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NYPD Goes James Bond
By Luke O'Brien March 26, 2007 10:22:37 AM
 New York cops traveled the world to spy on protestors before the GOP convention in 2004, jetting from Montreal to Miami to scores of other cities, including some in Europe . The NYT broke the story yesterday.
The NYPD spent countless tax dollars to have its Intelligence Division create hundreds of secret files on people who planned to get rowdy at the convention. The files also include information on hundreds who didn't -- actors, churchgoers, environmentalists, death penalty opponents, anyone, really, who might be opposed to elements of the GOP platform.
Now the city is asking a court to keep the spy records sealed because the news media will "fixate upon and sensationalize them." Come on. That's ridiculous. We wouldn't do that.
Photo: Daniel M
Terror Database Threatens to Overwhelm
- By Luke O'Brien
- March 26, 2007
- 8:08 am
- Categories: Uncategorized
The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), a massive central database the government uses to store information on terror suspects and generate watch lists, has grown from fewer than 100,000 files in 2003 to around 435,000 today, according to an analysis in The Washington Post yesterday.
The Post story, which digs into how TIDE works, raises a number of questions about how information is gathered and used by federal agencies, which usually contend that their investigations are focused, purpose-driven and hold little likelihood of pulling innocent people into their scope. But the TIDE system also operates like "a vacuum cleaner for both proven and unproven information, and its managers disclaim responsibility for how other agencies use the data."
A GAO report (.pdf) last September found that of the "tens of thousands" of watch-list hits in 2004 and 2005, about half were misidentifications. And things seem to have improved little since then. The TIDE program is more overwhelmed than ever. Data screeners can’t keep up with the amount of intelligence coming in, and the threshold for inclusion in the database is "reasonable suspicion," meaning that extraneous information can probably slip through. One of the more troubling sections from The Post story contains comments from Rick Kopel, the acting director of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, which runs another database into which TIDE dumps its daily data every night:
"With little to go on beyond names, airlines find frequent matches. The screening center agent on call will check the file for markers such as sex, age and prior "encounters" with the list. The agent might ask the airlines about the passenger’s eye color, height or defining marks, Kopel said. "We’ll say, ‘Does he have any rings on his left hand?’ and they’ll say, ‘Uh, he doesn’t have a left hand.’ Okay. We know that [the listed person] lost his left hand making a bomb."
If the answers indicate a match, that "encounter" is fed back into the FBI screening center’s files and ultimately to TIDE. Kopel said the agent never tells the airline whether the person trying to board is the suspect. The airlines decide whether to allow the customer to fly."
Unless The Post has muddied the context of Kopel’s comments, it sounds like when an airline passenger’s name matches a watch list populated with thousands of erroneous entries, the FBI assumes that the passenger is a terrorist. Which means that when a guy is missing a hand — maybe he lost it in the sprocket assembly line — he becomes an injured bomb-maker, potentially bad information that gets fed back into TIDE. In the end, though, the FBI defers to the airlines on whether to let its suspected one-handed bomb-making mullah board a plane. Hmm….
FBI Broke Law Using Patriot Powers, Former FBI Agent Says
By Ryan Singel March 19, 2007 3:53:03 PM
The FBI's misuse of a key Patriot Act power was both intentional and criminal, and is symptomatic of the department's over-reliance on ineffective data-mining methods, according to Mike German, a former FBI special agent who now works as the ACLU's National Security Policy Counsel.
The devil is in the details of March 9's Justice Department's 200-page report on the FBI's misuse of so-called National Security Letters and the most damning details were left out of the executive summary and subsequent news accounts, German told reporters in a conference call Monday. That report found that the FBI acquired information on 143,074 persons from 2003 to 2005 and that of a sample of investigations audited, some 22% included possible violations of the law.
NSLs are self-issued subpoenas that allow investigators in terrorism and espionage cases to require phone companies, banks, credit reporting agencies and ISPs to turn over records on Americans. Those records are then fed into three computer systems, including a shared data-mining warehouse known the Investigative Data Warehouse.
"There's this idea that data mining is going to be the answer," German said. "The FBI has bought into this snake oil. You have agents who are doing collection rather than investigation."
Continue reading "FBI Broke Law Using Patriot Powers, Former FBI Agent Says " »
One in three police shootings involve unarmed people Chron.com ...
