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Paul Merrell

NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes with Children, C... - 1 views

www.blacklistednews.com/...M.html

Auction 2016 Hillary-emails FBI NYPD Huma Weiner sex-crimes perjury Clinton-Foundation money-laundering obstruction

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • New York Police Department detectives and prosecutors working an alleged underage sexting case against former Congressman Anthony Weiner have turned over a newly-found laptop he shared with wife Huma Abedin to the FBI with enough evidence “to put Hillary (Clinton) and her crew away for life,” NYPD sources told True Pundit. NYPD sources said Clinton’s “crew” also included several unnamed yet implicated members of Congress in addition to her aides and insiders. The NYPD seized the computer from Weiner during a search warrant and detectives discovered a trove of over 500,000 emails to and from Hillary Clinton, Abedin and other insiders during her tenure as secretary of state. The content of those emails sparked the FBI to reopen its defunct email investigation into Clinton on Friday.
  • But new revelations on the contents of that laptop, according to law enforcement sources, implicate the Democratic presidential candidate, her subordinates, and even select elected officials in far more alleged serious crimes than mishandling classified and top secret emails, sources said. NYPD sources said these new emails include evidence linking Clinton herself and associates to: Money laundering Child exploitation Sex crimes with minors (children) Perjury Pay to play through Clinton Foundation Obstruction of justice Other felony crimes NYPD detectives and a NYPD Chief, the department’s highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices. “What’s in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach,” the NYPD Chief said. “There is not going to be any Houdini-like escape from what we found. We have copies of everything. We will ship them to Wikileaks or I will personally hold my own press conference if it comes to that.”
  • The NYPD Chief said once Comey saw the alarming contents of the emails he was forced to reopen a criminal probe against Clinton. “People are going to prison,” he said. Meanwhile, FBI sources said Abedin and Weiner were cooperating with federal agents, who have taken over the non-sexting portions the case from NYPD. The husband-and-wife Clinton insiders  are both shopping for separate immunity deals, sources said. “If they don’t cooperate they are going to see long sentences,” a federal law enforcement source said. NYPD sources said Weiner or Abedin stored all the emails in a massive Microsoft Outlook program on the laptop. The emails implicate other current and former members of Congress and one high-ranking Democratic Senator as having possibly engaged in criminal activity too, sources said. Prosecutors in the office of US Attorney Preet Bharara have issued a subpoena for Weiner’s cell phones and travel records, law enforcement sources confirmed. NYPD said it planned to order the same phone and travel records on Clinton and Abedin, however, the FBI said it was in the process of requesting the identical records. Law enforcement sources are particularly interested in cell phone activity and travel to the Bahamas, U.S. Virgin Islands and other locations that sources would not divulge.
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  • The new emails contain travel documents and itineraries indicating Hillary Clinton, President Bill Clinton, Weiner and multiple members of Congress and other government officials accompanied convicted pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein on his Boeing 727 on multiple occasions to his private island in the U.S Virgin Islands, sources said. Epstein’s island has also been dubbed Orgy Island or Sex Slave Island where Epstein allegedly pimps out underage girls and boys to international dignitaries. Both NYPD and FBI sources confirm based on the new emails they now believe Hillary Clinton traveled as Epstein’s guest on at least six occasions, probably more when all the evidence is combed, sources said. Bill Clinton, it has been confirmed in media reports spanning recent years, that he too traveled with Epstein over 20 times to the island.
  • According to other uncovered emails, Abedin and Clinton both sent and received thousands of classified and top secret documents to personal email accounts including Weiner’s unsecured campaign web site which is managed by Democratic political consultants in Washington D.C. Weiner maintained little known email accounts that the couple shared on the website anthonyweiner.com. Weiner, a former seven-term Democratic Congressman from New York, primarily used that domain to campaign for Congress and for his failed mayoral bid of New York City. At one point, FBI sources said, Abedin and Clinton’s classified and top secret State Department documents and emails were stored in Weiner’s email on a server shared with a dog grooming service and a western Canadian bicycle shop. However, Weiner and Abedin, who is Hillary Clinton’s closest personal aide, weren’t the only people with access to the Weiner’s email account. Potentially dozens of unknown individuals had access to Abedin’s sensitive State Department emails that were stored in Weiner’s email account, FBI sources confirmed. FEC records show Weiner paid more than $92,000 of congressional campaign funds to Anne Lewis Strategies LLC to manage his email and web site. According to FBI sources, the D.C.-based political consulting firm has served as the official administrator of the anthonyweiner.com domain since 2010, the same time Abedin was working at the State Department. This means technically Weiner and Abedin’s emails, including top secret State Department emails, could have been accessed, printed, discussed, leaked, or distributed by untold numbers of personnel at the Anne Lewis consulting firm because they can control where the website and it emails are pointed, FBI sources said.
  • According to FBI sources, the bureau’s newly-minted probe into Clinton’s use and handling of emails while she served as secretary of state, has also been broadened to include investigating new email-related revelations, including: Abedin forwarded classified and top secret State Department emails to Weiner’s email Abedin stored emails, containing government secrets, in a special folder shared with Weiner warehousing over 500,000 archived State Department emails. Weiner had access to these classified and top secret documents without proper security clearance to view the records Abedin also used a personal yahoo address and her Clintonemail.com address to send/receive/store classified and top secret documents A private consultant managed Weiner’s site for the last six years, including three years when Clinton was secretary of state, and therefore, had full access to all emails as the domain’s listed registrant and administrator via Whois email contacts. Because Weiner’s campaign website is managed by the third-party consultant and political email guru, FBI agents are burdened with the task of trying to decipher just how many people had access to Weiner’s server and emails and who were these people. Or if the server was ever compromised by hackers, or other actors.
  • Abedin told FBI agents in an April interview that she didn’t know how to consistently print documents or emails from her secure Dept. of State system. Instead, she would forward the sensitive emails to her yahoo, Clintonemail.com and her email linked to Weiner. Abedin said, according to FBI documents, she would then access those email accounts via webmail from an unclassified computer system at the State Dept. and print the documents, many of which were classified and top secret, from the largely unprotected webmail portals. Clinton did not have a computer in her office on Mahogany Row at the State Dept. so she was not able to read timely intelligence unless it was printed out for her, Abedin said. Abedin also said Clinton could not operate the secure State Dept. fax machine installed in her Chappaqua, NY home without assistance. Perhaps more alarming, according to the FBI’s 302 Report detailing its interview with Abedin, none of the multiple FBI agents and Justice Department officials who conducted the interview pressed Abedin to further detail the email address linked to Weiner. There was never a follow up, according to the 302 report. But now, all that has changed, with the FBI’s decision to reopen the Clinton email investigation and the husband and wife seeking immunity deals to testify against Clinton and other associates about the contents of the laptop’s emails.
  • Gary Edwards on 03 Nov 16
     
