The Twentieth Century Fox Corporation is not unique in spreading propaganda, but they are rare in admitting it. Rupert Murdoch, himself in 2003, admitted that his Fox company helped to sell George W. Bush’s Iraqi-Afghani wars to the American public.

J. Speer-Williams
Infowars
October 30, 2009

	30,000 scientists signed onto a lawsuit, charging Al Gore with fraud, for his bogus video, “An Inconvenient Truth,” that so widely promoted the man-made (anthropogenic) global warming myth.

What a guy! Murdoch helped to sell wars that have made America a psychotic outlaw in the family of civilized nations, and destroyed her economy in the process.

Fox, also, promoted the man-made global warming scam with its popular TV shows the Simpsons, Family Guy, King of the Hill, and Prison Break. Dana Walden, Fox chairman said, “The most powerful way we could communicate the commitment on behalf of our company, was to change the practices within production, as well as work in a message about global warming, about environmental changes, about empowering people to take responsibilities.”

“Empowering people to take responsibilities” is Walden’s double-speak for weakening people with new carbon taxes, all going to the International Banking Cartel’s World Bank, supposedly in order to save and clean up our environment. The truth of the manner is an entirely different story: None of the taxes we will pay to the World Bank will be used to cleanup our environment; all such money – that is not pocketed – will be used to help eliminate national soveresignties, and capture us all in a one-world government.

Moreover, the good chairman’s desire for responsibility has never extended to his own responsibility of airing some hidden news: 30,000  scientists signed onto a lawsuit, charging Al Gore with fraud, for his bogus video, “An Inconvenient Truth,” that so widely promoted the man-made (anthropogenic) global warming myth.

You might, also, be interested in knowing that 9,000 of those scientists suing Mr. Gore hold PhDs, who might not know that the  global warming scam is meant to wrench carbon-taxes from us and cut our domestic production of consumer goods and foodstuffs, the very things we need for an economic recovery, or even for bare survival.

Additionally, a British court case found that Gore’s propaganda film had nine significant errors; but rather than try to refute those findings, Gore and the American press have kept the silence of the guilty.

But in spite of the billions of dollars worth of media air and space spent pushing the man-made global warming myth, their propaganda is no longer working. A Rasmussen poll, of May 2009, showed that only 34% of those polled still bought the big lies of man-made global warming, now called “climate change,” as it is becoming increasingly obvious our world is no longer warming.

And there are honest scientific organizations that are not afraid to report the truth as they see it. The Journal of Geophysical Research has stated, “Little or none of the late 20th century global warming and cooling can be attributed to human activity.”

The Journal additionally reported, “Our paper confirms what many scientists already know: which is that no scientific justifications exists for emissions regulations, and that, irrespective of the severity of the cuts proposed, the emissions trading scheme will exert no measurable effect on future climate.”

And yet, even today, our President Obama still talks of the dire need to curb global warming, by decreasing our standard of living, and increasing our taxes, all made to seem logical by the talking heads of television. And once Obama signs the Copenhagen Climate Treaty, he will have committed our once sovereign country to a world dictatorship, which will not only control, but own the economies of Earth.

But in a world of national-puppet leaders shines a noble man: Czech President Vaslav Klaus said, “They do not want to reveal their true [global warming] plans and ambitions to stop economic development and return mankind several centuries back.”

The Earth was warming for a period, due to sun cycles, not from Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs). The planet Mars, 1.5 times further away from the Sun than our Earth, had melting ice caps during the same period as our warming, but not from SUVs, I presume.

Even Congress must know how intellectually indefensible are Obama’s anthropogenic global warming proclamations, due to their own 2009 US Senate Report of more than 700 dissenting scientists on man-made global warming. And while perhaps not many of those scientists can pin-point what is driving the global warming scam, they know it’s not science.

All media driven eco-fads – over population, peak oil, resource depletion, and global warming – interestingly, all promote one solution: massive controls over national economies and the economic lives of us all.  One could say that today’s environmental fear-mongering was unfocused from our real environmental problems on to fictitious ones, to gain more economic control over our lives, and be absolutely correct. The global warming/climate change/CO2 scare tactics are simply attacks on our prosperity and freedoms. Are there not already enough attacks on our prosperity and freedoms to allow any more?

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Getty

The NYPD is instructing cops to log serial numbers from suspects’ phones.

The NYPD is amassing a database of cell phone users, instructing cops to log serial numbers from suspects’ phones in hopes of connecting them to past or future crimes.

In the era of disposable, anonymous cell phones, the file could be a treasure-trove for detectives investigating drug rings and other criminal enterprises, police sources say.

“It’s used to help build cases,” one source said of the new initiative.

“It doesn’t replace the human element, like debriefing prisoners, but it’s another tool to use that we didn’t have in the past.”

A recent internal memo says that when cops make an arrest, they should remove the suspect’s cell phone battery to avoid leakage – then jot down the International Mobile Equipment Identity number.

The IMEI number is registered with the service provider whenever a call is made.

And that data could allow a detective to match, for example, a cell phone used by one suspect to a phone used by another.

There are limits to the data’s usefulness – all Chinese-made cells sold in India have the same number and some overseas cells are embedded with fake numbers.

Still, civil libertarians are alarmed by the new policy since normally a warrant is needed to obtain information such as calls made or numbers in an address book.

New York Civil Liberties Union associate legal director Christopher Dunn said it appears the NYPD is “taking phones apart to get information” without warrants.

“It’s hard to believe they feel there’s a real need to take out the battery to prevent leakage,” he said. “Instead, it looks like they’re doing this to circumvent the warrant process.”

The cell phone information joins another database of more than 20 million 911 callers that the NYPD has been building. It has paid off.

In one case involving a 911 call, detectives solved a burglary pattern after the suspect left a slip of paper with his cell number on it at a crime scene, Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said.

The phone was disposable so no owner information was available, but police were able to track it to the suspect because he had used it to make a 911 call after he was assaulted.

The NYPD started collecting 911 data for incidents involving a police response in 2003. Four years ago, it began putting the information into its new computer nerve center, the Real Time Crime Center.

rparascandola@nydailynews.com

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Our nation can be threatened not only by physical attacks on terra firma, but also in Cyberspace. Indeed, Cyber attacks could threaten all sorts of mission critical systems.

For this reason, aides to Senator Jay Rockefeller reportedly have been working recently on a revised draft Senate bill that would give the President broad powers in the event of a Cybersecurity emergency, and that apparently would go so far as allowing the President to temporarily seize control over computer networks in the private sector.

This power is akin to the power President Bush exerted when he grounded commercial aircraft in the wake of the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, according to a reported Senate source.

The revised draft Senate bill calls on the President, within 180 days of enactment, to develop and implement a comprehensive national Cybersecurity strategy. This strategy is to provide a “long-term vision of the Nation’s Cybersecurity future” and a plan that “encompasses all aspects of national security,” which would include private sector involvement.

