The document-leaking web site Wikileaks announced Tuesday that it would release 500,000 alphanumeric pager messages sent on September 11, 2001.

A notice posted on the site said that Wikileaks would release the pager message intercepts in “real time” beginning at 3 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday and continuing for 24 hours, corresponding to the same time of day on 9/11.

“Text pagers are mostly carried by persons operating in an official capacity,” the site said prior to the release. “Messages in the archive range from Pentagon and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults to their operators as the World Trade Center collapsed.”

Wikileaks did not identify its source for the pager messages, but said that it received them from “an organization which has been intercepting and archiving US national telecommunications since prior to 9/11.”

Kevin Poulsen ofWired points out that pager traffic is not encrypted and trivially easy to intercept.

Alphanumeric pagers were popular in the 1990s but have declined in popularity as mobile phone text messages largely supplanted them.

“This is a significant and completely objective record of the defining moment of our time,” the Wikileaks site said. “We hope that its entry into the historical record will lead to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how this tragedy and its aftermath may have been prevented.”

I was planning to sleep, but I came home tonight to this news and now I’m brewing coffee and preparing to “live” blog the more interesting of these half million intercepts as they are released over the next 24 hours.

2001-09-11 03:01:18 Metrocall [1064386] A ALPHA MONEY MARKETS FF__3.500 PR 6.500 EU$ 3.45/3.40/3.27 LIB 3.50/3.36/3.32 EIB4.301/4.242/114 REP 3.47/3.40/3.36 DCP 3.46/3.33/3.29 UBA 3.41/3.21/3.18 BBA 3.50/3.36/3.32 U

2001-09-11 03:01:48 Metrocall [1064375] B ALPHA /FTSE 5033.70 -036 NIKK 10292.95 +097 DAX 4704.36 +034 CAC40 4415.02 +031 MIB30 31564 +0000 HSI 10348.65 -0017 30 _99.0

2001-09-11 03:03:11 Arch [1617998] D ALPHA smartlady|thinking of you |Hi Gody, Sorry so late, I just replied to your email. Glad to know u r home safely. I miss u... Karen |129

2001-09-11 03:03:11 Arch [0960635] C ALPHA Wendy Javier|Please check queue |Hello there, I am working on a launch. Can you please check the queue? It doesn't look like it's moving... Thanks, Wendy|153

2001-09-11 03:04:50 Skytel [007555619] A ALPHA netrangr@prodrubdir.hew.us.ml.com|Alm: 4 3150:0 1|Tme: 2001/09/11 03:03:26 Src: I tpcb.teleplex.ml.com:3897 Dst: I 216.35.94.76:21 NSX: [10008.12501.41] SID: 3150 "FTP SITE" Msg: "SITE"

2001-09-11 03:05:24 Arch [1164259] A ALPHA From Kristin Allbright Sub:x75245 remedy#10024876 Communications to Puerto Rico buying office were down due to circuit issue. Circuit has recovered. AT&T still engaged to find resolution. Msg:

2001-09-11 03:06:00 Metrocall [1458228] B ALPHA 3000 CHINABERRY DR CAR VS TREE POSS ENTRAPMENT HAMM

2001-09-11 03:07:48 Metrocall [002510081] A ALPHA [McBride, Greg]FW: American Airlines Net SAAver Fares-- Dear Greg McBride, Today's American Airlines Domestic & International Net SAAver Weekend Getaway Fares e-mail offer is valid for travel next weekend. Domestic Departure dates: Sep

2001-09-11 03:08:09 Arch [0915948] D ALPHA From:NJROS1NHA01/SERVER/Prudential@PRUDENTIAL Subject:ServerWatch Notification - Server NJROS1NAP39/SERVER/Prudential is NOT Responding Body:WARNING: Server NJROS1NAP39/SERVER/Prudential is Not Responding. Reason: Remote system no longer r

2001-09-11 03:09:36 Skytel [002839867] C ALPHA 23985@emc.fedex.com|pushback on early departures and chase city aircraft asap...

2001-09-11 03:11:35 Skytel [005207087] D ALPHA FLT1011 APPROX 45 MIN LATE, FLT1153 ETA 0444

2001-09-11 03:13:20 Arch [1614034] A ALPHA From:NJROS1NHA01/SERVER/Prudential@PRUDENTIAL Subject:ServerWatch Notification - Server NJROS1NAP39/SERVER/Prudential is Responding Body:Server NJROS1NAP39/SERVER/Prudential is Responding or has been restarted.

2001-09-11 03:16:35 Skytel [007523119] D ST NUM 0-212-222-9018

2001-09-11 03:18:48 Metrocall [002178488] C ALPHA EMAIL goodtining@www40.net Rates may NEVER be Lower !!

2001-09-11 03:20:36 Skytel [002839867] C ALPHA 23985@emc.fedex.com|attention second floor: please move your exception bags asap

2001-09-11 03:22:44 Skytel [003862901] B ALPHA BTY 50.67 -1.28 NWS 30.81 +0.10 WCOM 12.88 -0.10 DJIA 9654.71 +48.86 (1

2001-09-11 03:26:35 Skytel [005327015] B ALPHA frank,mike can u give me status? is khh on battery or gen? Michael Bishop

2001-09-11 03:29:58 Metrocall [1064378] C ALPHA TRICHET SEES EUROZONE GROWTH OF AROUND 2.0 PCT FOR 2001

So far a quiet night, not much going on except for sysadmins doing their usual nightly maintenance on the servers that keep the Internet and business operations going.

2001-09-11 03:30:44 Skytel [002402427] C ALPHA < <86901:534>>PAC 03:23 9/11/01 FINAL AT&T VANTIVE SYSTEM WENT DOWN. ABLE TO ACCESS WHEN USING URL https://www.acss.att.com/Login. URL IS CASE SENSITVE. SERVER WAS REBOOTED BUT UNSURE IF THIS RESOLVED ISSUE. IMPACT: NO KNOWN. 18028 GMIR/92

2001-09-11 03:33:31 Arch [0801351] B ALPHA (25)06:ABS: Tkt:5002798, Sev:1, Opened, Sname:BNK, CIS Id:195942813, Contact:JOSEPH GANDIA/NOC @ 2122507800 Note:HOST IN NYC BOUNCING\\PWR VRFD\\RECOVER ON OWN\\NO PATTERN\\DLCI 35\\RED ALARMS ON ROUTER\\NO CHANGES\\OK TO TEST\\ROTI PSN2 SHOWS UP,

2001-09-11 03:35:01 Metrocall [1576347] C ALPHA Frm: Swoon Horoscopes Sub: Gemini Daily Horoscope Txt: Dear SWOON user, If you have used the SWOON Personals in the past, we've got some great news: Through an exciting partnership that has blossomed between Match.com and SWOON, Persona

2001-09-11 03:35:20 Metrocall [1064378] C ALPHA EURO PUSHES TO DAY'S HIGHS AGAINST DOLLAR, YEN

2001-09-11 03:35:52 Metrocall [0905692] D ALPHA (1/1) NOVA STC I-295 NB On MD Side Vehicle Accident Right lane Blocked. Event open and Closed shortly after. EOC/KMT. 9/11/01 3:31:15 AM

2001-09-11 03:38:34 Skytel [005105954] A ALPHA CALL MY CELL PHONE INSTEAD OF MY HOUSE PHONE CAUSE I DON'T WANT IT TO RING, AND CRYSTALS BEEN GOING AROUND SAYING STUFF ABOUT YOU AND ME. I LOVE YOU.

2001-09-11 03:39:35 Skytel [005359140] B ALPHA ATTN OUTBOUNDS, EXPECT HEAVY NON-CON PULLS AND FLOWER VOLUME FROM THE NORTHEAST..

2001-09-11 03:40:09 Metrocall [1064381] D ALPHA ICRC SAYS 165 REPORTED DEAD IN JOS, 928 WOUNDED

2001-09-11 03:41:08 Arch [0015079] B ALPHA Tom.Marble@dtn.c|Operations Notification ,|Final Notify: Apwire is once again updating. The problem was with an application in New York. Questions regarding this outage should be directed to x 5467 Thank-you, OPS(Document link: Database 'OPs

2001-09-11 03:44:18 Metrocall [1145662] D ALPHA Frm: StormCenter.COM Sub: Storm Advisory (1/2) Txt: FORECAST FOR For Fairfax County TODAY-SUNNY. HIGHS IN THE LOWER 80S....

2001-09-11 03:44:30 Metrocall [1145662] D ALPHA Frm: StormCenter.COM Sub: Storm Advisory (2/2) Txt: ..NORTHWEST WIND 10 TO 15 MPH.

2001-09-11 03:48:03 Skytel [004690331] C ALPHA netrangr@prodrubdir.hew.us.ml.com|Alm: 4 2153:0 1|Tme: 2001/09/11 03:44:25 Src: I 216.35.60.62:0 Dst: I 216.35.39.152:0 NSX: [10008.17001.41] SID: 2153 "ICMP Smurf attack" Msg: " "

2001-09-11 03:55:32 Metrocall [1064376] C ALPHA GOVPX TREASURY 30__99.03 /05+5.437 10_101.07+/09 4.841 5Y_101.07+/08+4.329 2Y_100.06+/07 3.513 6M 3.110/100 3M 3.167/157

2001-09-11 03:58:57 Skytel [004732386] A ALPHA wn@solutions.att.com|Tkt#0570912-CITICORP|MEXMONT-01-CU-DL3800-E1 up after manual restore-monitoring-GCSC 9194741488

At this time several men of Middle Eastern descent were reportedly seen entering the airport in Portland, Maine, where several 9/11 hijackers will fly to Boston and take a connecting flight, American Airlines flight 11, which they will then hijack.

2001-09-11 04:03:36 Skytel [003273267] A ALPHA julie.rodriguez@fritz.com||We have just been informed that Customs has gone manual as of 2:50am.

