http://sfscope.com/2009/05/comics-artist-mark-sable-detai.html
Comics artist Mark Sable detained for Unthinkable
By Ian Randal Strock
Boom! Studios sends word that comics writer Mark Sable was detained by TSA security guards at Los Angeles International Airport this past weekend because he was carrying a script for a new issue of his comic miniseries Unthinkable. Sable was detained while traveling to New York for a debut party at Jim Hanley's Universe today.Scenarios
The comic series follows members of a government think tank that was tasked with coming up with 9/11-type 'unthinkable' terrorist scenarios that now are coming true. (See this article for more on the series.)
Sable wrote of his experiences: 'Flying from Los Angeles to New York for a signing at Jim Hanley's Universe Wednesday (May 13th), I was flagged at the gate for 'extra screening'. I was subjected to not one, but two invasive searches of my person and belongings. TSA agents then 'discovered' the script for Unthinkable #3. They sat and read the script while I stood there, without any personal items, identification or ticket, which had all been confiscated.'
'The minute I saw the faces of the agents, I knew I was in trouble. The first page of the Unthinkable script mentioned 9/11, terror plots, and the fact that the (fictional) world had become a police state. The TSA agents then proceeded to interrogate me, having a hard time understanding that a comic book could be about anything other than superheroes, let alone that anyone actually wrote scripts for comics.'
'I cooperated politely and tried to explain to them the irony of the situation. While Unthinkable blurs the line between fiction and reality, the story is based on a real-life government think tank where a writer was tasked to design worst-case terror scenarios. The fictional story of Unthinkable unfolds when the writer's scenarios come true, and he becomes a suspect in the terrorist attacks.'
'In the end, I feel my privacy is a small price to pay for educating the government about the medium.'
I suspect this is to filter the internet to thwart/slow the spread of politically dangerous ideas, such as Wlodimir Ledochowski's Kulterkampf Revenge to the Vertriebenen (Expellees)
From The New York Times
Pentagon Plans New Arm to Wage Wars in Cyberspace
David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker
published May 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/us/politics/29cyber.html?th&emc=th
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon plans to create a new military command for cyberspace, administration officials said Thursday, stepping up preparations by the armed forces to conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare.The military command would complement a civilian effort to be announced by President Obama on Friday that would overhaul the way the United States safeguards its computer networks.
Mr. Obama, officials said, will announce the creation of a White House office — reporting to both the National Security Council and the National Economic Council — that will coordinate a multibillion-dollar effort to restrict access to government computers and protect systems that run the stock exchanges, clear global banking transactions and manage the air traffic control system.
White House officials say Mr. Obama has not yet been formally presented with the Pentagon plan. They said he would not discuss it Friday when he announced the creation of a White House office responsible for coordinating private-sector and government defenses against the thousands of cyberattacks mounted against the United States — largely by hackers but sometimes by foreign governments — every day.
But he is expected to sign a classified order in coming weeks that will create the military cybercommand, officials said. It is a recognition that the United States already has a growing number of computer weapons in its arsenal and must prepare strategies for their use — as a deterrent or alongside conventional weapons — in a wide variety of possible future conflicts.
The White House office will be run by a “cyberczar,” but because the position will not have direct access to the president, some experts said it was not high-level enough to end a series of bureaucratic wars that have broken out as billions of dollars have suddenly been allocated to protect against the computer threats.
The main dispute has been over whether the Pentagon or the National Security Agency should take the lead in preparing for and fighting cyberbattles. Under one proposal still being debated, parts of the N.S.A. would be integrated into the military command so they could operate jointly.
Officials said that in addition to the unclassified strategy paper to be released by Mr. Obama on Friday, a classified set of presidential directives is expected to lay out the military’s new responsibilities and how it coordinates its mission with that of the N.S.A., where most of the expertise on digital warfare resides today.
