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More On the Status of Posse Comitatus in the US

by ThePete 3:20 pm 2008-10-10
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I’ve blogged on US Army troops serving on American soil before (here: http://thepete.com/…-inside-us and here: http://thepete.com/…de-the-us/ ) and on Tuesday of this week (here: http://www.democracynow.org/…it_will_be ) Democracy Now covered the topic as well. They had a mini-debate on the topic of the Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Team serving under US Army North, which, Amy Goodman explained, is "the Army service component of Northern Command". She had on Army Col. Michael Boatner, future operations division chief of USNORTHCOM, and Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive magazine to discuss the issue.

The transcript does make for good reading and, to be fair, Boatner does assuage some fears about a unit of active duty soldiers functioning on American soil. However, what the debate doesn’t discuss is the slippery slope argument. There’s another phrase that can describe the danger more accurately: Mission Creep.

This is when your mission is to achieve one goal, but along the way you see something else you can do so you just do it, rather than getting permission or get any other feedback about it. This is fine if you’re doing chores around the house, but when you’re a soldier trained to kill insurgents (and have just came back from doing exactly that) I don’t think even an inch of mission creep is acceptable.

In the Democracy Now segment, Boatner assured us that soldiers wouldn’t be bringing their "heavy weapons and combat vehicles" with them on this domestic service but that "They would bring their individual weapons, which is the standard policy for deployments in the homeland."

Now, think about this–do you really want to have some guy with an M-16 patrolling the streets during a disaster? What if he makes a single mistake and mis-identifies someone as a threat who really isn’t one? During Katrina I remember members of the press identifying black people wading through flood waters with garbage bags in their hands as looters. Meanwhile, white people wading through the water with suitcases were identified as refugees.

Any human is capable of this kind of mistake. What makes this mistake even more dangerous is when someone trained to defend themselves with a gun makes it.

More…

by ThePete 3:20 pm 2008-10-10 In TheNews, TheBig Brother, ThePete.Com, TheWarnings | Tags , , | $ |

US Army Troops Have Begun Serving Inside US

by ThePete 12:32 pm 2008-10-06
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So, while we’re all watching the stock market’s ride to hell, we may be missing another important story.

Back on September 23, 2008, I posted (here: http://thepete.com/…de-the-us/ ) about how Democracy Now was reporting that US military troops would begin training for domestic duty here, inside the US on October 1. This, in theory, violates the Posse Comitatus Act which prohibits the use of the military as any type of law enforcement. From the Wikipedia article on the PCA (here: http://en.wikipedia.org/…itatus_Act ): "The statute generally prohibits federal military personnel and units of the United States National Guard under federal authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress. The Coast Guard is exempt from the Posse Comitatus Act."

Yet, the following comes from the CNN.com article (original here: http://www.cnn.com/…index.html ) I screencapped above:

They will be based in Fort Stewart, Georgia, and focus primarily on logistics and support for local police and rescue personnel, the Army says.

Huh, so guys who have been trained to fire automatic weapons at enemies are now going to provide "logistics and support" for police and local rescue? Seems like the police should just hire more people for that–that is unless the soldiers will be doing more than just providing support.

It’s a little bit like hiring a professional sniper to shut your kid up during dinner. Obviously inappropriate overkill.

But there’s more from the CNN article of interest:

The plan is drawing skepticism from some observers who are concerned that the unit has been training with equipment generally used in law enforcement, including beanbag bullets, Tasers, spike strips and roadblocks.

That sounds suspiciously like law enforcement duties…

And more from the article:

That kind of training seems a bit out of line for the unit’s designated role as Northern Command’s CCMRF (Sea Smurf), or CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force. CBRNE stands for chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high-yield explosive incidents.

Isn’t that adorable? They’re trained to deal with chemical. biological, radiological, nuclear and high-yield explosive incidents and they’re called "Sea Smurf"!