2001-09-11 04:04:42 Skytel [004682599] B ALPHA rddoyle@fedex.com| Can't call now, had a emergency landing in PHX. Have fun....I'll miss ya....

2001-09-11 04:06:32 Metrocall [1064381] D ALPHA BRUNEI CUTS AUG SERIA LT CRUDE PRICE TO $25.16/BBL,DOWN $1.17 VS JUL-TRADE

2001-09-11 04:16:44 Skytel [005092733] D ALPHA dss@tcysnp34.travelocity.com|TCYSNP34 Error occurred in cruisedata.csh at Tue Sep 11 03:16:25 CDT 2001|

2001-09-11 04:20:36 Skytel [004697392] A ALPHA ovmail@sexo4066.whq.ual.com||OpenView ITO alert. Node: skypath1.whq.ual.com Msg: Old wind data for Skypath

2001-09-11 04:25:40 Skytel [005107544] C ALPHA OPEN/CLOSE:Link TRGR54A (Tarragona, Spain) --> BLR54A (Bilbao, Spain) is down. TOP:03:21 TOR:03:45. TKT#1484962 -- From: SMT - 248.528.7000

2001-09-11 04:27:55 Skytel [002673372] D ALPHA alert@msn.com||Hotmail MSNBC Sports:msnbc: Jordan all but confirms return to NBA

2001-09-11 04:29:57 Skytel [007509738] C ALPHA alert@msn.com||JDSU 6.19 -0.24 Merrill Lynch - Be Bullish

I need more caffeine. I’m usually going to bed by this time of night. But it’s very difficult to pull myself away from this traffic, mundane as most of it is.

2001-09-11 04:36:04 Arch [1026292] B ALPHA Backup@NYED.usco|Operator Attention|(Server: "NYEPSROGUE" Job: "Monday backup" Device: "HP 1") Please inser t overwritable media into the changer using the slot import command.

2001-09-11 04:37:04 Arch [0983370] C ALPHA "Andrews, Rick" |travelweb|travelweb is back up 01:35

2001-09-11 04:44:49 Arch [0515405] D ALPHA (3)ERIN MOVIN SLOWLY NORTHWARD & CONTINUING TO WEAKEN HURR ERIN NOW @ 37.2 N. LAT 65.9 W. LON MAX WIND ARE NEAR 90 MPH. MOVIN TOWARD THE NORTH NEAR 7 MPH. PRES. IS 976 MB...28.82 IN.

2001-09-11 04:59:45 Arch [1184785] A ALPHA From:PAERSCNHM01/SERVER/Prudential@PRUDENTIAL Subject:ServerWatch Notification - Server PAERSCNML25/SERVER/Prudential is Responding Body:Server PAERSCNML25/SERVER/Prudential is Responding or has been restarted.

By this time practically nothing’s talking except the computers. And the monkey.

2001-09-11 04:59:48 Metrocall [0300391] B ALPHA _01Z00_02A)_1B"n6_1A8_1C3_09Odd_1A5 but _1A8True_1A9_1B&a _1C1MONKEY SIGHTINGS: It's not `Planet of the Apes.' It's more like town of the monkey. About a dozen people in Danville, New Hampshire, report seeing a large monkey on the

2001-09-11 04:59:50 Metrocall [0300391] B ALPHA loose, including Fire Chief David Kimball. He describes the animal as being about four feet tall, with woolly, brown fur. Kimball figures it's an escaped pet, but the owner doesn't want to report it because monkeys are illegal in the state. _0D_1C2TOU

2001-09-11 05:04:23 Arch [0553455] D ALPHA MUHAMMED, MUSTAFAH UNAUTHORIZED RETURN 09/11/2001 4:59AM

2001-09-11 05:07:49 Arch [0944991] D ALPHA PAGE FROM lifeline: alert 8931351 AMDB_FD dba nyfdpsyb01.gsam.gs.com FD_PROD nyfdpsyb01.gsam.gs.com_DBA (FD_PROD): 01-09-11 05:07:19 DBmaint.func_dump: ERROR: Dump for FD_PROD.SMART_data failed

2001-09-11 05:21:38 Skytel [004539594] C ALPHA delay code for flights holding due to late arrival MP. main cargo door broken from 0246 (block in) to 0320 (cargo door open). sort was from 0302 - 0341.

2001-09-11 05:25:17 Arch [1400339] A ALPHA LIRR MVB-AMD,THERE ARE 94 CARS OUT OF SERVICE.. TRAIN 1013 WILL BE RUNNING 2 CARS SHORT..

2001-09-11 05:32:19 Arch [1749363] A ALPHA |P2 NOTICE #4243326 |Etisalat link Dubai to Cairo failed impacting users WAN connectivity. Etisalat contacted Cairo PTT. OUTAGE START: 11 Sep 10:21 CET NO ETU. walho x4112 |172

2001-09-11 05:39:12 Skytel [005524707] A ALPHA PBSS@NA2.US.ML.com|NS MSG: MarginCall has startedStarted Operation: OP7_CMSma...|2001-09-11 05:41 am: MarginCall has startedStarted Operation: OP7_CMSmargincall

2001-09-11 05:39:52 Metrocall [1064381] D ALPHA OPEC CRUDE BASKET EDGED UP TO $25.56 ON MONDAY

2001-09-11 05:47:31 Skytel [005255305] C ALPHA Please join the following bridge for a Netcap PTP link issue. Bridge 888-789-0276 Pin 592965. Thank You Serena/SMC - Serena Doore * wcomnet.com paging

2001-09-11 05:48:36 Arch [0983449] C ALPHA Time to wake up!!

2001-09-11 05:54:41 Metrocall [1543599] D ALPHA Remember morning medication.

As the country wakes up, Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari breeze through security and board Colgan Air flight 5930 to Boston, which departs at 6 a.m.

2001-09-11 05:59:36 Skytel [005384638] D ALPHA oracle@hqfas14.desc.dla.mil|Errors found in routine alert file checkup of fest on hqfas14 at 09/11/01 06:00:00. Check /u001/app/oracle/admin/scripts/dba/data/monAlertLogErrors.fest.ERROR_LOG.110901_060000 for error message.|****************

2001-09-11 06:02:41 Metrocall [1064378] C ALPHA GOLD FIXED PRICE LONDON FIX $271.39

2001-09-11 06:05:31 Skytel [007555205] B ALPHA jjlongwell@fedex.com|Numerous calls on service disruption|Please inform; John Longwell 262-1015

2001-09-11 06:12:07 Arch [1274765] D ALPHA 11-THIS IS RORY CONCEPCION. I AM UNABLE TO GO INTO WORK TODAY. WE ARE GOING TO MY AUNT'S !1/2 011

2001-09-11 06:12:09 Arch [1274765] D ALPHA 11- WAKE TODAY AT CHERRY HILL. SHE DIED RECENTLY. !2/2 011

2001-09-11 06:13:41 Metrocall [0639948] D ALPHA Frm: Southwest Airlines Sub: southwest.com Weekly Internet Specials September 11, 2001 Txt: Southwest Airlines e-mail update for September 11, 2001

2001-09-11 06:25:06 Arch [0904389] B ALPHA LIRR MVB-AMD,AT 6:16 ALL DEBRIS REMOVED FROM TRAIN 901. REQUESTING RESTORE POWER.. TRAIN IN PROCESS OF RECEIVING PAPERWORK.

2001-09-11 06:27:40 Skytel [003928287] D ALPHA TOM. THIS IS RAY, MY CONTINENTAL FLIGHT CANCELLED MHT TO EWR. NEXT FLIGHT IS AT 9:40 AM ARRIVING 11 AM. PAGER NUMBER 1 888 935 8317

2001-09-11 06:31:04 Arch [1276083] A ALPHA "NJDOT TOC North|Cave in|Route 1&9 Southbound left lane closed at 86th Street. Northbound all lanes = closed due to cave in. In North Bergen. Duration 4 - 8 hours. Crew 219, = 2006 on scene in construction project. TOC-N FS

2001-09-11 06:31:48 Skytel [003918495] D ALPHA 148411@emc.fedex.com||lets go...traffic on the gw bridge

2001-09-11 06:36:03 Metrocall [1064381] D ALPHA IRAQ SAYS IT SHOOTS DOWN U.S. RECONNAISSANCE PLANE

The five Flight 11 hijackers arrive at Logan Airport in Boston, the two from Portland and three more who drove to the airport. Flight training manuals are later found in the rental car they left behind. The Flight 175 hijackers also start arriving.

2001-09-11 06:47:03 Metrocall [0753507] A ALPHA Bill, check your WTC email for a message regarding Panacea.-Kent(x6137)

2001-09-11 06:56:47 Arch [0912340] B ALPHA Bomb Scare, ND, 700 W. 40TH Male caller stated a bomb in the bldg, set to go of at 0815. 7811 notified.

Flight 93 hijackers begin checking in.

Several hijackers are selected for additional security screening, but this only means that their bags are scanned for explosives and held off the plane until they board. No one had ever anticipated that a hijacker would blow up a plane while still on board.

2001-09-11 07:01:33 Arch [0911009] A ALPHA <opsosf @GlaxoWel|SYSTEM STATUS AS OF 7 AM|GOOD Morning! ALL TASKS THAT SHOULD BE UP NOW ARE UP!

2001-09-11 07:05:22 Metrocall [1064379] C ALPHA LONDON SILVER FIXED AT 418.00 CENTS - SEP 11

2001-09-11 07:06:35 Skytel [003071916] D ALPHA alert@msn.com||Manhattan - Tuesday: Sunny (Clear at night) 80/60*Wednesday: Mostly Sunny 78/60*Thursday: Showers /

OK, I admit defeat. There’s much too much traffic here to read through and post in one sitting. At this rate it will take at least a week just to skim through it all. I’ll continue doing so throughout the holiday and post anything I find of interest.

Update: Declan McCullagh posted a much more interesting report on the contents of the pager traffic. As it turns out, the pager messages had been leaked on a file-sharing site before WikiLeaks could complete their release. I’ll be going through them as time permits over the next few weeks.