    "New York Police Department detectives and prosecutors working an alleged underage sexting case against former Congressman Anthony Weiner have turned over a newly-found laptop he shared with wife Huma Abedin to the FBI with enough evidence "to put Hillary (Clinton) and her crew away for life," NYPD sources told True Pundit. NYPD sources said Clinton's "crew" also included several unnamed yet implicated members of Congress in addition to her aides and insiders. The NYPD seized the computer from Weiner during a search warrant and detectives discovered a trove of over 500,000 emails to and from Hillary Clinton, Abedin and other insiders during her tenure as secretary of state. The content of those emails sparked the FBI to reopen its defunct email investigation into Clinton on Friday. But new revelations on the contents of that laptop, according to law enforcement sources, implicate the Democratic presidential candidate, her subordinates, and even select elected officials in far more alleged serious crimes than mishandling classified and top secret emails, sources said. NYPD sources said these new emails include evidence linking Clinton herself and associates to: Money laundering Child exploitation Sex crimes with minors (children) Perjury Pay to play through Clinton Foundation Obstruction of justice Other felony crimes NYPD detectives and a NYPD Chief, the department's highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices. "What's in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach," the NYPD Chief said. "There is not going to be any Houdini-like escape from what we found. We have copies of everything. We will ship them to Wikileaks or I will personally hold my own press conference if it comes to that." The NYPD
Paul Merrell

The NYPD's X-Ray Vans - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...411181

