Tag: terrorism_theater

FBI and their new Mission

Seth Anderson0 comment

I mean, what is the FBI going to say? “Well, there are a lot of stupid people accusing others of being terrorists, and we don’t have the mental energy to examine all of the leads.” Of course not. Still, perhaps they’ll stop harassing photographers one of these days:

The bureau now ranks fighting terrorism as its No. 1 priority. It has doubled the number of agents assigned to counterterrorism duties to roughly 5,000 people, and has created new squads across the country that focus more on deterring and disrupting terrorism than on solving crimes.

But the manpower costs of this focus are steep, and the benefits not always clear. Of the 5,500 leads that the squad has pursued since it was formed five years ago, only 5 percent have been found credible enough to be sent to permanent F.B.I. squads for longer-term investigations, said Supervisory Special Agent Kristen von KleinSmid, head of the squad. Only a handful of those cases have resulted in criminal prosecutions or other law enforcement action, and none have foiled a specific terrorist plot, the authorities acknowledge.

…

Security guards have questioned people taking pictures of oil refineries in the Los Angeles area. Many turned out to be college students fulfilling assignment for class projects.

[Click to continue reading F.B.I. Agents’ Role Is Transformed by Terror Fight – NYTimes.com]

Photography is not a crime, remember?

Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Revised and Updated]” (Jeremy Scahill)

Whoa, explosive allegations about Bush’s favorite crusader/military and drug-war contractor, Erik Prince.

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting “illegal” or “unlawful” weapons into the country on Prince’s private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.

These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct.

[Click to continue reading Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder]

Walk On By

Dennis Kucinich weighed in:

Briefed on the substance of these allegations by The Nation, Congressman Dennis Kucinich replied, “If these allegations are true, Blackwater has been a criminal enterprise defrauding taxpayers and murdering innocent civilians.” Kucinich is on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and has been investigating Prince and Blackwater since 2004.

“Blackwater is a law unto itself, both internationally and domestically. The question is why they operated with impunity. In addition to Blackwater, we should be questioning their patrons in the previous administration who funded and employed this organization. Blackwater wouldn’t exist without federal patronage; these allegations should be thoroughly investigated,” Kucinich said.

Sibel Edmonds claims bin Laden worked with US right up to 9-11

Seth Anderson0 comment

No wonder Sibel Edmonds got fired, and silenced, the Bush-ites would have been very embarrassed if this allegation had been made in the election of 2004, for instance.

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript).

In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, “all the way until that day of September 11.”

These ‘intimate relations’ included using Bin Laden for ‘operations’ in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These ‘operations’ involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner “as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict,” that is, fighting ‘enemies’ via proxies.

…

The bombshell here is obviously that certain people in the US were using Bin Laden up to September 11, 2001.

It is important to understand why: the US outsourced terror operations to al Qaeda and the Taliban for many years, promoting the Islamization of Central Asia in an attempt to personally profit off military sales as well as oil and gas concessions.

[Click to continue reading Daily Kos: State of the Nation]

Despite all sorts of pressure from the federal government, Ms. Edmonds refuses to fade away, she continues to try to get her understanding of the truth out.

Such as:

Last year, Sibel came up with a brilliant idea to expose some of the criminal activity that she is forbidden to speak about: she published eighteen photos, titled “Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery,” of people involved the operations that she has been trying to expose. One of those people is Anwar Yusuf Turani, the so-called ‘President-in-exile’ of East Turkistan (Xinjiang). This so-called ‘government-in-exile’ was ‘established‘ on Capitol Hill in September, 2004, drawing a sharp rebuke from China.

Also featured in Sibel’s Rogues Gallery was ‘former’ spook Graham Fuller, who was instrumental in the establishment of Turani’s ‘government-in-exile’ of East Turkistan. Fuller has written extensively on Xinjiang, and his “Xinjiang Project” for Rand Corp is apparentlythe blueprint for Turani’s government-in-exile. Sibel has openly stated her contempt for Mr. Fuller.

from the Brad Friedman interview:

Sibel Edmonds: (interrupts) I have to jump in here and say that I have information about things that our government has lied to us about. I know. For example, to say that since the fall of the Soviet Union we ceased all of our intimate relationship with Bin Laden and the Taliban – those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11.