Did you buy extra ammunition after Barack Obama was elected President, and are you still concerned that he might ban your guns? Are you concerned that the economic crisis could devolve into a depression, or worse? Do you think the federal government has overstepped its authority under the Constitution? If so, the government thinks you’re a right-wing extremist and a potential terrorist threat.

Last week the Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis published an “analysis” of “right-wing extremists” in the United States in which it claims, quite vaguely, that: “Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”

Naturally the document was leaked and has provoked a firestorm of controversy, with conservatives saying it unfairly paints their viewpoints as extremist. You’ll have to read it for yourself to see how far it goes in demonizing anyone who believes in individual rights and limited government. But here’s a sample:

(U//FOUO) Rightwing extremist chatter on the Internet continues to focus on the economy, the perceived loss of U.S. jobs in the manufacturing and construction sectors, and home foreclosures. Anti-Semitic extremists attribute these losses to a deliberate conspiracy conducted by a cabal of Jewish “financial elites.” These “accusatory” tactics are employed to draw new recruits into rightwing extremist groups and further radicalize those already subscribing to extremist beliefs. DHS/I&A assesses this trend is likely to accelerate if the economy is perceived to worsen. . . .

(U//FOUO) Historically, domestic rightwing extremists have feared, predicted, and anticipated a cataclysmic economic collapse in the United States. Prominent antigovernment conspiracy theorists have incorporated aspects of an impending economic collapse to intensify fear and paranoia among like-minded individuals and to attract recruits during times of economic uncertainty. Conspiracy theories involving declarations of martial law, impending civil strife or racial conflict, suspension of the U.S. Constitution, and the creation of citizen detention camps often incorporate aspects of a failed economy. Antigovernment conspiracy theories and “end times” prophecies could motivate extremist individuals and groups to stockpile food, ammunition, and weapons. . . .

(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A assesses that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat. These skills and knowledge have the potential to boost the capabilities of extremists — including lone wolves or small terrorist cells — to carry out violence. The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today.

That’s just the beginning.

Interestingly, the report draws a distinction between “right-wing extremists” and “law-abiding citizens,” as if good, honest, moral people could not possibly hold any of these viewpoints.

A DHS spokesman told FOX News that nothing was wrong with this assessment, citing a January assessment of left-wing extremists the department also issued.

DHS spokeswoman Sara Kuban said the April 7 assessment is one in an ongoing series published by DHS “to facilitate a greater understanding of radicalization in the United States.”

“DHS has no specific information that domestic right-wing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence, but right-wing extremists may be gaining new recruitments by playing on their fears about several emerging issues,” Kuban said. . . .

“This is the job of DHS, to assess what is happening in this country, with regard to homegrown terrorism, and determine whether it’s an actual threat or not, and that’s what these assessments do. This is nothing unusual. These assessments are done all the time. This is about awareness,” the official told FOX News on Monday. — FOX News

You might be tempted to believe that if you hadn’t actually seen the left-wing extremist assessment, so I invite you to read it for yourself and contrast it to the right-wing extremist document. It’s much more clear about its definition of left-wing extremists and even gives examples of organizations it considers to be left-wing extremists (and they’re quite difficult to argue with, unfortunately for my more liberal readers).

As you’ll see, the left-wing document is narrowly focused on specific groups and activities while the right-wing document covers almost any belief to the right of, well, Barack Obama. It names no organizations as examples, and as one commentator pointed out, doesn’t even say there’s an actual threat! You right-wing extremist loonies are just a potential threat to the nation, and so the government is going to have to keep an eye on you.

This report smacks of profiling and harassing American citizens based on their political views, and specifically based on their opposition to the Obama administration’s proposals.

This used to be called “democracy” and “free speech” protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. But under Obama, “Homeland Security” has become an instrument of oppression of opposing points of view. — WorldNetDaily

Oh, Bush would have done the same thing if he thought he could get away with it. Let’s not pretend this is a purely Democratic problem. The problem is that the institution of government allows people who disagree with each other to beat each other over the head with the world’s largest hammer, and whoever is out of power must suffer at the hands of whoever is in power. That whoever is in power can be changed every couple of years makes it no less of a problem; it just means that everyone gets a chance to wield the hammer, and to be hit by it, in turn.

Oops, that’s an antigovernment sentiment. I must be a right-wing extremist.

You haven’t done anything wrong, so why should you worry about surveillance? It was Cardinal Richelieu who said, “If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.” The United States doesn’t hang innocent people any more, but it certainly does imprison them by the millions, and occasionally does kill them.

So why worry about surveillance, if you are honest? As the Miranda saying goes, anything can be used against you in a court of law. Law enforcement’s job is to come up with things to use against you, and the most innocent bits of data, combined together in ways you might not expect, can paint the most honest, innocent person as a criminal. Someday you could find yourself on trial for a crime you never committed, for instance, or you could be detained for hours every time you try to board an airplane or cross the border.

Last week the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched its Surveillance Self-Defense project, an online guide for protecting your private data against government spying. EFF created the guide, it said in a news release, “to educate Americans about the law and technology of communications surveillance and computer searches and seizures, and to provide the information and tools necessary to keep their private data out of the government’s hands.”

After all, data the government doesn’t have can’t be used against you. I presume, of course, that you are innocent of wrongdoing, and it is for innocent people that this guide is designed: activists who use their First Amendment rights to lobby for changes in government policy, for example, or ordinary Americans who get caught up in a criminal investigation due to a computer error, or simple human mistake such as police serving a warrant at the wrong house. Unfortunately this sort of thing happens far too often.

“Despite a long and troubling history in this country of the government abusing its surveillance powers, most Americans know very little about how the law protects them or about how they can take steps to protect themselves against government surveillance,” said EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston. “The Surveillance Self-Defense project offers citizens a legal and technical toolkit with tips on how to defend themselves in case the government attempts to search, seize, subpoena or spy on their most private data.”

The site explains the law in the United States as it applies to what data the law enforcement and intelligence communities can obtain about you and how they obtain it. It then covers in depth how to protect your personal data on your computer, as it is in transit over the Internet, and while it is held by third parties. Importantly, it also provides an easy to understand overview of what security is and how to assess your personal security risks so that you can implement security measures which make sense for your own circumstances. Finally it covers specific security measures and technologies which you can use to protect yourself.

I’ve reviewed the site myself and I highly recommend it for anyone who has even the slightest possibility of being targeted by the government for any reason. And, unfortunately, that means every single individual, since, but for happenstance, the next person who gets their house mistakenly raided and their dog shot to death by a SWAT team could be you. Protecting your privacy using these techniques won’t guarantee your security, of course, but it will certainly reduce the likelihood of becoming the next victim of government surveillance.

A congressionally mandated study released Wednesday found that the U.S. national security system is outdated and needs major restructuring.

The 93-page preliminary report (PDF) from the Project on National Security Reform shows how the federal government’s national security apparatus, which is still largely geared toward a Cold War mentality, has failed to work together to combat terrorism, rogue states, natural disasters and other modern threats.

The report cites bureaucratic infighting, short-term crisis management rather than long-term planning, fast turnover of political appointees in top national security positions, and partisan politics in Congress as some of the major problems preventing the government from responding appropriately to threats.

Project member Thomas Pickering, a former Deputy Secretary of State and ambassador to the United Nations, said national security is not a partisan issue, and that the report’s findings will be valuable for the next administration.

“Our national security system is broken and needs fixing,” Pickering said. “Agencies need to cooperate rather than compete with each other as they work to protect the United States from a broad range of new dangers never imagined when the National Security Act of 1947 was signed into law.”

Government bureaucracies are quite unaccustomed to working together. Agencies are structured as stovepipes, which send information up and down a chain of command, but provide little means to share information between agencies. Whenever they do try to work together, the joint operations are almost always plagued by infighting as well as trouble actually sharing needed information.

The Project on National Security Reform is a non-partisan organization, partly funded by Congress, made up of former government officials with national security expertise. The project is scheduled to release its final report in October, including a list of recommendations for fixing the problems.

“Our study deals with issues vital to the protection of every American family,” said PNSR executive director James R. Locher III. “How will America respond to another major terrorist attack, even a nuclear one? How will we deal with future natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina at home and conflicts abroad? The way our national security system is structured plays an enormous role in the answers to these questions.”

John McLaughlin, the former deputy CIA director and a member of the group, told CNN, “The key message is that we have many impressive capabilities in national security — and they work well individually — but today’s complex problems require more integrated effort and agility than the current system can deliver.”

The report barely mentions the post-9/11 reforms already undertaken, including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the office of the director of national intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center.

Locher said those changes are still works in progress and represent individual components of the overall national security system. This study, he said, focuses on the role of the highest level of government, the executive branch and Congress, where changes are needed to provide the strategic direction and management necessary for an integrated national security system. — CNN

I wish you good luck in restructuring the entire national security apparatus of the federal government. Such a restructuring promises to be even larger than that which created the Department of Homeland Security, a bureaucracy still having trouble getting its act together, even within the department, five years after it was created. It will take even longer for the rest of the agencies involved in national security to get their act together, even after they get restructured.

Meanwhile, there are threats out there to be dealt with. Perhaps we should consider dismantling the federal government’s security stovepipes and doing security ourselves. We just might get it done faster and cheaper and more effectively.

Go Brooklyn. A jury in that fair borough has found Emmanuel “Toto” Constant guilty of mortgage fraud and grand larceny. Emmanuel Constant is the former founder and leader of FRAPH, the Haitian paramilitary group that in the early 90’s systematically tortured and murdered thousands of supporters of deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Gang rapes and mutilation by ax were FRAPH specialties. The majority of victims lived in Haiti’s slums. Aristide, a Catholic priest enamored of liberation theology, was prone to totalitarian temptation. Some say he dabbled in drug traffic. Still, he was democratically elected by a desperately poor populace.

Try telling that to the CIA.

