Privacy/Surveillance

Our Neighbors' Keeper: Local Cop Chiefs Want to Create a Nation of Snoops

dlindorff — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:54:04 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and other big city cops
are calling for a new system of “citizen watch” programs, allegedly to
help them spot hidden terrorists. I view this new call for a nation of
private spies with a deep suspicion born of experience with the LAPD
and its historic penchant for spying on law-abiding residents of that
city.

Back in the late 1970s, together with a band of other doughty
journalists, including Tommy Thompson, Ron Ridenour, Ben Pleasants, I
co-founded and ran a spunky little news weekly called the LA Vanguard.
In the course of just one year, we broke stories about secret “security
offices” run by local phone companies (Pacific Telephone and GTE) which
provided unlisted numbers and credit information to police and other
government agencies without requiring a warrant, about the killing of
unarmed citizens by police, about the LAPD’s “shoot to kill” gun use
policy, about judges in landlord-tenant cases who were slumlords
themselves, and many other stories that were being ignored by the LA
Times and the rest of the local establishment media.

For our efforts, we found out years later, we were targeted by the
LAPD’s “red squad,” known at the time as the Public Disorder
Intelligence Division (PDID), for an intensive program of spying that
including planting a young cop, Connie Milazzo, as a member of our
editorial collective. We only learned of Milazzo’s real identity years
later when she admitted disclosed it herself to a judge in a public
hearing (she wanted to avoid being sent to the county lockup along with
a group of activists she had “joined” undercover who had all been
arrested during a protest and who were refusing to provide their
identities to the court).

A subsequent lawsuit filed with the help of the ACLU of Southern
California, eventually settled for a payment of $1.8 million by the
City of Los Angeles, disclosed that the PDID had for years been using
as many as 20 undercover cops to infiltrate and spy on over 200 legal
political and activist organizations in the Los Angeles area, gathering
rooms full of files on everyone from members of the National
Organization for Women to the staffs of certain members of the city
council. We also learned that the LAPD was providing those files to a
shadowy private outfit in San Francisco called Western Goals, which had
links to the ultra-right John Birch Society. Western Goals was
apparently seeking to serve as a private repository of dossiers on
leftists and political activists collected by local police all around
the country in a kind of end run around the restrictions on domestic
spying by the FBI that had been imposed after the post-Watergate
revelations about the abuses of the COINTELPRO era.

This is why Bratton’s idea stinks. Local police, because they are
local, are even more prone to rogue activities that will never be
exposed or monitored than are federal police.

As accommodating of police-state tactics as Congress has been,
especially since 9-11, at least some members of that body have raised
concerns and demanded investigations of some of those abuses by
organizations like the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency. But
city councils have been notoriously uninterested in monitoring the
unconstitutional activities of their local police around the country,
who have extremely powerful political connections and the support of
local media establishments.

Any attempt to organize a citizen’s watch program to look for
suspicious activity is bound to devolve into a police program of spying
on those who are outside of the “norm”: minorities, leftists,
activists, loners, people with alternative life-styles, artists, etc.

Let’s be honest. America faces no existential threat from
terrorism. It does face such threats from rampaging climate change,
political corruption, corporate power, economic collapse, and many
other things, but it is hardly threatened by terrorism, which has
killed far fewer people even in 2001 than have auto defects,
contaminated food, and insurance company denials of care.

Back in 2001, the Bush/Cheney administration stoked an irrational
fear of terrorism in order to win passage of the Patriot Act and
acceptance of other actions, such as creation of a program by the
National Security Agency to use supercomputers to monitor millions of
Americans’ electronic communications. Many of those threats to freedom
remain in place today. Now Chief Bratton and his compatriots in police
departments around the country are trying to stoke that same irrational
fear of terrorism to move the country even further towards a
police-state mentality.

The last thing we need in this era of corporate-media-induced
conformity and citizen passivity is a bunch of self-appointed citizen
snoops calling in to the cops with reports on every neighbor who looks
or acts a little bit different.
______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Clinton and Obama: The Worst and Best Thing to Happen to the Democratic Party in Years

dlindorff — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:20:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

Not because he is the Great Black Hope of progressives, but because
he has taken the concept of selling out to corporate interests and
compromising with Republicans to such remarkable heights that
progressives hopefully can no longer be confused about the
irretrievably corrupted nature of the Democratic Party.

On virtually every issue of importance, President Obama has sided with corporate interests and the wealthy.