The decision to create a cybercommand is a major step beyond the actions taken by the Bush administration, which authorized several computer-based attacks but never resolved the question of how the government would prepare for a new era of warfare fought over digital networks.
It is still unclear whether the military’s new command or the N.S.A. — or both — will actually conduct this new kind of offensive cyberoperations.
The White House has never said whether Mr. Obama embraces the idea that the United States should use cyberweapons, and the public announcement on Friday is expected to focus solely on defensive steps and the government’s acknowledgment that it needs to be better organized to face the threat from foes attacking military, government and commercial online systems.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has pushed for the Pentagon to become better organized to address the security threat.
Initially at least, the new command would focus on organizing the various components and capabilities now scattered across the four armed services.
Officials declined to describe potential offensive operations, but said they now viewed cyberspace as comparable to more traditional battlefields.
“We are not comfortable discussing the question of offensive cyberoperations, but we consider cyberspace a war-fighting domain,“ said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. “We need to be able to operate within that domain just like on any battlefield, which includes protecting our freedom of movement and preserving our capability to perform in that environment.”
Although Pentagon civilian officials and military officers said the new command was expected to initially be a subordinate headquarters under the military’s Strategic Command, which controls nuclear operations as well as cyberdefenses, it could eventually become an independent command.
“No decision has been made,” said Lt. Col. Eric Butterbaugh, a Pentagon spokesman. “Just as the White House has completed its 60-day review of cyberspace policy, likewise, we are looking at how the department can best organize itself to fill our role in implementing the administration’s cyberpolicy.”
The creation of the cyberczar’s office inside the White House appears to be part of a significant expansion of the role of the national security apparatus there. A separate group overseeing domestic security, created by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks, now resides within the National Security Council. A senior White House official responsible for countering the proliferation of nuclear and unconventional weapons has been given broader authority. Now, cybersecurity will also rank as one of the key threats that Mr. Obama is seeking to coordinate from the White House.
The strategy review Mr. Obama will discuss on Friday was completed weeks ago, but delayed because of continuing arguments over the authority of the White House office, and the budgets for the entire effort.
It was kept separate from the military debate over whether the Pentagon or the N.S.A. is best equipped to engage in offensive operations. Part of that debate hinges on the question of how much control should be given to American spy agencies, since they are prohibited from acting on American soil.
“It’s the domestic spying problem writ large,” one senior intelligence official said recently. “These attacks start in other countries, but they know no borders. So how do you fight them if you can’t act both inside and outside the United States?”
Bid to End Wiretap Suit Is Rejected
The Associated Press
Published February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/us/28brfs-BIDTOENDWIRE_BRF.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y
The Obama administration has lost its argument that the state secrets privilege is a good enough reason to stop a lawsuit over the government’s program of wiretapping without warrants. A federal appeals court in San Francisco has rejected the Justice Department’s request for an emergency stay. The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, claimed national security would be compromised if a lawsuit brought by the American chapter of an Islamic charity was allowed to proceed. The case was brought by the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a defunct charity with a chapter in Oregon.
MSNBC INTERVIEW
Raw Story - Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists.
"The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications -- faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications," Tice claimed. "It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications."
Tice further explained that "even for the NSA it's impossible to literally collect all communications. . . What was done was sort of an ability to look at the metadata . . . and ferret that information to determine what communications would ultimately be collected."
According to Tice, in addition to this "low-tech, dragnet" approach, the NSA also had the ability to hone in on specific groups, and that was the aspect he himself was involved with. However, even within the NSA there was a cover story meant to prevent people like Tice from realizing what they were doing.
"In one of the operations that I was in, we looked at organizations, just supposedly so that we would not target them," Tice told Olbermann. "What I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7 and 365 days a year -- and it made no sense. . . I started to investigate that. That's about the time when they came after me to fire me."
When Olbermann pressed him for specifics, Tice offered, "An organization that was collected on were US news organizations and reporters and journalists."