During the Clinton years Toto Constant got CIA jack. When Aristide returned to power (briefly) Toto snuck out the back. Entering the USA through Puerto Rico on a tourist visa. When Toto’s stateside presence was discovered it was kinda embarrassing for the Clinton admin. Threats of deportation were made. Supposedly Toto beat that rap by offering to reveal the details of his CIA deal on TV. Whatever. The Bloody One settled down in a lovely home on a quiet street in Queens. Though his residence in the USA remained legally dicey neither Clinton nor Bush deported him.

Eventually Toto became a licensed Realtor and mortgage broker. (In New York State having a rep for paramilitary excess doesn’t disqualify a person from becoming a real estate pro.) By the beginning of the new millennium Toto’s mortgage fraud career was flourishing. He was working with several overlapping groups of organized white collar criminals based in New Jersey and New York — zeroing in on low-income and/or Caribbean immigrant neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. Toto also flipped out on Long Island, a regional hot spot of the national mortgage biz. Constant & crew employed all the tricks the FBI has been hollering about for years. Straw buyers, collusive bank officers, phony appraisers, forged docs, invisible rehabs, etc. One player bragged that their fraudulent appraisals had inflated the values of an entire down-at-the-heels neighborhood. Turning it into a pair of Manolo Blahniks. On paper.

Some of the biggest names in the mortgage game went for paper cranked out by Toto and his twisted business associates. One prime example: EMC Mortgage, son of Bear Stearns.

You can read all about Bloody Toto in Mortgage Fraud Land at Blogger News Network or NowPublic. Detailed trial coverage can be found at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Incidentally, Toto was warned about intimidating witnesses. He’d been making creepy phone calls. You can take the boy out of FRAPH but –

Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff
Mondo QT

“Se bon ki ra”
Good is rare
Haitian proverb

Send comments or confidential tips to:

mailto:editor@mondoqt.com

Are you an American terrorist sympathizer but don’t know how to strike back at the Great Satan? Afraid of getting arrested while your plot to blow up something or other is still half-baked? You don’t have to worry anymore. Now, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency want to hire you.

Both the FBI and CIA are running recruitment advertising with a pro-terrorist magazine,Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. The magazine is well known for its anti-Israel, pro-terrorist writing, except, it seems, to the human capital managers. One glance at the magazine’s homepage today reveals, for instance, five articles on “The Ordeal of Dr. Sami Al-Arian,” who pleaded guilty in 2006 of conspiracy to provide funds to the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

It’s as if they’re inviting the terrorists to infiltrate. If you are one, you may as well go ahead and infiltrate now, because it’s going to take a couple of years for these thickheaded government human capital managers to catch on.

It is the same lack of judgment that led the Department of Justice to set up a recruitment booth and serve as a co-host for the annual Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) convention in September. Four months earlier, the same Justice Department designated ISNA as an unindicted co-conspirator (PDF) in Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) case as part of the Hamas-Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy in the United States. U.S. Reps. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., and Sue Myrick, R-NC, protested the Justice Department’s recruitment effort with ISNA in a letter (PDF) to then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asserting that ISNA is a Jihadi organization.

The Justice Department blithely dismissed the concerns, saying other organizations did it, too. That was true. That willful blindness was evident in the fact that, in 2006, the Department of Defense dispatched Deputy Secretary Gordon England to an ISNA conference and sent another representative to the annual conference in 2007. The Department of Homeland Security was there, too, with its recruitment booth adjacent to the Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical movement which endorses the use of violence and is devoted to establishing a global Islamic state governed by Shariah law.

After that embarrassment, the FBI placed a full-page recruiting ad (PDF) in the November 2007 issue of ISNA’s magazine Islamic Horizons. “Help us light the way to a new era of understanding,” the ad reads.

Just what types of recruits are the FBI and CIA looking for? Apparently, these agencies do not learn from experience, even recent experiences. Just last November, former FBI and CIA agent Nadia Nadim Prouty was arrested and pled guilty to fraudulently obtaining American citizenship through a sham marriage, and using her illegally acquired status to attain employment with both the FBI and CIA. Prouty is the sister of Elfat Al Aouar, who is the wife of Talal Chahine — the Detroit-based restaurateur linked to Hizballah. — The Investigative Project on Terrorism

That’s right. It’s not just the FBI and CIA. It’s Homeland Security too. And the State Department will get 1,000 new diplomats in President Bush’s 2009 budget. How many terrorist sympathizers will they hire? Government is growing so fast and in so many different directions that the opportunities to cause mayhem from within — or just to run interference so your buddies can carry out their next attack — grow by the day.

Steven Emerson from IPT closes by saying that “Congress should investigate immediately,” but really, will that help? Congressional hearings take months to set up, and months more to accomplish anything. By the time they call these wayward human capital managers onto the carpet, who knows how many enemies of the state could be in the pipeline? And that’s assuming Congress bothers to do anything. Maybe they just won’t see a problem.

So, let’s get serious. The federal government’s own internal security is so bad that it’s recruiting among the “enemy.” You expect these idiots to keep you safe? They can’t. They never could, and they never will.

One of the requirements for a totalitarian police state is a system of kangaroo courts, star chambers which operate in secret and in parallel to the existing judicial system to convict political prisoners of pretended crimes against the state, which could never survive in the regular courts. And former judge Michael Mukasey, nominee for U.S. Attorney General to replace Alberto Gonzales, has proposed that the United States adopt such a system of courts.

In a little-noticed opinion piece in theWall Street Journal in August, Mukasey argued that terrorism trials in regular courts exposed too much information to the enemy, undermining national security. The existing legal system, he says, is “strained and mismatched” to the task of dealing out justice to those accused of terrorism.

Mukasey cites two proposals, one by former deputy attorney general George Terwilliger to authorize detention of suspects before they have committed any crime, and one by Andrew C. McCarthy and Alykhan Velshi of the Center for Law & Counterterrorism to create national security courts which would try suspects — foreigner and American alike — in secret. The McCarthy-Velshi proposal would apply to “international terrorism and other national security issues.”

Legal scholar Glenn M. Sulmasy was the first to propose a national security court to try suspects in secret. Sulmasy’s proposal would create National Security Courts, loosely based on courts-martial, which operate in secret, where defendants cannot obtain their own counsel unless the government agrees to grant the attorney a security clearance, and where defendants are tried at U.S. military bases and detained, imprisoned and executed at U.S. military brigs.

Most importantly, anyone, American or not, could be tried in a National Security Court, or as they seem to be called these days, Homeland Security Court.

“Another need for [homeland security] courts is to deal with the latest issues,” Sulmasy explained during his discussions with HSToday.us. “US citizens who turn their backs on the government and seek to overthrow it by engaging in jihad right now are treated differently than jihadists from other countries. A homeland security court would remove this disparity. . . .”

Commander Sulmasy, who’s been interviewed at length by HSToday.us in recent weeks, is the first permanent commissioned military law professor (appointed by President Bush in 2003) at the Coast Guard Academy, where he is an associate professor teaching international, constitutional and criminal law. He’s also a judge advocate, served on the faculty of the International Law Department at the US Naval War College and next year will be a National Security and Human Rights Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He’s written extensively in law journals on the legal challenges of adjudicating captured terrorists. — HSToday.us

It’s clear that, in the short term, some legitimate system is needed to deal with people who engage in hostilities with the United States. It’s not at all clear that a separate and parallel judicial system, which would sweep up ordinary innocent Americans accused of terrorism and other undefined “national security issues,” is the right answer.

Remember Guantanamo Bay, chock full of innocent people who were ordinary farmers one day and being waterboarded the next, because some bounty hunter wanted an easy $5,000? The government admits that of all the people it’s released from Guantanamo, 10 percent returned to the battlefield. What of the other 90 percent, who we can only presume were innocent, whose lives were disrupted for years by being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Federal district court judge John Coughenour, who presided over the trial of Ahmed Ressam, who attempted to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in the so-called millennium bombing plot, says that a separate judicial system is unnecessary.

It is regrettable that so often when our courts are evaluated for their ability to handle terrorism cases, the Constitution is conceived as mere solicitude for criminals. Implicit in this misguided notion is that society’s somehow charitable view toward “ordinary” crimes of murder or rape ought not to extend to terrorists. In fact, the criminal procedure required under our Constitution reflects the reality that law enforcement is not perfect, and that questions of guilt necessarily precede questions of mercy.

Consider the fact that of the 598 people initially detained at Guantánamo Bay in 2002, 267 have been released. It is likely that for a number of the former detainees, there was simply no basis for detention. The American ideal of a just legal system is inconsistent with holding “suspects” for years without trial. . . .

If confirmed, Judge Mukasey will join Michael Chertoff as another esteemed former jurist in the executive branch facing the formidable task of keeping our nation safe from terrorism. The distinction between the roles of judge and law enforcement officer should not be lost in the transition. Our courts ensure an independent process; they do not enforce the prerogatives of law enforcement. Any proposal that would blur this distinction would compromise a bedrock principle of government that has defined this country from its inception. — New York Times

But merely providing a system to try suspected terrorists in what could easily become a kangaroo court, a complete mockery of due process in which the innocent are convicted right along with the guilty, is just the beginning.

Terwilliger would like to see a national security court that could authorize preventive detention. So a judge could lock suspects up to stop them from committing a terrorist act — even if prosecutors can’t show that they’ve already committed a crime. Britain has a system like that, but the United States does not.

“The government will find a way to identify people who are dangerous and need to be incapacitated to neutralize the threat that they represent, because the people will demand that,” Terwilliger says.

He says the question is whether the government will incapacitate people by bending the rules of the system we have now, or by working within the rules of a new system that everybody signs on to. — National Public Radio

The Homeland Security Court, as effective as it might be for prosecuting real terrorists, would also open the way for innocent Americans to be picked off the streets and suffer the same treatment as innocent foreigners.