On the issue of war and peace, he has sided with the
military-industrial complex, with a policy of permanent occupation of
Iraq and endless war in Afghanistan, as well as continued funding of
the country’s colossal armory of death, from strategic missiles and
submarines to aircraft-carrier-group armadas to high-tech fighter
squadrons and space weaponry.

On civil liberties, he has sided with the police state, supporting
continuation of the Bush/Cheney administration’s insidious National
Security Agency spying program, defended military spying within the US,
and refused to prosecute obvious abuses by the prior administration.

On torture, the Obama administration is continuing the imprisonment
and torture of captives in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world
at Bagram Air Base and, probably, at other secret sites, and instead of
closing Guantanamo as promised, is looking into transferring that
hellhole of torture and abuse to one or several sites in the mainland
US.

Health care reform has become a sad joke, with the emerging
“reform” bill looking for all the world like the Rube Goldberg creation
of the Clinton era that properly went down in flames. Instead of taking
on the insurance industry, the hospital companies and the
pharmaceutical industry and other parts of the profit-making
medical-industrial complex, Obama cut deals with all of them behind
closed doors, assuring that their profits would be left untouched, and
that they could essentially write their own “reform” bill through the
offices of bought-and-paid members of Congress like Senator Max Baucus.
Obama and his congressional allies carefully kept any discussion of the
single-payer idea—essentially Medicare for all, and the approach that
even Obama himself admits would be cheaper and more universal—out of
sight and off the table.

Climate change action, too, has been sold out, with Obama adopting
the approach favored by the energy industry—“cap and trade.” That
concept is a gold mine for Wall Street trading firms, which will be
doing trades next in pollution credits instead of subprime mortgages,
and for energy companies which will get free credits to sell, courtesy
of the taxpayer. And because it’s a system so easy to game, it will do
nothing or next to nothing to reduce greenhouse gases.

Finally, there’s economy and banking reform. Here Obama didn’t even
make a pretense of taking a progressive approach. There is a stimulus
program, but half of it was in the form of tax cuts—token for the poor
and middle class and significant for the rich and for businesses, and
half in the form of federal grants, often for unneeded projects like
roads and road repair which go to some of the higher paid members of
the working class, leaving the poor and the ununionized with no job
help. Meanwhile, bankers were the recipients of trillions of dollars in
bailout assistance, while nothing was done to break up the huge
mega-bank holding companies that brought on the financial and economic
crisis in the first place. Instead of picking economic advisers and
bank regulators from the many talented system critics like Nobelists
Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, Obama picked veterans of the
Bush/Cheney administration, and Wall Street shills like Larry Summers
and Timothy Geithner.

Last fall, I and many progressives urged voters to elect Obama, not
because we thought he was a progressive, but because we hoped that his
background—community organizer, raised by a single mother, experience
living in a third world country (Indonesia), multi-racial—would lead
him to make at least some right decisions. We, or certainly I, hoped
too that the energized young and working class electorate that came out
for him in the fall would continue to press him aggressively to do the
right thing on war, environment, civil liberties and the economy.

I was wrong on the first count: Obama has been a corporatist
through and through on all the major issues that matter. And I was
wrong on the second. Most of the left in the US, from the labor
movement to the environmentalist movement to the anti-war movement, has
to date remained glumly quiescent as Obama has sold them out on each of
their key issues.

But here is the silver lining: The sell-out this time is so much
more blatant, and so much more serious, than it was with Clinton, and
for all the talk about Obama’s ability to string words together, he is
so much less of a charismatic figure than the gregarious Bill Clinton,
that he is unlikely to hang on to the ardent support that propelled him
to his victory last November. The disappointment and sense of betrayal
among progressives this time is palpable, especially because, while
Clinton, by 1994, had the excuse that he was working with a Republican,
or partially Republican Congress, Obama has solid control of both
houses, but refuses to use it. If, as I expect, the recession continues
to deepen, with more and more people losing jobs and homes, if, as I
predict, health care continues to be unaffordable and inaccessible, if,
as I know will happen, evidence of deadly climate change continues to
pile up, and if, as I am equally certain, Iraq explodes and the war in
Afghanistan continue to worsen, the left is going to see Obama and the
Democrats in Congress as the failures and corrupt frauds they are, and
will abandon them.

That leaves the question of what to do, and where those frustrated progressives will turn.