Importantly, the revised draft Senate bill sets forth that “in the event of an immediate threat to strategic national interests involving a compromised Federal Government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network,” the President may declare “a Cybersecuirty emergency” and may, if deemed necessary by the President for “the national defense and security,” direct “the national response to the Cyber threat” and the “timely restoration of the affected critical infrastructure information system or network.”

This is a mouthful, of course. But what it boils down to is that, if this becomes law, the President will be able to declare a Cybersecurity emergency and then direct the response to that threat. This would give the President very broad power.

Some might argue that this open-ended power and flexibility are exactly what the President would need to cope with the unusual circumstances that could be encountered by various types of Cyber attacks.

Others might argue that the revised draft Senate bill is too vague in terms of the scope of authority ceded to the President, and that there should be greater specificity to ensure that unbridled power is not abused potentially in the future.

• Plainly, the United States needs a chain of authority and plans and measures designed to prevent and then cope with possible Cyber attacks. However, whether the revised draft Senate bills gets off the ground and becomes law as is remains to be seen.Presidential Powers During Cybersecurity Emergencies

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The United States Supreme Court recently re-wrote the law on search and seizure regarding vehicles. Now, if a police officer pulls you over for a traffic violation and then removes you from your vehicle and handcuffs you, he can not then go back into the car to search for drugs and guns (or any other evidence).

The old law gave the officers the right to always search the passenger compartment of your vehicle after the arrest in order to look for guns or drugs (or other evidence) that could be destroyed. The logic was that the officers need to protect themselves and preserve any evidence that the arrestee might destroy. In the Supreme Court case of Arizona v. Gant (April 2009), Mr. Gant had an outstanding warrant for driving on a suspended license and that his license was suspended. When he was pulled over, he exited his vehicle and was immediately placed in handcuffs and then secured in the back of the officer’s patrol car. The officer then went and searched Gant’s car and found a firearm and cocaine in the passenger compartment.

The Supreme Court held that the drugs and gun found in Gant’s car should be suppressed because the officer did not have a warrant to search Gant’s car. The prosecutors’ argued that they could search Gant’s car after they arrested him under the “search incident to arrest” rule of New York v. Belton. However, the Supreme Court said that, in Gant’s case, he was in handcuffs and secured in the back of the officer’s patrol car, there was no way that Gant could have grabbed a gun or destroyed evidence, so the officer was not allowed to go back into the car to search. Also, since the arrest was for driving on a suspended license, there was no reason to believe that evidence related to that crime would be located in the car. If the arrest would have been for a suspected drug or gun offense, then the search would have been valid as the officers could have searched the car for evidence relevant to the offense for which Gant was arrested. However, the court ruled that the “search incident to arrest” rule does not give officers the right to rummage through a suspects vehicle for every arrest they make.

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By DEBORAH YAO (AP) – 3 days ago

Parents who install a leading brand of software to monitor their kids’ online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children’s chat messages — and sell the marketing data gathered.

Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids.

“This scares me more than anything I have seen using monitoring technology,” said Parry Aftab, a child-safety advocate. “You don’t put children’s personal information at risk.”

The company that sells the software insists it is not putting kids’ information at risk, since the program does not record children’s names or addresses. But the software knows how old they are because parents customize its features to be more or less permissive, depending on age.

Five other makers of parental-control software contacted by The Associated Press, including McAfee Inc. and Symantec Corp., said they do not sell chat data to advertisers.

One competitor, CyberPatrol LLC, said it would never consider such an arrangement. “That’s pretty much confidential information,” said Barbara Rose, the company’s vice president of marketing. “As a parent, I would have a problem with them targeting youngsters.”

The software brands in question are developed by EchoMetrix Inc., a company based in Syosset, N.Y.

In June, EchoMetrix unveiled a separate data-mining service called Pulse that taps into the data gathered by Sentry software to give businesses a glimpse of youth chatter online. While other services read publicly available teen chatter, Pulse also can read private chats. It gathers information from instant messages, blogs, social networking sites, forums and chat rooms.

EchoMetrix CEO Jeff Greene said the company complies with U.S. privacy laws and does not collect any identifiable information.

“We never know the name of the kid — it’s bobby37 on the house computer,” Greene said.

What Pulse will reveal is how “bobby37″ and other teens feel about upcoming movies, computer games or clothing trends. Such information can help advertisers craft their marketing messages as buzz builds about a product.

Days before “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” opened in theaters on July 15, teen chatter about the movie spiked across the Internet with largely positive reactions.

“Cool” popped up as one of the most heavily used words in teen chats, blogs, forums and on Twitter. The upbeat comments gathered by Pulse foreshadowed a strong opening for the Warner Bros. film.

Parents who don’t want the company to share their child’s information to businesses can check a box to opt out.

But that option can be found only by visiting the company’s Web site, accessible through a control panel that appears after the program has been installed. It was not in the agreement contained in the Sentry Total Home Protection program The Associated Press downloaded and installed Friday.

According to the agreement, the software passes along data to “trusted partners.” Confidentiality agreements prohibit those clients from sharing the information with others.

In recognition of federal privacy laws that restrict the collection of data on kids under 13, the agreement states that the company has “a parent’s permission to share the information if the user is a child under age 13.”

Tech site CNet ranks the EchoMetrix software as one of the three best for parental control. Sales figures were not available.

The Sentry and FamilySafe brands include parental-control software such as Sentry Total Family Protection, Sentry Basic, Sentry Lite and FamilySafe (SentryPC is made by a different company and has no ties with EchoMetrix).

The Lite version is free. Others range from $20 to download and $10 a year for monitoring, to about $48 a year, divided into monthly payments.

The same company also offers software under the brands of partner entities, such as AmberWatch Lookout.

AmberWatch Foundation, a child-protection nonprofit group that licenses its brand to EchoMetrix, said information gathered through the AmberWatch-branded software is not shared with advertisers.

Practically speaking, few people ever read the fine print before they click on a button to agree to the licensing agreement. “Unless it’s upfront in neon letters, parents don’t know,” Aftab said.

EchoMetrix, formerly known as SearchHelp, said companies that have tested the chat data using Pulse include News Corp.’s Fox Broadcasting and Dreamworks SKG Inc. Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures recently signed on.

None of those companies would comment when contacted by the AP.

EchoMetrix has been losing money. Its liabilities exceeded its assets by nearly $25 million as of June 30, according to a regulatory filing that said there is “substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

To get the marketing data, companies put in keywords, such as the name of a new product, and specify a date range, into Pulse. They get a “word cloud” display of the most commonly used words, as well as snippets of actual chats. Pulse can slice data by age groups, region and even the instant-messaging program used.

Pulse also tracked buzz for Microsoft Corp.’s “Natal,” a forthcoming Xbox motion-sensor device that replaces the traditional button-based controller. Microsoft is not a client of Pulse, but EchoMetrix used “Natal” to illustrate how its data can benefit marketers.