You won’t have to be brown skinned, wearing funny clothing, and praying to the east in order to be thrown into a military brig, given a secret trial where for the government justice is secondary to winning, and disappeared forever. These Homeland Security Courts, or National Security Courts, once established, will begin growing just like any other government program. It won’t be long before the government begins to expand the categories of people who are eligible for the secret star chamber process until virtually anybody could be disappeared for saying the wrong thing in public.

It can happen here. You could be next. Our system of government doesn’t make it impossible, only somewhat more difficult than in other countries. Innocence won’t protect you. It won’t even matter anymore.

And, as Judge Coughenour says, “This is a price too high to pay.”

Mukasey’s nomination was approved 11-8 Tuesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee and has gone to the full Senate for confirmation. He faced harsh criticism over his refusal to state that waterboarding of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay was torture and therefore illegal under U.S. law. The Senate is expected to vote as early as Thursday.

Here at Homeland Stupidity, no government cow is sacred. Waste, fraud, abuse, plain incompetence, and bad policy are all fair game. As a result, government officials in the higher pay grades tend to be displeased with what they read here. As a general rule, the higher the pay grade, the more displeased.

Therefore, I was not at all surprised to hear that high-ranking officials in the U.S. Marshals Service were upset with Sunday’s published story regarding their Office of Protective Intelligence. I was, however, surprised to spot two surveillance teams while going about my business Tuesday night.

Before I get into that, though, I want to make a clarification regarding the Department of Justice inspector general’s report (PDF) on the OPI which was published last Wednesday. The report does state that “USMS’s efforts to improve its capabilities to assess reported threats and identify potential threats languished” between 2004 and early 2007, with a significant backlog of reported threats to be assessed in 2006. In fairness to the rank and file, the report also states that they cleared the backlogs and that OPI is revising its threat assessment process to be faster and more efficient. Those changes are set to take place this month.

However, the report also notes that there is no formal process in place “to develop protective intelligence that identifies potential threats against the judiciary. . . . USMS was slow to staff the protective intelligence function and has not developed a strategy to effectively collect, analyze, and share information.” This means that USMS’s ability to identify previously unknown threats is limited. Since, as the report acknowledges, less than 10 percent of individuals who “attacked or approached to attack a prominent public figure” communicated a threat beforehand, developing this capability is critical to providing effective protection.

As you’ll recall, an OPI inspector is here in New Hampshire attempting to assess Manchester resident Rob Jacobs. That is, of course, after he assessed several completely unrelated people who just happen to be Free State Project members. Jacobs and the inspector have yet to meet in person, as they have been unable to agree on a meeting place. After marshals failed to meet with him on Saturday, Jacobs attempted to set up a second meeting for Tuesday evening, which the inspector declined to attend. He apparently objected to the venue, Murphy’s Taproom, a local restaurant where Free State Project members regularly meet.

Tuesday evening at Murphy’s Taproom, instead of the inspector, several of us spoke to a local reporter, who wrote a more neutral story than this one.

Jacobs said he supports the Browns’ cause and has visited their home many times in the past year. He said he has never seen Ed Brown’s supposed hit list and said he does not know anyone who might be planning to harm government officials. . . .

Keith Murphy, owner of Murphy’s Tap Room and a member of the Free State Project, said many Free Staters who already have come to New Hampshire supported the Browns’ crusade against the federal income tax. They were turned off, however, as Ed Brown’s rhetoric became increasingly violent and after he told reporters all of the world’s problems are the fault of Freemasons and Jews.

“We are ’small L’ Libertarians,” Murphy said of the Free Staters. “We believe violence is inherently wrong. It’s not in our nature.” — Manchester Union Leader

We certainly need to do away with the whole sorry system of income taxation. Just throw Title 26 out. (And a few billion useless pork-barrel government programs along with it.) But doing violence to government officials won’t get rid of the income tax, and it will result in crackdowns the likes of which we haven’t seen in this country in recent memory, or perhaps ever.

Interestingly, those same high-ranking government officials are upset at the level of publicity this story has been getting in general, and especially with the publication of videos documenting the experiences of the people here who feel they were harassed and threatened by the marshals and “Treasury agents.” It’s been my experience that, for the most part, it’s the bad apples in government who object to having their actions publicized.

And perhaps the surveillance teams at Murphy’s got wind of some of this. Among the people they got to see while the Republican debate played on the TV screens were a state representative, an off-duty police officer planning a run for state representative next year, two local candidates for alderman in two different wards in the city, several individuals starting a newspaper, local Republican and Democratic party officials, and a couple dozen quite ordinary people who are sick and tired of big government spending their children into debt and invading their private lives at every turn.

Ideas, they say, are bulletproof. And the idea of freedom, to be left alone when you’ve harmed nobody and to have no more government than is necessary to protect your right to be left alone when you’ve harmed nobody, has persisted throughout human history. The income tax flies in the face of everything we understand about what it means to be free. It is indeed a form of slavery, involuntary servitude of the worst kind: the fruits of your labor are not only taken by force, they are taken by a group of strangers you have no effective way to reason or plead with. It will eventually be swept into the dustbin of history along with many other methods of tyranny which have preceded it.

But the battle is for the hearts and minds of those enslaved by it, many of whom don’t even know they are enslaved, and whom along with us would be freed. It is a battle of ideas. Bullets have no place here. It is the state which uses bullets and other means of violence to enforce its tyranny over the people. This is why freedom will ultimately prevail: the state’s bad ideas and their bad actions cannot stand in the harsh light of day.

Satire became reality Friday afternoon when half a dozen armed federal agents wearing body armor showed up at this author’s home and detained everyone in the house for nearly 90 minutes to determine who might pose a threat to the government.

Marshal John Bolen of the U.S. Marshals Office of Protective Intelligence traveled to Manchester, N.H., to investigate threats of violence allegedly made against Steven McAuliffe, a federal judge in the district court in Concord, and other federal officials in the area. He brought along with him other marshals and agents who would only say that they were with the Treasury Department.

Later in the afternoon the federal agents detained and interrogated another Manchester resident for nearly 30 minutes trying to locate yet another person of interest to them, and then after having set up a Saturday meeting with this person of interest, didn’t even bother to show up.

The threats allegedly originated with convicted tax protesters Ed and Elaine Brown, late of Plainfield, and supporters of their cause. Marshals took the Browns into custody Thursday night to begin serving 63-month prison terms after a nine-month standoff in which the couple remained in their home, supporters brought food, supplies and firearms, and staged concerts and press conferences on the property.

Reports Friday morning stated that a supporter of the Browns left a threat of retaliatory violence on a MySpace page Thursday night after the arrest, but this author was unable to find such a threatening message. Nevertheless, according to media reports, some militant supporters of the Browns have threatened violence against government officials in the past.

And the marshals, under fresh criticism for failing to protect federal judges properly, desperately needed to look like they were doing something. A report (PDF) released Wednesday by the Department of Justice Inspector General found that marshals’ efforts to protect federal judges had “languished,” with growing backlogs of threats to be assessed and investigated, and improper assessment of threats leading to misallocation of resources.

So, apparently unable or unwilling to face the people who have said they want to shoot government agents, they came to my house instead. And misallocation of resources certainly seems to describe Friday’s incidents.

Bolen’s investigation in Manchester seemed to center around members of the Free State Project, a group whose members pledge to move to New Hampshire in order to help reduce the size and scope of government. “Anyone who promotes violence, racial hatred, or bigotry is not welcome” in the Free State Project, according to a statement on its Web site.

As I have said repeatedly here, I do not believe that using violence against government officials is an appropriate method to effect positive change. For one, it would not have the desired effect. Those of you who have read Matthew Bracken’s Enemies Foreign and Domestic know that shooting government agents is a significant part of the plot in that novel. But to see what would happen, you should read the sequel, Domestic Enemies. This would be a significant step backward for a freedom movement.

In contrast to those espousing violence, Free State Project members spent the last three days trying to determine if Ed and Elaine Brown were truly unharmed, as Marshal Stephen Monier said, and seeking a loving home for the Browns’ presumably abandoned dog.

Hopefully the U.S. Marshals, and other law enforcement agencies, will learn something from this misallocation of resources, and start spending their time going after actual threats.

One final note. Bolen told everyone here that he was seeking our help in preventing acts of violence from being perpetrated. Yet he and the agents who came with him gave numerous conflicting statements to each of us. Normal people call this lying. I would suggest that it’s not a good idea to lie to people whose support you’re trying to enlist. It tends to foster resentment and distrust, and that is the last thing that an intelligence organization should be doing.

A Justice Department audit of the government’s master list of known and suspected terrorists found errors and inconsistencies which would have allowed terrorists to enter the country undetected and would mistakenly identify innocent Americans as terrorists.

The Terrorist Screening Database, maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, contains over 700,000 records (and growing fast) submitted by the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies, and exports its data to other government databases, such as those used by the State Department to screen visa applications, and for the Transportation Security Agency’s no-fly and selectee lists.

But according to the audit, (PDF) conducted by inspector general Glenn A. Fine, the database “continues to have significant weaknesses,” he told Congress.

Depending on the requirements of the agency in question, the TSDB exports different sets of names to various government databases. An in-depth audit of one of those, the TSA’s no-fly list, found that the list should be cut in half.

Part of the problem is that the TSDB consists of two distinct databases which are supposed to be synchronized with exactly the same information, in order to facilitate exporting the data to different government agencies, but the auditors found that the two databases did not always remain in sync.

The auditors reviewed the TSC’s quality assurance protocols and found that of 105 records reviewed for quality assurance, 38 percent had errors or inconsistencies that the quality assurance process did not discover.

The audit reviewed complaints, finding that it usually took more than two months to resolve complaints, and that some remained open for more than a year.

In addition, the auditors found that 20 names of known and suspected terrorists were not being exported from the system so that front-line agents with Customs and Border Protection could prevent them from entering the country.

“For technical reasons, about 20 identities or records did not get distributed as completely as they should have,” [TSC director Leonard ] Boyle said in an interview. The CBP can access the crime center data, Boyle said, but the FBI did not send the watch list data directly to CBP systems “as they should have been.” — Associated Press

Finally, the audit found 2,682 records which were not being exported to any other database, and after reviewing them, found that 2,118 of them did not belong on any government watch list at all and should be removed.