"To what purpose?" Olbermann asked. "I mean, is there a file somewhere full of every email sent by all the reporters at the New York Times? Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York?"
Tice did not answer directly, but simply stated, "If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything." He added, however, that he had no idea what was ultimately done with the information, except that he was sure it "was digitized and put on databases somewhere."
Tice first began alleging that there were illegal activities going on at both the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency in December 2005, several months after being fired by the NSA. He also served at that time as a source for the New York Times story which revealed the existence of the NSA's wireless wiretapping program.
Did the Cameras Go on Strike?
Sunday, January 18th, 2009A jury has found that officers with the Prince George’s County, Maryland (where else?) police department used excessive force when they apprehended and arrested a TV reporter who was investigating possible improper use of public resources. I don’t know the much about the case other than what’s in the article, and from the article, it sound like the jury got it right–too much force, though the decision to puller her over may not have been out of bounds.
But it’s the last sentence of the article I found particularly interesting:
In all, nine police cars from Prince George’s and Cheverly responded. Although most of the squad cars were equipped with video cameras, police said none of them were working that day, Pavsner said.So “most” squad cars in PG County have video cameras. Yet at the scene of a controversial arrest, with nine cars at the scene, not a single squad car camera was “working that day?”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/14/AR2009011401409.html?hpid=moreheadlinesSo, as with such subversive police tactics as the [criminal-apostate] Commonwealth of Virginia's excuse that the police video was "just grey static", record keeping 'blunders' may be used to subvert the U.S. Constitution's 4th Amendment protections against politically motivated searches.
[excerpt]
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the court, said the evidence may be used "when police mistakes are the result of negligence such as that described here, rather than systemic error or reckless disregard of constitutional requirements."
He was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.
U.S. President Bush and Chief Justice Roberts with Cardinal Archbiship McCarrick
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/opinion/14keefe.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y
Big Brother Has Not Won
IF you thought the wiretapping controversy ended last summer, when Congress blessed the Bush administration’s warrantless-wiretapping program by passing a new surveillance law that greatly enhanced the powers of the National Security Agency, think again. The legacy of the illegal operation represents a serious problem for the Obama administration.After a contentious hearing this month on the most controversial aspect of the new law — a blanket grant of immunity to the telecom giants like AT&T that secretly permitted the N.S.A. to siphon off their customers’ communications — a federal judge in San Francisco must decide whether Congress has the authority to bestow absolution on private companies that appear to have violated the law. One paradox is that Bush administration lawyers have claimed from the outset that the surveillance program was entirely legal, yet they remain desperate to prevent any court from testing that claim. Instead, they are in the odd position of advocating immunity for something that they insist is not a crime.
Another paradox, which Barack Obama surely appreciates, is that the real issue underlying the immunity debate is not whether the telecoms should pay damages; it is whether lawsuits against the companies can be used to answer a question that Congress and the press have not: Just how bad was the N.S.A. program, after all?
Mr. Obama says he does not want his first term to become bogged down in any sort of “partisan witch hunt.” Indeed, the sheer extent of executive lawlessness in Washington over the past eight years has left so many wrongs to right that, in the interests of triage, the new president may choose to let bygones be bygones where wiretapping is concerned.But that would be a mistake. From 2001 to 2007, the United States government violated one of the signature prohibitions of the post-Watergate era by turning its formidable eavesdropping apparatus on its own citizens. The new law last summer resolved matters only by moving the goalpost, so that many of the N.S.A.’s more questionable activities simply became legal. But major questions remain about the legal grounds used to justify the program, and about how many innocent Americans were ensnared.
The Obama administration cannot enact the kind of thorough course correction on domestic surveillance that is needed without understanding how far off course the intelligence community got in the first place. Mr. Obama, who initially vowed to filibuster the immunity provision but, under pressure in the race against John McCain, backed down and reluctantly supported it, has committed “to have my attorney general conduct a comprehensive review” of N.S.A. surveillance.