Hrm… that sounds way worse than just Army soldiers trained to kill supporting cops. If they’ve been previously trained to deal with all that heavy crap, it means they’re *paranoid* Army soldiers trained to kill.

Do I even need to say how not cool that is?

Funny how this is happening right on top of a huge economic crisis. Is the USG expecting other things to go wrong, too?

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by ThePete 12:32 pm 2008-10-06 In TheNews, TheBig Brother, ThePete.Com | Tags , , | $ |

Cheney Edited Global Warming Testimony

by ThePete 8:23 pm 2008-07-10
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I grabbed this from Google News just after midnight on 7/9/8. It seems that somebody in the USG admitted that Cheney had edited the testimony a USG health official gave to Congress.

Isn’t that nice? A man with no experience or expertise in the field of environment-related health issues told a government expert in said issues what to tell another part of the government about the issue.

Will this absurd royalism ever stop?

I know, I know–it’ll stop January 20, 2009.

But to that I say this: I wonder if the Obama Administration (knock on simulated wood grain) would give into the temptation of getting all big-brothery on our asses. If the last guys did it, what’s to stop the new guys?

Of course, I still think Hillary will pull it out and win it. :P

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by ThePete 8:23 pm 2008-07-10 In TheNews, Politricks, TheBig Brother, ThePete.Com, TheScience | Tags , , , , | $ |

Random Jabberings on Oppression and Big Brothery

by ThePete 4:32 pm 2008-03-07

Random Jabberings on Oppression and Big Brothery

I remember back in 1992 when Clinton was first elected. As a writer I was concerned: Without Bush in office, how would we ever see that dystopian future, replete with all manner of big-brothery and oppression? Well, little did I know that eight years later Clinton would be replaced by…another Bush.

Eight years after that is where we are today and, once again, I’m looking for evidence of this dystopian future/present. Of course, the problem with looking for things is that you often find them–even if they’re not there. But if I deal with only the hard facts of a situation, it’s then up to us to interpret those facts as either oppression or not.

Then again, what does oppression even mean? Is it OK if we live in a society that is generally un-oppressive? Or is that old saying true–that if one man is oppressed all men are?

Ever since George W. Bush made that joke about how his job would be easier if he were a dictator, I’ve found myself trying to imagine life in the shoes of a German, circa 1932. When Hitler was elected with just 31% of the vote, did Germans freak out and hold their government responsible for making sure he was the rightful winner? When a government building was set on fire, were there conspiracy theorists who were called whack-jobs and freaks? When Hitler opened secret camps to keep the Jews in (he didn’t advertise them, you know) did Germans hear the rumors and just ignore them?

I’m not comparing Bush to Hitler, I’m comparing we American citizens to the German citizens in the 1930s. Is it not real oppression until America looks like the society of George Orwell’s novel, "1984?"

A few weeks ago, I noticed a Twitter post from an Internet friend of mine that explained (quickly) that she had been in a car that was pulled over by a cop. While being pulled over, the police officer took her USB thumb drive and looked at it’s contents on the laptop in his police cruiser. This is the kind of thing (as a writer) I’m looking for, so I wanted to know more. I contacted her and she told me more about it. Here’s a nutshell of what she said:

1) She’s disabled, so she wasn’t at the wheel.

2) They asked her if they could search her bag, but when she said no, they said that her answer gave them reason to be suspicious. So, they searched it anyway.

3) They asked her to play her harmonica to prove the bag was hers.

4) Upon finding her thumb drive, they looked at its contents. She said it held financial and medical records–things most of us consider private. Though, I believe that under the Patriot Act there’s something about being able to search your financial records without a warrant.

5) The driver hadn’t been speeding, they had pulled him over because he had a past drug conviction.

6) When she asked what the police were looking for on her thumb drive, she was told something to the effect of “evidence of terrorist activities and/or child pornography.”

