by Ted Bridis and John Solomon |
| Numerous federal and local law enforcement agencies have bypassed subpoenas and warrants designed to protect civil liberties and gathered Americans' personal telephone records from private-sector data brokers. These brokers, many of whom advertise aggressively on the Internet, have gotten into customer accounts online, tricked phone companies into revealing information and even acknowledged that their practices violate laws, according to documents gathered by congressional investigators and provided to The Associated Press. The law enforcement agencies include offices in the Homeland Security Department and Justice Department — including the FBI and U.S. Marshal's Service — and municipal police departments in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia and Utah. Experts believe hundreds of other departments frequently use such services. "We are requesting any and all information you have regarding the above cell phone account and the account holder ... including account activity and the account holder's address," Ana Bueno, a police investigator in Redwood City, Calif., wrote in October to PDJ Investigations of Granbury, Texas. An agent in Denver for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Anna Wells, sent a similar request on March 31 on Homeland Security stationery: "I am looking for all available subscriber information for the following phone number," Wells wrote to a corporate alias used by PDJ. Congressional investigators estimated the U.S. government spent $30 million last year buying personal data from private brokers. But that number likely understates the breadth of transactions, since brokers said they rarely charge law enforcement agencies any price. PDJ said it always provided help to police for free. "Agencies from all across the country took advantage of it," said PDJ's lawyer, Larry Slade of Los Angeles. A lawmaker who has investigated the industry said Monday he was concerned by the practices of data brokers. "We know law enforcement has used this because it is easily obtained and you can gather a lot of information very quickly," said Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., head of the House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee. The panel expects to conduct hearings this week. Whitfield said data companies will relentlessly pursue a target's personal information. "They will impersonate and use everything available that they have to convince the person who has the information to share it with them, and it's shocking how successful they are," Whitfield said. "They can basically obtain any information about anybody on any subject." The congressman said laws on the subject are vague: "There's a good chance there are some laws being broken, but it's not really clear precisely which laws." James Bearden, a Texas lawyer who represents four such data brokers, compared the companies' activities to the National Security Agency, which reportedly compiles the phone records of ordinary Americans. "The government is doing exactly what these people are accused of doing," Bearden said. "These people are being demonized. These are people who are partners with law enforcement on a regular basis." The police agencies told AP they used the data brokers because it was quicker and easier than subpoenas, and their lawyers believe their actions were lawful. Some agencies, such as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, instructed agents to stop the practice after congressional inquiries. The U.S. Marshal's Service told AP it was examining its policies but compared services offered by data brokers to Web sites providing public telephone numbers nationally. None of the police agencies interviewed by AP said they researched these data brokers to determine how they secretly gather sensitive information like names associated with unlisted numbers, records of phone calls, e-mail aliases — even tracing a person's location using their cellular phone signal. "If it's on the Internet and it's been commended to us, we wouldn't do a full-scale investigation," Marshal's Service spokesman David Turner said. "We don't knowingly go into any source that would be illegal. We were not aware, I'm fairly certain, what technique was used by these subscriber services." At Immigration and Customs Enforcement, spokesman Dean Boyd said agents did not pay for phone records and sought approval from U.S. prosecutors before making requests. Their goal was "to more quickly identify and filter out phone numbers that were unrelated to their investigations," Boyd said. Targets of the police interest include alleged marijuana smugglers, car thieves, armed thugs and others. The data services also are enormously popular among banks and other lenders, private detectives and suspicious spouses. Customers included: _A U.S. Labor Department employee who used her government e-mail address and phone number to buy two months of personal cellular phone records of a woman in New Jersey. _A buyer who received credit card information about the father of murder victim Jon Benet Ramsey. _A buyer who obtained 20 printed pages of phone calls by pro basketball player Damon Jones of the Cleveland Cavaliers. The athlete was "shocked to learn somebody had obtained this information," said Mark Termini, his lawyer and agent in Cleveland. "When a person or agency is able to obtain by fraudulent means a person's personal information, that is something that should be prohibited by law." PDJ's lawyer said no one at the company violated laws, but he acknowledged, "I'm not sure that every law enforcement agency in the country would agree with that analysis." Many of the executives summoned to testify before Congress this week were expected to invoke their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and to decline to answer questions. Slade said no one at PDJ impersonated customers to steal personal information, a practice known within the industry as pretexting. "This was farmed out to private investigators," Slade said. "They had written agreements with their vendors, making sure the vendors were acquiring the information in legal ways." Privacy advocates bristled over data brokers gathering records for police without subpoenas. "This