Greene said children’s conversations about Natal were focused on its price and availability, which suggested that Microsoft should assure teens that there will be enough stock and that ordering ahead can lock in a price.

Competing data-mining companies such as J.D. Power Web Intelligence, a unit of quality ratings firm J.D. Power and Associates, also trolls the Internet for consumer chats. But Vice President Chase Parker said the company does not read any data that’s password-protected, such as the instant message sessions that EchoMetrix collects for advertisers.

Suresh Vittal, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said EchoMetrix might have to make its disclosures more apparent to parents.

“Are we in the safeguarding-the-children business or are we in the business of selling data to other people?” he said. If it’s the latter, “it should all be done transparently and with the knowledge of the customer.”

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By Karolina Tagaris

mercurynewsAssociated Press

LONDON — People who repeatedly download copyright-protected films and music could have their Internet connection cut off under proposed laws the British government unveiled today to tackle illegal file-sharing.

Treasury Minister Stephen Timms said that previous plans, which would only have restricted users’ broadband speed, did not go far enough. That potential punishment remains under the new proposal, but is accompanied by the possibility of blocking offenders’ access to download sites as well as banning them from the Internet altogether.

Civil-rights groups and Internet service providers criticized the proposal as unnecessarily restricting users’ rights without doing much to tackle online piracy.

If the measures are passed when they come to Parliament in November, Britain would join France in attempting to cut off Internet access for offenders.

The British proposal could potentially conflict with a European Parliament ruling in May prohibiting European Union governments from cutting off a user’s Internet connection without a court order. A final version of that measure must still be negotiated with the European Council.

The French government initially defied that ruling when it passed a similar cutoff law in May, but a French court later ruled that only a judge could allow Internet access to be cut off. French lawmakers are working on a new bill.

Still, France has already created what may be the first government agency to track and punish online pirates. The earliest a British ban could be put into place is 2011.

The British proposals put the onus on Internet service providers to catch offenders. Providers would have to issue written warnings to subscribers whose IP address — the unique number assigned to every computer that connects to the Internet — has been spotted accessing a download site.

Copyright holders would then be able to use a court order to access details of such warnings and sue any suspected offender.

The latest British proposal assumes that the written warnings and court action by copyright holders will be enough to reduce illegal downloads by around 70 per cent. If those measures prove ineffective, the government will then consider technicalities of how and when to cut off Internet access.

It is not clear, however, whether and how service providers would verify that files accessed through the download site are illegal. Although many file-sharing sites do contain movies and songs shared illegally, they can also be used by some independent directors and bands to distribute their works with their consent.

The proposal — a consultation document at the moment — works on the assumption that service providers will know which sites are legal and which are not.

Internet provider TalkTalk said it would “strongly resist” government attempts to oblige Internet service providers to act as Internet police. TalkTalk said disconnecting alleged offenders “will be futile given that it is relatively easy for determined filesharers to mask their identity or their activity to avoid detection.”

The Open Rights Group, which protects civil liberties in the area of digital technology, said any suspension would “restrict people’s fundamental right to freedom of expression.”

But the British Phonographic Industry, which represents the recorded music industry, said the move was “a step forward that should help the legal digital market to grow for consumers.”

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry estimates it loses billions of dollars worldwide from online piracy, far more than it makes from legal Internet sales.

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Last week, the governor of Arizona signed H.B. 2426, which bars the state from implementing the “enhanced” drivers license (EDL) program.

If the federal REAL ID revival bill (PASS ID) becomes law, it will give congressional approval to EDLs, which up to now have been simply a creation of the federal security and state driver licensing bureaucracies.

ENHANCED DRIVERS LICENSES AS “SNAKE OIL”

As governor of Arizona, the current Secretary of Homeland Security signed a memorandum of understanding with the DHS to implement EDLs, and she backs PASS ID even though she signed an anti-REAL ID bill as governor. As I said before, Secretary Napolitano seems to be taking the national ID tar baby in a loving embrace.

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By Carlos Miller
A 43-year-old man was jailed for six hours – and had his camera and memory card confiscated by a judge – after filming an FBI building from across the street in New York City Monday.

Randall Thomas, a professional photographer, said he was standing on the corner of Duane Street and Broadway in downtown Manhattan when he used his video camera to pan up and down on the 42-story building at 26 Federal Plaza.

He was immediately accosted by a security guard in a brown uniform who told him he was not allowed to film the building.

Thomas asserted his legal right to film from a public street. The guard called a Homeland Security Officer who asked Thomas what he was filming.

“I said ‘that’s none of your business,’” Thomas said in a telephone interview with Photography is Not a Crime Wednesday night.

The federal officer handcuffed Thomas and sat him on the curb for ten minutes, before escorting him inside the same FBI building and taking him to the 10^th floor and placing him in a holding cell.

His charges: Disorderly conduct; failure to comply and impeding duties of a federal officer.

During his incarceration, the feds persuaded Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV to sign a search warrant that authorized them to confiscate his camera and memory card, which were not returned to him when he was released six hours later.

This is not his first run-in he’s had with authorities for using his cameras in public. Two years ago, he was arrested for taking a still photo of the same building. He was escorted into the same building where he was handcuffed to a pole for two hours and interrogated by feds.

He ended up pleading not guilty to two misdemeanors but said he never heard back about that case, so he assumes it was somehow dropped from the system.

He also has an ongoing case with the Civilian Complaint Review Board after he says he was assaulted by a group of NYPD officers in Times Square for filming them in February.

“It’s crazy how they can arrest me when you can see the same building on Google Maps,” he said.

During our interview last night, we both pulled up the FBI building on Google Maps on our respective computers and he explained where he was standing, where he was forced to sit after he was handcuffed and where the Homeland Security Officer parked.

In fact, in the Google Maps picture, there is the same type of vehicle parked in the same spot except it is pointed in a different direction than it was when it pulled up to arrest him.

Two months ago, a photographer in Arlington, Virginia was ordered to delete a photo of a federal building even though I was able to pull up that same building on Google Maps in seconds, as I did with the FBI building in New York.

Maybe they’ll come barging down my door for panning up and down the building on Google Maps.

Here is a PDF Thomas compiled that includes a copy of the search warrant, his citations and definition of the statutes he is accused of violating.

Google Maps allows one to pan up and down the FBI building in the same manner Thomas was doing when he was arrested.

-30-

I am a multimedia journalist who has been fighting a lengthy legal battle after having photographed Miami police against their wishes in Feb. 2007. Please help the fight by donating to my Legal Defense Fund in the top left sidebar, which helps pay for the thousands of dollars I’ve acrued in debt since my arrest. To keep updated on the latest articles, join my networks at Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed.

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Eds: APNewsNow. Will be led. BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley says imprisoned American Indian activist Leonard Peltier has once again been denied parole.