I don’t claim to have the answer to that. Clearly the labor movement
needs to recognize that hitching its fortunes to the Democratic Party
has been and will continue to be a dismal failure. It needs to pull all
its political money back and only support those who are 100% allies in
the struggle for the rights of workers. No money for the party as a
whole. It should also go back to the pioneering work of people like the
late Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil and Chemical and Atomic Workers Union,
who before his death was tirelessly working to establish an American
labor party.

Other third parties on the left need to drop their individual
agendas and work towards unity, especially with the labor movement, in
order to create a broad-based left party that doesn’t have litmus tests
for inclusion—just broad principles like steeply progressive taxation,
an end to NAFTA and the WTO, democratization of the Federal Reserve
Bank, national health care, a wholesale slashing of the military
budget, by perhaps two-thirds or more, free education through four
years of college for all, and a crisis plan to attack climate change.

If the ever fractious US left, and the somnolent labor movement,
cannot come together as one, there is little hope of political change
in America. At that point the alternative would be an increasing
militancy over these critical issues, outside of the electoral
arena—something that has to happen anyhow, regardless of whether a real
third party force can be put together. We know that simply organizing
occasional polite marches in Washington, or in key cities, accomplishes
nothing. We have learned that email campaigns to deluge members of
Congress with canned opinions don’t work. What has worked, and will
always work, is massive campaigns of civil disobedience, tent cities in
Washington, organized disruption of war preparations, and door-to-door
organizing. The corrupt hacks who inhabit the halls of Congress and the
White House will not do the right thing just because it is the right
thing, or because we ask them nicely. They may, if we make them fear
that they will actually lose our votes in the next election. For the
most part, incumbent Democrats know that the people who peacefully
march down Connecticut Avenue are still likely to vote for them come
the next election. They’re not going to be so sure about people who are
being hit by tear gas and water cannons and who are being hauled off en
masse to jail at protests.

We may need to start sending that stronger message.
___________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net www.thiscantbehappening.net

Cops Gone Wild

dlindorff — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:16:41 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley has gone whining to his
professional organization, the Cambridge Police Superior Officers
Assn., asking for support in calling for President Obama to apologize
for saying he acted "stupidly" in arresting Harvard Prof. Henry Gates
after first suspecting the prominent African-American scholar of being
a burglar caught breaking into Gates' own home.

Sgt. Crowley claims he was totally justified in making the arrest on
a charge of "disorderly conduct" (later dropped by the police), because
Gates, who actually had been forced to break into his own home during a
return from a speaking tour in China when the front door was stuck, had
allegedly become "enraged" when the officer confronted him and asked
for identification. Crowley claims that Gates called him names, called
him a racist, and threatened to file a complaint against him, and that
as a result he arrested him.

President Obama said that this arrest, made after Gates had shown
the officer both his Harvard faculty ID and also his drivers license,
showing that he in fact lived in the residence in question, was stupid,
but in truth it was much worse than that. It was a blatant abuse of
power--one that has become all to common, and accepted, in today's
America, where every cop's a "hero"...

For the rest of this story, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net

______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
work is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Living in a Police State: The Gates Incident

dlindorff — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:33:43 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The point about the arrest Monday by a Cambridge Police sergeant of
Harvard Distinguished Professor Henry “Skip” Gates is not that the
police initially thought the celebrated public intellectual, PBS host
and MacArthur Award winner might have been a crook who had broken into
Gates’ rented home. Anyone capable of seeing a 58-year-old man with a
cane accompanied by a man in a tux as a potential burglar might make
the same mistake, given that a neighbor had allegedly called 911 to
report seeing two black men she thought were breaking into the house.

But after Prof. Gates had shown the cops his faculty ID and his
drivers’ license, and had thus verified his identity, and after he had
explained that he had just returned home on a flight from China and had
been getting help from his limo driver in opening a stuck door, the
cops should have been extremely polite and apologetic for having suspected him and for having insisted on checking him out.

After all, a man’s home is supposed to be his castle. When you
violate that sanctity, you should, as a police officer, appreciate that
the owner might be upset.

But where it really goes wrong is what happened next...