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • In New York City, the police now maintain an unknown number of military-grade vans outfitted with X-ray radiation, enabling cops to look through the walls of buildings or the sides of trucks. The technology was used in Afghanistan before being loosed on U.S. streets. Each X-ray van costs an estimated $729,000 to $825,000.The NYPD will not reveal when, where, or how often they are used.
  • Here are some specific questions that New York City refuses to answer:How is the NYPD ensuring that innocent New Yorkers are not subject to harmful X-ray radiation? How long is the NYPD keeping the images that it takes and who can look at them? Is the NYPD obtaining judicial authorization prior to taking images, and if so, what type of authorization? Is the technology funded by taxpayer money, and has the use of the vans justified the price tag? Those specifics are taken from a New York Civil Liberties Union court filing. The legal organization is seeking to assist a lawsuit filed by Pro Publica journalist Michael Grabell, who has been fighting New York City for answers about X-ray vans for 3 years.“ProPublica filed the request as part of its investigation into the proliferation of security equipment, including airport body scanners, that expose people to ionizing radiation, which can mutate DNA and increase the risk of cancer,” he explained. (For fear of a terrorist “dirty bomb,” America’s security apparatus is exposing its population to radiation as a matter of course.)
  • A state court has already ruled that the NYPD has to turn over policies, procedures, and training manuals that shape uses of X-rays; reports on past deployments; information on the costs of the X-ray devices and the number of vans purchased; and information on the health and safety effects of the technology. But New York City is fighting on appeal to suppress that information and more, as if it is some kind of spy agency rather than a municipal police department operating on domestic soil, ostensibly at the pleasure of city residents.Its insistence on extreme secrecy is part of an alarming trend. The people of New York City are effectively being denied the ability to decide how they want to be policed.
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  • For all we know, the NYPD might be bombarding apartment houses with radiation while people are inside or peering inside vehicles on the street as unwitting passersby are exposed to radiation. The city’s position—that New Yorkers have no right to know if that is happening or not—is so absurd that one can hardly believe they’re taking it. These are properly political questions. And it’s unlikely a target would ever notice. “Once equipped, the van—which looks like a standard delivery van—takes less than 15 seconds to scan a vehicle,” Fox News reported after looking at X-ray vans owned by the federal government. “It can be operated remotely from more than 1,500 feet and can be equipped with optional technology to identify radioactivity as well.”
  • And since the technology can see through clothing, it is easy to imagine a misbehaving NYPD officer abusing it if there are not sufficient safeguards in place. Trusting the NYPD to choose prudent, sufficient safeguards under cover of secrecy is folly. This is the same department that spent 6 years conducting surveillance on innocent Muslims Americans in a program so unfocused that it produced zero leads—and that has brutalized New York City protestors on numerous occasions. Time and again it’s shown that outside oversight is needed.Lest readers outside New York City presume that their walls still stand between them and their local law enforcement agency, that isn’t necessarily the case. Back in January, in an article that got remarkably little attention, USA Today reported the following:
  • At least 50 U.S. law enforcementagencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance. Those agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, began deploying the radar systems more than two years ago with little notice to the courts and no public disclosure of when or how they would be used. The technology raises legal and privacy issues because the U.S. Supreme Court has said officers generally cannot use high-tech sensors to tell them about the inside of a person's house without first obtaining a search warrant. The radars work like finely tuned motion detectors, using radio waves to zero in on movements as slight as human breathing from a distance of more than 50 feet. They can detect whether anyone is inside of a house, where they are and whether they are moving.
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Oct 15
     
    About the technology from the patent holder's web site: http://as-e.com/resource-center/technology/z-backscatter/ Example photos of the Z Backspatter Vans and examples of X-Ray photos taken with it. https://goo.gl/MO1TVi  Forty percent higher radiation than airport security scanners. with a range of over a thousand feet. 12-seconds to conduct a scan.  
Paul Merrell

US court blocks NYPD stop-and-frisk ruling and removes judge from case | World news | t... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...d-stop-and-frisk-appeals-court

surveillance state NYPD courts civil liberties

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • A federal appeals court has blocked a judge's ruling that demanded changes to the New York police department's controversial stop-and-frisk policy and ordered she be removed from the case.In a victory for the outgoing mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, the court said Shira Scheindlin's ruling, in which she declared the practice to be unconstitutional, would be stayed pending the outcome of an appeal by the city.Scheindlin had ruled that the city violated the constitution in the way it carried out its program of stopping and questioning people. She appointed an outside monitor to oversee major changes to the NYPD, and ordered reform to police training and supervision.Those changes will now be delayed pending the outcome of the city's appeal, and Scheindlin will no longer be involved in the case following a ruling that Jonathan Moore, a lead attorney in the federal lawsuit challenging the department's stop-and-frisk practices, said was "unprecedented"."Basically, this court is saying to the citizens of New York, who have followed this case and who were very uplifted by the fact that a federal judge stood up to protect the rights of all citizens of the city of New York … this is the panel of the second circuit saying: 'Drop dead, New York'," Moore said.
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Nov 13
     
    Wow! Stays of injunctions pending appeal are fairly common and it's not unheard of for district judges to be disqualified at the point the appeal is decided for public statements made after an appeal is launched. For example, in U.S. v. Microsoft. But I've never heard of a federal judge being removed from a case before the appeal is decided.  In a civil rights case injunction to protect civil rights, this is outrageous. 
Paul Merrell

