Iraq is upset over UAV surveillance drone usage, where is the outrage in the U.S.?

Iraq, is outraged that the U.S. is using UAV aerial drones to spy on its citizens. U. S. authorities are doing the same thing in our country, where is the outrage?

Baghdad — A month after the last American troops left Iraq, the State Department is operating a small fleet of surveillance drones here to help protect the United States Embassy and consulates, as well as American personnel. Some senior Iraqi officials expressed outrage at the program, saying the unarmed aircraft are an affront to Iraqi sovereignty.       

The program was described by the department’s diplomatic security branch in a little-noticed section of its most recent annual report and outlined in broad terms in a two-page online prospectus for companies that might bid on a contract to manage the program. It foreshadows a possible expansion of unmanned drone operations into the diplomatic arm of the American government; until now they have been mainly the province of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency.
       

American contractors say they have been told that the State Department is considering to field unarmed surveillance drones in the future in a handful of other potentially “high-threat” countries, including Indonesia and Pakistan, and in Afghanistan after the bulk of American troops leave in the next two years. State Department officials say that no decisions have been made beyond the drone operations in Iraq.

The drones are the latest example of the State Department’s efforts to take over functions in Iraq that the military used to perform. Some 5,000 private security contractors now protect the embassy’s 11,000-person staff, for example, and typically drive around in heavily armored military vehicles. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/world/middleeast/iraq-is-angered-by-us-drones-patrolling-its-skies.html?scp=1&sq=iraq%20upset%20over%20uavs&st=cse

Police across the country are using private cameras to spy on citizens.

  The nonprofit ProjectNOLA has donated 75 high-definition cameras to homeowners in high-crime areas, on the condition that they be aimed at the street.

The nonprofit group's volunteers already monitor crime scanners, but now they can link remotely to any camera in the area and, if appropriate, send fresh footage via cell phone to detectives, sometimes "as they drive up to the crime scene for the first time," said ProjectNOLA founder Bryan Lagarde, who noted that he hopes to add more cameras in hot spots in coming months.

In the French Quarter, Gernon said the NOPD is able to remotely access video at several bars on Bourbon Street. "We call first, get permission and log into the systems," he said.

Other cities, such as Chicago and Atlanta, combine public-private systems more formally, by compiling maps of all private surveillance systems or creating integrated systems that allow police departments, under certain conditions, to view live footage from thousands of private systems. It does not appear the NOPD does that, although the department did not provide information about its agency-wide approach to seeking and using surveillance footage.

Public crime cameras can be "incredibly helpful, but mostly in combination with private cameras." said police superintendent Ronal Serpas, who basically shut down the public system because the city's tight budget couldn't support it.
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/01/new_orleans_cops_relying_on_p.html

Making a reservation to a hotel or airlines? Private corporations are using prison slave labor to answer phones.

Private corporations are using slave labor to answer phones in what they euphemistically call "vocational training."

Today, in a twisted marriage between Congress, the American prison system and large private corporations seeking to reduce costs and increase profits, slave labor has become a booming business in the United States. Generating over $2.4 billion dollars a year in revenue, and encompassing some 600,000 state, federal and local inmates, there seems to be no end in sight to this flourishing enterprise some have called the Prison Industrial Complex. Men who are in prison for non-violent offenses, that have gotten caught up in the never ending ‘War on Drugs’, mandatory minimum sentencing statues, “three strikes” laws and increasingly ending up in prison for unpaid debts, many times child support payments they are unable to make due to lack of employment, are by far and away the almost exclusive fodder for this new type of slavery. But how is this possible?

While Federal regulations stipulates that prisons and companies must “pay wages at a rate not less than that paid for similar work in the same locality’s private sector,” the statue also allows for ‘allowable wage deductions’ of up to 80% of the prisoner’s wages. These deductions are for room and board, child support, victim programs and taxes. Through other loopholes in the PIE act, public prisons and “for profit” private prisons have found ways to deduct or withhold almost all of the remaining inmate’s wages. Today, after these ‘allowable wage deductions’, inmate wages rage from .17 cents an hour on the low end, to perhaps $3-4 dollars a day on the high end.

Since room and board is usually the biggest chunk of deductions from the inmates paycheck, most of these cost savings are often passed back to the private corporations, as an incentive to bring in more projects. Private corporations are standing in line to take advantage of cheap prison labor. The bottom line is that this slave labor can make a prison’s cash flow soar, and enable corporations to take advantage of third world wages right here in the United States, without the hassle or political fallout of overseas sweat shops or the expense of transporting goods from other countries.

By law, except in Federal prisons and the State of California, the inmates are not forced to work, and can remain in their cells during the work day. The catch is, if prisoners refuse to work, the prison can take away their canteen and telephone privileges, move the inmates into solitary confinement or disciplinary housing and most importantly halt the inmate’s ‘good time credit’, that can reduce their prison sentence length by up to 40%. The choice to work for the inmates is not a difficult one given the tactics used by the different prisons, which are tantamount to profiteering through coercion and extortion; an illegal act outside prison walls, but completely legal inside.

