What a travesty.  These lemmings climbed all over each other to sign this abomination into law without even reading it. 

No problem!  Just look at the name!  The USA Patriot Act!!  How can we not vote for that!?!

Some patriots.  @&^$*&## cowardly lemmings!

Repeal telecom immunity and roll back PATRIOT ACT abuses

Act now, or regret it later.

they DONT NEED to read it AZ Mod, just like they dont need to read the Consitution, by which they swore to GOD to uphold....

Grandmother arrested for buying medicine.

If a historian were to write about the events of the first nine months of 2009 when it came to transparency issues as they relate to the war crimes of the Bush years, the following is what would be written.  Just remember this was all done with an overwhelming Democratic majority in both houses of Congress and a Democratic President elected on a promise to usher in "an unprecedented level of openness in Government" and "a new era of openness in our country."  There's no blaming Republicans for any of this:

In February, the Obama DOJ went to court to block victims of rendition and torture from having a day in court, adopting in full the Bush argument that whatever was done to the victims is a "state secret" and national security would be harmed if the case proceeded.  The following week, the Obama DOJ invoked the same "secrecy" argument to insist that victims of illegal warrantless eavesdropping must be barred from a day in court, and when the Obama administration lost that argument, they engaged in a series of extraordinary manuevers to avoid complying with the court's order that the case proceed, to the point where the GOP-appointed federal judge threatened the Government with sanctions for noncompliance.  Two weeks later, "the Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, [tried] to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails." 

In April, the Obama DOJ, in order to demand dismissal of a lawsuit brought against Bush officials for illegal spying on Americans, not only invoked the Bush/Cheney "state secrets" theory, but also invented a brand new "sovereign immunity" claim to insist Bush officials are immune from consequences for illegal domestic spying.  The same month -- in the case brought by torture victims -- an appeals court ruled against the Obama DOJ on its "secrecy" claims, yet the administration vowed to keep appealing to prevent any judicial review of the interrogation program.  In responses to these abuses, a handful of Democratic legislators re-introduced Bush-era legislation to restrict the President from asserting "state secrets" claims to dismiss lawsuits, but it stalled in Congress all year.  At the end of April and then again in August, the administration did respond to a FOIA lawsuit seeking the release of torture documents by releasing some of those documents, emphasizing that they had no choice in light of clear legal requirements. 

In May, after the British High Court ruled that a torture victim had the right to obtain evidence in the possession of British intelligence agencies documeting the CIA's abuse of him, the Obama administration threatened that it would cut off intelligence-sharing with Britain if the court revealed those facts, causing the court to conceal them.  Also in May, Obama announced he had changed his mind and would fight-- rather than comply with -- two separate, unanimous court orders compelling the disclosure of Bush-era torture photos, and weeks later, vowed he would do anything (including issue an Executive Order or support a new FISA exemption) to prevent disclosure of those photos in the event he lost yet again, this time in the Supreme Court.  In June, the administration "objected to the release of certain Bush-era documents that detail the videotaped interrogations of CIA detainees at secret prisons, arguing to a federal judge that doing so would endanger national security."  In August, Obama Attorney General Eric Holder announced that while some rogue torturers may be subject to prosecution, any Bush officials who relied on Bush DOJ torture memos in "good faith" will "be protected from legal jeopardy."  And all year long, the Obama DOJ fought (unsuccessfully) to keep encaged at Guantanamo a man whom Bush officials had tortured while knowing he was innocent.

That's the record which an historian, wedded as faithfully as possible to a narration of indisputable facts, would be compelled to write.  And those are just disclosure and transparency issues relating to Bush-era crimes.  None of that has anything to do with ongoing assertion of detention powers, habeas corpus denials, renditions, transparency issues generally, the Democrats' active efforts just this week to prevent abuses of the Patriot Act and FISA, etc. (for those with Twitter, just read Marcy Wheeler's infuriating account from the last two hours of how key Democrats in the Senate -- led by Dianne Feinstein and Pat Leahy -- just gutted virtually every effort to rein in Patriot Act and FISA abuses that were sponsored by Feingold, Durbin and even Arlen Specter:  NAJIBULLAH ZAZI!!!).  And now this war on transparency is all culminating with a White House-backed effort -- spearheaded by key ally Joe Lieberman -- to sweep aside two federal court rulings and to write a new exemption for FOIA that has no purpose but to prevent the world from seeing new and critical evidence of systematic American war crimes.  If the stated goal of Democrats had been to use their newfound control of Government to protect and suppress Bush-era war crimes, how could they have done any better?

link:[www.salon.com]

Hi, Im a paste eater and deserve to be castrated in front of a live audience..........thanks for listening!