Wrigley says the next scheduled hearing for Peltier is 2024, when Peltier would be 79 years old. Peltier is serving two life sentences for the execution-style deaths of FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams during a June 26, 1975, standoff on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

He was convicted in Fargo, N.D., in 1977. He has claimed the FBI framed him, which the agency denies, and unsuccessfully appealed his conviction numerous times.

Peltier had a full parole hearing for the first time in 15 years last month at the Lewisburg, Pa., federal prison where he is being held. Defense attorney Eric Seitz declined comment on the U.S. Parole Commission decision Friday, saying the Justice Department had not informed him.

Incident at Oglala – The Leonard Peltier Story

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There is an old Jewish joke that tells the story of a dying Jewish merchant who calls his son to his sickbed just before he perishes. He tells him, “Listen to me Moisha’le, life is not just about money… you can also do gold and diamonds.”

Monitoring Israeli and Jewish news reveals a devastating fact, it is not ‘just’ about money. It may also be about human organs. A few weeks ago we learned about a ring of American Rabbis who had been arrested in New Jersey upon suspicion of human organs trafficking (amongst many other crimes).  Rabbi Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, we read, enticed “vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 which he would turn around and sell for $160,000.” Not too bad, I thought to myself then. We are living in hard times, financial melt down, credit crunch, Wall Street is licking its wounds, the car industry is evaporating.  Seemingly, kidney trafficking is still booming.

In fact, the ring of the Rabbi in New Jersey didn’t take me by complete surprise. For years we have been hearing about Palestinians claiming that Israel is “deep into organ trafficking.” We also learned that the family of Alastair Sinclair, a Scottish tourist who hanged himself in an Israeli jail, “was forced to bring suit for his return with missing body parts.”

In 2002 the Tehran Times reported: “The Zionist state has tacitly admitted that doctors at the Israeli forensic institute at Abu Kabir had extracted the vital organs of three Palestinian teenage children killed by the Israeli Army nearly ten days ago. Zionist Minister of Health Nessim Dahhan said in response to a question by Arab member of the Zionist Parliament ‘Knesset’, Ahmed Teibi, on Tuesday that he couldn’t deny that organs of Palestinian youths and children killed by the Israeli forces were taken out for transplants or scientific research.”

But now the news about Israeli trafficking of human organ is spreading to Western mainstream media. Ynet, the biggest Israeli online newspaper, reported today that  “Leading Swedish daily Aftonbladet claimed in one of its articles that IDF soldiers killed Palestinians in order to trade in their organs.”

A few weeks ago we had a debate here on PTT whether Zionism is a colonial apparatus or not. One of the Materialist arguments against the perception of Zionism as a colonial practice was that Palestine has never been too attractive economically; it lacks oil, gold or minerals. However, this may change now. People who specialise in organ theft may find Palestine to be heaven on earth. In the light of the latest vastly spreading accusations, the Jewish national project maybe is colonial after all.

Though the Israeli government denies the accusation, and I myself far from being qualified to know what the truth of the matter is, one cannot deny that we are facing here a shift of consciousness within the Western discourse. At the end of the day, after watching the Israeli army dumping great quantities of white phosphorous on a civilian population in broad daylight, after seeing Israelis gathering gleefully en masse on the hills around Gaza just to watch their military spreading death and physical suffering in a genocidal manner, after reading that 94% of the Israelis supported the IDF military campaign against the elderly, women and children, most of whom were refugees with nowhere to escape and seek further refuge, organ theft seems to be a ‘light crime’.

Whether or not the Swedish paper’s accusations are genuine is yet to be revealed. However, one fact has already been established: after so many years of Western inclination to dance to the relentless crying violin of the Jewish melancholic victim serenade, the Western media is now changing its appetite, it is willing to confront Jewish institutional crime.

Rather than talking about the rise of anti-Semitism, we better discuss the growth of Jewish institutional crime.

NOTE: WE WILL HAVE THE TRANSLATION FROM SWEDISH INTO ENGLISH AVAILABLE LATER IN THE DAY

THIS IS THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE: http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5652583.ab

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By Andrew J. Blumberg and Peter Eckersley, August 2009 Source: EFF

Also available as a PDF

Over the next decade, systems which create and store digital records of people’s movements through public space will be woven inextricably into the fabric of everyday life. We are already starting to see such systems now, and there will be many more in the near future.

Here are some examples you might already have used or read about:

• Monthly transit swipe-cards
• Electronic tolling devices (FastTrak, EZpass, congestion pricing)
• Cellphones
• Services telling you when your friends are nearby
• Searches on your PDA for services and businesses near your current location
• Free Wi-Fi with ads for businesses near the network access point you’re using
• Electronic swipe cards for doors
• Parking meters you can call to add money to, and which send you a text message when your time is running out

These systems are marvellously innovative, and they promise benefits ranging from increased convenience to transformative new kinds of social interaction.

Unfortunately, these systems pose a dramatic threat to locational privacy.

What is “locational privacy”?

Locational privacy (also known as “location privacy”) is the ability of an individual to move in public space with the expectation that under normal circumstances their location will not be systematically and secretly recorded for later use. The systems discusssed above have the potential to strip away locational privacy from individuals, making it possible for others to ask (and answer) the following sorts of questions by consulting the location databases:

• Did you go to an anti-war rally on Tuesday?
• A small meeting to plan the rally the week before?
• At the house of one “Bob Jackson”?
• Did you walk into an abortion clinic?
• Did you see an AIDS counselor?
• Have you been checking into a motel at lunchtimes?
• Why was your secretary with you?
• Did you skip lunch to pitch a new invention to a VC? Which one?
• Were you the person who anonymously tipped off safety regulators about the rusty machines?
• Did you and your VP for sales meet with ACME Ltd on Monday?
• Which church do you attend? Which mosque? Which gay bars?
• Who is my ex-girlfriend going to dinner with?

Of course, when you leave your home you sacrifice some privacy. Someone might see you enter the clinic on Market Street, or notice that you and your secretary left the Hilton Gardens Inn together. Furthermore, in the world of ten years ago, all of this information could be obtained by people who didn’t like you or didn’t trust you.

But obtaining this information used to be expensive. Your enemies could hire a guy in a trenchcoatto follow you around,but they had to pay him. Moreover, it was hard to keep the surveillance secret — you had a good chance of noticing your tail ducking into an alley.

In the world of today and tomorrow, this information is quietly collected by ubiquitous devices and applications, and available for analysis to many parties who can query, buy or subpeona it. Or pay a hacker to steal a copy of everyone’s location history.

It is this transformation to a regime in which information about your location is collected pervasively, silently, and cheaply that we’re worried about.

Threats and opportunity

Some threats to locational privacy are overt: it’s evident how cameras backed by face-recognition software could be misused to track people and record their movements. In this document, we’re primarily concerned with threats to locational privacy that arise as a hidden side-effect of clearly useful location-based services.