Proponents of these prison work programs have argued that these “jobs” give inmates life work skills for after their release, a lower case of recidivism, less instances of violence inside the facilities and a method by which convicts can help pay for the cost of their own imprisonment. The Department of Justice has shown in most studies that recidivism in not effected by whether the prisoner was forced to work, and also showed an increase in the number of violent incidents and escapes, especially in “for profit” prison corporation facilities.

The jobs that these inmates do, which the prison systems call “vocational training” are usually nothing more than repetitious activities needed for mass production, call center operators or farming work, such as planting or harvesting crops. In fact, one of the fastest growing segments of the prison slave labor are call centers for companies that need reservation operators for hotels, airlines and rental car companies.
http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/government-tyranny/the-booming-business-of-american-slavery/

Private corporations profit as the U.S. imprisons more people than Stalin.

Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.

Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected.

William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment.

A growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible.

Conglomerates such as IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin, Victoria’s Secret, and Target have all begun mounting production operations in US prisons. Many of these Fortune 500 conglomerates are corporate members of civil society groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

"Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them."
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1kmV0sU4z

http://nilebowie.blogspot.com/2012/02/economics-of-incarceration.html

Private citizens are using GPS devices is it legal?

But today, anyone with $300 can compete with Jack Bauer. Online, and soon in big-box stores, you can buy a device no bigger than a cigarette pack, attach it to a car without the driver’s knowledge and watch the vehicle’s travels — and stops — at home on your laptop.

Tens of thousands of Americans are already doing just that, with little oversight, for purposes as seemingly benign as tracking an elderly parent with dementia or a risky teenage driver, or as legally and ethically charged as spying on a spouse or an employee — or for outright criminal stalking. So many suspicious spouses are now doing their own spying, a private investigator in New Jersey said, that his infidelity business is declining.

In the absence of legislation in most states, putting a GPS device on a spouse’s car, or hiring an investigator to do so, is widely considered to be legal if the person placing it shares ownership of the car. But some privacy experts question this standard, and there is little to stop a jealous suitor, or an abusive man trying to prevent a battered woman from escaping, from doing the same.

GPS trackers are increasingly being cited in cases of criminal stalking and civil violations of privacy.
  

One increasing use of GPS tracking — by as many as 30,000 parents, one seller estimates — is to monitor the driving habits of teenagers; some devices even send a text message when the car goes over a certain speed.

Sales of GPS trackers to private individuals may have already surpassed more than 100,000 per year, some experts believe. The marketing is just getting started.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/us/gps-devices-are-being-used-to-track-cars-and-errant-spouses.html?_r=2&hpw

FDA panelists worked for Bayer, casting doubt on the advisory comittee.

Food and Drug Administration advisers, in a recent vote, said the benefits of four popular Bayer AG birth-control pills outweigh the blood-clot risk. What the FDA didn't disclose is that three of the advisers have had ties to Bayer, serving as consultants, speakers or researchers.

Last month, an FDA advisory committee voted 15-to-11 that the benefits of the Yaz and Yasmin birth control pills outweigh the risks, and so the drugs should remain on the market, albeit with added information about the risk of blood clots. The decision followed a long-running controversy - studies by Bayer, which sells the pills, found there is no risk, while other studies say the risk is evident (see this).

Jill Hartzler Warner, an FDA official who oversees advisory committees, said the agency is "prohibited from giving the public any information contained in a financial disclosure" from committee members. When picking committees, the FDA weighs "whether a meeting would affect the financial interest" of a panelist. The agency also does "look at whether past relationships would give the appearance of being a conflict," she said.

Steven Nissen, a frequent FDA panel member and prominent Cleveland Clinic cardiologist, said that, in general, if panelists have significant financial ties to a drug maker whose product is under review, it can "bias the proceedings." He added, "Lack of disclosure undermines the credibility of the advisory committee process and undermines public trust in the fairness of the regulatory process."

Bayer said it had no role in selecting the committee, and defended the safety of its products, all four of which contain the active ingredient drospirenone. The potential conflicts of the three panel members were earlier reported in a joint article by the British medical journal BMJ and Washington Monthly.

Dr. Kessler's report contends that all three members' relationships are evidence that "the FDA advisory committee was not independent of Bayer and its recommendations and votes need to be viewed as such."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203436904577153160177537828.html

http://www.pharmalot.com/2012/01/a-conflicted-fda-panel-bayer-birth-control-pills/

The Yaz Men: Members of FDA panel reviewing the risks of popular Bayer contraceptive had industry ties:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ten-miles-square/2012/01/the_yaz_men_members_of_fda_pan034651.php#

Does the Texas Supreme Court favor corporations over consumers?

In the last 10 years, the majority of Texas Supreme Court decisions have favored corporate interests over consumers, and the panel of judges has repeatedly overstepped its authority by overturning jury verdicts and interpreting the law to benefit the rich, according to a scathing report set to be released today by consumer advocacy group Texas Watch.

“The Texas Supreme Court has marched in lock-step to consistently and overwhelmingly reward corporate defendants and the government at the expense of Texas families,” the report says.