Homeland Security Embarks on Big Brother Programs to Read Our Minds and Emotions

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted December 9, 2009.

This past February, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) awarded a one-year, $2.6 million grant to the Cambridge, MA.-based Charles Stark Draper Laboratory to develop computerized sensors capable of detecting a person's level of "malintent" -- or intention to do harm. It's only the most recent of numerous contracts awarded to Draper and assorted research outfits by the U.S. government over the past few years under the auspices of a project called "Future Attribute Screening Technologies," or FAST. It's the next wave of behavior surveillance from DHS and taxpayers have paid some $20 million on it so far.

Conceived as a cutting-edge counter-terrorism tool, the FAST program will ostensibly detect subjects' bad intentions by monitoring their physiological characteristics, particularly those associated with fear and anxiety. It's part of a broader "initiative to develop innovative, non-invasive technologies to screen people at security checkpoints," according to DHS.

The "non-invasive" claim might be a bit of a stretch. A DHS report issued last December outlined some of the possible technological features of FAST, which include "a remote cardiovascular and respiratory sensor" to measure "heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia," a "remote eye tracker" that "uses a camera and processing software to track the position and gaze of the eyes (and, in some instances, the entire head)," "thermal cameras that provide detailed information on the changes in the thermal properties of the skin in the face," and "a high resolution video that allows for highly detailed images of the face and body … and an audio system for analyzing human voice for pitch change."

Ultimately, all of these components would be combined to take the form of a "prototypical mobile suite (FAST M2) … used to increase the accuracy and validity of identifying persons with malintent."

Coupled with the Transportation Security Administration's Behavior Detection Officers, 3,000 of whom are already scrutinizing travelers' expressions and body language at airports and travel hubs nationwide, DHS officials say that FAST will add a potentially lifesaving layer of security to prevent another terrorist attack. "There's only so much you can see with the naked eye," DHS spokesperson John Verrico told AlterNet. "We can't see somebody's heart rate…. We may be able to see movements of the eye and changes in dilation of the pupil, but will those give us enough [information] to make a determination as to what we're really seeing?"

Ideally, Verrico says, FAST mobile units would be used for security, not just at airports, but at "any sort of a large-scale event," including sporting events or political rallies. ("When the Pope visited Washington D.C.," he says, "it would have been nice to have something like this at the entrance of the stadium.")

"Basically," says Verrico, "we're looking to give the security folks just some more tools that will help to add to their toolbox."

If you think eye scanners and thermal cameras sound like the twisted props of some Orwellian dystopia, you're not alone. FAST may be years from being operational, but civil libertarians have already raised concerns over its implications.

"We think that you have an inherent privacy right to your bodily metabolic functions," Jay Stanley, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty program told AlterNet. "Just because somebody can build some high-tech piece of equipment that can detect your pulse and perspiration and breathing and heart rate, that doesn't mean that it should be open season to detect that on anybody without suspicion."

Besides, he says, the FAST program is based on "the same old pseudo-scientific baloney that we've seen in so many other areas. As far as I can tell, there's very little science that establishes the efficacy of this kind of thing. And there probably never will be."

Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and bestselling author who has been one of the most vociferous critics of such new high-tech DHS initiatives, concurs. In fact, he says, all the evidence suggests the opposite. "The problem is the false positives," he says.

Beyond the fact that ordinary travelers are likely to exhibit many of the symptoms supposedly indicative of malintent (how many people run to catch a plane and end up overheated and out of breath?), compare the rarity of terrorist attacks with the millions of travelers who pass through a security checkpoint. Statistically, Schneier argues, it's a fool's errand. "If you run the math, you get several million false positives for every real attack you find. So it ends up being as useless as picking people randomly. If you're going to spend money on something, you can spend money on dice -- it's cheaper. And equally as effective."
link:[www.alternet.org]