Now, I’ve heard of other cases of this sort of thing happening. There was the toy shop owner who had Homeland Security take away her Rubik’s Cubes because they violated patent laws, even though the patent had expired (http://thepete.com/…fringement ). There was another case of a young woman venting her frustrations about George W. Bush on her LJ and then getting a visit from the Secret Service (http://thepete.com/…ion-or-not ).

To me, this seems bad. To me, this all seems oppressive. But is it? Didn’t most Germans live normal lives during World War II? Weren’t most Germans able to generally go on with their lives as usual?

Aren’t most of us going about our lives as normal, too?

I wonder what Germans of 1932 would think about something like this.

A sidenote on that Internet friend of mine who clearly had her rights violated–she calls herself "Cherrishhellfire" online and she said something really quite profound when we spoke on the phone. She said:

"If I am nothing else in this lifetime, I need to be an alarm clock."

I realize now that this is precisely what I’ve been trying to be during my ten years of being a blogger. I’ll have to thank her for helping me work that out. :)
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EDIT: I forgot to mention point 6 when I first posted this.

by ThePete 4:32 pm 2008-03-07 In TheNews, TheBig Brother, TheMiniBlog, ThePete.Com | Tags , | $ |

Wikileaks.org Threatened by "Legal" Action

by ThePete 12:10 pm 2008-02-19

So, I see an article at the BBC News website today (here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…250916.stm ) and it reports on how a California court has ordered the website Wikileaks.org to be taken offline. From the article: "A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US.

Wikileaks.org, as it is known, was cut off from the internet following a California court ruling, the site says.

The case was brought by a Swiss bank after "several hundred" documents were posted about its offshore activities.

Other versions of the pages, hosted in countries such as Belgium and India, can still be accessed.

However, the main site was taken offline after the court ordered that Dynadot, which controls the site’s domain name, should remove all traces of wikileaks from its servers."

The catch is, that the above screencap was taken by me *after* I read the BBC News article. Seems like folks at the BBC, good as they are at reporting news with reasonable depth, still make mistakes. Of course, the real problem here isn’t that the BBC makes the odd mistake. It’s that a site like Wikileaks.org is being threatened in this way.

More from the article: "The case was brought by lawyers working for the Swiss banking group Julius Baer. It concerned several documents posted on the site which allegedly reveal that the bank was involved with money laundering and tax evasion.

The documents were allegedly posted by Rudolf Elmer, former vice president of the bank’s Cayman Island’s operation.

A spokesperson for Julius Baer said he could not comment on the case because of "pending legal proceedings".

The BBC understands that Julius Baer asked for the documents to be removed because they could have an impact on a separate legal case ongoing in Switzerland."

This makes no sense to me. So, a legal case in another country is grounds for people in the US (and the rest of the world) to go without information that they need in order to know who to trust or who to work for or who to avoid? This decision by the California court removes ALL whistleblower information that Wikileaks.org was hosting from the public–not just the stuff pertaining to this Swiss case.

This kind of censorship harms us all and it allows crimes to be committed and it allows the criminals who commit them to get away with it.

So much for freedom of speech.
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by ThePete 12:10 pm 2008-02-19 In TheNews, TheBig Brother, ThePete.Com, TheWarnings | Tags , , , , | $ |

InfraGard: USGov Working With Businesses-Not You

by ThePete 12:42 am 2008-02-12

What do you get when the US government and private businesses work together?

Something fishy, in my mind.

Today on DemocracyNow.org’s podcast (www.democracynow.org/2008/2/11/report_fbi_deputizes_23_000_business ), I heard about a part of the federal government that is working with “business leaders” to help secure the infrastructure of America in case of a disaster or terrorist attack. At least that’s what a group with a name like “InfraGard” suggests.

Here’s a bit from InfraGard’s entry at Wikipedia.org (here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfraGuard ) that suggests something different: “InfraGard Alliances and the FBI said that they have developed a TRUST-based public-private sector partnership to ensure reliability and integrity of information exchanged about various terrorism, intelligence, criminal, and security matters.”