For the rest of this story, please to to:

www.thiscantbehappening.net
___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment, 2006). He is also author of “Killing
Time” (Common Courage Press, 2003), about the death-penalty case of
Mumia Abu-Jamal, surely one of the most well-known victims of police
abuse of power. Lindorff’s work can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

CIA’s Lies About Secret Program Should Have Congress In Open Revolt

dlindorff — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:04:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

If this were the democracy that the Founding Fathers thought they
were creating, word from CIA Director Leon Panetta that his agency had
lied to Congress and specifically that it had lied repeatedly from
9-11-2001 through the end of 2008 concerning an as-yet undisclosed
secret program, would have virtually every member of Congress in a
state of rebellion, demanding answers.

After all, the CIA is required by law to report to at least the
majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees and to the majority and minority leaders of both houses of
Congress about such things.

But not only did the spy agency not report on what it was up to; it lied about what it was up to.

Now, given what we do know about the Bush/Cheney
administration—that it initiated a massive campaign of spying on
Americans by the Defense Department, the FBI, and the National Security
Agency, as well as other intelligence agencies, that it initiated a
campaign of torture of captives, including American citizens, while
asserting that the President didn’t even need to notify the courts or
the public about the arrest, detention, torture or even execution of an
American citizen if he, acting on his own, deemed that person to be an
“enemy combatant,” and given that we also know that Bush and Cheney
lied repeatedly about the justification for their invasion of Iraq, and
refused to be put under oath in their “interviews” by the 9-11
Commission, you would think the members of Congress, which was
railroaded into supporting everything from the USA PATRIOT Act to the
Iraq War invasion based on all these lies and deceptions, would be
demanding answers regarding this mysterious program.

For the rest of this story, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Criminalizing Dissent: Obama Pot Calls Iranian Kettle Black

dlindorff — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:41:14 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

President Barack Obama, referring to the violent attacks on
protesters against the controversial election results in Iran’s
just-completed presidential election, this week lectured Iran’s
government, saying, “Peaceful dissent should never be subject to
violence.”

Referring to the tens and hundreds of thousands of frustrated and
angry Iranians who have taken to the streets accusing Iranian
authorities of rigging the election in favor of incumbent President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama said that “the Iranian people and their
voices should be heard and respected."

But there is a certain hypocrisy going on here.

Just days ago, the ACLU of Northern California issued a press release
announcing that it had filed a complaint over a Pentagon anti-terrorism
training manual. That training manual, aimed at Pentagon personnel,
describes domestic protests as “low-level terrorist activity.”

As Staff Attorney Ann Brick and ACLU Washington National Security
Policy Council member Michael German write in their complaint letter to
the Department of Defense, “For the DoD to instruct its employees that
lawful protest activities should be treated as ‘low-level terrorism’ is
deeply disturbing in and of itself. It is an even more egregious insult
to constitutional values, however, when viewed in the context of a
long-term pattern of domestic security initiatives that have attempted
to equate lawful dissent with terrorism.”

The ACLU has documented that the government has been and continues a
policy of spying on legitimate peaceful protest
organizations—particularly those that have been opposing America’s wars
and its military policies, and the new president has said nothing and
done nothing about terminating this egregious assault on First
Amendment freedom of speech and assembly. Given that President Obama
has also done nothing since taking office to undo the USA PATRIOT Act,
which codifies much activity that traditionally would have been called
dissent as a crime, or to publicly reverse the policy of the last eight
years during which non-violent protest organizations have been spied on
and infiltrated by agents of the military and by the FBI, and during
which actual protesters have been harassed, penned into fenced-off
“free speech zones,” assaulted by armed police and arrested, his
pontificating to Iran about the sanctity of dissent rings particularly
hollow.

Imagine, if you will, what this government’s response would be to
having hundreds of thousands of American protesters gather in the
center of Washington, DC without a permit, to protest the policies of
the national government. There would be riot police in the thousands,
some mounted on horseback. There would be federal troops. There would
be police charges against demonstrators. There would be tear gas and
arrests.

How do we know this? It happens every time there are major protests in Washington—even when protests are granted permits.

This writer spent three days in the Federal Detention Center at
Occoquan, VA, back in 1967 for participating in a peaceful anti-war
protest at the Pentagon that year. I was one of hundreds at that event
who found himself, as a peaceful demonstrator, confronting armed
federal troops with fixed bayonets at that event. Not much has changed
since ‘67, as others have met the same fate over the years in
Washington and around the country. Certainly there is every reason to
assume that, if the public finally loses patience over the current
administration’s continuation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its
failure to really tackle the health care crisis, and its limp response
to the economic crisis, and if people descend on Washington or perhaps
New York City en masse to protest, those people will be met with the
same kind of draconian, police-state style response that protesters
have met in the past--or that protesters are being met with in Iran
today.

