- This week we take a larger look at the implications for
all US citizens in the manner in which Jose Padilla, a US citizen was arrested
and held without charge for 3 years. We will also cover new details revealed
about the FBI automatic phone tapping system installed in every telephone
and cell phone exchange in the country. Together, total surveillance of
domestic communications along with the power to arrest people without charge
and keep them in prison without habeas corpus, represent two primary pillars
of a totalitarian system being designed to take down American liberty.
It is almost certain that the FBI is using illegal surveillance to build
dossiers on Americans who are or will become future activists against this
type of tyranny. The Padilla case gives us a chilling picture of the future
fate of American dissidents who will someday disappear into the new American
Gulag.
-
- Warren Richey of the Christian Science Monitor detailed
the tactics of isolation used to break down Padilla during his illegal
incarceration without charge: "When suspected Al Qaeda operative Jose
Padilla was whisked from the criminal justice system to military custody
in June 2002, it was done for a key purpose--to break his will to remain
silent. As a US citizen, Mr. Padilla enjoyed a right against forced self-incrimination.
But this constitutional guarantee vanished the instant President Bush declared
him an enemy combatant. For a month, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
had been questioning Padilla in New York City under the rules of the criminal
justice system. Padilla was delivered to the US Naval Consolidated Brig
in Charleston, S.C., where he was held not only in solitary confinement
but as the sole detainee in a high-security wing of the prison. Fifteen
other cells sat empty around him.
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- "The purpose of the extraordinary privacy, according
to experts familiar with the technique, was to eliminate the possibility
of human contact. No voices in the hallway. No conversations with other
prisoners. No tapping out messages on the walls. No ability to maintain
a sense of human connection, a sense of place or time. In essence, experts
say, the US government was trying to break Padilla's silence by plunging
him into a mental twilight zone."
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- Jack Balkin discussed the frightening implications of
these actions on a broader scale: "It's important to remember that
the Bush Administration did everything it could to deny Padilla even the
basic right of habeas corpus. It argued that courts had no power to second
guess the President's determination that Padilla was an enemy of the United
States and could be held in solitary confinement indefinitely. It argued
that no one had the right to contact Padilla and that no one had the right
to know what the government was doing to him. It argued that courts should
defer to the President's views about who was dangerous and who was not--
that once the President declared a person an enemy, that person had all
the process that was due them and courts should respect that determination.
-
- "It argued, in short, that the President always
knows best. If the President had his way, the government, on the basis
of information that never had to be tested before any neutral magistrate,
could pluck any citizen off the streets, throw them in a military prison,
and proceed to drive them insane. Those are the powers that the Bush Administration
sought. I will not mince words: They are the powers of a dictator in an
authoritarian regime...
-
- "Attorney General Ashcroft held a series of press
conferences telling us how dangerous Padilla was. (If the Attorney General
says something at a press conference, who are we to doubt his word?) But
despite all those press conferences, the government was never willing to
put those claims to the test before a court....Despite arguments by extremely
talented government lawyers, courts eventually rejected the Bush Administration's
claims of near-dictatorial powers [Actually, they only threatened to rule
against the government on some issues. U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke
actually said it was allowable to hold a prisoner without charge as long
as the prisoner was eventually charged with a crime--chilling!].
-
- "Unable to demonstrate before a neutral arbiter
that its claims about Padilla were true, the government instead transferred
him to the criminal process [to avoid a negative ruling], where he is now
on trial for a different set of charges than those offered by the government
as the justification for holding him in solitary confinement."
-
- That trial is now over and Padilla was found guilty of
conspiracy with others to commit terrorist acts. This was a trumped up
case using murky evidence dredged up by US black-ops intelligence and filled
with contradictions, as I covered in prior briefs. While I don't doubt
Padilla was a disaffected and angry Hispanic lured into the government's
own al Qaeda network of agent provocateurs, he clearly wasn't planning
a "dirty bomb" attack as the government originally alleged and
there was no evidence that he was a dangerous terrorist worthy of this
kind of illegal treatment.
-
- It appears as if the government was using the Padilla
case as a means of testing the courts for objections. They got most of
what they wanted. The courts, even when mildly protesting government arguments,
do not really intend to stop the government. It is as if they are merely
covering for their own collusion, projecting a false image that American
rights are still defended, when they are not. As commentator Chris Floyd
wrote, "We are all Jose Padilla now."
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- NEW REVELATIONS ON DOMESTIC WIRETAPPING AND SPYING
BY SATELLITE
-
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation [EFF] is at the forefront
of a growing internet movement to ferret out the truth about the extent
of US snooping on its own citizens. Wired.com is courageous enough to publish
these findings. Here are excerpts [with my comments in brackets] on the
latest dramatic revelations secured through the Freedom of Information
act and court "discovery" demands by the EFF. The entire article
is here:
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- http://www.wired.com/politics/security/multimedia/2007/08/gallery_wiretaps
-
- "DCSNet is a suite of software that collects, sifts
and stores phone numbers, phone calls and text messages. The system directly
connects FBI wiretapping outposts around the country to a far-reaching
private communications network. Many of the details of the system and its
full capabilities were redacted from the documents [The government is never
open about its real secrets that cover for illegal activities] acquired
by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but they show that DCSNet includes
at least three collection components, each running on Windows-based computers.