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1 in 3 police shootings involve unarmed people ... Other cities, pushed by citizen protests and lawsuits, have radically reduced officer shootings by ...
www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/04/shootings/2698952.html - 55k - Cached - Similar pages
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Context of 'February 1999-September 10, 2001: FBI Agents ...
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[Source: International Islamic Relief Organization]The CIA creates a report for the .....
US officials will later argue that Miller’s phone call and article ...
www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a0299fbibif -
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Crooks and Liars » Cafferty: White House Illegally Deleted Over ...
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And we all know, there were 10 million missions documents about Travelgate. .....
Bush has no problem pushing the government to monitor our phone calls, ...
www.crooksandliars.com/2007/12/05/cafferty-white-house-illegally-deleted-over-ten-million-e-mails/
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Report: CIA Seeking Info from D&T About BCCI - - CFO.com
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D&T declined to comment to The Times and did not return phone calls to CFO.com.. ..By sector,
there were seven industrials ($3.3 billion), ...
www.cfo.com/article.cfm/3001197/c_3042868?f=singlepage -
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Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer
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Following the phone call, the President had his intelligence briefing, .....
Q The latest tax cut relieved 10 million low-income Americans of paying any ...
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/06/20030609-6.html -
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Think Progress » THE ARCHITECTS OF WAR: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
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The groups were “created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, ...
Hadley disregarded memos from the CIA and a personal phone call from ...
thinkprogress.org/the-architects-where-are-they-now/ -
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Enron, investment espionage and the White House
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California Investigating Problems With Voting-Machine Audit Logs
LOS ANGELES — California is conducting a months-long investigation into audit logs inside the state’s electronic voting systems after reports of serious flaws with the logs — including the ability for an election official or someone else to delete votes without leaving an electronic trail.
The investigation is examining what the audit logs record and whether they can be easily altered or deleted, according to Secretary of State Debra Bowen.
The investigation stems from a serious problem discovered in January with voting systems made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems). Investigators found that the tabulation software used with all of the company’s touchscreen and optical scan machines failed to record crucial events, including the act of someone deleting votes from the system on Election Day. The logs also failed to record who performed an action on the system and listed some events with the wrong date and timestamps.
The investigation is just the latest critical look at e-voting machines, whose proprietary inner workings have led voting rights activists and computer scientists to question the integrity of the country’s voting processes. The company’s software is used to count votes in more than 1,400 election jurisdictions in 31 states, including Maryland and Georgia, which use Premier/Diebold voting systems exclusively.
Bowen, appearing at an event Wednesday evening to discuss an open source voting project in development, told Threat Level that the state contracted with David Wagner, a computer scientist with the University of California at Berkeley, to investigate fully what the logs on the Premier/Diebold system, as well as every other voting system used in the state, do and don’t record.
Deputy Secretary of State Lowell Finley is currently examining a draft report of
the investigation that is “as thick as you would imagine (it would be),” said
Bowen, who indicated that she has not yet read it herself.
Audit logs are required under federal voting-system guidelines, which are used to test and qualify voting systems for use in elections. The logs are supposed to record changes and other events that occur on voting systems to ensure the integrity of elections and help determine what occurred in a system when something goes wrong.
But a Premier/Diebold representative admitted at a California hearing in March
that none of the logs in its Global Election Management System (GEMS) — the software that tabulates votes — records significant events, such as when votes
are intentionally or unintentionally deleted. Justin Bales, general service manager for Premier/Diebold’s western region said that the GEMS logs had been the same since the software was first created more than a decade ago.
“We never … intended for any malicious intent and not to log certain activities,” Bales said. “It was just not in the initial program, but now we’re taking a serious look at that.”
Bowen called the audit logs “useless” at the time and told Threat Level that her office would investigate the issue further and determine if audit logs in other voting systems — such as those made by Election Systems & Software, Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic — had the same problems.
Bowen wouldn’t discuss what steps the state might take if it turns out that all voting systems have the same audit log problems found in Premier’s system.
Continue Reading “California Investigating Problems With Voting-Machine Audit Logs” »
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http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/
7B Files Open Government Request for FBI Telco Contracts
By Ryan Singel March 26, 2007 1:43:56 PM
 27B filed a request Friday for the FBI
to produce copies of the contracts it signed
with three large telecoms, post-Patriot Act, in order to get phone call records
in response to agent's self-issued subpoenas faster. Those contracts created a cozy relationship that agents quickly abused to get records without even jumping through
the few administrative hoops required for
so-called "National Security Letters," according to a recent internal audit.