New York Police Have Used Stingrays Widely, New Documents Show - 0 views

theintercept.com/...rays-widely-new-documents-show

surveillance state NYPD stingrays ACLU

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • The NYPD has used cell-site simulators, commonly known as Stingrays, more than 1,000 times since 2008, according to documents turned over to the New York Civil Liberties Union. The documents represent the first time the department has acknowledged using the devices. The NYPD also disclosed that it does not get a warrant before using a Stingray, which sweeps up massive amounts of data. Instead, the police obtain a “pen register order” from a court, more typically used to collect call data for a specific phone. Those orders do not require the police to establish probable cause. Additionally, the NYPD has no written policy guidelines on the use of Stingrays. Stingrays work by imitating cellphone towers. They force all nearby phones to connect to them, revealing the owners’ locations. That means they collect data on potentially hundreds of people. They are small enough to fit in a suitcase, or be mounted on a plane.
  • When they were originally developed in 2003, Stingrays were designed for military use. But in the past decade, they have increasingly been purchased by law enforcement agencies. According to the ACLU, Stingrays are used by at least 59 police departments in 23 states, and at least 13 federal agencies, including the DEA, FBI, and the IRS. Because most departments withhold information about Stingrays, these numbers likely underrepresent the total.
  • Stingrays have long been a topic of concern for privacy activists. “Cell-site simulators are powerful surveillance devices that can track people, including in their homes, and collect information on innocent bystanders,” said Mariko Hirose, a senior staff attorney at the NYCLU.  “If they are going to be used in communities the police should at minimum obtain a warrant and follow written policies.” Instead, law enforcement agencies have fought to keep Stingrays secret, even dropping criminal cases to avoid disclosing anything about them. The FBI has forced local police agencies to sign Stingray-related non-disclosure agreements, claiming that criminals and terrorists who know about Stingrays could take countermeasures against them. The increasing use of Stingrays, coupled with the lack of transparency, has alarmed civil liberties groups. “I think it’s critical to have transparency about the use of technology like Stingrays,” said Faiza Patel, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice. “That’s what allows courts, the public, and our elected officials to weigh in on the proper rules.”
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  • In September, the Department of Justice issued guidelines requiring its officers to seek probable cause warrants before using a Stingray. But the guidelines only applied to federal law enforcement agencies, not to state and local police, who have fought such a change. In one ongoing court case, the state of Maryland has argued that anyone who turns on their phone consents to having his or her location tracked. In November, Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, introduced the GPS Act, a bill that would extend the Department of Justice’s guidelines to all law enforcement agencies. “Buying a smartphone shouldn’t be interpreted as giving the government a free pass to track your movements,” Wyden said.
Paul Merrell

What the Third Circuit Said in Hassan v. City of New York | Just Security - 0 views

