Photo Credit: APSenator John McCain (R-Ariz.), a member of the “Gang of Eight” that helped write and pass the immigration reform bill in that chamber, said he did not know how many passports a person could forge under the proposed law before being charged with a crime.
On Capitol Hill on Wednesday, CNSNews.com asked McCain, “Senator McCain, can I ask you a question about the Senate immigration bill? Under the bill, how many passports can someone forge before it becomes a crime?”
McCain said, “You’re going to have to ask our folks that, I don’t think that we stand for any forgeries”…
In the legislation that passed in the Senate, Section 1541 “Trafficking in Passports,” it explains in detail that a person can be charged for a crime if they forge “3 or more passports,” meaning that they potentially would not be charged if they falsely made only one or two passports. The criminal charges and penalties do not kick in until after “3 or more passports” are falsely made, issued, or transferred, etcetera.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-19 04:55:542016-04-11 11:18:54McCain: I Don’t Know How Many Passports the Amnesty Bill Lets Illegal Aliens Forge
Photo Credit: APBy DAVID MARTOSKO. The U.S. Department of Justice, overseen by Attorney General Eric Holder, has ordered the Sanford, Florida police department to keep possession of all the evidence from George Zimmerman’s second-degree murder trial – including the exonerated neighborhood watch volunteer’s gun.
Sanford police confirmed on Thursday that the DOJ asked the agency not to return any pieces of evidence to their owners. Zimmerman was expected to get his firearm back by month’s end.
The development is a sign that the criminal section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is seriously investigating Zimmerman to determine if federal civil rights charges should be filed.
Zimmerman was acquitted of murder and manslaughter on Sunday in a Florida courtroom, but civil rights violations provide an exception to the U.S. Constitution’s protection against double jeopardy after a defendant has been found ‘not guilty’ in a state or local jurisdiction.
That’s because if Zimmerman were tried in federal court, he would be charged with violating Trayvon Martin’s civil rights, not causing his death.
Photo Credit: Fox NewsFed’s Expand Fishing Expedition to Find Any History of Racism in Zimmerman’s Past
By FOX NEWS. Amid pressure from the NAACP and several Democratic lawmakers to pursue Zimmerman, the department expanded its probe Wednesday by setting up a public email address asking for any tips or information regarding the case.
The department also held a conference call with civil rights leaders on Monday.
The conference call included DOJ officials, along with representatives from the FBI and federal prosecutors. They spoke to civil rights leaders from Sanford, Fla., as well as others from around the country.
The call was convened by Tom Perez, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division.
A Justice official told Fox News that both the conference call and the email address asking for tips and information are fairly standard procedure when dealing with a high-profile investigation such as this one. The department has used such tip lines in the past, including in a probe last year of the Albuquerque, N.M., police department. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-19 04:55:542016-04-11 11:18:54Feds Moving Toward Prosecution, Order State of Florida to ‘Hold’ Zimmerman’s Gun
Photo Credit: John ShinkleJim DeMint’s at war with Republicans — again.
The tea party firebrand who made his mark in GOP primary races across the country is now at the helm of the Heritage Foundation where its political arm is doing the same thing: holding conservatives’ feet to the fire.
DeMint only joined the group earlier this year, but already Heritage’s political arm has had some early fights out of the gate that have Republican leaders both angry and frustrated – feeling like DeMint is diminishing one of the party’s most powerful intellectual engines by turning it into a group taking cheap shots at Republicans.
The tensions have spilled into the open. Heritage urged members to vote against the farm bill – dealing an embarrassing loss to Speaker John Boehner – then even urged a “no” vote on the bill that stripped out food stamps and other provisions, even though Heritage had urged House leadership to strip them out.
And in the House, the tensions are so raw that House Republicans are beginning to protest including staffers from the three-year-old political arm, Heritage Action, in weekly meetings the Heritage Foundation has hosted for decades for conservative lawmakers.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-19 04:55:542016-04-11 11:18:54Jim DeMint Back at War With RINO’s
Photo Credit: Washington TimesMore than two years after her upstart Senate campaign rocked the Delaware political world, Christine O’Donnell got an unexpected contact from a U.S. Treasury Department agent warning that her private tax records may have been breached.
The phone message earlier this year shocked the battled-scarred candidate, a tea party favorite who knocked off Republican mainstay Michael Castle in the primary before losing in a bid to win Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s former seat.
“Ms. O’Donnell, this is Dennis Martel, special agent with the U.S. Department of Treasury in Baltimore, Md. … We received information that your personal federal tax info may have been compromised and may have been misused by an individual,” he said in the January message left on her cellphone.