is pernicious, an end run around the Fourth Amendment," said Marc Rotenberg, head of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, a leading privacy group that has sought tougher federal regulation of data brokers. "The government is encouraging unlawful conduct; it's not smart on the law enforcement side to be making use of information obtained improperly." A federal agent who ordered phone records without subpoenas about a half-dozen times recently said he learned about the service from FBI investigators and was told this was a method to obtain phone subscriber information quicker than with a subpoena. The agent, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak with reporters, said he and colleagues use data brokers "when he have the need to act fairly quickly" because getting a subpoena can involve lengthy waits. Waiting for a phone company's response to a subpoena can take several days or up to 45 days, said police supervisor Eric Stasiak of Redwood City, Calif. In some cases, a request to a data broker yields answers in just a few hours, Stasiak said. Legal experts said law enforcement agencies would be permitted to use illegally obtained information from private parties without violating the Fourth Amendment's protection against unlawful search and seizure, as long as police did not encourage any crimes to be committed. "If law enforcement is encouraging people in the private sector to commit a crime in getting these records that would be problematic," said Mark Levin, a former top Justice Department official under President Reagan. "If, on the other hand, they are asking data brokers if they have any public information on any given phone numbers that should be fine." Levin said he nonetheless would have advised federal agents to use the practice only when it was a matter of urgency or national security and otherwise to stick to a legally bulletproof method like subpoenas for everyday cases. Congress subpoenaed thousands of documents from data brokers describing how they collected telephone records by impersonating customers. "I was shot down four times," Michele Yontef complained in an e-mail in July 2005 to a colleague. "I keep getting northwestern call center and they just must have had an operator meeting about pretext as every operator is clued in." Yontef, who relayed another request for phone call records as early as February, was among those ordered to appear at this week's hearing. Another company years ago even acknowledged breaking the law. "We must break various rules of law in acquiring all the information we achieve for you," Touch Tone Information Inc. of Denver wrote to a law firm in 1998 that was seeking records of calls made on a calling card. The FBI's top lawyers told agents as early as 2001 they can gather private information about Americans from data brokers, even information gleaned from mortgage applications and credit reports, which normally would be off-limits to the government under the U.S. Fair Credit Reporting Act. FBI lawyers rationalized that even though data brokers may have obtained financial information, agents could still use the information because brokers were not acting as a consumer-reporting agency but rather as a data warehouse. The FBI said it relies only on well-respected data brokers and expects agents to abide by the law. "The FBI can only collect and retain data available from commercial databases in strict compliance with applicable federal law," spokesman Mike Kortan said Monday. |
21.6.06
Police Got Phone Data from Brokers
20.6.06
U.S. Learns to Live with Less Freedom
by Tim Harper |
Speak for yourself. |
| MANCHESTER, New Hampshire - The fierce cultural aversion to the long reach of government is emblazoned on every licence plate here, an omnipresent statement that should make Rich Tomasso's job easier. But even a man who makes it his business to protect individual liberties in a state where no government would dare collect a sales tax or personal income tax — or force a seatbelt around a driver or a helmet on a motorcyclist — has to face some harsh realities in George W. Bush's America. "People are more afraid of terror than having their privacy violated," says Tomasso, chair of the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance. "For so long the rhetoric has been about fear, not hope and more traditional American values.""Live Free or Die" is not just a cheesy licence plate slogan in this tiny New England state. But even New Hampshire is not immune to the national erosion of civil liberties that has permeated every part of the United States since terrorists forced their way into airline cockpits almost five years ago, taking away a nation's bravado and replacing it with fear. The exploitation of that fear by an administration intent on inflating the powers of the presidency, at the expense of a cowed Congress and with the tacit approval of an anxious nation, may be a cautionary tale for Canadians should some of that U.S.-style fear find its way north of the border in the wake of Toronto's recent terrorism arrests.In recent years, it has become a truism that Americans will trade away some liberties because they have been attacked. Canadians have not.But where is that rugged U.S. individuality that had helped define this nation? "Canadians, over the past couple of decades, appear to be much more aware of civil liberties. They have the balance just about right between the sense of community and individualism," says Phillip Cooper, an expert on separation of powers at Portland State University in Oregon."I hope this politics of fear doesn't gravitate across the border. One hopes that your country won't see the polarization we have here. Canadians look down here and see this U.S. individuality, but it has become a fearful, combative individuality."Since Bush declared his global war on terror, "it has become a war on American citizens," says Dan Belforti, who is running for the U.S. Congress as a Libertarian candidate in New Hampshire.It started with the country — those of all political stripes — rallying around a leader who cast the U.S. as victim, declaring the rest of the world was either with him or against him. Bush and his inner circle allowed to stand the perception that the Iraq war