Texas Watch says in its study, which reviewed court decisions in more than 624 cases in the past 10 years, that the trend started when Gov. Rick Perry began appointing Supreme Court justices in 2000. The report argues that data from court rulings shows that Perry’s appointees “corporatized the court.” But the court, a former justice and conservative groups disagree with the report's conclusions, arguing that a statistical analysis doesn't provide enough context.

The state's highest civil court ruled in favor of defendants — mostly corporations and government entities — in about 74 percent of the 624 consumer cases brought before the panel in the last decade, according to the report.

Alex Winslow, executive director of Texas Watch, said the high court’s nine justices, who are all Republicans, are too similar to one another. Many represented corporations in court before they became justices, and 85 percent of the time, they agreed with one another.
http://www.texastribune.org/texas-courts/texas-supreme-court/texas-watch-claims-supreme-court-favors-businesses/

Texas Watch Report:
http://www.texaswatch.org/2012/01/report-decade-long-review-shows-texas-supreme-court-is-activist-ideological/

The FBI plans to monitor social media & local traffic cameras.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has quietly released details of plans to continuously monitor the global output of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, offering a rare glimpse into an activity that the FBI and other government agencies are reluctant to discuss publicly. The plans show that the bureau believes it can use information pulled from social media sites to better respond to crises, and maybe even to foresee them.

The information comes from a document released on 19 January looking for companies who might want to build a monitoring system for the FBI. It spells out what the bureau wants from such a system and invites potential contractors to reply by 10 February.

The bureau's wish list calls for the system to be able to automatically search "publicly available" material from Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites for keywords relating to terrorism, surveillance operations, online crime and other FBI missions. Agents would be alerted if the searches produce evidence of "breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats".

Agents will have the option of displaying the tweets and other material captured by the system on a map, to which they can add layers of other data, including the locations of US embassies and military installations, details of previous terrorist attacks and the output from local traffic cameras.

The document says: "Social media has become a primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events and the primal alert to possible developing situations."

It says the application should collect "open source" information and have the ability to:

• Provide an automated search and scrape capability of social networks including Facebook and Twitter.
• Allow users to create new keyword searches.

Lynch says that many people post to social media in the expectation that only their friends and followers are reading, which gives them "the sense of freedom to say what they want without worrying too much about recourse," says Lynch. "But these tools that mine open source data and presumably store it for a very long time, do away with that kind of privacy. I worry about the effect of that on free speech in the US".  
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/01/fbi-releases-plans-to-monitor.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16738209

Link to the FBI document:
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=c65777356334dab8685984fa74bfd636&tab=core&_cview=1

Mayors & police chiefs held secret meetings to coordinate responses to Occupy Wall Street

WASHINGTON -- After denying that they are coordinating responses to Occupy Wall Street, the U.S. Conference of Mayors recently surveyed city administrations across the country about the movement.

In late November, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, the District of Columbia mayor's office received a request to update its answers to the survey. The questions to city officials appeared to elicit profiles of Occupy activists and answers that could help show the activists as a drain on resources.

The mayor's conference asked via the emailed survey: What are the estimated Occupy-related costs? What are the major issues relating to Occupy events? Has the Occupy membership changed and if so "describe those involved in the movement how they've changed in terms of who they are and what their intentions for the demonstrations are."

In the survey, the organization also called on city administrations to share tactics. "Please describe any strategies or tactics your city is employing in responding to Occupy-related events, including an assessment of their effectiveness if possible."

The U.S. Conference of Mayors has quietly led efforts to coordinate city responses to the Occupy Wall Street movement, the records show. These documents -- which comprise emails to local D.C. officials -- appear to contradict previous statements in which mayors denied any sort of group strategy sessions.

In a Nov. 10 email, Tom Cochran, CEO and executive director for the conference, hyped a follow-up conference call led by Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter. Cochran wrote that the call "will enable more mayors and police chiefs from across the country to participate in the discussion, sharing information about the situation in their cities, their concerns, and the strategies that are working."

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, the executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, has obtained her own set of conference-call related documents and says the mayors' conference is an active participant in setting the stage for the camp raids. "These are sessions that were intended in assisting cities in creating the public pretext for the eviction of the encampments," Verheyden-Hilliard said. "I think they tried to play a fairly covert role in what was an extremely significant nationally coordinated effort to shut down the occupations."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/25/occupy-wall-street-us-conference-of-mayors_n_1232080.html

U.S. ranked 47th. in the Press Freedom Index 2011/2012:

“This year’s index sees many changes in the rankings, changes that reflect a year that was incredibly rich in developments, especially in the Arab world,” Reporters Without Borders said today as it released its 10th annual press freedom index. “Many media paid dearly for their coverage of democratic aspirations or opposition movements. Control of news and information continued to tempt governments and to be a question of survival for totalitarian and repressive regimes. The past year also highlighted the leading role played by netizens in producing and disseminating news.

“Crackdown was the word of the year in 2011. Never has freedom of information been so closely associated with democracy. Never have journalists, through their reporting, vexed the enemies of freedom so much. Never have acts of censorship and physical attacks on journalists seemed so numerous. The equation is simple: the absence or suppression of civil liberties leads necessarily to the suppression of media freedom. Dictatorships fear and ban information, especially when it may undermine them.