Sounds more like domestic spying to me. What would business owners have to do with “information exchanged about various terrorism, intelligence, criminal, and security matters”? As good citizens shouldn’t business leaders feel obligated to report anything suspicious they see going on?

Why do they need to be recruited, specifically? Do they get special training? Exactly what the heck is all this about?

In fact, if you have a look at the paragraph in the screencap of the InfraGard website above, you’ll see that they actually describe themselves *three* different ways. Check ‘em out:

1)InfraGard is an information sharing and analysis effort serving the interests and combining the knowledge base of a wide range of members.

OK, so, the FBI helps the members of InfraGard share and analyze information across all of it’s various members–but what kind of information could that even be?

2) At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector.

Why would the private sector need to partner-up with the FBI? Would my friend who runs a boba drink shop benefit from InfraGard? This kind of vague language could mean anything.

3) InfraGard is an association of businesses, academic institutions, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other participants dedicated to sharing information and intelligence to prevent hostile acts against the United States.

Whoa.

So, this *is* domestic spying. It’s just that the government is having businesses do the actual big-brother routine. Isn’t it the job of the government to protect us from our enemies and not the Coca-Cola company?

Exactly where are our tax dollars going if the USGov needs this kind of “partnership” with some 23,000 business leaders? This is like Blackwater, only much more subtle–and therefore more scary since it’s practically invisible.

What’s worse is that apparently, some of InfraGard’s business leaders have been told that in a time of martial law *they* can use *lethal* force if they see the need. According to journalist Matt Rothschild who wrote a piece on InfraGard for The Progressive magazine (here: www.progressive.org/mag_rothschild0308 ) and gave an interview on today’s Democracy Now: “The business leaders themselves were told, at least in this one meeting, that if there is martial law declared or if there’s a time of an emergency, that members of InfraGard would have permission to protect—you know, whether it’s the local utility or, you know, their computers or the financial sector, whatever aspect. Whatever aspect of the infrastructure they’re involved with, they’d have permission to shoot to kill, to use lethal force to protect their aspect of the infrastructure, and they wouldn’t be able to be prosecuted, they were told.”

He also said: “These companies, these representatives of these companies feed the FBI information about threats. They also can give the FBI information about disgruntled employees and have the FBI investigate them. So the pipeline goes that way.”

So, if you’re not happy at your current work place, I’d be careful how you express it. With the power to call in the FBI, you can bet *some* businessman is going to abuse that power at some point.

Rothschild added: “And the pipeline goes the other way, too. The FBI gives these 23,000 businesspeople almost daily threat warnings that the public never gets. In at least one occasion, a government official, Governor Gray Davis of California, didn’t get, until he heard from his brother, who was in InfraGard, about threats to the bridges in California.”

So, now these businesses are more important than we individual citizens. The USG cares more about businesses than the citizens it is supposed to protect.

And don’t think InfraGard came into being just because of 911. According to their entry in Wikipedia, they were first formed in 1996 in Cleveland, Ohio, but expanded to other cities two years later–more than three years before 911.

So, this isn’t about protecting America from Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda didn’t exist in 1996. This is about being paranoid.

Am I against protecting infrastructure like electricity, water and communications? Of course not–but isn’t that the job of the police, the National Guard and other local authorities? Where is the check and/or balance here?

Also, why haven’t we heard of InfraGard in the last ten years it’s been around?

And why the hell did they spell “guard” wrong in their name?

What is our country coming to??

Wow–this was a long one

by ThePete 12:42 am 2008-02-12 In TheNews, TheBig Brother, ThePete.Com, TheWarnings | Tags , , , | $ |

Big Brother Week: REAL ID ACT AND STATES’ RIGHTS

by ThePete 3:00 pm 2007-02-13

This is part two of the ThePete.Com’s Big Brother Week series. This one talks about the homogenization of something almost every adult in America carries and why its homogenization is a bad thing. Ready? Here we go!