That is a promising first step, but it is not enough. Nor is the prospect of reports due next summer from the inspectors general of the N.S.A. and the Justice Department. The good news for Mr. Obama, politically, is that the executive branch should not lead the charge in investigating the wiretapping. Congress should.
Provided that the Obama administration is willing to cooperate rather than stonewall in the Bush fashion, Congress can get to the bottom of the abuses while simultaneously reasserting itself as a coequal branch of government. To the extent possible, the hearings should be public, and if necessary, investigators should grant immunity to witnesses in exchange for candid testimony; this is no witch hunt, but an effort to establish an accurate historical record.
What details can actually be aired in public without violating national security? The number of Americans listened to and the broad contours of the program, for a start. For example, in March 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft threatened to resign over the program, backing down only when it was adjusted. What transgression was so appalling that it made John Ashcroft look like a civil libertarian? We still don’t know.
Even the legal opinions governing the program are still squirreled away in a safe in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. In recent months, the Senate Judiciary Committee and a Washington district judge have ordered them turned over, and the next attorney general should do so immediately.
Without some baseline understanding of what went wrong — and how wrong — in recent years, and without the establishment of some bright line rules of the road, it would be naïve to think that there won’t be future abuses. For aggressive intelligence agencies, legal ambiguity is an invitation to excess.
Wiretapping can sometimes seem forbiddingly complex, and many Americans just aren’t concerned that the government might monitor their calls. But what is at stake here is not mere personal privacy, but the bedrock American principles of separation of powers and the rule of law.
Jack Goldsmith, a former top Bush administration lawyer, pronounced the wiretapping program “the biggest legal mess” he had seen in his life. That sort of mess cannot simply be swept under the rug; it must be cleared up.
Patrick Radden Keefe, a fellow at the Century Foundation, is the author of “Chatter: Uncovering the Echelon Surveillance Network and the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping.”
New ID Scanners at Borders Raise Privacy Alarm
Monday, December 1, 2008 6:19 PM
By: Dave Eberhart
The federal government has already deployed new detection machines that can scan citizens without their knowledge from as far as 50 feet away and "read" their personal documents such as passports or driver's licenses.
The Homeland Security Department touts the high-tech devices as increasing security at border crossings, but privacy advocates are raising all sorts of red flags.
Critics say the new machines, which read one's personal information right through a wallet or purse, do so without consent or a warrant and may set a worrisome precedent.
The devices, called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) machines, allow officials to read remotely any passports, pass cards, and driver's licenses that contain special chips with personal information.
The RFIDs are so sensitive that, even before a vehicle pulls up at a border checkpoint, agents already will have on their computer screen the personal data of the passengers, including each person's name, date of birth, nationality, passport or ID number, and even a digitized photo.
The new gadgets are in place, or soon will be, at five border crossings: Blaine, Wash.; Buffalo; Detroit; Nogales, Ariz.; and San Ysidro, Calif. They are slated to have a dramatically expanded presence in June.
Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that the technology could make Americans less secure because terrorists or other criminals may be able to steal the personal information off the ID cards remotely.
Tien and other critics warn that people up to no good can use their own RFID machines in a process called "skimming" to read the information from as far as 50 feet.
Indeed, consumer privacy expert Katherine Albrecht maintains that the chips create the "potential for a whole surveillance network to be set up." Among other abuses, she says police could use them to track criminals; abusive husbands could use the technology to find their wives; and stores could trail the shopping patterns of patrons.
Homeland Security, however, rebuts the criticism, arguing that the embedded chips surrender only a code to machine readers. That code is then broken in order to display the personal information on the border agents' screen.
Meanwhile, the same agencies that are issuing the newfangled IDs supply a sleeve that keep out all prying electronic eyes when not in use.