The United States 47th. also owed its fall of 27 places to the many arrests of journalist covering Occupy Wall Street protests.

http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2011-2012,1043.html

New whitepaper reveals DHS wants total federalization of police under new Homeland Security mission.

A new white paper presented to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence carves out an ‘evolving mission’ for Homeland Security that moves away from fighting terrorism and towards growing a vast domestic intelligence apparatus that would expand integration with local/state agencies and private-public partnerships already underway via regional fusion centers.

Crafted by the Aspen Institute Homeland Security Group, co-chaired by former DHS chief Michael Chertoff and composed of a who’s who of national security figures, the report outlines a total mission creep, as the title “Homeland Security and Intelligence: Next Steps in Evolving the Mission” implies.
Next Steps in Evolving the Mission Pdf:
http://www.aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/content/docs/pubs/HS-HPSCI-hearing-011812.pdf

http://www.infowars.com/shock-docs-total-federalization-of-police-under-new-homeland-security-mission/

Click on the Public Intelligence link to view the members of the Aspen Institute Homeland Security Group:
http://publicintelligence.net/dhs-to-focus-on-providing-intelligence-on-domestic-threats/

How reliable is eyewitness identification?

The U.S. Supreme Court had a chance last week to address a serious defect in criminal cases, improve the quality of American justice and strengthen people's faith in the court system. It did none of those things.

Instead, by an 8-1 margin, the court reaffirmed a rule that stretches back at least as far as a 1977 decision involving eyewitness identifications. According to the rule, if law enforcement officers appear to have used suggestive methods to obtain such an identification, a judge must assess its reliability before it may be introduced as evidence in a trial.

That process, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote last week in her majority opinion, helps ensure a person's constitutional right to due process of law and serves as a deterrent to police rigging witness ID conditions to get the results they want. It also is an incentive for officials to ensure accurate identifications take criminals off the streets, rather than convicting innocent individuals.

But the court's ruling last week in Perry v. New Hampshire ignored two crucial developments.

First, more than 2,000 studies into the mechanics and psychology of eyewitness identifications, all published since the court's 1977 decision, have found a wide range of variables that produce inaccurate eyewitness identifications. They include the presence of a weapon, consumption of alcohol or drugs, how long a witness watched what was happening, how long after a crime an identification is made and the race and age of an alleged perpetrator. They go well beyond suggestive conditions set up by police.

Second, despite the often-shaky reliability of eyewitness identifications and the opportunity of defense lawyers to expose flaws through cross-examination in court, juries place disproportionate faith in the ID's.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/the-platform/editorial-supreme-court-needs-to-know-seeing-is-not-believing/article_6e699cfe-ebc0-5c05-8004-7f4c5030a645.html

Eyewitness Identification Has 50% Error Rate? How Do We Throw People in Prison Based on False ID?

http://www.alternet.org/story/153864/eyewitness_identification_has_50_error_rate_how_we_throw_people_in_prison_based_on_false_id/

Google announces it will track each user's identity for all it products and users can't opt out.

Google will soon know far more about who you are and what you do on the Web.

The Web giant announced Tuesday that it plans to follow the activities of users across nearly all of its ubiquitous sites, including YouTube, Gmail and its leading search engine.

Google has already been collecting some of this information. But for the first time, it is combining data across its Web sites to stitch together a fuller portrait of users.

Consumers won’t be able to opt out of the changes, which take effect March 1. And experts say the policy shift will invite greater scrutiny from federal regulators of the company’s privacy and competitive practices.

Think a combined catalog of every Google search, YouTube video watched and places visited with Google Maps — and that’s just the beginning. Android users? You’re so far invested, the only way out is to quit.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-tracks-consumers-across-products-users-cant-opt-out/2012/01/24/gIQArgJHOQ_story.html?wpisrc=al_comboNE_b

Police to use red spotlight on people they suspect might commit a crime.

East Orange, NJ- According to the report, police officers monitor hundreds of video feeds from across the city and opt to brand would-be criminals with a red glow if they believe they are about to engage in a crime, such as a street corner mugging.

Each unit costs about $7,200, and the police department is still figuring out how many it needs and where in town they’ll be set up, city spokesman Darryl Jeffries said.

East Orange is buying the light technology from a company called The Cordero Group, which is run by the former police director Jose Cordero. The installation company is Packetalk.

“Whereas London has talking cameras, we’re about to deploy light projecting cameras, better known as light-based intervention systems.” said William Robinson, Police Chief for East Orange. He added, “The message to criminals is, we’re observing you, the police are recording you, and the police are responding.”

Now “pre-crime” spotlights that bathe surveillance targets in a criminally-branded red color will help complete the circle of preemptive suspicion.

But that’s just one flashy feature in a rash of new high-tech solutions provided to the crime-ridden city under federal grant money. In East Orange, and probably a locale near you, too, everyone is a “pre-crime” suspect until proven innocent.