We can’t stop the cascade of new location-based digital services. Nor would we want to — the benefits they offer are impressive. What urgently needs to change is that these systems need to be built with privacy as part of their original design. We can’t afford to have pervasive surveillance technology built into our electronic civic infrastructure by accident. We have the opportunity now to ensure that these dangers are averted.

Our contention is that the easiest and best solution to the locational privacy problem is to build systems which don’t collect the data in the first place. This sounds like an impossible requirement (how do we tell you when your friends are nearby without knowing where you and your friends are?) but in fact as we discuss below it is a reasonable objective that can be achieved with modern cryptographic techniques.

Modern cryptography actually allows civic data processing systems to be designed with a whole spectrum of privacy policies: ranging from complete anonymity to limited anonymity to support law enforcement. But we need to ensure that systems aren’t being built right at the zero-privacy, everything-is-recorded end of that spectrum, simply because that’s the path of easiest implementation.

Location Based Services That Don’t Know Where You Are

Surprisingly, modern cryptography offers some really clever ways to deploy road tolls and transit tickets and location searches and all the other mobile services we want, without creating a record of where you are. This isn’t at all intuitive, but it’s really important that policymakers and engineers working with location systems know about it. This section lists just a few examples of the kinds of systems that are possible.

Automated tolling and stoplight enforcement

In many metropolitan areas, drivers are encouraged to use small electronic transponders (FastTrak, EZpass) to pay tolls at bridges and tunnels. As momentum builds behind nuanced usage tolling and congestion pricing schemes, we expect to see an explosion of such devices and tolling methods.

For simple point tolls (e.g. bridge tolls), protocols that cryptographers call electronic cash are an excellent solution. In its cryptographic sense, electronic cash refers to means by which an individual can pay for something using a special digital signature which is anonymous but which guarantees the recipient that the can redeem it for money; it acts just like cash! See this paper for the details of a modern implementation. Thus, a driver “Vera” would buy a wad of electronic cash every few months and “charge up” her transponder. As Vera drives over bridges and through tunnels, the tolling transponder would anonymously pay her tolls.

For more complicated tolling systems (in which the price depends on the specific path taken), a somewhat more involved implementation can be used (discussed in detail in this technical paper).

Straightforward but privacy-insensitive implementations of congestion-pricing systems simply track drivers and use the tracking information to generate tolls. For instance, you might have all of the cars using a little radio gadget to report their location all the time. As Vera drives throughout the congestion pricing area (e.g. down a street in central London), the gadget says “Hi, this is Vera’s car.” That creates a record of everywhere Vera went. Equivalently, one might put cameras everywhere which record Vera’s license plate as she drives and keeps track of everywhere she goes to subsequently compute his tolls. Both of these solutions violate Vera’s locational privacy.

The less obvious but much better way to run such tolls is to have Vera’s gadget commit to a secret list of “dynamic license plates” — a long list of random-looking cryptographic numbers. This commitment takes the form of a digital signature given to the tolling authority. As Vera drives through the tolling region, her gadget cycles through these numbers rapidly, sending the current number to the monitoring devices she passes. None of those numbers actually identifies Vera, and since they keep changing there’s no way to string them together to track her.

But, at the end of the month, Vera has to pay her road toll by plugging the gadget in her car into her computer. The computers execute a fancy cryptographic process called a “secure multi-party communication”. At the end, her computer proves that she owes $17.00 in road tolls this month, without revealing how she acumulated that total. The committment exchanged at the beginning ensures that Vera can’t cheat: she can’t prove a lower total if she actually drove across a bridge with the gadget active.

This kind of approach can be used to solve various automated traffic enforcement needs, as well. For instance, every time Vera passes a traffic light a monitoring device can collect the current “dynamic license plate”. Although again, the collected data can’t be used to track Vera around, if Vera runs a red light the system can detect this and issue Vera a ticket.

Location-based search

A location-based search on a mobile device is another important example. Phones are starting to be able to locate themselves based on the signal strength or visibility of nearby wireless networks or on GPS data. Naturally, companies are also racing to provide search tools which use this data to offer people different search results depending on where they are at any given moment. The naive way to do mobile location search is for the device to say “This is Frank’s Nokia here. I see the following five WiFi networks with the following five signal strengths”. The service replies “okay, that means you’re at the corner of 5th and Main in Springfield”. Then your device replies, “What burger joints are nearby? Are any of Frank’s friends hanging out nearby?”. That kind of search creates a record of everywhere you go and what you’re searching for while you’re there.

A better way to do location-based services and search is something like this: “Hi, this is a mobile device here. Here is a cryptographic proof that I have an account on your service and I’m not a spammer. I see the following five wireless networks.” The service replies “okay, that means you’re at the corner of 5th and Main in Springfield. Here is a big list of encrypted information about things that are nearby”. If any of that encrypted information is a note from one of Frank’s friends, saying “hey, I’m here”, then his Nokia will be able to read it. If he likes, he can also say “hey, here’s an encrypted note to post for other people who are nearby”. If any of them are his friends, they’ll be able to read it. (An excellent and detailed discussion of a related approach via secure multi-party computation is presented in this paper.)

Transit passes and access cards

Another broad area of application is for passcards and devices allowing access to protected areas; for instance, passcards which allow access to bike lockers near train stations, or cards which function as a monthly bus pass. A simple implementation might involve an RFID card reporting that Bob has checked his bike into or out of the storage facility (and deducts his account accordingly), or equivalently that Bob has stepped onto the bus (and checks to make sure Bob has paid for his pass). This sort of scheme might put Bob at risk.

A better approach would involve the use of recent work on anonymous credentials. These give Bob a special set of digital signatures with which he can prove that he is entitled to enter the bike locker (i.e. prove you’re a paying customer) or get on the bus. But the protocols are such that these interactions can’t be linked to him specifically and moreover repeated accesses can’t be correlated with one another. That is, the bike locker knows that someone authorized to enter has come by, but it can’t tell who it was, and it can’t tell when this individual last came by. Combined with electronic cash, there are a wide-range of card-access solutions which preserves locational privacy.

Privacy concerns and anonymized databases

We should note that even the existence of location databases stripped of identifying tags can leak information. For instance, if I know that Vera is the only person who lives on Dead End Lane, the datum that someone used a location-based service on Dead End Lane can be reasonably linked to Vera. This problem is widely acknowledged (and studied) in the context of epidemiological data as well: it turns out to be relatively easy to deduce the identity of individual disease victims from “anonymized” geographic information about the location of cases. Generally speaking, one solution to this problem is to restrict the use of location-based services to high density areas. There are more complicated cryptographic solutions that are also possible. See this paper for a discussion (and proposed solution) to this problem in the context of collection of aggregate traffic statistics, and this paper for discussion of “differential privacy”, a formalization of ideal privacy guarantees in the face of the existence of databases.