If the Pentagon is teaching its people to equate protest with
“low-level terrorism,” how different, really, is Washington from Tehran?
______________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now
available in signed collector’s edition through his website).
Lindorff’s work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Sen. Specter Joins Dems, Puts Party on the Spot

dlindorff — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:00:45 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

For almost a generation, the Democrats in Congress have been able
to pretend to be the party of ordinary working people, the party of
progressives, and the inheritor of the mantel of Franklin Roosevelt and
the New Deal, all the while doing little of substance and catering
primarily to the interests of Wall Street and the nation’s corporate
interests.

The Democrats managed this sleight of hand for so long by claiming
that while they had the best of intentions, reality, in the form of
their inability to pass legislation, even when they were in the
majority in both houses of Congress, that could avoid being
filibustered to death by a Republican minority.

That situation has continued to this day, with the party currently having 58 seats in the Senate.

It appears likely that Al Franken has won his tight race defeating
former Sen. Norm Coleman in Minnesota, with the contest all over but
the shouting. (A 3-judge state panel already found Franken to be ahead
by 312 votes, with no outstanding issues in the count, and public
opinion in the state widely favors Coleman finally conceding.)

And now comes the changeling Arlen Specter, the onetime Democratic
district attorney of Philadelphia, who switched to a Republican to run
for the US Senate and has held that state’s senior senator position now
for 29 years. But facing likely defeat from the right in a Republican
primary for his party’s nomination by a conservative challenger who
almost knocked him off last time around, Specter has finally faced
reality: In a state that has been moving steadily into the Democratic
column for years, his future is with the Democrats.

With Specter switching his party affiliation to Democrat, the
Democrats will finally have a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the
Senate, and an already solid majority in the House.

There will, at that point, be no more excuse for Democrats to duck
progressive, liberal, pro-worker, pro-ordinary person issues, using
their old-standby excuse of needing to compromise and win over
Republican votes. There won’t even be any need to cater to party
turncoat Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) to get things done.

So the way I see it, it’s time for progressives, for the union
movement, for the peace movement, for the environmentalist movement,
the single-payer health care reform movement, indeed for all
progressive elements in the US, to pour on the pressure to get Congress
and President Obama to pass real, progressive legislation in this
Congress.

`We don’t need no effin “bipartisanship” anymore.

Now granted, not all Democrats are progressive, but getting
Democrats on board for issues like overriding a filibuster attempt is
different from getting Democrats to vote for a particular bill. The
party leaders have plenty of leverage in the form of control over the
moving forward of members’ bills, of committee assignments, office
assignments, etc., to get members of the caucus to line up on
procedural votes like terminating a filibuster, if they want to use them.

And of course, that’s where the pressure comes in. No longer can
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
(D-CA) claim that they are hamstrung by the need to win over Republican
members to their side. If they don’t use their caucus power to control
their own members, they will stand exposed as fake liberals, and fake
advocates of ordinary Americans. They will stand exposed as agents of
the corporatocracy.

Maybe that’s what they want, but I don’t think the party will survive that kind of exposure.

So let’s get moving. We can start with renewed pressure for
single-payer healthcare reform, passage of the Employee Free Choice Act
and a real end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are litmus
test issues for progressives and will let us know if the Democrats are
going to keep being the other corporate party, or are going to be a
real liberal alternative.

The Employee Free Choice Act will be an interesting one to watch in
Specter’s case. Specter, who has long enjoyed union backing in
Pennsylvania, a few weeks ago said that after earlier backing the
measure he was now not going to support it. But that was when he was
facing a bitter Republican primary. Now he has to earn his spurs as a
prodigal Democrat, returned to the fold. Unions in Pennsylvania are
going to put heavy pressure on him to back the measure if he wants to
avoid a primary now in the Democratic Party for nomination as its
candidate for Senate next year.
____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Repeal Real ID NOW!!

Max R. — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:28:06 -0400

This should be at the top of the list. Get this Orwellian nightmare out of our lives ASAP!! From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

The federal government is trying to force states to turn your drivers license into a national ID. Unless you tell your state legislator to push back, the Real ID Act will create grave dangers to privacy and impose massive financial burdens without improving national security in the least.

Signed into law in May 2005 without meaningful debate, the Real ID Act states that drivers licenses will only be accepted for "federal purposes"—like accessing planes, trains, national parks, and court houses—if they conform to certain uniform standards. The law also requires a vast national database linking all of the ID records together.