I know you are going to say ‘Oh my God, we went there and bombed the medical factory in the 1990s during Clinton, we declared him Most Wanted’ and what I’m telling you is, with those groups, we had operations in Central Asia, and that relationship – using them as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict – we used them all the way until September 11.

[Click to continue reading Let Sibel Edmonds Speak: Sibel Edmonds on Mike Malloy]

John Yoo Says It Is Ok

Seth Anderson1 Comment

If I ever had plans to do anything illegal, like break a law that has been on the books since at least 18781, I’ll just get John Yoo to write a memo saying it is ok. Law, hunh, what is good for, absolutely nothing. I’ll say it again.2

Torture, Posse Comitatus, does anything else have your bloody fingerprints on it, Mr. Yoo?

The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures without probable cause. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from acting in a law enforcement capacity.

In the discussions, Mr. Cheney and others cited an Oct. 23, 2001, memorandum from the Justice Department that, using a broad interpretation of presidential authority, argued that the domestic use of the military against Al Qaeda would be legal because it served a national security, rather than a law enforcement, purpose.

“The president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States,” the memorandum said.

The memorandum — written by the lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty — was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked the department about a president’s authority to use the military to combat terrorist activities in the United States.

[Click to continue reading Bush Weighed Using Military in Arrests – NYTimes.com]

and then cite the memo right before doing the illegal act:

Those who advocated using the military to arrest the Lackawanna group had legal ammunition: the memorandum by Mr. Yoo and Mr. Delahunty.

The lawyers, in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, wrote that the Constitution, the courts and Congress had recognized a president’s authority “to take military actions, domestic as well as foreign, if he determines such actions to be necessary to respond to the terrorist attacks upon the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and before.”

The document added that the neither the Posse Comitatus Act nor the Fourth Amendment tied a president’s hands.

I certainly do not understand why Berkley employs this Yoo character, he is such a stain on the legal profession.

The Wikipedia entry for Posse Comitatus Act:

The Posse Comitatus Act is a United States federal law (18 U.S.C. § 1385) passed on June 18, 1878, after the end of Reconstruction, with the intention (in concert with the Insurrection Act of 1807) of substantially limiting the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement. The Act prohibits most members of the federal uniformed services (today the Army, Air Force, and State National Guard forces when such are called into federal service) from exercising nominally state law enforcement, police, or peace officer powers that maintain “law and order” on non-federal property (states and their counties and municipal divisions) within the United States.
The statute generally prohibits federal military personnel and units of the National Guard under federal authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress. The Coast Guard is exempt from the Act during peacetime.

[Click to continue reading Posse Comitatus Act – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Seems clear enough. Except for John Yoo.

John Yoo and the so-called Torture memos, if you had forgotten the details:

You have to give John Yoo credit for chutzpah. The disgraced author of the so-called torture memo was back in the news last week, when the Obama administration released seven more secret opinions, all but one written in whole or in part by Yoo and fellow Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) lawyer Jay Bybee, arguing that the Bush administration had the right to override the Constitution as long as it claimed to be fighting a “war on terror.” Professor Yoo, who I am embarrassed to say holds a tenured position at the law school of my alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, was already known as the official who provided a legal fig leaf behind which the Bush administration tortured inmates at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. His legal misdeeds are widely known, but now they have been exposed chapter and verse. Among the new memos is one written in 2001 [8.3 Meg PDF], in which Yoo and co-author Robert J. Delahunty advised the U.S. that the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the Army to be used for law enforcement, and the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, do not apply to domestic military operations undertaken during a “war on terror.”