For more information

Safely and correctly implementing such modern cryptographic protocols can be a substantial engineering challenge. And implementing them efficiently takes work. But it can be done — this is exactly the kind of cryptographic software that protects the security of our financial network (e.g. ATMs), makes it safe for us to buy things online, and encodes our phone calls. Big software contractors (e.g. IBM and Siemens) maintain large staffs of cryptographers.

We’ve linked to some of the sources that would be useful for engineers who want to understand how these protocols work. But, if you’re a policymaker or an engineer and you have questions about how these methods work, don’t hesitate to contact us: we can point you at literature and connect you with experts to answer your questions.

Why Should Private Sector Firms Prioritize Locational Privacy?

We believe that governments have a civic responsibility to their citizens to ensure that the infrastructure they deploy protects locational privacy. But there are also financial reasons for the private sector to go to some length to design privacy into the locational systems they build.

Avoid legal compliance costs

If a corporation retains logs that track individuals’ locations, they may be subject to legal requests for that information. Such requests may come in different forms (including informal questions, subpoenas or warrants) and from different parties (law enforcement or civil litigants). There are complex legal questions as to whether compliance with a particular request is legally required, optional, or even legally prohibited and a liability risk.

This legal complexity may even involve international law. For instance, US corporations which also have operations in the European Union might be subject to European data protection laws when EU citizens visit the United States and use the US company’s services.

Corporations with large locational datasets face a risk that lawyers and law enforcement will realize the data exists and begin using legal processes to obtain it. The best way to avoid this costly compliance risk is to avoid having identifiable location data in the first place.

Obtain a competitive edge

The public is slowly becoming aware of the potential downsides of having their location tracked on a continuous basis. The ability to demonstrate reliable privacy protections will increasingly offer firms a competitive edge if they can persuade individual customers — or government clients — that their product offers more robust and trustworthy privacy protections.

Isn’t there an easier/different alternative?

Using cryptography and careful design to protect location privacy from the outset requires engineering effort. So it’s important to ask whether there are other adequate ways to preserve privacy in these systems. Unfortunately, we believe the alternatives are unreliable or harder to implement and enforce.

Data retention and erasure

One kind of protection you might hope for is that your location records will be deleted before your adversary gets to them. If the company that’s offering you a fancy location search on your cell phone doesn’t need to remember your history a week later, perhaps they can be persuaded to forget it quickly. Perhaps they promise that they will.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much basis for optimism on the data retention front. Search companies have incentives to keep extensive records of their users’ queries, so that they can learn how to improve their results (and sell more effective advertisements). Storage space is cheap and getting cheaper. Tolling agencies have incentives to keep extensive records of toll usage, to settle complaints and provide aggregate statistics and accounting data.

Even if the collecting outfit does promise to delete the data after a set interval, there’s no guarantee that they’re actually going to do that properly. Firstly, secure deletion tools are necessary to make sure that deleted data is really gone; many sys admins will fail to use them correctly. Secondly, all it takes is the flip of a switch to suddenly change policies from deletion to retention. To make matters worse, there’s no guarantee that a government won’t suddenly pass a law requiring such companies and government agencies to keep all of their records for years, just in case the records are needed for “national security” purposes. This last concern isn’t just idle paranoia: this has already happened in Europe, and the Bush administration has toyed with the same idea.

And as for government agencies, experience so far with data retention has not been reassuring. An interesting example is provided by automated tolling data (records from FastTrak and EZpass). Different states have made different promises about how long they keep the data, and there have been varying degrees of effectiveness in carrying out these promises. Data has often remained available for subpeona after a number of years. Legal penalties for the violation of these promises are currently minimal.

Limiting data retention is an important protection for privacy, but it’s no substitute for the best protection: not recording that information in the first place.

Opting out

Sometimes people respond to these sorts of worries with the claim that the free market will solve this problem. “People who are worried about privacy shouldn’t use these services,” they say. “If people really care, a company offering privacy as an explicit feature will arise.”

We don’t believe this is an acceptable viewpoint — there is too much coercion in play. Often, there’s no adequate replacement for the service in question, and it is or will soon be a dramatic hardship to avoid its use. Suppose that parts of the United States began to adopt mandatory “pay as you drive” insurance, or congestion pricing, that was based on location tracking. In most parts of the United States, it’s not really reasonable to suggest that people who are worried about privacy shouldn’t drive (or shouldn’t drive to their religious institution of choice). And in the case of location-based services, it’s clear that the deck is stacked against people choosing to take inconvenient measures to protect themselves: it’s too hard to know what is being recorded by whom, too hard to know what options there are to avoid being recorded, and too hard to keep researching these questions as you interact with new pieces of technology. In this environment, people simply haven’t adjusted to the potential for the loss of the reasonable expectation of privacy in public places, and our standard intuitions haven’t kept up with advances in technology.

Cell phones and credit cards already create a trail

It’s true that most cell phones provide some amount of tracking information to the carriers as long as they’re on, and that credit card records provide a pervasive trail of activity. This is no reason to surrender further locational privacy, but rather a reason to fight for better practices or laws for cell phone technology and credit card data. The problems we’re having now with identity theft make it clear how problematic the handling of sensitive personal data is.

Law-abiding citizens don’t need privacy

Another common response to worries about locational privacy is to say that law-abiding citizens don’t need privacy. “I don’t commit adultery, I don’t break the law,” people say (and tacitly, “I’m not in the closet, and I don’t belong to any non-majority religious or political groups”).

One answer to this concern is a reminder that there are more subtle reasons for needing privacy. It’s not just the government, or law enforcement, or political enemies you might want to be protected from.

• Your employer doesn’t need to know things about whether, when, and where you went to church.
• Your co-workers don’t need to know how late you work or where you shop.
• Your sister’s ex-boyfriend doesn’t need know how often she spends the night at her new boyfriend’s apartment.
• Your corporate competitors don’t need to know who your salespeople are talking to.

Preserving locational privacy is about maintaining dignity and confidence as you move through the world. Locational privacy is also about knowing when other people know things about you, and being able to tell when they are making decisions based on those facts.

Suppose that an insurance company manages to obtain a record of Alice’s movements over the past year, and decides that there is some aspect of that record which is grounds for raising her premiums or denying her coverage. The problem with that decision is not just that it is unfair, but that Alice may have no ability to dispute it. If the insurance company’s reasoning is misinformed, will Alice have a practical way of knowing that and disputing it?

The “I’ve got nothing to hide” argument against privacy is criticized at greater length in this article.

Conclusion

In the long run, the decision about when we retain our location privacy (and the limited circumstances under which we will surrender it) should be set by democratic action and lawmaking. Now is a key moment for organizations that are building and deploying location data infrastructure to show leadership and select designs that are responsible and do not surrender the locational privacy of users simply for expediency.

