government – Page 30 – B12 Solipsism

FBI Wiretaps Dropped Due to Unpaid Bills

January 10, 2008February 27, 2018 Seth Anderson0 comment

What a joke. Is this why the Telecoms want immunity?

Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau’s repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.

A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI’s lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.

In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation ”was halted due to untimely payment,” the audit found. FISA wiretaps are used in the government’s most sensitive and secretive criminal and intelligence investigations, and allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies.

”We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence,” according to the audit by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.

More than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance in five unidentified FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report show

[Click to read more of FBI Wiretaps Dropped Due to Unpaid Bills – New York Times]

The ACLU is calling for the full release of the report, as something doesn’t quite add up.

Americans should be extremely concerned when the FBI’s failure to pay its bills on time puts our national security at risk. We’re down the constitutional rabbit hole when lack of payment, and not the lack of a warrant, prevents the FBI from wiretapping. It seems the telecoms, who are claiming they were just being “good patriots” when they allowed the government to spy on us without warrants, are more than willing to pull the plug on national security investigations when the government falls behind on its bills. To put it bluntly it sounds as though the telecoms believe it when FBI says warrant is in the mail but not when they say the check is in the mail.

The information released by the OIG is yet another example of the complete disarray at the FBI. The FBI has failed to address its serious management issues – continuing to turn a blind eye to its internal problems. Yet against all odds, instead of being chided for not addressing these problems, the agency has asked for and received even more authority from Congress.

Six and a half years after 9/11, the bureau’s mismanagement still threatens our national security.

Until proper oversight is imposed on the intelligence community, our security and our rights will remain at risk. As Congress is seeking to further expand surveillance powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, we urge them to take these facts into account. The bureau must be held accountable. If the FBI can’t even manage its checkbook properly, how can we trust it to ensure that our rights are being protected?”

For more information on FISA and surveillance, go to:
www.aclu.org/fisa

[From American Civil Liberties Union : ACLU Says FBI Can’t Manage Checkbook]

Terrorism Theater

January 1, 2008 Seth Anderson0 comment

Here’s why I hate to fly, post 9/11. All of the counter-terrorism measures enacted at US airports are just prop-comic jokes – supremely unfunny ones to boot. Shoe bombs? Liquid explosives? Only on television or in James Bonds films, not practical in the real world. Restricting wine openers and cuticle scissors? Ridiculous. One can make a deadly weapon out of a myriad of devices, including a credit card or a photo id! Try bending a card you no longer need in half, that sucker quickly becomes a sharp, sharp blade. Confiscating bottles of liquid in huge garbage barrels? If the bottles of water are so dangerous, why are they kept in the crowded areas of airports for hours? Obviously nobody is really scared of these liquids, yet the TSA guards become rapidly belligerent if one attempts to notice this fact, or any other inane Terrorism Theater prop.

Does any of the Terrorism Theater Kabuki make us safer? Doubtful.

Patrick Smith (a commercial pilot) explores the topic in detail:

But of all the contradictions and self-defeating measures T.S.A. has come up with, possibly none is more blatantly ludicrous than the policy decreeing that pilots and flight attendants undergo the same x-ray and metal detector screening as passengers. What makes it ludicrous is that tens of thousands of other airport workers, from baggage loaders and fuelers to cabin cleaners and maintenance personnel, are subject only to occasional random screenings when they come to work.

These are individuals with full access to aircraft, inside and out. Some are airline employees, though a high percentage are contract staff belonging to outside companies. The fact that crew members, many of whom are former military fliers, and all of whom endured rigorous background checks prior to being hired, are required to take out their laptops and surrender their hobby knives, while a caterer or cabin cleaner sidesteps the entire process and walks onto a plane unimpeded, nullifies almost everything our T.S.A. minders have said and done since September 11th, 2001. If there is a more ringing let-me-get-this-straight scenario anywhere in the realm of airport security, I’d like to hear it.

I’m not suggesting that the rules be tightened for non-crew members so much as relaxed for all accredited workers. Which perhaps urges us to reconsider the entire purpose of airport security:

[Click to read more of The Airport Security Follies – Jet Lagged – Air Travel – Opinion – New York Times Blog]

I just drive, or don’t go at all, if at all possible.

FAA Official to Lead Industry Group

August 26, 2007 Seth Anderson3 Comments

No possibility of conflict of interest here. Ahem.

I think government officials should be barred from employment in the sector they regulate for ten years, or even forever. The so-called revolving door has been standard for years, and it stinks like crony capitalism by a different name to me.