The video goes on to brag that officer squad cars also scan the license plates of every single vehicle they pass, checking them against a variety of lists– from terrorist monitor lists, to unpaid parking tickets, warrants and more. Officers can then pull over vehicles that match watch lists, even if the driver has committed no violations to draw attention from the patrol vehicle.

Further, cameras tied into police video monitor stations can also be accessed from squad cars; officers can zoom in on nearby locations to determine if a situation is underway, or if a suspect can be identified. The red light is intended to help track a would-be criminal once surveillance is already underway.

A spokesperson for the ACLU noted a worrisome climate of monitoring and spying on political groups, anti-abortion activists and more. Meanwhile, the MIAC Missouri law enforcement memo, as well as similar documents released from the Department of Homeland Security, have made clear that returning veterans and supporters of third party political candidates and many other groups are note only considered “domestic extremists,” but have been put on law enforcement watch lists as well as anti-terrorism databases. It has further been revealed that numerous non-violent political groups and grassroots campaigns have been labeled as “terrorists” labeled as “terrorists” and monitored by regional Fusion Centers.
http://www.infowars.com/red-spotlights-to-mark-precrime-suspects/

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/01/east_orange_to_install_spotlig.html

The Federal Gov't. keeps permanent records of every student.

Since “No Child Left Behind” was passed 10 years ago, states have been required to ramp up the amount of data they collect about individual students, teachers, and schools. Personal information, including test scores, economic status, grades, and even disciplinary problems and student pregnancies, are tracked and stored in a kind of virtual “permanent record” for each student.

But parents and students have very little access to that data, according to a report released Wednesday by the Data Quality Campaign, an organization that advocates for expanded data use.

All 50 states and Washington, D.C. collect long term, individualized data on students performance, but just eight states allow parents to access their child’s permanent record. Forty allow principals to access the data and 28 provide student-level info to teachers.

Privacy experts say the problem is that states collect far more information than parents expect, and it can be shared with more than just a student’s teacher or principal.“When you have a system that’s secret from parents and you can put whatever you want into it, you can have things going in that’ll be very damaging,” says Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “When you put something into digital form, you can’t control where that’ll end up.”
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/01/19/who-should-have-access-to-student-records

Supreme Court ruled warrants are required before police can attach a GPS device to a vehicle.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that police must obtain a search warrant before using a GPS device to track criminal suspects. But the justices left for another day larger questions about how technology has altered a person’s expectation of privacy. 

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the government needed a valid warrant before attaching a GPS device to the Jeep used by D.C. drug kingpin Antoine Jones, who was convicted in part because police tracked his movements on public roads for 28 days. 

“We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search’ ” under the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, Scalia wrote. 

All justices agreed with the outcome of the case, which affirmed a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that said evidence of Jones’ s frequent trips to a stash house where drugs and nearly $1 million in cash were found must be thrown out.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the decision also should have settled some of those questions instead of deciding a case about a “21st-century surveillance technique” by using “18th-century tort law.” 

“The court’s reasoning largely disregards what is really important (the use of a GPS for the purpose of long-term tracking) and instead attaches great significance to something that most would view as relatively minor (attaching to the bottom of a car a small, light object that does not interfere in any way with the car’s operation),” Alito wrote. 

Alito’s point was that it was the lengthy GPS surveillance of Jones itself that violated the Fourth Amendment and that “the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy.” 

“For such offenses,” he wrote, “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not — and indeed, in the main, simply could not — secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/supreme-court-warrants-needed-in-gps-tracking/2012/01/23/gIQAx7qGLQ_story.html

Supreme Court Decision:
 http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-1259.pdf

DHS is using the private company General Dynamics to monitor political dissent in the U. S.

As the result of EPIC v. DHS, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, EPIC has obtained nearly thee hundred pages of documents detailing a Department of Homeland Security's surveillance program. The documents include contracts and statements of work with General Dynamics for 24/7 media and social network monitoring and periodic reports to DHS. The documents reveal that the agency is tracking media stories that "reflect adversely" on DHS or the U.S. government. One tracking report -- "Residents Voice Opposition Over Possible Plan to Bring Guantanamo Detainees to Local Prison-Standish MI" -- summarizes dissent on blogs and social networking cites, quoting commenters. EPIC sent a request for these documents in April 2004 and filed suit against the agency in December.          

DHS documents:
http://epic.org/foia/epic-v-dhs-media-monitoring/EPIC-FOIA-DHS-Media-Monitoring-12-2012.pdf

DHS is funding unmanned aerial surveillance of Americans.

The Department of Homeland Security says it needs a fleet of two-dozen Predator and Guardian drones to protect the homeland adequately. Designed for military use, 10 of these unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are already patrolling U.S. borders in the hunt for unauthorized immigrants and illegal drugs.

DHS is building its drone fleet at a rapid pace despite its continuing inability to demonstrate their purported cost-effectiveness. The unarmed Predator and Guardians (the maritime variant) cost about $20 million each. Yet DHS has little to show for its UAV spending spree other than stacks of seized marijuana and several thousand immigrants who crossed the border without visas.