In other words, bye-bye, Bill of Rights. This is a prescription for a police state, where not just the police but the Army can kick your door down without a warrant or probable cause, as long as the president says he’s fighting “terror.” If Barack Obama had solicited such an opinion from an obliging Justice Department lawyer because he wanted to sic the U.S. Army on a group of domestic terrorists, the right would be screaming about jackbooted federal thugs descending from black helicopters to haul off American citizens. Strangely, no conservatives have taken to the streets to warn us of the Big Government danger posed by this radical doctrine.

[Click to continue reading John Yoo Torture Memo | Salon ]

Footnotes:
  1. and arguably one of the reasons the United States broke away from Britain way back in 1776 [↩]
  2. sung in one’s best Edwin Starr voice [↩]

NSA Wiretaps Combined with Credit Card Records of U.S. Citizens

swanksalot0 comment

My paranoid self wonders if this is why the TSA always opens my suitcase every time I travel, and why I used to always get marked for special searches of my person and luggage (up until recently). Maybe, maybe not, but of course, I’ll never know.

Data Dump

NSA whistleblower Russell Tice was back on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC program Thursday evening to expand on his Wednesday revelations that the National Security Agency spied on individual U.S. journalists, entire U.S. news agencies as well as “tens of thousands” of other Americans.

Tice said on Wednesday that the NSA had vacuumed in all domestic communications of Americans, including, faxes, phone calls and network traffic.
Today Tice said that the spy agency also combined information from phone wiretaps with data that was mined from credit card and other financial records. He said information of tens of thousands of U.S. citizens is now in digital databases warehoused at the NSA.

“This [information] could sit there for ten years and then potentially it marries up with something else and ten years from now they get put on a no-fly list and they, of course, won’t have a clue why,” Tice said.

In most cases, the person would have no discernible link to terrorist organizations that would justify the initial data mining or their inclusion in the database.

[From NSA Whistleblower: Wiretaps Were Combined with Credit Card Records of U.S. Citizens | Threat Level from Wired.com]

The NSA started large – accumulating as much information from as wide a source as they could get. Theoretically, once their database was seeded, they culled out non-terrorists, but I’m skeptical. The data is still being held, waiting for some future reason to utilize it.

“This is garnered from algorithms that have been put together to try to just dream-up scenarios that might be information that is associated with how a terrorist could operate,” Tice said. “And once that information gets to the NSA, and they start to put it through the filters there . . . and they start looking for word-recognition, if someone just talked about the daily news and mentioned something about the Middle East they could easily be brought to the forefront of having that little flag put by their name that says ‘potential terrorist’.”

Bookmarks for December 29th through December 30th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links for December 29th through December 30th:

  • Flickriver: swanksalot’s most interesting photos – takes forever to load, but I’m still baffled by Flickr’s algorithm
  • An Illegal Bridge? on Flickr – Photo Sharing! – “print these out on Avery stock #8871 and carry the cards with me.

    focusonthelaw.net/files/photo.doc
    ——————————————– ———————–
    I am a freelance photographer

    I am a photographer, not a terrorist

    My activity is protected by the United States Constitution.

    I do not consent to any search of my camera, photos, bags, or self without a proper warrant.

    If you are a police officer objecting to your picture being taken, your objection is hereby denied under USDC Robinson v. Fetterman. No. 04-3592 Civ.A. (E.D. Pa Order Dated May 5, 2005)
    ——————————————– —————————-
    I am going to add this:

    I am excercising my 1st Amendment rights and any denial of those rights will be a violation of 42 USC Section 1983 ”

  • Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection: Port of Long Beach Responds to Incident of Photographer Harassment – Still in CYA mode at Port of Long Beach “The fact that the Officer would suggest that he forced us to stop shooting because he “thought we were trying to enter a private area,” is a bald faced lie. This Officer is a liar who is trying to justify his act of harassment in some way after the fact. I would encourage staff at the Port of Long Beach to examine the photograph of the Officer, the bridge above and the Google Map link. They should know the location where we were shooting and should also know that we were nowhere near any private areas whatsoever when this incident took place.”