F.A.A. Chief to Lead Industry Group:
Marion C. Blakey, the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, will become the new head of the Aerospace Industries Association, a trade group representing civilian and military aerospace companies, in November, the association said. Ms. Blakey, who led the National Transportation Safety Board before joining the F.A.A., was appointed by President Bush to a five-year term. Her term expires Sept. 13. The term of a successor would fall mostly in the next presidential administration. The White House has not announced an intention to nominate a successor.

Adults and Prescription Drugs

April 17, 2007June 2, 2008 Seth Anderson0 comment

This has long bothered me as well. Why are doctors (and governments) given such vast powers over which drugs are ok for a patient? Seems like a capricious system. Competent adults should be allowed to treat themselves as they see fit (which of course they often do by resorting to other means, or alternative medicine, etc.), and not strictly as their doctor sees fit. No other profession has quite as much power as doctors do in this instance.

Glenn Greenwald – Salon

I’ve always been interested in the topic of prescription drug laws because — even more than laws which prohibit adults from using recreational drugs — it seems absolutely unjustifiable for the government to prevent adult citizens from deciding for themselves which pharmaceutical products they want to use. Put another way, it seems unfathomable that competent adults are first required to obtain the “permission” of a doctor before being “allowed” to obtain and consume the medications they think they need — and that they are committing crimes if they do not first obtain that permission (or, worse, if they try to obtain that permission and are unable to do so).
….
Why should the doctor have the ability to override the decisions of the patient? Why should the doctor’s permission be required before the patient undergoes the pharmaceutical treatment he chooses? That really makes no sense to me, and for that reason, I am vehemently opposed to these prescription laws.

Beyond all of that, there is even less reason for the Federal government to be monitoring what substances anyone takes. In addition to all the other reasons I listed in the post and commenters have added, I am also convinced — reading around everywhere today on this topic — that there are substantial numbers of people foregoing pharmaceutical treatments that they think they should have (and which even their physicians recommend) because they fear having that information registered in data bases with the government.

Adults have the right to do all sorts of things that other people, including experts in a particular field, think are stupid and self-destructive, even when the person’s livelihood or even life are at stake. That is, more or less, a defining attribute of being an adult.

What is the difference between the attorney-client and doctor-patient relationship, where the former is purely advisory but the latter becomes parental? And other than consumption of medicine which can actually affect the public health (such as excessive consumption of antibiotics), why should an adult be deemed a criminal for using a particular medicine all because a doctor (for whatever reasons, including self-interest) will not give permission?

Bush Censors Climate Reports

March 20, 2007 Seth Anderson0 comment

Speaking about Bush crony-corruption (aren’t we always?), climate change science also was a target of the heavy hand of the Assministration. Following the Bush playbook, oil industry hacks were placed in positions of authority, and manipulated every bit of data they could to obfuscate global warming reports.

Chris Mooney has more, as does the LA Times:

Congressional hearing heats up over changes to climate reports – Los Angeles Times

Government scientists, armed with copies of heavily edited reports, charged Monday that the Bush administration and its political appointees had soft-pedaled their findings on climate change.The accusations led Democrats and Republicans at the congressional hearing to accuse each other of censorship, smear tactics and McCarthyism.

To underscore their charges of the administration’s oil-friendly stance, Democrats grilled an oil lobbyist who was hired by the White House to review government climate change documents and who made hundreds of edits that the lawmakers said minimized the impact of global warming.“You were a spin doctor,” Rep. John A. Yarmuth (D-Ky) told the lobbyist.

Henry Waxman is doing his job well:

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing was marked by an open confrontation between Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) and the ranking Republican, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) — a rare display of direct debate in otherwise carefully choreographed hearings.

The hearing was the latest effort to challenge what the Democratic congressional majority sees as the Bush administration’s unchecked use of power. In the past few weeks, Democrats have held inquiries or announced plans to examine the unmonitored use of national security letters that allow the government to spy on Americans, the dismissal of U.S. attorneys and the identifying of former covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, among other issues.

Waxman has been particularly aggressive, pursuing inquiries about intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq war and the politics of global warming.

To support their charges Monday, the Democrats produced hundreds of pages of legal depositions, exhibits and e-mail exchanges between administration officials. The paper trail illustrated how officials with no scientific training shaped the administration’s climate change message and edited global warming reports, inserting doubt in the place of definitive statements and diminishing the role people play in the planet’s rising temperatures.

Waxman’s committee received more than eight boxes of papers from the White House Council on Environmental Quality that he said provided disturbing indications of political interference.

“There may have been a concerted effort directed by the White House to mislead the public about the dangers of global climate change,” said Waxman, who also cited the administration practice of “controlling what federal scientists could say to the public and the media about their work.”

“It would be a serious abuse if senior White House officials deliberately tried to defuse calls for action by ensuring that the public heard a distorted message about the risks of climate change,” Waxman said.

Continue reading “Bush Censors Climate Reports”