Trading our freedom for security: Senate votes to extend Patriot Act
Source: AP
WASHINGTON – The Senate voted Wednesday to extend for a year key provisions of the nation’s counterterrorism surveillance law that are scheduled to expire at the end of the month. In agreeing to pass the bill, Senate Democrats retreated from adding new privacy protections to the USA Patriot Act. The Senate approved the bill on a voice vote with no debate. It now goes to the House. Three important sections of the Patriot Act are to expire at the end of this month.
One authorizes court-approved roving wiretaps that permit surveillance on multiple phones. A second allows court-approved seizure of records and property in anti-terrorism operations. A third permits surveillance against a so-called lone wolf, a non-U.S. citizen suspected of engaging in terrorism who may not be part of a recognized terrorist group.
Supporters say extending the law enables authorities to keep important tools in the fight against terrorism. It would also give Democrats some cover from Republican criticism that the Obama administration is soft on terrorism. Republicans have criticized the administration for trying terrorist suspects in civilians courts, rather than military ones, and for trying to close the military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Chemist’s War: The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences.
Source: Slate – Deborah Blum
It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.
Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.
Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.” Poisonous alcohol still kills—16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes—but that’s due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.
Texas Supplied Newborn Blood Samples to U.S. Armed Forces laboratory
Source: Science Mag - Jennifer Couzin-Frankel
Dogged investigation by a non-profit online media organization in Texas has revealed that between 2003 and 2007, the state quietly gave hundreds of newborn blood samples to a U.S. Armed Forces laboratory for use in a forensics database. The revelation will likely raise questions about how newborn screening programs are run and how the samples are disseminated, almost always without families knowing where they go.
In this case, 800 blood samples were to be part of a new, national mitochondrial DNA database intended as a reference databank for the forensic community and for research into mitochondrial DNA variation—DNA we inherit from our mother. California, Minnesota, and Florida have also reportedly supplied infant blood samples to the effort, according to The Texas Tribune investigation.
Like virtually every state, Texas routinely screens almost all newborns for rare diseases, collecting a few drops of blood at birth. In recent years many states, Texas included, have stored the samples and offered them up for research, mainly in pediatrics. Because the samples are anonymous (though they may come with some demographic information, depending on the study), researchers have argued that they don’t need to seek informed consent to use them.
That hasn’t gone over well recently; in March of last year, a civil rights group sued the Texas screening program. In December, the state settled the case and agreed to destroy all newborn blood spots collected before May 2009, when legislation passed allowing for sample storage.
That’s where the story gets interesting. The Texas Tribune describes a drawn-out effort to review records of the newborn blood spots. After a couple requests, the Texas Department of State Health Services released a batch of documents, which included a single e-mail mentioning the mtDNA project at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. “When the Tribune pressed health officials about the missing research files, they produced them, saying it was an oversight, and that the documents had been overlooked in their initial search,” writes The Tribune’s Emily Ramshaw.
There’s growing concern among researchers that public wariness about the newborn screening program will create a backlash—with parents declining to screen their kids (who may end up much sicker because their disease wasn’t caught early), and with the spots no longer made available for valuable pediatrics research, such as tracing the origins of childhood leukemia. This new revelation is likely to fan those flame—even if the samples in question are being destroyed.
1,000 Architects & Engineers Call for New 9/11 Investigation
The mother of all cover ups. An inside job that was outlined by the federal government almost 40 years before.
Source: Yahoo News
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – Richard Gage, AIA, architect and founder of the non-profit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Inc. (AE911Truth), will announce a decisive milestone today at a press conference in San Francisco, as more than 1,000 worldwide architects and engineers now support the call for a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. After careful examination of the official explanation, along with the forensic data omitted from official reports, these professionals have concluded that a new independent investigation into these mysterious collapses is needed.
Mr. Gage will deliver the news around this major development, accompanied by signers of the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth petition. The press conference will be held concurrently in 38 cities in 6 countries.http://www.ae911truth.org/info/160
These prominent architectural and engineering professionals will discuss the organization’s findings and concerns. A brief presentation of the explosive evidence they have compiled will be followed by Q & A. The presentation is an important update of “9/11: Blueprint for Truth – The Architecture of Destruction,” the DVD produced by the organization, and available on their website AE911Truth.org, which analyzes thescientific forensic evidence concluding that the three skyscrapers in New York City were demolished with explosives on 9/11. The petition will be delivered today to every congressional representative by AE911Truth petition signers throughout the country. Government officials will be notified that “Misprision of Treason”, US Code 18 (Sec. 2382), is a serious federal offense which requires those with evidence of treason to act.