www.justsecurity.org/...circuit-hassan-v-city-york

liberties surveillance state NYPD Muslim-surveillance litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • In Hassan v. City of New York, the Third Circuit yesterday emphatically overturned a New Jersey district court, which had dismissed a challenge to the New York City Police Department’s Muslim surveillance program. The decision is important not only for the New Jersey plaintiffs who brought the case, but also for its analysis of several legal issues that have dogged efforts to obtain judicial review of surveillance programs.
  • The threshold issue in Hassan was whether the plaintiffs had alleged injury sufficient to establish standing to bring claims that the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim communities in New Jersey violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as well as the free exercise and establishment clauses of the First Amendment. The Third Circuit ruled that the fundamental injury alleged by the plaintiffs — unequal treatment on the basis of religion — was sufficient to keep them in court. The court rejected as “too cramped,” the City’s contention that discrimination is only actionable when it results in deprivation of “a tangible benefit like college admission or Social Security.”
  • One of the most remarkable aspects of the lower court’s dismissal of Hassan was its acceptance of the City’s argument that any injury to the plaintiffs was not fairly traceable to the police. Rather, defendants argued, it was the fault of the Associated Press, which published a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim communities in New York and New Jersey. The court described this position — variants of which have been articulated in the wake of Snowden’s disclosures as well — as “What you don’t know can’t hurt you. And, if you do know, don’t shoot us. Shoot the messenger.” The Third Circuit wasn’t buying it. The primary injury alleged was discrimination, which was caused by the City, not than the press.
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  • Next up was the lower court’s dismissal of the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs had failed to state a claim. The plaintiffs had alleged that the NYPD’s surveillance program was facially discriminatory because it targeted Muslims. In response, the City had demanded information about “when, by whom, and how the policy was enacted and where it was written down.” But the court found the plaintiffs had met their burden, alleging specifics about the program “including when it was conceived (January 2002), where the City implemented it (in the New York Metropolitan area with a focus on New Jersey), and why it has been employed because of the belief ‘that Muslim religious identity … is a permissible proxy for criminality.’” In other words, the plaintiffs had sufficiently alleged a facially discriminatory policy even when they couldn’t identify a piece of paper on which it was memorialized. For civil rights lawyers concerned that cases like Iqbal and Twombly are closing off avenues for civil rights litigation, the Third Circuit holding provides some comfort. A key issue in the case was the NYPD’s intent in monitoring Muslims. The City had successfully argued below that it “could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself.” Its motive, the City argued, was counterterrorism, not treating Muslims differently. The problem with this argument, the Third Circuit explained, was that the City was mixing up “intent” and “motive.” The intent inquiry focuses on whether a person acts intentionally rather than accidentally, while the motive inquiry focuses on why a person acts. “[E]ven if NYPD officers were subjectively motivated by a legitimate law enforcement purpose … they’ve intentionally discriminated if they wouldn’t have surveilled Plaintiffs had they not been Muslim,” the court concluded.
  • The court then turned to whether, assuming differential treatment, the NYPD program was nevertheless justified on security or public safety grounds. It began its inquiry by examining the appropriate standard of review, concluding that it was appropriate to apply heightened scrutiny to religion-based classifications under the equal protection clause rather than simply to examine whether the City had a rational basis for its actions. Even though religious affiliation, unlike race, is capable of being changed, the Third Circuit agreed with many of its sister courts that it was of such fundamental importance that people should not be required to change their faith.
  • New York City had argued that the surveillance program met the heightened scrutiny standard because it was necessary to meet the threat of terrorism. In support, the City put forward its oft-repeated argument that a “comprehensive understanding of the makeup of the community would help the NYPD figure out where to look — and where not to look — in the event it received information that an Islamist radicalized to violence may be secreting himself in New Jersey.” The court was not convinced that this was a sufficiently close fit with the goal, finding that the City failed to meet its burden of rebutting the presumption of unconstitutionality created by plausible allegation of discrimination. Harking back to the World War II internment of Japanese Americans
  • the Third Circuit cautioned: No matter how tempting it might be to do otherwise, we must apply the same rigorous standards even where national security is at stake. We have learned from experience that it is often where the asserted interest appears most compelling that we must be most vigilant in protecting constitutional rights … Given that “unconditional deference to [the] government[’s] … invocation of ‘emergency’ … has a lamentable place in our history,” the past should not preface yet again bending our constitutional principles merely because an interest in national security is invoked.
  • Lastly, the Third Circuit rejected as “threadbare” the City’s argument that plaintiffs First Amendment free exercise and establishment clause claims failed because they did not allege “overt hostility and prejudice.” As with the equal protection claims, it was not necessary for plaintiffs to demonstrate animus. *     *     * In conclusion, the court reminded us that the targeting of Muslims, which has been a leitmotif of US security policy, was not new. We have been down similar roads before. Jewish-Americans during the Red Scare, African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement, and Japanese-Americans during World War II are examples that readily spring to mind. We are left to wonder why we cannot see with foresight what we see so clearly with hindsight — that “[l]oyalty is a matter of the heart and mind[,] not race, creed, or color.”
Paul Merrell