Once the IDs and database are in place, their uses will inevitably expand to facilitate a wide range of surveillance activities. Remember, the Social Security number started innocuously enough, but it has become a prerequisite for a host of government services and been coopted by private companies to create massive databases of personal information. A national ID poses similar dangers; for example, because "common machine-readable technology" will be required on every ID, the government and businesses will be able to easily read your private information off the cards in myriad contexts.

Real ID won't just cost you your privacy. The federal government didn't give the states funds to implement the law and overcome its many administrative burdens, so the billions of dollars in costs will be passed down to you in the form of increased DMV fees or taxes.

And what will you get in return? Not improved national security, because IDs do nothing to stop those who haven't already been identified as threats, and wrongdoers will still be able to create fake documents. In fact, the IDs and database will simply create an irresistible target for identity thieves.

It's not too late to fight back—state legislators can still resist implementing the Real ID Act and force Congress' hand. Learn more about Real ID through the links below, and tell your representatives to oppose the Real ID Act.

News articles and an action item linked at the EFF page.

Attorney Accountability

Jowey Styxx — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 16:31:40 -0500

Attorney Oversight

My girlfriend was an abused housewife, years prior to her separation she had sought marriage and mental health counseling. I have been assaulted by the police twice, one time they were trespassing on a dark night, we thought that they were the abusive husband seeking to assault my girlfriend again. The second time we were in a CVS pharmacy that had camera's throughout the store, we were returning from the Emergency Room because my girlfriend had a reaction to medication that was being used to treat severe anxiety and depression.

We were also persecuted by an attorney because the stress caused by the stalking, assaults, threats and courts caused my girlfriend to hemmorage and have an abortion. We became murderers.

With all the material available counselors, cameras, documents, police reports the attorneys retained did not use this material, in several cases they actively avoided it and we also have a case of attorney desertion.

The Virginia State Bar claims that they do not address "strategy" complaints, this we discovered when our attorney deserted in 2000. The Bar had changed its policies so that they could avoid accountability for its members. We became the "evil" people with "sour grapes", the demand for proof of our crimes falls on deaf ears.

This avoidance to address, the damaged position that we the client was put in made it untenable to attempt a civil suit/writ that the Bar claims would regulate its members. It also claims a diligent membership, this is without foundation.

Imagine if a client had actual leverage over the "professional" they retained, that their compliants would be documented and merit of the complaint rated so that others could make informed decisions. I am sure that a woman that is abused would want an attorney that would provide Social Services, marriage, mental health counselors and supporting documents to the courts. I am sure a victim of a police assault would want an attorney that would at least review the video evidence and question why the police did not obtain this material to support their position.

Department of Homeland Lunacy

dlindorff — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:33:10 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

I am not a terrorist.

How can I prove this in these paranoid times? Easy. The New York
Department of Motor Vehicles took my $30 payment over the phone to
clear what they said was a record of my NY drivers license having once
been withdrawn, and informed the National Driver Register in Washington
that I’m a good guy deserving of a renewal of my Pennsylvania drivers
license.

Let me explain.

After 9-11, Congress and the Bush Department of Homeland Security
went into overdrive passing things like the USA PATRIOT Act, the
establishment of the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) to
monitor air passengers and to develop lists of people to harass at air
terminals, a network of black sites to detain and torture suspected
terrorists, and more recently the National Driver Register, a federal
data bank designed to link all drivers licenses and car registrations
to a central computer system, and thus ferret out would be terrorists
trying to create false identities courtesy of the state DMVs.

I, like uncounted tens of thousands of innocent Americans, ran
afoul of this latest catch-a-terrorist system as my Pennsylvania
drivers license, which I first obtained in 1997 when I moved from New
York to Pennsylvania, came up for a third renewal. Several months ahead
of my renewal date, I got a coldly worded and ominous letter from the
Pennsylvania Department of Motor Vehicles saying my license could not
be renewed because the new federal data base was reporting that my New
York license had been “withdrawn” by the NY DMV.

When I called the Pennsylvania DMV to explain that my New York
license had never been withdrawn or suspended (it had to have been in
good order for me to have used it under the state’s reciprocity
agreement with neighboring New York to obtain my new Pennsylvania
license), and to ask what the problem might be, I was told that they
couldn’t tell me, because the federal report doesn’t say what the
problem is. Nor is there any way to contact or appeal to Washington.

