.

Secure Our Border Now! No Amnesty! Send YOUR blast faxes to ALL 535 Congressman
NOW. To Fax Blast Washington D.C. click here: http://faxdc.com/fence.htm

As FAXDC.com reported yesterday the National Guard troops assigned to help
increase security along the U.S.-Mexico border have been pulled off the line a
year earlier than expected. The reductions, which began July 1 and will be
completed by Sept. 1, will result in a cut of Guard troops in Arizona,
California, New Mexico and Texas from 6,000 to 3,000 — half of that promised by
Mr. Bush in 2006.

Already The Department of Homeland Security recently alerted law enforcement
officials to a danger along U.S. borders: illicit tunnels.

"Tunnels under U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico serve primarily as conduits
for transporting illegal drugs in the United States," the threat assessment says.
"In addition, reliable reporting indicates that some tunnels also are used for
alien smuggling, including special interest aliens."

TAKE ACTION NOW!

To Fax Blast Capitol Hill, click here: http://faxdc.com/fence.htm

It's time to send a LOUD MESSAGE to our hired hands in D.C.!

It must be done today! America needs your help!

Do your civic duty now from the comfort of your home or office. FAX HAMMER today,
tomorrow will be too late and America will be lost!

What are you waiting for?

Thank You Patriot! Your friends at:

FAXDC.COM

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China Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track People

By KEITH BRADSHER

SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 9 — At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the technology can be used to violate civil rights.

The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency.

Both steps are officially aimed at fighting crime and developing better controls on an increasingly mobile population, including the nearly 10 million peasants who move to big cities each year. But they could also help the Communist Party retain power by maintaining tight controls on an increasingly prosperous population at a time when street protests are becoming more common.

“If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future,” said Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology.

Incorporated in Florida, China Public Security has raised much of the money to develop its technology from two investment funds in Plano, Tex., Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund. Three investment banks — Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach, Calif.; Oppenheimer & Company in New York; and First Asia Finance Group of Hong Kong — helped raise the money.

Shenzhen, a computer manufacturing center next to Hong Kong, is the first Chinese city to introduce the new residency cards. It is also taking the lead in China in the large-scale use of law enforcement surveillance cameras — a tactic that would have drawn international criticism in the years after the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989.

But rising fears of terrorism have lessened public hostility to surveillance cameras in the West. This has been particularly true in Britain, where the police already install the cameras widely on lamp poles and in subway stations and are developing face recognition software as well.

New York police announced last month that they would install more than 100 security cameras to monitor license plates in Lower Manhattan by the end of the year. Police officials also said they hoped to obtain financing to establish links to 3,000 public and private cameras in the area by the end of next year; no decision has been made on whether face recognition technology has become reliable enough to use without the risk of false arrests.

Shenzhen already has 180,000 indoor and outdoor closed-circuit television cameras owned by businesses and government agencies, and the police will have the right to link them on request into the same system as the 20,000 police cameras, according to China Public Security.

Some civil rights activists contend that the cameras in China and Britain are a violation of the right of privacy contained in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Large-scale surveillance in China is more threatening than surveillance in Britain, they said when told of Shenzhen’s plans.

“I don’t think they are remotely comparable, and even in Britain it’s quite controversial,” said Dinah PoKempner, the general counsel of Human Rights Watch in New York. China has fewer limits on police power, fewer restrictions on how government agencies use the information they gather and fewer legal protections for those suspected of crime, she noted.

While most countries issue identity cards, and many gather a lot of information about citizens, China also appears poised to go much further in putting personal information on identity cards, Ms. PoKempner added.

Every police officer in Shenzhen now carries global positioning satellite equipment on his or her belt. This allows senior police officers to direct their movements on large, high-resolution maps of the city that China Public Security has produced using software that runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system.

“We have a very good relationship with U.S. companies like I.B.M., Cisco, H.P., Dell,” said Robin Huang, the chief operating officer of China Public Security. “All of these U.S. companies work with us to build our system together.”

The role of American companies in helping Chinese security forces has periodically been controversial in the United States. Executives from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems testified in February 2006 at a Congressional hearing called to review whether they had deliberately designed their systems to help the Chinese state muzzle dissidents on the Internet; they denied having done so.

China Public Security proudly displays in its boardroom a certificate from I.B.M. labeling it as a partner. But Mr. Huang said that China Public Security had developed its own computer programs in China and that its suppliers had sent equipment that was not specially tailored for law enforcement purposes.

The company uses servers manufactured by Huawei Technologies of China for its own operations. But China Public Security needs to develop programs that run on I.B.M., Cisco and Hewlett-Packard servers because some Chinese police agencies have already bought these models, Mr. Huang said.

Mr. Lin said he had refrained from some transactions with the Chinese government because he is the chief executive of a company incorporated in the United States. “Of course our projects could be used by the military, but because it’s politically sensitive, I don’t want to do it,” he said.

Western security experts have suspected for several years that Chinese security agencies could track individuals based on the location of their cellphones, and the Shenzhen police tracking system confirms this.

When a police officer goes indoors and cannot receive a global positioning signal from satellites overhead, the system tracks the location of the officer’s cellphone, based on the three nearest cellphone towers. Mr. Huang used a real-time connection to local police dispatchers’ computers to show a detailed computer map of a Shenzhen district and the precise location of each of the 92 patrolling officers, represented by caricatures of officers in blue uniforms and the routes they had traveled in the last hour.

All Chinese citizens are required to carry national identity cards with very simple computer chips embedded, providing little more than the citizen’s name and date of birth. Since imperial times, a principal technique of social control has been for local government agencies to keep detailed records on every resident.

The system worked as long as most people spent their entire lives in their hometowns. But as ever more Chinese move in search of work, the system has eroded. This has made it easier for criminals and dissidents alike to hide from police, and it has raised questions about whether dissatisfied migrant workers could organize political protests without the knowledge of police.

Little more than a collection of duck and rice farms until the late 1970s, Shenzhen now has 10.55 million migrants from elsewhere in China, who will receive the new cards, and 1.87 million permanent residents, who will not receive cards because local agencies already have files on them. Shenzhen’s red-light districts have a nationwide reputation for murders and other crimes.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/business/worldbusiness/12security.html?_r=3&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin&oref=slogin