Aside from a continuing funding bonanza for border security, to pursue its drone strategy DHS is also counting on the Federal Aviation Administration to continue authorizing the use of more domestic airspace by the unarmed drones. And FAA seems set to comply, having approved 35 of the 36 requests by the department’s Customs and Protection agency from 2005 to mid-2010. In congressional testimony in July 2010, the FAA said it was streamlining its authorization process for drones, including the hiring of 12 additional staff to process drone airspace requests.

While DHS is leading the way, national and local law enforcement agencies, as well as private entities, are demanding that FAA open the American skies to drone surveillance.

http://www.alternet.org/story/153735/dhs_pumping_money_into_drones_for_domestic_surveillance%2C_hunting_immigrants_and_seizing_pot/

Is The NYPD Experimenting With Drones Over The City?

A website named Gay City News posted an e-mail it says it acquired through the Freedom of Information Act. It’s purportedly from a detective in the NYPD counterterrorism division, asking the Federal Aviation Administration about the use of unmanned aerial vehicles as a law enforcement tool.

And the following is part of a recent interview with Commission Ray Kelly that raised more questions than it answered.

“In an extreme situation, you would have some means to take down a plane,” Kelly told “60 Minutes.”

Drones are already being used by law enforcement in other cities. Miami and several cities in Texas are experimenting with such aircraft. Just the mere possibility that the city could be looking into the use of drone surveillance aircraft prompted one anonymous New Yorker to post official looking NYPD warning signs all over the city.
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/01/23/is-the-nypd-experimenting-with-drones-over-the-city-evidence-points-to-yes/

Army Foresees Expanded Use of Drones in U.S. Airspace

The Army issued a new directive last week to govern the growing use of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) or “drones” within the United States for training missions and for “domestic operations.”

Much of the Army’s UAS activity will be devoted to UAS operator training conducted at or near military facilities, the policy indicates. But beyond such training activities, the military also envisions a role for UAS in unspecified “domestic operations” in civilian airspace, according to a 2007 Memorandum of Agreement between the Department of Defense and the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates domestic air traffic.
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2012/01/army_drones.html

Attempt to buy allergy medication and your name will be entered into a state police database.

Chicago, IL - Buying a package of allergy medicine at the corner drugstore will put you in a state police database under a new Illinois law aimed at identifying people who make methamphetamine.

Gov. Pat Quinn signed the measure into law Friday, saying a pilot project in southern Illinois has helped police tracking sales of medicines that can be used to make meth has helped police crack down.

The goal is to watch for large purchases of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, which are found in some cold, allergy and sinus medicines such as Claritin-D and certain Sudafed products.

Stores already keep the products behind the counter to guard against theft and record who buys them. Now stores will transmit those records electronically to state police. The information sent to authorities will include the customer’s name and address.

Under the new law, stores must continue blocking sales if a person tries to buy more than 7.5 grams of pseudoephedrine in 30 days - or more than a month’s supply of 24-hour Claritin-D for a single person.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/10136396-418/state-to-track-the-makings-for-meth.html

Seattle police officer drafts Bill to block the Dept. of Justice takeover of the police department.

A Seattle cop who serves in the state legislature is attempting to derail a possible Department of Justice takeover of the Seattle Police Department.

Last month, the DOJ released a report that found that Seattle police frequently used excessive force during arrests, and described the department’s “system of accountability” as “broken.” As a result of the probe, the SPD could be forced to enter into an agreement with DOJ, which would mandate changes within the department under threat of a federal civil rights lawsuit.

SPD has taken issue with the DOJ’s findings and asked the DOJ to back up their report by sharing more data, but some members of the city council have endorsed moving forward with an agreement with the feds.

Now, Seattle police officer and State Rep. Mike Hope (R-44) has proposed legislation that would prevent SPD or any other law enforcement agency in the state—like the Spokane PD, also facing a DOJ probe—from adopting DOJ directives.

Hope is the sole sponsor of the legislation.

Hope’s bill would prohibit police departments across the state from adopting any use of force policies dictated by the DOJ, unless they’re explicitly required by an act of Congress, and would task the state attorney general with handling any civil rights lawsuits brought against police departments by the federal government.
http://publicola.com/2012/01/20/legislator-tries-to-block-doj-takeover-of-spd/

U.S. Justice Department officials are connected to mortgage banks.

The firm, Covington & Burling, is one of Washington's biggest white shoe law firms. Law professors and other federal ethics experts said that federal conflict of interest rules required Holder and Breuer to recuse themselves from any Justice Department decisions relating to law firm clients they personally had done work for.

Both the Justice Department and Covington declined to say if either official had personally worked on matters for the big mortgage industry clients. Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said Holder and Breuer had complied fully with conflict of interest regulations, but she declined to say if they had recused themselves from any matters related to the former clients.

Reuters reported in December that under Holder and Breuer, the Justice Department hasn't brought any criminal cases against big banks or other companies involved in mortgage servicing, even though copious evidence has surfaced of apparent criminal violations in foreclosure cases.

Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and several other large banks. It was meant to speed up registration and transfers of mortgages. By 2010, MERS claimed to own about half of all mortgages in the U.S. -- roughly 60 million loans.

