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America Marches towards a Police State in
New Bill
28
November 2011 © DOJgov.net newswire
In a
bi-partisan effort by Senatorial big mouth weenies, a new bill will create a
de facto national military police force. It’s the usual “bi-partisan”
result of what happens when you breed left wing Progressives Democrats like
Carl Levin with big mouth turncoats like Alleged Republican John McCain.
You
remember John McCain don’t you? He’s the one who acted so bravely as a POW
in Viet Nam and fawned like an effete coquette when running against Barack
Obama. He loves “crossing the isles” to shaft the American people with a
smirk. Even the ACLU is upset and I agree with them.
The
bill will be voted on today, which may make November 28th “a day
that will live in infamy.” Essentially, the Senate will vote on a bill that
would define the whole of the United States as a “battlefield,” allowing the
U.S. military to arrest American citizens as they walk the streets or sit in
their homes while watching football or Dancing with the Stars.
“The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this
president—and every future president — the power to order the military to
pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the
world. The power is so broad that even
U.S.
citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used
far from any battlefield, even within the
United States
itself,” writes Chris Anders of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.
The
bill was drafted in secret by Senator’s Carl Levin and John McCain. It was
then passed in a closed door committee meeting without any hearing. You can
read it in sections 1031 and 1032 of the NDAA bill.
In
1878, Congress passed the Possee Comitatus Act
http://www.dojgov.net/posse_comitatus_act.htm which keeps our military
from acting as a national police force. This little known law has been a
benchmark in keeping
America
free of being transformed into a police state under an emasculated
constitution.
In the
past, Homeland Security has characterized behavior such as buying gold,
owning guns, using a watch or binoculars “suspiciously, and a host of other
ridiculous criteria as suspect. This Bill combines politicized Homeland
Security logic with the United States Military as average Americans become
potential targets of anti-terrorist laws. It goes along with politically
correct refusal to profile.
This is an excellent example of what our Founding Fathers feared most about
government. And even if the bill fails to pass, it’s a touchstone of a dark
future in a nation being told that “government is your friend.”
10 airports install body scanners
Devices can peer under passengers' clothes
6 Jun USA TODAY
BALTIMORE — Body-scanning machines that show images of people underneath
their clothing are being installed in 10 of the nation's busiest airports in
one of the biggest public uses of security devices that reveal intimate body
parts.
 The
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently started using body
scans on randomly chosen passengers in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Denver,
Albuquerque and at New York's Kennedy airport.
Airports in Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas and Miami will be added this month.
Reagan National Airport in Washington starts using a body scanner today. A
total of 38 machines will be in use within weeks.
"It's the wave of the future," said James Schear, the TSA security director
at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, where two
body scanners are in use at one checkpoint.
Schear said the scanners could eventually replace metal detectors at the
nation's 2,000 airport checkpoints and the pat-downs done on passengers who
need extra screening. "We're just scratching the surface of what we can do
with whole-body imaging," Schear said.
1984 Revisited: Pentagon and
USDOJ FBI. Join Forces to Create
Computer System That Would Expose Personal Data and Life Decisions of Americans
under DARPA
DOJgov.net newswire Nov 9, 2002
 According to the New York Times (Nov 9, 2002) the Pentagon is constructing a
computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for
personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe —
including the United States.
Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, director of this effort, has described the
system in Pentagon documents and speeches. Its alleged goal is to provide
intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to
information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and
banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant.
Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to
spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral
Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan
administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to
process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the
United States.
Admiral Poindexter has described this plan in public documents and speeches,
but declines to be interviewed on the subject. However, he did say that
that the government needs to "break down the stovepipes" that separate
commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence agency
analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.
"We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new
sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate
information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge, and
create actionable options," he said in a California speech earlier this
year.
Admiral Poindexter quietly returned to the government in January to take
charge of the Office of Information Awareness at the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA. The office is responsible for
developing new surveillance technologies in the wake of the Sept. 11
attacks.