60 Minutes Hearts the NSA -- Daily Intelligencer - 0 views

nymag.com/...60-minutes-hearts-the-nsa.html

surveillance state NSA NSA-publicity CBS 60-Minutes presstitutes Alexander

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Last night’s episode of 60 Minutes on CBS included what basically amounted to an uncritical commercial for the embattled National Security Agency, led by a journalist who used to be a government colleague. While the show — which has faced recent problems of its own, from the Benghazi debacle to the Amazon drone PR stunt — celebrated its own “unprecedented access to NSA headquarters,” it’s clear the meeting was on the NSA’s terms. In fact, NSA Director General Keith Alexander “made the call to invite us in,” a 60 Minutes producer admitted. They pretty much let him say his piece, nodding along excitedly. “Full disclosure, I once worked in the office of the director of National Intelligence where I saw firsthand how secretly the NSA operates,” said the reporter John Miller at the start of the segment.
  • While no critics of the NSA programs were given a chance to make the case against the potentially extralegal spying, which has resulted in international outrage, CBS did assist in the discrediting of master leaker Edward Snowden. Take, for example, this galling exchange with the head of the Snowden task force within the NSA, following Miller’s dismissive description of Snowden as a “twentysomething-year-old, high-school-dropout contractor”: John Miller: Did you sit in his chair?Rick Ledgett: I did not. I couldn’t bring myself to do that. […] At home, they discovered Snowden had some strange habits. Rick Ledgett: He would work on the computer with a hood that covered the computer screen and covered his head and shoulders, so that he could work and his girlfriend couldn't see what he was doing.John Miller: That's pretty strange, sitting at your computer kind of covered by a sheet over your head and the screen?Rick Ledgett: Agreed.
  • Media observers, some less personally involved in the Snowden leaks than others, could not believe what they were watching: 60 Minutes forgot to ask about how James Clapper & Keith Alexander routinely lied to Congress & FISA courts - just ran out of time.— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 16, 2013 Wow, the 60 Minutes piece about the NSA was just embarrassing. Kudos to the NSA communications staff. You guys should get a raise.— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) December 16, 2013
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  • "NSA Doing Great Job, NSA Says" - 60 Minutes— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) December 16, 2013 This 60 Minutes episode has been a pretty good infomercial for the NSA so far. Did anyone catch that 1-800 number so I can order?— Andy Greenberg (@a_greenberg) December 16, 2013 That time a 60 Minutes correspondent asked an NSA analyst to solve a Rubik's cube. #journalism pic.twitter.com/9fgJkLB1oK— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) December 16, 2013
  • CBS’s John Miller, though, knew what he was doing. “General Alexander agreed to talk to us because he believes the NSA has not told its story well,” he explained in a behind-the-scenes segment. “I think we asked the hardest questions we could ask,” he said. “We’ve heard plenty from the critics. We’ve heard a lot from Edward Snowden.” Still, “You also don’t want this to be a puff piece,” he added. We got one anyway.
  • The cherry on top is that Miller is currently in the running, reportedly, for a “top counterterrorism or intelligence role” in the NYPD when his old pal Bill Bratton takes over, something that was not disclosed by 60 Minutes.  He's certainly qualified. (Miller held a similar job as chief of counterterrorism under Bratton at the LAPD in addition to his work in national intelligence.) “He wants the badge, the gun and the adrenaline — to be in the center of the action,” a source told the New York Post of Miller, calling it “a 99.44 percent done deal.” And on top of describing Bill Bratton as “one of my best friends,” this was a great audition.  [CBS News] [HuffPost] [Poynter]
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Dec 13
     
    I'm glad I didn't miss anything important that I haven't heard before too many times. Filmed before a federal judge and Obama's blue ribbon committee report on DoD intelligence community digital spying both in effect branded Alexander as a liar again. 
Paul Merrell