But evidence in numerous state and federal court cases around the country has shown that MERS authorized thousands of bank employees to sign their names as MERS officials. The banks allegedly drew up fake mortgage assignments, making it appear falsely that they had standing to file foreclosures, and then had their own employees sign the documents as MERS "vice presidents" or "assistant secretaries."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/20/us-usa-holder-mortgage-idUSTRE80J0PH20120120

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/01/is-this-why-they-wont-prosecute-top-justice-officials-represented-big-banks.html

Is the CMI Intoxilyzer 8000 accurate in determing possible DUI's?

Florida- The $8,000 study, put together in three days, was part of a broader push to save the reputation of the embattled Intoxilyzer 8000, FDLE records show. And in December, FDLE's alcohol testing guru Laura Barfield came to a Sarasota County courtroom for a hearing and presented results of the drunken employee experiment to a panel of judges, saying it proved the machines were accurate. But the study might not even be worth the $330 bar bill.

At the hearing, judges deciding the fate of the machine in Sarasota and Manatee counties seemed skeptical of even considering the study, in part because bloodwork was still at the lab and the examination was not yet finalized.

Beyond that, statistics experts say there are concerns about how the study was conducted, whether it has any scientific validity, or whether it proves what it intended to.

"That doesn't really address the problem," said Dr. John Robinson, a biostatistics consultant with expertise in health care. "It's only performed at one time, with a small group of people."

A Herald-Tribune article in October showed how flawed machines stayed in service across the state for years, unquestioned, sometimes providing impossible results about how much breath was blown into them.

Breath-test results in about 100 Manatee and Sarasota county DUI cases were thrown out as a result. A defense expert who examined one machine in Venice found the breath volume issue was skewing breath-alcohol readings.

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20120118/article/120119530?google_editors_picks=true

CMI, refused to reveal details of how the Intoxilyzer 8000 works — even after orders from judges telling the company to do so — so that DUI defendants could hire experts to check it out. http://www.alcoholtest.com/

The Kentucky company's long refusal to provide the device's software code, despite unpaid and mounting daily fines for contempt of court, makes me suspicious. Clearly, technicians who do not work for the company or the police should be allowed to check that complicated device's design inside and out, especially its secret software. Defendants should have a right to check for flaws the company might not reveal.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement should be really irked at CMI about that refusal to obey judges. After all, FDLE has been, in effect, the company's top sales rep in Florida.

FDLE approved that breath tester and made Florida's police agencies a monopoly market for CMI. Police here are not allowed to use any of the devices made by rival companies.

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20110511/COLUMNIST/110519879

Does the recent purchase of a U. S. election results voting firm by Clarity Elections compromise our elections?

In a major step towards global centralization of election processes, the world's dominant Internet voting company has purchased the USA's dominant election results reporting company.

When you view your local or state election results on the Internet, on portals which often appear to be owned by the county elections division, in over 525 US jurisdictions you are actually redirected to a private corporate site controlled by SOE software, which operates under the name ClarityElections.com. http://www.soesoftware.com/

With the merger of SOE and SCYTL, that won't work (if SCYTL's voting system is used). When there are two truly independent sources of information, the public can perform its own "audit" by matching one number against the other.

These two independent sources, however, will now be merged into one single source: an Internet voting system controlled by SCYTL, with a results reporting system also controlled by SCYTL.

With SCYTL internet voting, there will be no ballots. No physical evidence. No chain of custody. No way for the public to authenticate who actually cast the votes, chain of custody, or the count.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

Why is the Federal gov't. encouraging law enforcement to criminalize photography, saying it's an indicator of terrorism?

When the Los Angeles Police Department developed a Suspicious Activity Report program, the federal government encouraged local law enforcement agencies to adopt its guidelines for gathering information “that could indicate activity or intentions related to” terrorism. From the fact that terrorists might take pictures of potential infrastructure targets (“pre-operational surveillance”), it is a short slide down a slippery slope to the judgment that photography is a potential indicator of terrorism and hence private investigators and photographers are suspect when taking pictures “with no apparent aesthetic value” (words from the suspicious-activity guidelines).

Peter Bibring of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California has filed a complaint alleging violations of the First Amendment (photography as an expressive activity; freedom of the press is constitutionally guaranteed) and Fourth Amendment (unreasonable searches of persons and their cameras).

Bibring, not a stereotypical ACLU fire-breather, is sympathetic about the difficult decisions law enforcement officers must make concerning the shadowy threat of terrorism. “Points of friction,” he says equably, “are inevitable.”

As are instances of government overreaching in the name of security. Most seasoned law enforcement professionals, however, have sufficient judgment to accommodate the fact that online opportunities for the dissemination of photographs mean lots of people can plausibly claim to be photojournalists.

Furthermore, digital cameras — your cellphone probably has one — are so inexpensive and ubiquitous that photography has become a form of fidgeting: Facebook users upload 7.5 billion photos every month.

This raises reasonable suspicions not of terrorism but of narcissism, which is a national problem but not for law enforcement.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/police-overreach-in-the-name-of-fighting-terrorism/2012/01/17/gIQADluG9P_story.html

Did a California Judge dismiss a juror because the juror was standing in the way of a guilty verdict?