was linked to Sept. 11, 2001 — a belief still held today by a substantial number of Americans. (we fear our Government will cause us another mass murder) With the threat of another attack foremost in their minds, Americans looked the other way as "enemy combatants" were held without due process at Guantanamo Bay, shrugged amid revelations their government was secretly picking up terrorist suspects and flying them to countries with ugly human rights records, yawned when they were told the CIA might be holding prisoners in secret sites in Eastern Europe. But more surprising has been the lack of pushback when they were told the Bush administration had ignored a law requiring court approval and had begun wiretapping international calls of Americans and assembling a massive databank of phone records of Americans.In Canada, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service must get court approval before conducting any electronic surveillance, and the Communications Security Establishment needs written authorization from the minister of defence. Here, Bush argued his constitutional power overrode the need to go to a court that took too long to give approval anyway.More quietly, Bush has claimed, some 750 times, the authority to disobey laws he has signed — including a much-publicized ban on torture — if they conflict with his interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. No U.S. president has ever invoked that right so many times.The U.S. Congress has passed legislation that essentially establishes a national ID card, and there are calls for a national DNA registry of Americans.The Bush administration believes it is on the winning side when it comes to the tug between security and liberty."When you push even the harshest critic, even they say, `Yeah, we should be listening to Al Qaeda,'" a senior administration official told The Washington Post, making a reference to the wiretapping program. "So from that perspective, that's a winning (issue) and we're on the side of the public." But there have been recent signs that the beginning of a pushback may finally be at hand."The Bush administration has been bent on a scheme for years of reducing Congress to akin to an extra in a Cecil B. DeMille political (movie) extravaganza," Bruce Fein, a justice official in Ronald Reagan's administration, told Congress recently. "(It includes) the assertion of executive privilege to deny Congress any authority to oversee executive branch operations; a claim of inherent presidential authority to flout any statute that he thinks impedes his ability to gather foreign intelligence, whether opening mail, conducting electronic surveillance, breaking and entering, or committing torture. "Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch of the libertarian Cato Institute have written that Bush has conferred upon himself the power to pursue any tactic he wishes to win the war on terror, simply by telling audiences he will use any "legal" means to protect the country."That is what most Americans want to hear and believe," they write. "Unfortunately, the president appears to believe that he is the ultimate arbiter of what is legal and what is illegal — at least in matters relating to national security. "Cooper says there is nothing unusual or wrong about people rallying around leaders in times of stress. What is wrong, he says, is when they stop paying attention to what the government is doing."There is not much doubt the administration has utilized the fear of another 9/11 and the war on terror to expand the executive power," Cooper says.But he says the wakeup call might have been sounded. "People are starting to ask questions," he says. "In a way, I'm a little bit surprised that things as obscure and arcane as presidential signing statements appear to have had some staying power in the media. "Bush's predilection for presidential signing statements, which give him the right to ignore portions of the laws he signs, had largely gone unnoticed until late last year, when he signed an amendment to a military spending bill that banned cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of foreign prisoners. Then, after a highly publicized signing ceremony with the man behind the ban, Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, Bush quietly put a statement in the U.S. register giving him the right to ignore the ban if he felt it was protecting Americans from terror. BU*SH*IT A litany of court challenges have been issued by civil liberties groups over the reported data-mining by U.S. phone companies and arguments were heard in a Detroit court last week in a legal challenge to the wiretapping program. A Supreme Court ruling on Bush's plan to try "enemy combatants" under special military tribunals at Guantanamo could come this month and if the court rules the tribunals invalid, it could begin the process of closing the prison camp.Revolt may finally be brewing within the ranks of Congress where Republicans facing mid-term elections in the fall are finding backbone. Revolt is brewing in New Hampshire, too. It is the first state to openly challenge the so-called Real ID Act, approved last year and scheduled to come into effect in May 2008. Many believe it is the precursor to a national ID card.The bill requires states to check whether driver's licence applicants are in the country legally, and to require documents showing their birthdate, social security number and home address. The act also requires that states find a way to verify the documents are valid. If New Hampshire rejects the law, its residents will no longer be allowed to use driver's licences as required identification at airports, federal buildings and, potentially, the Canadian border."The view here is `get off my motorcycle, get out of my car, stay away from my guns and get out of my bedroom,'" says Michael Dupre, a professor of political sociology at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics."The culture of liberty is still very strong here." |
Russia's 'Floating Chernobyls' to Go Ahead Despite Green Fears
by Andrew Osborn | |
| Russia is to press ahead with the world's first floating nuclear power station despite environmental concerns. The first "floating Chernobyl" could be ready in four years.