© 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
For Immediate Release:
November 10, 2008http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20081110/index.htm
Court Rejects White House on Missing E-mails
Judge Kennedy sides with Archive and CREW on ability to sueFor more information contact:
Meredith Fuchs - 202/994-7000
John B. Williams/Sheila L. Shadmand [Jones Day] - 202/879-3939
Washington D.C., November 10, 2008 - A court ruled today that the National Security Archive may proceed with its effort to force the White House to recover millions of Bush Administration Executive Office of the President (EOP) e-mail records before the presidential transition. Rejecting the government’s motion to dismiss the Archive’s lawsuit, the Court ruled that the Federal Records Act permits a private plaintiff to bring suit to require the head of the EOP or the Archivist of the United States to notify Congress or ask the Attorney General to initiate action to recover destroyed or missing e-mail records.
“This ruling gives the public a clear voice in demanding preservation of our nation's history, even when that history is created at the White House,” explained Sheila Shadmand, an attorney at Jones Day who is representing the Archive. “We can now give positive action to that voice and protect these records before they get carted off or destroyed as the current administration packs its bags to leave. In that sense, the ruling itself is as historical as the records it will protect.”
“This is a major victory for the public interest in accountability at the White House,” added Archive General Counsel Meredith Fuchs. “Through this lawsuit we have preserved over 65,000 computer backup tapes. This decision means those tapes will survive the end of the Bush Administration so that Congress, the courts, and eventually the public will be able to learn about the decision-making that took place over the last 8 years.”
The National Security Archive originally filed its case against the Executive Office of the President and the National Archives and Records Administration to preserve and restore missing e-mail federal records in September 5, 2007. A subsequent lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has been consolidated with the Archive's lawsuit. A chronology of the litigation is available here.
--PLEASE FORWARD FAR AND WIDE--
Dear Doug,
Since 2001, I have devoted my life entirely to the peaceful promotion of windmills and solar panels to solve global warming. Apparently not everyone liked my work, however. Believe it or not, the Maryland State Police - your state police - put my name in their criminal intelligence database as a "suspected terrorist" as part of their larger program of collecting information about political activists in 2005-2006. I was on this outrageous "watch" list apparently because of a single act of peaceful civil disobedience I participated in outside a coal-fired power plant in 2004. CCAN's former deputy director Josh Tulkin was also put in the database as was another former CCAN staffer who has chosen to remain anonymous. Neither of these people has ever been arrested for anything in their entire lives. (See background below)
So about one third of the entire Maryland CCAN staff - one of the largest environmental groups in the state - was officially spied on by the police while we peacefully promoted clean electricity and clean cars for Maryland. This is, of course, an outrage and a threat, not just to civil liberties in Maryland, but to the state's entire environmental community. When people who are trying SAVE the climate and SAVE the Bay are considered terrorists, the world has truly been turned upside down.
To fix this problem, we need your help right now in two simple ways. Please:
Send an email: Write an email to the Md. Gov. Martin O'Malley asking him to release all surveillance files kept on CCAN staff and other activists statewide. (Presently, the police want to destroy the files without releasing printed copies, another outrage!) And ask O'Malley to support comprehensive legislation to prevent similar abuses from happening again. Send an email>>
Attend a rally Thurs. (tomorrow) at 10:30 am: Attend an emergency rally in Silver Spring at 10:30 am Thursday and make your voice heard. We'll be gathering at the Silver Spring Metro station with the heads of leading environmental organizations as well as elected officials and lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland. But we need you there too. We'll have signs and banners. Come have fun with us. Click here for details>>
Help end forever these police abuses in Maryland that threaten our climate/clean energy movement, and our right to organize for causes we believe in. Why has our state wasted precious resources creating a "terrorist" watch list of innocent people instead of devoting maximum resources to solving real environmental problems? The REAL terror in Maryland is the threat of 20 feet of sea-level rise. The REAL violence is the burning of coal to create electricity while wrecking the climate.
With your help we can end ALL of these abuses.
Sincerely,
Mike Tidwell
Executive Director, Chesapeake Climate Action Network