“The new report confirms a widespread impression that the watch-list system still needs work,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “Not only are too many innocent people being listed in error, some of the bad guys are not properly included.” — Washington Post

And the problems just go on and on.

Additional problems with the TSC’s technology that the auditors identified included:

• Cumbersome FBI data handling practices that create unnecessary errors, anomalies and inconsistencies in the records;
• The FBI practice of entering data about suspected terrorists into a downstream database, which prevents other agencies from reviewing the bureau’s data;
• Needless delays in entering data into the terrorist watch list, which cause a significant vulnerability to the integrity of the consolidated database;
• Duplicate information problems with 6,262 records in the TSDB;
• Delays in resolving data quality assurance problems that ranged up to 329 days, with an average processing time of 80 days (as of February 2007, TSC officials were working with 3,000 open quality assurance problems); and
• Delays and inefficiencies in handling requests by specific people for correction or deletion of their watch list records.

— Government Computer News

Don’t you just love how the government has turned a simple idea, maintaining a watchlist of known and suspected terrorists, and made a complete bureaucratic nightmare out of it? Do you feel safer now?

“Inaccurate, incomplete and obsolete watchlist information can increase the risk of not identifying known or suspected terrorists,” Fine said, “and it can also increase the risk that innocent persons will be stopped or detained.”

And if you’re one of those innocent Americans mistakenly watchlisted, good luck getting off the list. It gets checked by every police officer who asks you for your driver license. The next time you’re stopped for speeding, and the next thing you know your car is surrounded by cops pointing guns at you for no good reason, now you know who to blame.

In December of 1998, then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet wrote in an internal Central Intelligence Agency memorandum that “We are at war” with Osama bin Laden and that he wanted “no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the [Intelligence] Community.”

But a 2005 report from John L. Helgerson, the CIA’s inspector general, parts of which were declassified this week, found that Tenet failed to follow through and create a plan for countering the terrorist threat posed by bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.

The report, requested by the House and Senate intelligence committees after the release of their Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, was to determine if any CIA employees “were deserving of of awards for outstanding service . . . or should be held accountable for failure to perform their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner.”

The 19-page executive summary (PDF) of the report was released this week as a result of an amendment to a bill implementing some 9/11 Commission recommendations which President George W. Bush signed earlier this month.

Very little in this executive summary is new or disagrees with the Joint Inquiry report, which predated the 9/11 Commission, and focused on the nation’s intelligence agencies’ failure to detect or prevent the September 11, 2001, attacks. But the report does name names and recommend that specific CIA officials be investigated further for their individual failures.

The full report by the inspector general, totaling several hundred pages, remains classified. As spelled out in the executive summary that was released on Tuesday, the report found neither “a single point of failure” nor a “silver bullet” that would have allowed the C.I.A. to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks. It found that no agency employee violated the law and that none of their errors amounted to misconduct.

But the report did conclude that C.I.A. resources devoted to counterterrorism had been mismanaged, and that some had been redirected away from Al Qaeda toward other parts of the agency’s clandestine service. It cited “failures to implement and manage important processes, to follow through with operations, and to properly share and analyze critical data.”

The report does not cite the names of the officials who it says “did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner,” but it identifies some of them by title. Besides Mr. Tenet, the report criticizes James L. Pavitt, the C.I.A.’s former deputy director for operations; J. Cofer Black, the former director of the agency’s Counterterrorist Center; and other top officials. — New York Times

The conclusion of the report you should read for yourself:

(U) The Team found no instance in which an employee violated the law, and none of the errors discussed herein involves misconduct. Rather, the review focuses on areas where individuals did not perform their duties in a satisfactory manner; that is, they did not — with regard to the specific issue or issues discussed — act “in accordance with a reasonable level of professionalism, skill and diligence,” as required by Agency regulation. . . .

(U) The findings of greatest concern are those that identify systemic problems where the Agency’s programs or processes did not work as they should have, and concerning which a number of persons were involved or aware, or should have been. Where the Team found systemic failures, it has recommended that an Accountability Board assess the performance and accountability of those managers who, by virtue of their position and authorities, might reasonably have been expected to oversee and correct the process. In general, the fact that failures were systemic should not absolve responsible officials from accountability. — OIG Report on CIA Accountability With Respect to the 9/11 Attacks (PDF)

But current CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden, and his predecessor Porter Goss, rejected this recommendation, and no accountability boards were ever formed. “Director Goss noted at the time that the officers cited include some of our finest,” Hayden said in a statement accompanying the report. “With inadequate resources, they and those they led worked flat out against a tough, secretive foe.” In government, working hard is a sufficient defense for incompetence.

Hayden also objected to the document’s release.

“While meeting the dictates of the law, I want to make it clear that this declassification was neither my choice nor my preference,” Hayden said.

“I thought the release of this report would distract officers serving their country on the frontlines of a global conflict. It will, at a minimum, consume time and attention revisiting ground that is already well plowed. I also remain deeply concerned about the chilling effect that may follow publication of the previously classified work, findings, and recommendations of the Office of Inspector General. The important work of that unit depends on candor and confidentiality.”

In other words, only the government should monitor the government. We the people can’t really be made privy to the government’s budgets, decisions, people, or operations. Even with regard to something as innocuous as the intelligence community budget, only the bureaucracy and a handful of cleared congressional officials deliberate.

Yet the review finds that even after Tenet declared “war,” even after he ordered that no resource be spared in the counterterrorism effort, even after he had gained all necessary authority to move money and people — not only wasn’t it done, but the CIA Counterterrorist Center didn’t even spend its entire budget. And then the center complained that it could not afford to put an officer at the National Security Agency because it did not have the resources. . . .

Whether through secret budgets or bureaucratic selfishness, this is the way the intelligence community works. Heck, this is the way the CIA itself works, with one group not cooperating with another, with one office in competition with another, with the prestige stations and locations looking down on the less fortunate.

Now we are supposed to believe that, after 9/11, all of those old problems have been resolved. — Early Warning

And if you believe that, I’ve got a hot tip on the whereabouts of Osama, too.

Tenet defends his record at the agency, calling the report’s conclusions “flat wrong” and blaming, in part, the scaling back of the intelligence community in the 1990s. “For me, however there was no priority higher than fighting terrorism,” Tenet said in a statement. “As I said to the 9/11 Commission: ‘No matter how hard we worked — or how desperately we tried — it was not enough. The victims and the families of 9/11 deserved better.’”

Remember, in government, working hard means you can’t be judged incompetent.

But former CIA analyst Ray McGovern told the BBC the inspector general’s criticism was justified.

“… [George Tenet] was too busy schmoozing with foreign leaders and getting sort of swamped with the detail that he forgot that his job was to manage the intelligence community and so the cracks such as existed became wider and wider. He didn’t talk to the FBI and 9/11 happened.”

Meanwhile, the former head of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, described the agency’s rank-and-file employees under Mr Tenet as “lions led by asses”.

“Many of the difficulties that were listed in that report today – the inability to share information, the lack of people to support and run operations against Osama bin Laden – those were problems that were brought to Mr Tenet’s attention as early as 1996 and he never did anything about them,” he told the BBC. . . .

But Lori Van Auken – whose husband, Kenneth, died in the World Trade Center attack – said of the report: “We’re talking about complete and utter incompetence, and people should be held accountable and we should know who they are…” — BBC News

CIA incompetence is, of course, nothing new. The I, after all, stands for incompetent. DCI Hayden, for his part, says things are getting better and the CIA is “self-aware, self-critical, and, to a great degree, self-improving.” But the evidence of that, if there is any, is classified.

Last weekend the Bush administration pushed through Congress a law to bolster the government’s ability to intercept the electronic communications of foreigners and other “persons reasonably believed to be outside the U.S.” without a court order.

The so-called Protect America Act, which passed both the House and Senate by wide margins just before Congress went on its August recess, allows the government to intercept the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who communicate with people overseas, and for the first time, allows the government to intercept communications between foreigners which are merely routed through the United States, as well as conversations of Americans traveling abroad.

The only bright spot in this legislation is that it requires the government to design procedures to prevent the intelligence collection under the law from infringing on the privacy of ordinary Americans and for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to sign off on those procedures within six months. It also requires a review of the program every six months afterward.

The legislation will “give our intelligence professionals the essential tools they need to protect our nation,” spokesman Tony Fratto said.

Democratic leaders expressed disappointment about the result, but they pointed to language that would require lawmakers to reconsider the key provisions in six months.

“My Republican colleagues chose to rubber-stamp a flawed administration proposal that fails to provide the accountability needed in the light of the administration’s past mismanagement of key tools in the war on terror,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). — Washington Post

Privacy and civil liberties advocates were not mollified by the privacy provisions in the bill.

“Rather than acting as a meaningful check on the Executive, Congress essentially handed him a blank check to invade Americans’ privacy,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation activism coordinator Derek Slater. “Congress’ actions are particularly disgraceful given that the Administration has concealed the truth about its illegal spying.”

“This bill would grant the attorney general the ability to wiretap anybody, any place, any time without court review, without any checks and balances,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., during the debate preceding the vote. “I think this unwarranted, unprecedented measure would simply eviscerate the 4th Amendment,” which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.

Republicans disputed her description. “It does nothing to tear up the Constitution,” said Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif. — Associated Press

House Democrats complained that they had been “railroaded” into passing the bill, since they were close to passing a much narrower bill when the administration presented its demands for additional powers.

“I’m not comfortable suspending the Constitution even temporarily,” said Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), a member of the House intelligence committee. “The countries we detest around the world are the ones that spy on their own people. Usually they say they do it for the sake of public safety and security.” — Washington Post

The rush to push through enhanced spying powers came from a ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court earlier this year that found that several key portions of President Bush’s terrorist surveillance program were illegal.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) disclosed elements of the court’s decision in remarks Tuesday to Fox News as he was promoting the administration-backed wiretapping legislation. Boehner has denied revealing classified information, but two government officials privy to the details confirmed that his remarks concerned classified information.