  • Yes, Virginia, Bloggers Are Not Journalists, Usually – “Yeah, anybody can offer opinions, but not everybody can be a news reporter.

    The conceit on the Right Blogosphere — I really haven’t seen as much of this nonsense on the Left — is that an army of “Davids,” or little-guy bloggers, could replace journalism. If by “journalism” one means “reporting,” I say, not likely. Reporting for the most part is the daily slog of going forth to cultivate and talk to sources, interview insiders, assume the sources and insiders are all lying and talk to other sources and other insiders, check police blotters, chase ambulances, and otherwise dig through a lot of boring documentation so that you are as certain as you can be that what you say is true before the copy deadline, because your highest mission is to be accurate. That’s what reporters do.”

Long Beach Harbor Patrol Says Photography Is a Crime

Seth Anderson0 comment

Thomas Hawk and David Sommars fight for photographers rights, again, and Johnny Law wins, again, because Johnny (and Jill) Law had side arms, and Thomas Hawk and his buddy only had digital camera gear. Such a ridiculous belief on the part of police: they feel they are able to manufacture new laws on the spot. And of course, real terrorists wouldn’t be as conspicuous, even if they wanted to photograph industrial machinery (and there is exactly zero evidence that any terrorists have ever done so – it only happens in the movies). Photography is not a crime!

2nd Long Beach Harbor Patrol Officer (shrugging her shoulders): Oh, well, you’re just going to have to leave. Photography is not allowed here without a permit.”

During this altercation both David and I were asked to present identification to the police. They used our IDs to run background checks on both of us.

Now personally I have no problem with the cops stopping to talk to us and check out what we were doing. I also had no problem with Securitas photographing me earlier or following me to get my license plate number. But I think that it went too far when the Long Beach Harbor Patrol ran background checks on us and I think it also went too far when they required us to leave our shoot location. As far as I’m aware there is no law which requires permits in order to shoot the Long Beach Harbor from a public sidewalk. And to kick us off of the bridge that we were legally on was not justified and violated our constitutional rights.

We repeatedly tried to argue for our right to shoot at this location for about a half an hour. The entire time the cops were insistent that we were not allowed to shoot there without a permit. David showed the cops in question photos of his on his iPhone in order to share the type of photography that we were after, but none of this seemed to matter. We were on their turf and they weren’t going to stand for that. He just kept repeatedly bringing up 911 over and over telling us that we were going to need to leave.

What bothers me even more is that this is not the first time that David (who shoots in Long Beach Harbor more regularly than I do) has been harassed by the cops there. David has had lots of previous run ins there. David told me that he’s been stopped about 10 times in the last six months while shooting in Long Beach Harbor. About half of those stops involved actual police in addition to security guards. On one occasion the cops actually handcuffed him and in another incident 4 police cars and a black SUV converged on him. He’s also had FBI agents call on him over his photography. Personally I think it’s wrong to handcuff peaceful photographers for the “crime” of photography while questioning and detaining.

[Click to continue reading Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection: Long Beach Harbor Patrol Says Photography “Not Allowed” From Public Sidewalk]

Some photos of this incident and other similar incidents can be found here.

And Groucho Glasses Too

And as Thomas Hawk concludes:

What I am tired of though is the harassment that photographers face on a regular basis while out documenting our world. Photography is not a crime. 911 didn’t suddenly magically turn photographers into criminals. And as long as photography is not a crime, I think that cops, security guards and other authority figures should be required to live within the legal system as it now stands. Maybe some day they will pass a law that shooting Long Beach Harbor is in fact a crime. Or maybe they’ll actually pass a law that permits *are* actually required to shoot there. But until that day happens (and I’d be one vocally opposing any such rule like that) this sort of harassment ought not take place. And it’s unfortunate when it does.