Prior to taking the position at the Pentagon, Admiral Poindexter, who
was convicted in 1990 for his role in the Iran-contra affair, had worked as
a contractor on one of the projects he now controls. Admiral Poindexter's
conviction was reversed in 1991 by a federal appeals court because he had
been granted immunity for his testimony before Congress about the case.
In effect, a man convicted of falsifying and destroying information, will
now be put in charge of gathering information on every citizen and
transforming individual lives into fish tanks.
(As an
editorial aside, you can find a reciprocal page on Poindexter's personal
information by clicking on "Poindexter
the Snoop.")
In order to deploy such a system, known as Total Information Awareness,
new legislation would be needed, some of which has been proposed by the Bush
administration in the Homeland Security Act that is now before Congress.
That legislation would amend the Privacy Act of 1974, which was intended to
limit what government agencies could do with private information.
In response to these intrusions on personal privacy, Marc Rotenberg,
director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington said,
"This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America. The vehicle
is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is Darpa and the agency is the
F.B.I. The outcome is a system of national surveillance of the American
public."
According to a Pentagon spokesman, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld
has been briefed on the project by Admiral Poindexter and the two had a
lunch to discuss it.
"As part of our development process, we hope to coordinate with a variety of
organizations, to include the law enforcement community," a Pentagon
spokeswoman said.
An F.B.I. official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified,
said the bureau had had preliminary discussions with the Pentagon about the
project but that no final decision had been made about what information the
F.B.I. might add to the system.
A spokesman for the White House Office of Homeland Security, Gordon Johndroe,
said officials in the office were not familiar with the computer project and
he declined to discuss concerns raised by the project's critics without
knowing more about it.
He referred all questions to the Defense Department, where officials said
they could not address civil liberties concerns because they too were not
familiar enough with the project.
Some members of a panel of computer scientists and policy experts who were
asked by the Pentagon to review the privacy implications this summer said
terrorists might find ways to avoid detection and that the system might be
easily abused.
"A lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable about this and worry about the
potential uses that this technology might be put, if not by this
administration then by a future one," said Barbara Simon, a computer
scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing Machinery.
"Once you've got it in place you can't control it."
If deployed, civil libertarians argue, the computer system would rapidly
bring a surveillance state. They assert that potential terrorists would soon
learn how to avoid detection in any case while the innocent American public
will be subject to constant in depth investigation and surveillance.
The new system will rely on a set of computer-based pattern recognition
techniques known as "data mining," a set of statistical techniques used by
scientists as well as by marketers searching for potential customers.
The system would permit a team of intelligence analysts to gather and view
information from databases, pursue links between individuals and groups,
respond to automatic alerts, and share information efficiently, all from
their individual computers.
The project calls for the development of a prototype based on test data that
would be deployed at the Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort
Belvoir, Va. Officials would not say when the system would be put into
operation.
The system is one of a number of projects now under way inside the
government to lash together both commercial and government data to hunt for
patterns of terrorist activities.
"What we are doing is developing technologies and a prototype system to
revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and
identify foreign terrorists, and decipher their plans, and thereby enable
the U.S. to take timely action to successfully pre-empt and defeat terrorist
acts," said Jan Walker, the spokeswoman for the defense research agency.
Others, including Michael G. Leventhal, Editor and Publisher of
DOJgov.net feel that in a failed effort to provide a sane mix of safety with
personal liberty, the government is creating machinery to subdue the
American People. "The real problem involves an unwillingness on the part of
both Republicans and Democrats to control our borders.
Democrats want votes and Republicans want a source of cheap labor.
Uncontrolled immigration has invited terrorists and potential Sleeper Cells
into America. And a corrupt arrogant and indolent US Department of Justice
Immigration and Naturalization Service has spent more time and money
persecuting
whistleblowers to these activities than preserving the integrity and
heritage of liberty within our nation.
It has been the dream
of every despot in history to track citizens in real time, reconstructing
their associations, interests, habits and personal life decisions. We
now have the pretext and the tools.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been working on
this project, and the homeland security bill would lay the foundation for
the system.
