FBI Program Deputizes Corporations To Spy, Report On Workers, Among Others

If you haven't heard about InfraGard, a Bush Administration-FBI initiative to "fight the battle for homeland (in)security", you need to know. I've written about it in some detail at All Things Democrat, but you can also find the Democracy Now videocast of The Progressive's Matt Rothschild detailing it yesterday. Also, you can read his article here ("The FBI Deputizes Business").

At BEST, this is corporate favoritism and yet another program WE have to pay for with our tax dollars (many of these businesses involved with InfraGard not only pay minimal if any taxes, many are the recipients of huge rebates we also pay for).

At worst? Well, it staggers the imagination (like much of what the Bush Administration does).

John Edwards Says What We ALL Should

Cookie Jill over at Skippy The Bush Kangaroo's little corner of Blogtopia reminds us of this dead-on John Edwards quote:

"It's wrong for your government to spy on you."

Amen, three cheers, and hallelujah!

"Out of The Mouths of Blabbering Boobs & Bushies"

With so much bad news - from the economy to the declaration that we're having our deadliest years E-V-E-R in both Iraq and Afghanistan to a host of other awfuls, the Bushies have made a few really TELLING declarations in the past week that are worthy of note.

First, there was Bush's insistence that anything Pakistan leader Pervez Musharraf wanted to do to for his country was A-OK with Bush. But that's not quite the NEWS. Bush, when asked if it was appropriate for Musharraf to claim the presidency when he came to power through a military coupe with Musharraf heading the military at the time, Bush comes out with:

Can a leader run both the military AND be president of his country at the same time? Of course not!

Uh.... Houston to the president: YOU ostensibly run the military as commander in cheat.. uh chief WHILE you are also supposedly president.

Then there's White House spokesvermin Dana Perino, Tony Snow(job)'s even sorrier replacement who, when asked if it was appropriate for any country's leadership to choose arbitrarily to end his/her nation's democracy and civil liberties in the name of protecting its citizens from terrorism, said NO!

But all the Bushies have done, since even before Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, is spy upon us as its citizens without ANY proof any of us is jeopardizing national security, to wiretap and remove constitutionally protected liberties, all in the name of "homeland security." In fact, in the same week Perino uttered this startling declaration (and removing our liberties have NOT made us any safer, I must add), the Bushies had several new initiatives underway to snoop upon us without due cause.

Stop the insanity, people!

Dick Cheney, Enemy of the State (And The World)

As I posted elsewhere...

I strongly (as in STRONGLY) encourage you to find your local listing for this week's PBS Frontline for a startling, scary profile of Vice DickPresident Dick Cheney's 30+ year war to take away civil liberties at the same astonishing pace as he wants to turn the American presidency and any notion of democracy into a game only Cheney and his pals can play.

I was riveted and sickened all at once; those who maintain BIG questions about the Bush Administration's possible complicity in September 11th will find new fodder with the revelations from Cheney's own hench cretins that as buildings still burned that day, The Dick was calling in his people to stage a coup against American democracy and the U.S. Constitution while giving the president more powers than our founding fathers EVER wanted to allow.

This material, fully documented, FAR EXCEEDS the imagination of George Orwell's 1984 and the machinations of Machiavelli. And yet, with all of that, what REALLY amazed me was that the dimbulb former Attorney General (although a dimbulb HAS to burn brighter than also former AG Alberto Gonzales) John Ashcroft ACTUALLY stood up for us when Cheney demanded the feds launch the most massive domestic spying and data mining operation against the American people in U.S. history.

As The Worm(s) Turn: Rove Flips The Bird While His ASSistant Refuses to So Much As Identify His Job Function

Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post offers a good take on Karl Rove's middle finger flip to the Senate Judiciary Committee today in the continuing, ever more baffling U.S. Attorney purge scandal that Rove and Bush clearly orchestrated for partisan gain; God forbid someone - anyone - in the Bush White House be held accountable for his or her actions.

For my take on how Rove's hench-weasel responded to the simplest questions posed by Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA and Scotland (cough)), see this post. The fellow seemed unwilling to so much as give his name. The contempt these folks hold for anyone not part of them is just astonishing. I have to say I can find no real precedent for the extensiveness of the clear and utter disregard for any accountability for their felonious actions.