For Ms. O’Donnell, the message immediately raised red flags.
On March 9, 2010, the day she revealed her plan to run for the Senate in a press release, a tax lien was placed on a house purported to be hers and publicized. The problem was she no longer owned the house. The IRS eventually blamed the lien on a computer glitch and withdrew it.
Photo Credit: GettyHacker posts email addresses, passwords of House and Senate staffers online
By Alex Pappas. A hacktivist associated with Anonymous claims to have posted online thousands of email addresses and passwords for Capitol Hill staffers.
According to a Twitter account that posted a link to the hacked information, House and Senate staffers were targeted in protest of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program.
“Dear #Congress: We are paying very, very close attention to how you handle #NSA #FISA & #PRISM Don’t.. F**k.. Up….,” Twitter user OpLastResort wrote before posting a link to the email addresses and passwords.
PRISM is the government’s secret data mining program recently revealed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. FISA refers to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which deals with electronic surveillance. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: AFPWhite House stays silent on renewal of NSA data collection order
By Spencer Ackerman. The Obama administration is refusing to say whether it will seek to renew a court order that permits the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records on millions of Verizon customers when it expires at the end of this week.
Officials declined to discuss what action they intend to take about the order at the center of the current surveillance scandal, which formally expires at 5pm Friday.
The looming expiration of the order, issued by the secretive Fisa court, provides an early test of Barack Obama’s claim to welcome debate over “how to strike this balance” between liberty and security. Beyond the question of the phone records collection, the court order authorizing it is a state secret.
On Thursday, the administration would not answer a question first posed by the Guardian six days ago about its intentions to continue, modify or discontinue the Verizon bulk-collection order. The White House referred queries to the Justice Department. “We have no announcement at this time,” said Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon. The NSA and office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to questions.
A spokesman for the Fisa court, Sheldon Snook, said the court “respectfully declines to comment”. Read more from this story HERE.
NSA chief says leak damage ‘irresponsible and irreversible’
By Catherine Herridge. National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander said Thursday the damage from recently leaked information is “irresponsible and irreversible” because it has given terrorist groups the intelligence community’s “playbook.”
He also described the leaks as “crazy.”
Addressing the Aspen Security Forum, Alexander said the NSA was secretive about its programs out of necessity because the “operatives are among us.”
He added that, based on damage assessments, there is “concrete proof” terrorists now have changed their tactics. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: gaelxCongress: Anonymous Hack Got Only Old Emails and Passwords
By Ginger Gibson. The hacking group Anonymous published the login information for a constituent contact system used by thousands of congressional staffers, posting addresses and passwords on an online message board, according to a memo sent to Hill staffers.
Anonymous presented the information — when it on Thursday posted more than 2,100 email addresses and passwords, as login data for official congressional email accounts. But in a memo to staff from the Office of the Chief Administrator of the House, officials said the information was actually old login data for iConstituent, which is an online system used to contact voters.
“While this incident did not compromise the House email system, out of an abundance of caution, iConstituent Gateway eNewsletter account holders will be required to change their House network login,” said the memo, which was obtained by POLITICO.
The passwords, some of which belonged to individuals who no longer work for Congress, were expired, according to the memo.
“Earlier today, hackers disclosed expired login information (email addresses and passwords) of numerous iConstituent Gateway eNewsletter accounts outside of the House network,” the memo stated. “These passwords have expired and can no longer be used to access the external iConstituent service.” Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-19 04:47:222016-04-11 11:18:55Anonymous Hacked into Official Congressional Email, Threatens to Compromise Accounts if Congress Doesn’t Act to End Surveillance State
Photo Credit: APYes, that’s quintupled with a “q.” According to the Center for Public Integrity, an investigative journalism nonprofit, Justice Samuel Alito’s net worth jumped from between $380,000 and $1.1 million in 2011 to between $2.3 million and $6.2 million in 2012. The gulf in the estimates is due to the fact that federal officeholders such as justices and members of Congress must report only the range of their assets and liabilities, not the exact figures. Regardless of the exact amount, we know one thing: Justice Alito made a lot of money last year.
According to Public Integrity, the bump comes from “previously unreported PNC Bank accounts valued between $250,001 and $515,000, along with two Edward Jones investment accounts.” Alito’s investment portfolio includes holdings in Oracle Corp., a software firm; OEG Energy Corp.; Boeing; and Caterpillar. He also has some money in Chevron, which might be why he recused himself from a case last year that involved the company. Alito made $27,000 from teaching at Duke University and Penn State. (There are, however, limits to how much money a Supreme Court Justice can make on the side.)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-19 04:44:142016-04-11 11:18:55Justice Alito Might have Quintupled his Net Worth in 2012, Joins Super-Rich Colleagues on High Court
Photo Credit: Reuters As President Obama last month launched a sweeping new national program to combat “climate change,” including tens of billions of dollars in likely new subsidies for solar and wind power and bio-energy, a separate, groundbreaking study by the National Research Council has warned that those kinds of subsidies are virtually useless at quelling greenhouse gases.