The judge, whose name could not be learned, concluded early this year that the government had overstepped its authority in attempting to broadly surveil communications between two locations overseas that are passed through routing stations in the United States, according to two other government sources familiar with the decision.

The decision was both a political and practical blow to the administration, which had long held that all of the National Security Agency’s enhanced surveillance efforts since 2001 were legal. The administration for years had declined to subject those efforts to the jurisdiction of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and after it finally did so in January the court ruled that the administration’s legal judgment was at least partly wrong. — Washington Post

This is important to the administration because by monitoring foreign communications from within the U.S., where many of them are routed, the National Security Agency can gain access to over one-third of the world’s communications traffic.

Bush administration officials, though, said that the measure didn’t grant any broad authority to expand the government’s intelligence activities.

In a telephone briefing for reporters on Monday, officials said the administration had set out to resolve a “narrow” technical problem that had called into question whether intelligence officials needed to get a court warrant to intercept foreign-to-foreign communications that happened to pass through American telecommunication switches. But in fact the legislation as enacted not only provides that no warrant is needed in such a situation but also goes further, in giving the administration discretion to eavesdrop on foreign communications that might involve Americans.

The officials who participated in the briefing spoke on condition of anonymity, saying only that doing so would allow them to talk more freely.

They said the legislation did not authorize “a driftnet” aimed at eavesdropping on large volumes of phone calls and e-mail messages inside the United States. But they declined to discuss in detail the N.S.A.’s broader efforts tracing and analyzing the patterns of American communications — who is calling and e-mailing whom — without actually listening to or reading the content of the conversations. Those broader data-mining activities were part of a heated dispute within the administration that led senior Justice Department officials in 2004 to refuse at first to certify the legality of the N.S.A. operations and to threaten to resign in protest over their continuation. — New York Times

On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a motion with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court requesting the release of court orders interpreting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “Over the next six months, Congress and the public will debate the wisdom and necessity of permanently expanding the executive’s authority to conduct intrusive forms of surveillance without judicial oversight,” the motion said.

Indeed, the only oversight the program will get is from Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, and the attorney general. Alberto Gonzales has hardly proved himself capable of overseeing and preventing abuses of the American people’s rights. His idea of oversight, it seems, is the word’s other definition: to fail to notice, to overlook.

As for McConnell, he says in a letter to the U.S. Senate that he is “committed to keeping the Congress fully and currently informed of how this Act has improved the ability of the Intelligence Community to protect the country and reporting — and remedying — any incidents of non-compliance.” It remains to be seen if he’s up to the task.

There are at least three other problems with this law and the surveillance system it represents.

First among them is that the government will pay communications providers to create a potentially permanent surveillance infrastructure out of the country’s communications facilities, one which could be turned inward at any time and without legal recourse.

In short, the law gives the Administration the power to order the nation’s communication service providers — which range from Gmail, AOL IM, Twitter, Skype, traditional phone companies, ISPs, internet backbone providers, Federal Express, and social networks — to create possibly permanent spying outposts for the federal government.

These outposts need only to have a “significant” purpose of spying on foreigners, would be nearly immune to challenge by lawsuit, and have no court supervision over their extent or implementation.

Abuses of the outposts will be monitored only by the Justice Department, which has already been found to have underreported abuses of other surveillance powers to Congress.

In related international news, Zimbabwe’s repressive dictator Robert Mugabe also won passage of a law allowing the government to turn that nation’s communication infrastructure into a gigantic, secret microphone. — Threat Level

A second problem is that this surveillance infrastructure is unlikely to be secure, and will make an inviting target for hackers, criminals and other countries, not to mention the very terrorists it’s supposedly meant to catch.

Grant the NSA what it wants, and within 10 years the United States will be vulnerable to attacks from hackers across the globe, as well as the militaries of China, Russia and other nations.

Such threats are not theoretical. For almost a year beginning in April 2004, more than 100 phones belonging to members of the Greek government, including the prime minister and ministers of defense, foreign affairs, justice and public order, were spied on with wiretapping software that was misused. Exactly who placed the software and who did the listening remain unknown. But they were able to use software that was supposed to be used only with legal permission.

The United States itself has been attacked. In six hours in August 2006, remote attackers entered computers at the Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.; the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington; the Naval Ocean Systems Center in San Diego; and the Army Space and Strategic Defense Command in Huntsville, Ala. The hackers transported more than 10 terabytes of data to South Korea, Hong Kong or Taiwan, and from there to the People’s Republic of China. Each intrusion was only 10 to 30 minutes. The downloaded information included Army helicopter mission-planning-systems specifications and flight-planning software used by the Army and Air Force. — Washington Post

Why don’t we save the taxpayers a few hundred billion dollars and just publish all the government’s secrets on the Internet where everybody can get to them without having to waste 30 minutes hacking into an insecure system?

Finally, widespread surveillance introduces destructive changes in behavior in the population under surveillance.

Now imagine a society where everyone knows they are or may be watched as they walk through the streets, or while surfing online. That – as in societies like Hitler’s Germany or Soviet Russia – will have tangible and widespread psychological consequences, reinforcing conformity, and literally crippling the ability to make autonomous and ethical decisions, he argued.

An analogy might be the well-studied population of children with overprotective mothers, the philosopher said. Studies show that such children tend to be indecisive, dependent on others, have little “ethical competence,” and often live suppressed and unhappy lives.

As or more disturbing may be the political implications of having a surveillance infrastructure in place.

Many philosophers reject the notion that given technologies are inherently politically neutral, [philosopher Sandro] Gaycken said. Surveillance, for example, can be used to support democratic values of freedom, equality, and state neutrality – but its tendency to create a watched and a watching class lends itself better to totalitarianism. In a country such as Germany, which has seen democracy slide into the Nazi state, such a warning resonates strongly.

“Surveillance stabilizes totalitarianism, and destabilizes democracy,” Gaycken warned. — Threat Level

So the end result is 300 million Americans who think they’re safe because the government is watching out for them by watching them, even though they weren’t doing anything wrong to begin with. Shortly, the people begin watching what they say, suppressing themselves out of fear they could be mistaken for a terrorist, and the destruction is complete.

Renowned security expert Bruce Schneier conducted an extensive interview with Transportation Security Administration head Kip Hawley, and asked him, in essence, when is airport security going to start making sense?

In the interview, conducted by e-mail during May and June and which Schneier published this week, Hawley tries to answer the tough questions in order to help combat TSA’s negative image.

You can read the whole thing yourself to see if he succeeded. But I do want to comment on a few of his answers.

Bruce Schneier: By today’s rules, I can carry on liquids in quantities of three ounces or less, unless they’re in larger bottles. But I can carry on multiple three-ounce bottles. Or a single larger bottle with a non-prescription medicine label, like contact lens fluid. It all has to fit inside a one-quart plastic bag, except for that large bottle of contact lens fluid. And if you confiscate my liquids, you’re going to toss them into a large pile right next to the screening station — which you would never do if anyone thought they were actually dangerous.

Can you please convince me there’s not an Office for Annoying Air Travelers making this sort of stuff up?

Kip Hawley: Screening ideas are indeed thought up by the Office for Annoying Air Travelers and vetted through the Directorate for Confusion and Complexity, and then we review them to insure that there are sufficient unintended irritating consequences so that the blogosphere is constantly fueled. Imagine for a moment that TSA people are somewhat bright, and motivated to protect the public with the least intrusion into their lives, not to mention travel themselves. How might you engineer backwards from that premise to get to three ounces and a baggie?

How indeed? It turns out that the mysterious liquid explosive threat referred to here apparently requires a large container. This is why TSA seizes containers that hold more than three ounces of liquid, even if they are empty. I don’t like it much, but it does make a certain kind of sense.

I often read blog posts about how someone could just take all their three-ounce bottles — or take bottles from others on the plane — and combine them into a larger container to make a bomb. I can’t get into the specifics, but our explosives research shows this is not a viable option.

If you’re to believe Hawley, then the explosives have to come in via the large container, and can’t be simply brought in via multiple small containers and transferred to a large container later. I don’t have the expertise to comment on this, but it sounds fishy.

BS: People regularly point to security checkpoints missing a knife in their handbag as evidence that security screening isn’t working. But that’s wrong. Complete effectiveness is not the goal; the checkpoints just have to be effective enough so that the terrorists are worried their plan will be uncovered. But in Denver earlier this year, testers sneaked 90% of weapons through. And other tests aren’t much better. Why are these numbers so poor, and why didn’t they get better when the TSA took over airport security?

KH: Your first point is dead on and is the key to how we look at security. The stories about 90% failures are wrong or extremely misleading. We do many kinds of effectiveness tests at checkpoints daily. We use them to guide training and decisions on technology and operating procedures. We also do extensive and very sophisticated Red Team testing, and one of their jobs is to observe checkpoints and go back and figure out — based on inside knowledge of what we do — ways to beat the system. They isolate one particular thing: for example, a particular explosive, made and placed in a way that exploits a particular weakness in technology; our procedures; or the way TSOs do things in practice. Then they will test that particular thing over and over until they identify what corrective action is needed. We then change technology or procedure, or plain old focus on execution. And we repeat the process — forever.

So without getting into specifics on the test results, of course there are times that our evaluations can generate high failure rate numbers on specific scenarios. Overall, though, our ability to detect bomb components is vastly improved and it will keep getting better. (Older scores you may have seen may be “feel good” numbers based on old, easy tests. Don’t go for the sound-bite; today’s TSOs are light-years ahead of even where they were two years ago.)

Who else would conduct extensive observation and testing, and perhaps attempt to exploit inside knowledge, in order to get weapons and explosives past screeners? If you said terrorists, give yourself a cigar. For bonus points, how many terrorists and terrorist sympathizers currently hold jobs as TSA screeners?