So, waaaay back in 2001, on the eleventh day of September, something very big and scary happened in New York City. Perhaps you’re familiar with 911. if not, you probably haven’t attended any Republican rallies since then. Ha.

Anyway, so one of the myriad big brothery laws that the USG passed post-911 was the Real ID Act. He can at The Library of Congress website (LOC.gov). In short, here’s the official description of what this law is to do:

To establish and rapidly implement regulations for State driver’s license and identification document security standards, to prevent terrorists from abusing the asylum laws of the United States, to unify terrorism-related grounds for inadmissibility and removal, and to ensure expeditious construction of the San Diego border fence.

Wow–if that’s not big brothery enough for you, I don’t know what is!

OK, now those of you non-believers may wonder just what the big deal is here. What could be wrong with making it easier to “prevent terrorists from abusing the asylum laws of the United States?”

Well, let’s assume for a moment that our beloved United States Government (USG) is not perfect. I know–hard to believe, but, please, for the sake of argument, let’s just say it is.

What this law does is say that every state in the union must adopt the same standards–standards established by the USG. You can probably see where I’m taking this.

So, now that the law is passed (it is, this isn’t hypothetical) every state must adopt the USG’s guidelines for how to design and handle their drivers’ licenses. However, what if the guidelines from the USG are not good guidelines? What if they’re flawed or vulnerable to weakness? One of the proposed changes to IDs is to include an RFID chip into each ID card. The pro-argument says that this will allow a lot more info to stored on the card. The catch is, RFID chips are about as secure as a prostitute’s chastity belt. With $100 and the nearest Radio Shack I could build a device that could steal all the data on an RFID chip and encode it to a new RFID chip, thus stealing your identity. I wouldn’t even need to see your card, I could read the data from a couple feet away in most cases.

Sure, you could use a wallet that shields your RFID chip from being read, but I could just wait until you were about to pay for something. When you pull your wallet out, BUZZ! There goes my scanner.

Now, the Real ID Act doesn’t allow for states to veto any of the requirements of the law.

This is essentially our government (big brother) forcing every state to adopt flawed plans. Seems pretty lame, huh? So, why would our government want to put our personal identities (and therefore our finances and therefore even our lives) in danger? That’s a question to ask your leaders.

In fact, some states aren’t even bothering to ask–they’re putting their foot (feet?) down to say no way. Check out this cutting from from Reuters.Com available at News.Yahoo.Com:

Maine lawmakers on Thursday became the first in the nation to demand repeal of a federal law tightening identification requirements for drivers’ licenses, a post-September 11 security measure that states say will cost them billions of dollars to administer.

Maine lawmakers passed a resolution urging repeal of the Real ID Act, which would create a national digital identification system by 2008. The lawmakers said it would cost Maine about $185 million, fail to boost security and put people at greater risk of identity theft.

Maine’s resolution is the strongest stand yet by a state against the law, which Congress passed in May 2004 and gave states three years to implement. Similar repeal measures are pending in eight other states.

So, there ya have it! The USG is trying to tell the states what to do. Another time this kind of disagreement happened it resulted in the Civil War. Let’s hope big brother–I mean–the US Government comes to its senses and repeals the Real ID Act.

OK, stop by tomorrow for DAY TWO of ThePete.Com’s Big Brother Week when I’ll be going into how big brother tactics are being used to make sure the press plays along with the Bush 43 Administration’s plans for Iran. They’re actually putting journalists in jail for not cooperating. Don’t believe me? Check out tomorrow’s post or to get all hardcore, check your local PBS listings for the first episode of Frontline’s new documentary miniseries “News War” which premieres tonight. You can also check out their special preview page here:

www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/preview/

This is all for real, people. I’m not making this up. I really wish I were.

by ThePete 3:00 pm 2007-02-13 In TheNews, TheBig Brother, ThePete.Com | Tags , , | $ |

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