FBI Follies

Seth Anderson0 comment

Gee, feel so much safer after reading this:

The Hatfill search warrant material shows how an accumulation of claims from acquaintances can cast an innocent person in a highly suspicious light, said Mark A. Grannis, a lawyer for Dr. Hatfill. As an example of how innocent details can be made to look suspicious, Mr. Grannis said Dr. Hatfill was taking Cipro, a widely prescribed antibiotic, after sinus surgery in 2001.

Search warrants, Mr. Grannis said, often use hearsay and unconfirmed information to convince a judge that a suspect is worthy of further investigation.

“Whether or not it was right for the government to rely on this kind of information to obtain a search warrant in 2002, we know in 2008 that Steven Hatfill had nothing to do with the anthrax attacks,” Mr. Grannis said.

The F.B.I. affidavits were used to obtain a search warrant in August 2002 for Dr. Hatfill’s apartment and a basement storage room in his building in Frederick, Md., as well as his car and a storage locker he rented in Ocala, Fla. The agency had conducted a search with Dr. Hatfill’s permission two months earlier, but it was considered inconclusive.

[From New Details on F.B.I.’s False Start in Anthrax Case – NYTimes.com]

Salem witch trials modernized for the Great Age of Terrorism, in other words.

TSA batting average pretty low

Seth Anderson0 comment

The Transportation Security Administration batting average is pretty low, and of the tiny number of people arrested by the TSA, how many are for actual terror related activities? The number of arrests is even lower when you filter out drug-related crimes, penis-bumb related jokes, immigration issues, and whatever other petty offense sets off the wrath of TSA officials.

Had Enough for a Long Time

Fewer than 1% of airline passengers singled out at airports for suspicious behavior are arrested, Transportation Security Administration figures show, raising complaints that too many innocent people are stopped.
A TSA program launched in early 2006 that looks for terrorists using a controversial surveillance method has led to more than 160,000 people in airports receiving scrutiny, such as a pat-down search or a brief interview. That has resulted in 1,266 arrests, often on charges of carrying drugs or fake IDs, the TSA said.

The TSA program trains screeners to become “behavior detection officers” who patrol terminals and checkpoints looking for travelers who act oddly or appear to answer questions suspiciously.

Critics say the number of arrests is small and indicates the program is flawed.

“That’s an awful lot of people being pulled aside and inconvenienced,” said Carnegie Mellon scientist Stephen Fienberg, who studied the TSA program and other counterterrorism efforts. “I think it’s a sham. We have no evidence it works.”

[From TSA’s ‘behavior detection’ leads to few arrests – USATODAY.com]

I wonder if Droopy Dog Lieberman in his continued1 role as chair-loser of the Homeland Security committee is responsible for TSA oversight? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Footnotes:
  1. inexplicably continued, I might add. I can see the logic of keeping Lieberman in the Democratic caucus, but head of the Homeland Security committee? Really? With his piss-poor performance when war profiteers like Haliburton and Blackwater thumbed their noses at taxpayers? Not good. [↩]

TSA smelling my dirty socks

swanksalot1 Comment

TSA smelling my dirty socks, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

strange how often I get this notice. The worst part is then I wonder what exactly I did pack in my suitcase, and if anything is actually missing.

I pack my return luggage especially haphazardly, and I did hike in the Badlands, so I almost pity the TSA agent who had to wade through my sweaty undergarments to find there was exactly nothing objectionable in my luggage. Almost.

Canadian Bureacratic nonsense

Seth Anderson2 Comments

I want a copy of my “long form” Canadian birth certificate (I was born in Toronto, Ontario), but in order to receive this document, I have to jump through several bureaucratic hoops. Including this one:

If you are applying for a birth certificate for an individual nine years of age or older, guarantor information is required.

A guarantor is someone who has known you (the applicant) personally for at least 2 years during your life, is a Canadian citizen, and is currently serving in or a practicing member in good standing of one of the professions listed below.

The role of the guarantor is to certify that information provided on a birth certificate application is as complete and accurate as possible. If required, a qualified guarantor must also be available to verify the information with the Office of the Registrar General.