The study, which looks at the subsidies and other incentives embedded in U.S. federal tax law after the past several years of climate change initiatives, concludes that they have done little or nothing so far to cut U.S. contributions to global carbon emissions, and are unlikely to do much more before 2035, the project’s research horizon.
The two-year, $2 million probe was the first of its kind undertaken to examine the relationship between U.S. tax provisions, a key tool of U.S. climate change policy, and the actual reduction of greenhouse gases.
The pioneering nature of the study itself speaks volumes about the murkiness of official knowledge concerning how well government can tweak the global thermostat by trying to radically reorient energy production and consumption in the U.S. economy.
It was carried out by a 12-member National Academy of Sciences panel of economists, energy experts, environmentalists, tax specialists and climate scientists backed by consultants wielding powerful computerized economic models and a sizeable handful of National Academy of Sciences staff.
Photo Credit: WNDAn Arizona college is being sued for labeling a student a “bigot” and punishing her with a long-term suspension after she requested that English be used in her nursing studies class so she could learn the subject.
The action was filed against Pima Community College on behalf of student Terri Bennett, who alleged that school officials created a “learning environment [that] was hostile to her as an English-language speaker.”
The complaint alleges that Bennett repeatedly was thwarted in her work listening to lectures, finishing group studies and participating in skills labs, clinicals and other learning activities by fellow students who spoke Spanish, which she did not understand. Study groups and labs in which she participated, an essential part of her nursing training, were being conducted in Spanish.
In response, she asked the college – which operates, ironically, under Arizona’s English-only legal requirement – to help enforce the use of English in her class so she could continue to pursue her educational goals. However, according to the complaint, Bennett was targeted by the school with ridicule, attacks, threats and, eventually, a nine-month suspension.
The group ProEnglish is helping Bennett with legal support.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-19 04:00:592016-04-11 11:18:57Student Booted from U.S. College for Favoring English!
Photo Credit: APNSA warned to rein in surveillance as agency reveals even greater scope
By Spencer Ackerman. The National Security Agency revealed to an angry congressional panel on Wednesday that its analysis of phone records and online behavior goes exponentially beyond what it had previously disclosed.
John C Inglis, the deputy director of the surveillance agency, told a member of the House judiciary committee that NSA analysts can perform “a second or third hop query” through its collections of telephone data and internet records in order to find connections to terrorist organizations.
“Hops” refers to a technical term indicating connections between people. A three-hop query means that the NSA can look at data not only from a suspected terrorist, but from everyone that suspect communicated with, and then from everyone those people communicated with, and then from everyone all of those people communicated with.
Inglis did not elaborate, nor did the members of the House panel – many of whom expressed concern and even anger at the NSA – explore the legal and privacy implications of the breadth of “three-hop” analysis.
But Inglis and other intelligence and law enforcement officials testifying before the committee said that the NSA’s ability to query the data follows rules set by the secret Fisa court, although about two dozen NSA officials determine for themselves when those criteria are satisified. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: APObama loses support for renewal of surveillance; NSA phone program will expire next year
By Stephen Dinan. The lawmaker who wrote the USA Patriot Act said Wednesday that, as it stands, the House will never renew the provisions that the Obama administration uses to collect Americans’ phone records, meaning the government’s surveillance program will be cut off some time next year.
Both Democrats and Republicans told top administration officials that they reject President Obama’s claim that the law allows the intelligence community to collect the phone numbers, time, date and duration of calls made by Americans, and they said Mr. Obama needs to change the way he is running the program if he wants to keep it intact.
Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Wisconsin Republican who was chief author of the Patriot Act in 2001, said Congress specifically tried to limit the law’s uses when it renewed the provisions under Section 215 of the act that allow the government to collect data from businesses without obtaining a warrant.
In that renewal Congress added in the word “relevant” to try to limit what the government was pursuing. But Mr. Sensenbrenner said the intelligence community has expanded, not limited, its data-gathering efforts after Congress tried to reel them in.
“Section 215 expires at the end of 2015 and unless you realize you’ve got a problem, that is not going to be renewed. There are not the votes in the House to renew Section 215,” he said. “It’s got to be changed and you have to change how you operate Section 215. Otherwise, in a year or a year and a half, you’re not going to have it anymore.” Read more from this story HERE.