At the same time, the Bush Administration is apparently pumping its set of huge brass balls ever larger because, as it becomes clearer with each passing day that U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales cannot tell a truth and certainly has NO capacity for performing his job ("I serve at the pleasure of the president; I nap when he does!"), the Bushies want to give this dolt even MORE capability for spying on us all under FISA, without due cause and definitely without any accountability.

Elsewhere, Time Magazine states what is all too obvious to those of us paying attention: Bush won't boot Gonzo because to do so might bring some very nasty, impeachable, perhaps fully treasonous facts into the light of day. How terrible that would be - for them, that is.

The Latest Fed Privatization-To-Skirt-Civil-Protections Ploy

While the concept of outsourcing the work of government is hardly brand new with the Bush Administration, the Bushies have no less than a hundred-fold used what I can only see as appropriately called "the privatization ploy" not just to reward companies eager to subsidize the Republicans under Bush/Rove, but to deliberately and egregiously circumvent certain protections and liberties afforded not just by the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, but by other federal charters.

Notable examples include former Defense Secretary (and he's not only still on their payroll at a much-inflated "contractor" rate, but maintains a major desk at the Pentagon) Rumsfeld's extremely lucrative privatization of the military to the likes of Blackwater, Bechtel (Rumsfeld's former hunting ground), Halliburton and others; bringing in contract interrogators and soldiers of fortune; IRS collections to private agencies that can do even worse things than the IRS, hiring data mining companies like ChoicePoint to improperly bounce voters (especially those of color), dig into our most private affairs (and those of people in other countries), et al. The list goes on ad nauseum, I'm afraid.

Now the Bushies are set to launch a NEW privatization ploy, according to ABC News: contract with companies to keep sophisticated and detailed records on all our communications via phone and Internet that federal laws prevent the government from keeping themselves. The feds can then use this info, regardless of whether there is any reason whatsoever to monitor us (as in, due cause), while completely circumventing the very laws put in place to protect us from domestic spying/eavesdropping.

When and where the hell does this end? [And yes, I think it can end, but we have to stand up and MAKE it STOP!] Clearly, the Bush Justice Department exists only to persecute citizens.

Patriot Act Follies

Yet another thing US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has lied about; claiming there are no verified reports of abuses of the U.S. Patriot Act when he has them piling up.

What Punishment/Reward Will Scooter Libby Get?

Tuesday is I. Lewis Libby's sentencing day for his role in PlameGate.

What do you think he'll get, if anything?

Gonzo's Greaaaattt Adventure

The one glaring truth to come out of all we've seen and heard from and about U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his machinations with the Bush White House to turn federal prosecutors into the SS officers AND kangaroo partisan political party courtships is that Gonzo, much like his "bestest" pal George Bush, doesn't have a frickin' clue what his job is, cannot tell the truth even when offering countless versions of the same story.

Also like Bush, Gonzo admits no wrongdoing, uses the U.S. constitution (and other documents and provisions such as the Geneva Conventions) as toilet paper, a spitoon, and quaint and foolish items written by old men long sense dead.

Here's what The Times has to say:

There were many fascinating threads to the testimony on Tuesday by the former deputy attorney general, James Comey, who described the night in March 2004 when two top White House officials tried to pressure an ailing and hospitalized Attorney General John Ashcroft into endorsing President Bush’s illegal wiretapping operation.

But the really big question, an urgent avenue for investigation, is what exactly the National Security Agency was doing before that night, under Mr. Bush’s personal orders. Did Mr. Bush start by authorizing the agency to intercept domestic e-mails and telephone calls without first getting a warrant?

Mr. Bush has acknowledged authorizing surveillance without a court order of communications between people abroad and people in the United States. That alone violates the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Domestic spying without a warrant would be an even more grievous offense.

The question cannot be answered because Mr. Bush is hiding so much about the program. But whatever was going on, it so alarmed Mr. Comey and F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller that they sped to the hospital, roused the barely conscious Mr. Ashcroft and got him ready to fend off the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, and Mr. Bush’s counsel, Alberto Gonzales. There are clues in Mr. Comey’s testimony and in earlier testimony by Mr. Gonzales, Mr. Ashcroft’s successor, that suggest that Mr. Bush initially ordered broader surveillance than he and his aides have acknowledged.