Korematsu's Demise? | Just Security - 0 views

www.justsecurity.org/...korematsus-demise

surveillance state NYPD-intelligence litigation Korematsu

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • There’s a lot that’s remarkable about last Tuesday’s Third Circuit decision in Hassan v. City of New York, which Faiza Patel cogently summarized in her post last week. In a nutshell, Hassan involves a challenge to secret intelligence operations carried out by the New York Police Department (NYPD) over the years since September 11 that allegedly targets Muslim communities “based on the false and stigmatizing premise that Muslim religious identity ‘is a permissible proxy for criminality, and that Muslim individuals, businesses, and institutions can therefore be subject to pervasive surveillance not visited upon individuals, businesses, and institutions of any other religious faith or the public at large.'” The district court had tersely granted the City’s motion to dismiss both because it concluded the plaintiffs lacked standing and because, in the alternative, it held that the plaintiffs had failed to overcome the pleading burden articulated by the Supreme Court in Iqbal. But the Third Circuit reversed on both fronts, holding that the plaintiffs’ allegations, if true, were more than enough to establish both that they had suffered an injury in fact sufficient to satisfy Article III standing, and that their equal protection and First Amendment claims were sufficiently plausible to satisfy Iqbal. To be sure, the Third Circuit’s decision is interlocutory — coming at a very preliminary stage in the litigation. But what I want to suggest in the post that follows is that, as much as any other post-September 11 judicial decision, Hassan represents the full-throated repudiation of the Supreme Court’s infamous World War II-era ruling in Korematsu v. United States that has been so long in coming — and so thoroughly overdue.
  • As I’ve written about before, Korematsu reflects two separate — but equally important — constitutional failures. The first failure was the internment policy itself, which we now know (and which the US government knew at the time) to have been a completely unnecessary — if not hysterical — overreaction to hyperbolic and (after Midway, at least) categorically overstated fears of a Japanese invasion of the West Coast. By itself, the camps were a dark stain on the history of civil liberties in the United States — albeit one of many, alas. But the second failure was, historically, the far more significant and unique one — the Supreme Court’s conscious constitutional rationalization of the internment policy, based upon a combination of naïveté on the Justices’ part and the affirmatively misleading (if not downright disingenuous) briefing by the federal government. As Justice Robert H. Jackson understood — and forcefully articulated — in his Korematsu dissent, the real violence to the “rule of law” resulting from the camps was thus not the underlying policy, but rather its validation by the Supreme Court. In his words, “a military commander may overstep the bounds of constitutionality, and it is an incident. But if we review and approve, that passing incident becomes the doctrine of the Constitution.”
  • But we’ve struggled somewhat with the second constitutional failure. The courts have repudiated Korematsu’s conviction; the Office of the Solicitor General has confessed error for its role in perpetuating the government’s misleading case before the Supreme Court; and scholars have suggested that Korematsu itself has become part of the “anti-canon” — the class of Supreme Court decisions so reviled that they are cited, if at all, in support of the wrongness of their holdings. But Korematsu itself remains on the books, as do broader concerns that courts are still vulnerable to Korematsu — style reasoning, i.e., that the need to protect national security might provide legal justification for government conduct that would otherwise be unjustifiable. Indeed, one need look no further than the ongoing debate over the SSCI’s torture report for evidence of the Korematsu mentality being alive and well.
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  • That’s why I find the Third Circuit’s analysis in Hassan so significant — not because it allows this particular civil suit to go forward, but because it does so based upon an explicit (and conscious) rejection of Korematsu — style legal reasoning. As Judge Ambro explains, “No matter how tempting it might be to do otherwise, we must apply the same rigorous standards even where national security is at stake. We have learned from experience that it is often where the asserted interest appears most compelling that we must be most vigilant in protecting constitutional rights.” And applying the strict judicial scrutiny that is triggered by government action deemed to be intentionally discriminatory on the basis of religious affiliation, the court proceeds to hold that the NYPD lacked a sufficiently compelling justification for such discriminatory treatment, because even if abstract claims of security necessity could be a compelling government interest, the NYPD’s alleged policy was far too overbroad to survive the narrow tailoring required by strict scrutiny. Thus, quoting directly from Justice Jackson’s Korematsu dissent, Judge Ambro closed his opinion by noting that “Our job is judicial. We ‘can apply only law, and must abide by the Constitution, or [we] cease to be civil courts and become instruments of [police] policy.'”
  • Faiza’s post provides far more detail on the specifics of the Third Circuit’s analysis, and the opinion itself is worth a read. For present purposes, though, it’s this mentality that I find so refreshing — that even when the government invokes the specter of September 11 and the need to prevent future acts of terrorism, courts will not abdicate their responsibility to scrutinize the government’s justifications with care, and to be especially wary of overbroad government programs carried out under the broad guise of “necessity.” Hassan certainly isn’t the first example of this kind of principled judicial decisionmaking in a post-September 11 counterterrorism suit, but it is the one that, at least in my view, most directly confronts — and rejects — the kind of deferential judicial review that was responsible for the second constitutional failure in Korematsu, and all of the pain that followed.
Paul Merrell

Muslim Americans win chance to sue NYPD for spying - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...pd-spying-151015044346585.html

liberties surveillance state NYPD Muslim-surveillance litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • An appeals court in the US has given Muslim Americans another chance to sue the New York Police Department for its surveillance on them. Last year, a lower court had dismissed the case in which the police were accused of deliberately targeting Muslims because of their religion. However, the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia reversed a lower court's decision, finding the plaintiffs had legal standing to assert claims that the country's so-called counterterrorism programme violated their rights.
Gary Edwards

Character Matters and Mitt Romney has it - 1 views

The following eMail message is being forwarded around the Web and it does confirm my own personal experiences with then Governor Romney in 2005-2006. The issue then was the Massachusetts Open Gove...

Romney ODF Massachusetts-Lesson Massachusetts-RFi Microsoft OOXML

started by Gary Edwards on 17 Apr 12 no follow-up yet
Paul Merrell

Glassholes: A Mini NSA on Your Face, Recorded by the Spy Agency | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5367764

surveillance state Google-Glass NSA facial-recognition

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • eOnline reports: A new app will allow total strangers to ID you and pull up all your information, just by looking at you and scanning your face with their Google Glass. The app is called NameTag and it sounds CREEPY. The “real-time facial recognition” software “can detect a face using the Google Glass camera, send it wirelessly to a server, compare it to millions of records, and in seconds return a match complete with a name, additional photos and social media profiles.” The information listed could include your name, occupation, any social media profiles you have set up and whether or not you have a criminal record (“CRIMINAL HISTORY FOUND” pops up in bright red letters according to the demo).
  • Since the NSA is tapping into all of our digital communications, it is not unreasonable to assume that all of the info from your digital glasses – yup, everything – may be recorded by the spy agency. Are we going to have millions of mini NSAs walking around recording everything … glassholes? It doesn’t help inspire confidence that America’s largest police force and Taser are beta-testing Google Glasses. Postscript: I love gadgets and tech, and previously discussed the exciting possibilities of Google Glasses. But the NSA is ruining the fun, just like it’s harming U.S. Internet business.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Feb 14
     