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- "The $10 million DCS-3000 client, also known as
Red Hook, handles pen-registers and trap-and-traces, a type of surveillance
that collects signaling information -- primarily the numbers dialed from
a telephone -- but no communications content. (Pen registers record outgoing
calls; trap-and-traces record incoming calls.) DCS-6000, known as Digital
Storm, captures and collects the content of phone calls and text messages
for full wiretap orders. A third, classified system, called DCS-5000, is
used for wiretaps targeting spies or terrorists.
-
- "What DCSNet Can Do Together, the surveillance systems
let FBI agents play back recordings even as they are being captured (like
TiVo), create master wiretap files, send digital recordings to translators,
track the rough location of targets in real time using cell-tower information,
and even stream intercepts outward to mobile surveillance vans. FBI wiretapping
rooms in field offices and undercover locations around the country are
connected through a private, encrypted backbone that is separated from
the internet. Sprint runs it on the government's behalf [multi-million
dollar lucrative contracts are used to gain the willing collusion of private
companies. It also buys their silence].
-
- "The network allows an FBI agent in New York, for
example, to remotely set up a wiretap on a cell phone based in Sacramento,
California, and immediately learn the phone's location, then begin receiving
conversations, text messages and voicemail pass codes in New York. With
a few keystrokes, the agent can route the recordings to language specialists
for translation. The numbers dialed are automatically sent to FBI analysts
trained to interpret phone-call patterns, and are transferred nightly,
by external storage devices, to the bureau's Telephone Application Database,
where they're subjected to a type of data mining called link analysis.
-
- "FBI endpoints on DCSNet have swelled over the years,
from 20 'central monitoring plants' at the program's inception, to 57 in
2005, according to undated pages in the released documents. By 2002, those
endpoints connected to more than 350 switches. Today, most carriers maintain
their own central hub, called a 'mediation switch,' that's networked to
all the individual switches owned by that carrier, according to the FBI...
-
- "Randy Cadenhead, the privacy counsel for Cox Communications,
which offers VOIP phone service and internet access, says the FBI has no
independent access to his company's switches. [This is deceptive or naive.
Cadenhead simply doesn't know what's going on in larger companies. The
big companies whose systems predate CALEA have a system of processing token
warrants-that is only there for show. A few high level employees receive
notice of incoming warrants through official channels and store them to
cover for the company's legal liability should they ever have to defend
their collusion with government. The illegal forms of total surveillance
and subsequent data analysis based on key words is all done without warrants].
-
- "The nation's largest cell-phone providers -- whose
customers are targeted in the majority of wiretaps -- were less forthcoming.
AT&T politely declined to comment, while Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon
simply ignored requests for comment. Agent DiClemente, however, seconded
Cadenhead's description [the following is only true for a few:]. 'The carriers
have complete control. That's consistent with CALEA,' [remember, warrantless
telephone surveillance predated CALEA. All new laws being passed are merely
covering for ongoing illegal surveillance by government], DiClemente said.
'The carriers have legal teams to read the order, and they have procedures
in place to review the court orders, and they also verify the information
and that the target is one of their subscribers'"
-
- Notice the deception in the government assurance: the
legal review process he is referring to is NOT tied to the actual surveillance
or wire tap, except in the small VOIP internet phone companies. The wire
tap within major exchanges is done electronically by dedicated equipment
as describe above. There are no delays in execution based upon a company
review. The legal process is only a token fig leaf to cover legal liability.
In no way does the review process allow the phone company to stop a wiretap,
nor even scrutinize the validity of the notice of warrant --they only check
for judge's signature. Even if it did want to challenge a warrant, the
company would have to go to court, and that has never been done. So much
for the efficacy of "review."
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- DOMESTIC SATELLITE SURVEILLANCE
-
- Apparently Congress is beginning a probe into government
use of spy satellites to collect information on Americans. According to
a report filed by Nick Juliano, "The Department of Homeland Security's
top intelligence, privacy and civil rights officials will be called before
Congress next week to explain the Bush administration's plan to dramatically
expand the domestic use of spy satellites that can see through clouds,
buildings and underground bunkers. The House Homeland Security Committee
will examine whether privacy rights will be violated by the DHS's creation
of a new office to grant expanded access to spy satellite data to a variety
of local and federal agencies, including law enforcement.
-
- "Under a program approved by the DHS and Office
of the Director of National Intelligence, detailed imagery from powerful
satellites will be available to domestic security and emergency preparedness
agencies to deal with threats ranging from immigration and terrorism to
hurricanes and forest fires, the Washington Post reported. Access to the
data will be controlled by a newly created office within DHS, the National
Applications Office. In his letter, Thompson said Congress was not informed
[that's typical of our government] of the new program until its existence
was revealed in media reports a few weeks ago [based on leaks from the
government itself]. The office is expected to begin granting expanded access
to the spy-satellite data Oct. 1."
-
- As in the previous topic, I suspect the government is
already using spy satellites on Americans. Ask yourself, why would the
government leak to the press something they wanted to keep secret? I think
it is to bring it out in the open and get the public accustomed to its
"legitimacy." In like manner, the new scrutiny by Congress is
only being done to give the appearance of oversight. Congress rarely stops
government from doing illegal acts--that they know about.
-
- The use of satellites to spy on Americans primarily covers
electronic communications (part of the Echelon world-wide spy system) but
occasionally includes ground penetrating radar which can crudely map the
existence of underground facilities or tunnels apart from known above-ground
structures. It cannot see any distinct features in a multi-story structure.
-
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- World Affairs Brief. Commentary and Insights on a Troubled
World.
- Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution
permitted.
- Cite source as Joel Skousen's World Affairs Brief
- http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com
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