[From Do I have a valid guarantor for my birth certificate?-School & Work – Gateway for Individuals – Government of Ontario (Canada)]

Parliament Buildings in Victoria

From my perspective, this list is very socio-economic class bigoted. While the list of “acceptable” occupations is broad, I don’t understand why only professional class individuals are allowed to “vouch” for me. If you are a carpenter, or a graphic designer, your word is worth shite to the Ontario government. I assume these additional stipulations were added as part of the United States government’s export of Terrorism Theatre, coming to a town hall near you!

These are the professions who are deemed acceptable to the Canadian (Ontario) government:

  • Chief of a band recognized under the Indian Act (Canada)
  • Chiropractor
  • Dentist
  • First Nations police officer
  • Judge
  • Justice of the Peace
  • Lawyer
  • Mayor
  • Member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario (MPP)
  • Midwife
  • Minister of religion authorized under provincial law to perform marriages
  • Municipal clerk or treasurer (a member of the Association of Municipal Managers, Clerks and Treasurers of Ontario)
  • Notary public
  • Nurse
  • Optometrist
  • Pharmacist
  • Physician
  • Police officer (Municipal, Provincial, RCMP)
  • Principal or Vice-Principal (primary or secondary school)
  • Professional accountant
  • Professional engineer
  • Psychologist
  • Senior administrator (community college or in a CEGEP)
  • Senior administrator or professor in a university
  • Signing officer of a bank, caisse d’économie, caisse populaire, credit union or trust company.
  • Social worker or social service worker
  • Surgeon
  • Teacher in a primary or secondary school
  • Veterinarian

So what if I don’t know a doctor, lawyer or Indian chief?

More importantly, are any of you members of these preferred occupations?

Terrorism Theater Database Boondoggle

Seth Anderson0 comment

I feel so much safer knowing that such incompetents are in charge of national security. I bet an open-source MySQL database or similar would run rings around the current implementation, costing a fraction of budget. Of course, results don’t necessarily matter to defense contractors, only long term contracts.

The government’s main terrorist-watch-list system is hobbled by technology challenges, and the $500 million program designed to upgrade it is on the verge of collapse, according to a preliminary congressional investigation.

The database, which includes an estimated 400,000 people and as many as 1 million names, has been criticized for flagging ordinary Americans. Now, the congressional report finds that the system has problems identifying true potential terrorists, as well.

Among the flaws in the database, which was quickly built by Lockheed Martin Corp. in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, is its inability to do key-word searches. Instead, an analyst needs to rely on an indexing system to query the database

…

When tested, the new system failed to find matches for terrorist-suspect names that were spelled slightly different from the name entered into the system, a common challenge when translating names from Arabic to English. It also could not perform basic searches of multiple words connected with terms such as “and” and “or.”

Because the format of the data in the current database is “complex, undocumented, and brittle,” some significant data will be lost when the system is replaced by Railhead, according to the congressional report. For example, scraps of information such as phone and credit-card numbers found when law-enforcement and intelligence officials empty a suspect’s pocket, often called “pocket litter,” will not be moved to the new system.

Railhead was supposed to be completed by year’s end but has been delayed. Nearly half of the 72 so-called “action items” for the program were delayed as of June, congressional investigators found.

[From Flaws Found In Watch List For Terrorists – WSJ.com]

More info here (Miller letter to Inspector General Maquire Regarding Technical Flaws in Terrorist Watch List), here (11 page PDF from the Subcommittee Staff, Investigations and Oversight Committee on Science and Technology), Railhead System Concept Definition (28 page PDF) and 79 page PDF

TSA grounds airplanes at O’Hare

Seth Anderson1 Comment

A Transportation Security Administration inspector grounded a plane the old-fashioned way: by damaging the plane itself. Yikes. Luckily airline mechanics noticed, avoiding a possible crash.

A bumbling inspector with the Transportation Safety Administration apparently has some explaining to do, after nine American Eagle regional jets were grounded at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on Tuesday.