Sergey Kiriyenko, the head of Rosenergoatom, said: "There will be no floating Chernobyl," referring to the 1986 nuclear disaster. Sergey Obozov, a senior official at the agency, said they would be "reliable as a Kalashnikov assault rifle, which are a benchmark of safety." But environmentalists warned that the power stations could sink in stormy weather, and could become a target for terrorists. A report from Bellona Foundation, an independent Norwegian research group, claims the floating power stations are "a threat to the Arctic, the world's oceans, and the whole concept of non-proliferation." The structures will supply heat and electricity to far-flung corners of Russia's far east and far north where it is difficult and expensive to ship coal and oil. Russia also wants to sell the structures to other countries, including China and India. The structures will have a service life of 40 years, require a crew of 69 people, and could power a medium-sized town. The first power station will be moored in the White Sea off the town of Severodvinsk in Russia's northern Archangel region. I find it quite amusing, that America claims to be this 'super power' with the chutzbah to go around 'warning' other countries regarding thier use of technology (should it pose a "threat"), yet many other countries are for more technologically sophisticated. Yet we can't even get a grasp on the metric system. |
Democrats Say Key Superfund Data Is Being Withheld From the Public
The EPA won't release some data on 140 Superfund locations. Senate Republicans say their rivals may want to reinstate a cleanup fee. |
| by T. Christian Miller |
| WASHINGTON - Senate Democrats on Thursday accused the Bush administration of withholding key details about toxic waste sites that present risks of exposure to nearby residents. |
US Warns North Korea against 'Provocative' Missile Test
by Felipe Seligman and Juliana Lara Resende |
| The United States sharply warned North Korea against testing a ballistic missile, saying it would take steps to protect itself as speculation mounts about an imminent launch. "Together, our diplomacy and that of our allies has made clear to North Korea that a missile launch would be a provocative act that is not in their interests and will further isolate them from the world," said US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack. "We have a variety of national technical means that we could use to monitor the situation. We, of course, will take necessary preparatory steps to track any potential activities and to protect ourselves," he told reporters. North Korea on Friday accused a US reconnaissance plane of intruding over its territorial space to spy on strategic targets, amid jitters over the Stalinist country's apparent preparations for a missile test. South Korean and US officials have said that North Korea appears to be preparing to test-launch an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the mainland United States. On Friday, South Korean officials and analysts said that North Korea had not yet begun fueling a long-range missile on its northeast coast, the final step before a possible launch. "It will take at least two days to fill the rocket with liquid fuel and if they finish it, we can say they are ready to start the countdown," Baek Seung-Joo from the government-backed Korean Institute for Defence Analyses told AFP. Also on Friday, Japan warned North Korea against testing a ballistic missile, saying it would set back efforts to normalize diplomatic relations. "If a ballistic missile is launched, it would directly affect our nation's security and constitute a violation of the Pyongyang Declaration," Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, the government spokesman, told reporters. North Korea is believed to be developing the missile for a range of up to 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles). It shocked the world in August 1998 by firing a long-range Taepodong-1 missile with a range of up to 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) over Japan into the Pacific Ocean. The North claimed that was a satellite launch. Asked about the possible missile test, White House national security spokesman Fred Jones replied: "We're not going to discuss or speculate about intelligence matters. Our concerns about North Korea's missile program are well-known." "North Korea should abide by the long-range missile test moratorium it has observed since 1999 and return to the six-party talks" aimed at ending the crisis over its nuclear weapons, said Jones. Jones said North Korea should "negotiate steps to implement" an agreement in principle, made in September 2005, "in which North Korea agreed to abandon all its nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs." The latest developments led prominent Democratic senators Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin to send President George W. Bush a letter on Thursday pushing for a policy change after "largely fruitless" six-party talks. "We may be approaching the nightmare scenario