With a, better run and less self-serving government, none of
this would be necessary. When a government can't protect its citizens, it
subdues them." |
The White House is Tracking You
16 September 2009 DOJgov.net
Newswire
According to the Washington Times, The White House is collecting and storing
comments and videos placed on social-networking sites such as Facebook,
Twitter and YouTube without notifying or asking the consent of the site
users. Contrary to Obama’s pledge to protect privacy on the Internet, he is
developing a spy system whose goal can only be the compilation of dossiers
on those that do not march in lockstep with his administration
Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said
the White House signaled that it would insist on open dealings with Internet
users and, in fact, should feel obliged to disclose that it is collecting
such information. "The White House has not been adequately transparent,
particularly on how it makes use of new social media techniques, such as
this example," he said.
In defense of Obama’s actions, The White House claimed that “The
Presidential Records Act” requires that the administration gather the
information and that it was justified in taking the additional step of
asking a private contractor to "crawl and archive" all such material.
Nicholas Shapiro, a White House spokesman, declined to say when the practice
began or how much the new contract would cost.
But Susan Cooper, a spokeswoman for National Archives and Records
Administration, said the presidential records law only applies to "social
media" and to public comments "received by the president or immediate
staff."
Unmarked "Star Wars" Chopper
keeps Tabs on people from high above. The era of the "Black Unmarked
Government helicopter" Spy has arrived
May 23, 2008
NEW YORK (AP) - On a cloudless spring day, the NYPD helicopter soars over
the city, its sights set on the Statue of Liberty.
A dramatic close-up of Lady Liberty's frozen gaze fills one of three
flat-screen computer monitors mounted on a console. Hundreds of sightseers
below are oblivious to the fact that a helicopter is peering down on them
from a mile and a half away.
"They don't even know we're here," said crew chief John Diaz, speaking into
a headset over the din of the aircraft's engine.
The helicopter's unmarked paint job belies what's inside: an arsenal of
sophisticated surveillance and tracking equipment powerful enough to read
license plates—or scan pedestrians' faces—from high above the nation's
largest metropolis.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said that no other U.S. law
enforcement agency "has anything that comes close" to the surveillance
chopper, which was designed by engineers at Bell Helicopter and computer
technicians based on NYPD specifications. The chopper is named simply
"23"—for the number of police officers killed in the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks.
Kelly even envisions someday using futuristic "stationary airborne devices"
similar to blimps to conduct reconnaissance.
Civil rights advocates are skeptical about the push for more surveillance,
arguing it reflects the NYPD's evolution into ad hoc spy agency.
Police insist that law-abiding New Yorkers have nothing to fear.
"Obviously, we're not looking into apartments," Diaz said during a recent
flight. "We don't invade the privacy of individuals. We only want to observe
anything that's going on in public."
The helicopter's powers of observation come from a high-powered robotic
camera mounted on a turret projecting from its nose like a periscope. The
camera has infrared night-vision capabilities and a satellite navigation
system that allows police to automatically zoom in on a location by typing
in the address on a computer keyboard.
The surveillance system can beam live footage to police command centers or
even to wireless hand-held devices.
"The commander on the ground can see what we're seeing," Diaz said.
Homeland Security revives
Super-Snoop
DOJgov.net newswire March 12, 2007
Homeland Security officials are testing a super-snoop computer system that
sifts through personal information on U.S. citizens to detect possible
terrorist attacks, prompting concerns from lawmakers who have called for
investigations.
The system uses the same data-mining process that was developed by the
Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that was banned by
Congress in 2003 because of vast privacy violations.
Information was gathered by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation of the project called
ADVISE -- Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic
Enhancement.
The ADVISE and TIA data-mining projects rely on personal data to track
individual behavior and consumer transactions to develop computer algorithms
that create a pattern that some behavioral scientists say can predict
terrorist behavior.
Data can include credit-card purchases, telephone or Internet details,
medical records, travel and banking information.
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security did not return a call
for comment.
September's Homeland Security spending bill tucks $40 million in funding to go forward in this year's budget
for the project.