Citing sources within the aviation industry, ABC News reports an overzealous TSA employee attempted to gain access to the parked aircraft by climbing up the fuselage… reportedly using the Total Air Temperature (TAT) probes mounted to the planes’ noses as handholds.

“The brilliant employees used an instrument located just below the cockpit window that is critical to the operation of the onboard computers,” one pilot wrote on an American Eagle internet forum. “They decided this instrument, the TAT probe, would be adequate to use as a ladder.” Officials with American Eagle confirmed to ANN the problem was discovered by maintenance personnel, who inspected the planes Tuesday morning… and questioned why the TAT probes all gave similar error indications.

One Eagle pilot says had the pilots not been so attentive, the damaged probes could have caused problems inflight. TSA agents “are now doing things to our aircraft that may put our lives, and the lives of our passengers at risk,” the pilot wrote on the forum.

Grounding the planes to replace the TAT probes affected about 40 flights, according to American Airlines spokeswoman Mary Frances. “We think it’s an unfortunate situation,” she told ABCNews.com.

[From .:: Aero-News Network: The Aviation and Aerospace World’s Daily/Real-Time News and Information Service ::.]

Yes, unfortunate. Even more so that these morons even have jobs. Not only did this TSA employee destroy one plane’s gear looking to see if “terrorists could get into the cockpit”, but he did it eight more times!

Flight 1053

Airline industry folks are understandably outraged:

This was an extraordinarily dangerous incident, folks. The TSA has neither the mandate nor the knowledge to inspect any aircraft for any reason. The stupidity of this matter is nearly unbelievable… until you hear that the TSA is involved… then it becomes understandable, though still tragic. And I can not tell you how frustrating it is, to see them continue to hurt an indsutry that they were created to protect. The TSA has NO BUSINESS putting untrained personnel in a position to damage aircraft. Their bizarre games, in the name of security, do NOTHING to enhance security and do much to inhibit safety. Aviation personnel — pilots, A&P’s, ground personnel — are all either licensed or supervised by licensed personnel and this kind of tampering, had it been accomplished by anyone else, would have subjected that person to criminal charges.

Vote for Fear

Seth Anderson0 comment

Speaking of Terrorism Theatre1, PSoTD catches a bit of fear mongering soft-shoe, Republican style. Vote for Fear, vote Republican!

I think it was CNN was showing a bit of a McCain fundraising/publicity stop. McCain was taking questions from the audience, and some 18 year old woman grabbed and microphone, and one of the first things she said was something like this:

I hope you win this. Obama, whew, he terrifies me! Whew!
and she kind of paused, and then…

the crowd applauded.

And I thought, there it is, in a nutshell. Republicans. Cheering for fear. Are you afraid? Yes? Hooray!!!!! Vote for Republicans then.

[From PSoTD Wuss Nation]

Whenever I think of Fear, I think of beer. Or more beer.


“More Beer” (Fear)

Footnotes:
  1. with my Canadian schooling, I am never sure how theater is spelled [↩]

Bioterrorism’s and BioWatch

swanksalot0 comment

Our tax dollars at work, well, possibly at work, if we could figure out what exactly is being done. Some backstory on the 2001 anthrax scare/hoax can be found here

The federal government has spent nearly $50 billion on programs to fight bioterrorism since 2001. Still, experience in New York City and elsewhere underscores the enduring difficulty of contending with this type of terror attack. Experts in the field say that the nation’s ability to detect biological weapons is still inadequate in most locales, as is its ability to distribute drugs to the population once the lethal agent is identified. Hospitals warn that the volume of casualties from an effective attack could simply overwhelm facilities.

“We’ve made very little progress in [any] of those very big areas,” says Dr. Tara O’Toole, director of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

[snip]

With easier access to fatal pathogens, it may be impossible to uncover preparations for an attack, leading government officials to focus more on lessening the impact of an attack than preventing one.