    Thankfully, there's buddying technology to block computer facial-recognition algorithms. http://tinyurl.com/mzfyfra On the other hand, used Hallowe'en masks can usually be purchased inexpensively from some nearby school kids at this time of year. Now if I could just put together a few near-infrared LEDs to fry a license plate-scanner's view ...  
Paul Merrell

Perfect Timing? ISIS Re-Tweets Threats Against Police | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...-isis-re-tweets-threats-police

war & peace ISIL politics of fear war-propaganda

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has reportedly put their officers on high alert after a video attributed to the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) was tweeted on social media threatening law enforcement in the US, France, Australia, and Canada. This video posted by an alleged ISIS spokesperson, was followed by the message: “Strike their police, security, and intelligence members, as well as their treacherous agents.” Interestingly, the video tweeted was a “re-release [of] a September 2014 message”.
  • One mainstream media outlet claims to have “obtained” an instructional email from an unidentified member of the Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA) stating: “If you are assigned to a fixed post, do not sit together in the RMP [police car]. At least one officer must stand outside the vehicle at all times. Pay attention to your surroundings. Officers must pay close attention to approaching vehicles . . . Pay close attention to people as they approach. Look for their hands.” At the time, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published similar warnings to police departments in the US, warning that the message “is consistent with previous threats that ISIS and others, including al Qaeda, have issued.” In October of last year, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commented speaking at the Economic Club reiterating the US intelligence community’s cries about the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
  • Clinton said: “It’s a serious threat because this is the best-funded, most professional, expansionist jihadist military force that we have ever seen. This is far more advanced and far richer than al-Qaeda ever was.”
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Jan 15
     
    A caution that the article's author, Susanne Posel, is not into fact-checking and frequently dispenses incorrect information.
Paul Merrell

Why Does the FBI Have to Manufacture its Own Plots if Terrorism and ISIS Are Such Grave... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...s-terrorism-isis-grave-threats

war on terror™ politics-of-fear budget-justification FBI entrapment

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The FBI and major media outlets yesterday trumpeted the agency’s latest counterterrorism triumph: the arrest of three Brooklyn men, ages 19 to 30, on charges of conspiring to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS (photo of joint FBI/NYPD press conference, above). As my colleague Murtaza Hussain ably documents, “it appears that none of the three men was in any condition to travel or support the Islamic State, without help from the FBI informant.” One of the frightening terrorist villains told the FBI informant that, beyond having no money, he had encountered a significant problem in following through on the FBI’s plot: his mom had taken away his passport. Noting the bizarre and unhinged ranting of one of the suspects, Hussain noted on Twitter that this case “sounds like another victory for the FBI over the mentally ill.” In this regard, this latest arrest appears to be quite similar to the overwhelming majority of terrorism arrests the FBI has proudly touted over the last decade. As my colleague Andrew Fishman and I wrote last month — after the FBI manipulated a 20-year-old loner who lived with his parents into allegedly agreeing to join an FBI-created plot to attack the Capitol — these cases follow a very clear pattern
  • Once again, we should all pause for a moment to thank the brave men and women of the FBI for saving us from their own terror plots.
  • We’re constantly bombarded with dire warnings about the grave threat of home-grown terrorists, “lone wolf” extremists and ISIS. So intensified are these official warnings that The New York Times earlier this month cited anonymous U.S. intelligence officials to warn of the growing ISIS threat and announce “the prospect of a new global war on terror.” But how serious of a threat can all of this be, at least domestically, if the FBI continually has to resort to manufacturing its own plots by trolling the Internet in search of young drifters and/or the mentally ill whom they target, recruit and then manipulate into joining? Does that not, by itself, demonstrate how over-hyped and insubstantial this “threat” actually is? Shouldn’t there be actual plots, ones that are created and fueled without the help of the FBI, that the agency should devote its massive resources to stopping? This FBI tactic would be akin to having the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) constantly warn of the severe threat posed by drug addiction while it simultaneously uses pushers on its payroll to deliberately get people hooked on drugs so that they can arrest the addicts they’ve created and thus justify their own warnings and budgets (and that kind of threat-creation, just by the way, is not all that far off from what the other federal law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, are actually doing). As we noted the last time we wrote about this, the Justice Department is aggressively pressuring U.S. allies to employ these same entrapment tactics in order to create their own terrorists, who can then be paraded around as proof of the grave threat.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • UPDATE: The ACLU of Massachusetts’s Kade Crockford notes this extraordinarily revealing quote from former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes, as he defends one of the worst FBI terror “sting” operations of all (the Cromitie prosecution we describe at length here): If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that “We won the war on terror and everything’s great,” cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive. That is the FBI’s terrorism strategy — keep fear alive — and it drives everything they do.
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