"The ADVISE program is designed to extract relationships and correlations
from large amounts of data to produce actionable intelligence on
terrorists," the spending bill said," although protection
for the average citizen is lacking.
"Recent increased awareness about the existence of the TIA project provoked
expressions of concern about the potential for the invasion of privacy of
law-abiding citizens by the government, and about the direction of the
project by John Poindexter, a central figure in the Iran-Contra affair," the
CRS report said.
ADVISE was initiated in 2003
following the demise of the TIA project.
The new system includes data-mining tools to digest "massive quantities of
information from many different sources" to find "hidden relationships in
the data," according to a 2004 report by Sandia National Laboratories and
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on a Homeland Security workshop that
outlined this and other technology under development.
The technology is expected to analyze more than 3 million "relationships" or
connections per hour, says the report, which included an example of how
friends, family members, locations and workplaces can be linked by pinging
the data.
Airlines To Electronically Monitor the Emotions of Passengers
July 25, 2002 DOJgov.net newswire
FARNBOROUGH, England
A British company has developed a system of seat-based body sensors that
measure passenger anxiety levels. Locked into a control panel, it signals
the aircraft cabin crew. At that point, the crew would make decisions
on whether or not to subdue the passenger.
The rationale for this system of emotion and thought monitoring is based on
stopping "air rage" or potential terrorists.
"The thin-film sensors could aid cabin crew in monitoring passengers for
things like anxiety or high stress or someone who has been motionless for
some time," said Mel Foster of QinetiQ Plc, the British government-owned
company behind the sensors.
Airlines and governments are becoming increasingly strident in controlling
the actions and words of passengers. By hooking passengers up to what
is essentially a polygraph built into each seat, they will be making
subjective decisions on whether to restrain an anxiety ridden passenger who
just might be upset over visiting a relative or going on a business trip.
Upon landing, the passenger under restraint could be met and interrogated by
government agents.
QinetiQ said its proposed seat sensors could also help combat "economy class
syndrome" -- potentially fatal blood clots suffered by some passengers
flying long distances in cramped conditions.
Foster said the sensors cost tens of dollars each and could be ready in 12
to 18 months, although the big cost would be in integrating them into
existing aircraft systems.
No mention has yet been made of combining this system with either auto
restraints or something triggered by a flight attendant pressing a button on
a control panel.
Robot cameras To Target
Citizens based on Actions and Personality
April 22, 2002 DOJgov.net newswire - In the interest of predicting
crimes before they happen, Computers and Closed Circuit TV monitors could
soon be targeting people and alerting police based on their own intuition.
According to the Independent (UK), computers can be taught "acceptable" and
"unacceptable" patterns of behavior.
Moving in the direction of computers making life decisions based on
approval of someone’s actions, is alleged to predict and prevent crimes
before they happen.
At Kingston University in London, scientists claim to have developed
software able to anticipate if someone is about to mug an old lady or plant
a bomb at an airport. It works by examining images coming in from close
circuit television cameras (CCTV) and comparing them to behavioral patterns
that have been pre-programmed into its memory.
The software, called Cromatica, can then mathematically work out what is
likely to happen next. And if it decides that your actions are "undesirable"
it can send a warning signal to a security guard or police officer.
The system was developed by Dr Sergio Velastin, of Kingston University's
Digital Imaging Research Centre. Dr Velastin explained that not feeling safe
was a major reason why some people did not use public transportation. "In
some ways, women and the elderly are effectively excluded from the public
transport system," he said.
Mr. Velastin went on to explain that humans can miss things but
action-analyzing cameras will not. "Our technology excels at carrying out
the boring, repetitive tasks and highlighting potential situations that
could otherwise go unnoticed," he added.
Dr Velastin believes his creation has a much wider social use than just
improving transport although he does admit that "we are still a long way off
from machines replacing humans."
Computer processors tend to double their speed every year, allowing for
the running of ever more sophisticated software. Combined with a fear driven
era of government imposed uniformity, personal freedom might very well be
based on the pre-programmed prejudices of a mechanical bureaucrat.
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