ACLU demands info on domestic military deployments

Following reports that US troops will be permanently on call to work inside the United States handling “civil unrest,” “crowd control” and other functions traditionally carried out by civilian law enforcement agencies, activists are demanding to know why the Pentagon is reversing a longstanding prohibition on domestic deployment of the military.

The Department of Defense for the first time is assigning a full-time Army unit to be on call with Northern Command, which was created after Sept. 11 to facilitate military cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security in the event of another terrorist attack.

The American Civil Liberties Union is demanding more details on the domestic deployments, which appear to violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits use of the military to direct internal affairs of the US. The ACLU warns that without fully knowing the reasoning and justifications behind the Army’s plan, the domestic deployments could be used to expand a militarized surveillance apparatus that already includes the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program and DHS’s plans to turn military spy satellites inside US borders. Read more

Iran busts ’spy pigeons’ near nuclear site

Security forces in Natanz have arrested two suspected “spy pigeons” near Iran’s controversial uranium enrichment facility, the reformist Etemad Melli newspaper reported on Monday. Read more

Paris to quadruple number of CCTV cameras

Paris will quadruple the number of closed-circuit police cameras in its streets by the end of next year, after President Nicolas Sarkozy’s promise to emulate London in an attempt to track crime and terrorism threats.

While the Paris metro and rail networks already operate around 9,500 CCTV devices, police have only 330 at their disposal to survey outside public areas. The new plan, dubbed “A Thousand Cameras for Paris”, will raise that number to more than 1,200 - with most installed in high-risk areas and outside railway and underground stations. Read more

UK Drivers will have no escape from new speed cameras

Clusters of speed cameras that will monitor drivers’ average speed on all routes across a wide area are to be deployed on hundreds of roads next year.

It will be impossible to evade detection because the digital cameras will cover every entry and exit point and, unlike the earlier speed cameras, will never run out of film.

Drivers who slow down briefly or who make a detour from the main route will still be caught because up to 50 of the cameras will work together in a network. They can be positioned more than 15 miles apart and will automatically read numberplates and transmit data instantly to a penalty processing centre. Read more

ABC: NSA agents admit spying on Americans’ private calls

The Bush administration has repeatedly defended its warrantless surveillance of Americans as being directed only against “people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations.”

Now two intercept operators who worked for the National Security Agency at Fort Gordon in Georgia have come forward to tell ABC News that isn’t true.

David Murfee Faulk described to ABC’s Brian Ross how he had listened to “personal phone calls of American officers, mostly in the Green Zone [in Baghdad], calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses and sometimes their girlfriends.” Read more

Enhanced FBI powers go into effect

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US Attorney General Michael Mukasey has signed new guidelines for FBI operations he said are designed to better protect the country from terrorist attacks, but that raise concern of some lawmakers and civil rights groups. Read more

U.K. to spend 12 bln pounds to spy on calls and e-mails - paper

LONDON, October 5 (RIA Novosti) - The U.K. authorities are considering spending up to 12 billion pounds ($21 billion) on a database to keep information on Internet intercepts, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain, The Sunday Times reported.

U.K. officials say live monitoring is necessary to fight terrorism and crime. However, critics have doubts about whether such a vast system can be kept secure, the paper said.

The British security service MI5 currently conducts limited e-mail and website intercepts only under warrants from the home secretary, the paper said.

According to The Sunday Times, the government’s eavesdropping center, GCHQ, has already been allocated 1 billion British pounds ($21 billion) to finance the first stage of the project.

Hundreds of secret probes are believed to be installed on two of the country’s biggest Internet and mobile phone providers - BT and Vodafone - to monitor customers live, the paper said.

According to The Sunday Times, no formal decision had yet been taken but sources said that officials had agreed in principle to the program.

“Any suggestion of the government using existing powers to intercept communications data without public discussion is going to sound extremely sinister,” the paper quoted Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, as saying.

RIA Novosti | Sunday, October 5, 2008

EU to introduce ‘virtual strip searches’ at airports by 2010

According to a draft European Commission regulation, seen by The Daily Telegraph, the new millimetre wave imaging scanners are to be used “individually or in combination, as a primary or secondary means and under defined conditions” to provide a “virtual strip search” of travellers.

The new EU regulation, which will be binding on Britain, is intended to enter into force across the continent by the end of April 2010. Read more

Facebook hires Alberto Gonzales’s former chief of staff

Accused of permitting unwarranted spying on citizens, torture, helping to blow a CIA agent’s cover and firing non-political appointees for political reasons, former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales left the White House shrouded in ignominy. Facebook just hired his former right-hand man, Ted Ullyot, as its general counsel. The privacy advocates who plagued Facebook during its Beacon controversy might not be pleased, but Washington insider and top Facebook flack Elliot Schrage is giddy. “He has an extraordinary combination of private legal practice and public sector experience. So many of the legal issues we face touch on both of those arenas,” Schrage told the Los Angeles Times. “Ted’s arrival really demonstrates we’re a little more grown-up.” Ullyot’s impressive resume:

• Served as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
• Worked as the top lawyer for AOL Time Warner in Europe.
• Joined Gonzales at the Department of Justice White House as a deputy assistant and deputy staff secretary in 2003, earning a promotion to chief of staff that stuck when he and Gonzales moved to the Department of Justice in 2005. “[Gonzales's] leadership style is to listen and engage,” Ullyot told the Washington Post of Gonzales. “Our job on the staff is to make sure that he’s hearing from all the people that he needs to be hearing from.”
• Along with Raul Yanes, coordinated the White House’s response to the investigation into the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. The case ended with Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief-of-staff Scotter Libby’s conviction.
• As assistant to Gonzales when he was the White House counsel, helped defend — or at least did not object to — policies established by the infamous “torture memo,” which argued for ways the Bush administration could forgo the Geneva Conventions in order to prosecute the War on Terror. “The tragedy of the torture memo is that it didn’t get caught at a much lower level much more quickly,” one former Justice Department official under President Bill Clinton told Law.com. “Had that memo received a broader look, there is no question that people would have said this is just wrong, as the administration later admitted it was.”
• Earned Alberto Gonzales’s unwavering praise: “I appreciate the steady leadership, counsel, integrity, and tireless commitment that Ted brought to this job and the cause of justice. I thank Ted for his great service to the President and the Nation in these challenging times. I wish him all the best as he moves on to this next phase of his career, and I look forward to our continued friendship.”

Correction: Part of this post originally suggested Ullyot began working at the DoJ in 2003. He began working with Gonzales at the White House and they both moved to the DoJ in 2005.

Valleywag | Ted Ullyot | Monday, September 29, 2008

Bush’s Economic 9/11 and the Rise of Big Brother Banking

Editor’s Note: Behind the economic bailout is a looming specter of government as Big ‘Banker’ Brother, and activists are protesting for fear of further erosion of civil liberties, reports NAM contributor Roberto Lovato.

NEW YORK - Arun Gupta stood between the throngs of tourists and the small army of activists squeezing onto the narrow concrete island occupied largely by the 7,000 pound bronze Wall Street bull and declared, “We’re here to say no to the bailout.” Read more

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