Pasadena, CA -The U.S. Supreme Court will consider the habeas claims of a woman convicted of murder only after the trial judge dismissed the lone juror standing in the way of a guilty verdict.

Tara Sheneva Williams had been the driver for two friends planning a robbery. While casing out stores one afternoon in October 1993, one member of the trio went into a liquor store alone, emptied the cash register, and shot and killed the store's owner.

As one juror who seemed inclined to acquit Williams on murder charges, against objections from other jurors, the trial court replaced him with an alternate. The alternate and his peers convicted Williams of special circumstances murder and a firearm enhancement.

On appeal in Pasadena, Calif., the 9th Circuit said that the action taken against that holdout juror violated Williams' rights.

The May 2011 decision opens by juxtaposing interviews with the jury in Williams' case against the fictional jury-room debate in "Twelve Angry Men," the 1957 Academy Award-winning film.

When the jury foreman in Williams' trial reported the holdout, the court questioned each juror at length and dismissed Juror No. 6 because it found that he was biased against the prosecution and had lied in court.

Writing for the three-judge panel, Judge Stephen Reinhardt said the decision to remove may have impermissibly stemmed from Juror No. 6's views of the merits of the case. It seems likely that the trial court did not rely on good cause to remove the juror, in violation of Williams' Sixth Amendment rights, the appellate judges added.

"The only good cause relied upon for dismissal of Juror No. 6 was 'actual bias,'" Reinhardt wrote. "The court did not find, however, that Juror No. 6 was 'biased' in any traditional sense of the term, as would have been the case if, for example, he had stated that he could not be impartial or had accepted a bribe related to the case. Nor did it find that he had 'implied bias,' such as might have resulted from Juror No. 6 having a connection to one of the parties, or being related to someone who had either committed or been a victim of some similar crime."
http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/01/16/43073.htm

The Justice Department has ramped up its investigations into police excessive force claims.

Such "pattern and practice" investigations — so-called because they seek to identify unconstitutional patterns and practices by police — are on a steep upswing, according to a review of Justice Department statistics.

Experts on race, the law and police accountability say the rise in such cases reflects, in part, a disturbing increase in cases of police abuse across the country that can't be entirely explained away by an aggressive civil-rights-minded attorney general or a change in the political winds.

There is no question that there is a problem," said Sam Walker, emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and the author of more than a dozen books on police accountability, civil rights and police oversight.

The Civil Rights Division, he said, has doubled its number of attorneys since President Obama took office, has moved to complete the few investigations that were under way, and is opening new ones with regularity

Last year alone, the division's Special Litigation Section, which oversees pattern-and-practice investigations, has released findings of investigations into seven law-enforcement agencies, including Seattle. There were none released in 2010 and two in 2009.

When he was in Seattle last month, Perez said the division had 20 ongoing pattern-and-practice investigations nationwide.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2017242781_doj15m.html

ACLU files federal lawsuit against Sheriff Baca over jail abuse:

The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California Wednesday filed a federal civil rights lawsuit that accuses Sheriff Lee Baca of failing to stop a “pattern and practice of deputy-on-inmate violence” inside L.A. County jails.

Baca is responsible for the operation of the jails. His deputies act as guards. The suit also names three of Baca’s top commanders.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of inmates, says Baca and his commanders “are aware of the culture of deputy violence that pervades the jails but have failed to take reasonable measures to remedy the problem.” The suit says the sheriff is in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, which provide citizens reasonable protection from violence and excessive force.Baca has yet to respond to the lawsuit. In the past, he has said he is quick to fire deputies who engage in abuse, and has begun implementing reforms to prevent future abuse.
http://www.scpr.org/news/2012/01/18/30849/aclu-files-federal-lawsuit-against-sheriff-over-ja/


ACLU lawsuit cites a "sick culture of deputy-on-inmate violence" in L.A. County jails:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/01/abu-ghraib-los-angeles-county-jail-abuses

The NYPD is testing a new Terahertz Imaging Detection system that scans everyone on the street.

The NYPD is stepping up their war against illegal guns, with a new tool that could detect weapons on someone as they walk down the street.

But is it violating your right to privacy?

Police, along with the U.S. Department of Defense, are researching new technology in a scanner placed on police vehicles that can detect concealed weapons.

“You could use it at a specific event. You could use it at a shooting-prone location,” NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly told CBS 2′s Hazel Sanchez on Tuesday.

It’s called Terahertz Imaging Detection. It measures the energy radiating from a body up to 16 feet away, and can detect anything blocking it, like a gun.

Police Commissioner Kelly said the scanner would only be used in reasonably suspicious circumstances and could cut down on the number of stop-and-frisks on the street.

But the New York Civil Liberties Union is raising a red flag.

“It’s worrisome. It implicates privacy, the right to walk down the street without being subjected to a virtual pat-down by the Police Department when you’re doing nothing wrong,” the NYCLU’s Donna Lieberman said.
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/01/17/nypd-testing-gun-scanning-technology/