New York is using the next generation of sensors that the federal BioWatch program hopes to distribute nationwide by 2010. The city has been asking the federal government for more sensors. Most of the devices require up to 34 hours to detect a lethal bug, but about a half dozen new machines can detect an agent more quickly.

Yet New York remains at the leading edge. In most other cities, there was little federal guidance about which systems to buy, which led to a patchwork of often ineffective programs. The BioWatch system is active in more than 30 cities.

In New York, if a lethal agent is detected, the city plans to immediately distribute drugs to counter the bug. The federal government has worked to develop a national stockpile of drugs to deploy anywhere in the country, and biosecurity experts give the program high marks, saying that it can get the drugs to an affected region quickly. The problem, they say, is getting the medication out of the airport, where the federal government leaves it, and into communities.

If a biological attack were to happen tomorrow, said Lawrence O. Gostin, a bioterrorism expert at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities, the best advice the government could give would be for people to stay where they are. He adds: “I have no idea how they would get to my suburban Maryland neighborhood and get me an antiviral or antibiotic.”

And biosecurity specialists lament that little progress has been made even on the most public of possible biological threats: countering an anthrax attack. Seven years after the nation contended with just such an attack, an $877 million effort to develop a new anthrax vaccine has failed; there’s no quick way to test patients for an anthrax infection; and efforts to develop a drug to counter anthrax’s lethal chemicals haven’t produced much.

[From Bioterrorism’s Threat Persists As Top Security Risk – WSJ.com] [non-WSJ subscribers use this link]

What are the 30 cities who are participants in this boondoggle, you might ask? Not mentioned in the article, but there’s a list at wikipedia. The budget is somewhere around $1,000,000 per city, per year, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wants to expand the program to include 120 cities.

BioWatch is a United States Federal Government program to detect the release of pathogens into the air as part of a terrorist attack on major American cities. Reportedly operating in Philadelphia, New York City, Washington, DC, San Diego, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis, Houston, Los Angeles and 21 other cities, the BioWatch program was created in 2001 in response to the increased threat of bioterrorism sparked by the 2001 anthrax attacks, and was announcing in President George W. Bush’s State of the Union Address of 2003. The program, described as “the nation’s first early warning network of sensors to detect biological attack” operates via a system of filters located within existing Environmental Protection Agency air filters which monitor the quality of the air. Results from these filters are analyzed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who then pass any significant results to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

and

The BioWatch system has received a mix of responses since coming online, many that result in waste of resources and a lowering public confidence in the system. A Congressional report in 2003 recorded that there was concern that the BioWatch filters would fail to detect indoor or underground releases, and also that the existence of BioWatch filters in some cities would direct terrorists to attack other cities without such protection. The report also highlighted the risk of the filters themselves being detected and destroyed. The report also states that, as EPA filters are located based on different policies than those which would provide optimum locations for counter-bioterrorism sensors, the BioWatch filters may not be optimally located. Furthermore, the BioWatch system may miss releases that take place within the gaps in coverage. The House of Representatives also concluded that models used to predict the spread of an infectious agent after release and detection may be inaccurate.

The Congressional Report also raises concerns as to whether BioWatch can detect pathogens in large, polluted cities, as well as issues relating to the BioWatch filter reporting harmful pathogens which are actually within safe background levels, and thus would throw up more positive hits than actual investigation warrants. There are also concerns that the BioWatch filters kill whatever pathogen has set them off, thus removing the possibility of further tests being undertaken.[8] Finally, concerns were raised in the Congressional Report regarding the sensitivity of the filters, and the fact that each filter would be exposed to different environmental conditions and thus a standardized detection rate would be near impossible to achieve. The complicated response that would be required should the BioWatch filter detect a pathogen would also be difficult to implement and put strain on local health authorities.

A probable big waste of money, in other words, protecting nobody in particular, with the exception of some defense contractors and other DHS friends and cronies. BioWatch does contribute to the climate of fear and apprehension, the so-called terrorism theatre.