27B is asking the FBI for "expedited processing." A copy
of the Freedom of Information Act request is here (.pdf).
Photo: NickD
By Ryan Singel March 20, 2007 1:42:08 PM
 One of the now-famous fired prosecutors, Arizona's U.S. attorney Paul Charlton,
got into a spat with Justice Department officials since he wanted to videotape interrogations in order to secure more convictions. Current Justice Department policy bans videotaping of interrogations and prosecutors must rely on agent's notes and recollections in court cases.
Now, thanks to a dump of documents from DoJ to a House committee looking into whether the prosecutors were fired for investigating Republicans or not investigating Democrats, we learn that the Justice Department shot down Charlton's attempt to start a videotaping operation because agencies didn't want jurors to see how interrogators worked.
The FBI argued that "as all experienced investigators and prosecutors know, perfectly lawful and acceptable interviewing techniques do not always come across in recorded fashion to
lay persons as a proper means of obtaining information from defendants. Initial resistance may be interpreted as involuntariness, and misleading a defendant as to the quality
of the evidence against him may appear to be unfair deceit."
For its part, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms fought the change, stating, "Law enforcement interrogation techniques (although completely legal) may still be unsettling for some jurors in video and audio form."
As if. How many cop dramas or episodes of The Wire must any citizen see to get at least some idea of how cops bluff and intimidate suspects who are too stupid to shut up and lawyer
up?
Continue reading "DOJ Opposed Confession Cameras To Hide Interrogation Techniques" »
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By Luke O'Brien March 20, 2007 11:37:26 AM
 The FBI's general counsel, Valerie Caproni, testified today on Capitol Hill that the FBI entered into contracts with AT&T, Verizon and MCI to harvest phone records on American citizens under a national security letter program that has come under fire from Congress and the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General for circumventing privacy laws.
Caproni confirmed during a House Judiciary hearing that AT&T and Verizon, which bought MCI in 2005, had and continue to have contracts with the FBI that compensate phone companies for turning over the toll records of customers connected to counterterroism investigations. The telecoms entered into the contracts in May 2003, according to the report issued last week
by the DoJ Inspector General.
"The contract essentially pays for the man hours or the personnel cost for the people who have to do the work," said FBI Assistant Director John Miller in an interview with Wired News last night. "We want dedicated people who handle our requests or do
nothing else."
UPDATE: 27B looks into the FBI's use of "exigent letters" to bypass privacy laws and request information from phone companies during terrorism-related emergencies. In less than three years, the FBI sent out at least 739 of these letters.
Were there really that many emergencies? We also hear back
from AT&T. Read more here.
FBI Response To Subpoena Rule Breaking? Remove Rules
By Ryan Singel March 21, 2007 3:41:47 PM
 The FBI is under scrutiny for asking phone companies for telephone records using fake emergency letters and then not following up with the required legal documents. In a pre-emptive response, the FBI halted the rule-breaking by telling agents that emergency letters no longer had to be followed up, according to this story yesterday from the Washington Post's John Solomon.
The new rules rely heavily on a provision of law that allows phone and internet companies turn over records to the government without legal liability if the companies believe there is an emergency.
Civil liberties advocates say that provision was originally intended to allow phone companies to turn over records when they found a problem, but that law enforcement has long abused the loophole to get information without a subpoena. New rules from the FBI general counsel’s office tell agents they are to limit emergency requests for phone records to the most dire situations,
in which the loss of life or bodily harm is believed to be imminent. They are to document carefully the circumstances surrounding the request.
Agents also have been relieved of a paperwork burden that was at the heart of past problems, officials said.
Under past procedures, agents sent “exigent circumstances letters” to phone companies, seeking toll records by asserting there was an emergency. Then they were expected to issue a grand jury subpoena or a “national security letter,” which legally authorized the collection after the fact. Agents often did not follow up with that paperwork, the inspector general’s investigation found.
The new instructions tell agents there is no need to follow up with national security letters or subpoenas. The agents are also told that the new letter template is the preferred method in emergencies but that they may make requests orally, with no paperwork sent to phone companies. Such oral requests have been made over the years in terrorism and kidnapping cases, officials said.
Hat Tip: Moon of Alabama via Glenn Greenwald Photo: rekha6
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The FBI, already taking flak for the abuse of national security letters used to spy on Americans, 