POLICE STATE: Police Brutality: Cops Plant Drugs On Suspect & Lets Dog Attack
Source: Federal Jack
A lawsuit has emerged after police stopped a man and allegedly allowed a dog to bit him and planted drugs on him. The incident was caught on video.
Obama attorneys argue for warrantless cell phone tracking
Source: therawstory
This is not change that privacy advocates can believe in.
A US appeals court began weighing Friday whether police should be allowed to track citizens through their cellphones without first obtaining a warrant.
The case “could prove to be one of the most important privacy rights battles of the modern era,” The Legal Intelligencer noted.
Adopting a Bush-era argument, Obama administration attorneys asked the court to allow telecoms companies to hand over their subscribers’ location information, even without a probable cause warrant.
But privacy and human rights groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) say the process is invasive and violates individuals’ privacy and Fourth Amendment rights, which safeguard against illegal search and seizure.
During the Olympics, The Feds Will Be Reading Your Tweets – And the Blotter
Police patrol the area outside of the BC Place Stadium which will host the Winter Olympics opening... (Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)
As the winter Olympics begin, the Department of Homeland Security has disclosed that it will be monitoring the comments and posts on websites and social media like Twitter for information on possible terror threats. Among the sites listed in a privacy impact statement filed Friday afternoon by DHS are the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, Twitter, Google and this web site, the Blotter.
Police patrol the area outside of the BC Place Stadium which will host the Winter Olympics opening… (Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)
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The National Operations Center of DHS will watch the web for information, according to the statement, to “provide situational awareness” in the event of natural disaster, an “act of terrorism, or other manmade disaster.”
“The Olympics are a potential target for such events,” said the statement. The statement did not list all web sites and social media that the NOC will monitor, but provided 31 examples, many of them, like the Blotter, sites that cover breaking news, security, or terror.
No joke: South Carolina now requires ’subversives’ to register
Source: Raw Story
Five-dollar registration fee for persons planning to overthrow US government
Terrorists who want to overthrow the United States government must now register with South Carolina’s Secretary of State and declare their intentions — or face a $25,000 fine and up to 10 years in prison.
The state’s “Subversive Activities Registration Act,” passed last year and now officially on the books, states that “every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States … shall register with the Secretary of State.”
There’s even a $5 filing fee.
By “subversive organization,” the law means “every corporation, society, association, camp, group, bund, political party, assembly, body or organization, composed of two or more persons, which directly or indirectly advocates, advises, teaches or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States [or] of this State.”
U.S. Intelligence Officials Asked State Department to NOT Revoke Crotch Bomber’s Visa
Source: Detroit News
Washington –The State Department didn’t revoke the visa of foiled terrorism suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab because federal counterterrorism officials had begged off revocation, a top State Department official revealed Wednesday.
Patrick F. Kennedy, an undersecretary for management at the State Department, said Abdulmutallab’s visa wasn’t taken away because intelligence officials asked his agency not to deny a visa to the suspected terrorist over concerns that a denial would’ve foiled a larger investigation into al-Qaida threats against the United States.
“Revocation action would’ve disclosed what they were doing,” Kennedy said in testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with, “rather than simply knocking out one solider in that effort.”
The committee’s hearing continues a series across Capitol Hill that started last week, all looking into the events leading up to and after the attempted bombing of Flight 253 over Detroit. Law enforcement officials say Abdulmutallab tried to detonate an explosive hidden in his underwear on board the flight from Amsterdam shortly before its landing at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Romulus on Christmas Day.
Since the failed attack, criticism has swirled around leaders of the U.S. intelligence community who have indicated they were warned by the suspect’s father about a month before the flight of a potential terror threat, but failed to stop Abdmutallab, despite other warning signs like the fact that he purchased a one-way ticket to Detroit with cash.
Politicians have also criticized the decision to treat Abdulmutallab as a civilian after the arrest in Michigan, with Miranda rights being read to him after less than an hour of interrogation and without input from the intelligence community.
Rep. Candice Miller, R-Harrison Township, the only Michigan House member on the Homeland Security Committee, said in a Tuesday statement that she planned to question officials on that matter at today’s hearing.