By Brian Hughes. Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted on Wednesday that an already frosty relationship between his government and the United States would not be damaged if Russia granted asylum to National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.
“Bilateral relations, in my opinion, are much more important than the squabbles around the activities of the security services,” Putin told reporters in eastern Siberia.
“We warned Mr. Snowden that any of his activities that cause damage to U.S.-Russian relations are unacceptable to us.”
Snowden, the former government contractor who disclosed details about U.S. phone and Internet surveillance programs, applied for temporary asylum in Russia on Tuesday. A lawyer representing Snowden told Russia’s Interfax news agency on Wednesday that the ex-CIA official could leave Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in the next few days.
The Obama administration has repeatedly warned the Putin regime not to give Snowden refuge since he faces a trio of espionage charges back on U.S. soil. If his application were approved, Snowden could stay in Russia for up to a year. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-18 03:06:112016-04-11 11:18:58NSA’s Surveillance Goes “Exponentially Beyond what it had Previously Disclosed”
Photo Credit: CNNBy Michael Martinez. Police around the United States are recording the license plates of passing drivers and storing the information for years with little privacy protection, the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday.
The information potentially allows authorities to track the movements of everyone who drives a car.
The ACLU documented the police surveillance after reviewing 26,000 pages of material gathered through public records requests to almost 600 local and state police departments in 38 states and the District of Columbia.
Police are gathering the vehicle information with surveillance technology called automatic license plate readers, and it’s being stored — sometimes indefinitely — with few or no privacy protections, the ACLU said.
“The documents paint a startling picture of a technology deployed with too few rules that is becoming a tool for mass routine location tracking and surveillance,” the ACLU said in a written statement.
Photo Credit: APHow the government is keeping track of EVERYWHERE you’re driving thanks to license plates and police scanners
By James Nye. Chances are, your local or state police departments have photographs of your car in their files, noting where you were driving on a particular day, even if you never did anything wrong.
Using automated scanners, law enforcement agencies across the country have amassed millions of digital records on the location and movement of every vehicle with a license plate, according to a study published Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Affixed to police cars, bridges or buildings, the scanners capture images of passing or parked vehicles and note their location, uploading that information into police databases. Departments keep the records for weeks or years, sometimes indefinitely.
As the technology becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and federal grants focus on aiding local terrorist detection, even small police agencies are able to deploy more sophisticated surveillance systems.
While the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that a judge’s approval is needed to track a car with GPS, networks of plate scanners allow police effectively to track a driver’s location, sometimes several times every day, with few legal restrictions. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Robert Landau/CorbisAlarming number of databases across US are storing details of Americans’ locations – not just government agencies
By Ed Pilkington. Millions of Americans are having their movements tracked through automated scanning of their car license plates, with the records held often indefinitely in vast government and private databases.
A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union has found an alarming proliferation of databases across the US storing details of Americans’ locations. The technology is not confined to government agencies – private companies are also getting in on the act, with one firm National Vehicle Location Service holding more than 800m records of scanned license plates.
“License plate readers are the most pervasive method of location tracking that nobody has heard of,” said Catherine Crump, ACLU lawyer and lead author of the report. “They collect data on millions of Americans, the overwhelming number of whom are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing.”
Crump said that the creeping growth of license plate scanners echoed the debate over the National Security Agency. “It raises the same question as the NSA controversy: do we want to live in a world where the government makes a record of everything we do – because that’s what’s being created by the growth of databases linked to license plate readers.”
ACLU based their research on the results of freedom of information requests to 300 police departments and other agencies nationwide that generated 26,000 pages of documents. The mountain of training materials, internal memos and policy statements retrieved by the group has opened a door on a previously little understood world. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Reuters ACLU: We’re Increasingly Living in a Dragnet Society
“There’s just a fundamental question of whether we’re going to live in a society where these dragnet surveillance systems become routine,” said Catherine Crump, a staff attorney with the ACLU, which wants police departments to immediately delete records of cars not linked to a crime…
The ACLU study, based on 26,000 pages of responses from 293 police departments and state agencies across the country, also found that license plate scanners produced a small fraction of “hits,” or alerts to police that a suspicious vehicle has been found.
In Maryland, for example, the state reported reading about 29 million plates between January and May of last year. Of that amount, about 60,000 — or roughly 1 in every 500 license plates — were suspicious. The No. 1 crime? A suspended or revoked registration, or a violation of the state’s emissions inspection program accounted for 97 percent of all alerts. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-18 03:05:242016-04-11 11:18:58Moving Closer to Police State: Agencies Tracking Innocent Drivers by License Plate Scanners Everywhere (+video)