My only recourse was to deal with the New York State DMV—probably one of the blackest of bureaucratic black holes known to man.

I called the number that the Pennsylvania DMV provided, and found
myself connected to a maddening automated system which had no options
that could respond to my problem, and that offered no way to reach a
human being. Finally, by calling the media relations office of the
Pennsylvania DMV and using my reporting credentials, I was able to get
someone who could at least check enough into the case with New York to
establish that the problem was that when I moved to Pennsylvania,
transferring my car registration from New York to Pennsylvania, New
York kept my car’s registration active in that state. (I don’t know
what I would have done had I not been a journalist.) Then, since I had
stopped paying for New York car insurance when I switched over to
Pennsylvania plates and Pennsylvania insurance, my New York insurer had
sent in word to the New York DMV saying my car no longer had insurance.

Never mind that my car was by then in Pennsylvania and properly
insured for months before the date that New York showed my car to have
become uninsured. Pennsylvania couldn’t do anything about it because
the federal law says they may not issue me a license as long as there
is a problem with my license in another state. There is no statute of
limitations on any of this, and no method of appeal of the federal
listing.

I called a number that was kindly provided by the media officer in
Pennsylvania, and got through to an actual person in the New York DMV.
She told me that the problem came up because when I moved to
Pennsylvania and shifted my plates over to my new state of residence, I
didn’t send my old license plate to New York. Never mind that there’s
no way I would have known I had to send that plate in. And never mind
that I did obtain a new title for the car in Pennsylvania, and that the
record of that title transfer is in the national computer system. Any
cop with a computer could find that out. Never mind. Eleven years after
the fact, New York still needed the plates.

Of course, I’d long since sold that car for junk and didn’t have
the plates. I didn’t even remember what the license number was.

The DMV woman in New York told me I could clear the whole thing up
for a $30 charge, which she could take care of with a credit card over
the phone.

Note that she had absolutely no way of identifying me, to know that
I wasn’t a terrorist just paying her $30 so I could get a dreaded
Pennsylvania drivers license to use as an ID for whatever nefarious
purposes I might have in mind. She just took down the credit card
number and bingo, I’m cleared to go. The New York DMV, happy with its
little act of extortion, is now notifying the National Driver Register
computer that I’m clear, and next week, Pennsylvania’s DMV will find my
record on the National Driver Register clean and will be ready to renew
my license.

This is the DMV and Homeland Security automotive equivalent of the
TSA rules that have now every flier taking off her or his shoes (even
baby’s’ booties!), and surrendering tubes of toothpaste and mouthwash
at airport security checkpoints.

A fundamental rule about rules should be that if there are records
being kept, and if actions are being taken on the basis of those
records, then there has to be a way for errors to be corrected by the
agency that is maintaining and disseminating those records and
by any agency that is acting on the basis of those records. But in the
case of America’s terrorism fetish, this rule is being violated
routinely.

The “no-fly” and the “let-fly-but-first-harass” lists maintained by
the TSA, which both reportedly now contain tens of thousands of names,
are used by the TSA at airport checkpoints, but developed not by the
TSA, but by the dozens of police and intelligence agencies of the
federal government—the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, the ATF, the State
Department, the FBI, etc., etc. If your name turns up on the TSA list,
and you end up getting strip searched every time you try to fly, the
TSA will tell you you’re on the list, but they won’t tell you who put
you there, and they won’t take you off either. That has to be done by
the agency that reported your name—the one they won’t identify to you.
It’s straight out of Kafka.

The National Driver Register is the same kind of thing. It collects
information about license “problems” from all of the state DMVs, and
disseminates that information widely to all the other states, but it
doesn’t provide any details about what your “problem” might be. It
could be anything from conviction of vehicular homicide or DWI to a
15-year old case of being late with a car insurance payment. In fact,
DMV officials in both PA and NY, before they had the details,
repeatedly referred to my case as a “crime” when no crime had ever been
committed. And although, once I had discovered the nature of my
particular “transgression,” even though the Pennsylvania DMV people
agreed that it was a silly reason to withhold my licence renewal, and
that in fact I had done nothing wrong and was already fully switched
over to a Pennsylvania licence and car registration by the time the New
York license was “withheld,” they said they were “powerless” to renew
my license because of the federal law.

Kafka again.

We are at the mercy of lunatics
____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net