Mr. Comey said the bizarre events in Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital room were precipitated by a White House request that the Justice Department sign off on a continuation of the eavesdropping, which started in October 2001. Mr. Comey, who was acting attorney general while Mr. Ashcroft was ill, refused. Mr. Comey said his staff had reviewed the program as it was then being run and believed it was illegal.

So someone at the White House (and Americans need to know who) dispatched Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card to Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital bed. Mr. Ashcroft flatly refused to endorse the program, Mr. Comey said. Later, he said, Mr. Bush agreed to change the wiretapping in ways that enabled Justice to provide a legal rationale. Mr. Comey would not say why he opposed the original program — which remains secret — or how it was changed.

Read the rest here.

Life In The Bush-Big Brother America: "My National Security Letter Gag Order"

Pundits are great for saying things like "President George W. Bush has never asked Americans to sacrifice anything in these dark and scary times."

But that is simply NOT true. Americans have been required to sign away their freedom and other tenets upon which this nation was founded by ancestors like mine. Time and again, the Bushies prove they cannot accurately assess intelligence and frequently abuse Americans' trust and reasonable expectation of privacy, only to have these same Bushies demand more and more access to our private lives.

With these so-called "National Security Letters" or NSLs, they can snoop wherever and whenever they like; and just the sending of an NSL can make people treat the person being "checked out" quite differently. For example, as in my case, a "friendly inquiry" to a publisher results in lost work because who wants to have to deal with Alberto Gonzales' corrupt Department of (In)Justice?

Here, from the Washington Post, is someone's tale of such a National Security Letter and its attendant gag order. Read it all:

It is the policy of The Washington Post not to publish anonymous pieces. In this case, an exception has been made because the author -- who would have preferred to be named -- is legally prohibited from disclosing his or her identity in connection with receipt of a national security letter. The Post confirmed the legitimacy of this submission by verifying it with the author's attorney and by reviewing publicly available court documents.

The Justice Department's inspector general revealed on March 9 that the FBI has been systematically abusing one of the most controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act: the expanded power to issue "national security letters." It no doubt surprised most Americans to learn that between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 specific demands under this provision -- demands issued without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval -- to obtain potentially sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents. It did not, however, come as any surprise to me.

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power. I never released the information the FBI sought, and last November the FBI decided that it no longer needs the information anyway. But the FBI still hasn't abandoned the gag order that prevents me from disclosing my experience and concerns with the law or the national security letter that was served on my company. In fact, the government will return to court in the next few weeks to defend the gag orders that are imposed on recipients of these letters.

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.

The inspector general's report makes clear that NSL gag orders have had even more pernicious effects. Without the gag orders issued on recipients of the letters, it is doubtful that the FBI would have been able to abuse the NSL power the way that it did. Some recipients would have spoken out about perceived abuses, and the FBI's actions would have been subject to some degree of public scrutiny. To be sure, not all recipients would have spoken out; the inspector general's report suggests that large telecom companies have been all too willing to share sensitive data with the agency -- in at least one case, a telecom company gave the FBI even more information than it asked for. But some recipients would have called attention to abuses, and some abuse would have been deterred.

I found it particularly difficult to be silent about my concerns while Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 and early 2006. If I hadn't been under a gag order, I would have contacted members of Congress to discuss my experiences and to advocate changes in the law. The inspector general's report confirms that Congress lacked a complete picture of the problem during a critical time: Even though the NSL statute requires the director of the FBI to fully inform members of the House and Senate about all requests issued under the statute, the FBI significantly underrepresented the number of NSL requests in 2003, 2004 and 2005, according to the report.

I recognize that there may sometimes be a need for secrecy in certain national security investigations. But I've now been under a broad gag order for three years, and other NSL recipients have been silenced for even longer. At some point -- a point we passed long ago -- the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy. In the wake of the recent revelations, I believe more strongly than ever that the secrecy surrounding the government's use of the national security letters power is unwarranted and dangerous. I hope that Congress will at last recognize the same thing.