BS: You don’t have a responsibility to screen shoes; you have one to protect air travel from terrorism to the best of your ability. . . . It’s “cover your ass” security. If someone tries to blow up a plane with a shoe or a liquid, you’ll take a lot of blame for not catching it. But if someone uses any of these other, equally known, attack methods, you’ll be blamed less because they’re less public.

KH: Dead wrong! Our security strategy assumes an adaptive terrorist, and that looking backwards is not a reliable predictor of the next type of attack. Yes, we screen for shoe bombs and liquids, because it would be stupid not to directly address attack methods that we believe to be active. Overall, we are getting away from trying to predict what the object looks like and looking more for the other markers of a terrorist. (Don’t forget, we see two million people a day, so we know what normal looks like.) What he/she does; the way they behave. That way we don’t put all our eggs in the basket of catching them in the act.

At least they’ve learned what they need to do to catch hostile actors. My concern is how many perfectly innocent people also get caught in this behavioral dragnet because they don’t fit the TSA’s definition of “normal.”

BS: Let’s talk about ID checks. I’ve called the no-fly list a list of people so dangerous they cannot be allowed to fly under any circumstance, yet so innocent we can’t arrest them even under the Patriot Act. Except that’s not even true; anyone, no matter how dangerous they are, can fly without an ID ­or by using someone else’s boarding pass. And the list itself is filled with people who shouldn’t be on it — dead people, people in jail, and so on — and primarily catches innocents with similar names. Why are you bothering?

KH: Because it works. We just completed a scrub of every name on the no-fly list and cut it in half — essentially cleaning out people who were no longer an active terror threat. We do not publicize how often the no-fly system stops people you would not want on your flight. Several times a week would low-ball it. . . .

TSA does not add people to the watch-lists, no matter how cranky you are at a checkpoint. Second, political views have nothing to do with no-flys or selectees. These myths have taken on urban legend status. There are very strict criteria and they are reviewed by lots of separate people in separate agencies: it is for live terror concerns only. The problem comes from random selectees (literally mathematically random) or people who have the same name and birth date as real no-flys. If you can get a boarding pass, you are not on the no-fly list. This problem will go away when Secure Flight starts in 2008, but we can’t seem to shake the false impression that ordinary Americans get put on a “list.” I am open for suggestions on how to make the public “get it.”

Of course, that secrecy is the problem. People get held up at the airport and are told it’s because they are on a list of some kind. This drives innocent Americans absolutely nuts — but only after they experience it for themselves. (If this has happened to you, file for redress, if you can, and if it does any good.)

BS: Let’s talk about behavioral profiling. I’ve long thought that most of airline security could be ditched in favor of well-trained guards, both in and out of uniform, wandering the crowds looking for suspicious behavior. Can you talk about some of the things you’re doing along those lines, and especially ways to prevent this from turning into just another form of racial profiling?

KH: We use a system of behavior observation that is based on the science that demonstrates that there are certain involuntary, subconscious actions that can betray a person’s hostile intent. For instance, there are tiny — but noticeable to the trained person — movements in a person’s facial muscles when they have certain emotions. It is very different from the stress we all show when we’re anxious about missing the flight due to, say, a long security line. This is true across race, gender, age, ethnicity, etc. It is our way of not falling into the trap where we predict what a terrorist is going to look like. We know they use people who “look like” terrorists, but they also use people who do not, perhaps thinking that we cue only off of what the 9/11 hijackers looked like.

After all, there are plenty of black, white, and all sorts of other people who want to kill people in the name of Islam, or just in the name of mayhem. Right? Your 90 year old grandmother in her wheelchair could secretly be a member of al-Qaeda. Or a serial killer. Whatever you do, don’t get pissed off in the airport, or you too could find yourself behaviorally profiled.

One last little clip:

BS: I’ve read repeated calls to privatize airport security: to return it to the way it was pre-9/11. Personally, I think it’s a bad idea, but I’d like your opinion on the question. And regardless of what you think should happen, do you think it will happen?

KH: From an operational security point of view, I think it works both ways. So it is not a strategic issue for me.

SFO, our largest private airport, has excellent security and is on a par with its federalized counterparts (in fact, I am on a flight from there as I write this). One current federalized advantage is that we can surge resources around the system with no notice; essentially, the ability to move from anywhere to anywhere and mix TSOs with federal air marshals in different force packages. We would need to be sure we don’t lose that interchangeability if we were to expand privatized screening.

I don’t see a major security or economic driver that would push us to large-scale privatization. Economically, the current cost-plus model makes it a better deal for the government in smaller airports than in bigger. So, maybe more small airports will privatize. If Congress requires collective bargaining for our TSOs, that will impose an additional overhead cost of about $500 million, which would shift the economic balance significantly toward privatized screening. But unless that happens, I don’t see major change in this area.

SFO’s semi-private security really is on par with nationalized security at other airports. They both suck. Of course, this means nothing changed when airport security was taken over by the federal government as though it was Hugo Chavez taking over a company. For airport security to get no worse is, perhaps, the best possible outcome.

Let’s be clear: Airport security before 9/11 wasn’t bad because it was private. It was bad because it was strictly government regulated, largely preventing companies from instituting any real security measures such as we are finally starting to get out of the government, now that it has seized total control. For instance, screeners were frequently trained to spot only specific types of weapons on X-ray in order to pass FAA-mandated tests. Identifying “a gun” that wasn’t the specific gun being tested for would cause the screener to fail. Sound familiar? It should. That’s what you get with government.

Airport security clearly went the wrong direction after 9/11. Now we all have to pay for this sort of incompetence, whether we fly or not. The proper thing to do would have been to get the FAA off airport security’s back and let them do their jobs properly. Instead, we got a whole new level of government incompetence: the Department of Homeland Security.

This makes yet another year I didn’t make it to DEFCON, the longest-running hacker conference now in its 15th year. Which is unfortunate, because I really would have loved to have been at the opening speech at the Black Hat Briefings, held just prior to the main event this weekend, and at which the National Security Agency got up and asked the hacker community for help.

Tony Sager, chief of NSA’s Vulnerability Analysis and Operations Group, addressed the crowd Wednesday, saying that IT security and information assurance is now too big a problem for government to solve on its own.

As part of its information assurance mission, NSA participates in various computer security initiatives such as the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures security vulnerability index and the Department of Homeland Security’s Security Content Automation Program. NSA also publishes security configuration guides for various operating systems such as Windows Vista and Mac OS X, as well as SELinux, a version of the Linux kernel with improved security.

“We’ve got to figure out how to solve this problem with solutions that scale across the entire community,” Sager said. That means his agency has to bring its information to the table and find common ground with the private and academic sectors. “‘We’re from the government and we’re here to help’ doesn’t work with this crowd.”

Although much of NSA’s work remains secret, Sager’s group is a reflection of the need to develop open and standardized security and research practices.

When he began working at NSA in 1977, “it was a dramatically different security problem,” he said. IT security was a government monopoly. “The government owned the problem” and could control the technology. “Those days are over.”

NSA has struggled with the change in culture. “But you have no choice but to be concerned about the security of commercial products” over which the government has no control, Sager said. “We changed the way we behaved” to gain the trust and cooperation of the security research community. — Government Computer News

I’m always amazed on those rare occasions when government actually admits that it can’t do something. Government can’t really do much of anything very well, though it hates to admit it. Anything government isn’t doing means less taxpayer money lining bureaucrats’ and contractors’ pockets, and what government isn’t doing gets done better.

I just wish I could have been there to see it myself. Unlike last year, I could easily have afforded to go, but I waited too long to get my travel plans in order. Oh well, there’s always next year.

(Hat tip: Fergie’s Tech Blog)

In late 2001, President Bush signed an executive order authorizing a controversial National Security Agency program, and on Tuesday, director of national intelligence Mike McConnell revealed that the executive order authorized not only the “terrorist surveillance program” whose existence was revealed in 2005, but a series of other programs as well.

The program, which President Bush publicly acknowledged in December 2005 after its existence was revealed by theNew York Times, is only one part of a series of undisclosed intelligence programs which were authorized at the same time.

The terrorist surveillance program has been criticized for producing large volumes of information with little intelligence value while violating the privacy of ordinary Americans.

In a letter (PDF) to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), McConnell wrote that the executive order following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks included “a number of . . . intelligence activities” and that a name routinely used by the administration — the Terrorist Surveillance Program — applied only to “one particular aspect of these activities, and nothing more.”

“This is the only aspect of the NSA activities that can be discussed publicly, because it is the only aspect of those various activities whose existence has been officially acknowledged,” McConnell said.

McConnell’s letter was aimed at defending Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales from allegations by Democrats that he may have committed perjury by telling Congress that no legal objections were raised about the TSP. Gonzales said a legal fight in early 2004 was focused on “other intelligence activities” than those confirmed by Bush, but he never connected those to Bush’s executive order.

But in doing so, McConnell’s letter also underscored that the full scope of the NSA’s surveillance program under Bush’s order has not been revealed. — Washington Post

Gonzales has also come under fire recently for telling Congress in 2005 that no civil liberties abuses had occurred in connection with the Federal Bureau Investigation’s misuse of national security letters and exigent letters in counterterrorism investigations, while he had received internal reports documenting such misuses as early as a year before his testimony. Some members of Congress have called for Gonzales to resign.

The Bush administration, which placed the terrorist surveillance program under the review of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in January, is pushing for a change in law which would permit it to continue operating the program without warrants or other court review.

“Time and again, the Administration has described the blatantly illegal TSP as a ‘narrow’ and ‘targeted’ program, and it’s playing a similar game of linguistic misdirection with this bill,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation legal director Cindy Cohn. “Rather than a mere ‘update’ to the law focused on foreign-to-foreign communications, it could facilitate wide-ranging surveillance of Americans’ private communications.”

Cohn urged people to contact their legislators and oppose the bill. “It would be absurd for Congress to legislate in the dark, before the Administration comes clean about the domestic spying program.”