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Changes Would Pose Serious Threat To Americans’ Personal Information, Says ACLU

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ACLU
CONTACT: (202) 675-2312; media@dcaclu.org

WASHINGTON – The American Civil Liberties Union submitted comments today to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) opposing its recent proposal to reverse current federal policy and allow the use of web tracking technologies, like cookies, on federal government websites. Cookies can be used to track an Internet user’s every click and are often linked across multiple websites; they frequently identify particular people.

Since 2000, it has been the policy of the federal government not to use such technology. But the OMB is now seeking to change that policy and is considering the use of cookies for tracking web visitors across multiple sessions and storing their unique preferences and surfing habits. Though this is a major shift in policy, the announcement of this program consists of only a single page from the federal register that contains almost no detail.

“This is a sea change in government privacy policy,” said Michael Macleod-Ball, Acting Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “Without explaining this reversal of policy, the OMB is seeking to allow the mass collection of personal information of every user of a federal government website. Until the OMB answers the multitude of questions surrounding this policy shift, we will continue to raise our strenuous objections.”

The use of cookies allows a website to differentiate between users and build a database of each user’s viewing habits and the information they share with the site. Since web surfers frequently share information like their name or email address (if they’ve signed up for a service) or search request terms, the use of cookies frequently allows a user’s identity and web surfing habits to be linked. In addition, websites can allow third parties, such as advertisers, to also place cookies on a user’s computer.

“Americans rely on the information from the federal government to research politics, medical issues and legal requirements. The OMB is now asking to retain the personal and identifiable information we leave behind,” said Christopher Calabrese, Counsel for the ACLU Technology and Liberty Project. “No American should have to sacrifice privacy or risk surveillance in order to access free government information.  No policy change should be adopted without wide ranging debate including information on the restrictions and uses of cookies as well as impact on privacy.”

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Unless the Dept. of Justice re-invokes their twice-invoked “state secrets privilege” claim in order to once again gag former FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, her attorneys have notified the department by hand-delivered, sworn letter of declaration [PDF] this week, that she intends to give a deposition, open to the media [Updated: see bottom of article for details], in response to a subpoena this Saturday in Washington D.C..

Edmonds has confirmed her intentions to answer any questions asked of her during the sworn proceedings, fully and publicly, during conversations with The BRAD BLOG this week. She notes that her agreement with her former employer, the FBI — who fired her illegally after she filed whistleblower allegations about corruption and foreign infiltration in the linguistics department — includes certain non-disclosure requirements. However, those requirements do not preclude her answering to a legally issued court subpoena.

The subpoena and request for sworn deposition is part of a case now pending before the Ohio Elections Commission in which Ohio’s Republican U.S. Congresswoman Jean Schmidt (R-2nd District) has filed a complaint against her 2008 independent challenger, David Krikorian who Schmidt has charged distributed false statements about her during last year’s campaign.

The resulting testimony, if it indeed occurs this weekend, could be far more explosive than either Schmidt or Krikorian might have ever guessed…

‘Blood Money’

Schmidt has alleged that Krikorian — who has announced plans to run against Schmidt again, as a Democrat, in 2010 — libeled her when he alleged in campaign materials that she had taken “blood money” as campaign donations from Turkish interest groups. Schmidt is co-chairwoman of the Congressional Turkish Caucus, according to Politico’s coverage of the case, and has received more than $10,000 from the Turkish Coalition USA PAC, “making it one of her top campaign contributors”, since taking office in 2005. She recently took a trip to Turkey sponsored by the Turkish Coalition of America, valued at more than $10,000.

At immediate issue in the initial Schmidt v. Krikorian tussle, is the century-long debate over whether the extermination of some 1.5 million ethnic Armenians during WWI will be declared a “genocide” by the American government. The issue is a highly contentious one that has cut across party lines in Congress, and has ensnared dozens of U.S. Congressmembers and highly-ranked officials in a lobbyist-funded, politically-charged battle.

The same Turkish lobby has also, according to information gleaned from Edmonds and others, based on her first-hand knowledge as an FBI case translator, helped to ensnare many of those same officials in a broad infiltration scheme of the U.S. Government and sensitive military facilities, by operatives from the U.S., Turkey, Pakistan and elsewhere, including alleged bribery of then Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. Some of the charges against Hastert were detailed in a remarkable 2005 Vanity Fair exposé. Additional allegations, concerning the the proliferation of nuclear secrets to the black-market in Turkey, Israel, Pakistan, Libya, Iran and beyond, as detailed in an explosive front-page series by London’s Sunday Times last year.

These are among the issues which Edmonds — whose classified allegations were found to have been “credible”, “serious” and “warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review by the FBI,” according to their Inspector General in 2002 — will be asked about on Saturday if the deposition moves forward without being quashed by the DoJ.

Krikorian’s campaign has released a statement [PDF], detailing several of the potentially explosive points about which they intend to ask Edmonds to testify in an “open to the media deposition”…

“Jean Schmidt and the Turkish Legal Defense Fund have been attempting to squash my right to political free speech by abusing the OEC (Ohio Election Commission) process by filing frivolous complaints against me for their own political gain,” Krikorian alleges in his statement.

He also notes that “Schmidt has previously been convicted by the OEC for having a reckless disregard for truth.” During her run for Congress, the OEC found, in a 7 to 0 vote, that Schmidt had lied about having a received an undergraduate degree from the University of Cincinnati and she was issued a letter of reprimand for the “false statements”.

The Backstory…

Edmonds agreement, via affidavit, to give testimony on the points mentioned by Krikorian above, under oath, and in public, would be a first. Much of her previous sworn testimony, to Congress and to the 9/11 Commission, has been entirely classified, leaving those of us in the media with an interest in her case to piece together the puzzle of what has made her, in the words of the ACLU, “the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America”.

On Tuesday, Congressional Quarterly’s intelligence reporter Jeff Stein filed a report on Edmonds’ upcoming “test” of the Department of Justice in the Schmidt v. Krikorian case. However, it’s fallen largely to the independent media in the U.S. and the foreign mainstream media to dig into the details of Edmonds’ allegations, described by one former CIA analyst early last year as “treason at the highest levels of the United State government.”

In October of 2007 — after she had exhausted all other options, having been shut down by both Congress and the Supreme Court due to the Bush Administration’s twice-imposed gag order — The BRAD BLOG broke the exclusive news of her promise to break the gag in order to relate the entire story to any U.S. mainstream broadcast media outlet willing to allow her to do so. Despite that story itself having made news in papers across the globe, nobody in the U.S. mainstream broadcast media took her up on her offer.

In November that year, legendary “Pentagon Papers” whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg guest blogged at The BRAD BLOG, describing Edmonds’ case as “far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers”. Still, the U.S. media ignored her.