in which our only option is to negotiate with a North Korea that can attack the United States with a nuclear weapon instead of a North Korea that is still working towards that capability," they wrote. The lawmakers urged Bush to craft a "single, coordinated presidential strategy" to deal with North Korea's nuclear and missile programs, led by a senior envoy. The United States had been involved with China, Russia, Japan and South Korea in talks with North Korea to disband the reclusive state's nuclear arms program in return for security and diplomatic guarantees and energy aid. Six-party talks came to a head in September 2005, with North Korea agreeing in principle to end its atomic weapons program. But talks collapsed two months later, after the United States imposed financial sanctions on Pyongyang for alleged US dollar counterfeiting and money laundering activities. North Korea refused to come back to the table unless sanctions were lifted, while the United States did not budge, saying it cannot compromise on issues such as counterfeiting that threaten national sovereignty. On Wednesday, White House national security adviser Stephen Hadley said that a missile launch "would be a bad idea for North Korea." North Korea's Air Force Command said Friday that a US RC-135 plane had spied on strategic targets for hours after flying over North Korean waters off the northeast coast. "The ceaseless illegal intrusions of their strategic reconnaissance planes on spy missions have created an imminent danger of military clash in the sky above those waters," it warned in a statement published by the official Korean Central News Agency. On Sunday, the North Korean air force threatened to "punish" US spy flights, recalling the fate of a US Navy plane it shot down in the Sea of Japan (East Sea) in 1969. Another US-North Korean incident occurred when North Korea fired missiles at a SR-71 spy plane in August 1981. The jet was undamaged. |
19.6.06
US Not Prepared for Catastrophe: Official Report
The United States is not prepared to cope with a large-scale terrorist attack or a powerful hurricane, the US Department of Homeland Security has said in a report.
The Nationwide Plan Review, conducted in response to directives from President George W. Bush and Congress, examined whether the emergency plans of cities and states were adequate to manage another tragedy.
"The majority of the nation's current emergency operations plans and planning processes cannot be characterized as fully sufficient to manage catatrophic events," the report said.
"Significant weaknesses in evacuation planning are an area of profound concern," it said, adding that the capabilities to receive and care of large numbers of evacuees were found to be "inadequate."
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement: "Most areas of the country are well-prepared to handle standard situations."
But the review findings "demonstrate the need for all levels of government across the country to improve emergency operations plans for catastrophic events such as a major terrorist attack or (top) category-five hurricane strike," it said.
"Several areas, including evacuation, attention to populations with special needs, command structure and resource management, were areas needing significant attention," it said.
The report also lists measures the federal government needs to take to improve and coordinate disaster planning.
The findings "unequivocally support the need to modernize planning processes, products and tools, and to move our national emergency planning efforts to the next level needed for catastrophic events," said George Foresman, the department's under-secretary for preparedness.
"It is a natural evolution towards working together as a nation to implement the lessons from seminal events such as the September 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina," he said in a statement.
Authorities at all levels of government were blasted over their response to Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1,300 people and displaced tens of thousands along the US Gulf coast in August last year.
The city of New Orleans is still struggling to recover and engineers have warned its levees may not withstand another Katrina-style battering.
Some groups warn Louisiana is especially vulnerable to hurricanes this season, because erosion continues to eat away a chunk of Louisiana's coastal wetlands the size of a football field every 30 minutes.
Scientists and environmental activists say that the wetlands are nature's barriers against hurricanes.
The Nationwide Plan Review comes two weeks into the hurricane season, which started June 1. US weather experts are forecasting between eight to 10 hurricanes -- as many as six of them major -- in the Atlantic basin this year.
The review was conducted in all 56 states and territories and 75 urban areas over six months.
The emergency plans were compared to pre-Katrina standards by review teams that included former state and local homeland security and emergency management officials.