Even CBS’ 60 Minutes — who ran a story on her in 2002 (which re-ran twice therafter), when she couldn’t speak at all about her case — chose not to tell her story once she had promised to tell all. That, even though Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), when asked about her credibility in their original piece said, “Absolutely, she’s credible…And the reason I feel she’s very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story.”

2005’s detailed exposé in Vanity Fair by investigative British investigative journalist David Rose, detailed extraordinary allegations that then Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL) was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations and bribes from Turkish interests tied into the drug-trade. Edmonds was said to have been the translator for FBI wiretaps in that case. Few in the media bothered to advance the story at all, even years later when, as Edmonds had years earlier predicted, the retired Hastert became a highly-paid lobbyist for Turkey.

And, as recently as last month, during our own recent interview with Edmonds while we were guest hosting the Mike Malloy Show (audio here, partial transcript here), she dropped details described as a “bombshell”, about the U.S. having retained “intimate relations” with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda through Turkish proxies right up until September 11, 2001. That interview has made news across the globe over the last several days (e.g. the Times of India coverage is here), yet it made nary a peep in the U.S. corporate mainstream.

Many other top U.S. officials are indicated to have been involved in the dark and sordid influence peddling, infiltration and treason as highlighted by a “Rogues Gallery” of photographs posted by Edmonds in 2007 without comment. Among the photos posted, in addition to Hastert’s: current and former Congressmembers Roy Blunt (R-MO), Dan Burton (R-IN), Tom Lantos (D-CA), Bob Livingston (R-LA) and Stephen Solarz (D-NY); current and former State and Defense Dept. officials including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Eric Edelman, Marc Grossman (specifically targeted by the landmark Sunday Times exposé), Brent Scowcroft and Larry Franklin; and photographs of a host of registered and non-registered Turkish lobbyists and agents.

Edmonds told The BRAD BLOG this afternoon that, though the DoJ has yet to timely answer her hand-delivered request for the revocation of the prior-issued “states secrets” privilege orders, she expects they may still intercede to quash her testimony before Saturday morning, when she’s currently scheduled to give her deposition at 10:30am in Washington D.C..

More details are available from Edmonds herself, on her planned deposition in Schmidt v. Krikorian at her blog, 123 Real Change…

UPDATE 8/6/09: Just heard from Edmonds who, in turn, has just heard from attorneys working on the case that they have been informed that Ohio Election Commission (OEC) regulations disallow media from attending depositions. So, despite Krikorian’s press release yesterday stating that her testimony would be “open to the media” (presuming it’s not blocked by the DoJ) it will not in fact be open to them now.

However, Edmonds tells us that Krikorian’s team will have their own videographer there to record it, and that tape is allowed to be released immediately after the proceeding. As well, court transcript should be available within 24 to 48 hours after the deposition.

Moreover, immediately following the deposition, attorneys from both sides will be able to speak to the media and answer any questions about it outside of the deposition room. If any media bother to cover it, that is.

(National Whistleblower Center’s update on this matter is now posted here.)

Edmonds still believes it’s likely that a last minute intervention by the DoJ, to block all or part of her testimony, will occur. As founder of the National Security Whistleblower’s Coalition (NSWBC) she relates that she’s seen a number of cases in which official whistleblower testimony is blocked at the last minute by DoJ attorneys who arrive with court orders just minutes beforehand, leaving no time for the opposition to challenge the ruling.

Though we’d planned to be on the road this Saturday, we’ll do our best to stay in touch as things move forward if at all possible.

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The Obama administration is quietly dusting off an effort to impose new federal quarantine regulations, which were vigorously resisted by civil liberties organizations and the airline industry when the rules were first proposed by the Bush administration nearly four years ago.

White House officials aren’t saying what their rules might ultimately require. But the previous administration proposed giving the federal government the authority to order a “provisional quarantine” of three business days — or up to six calendar days — for those suspected of having swine flu or other illnesses listed in a presidential executive order.

The Bush-era proposal would also have required airlines and cruise lines to store more information about domestic and international passengers, such as e-mail addresses, traveling companions and return flight information. The information would be subject to review by federal officials in a health emergency, though it would be voluntary for passengers to provide the data.

Opponents of the Bush administration’s efforts to enforce the new guidelines insist that they still are a mistake. “It’s not really going to help,” said Wendy Mariner, a professor of law and public health at Boston University. “The proposals to limit liberty represent a dangerous precedent to constitutional theory, particularly when there’s almost no evidence it will matter. … It wouldn’t surprise me if they try to sneak this past in August, when people are away.”

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget has set a September target date to complete the first major overhaul of the quarantine regulations in about three decades. That would have at least some of the rules in place if swine flu returns with a vengeance later this year, though officials are reluctant to make that link publicly.

“It’s important to public health to move forward with the regulations,” said Christine Pearson, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We need to update our quarantine regulations, and this final rule is an important step.”

Pearson said CDC had made “changes where appropriate” to the 2005 proposals, but she did not specify those adjustments.

An OMB spokesman, Tom Gavin, confirmed the rules submitted by the CDC in June were in “an interagency review process.”

Civil liberties groups and some public health experts question the value of the effort and not just on privacy grounds — they also contend that mandatory quarantine is unlikely to be an effective tool to contain swine flu or other diseases in the modern era.

“It doesn’t surprise me that when swine flu or any other epidemic is featured prominently in the news, we see a return to quarantine and other public health regulations,” said Christopher Calabrese of the American Civil Liberties Union, which sharply criticized the Bush-era proposal as too heavy-handed. “The enemy here isn’t the American people or sick people. It’s an illness. … Police officers with guns cannot make people obey a quarantine. In order for this to work, it has to be collaborative. They have to trust the government.”

Thus far, the Obama administration has gotten high marks from quarantine critics, particularly for rejecting suggestions that the U.S. close its border with Mexico during the initial swine flu outbreak. “The current administration quite rightfully resisted those calls,” Jennifer Nuzzo of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity said.

A report in The Washington Post on Tuesday signaled that the administration may lessen some of the more stringent measures recommended for swine flu earlier this year, such as school closures. Analysts said the administration may want to hold new quarantine powers in reserve, for unforeseen situations or for diseases other than the flu.

POLITICO spoke with about a half-dozen health policy experts and travel industry representatives who submitted comments about the rules the Bush administration proposed in 2005. None of those interviewed had heard that the Obama administration was in the process of reviving the plan, though some hailed the move.

“This is great news,” said Paula Steib of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, which generally supported the 2005 proposals.

“I do believe that the coming flu season and the prospect of a resurgence is the reason for the rushed response,” said Georgetown law professor Lawrence Gostin. “I have been calling for the federal government to finalize the CDC regulations for a long time now. They are so antiquated that they provide insufficient powers. … Much depends on what the final regulations actually say.”

While quarantines are sometimes imposed by state and local officials on uncooperative patients, federal quarantine has been almost unheard of in recent decades. Atlanta attorney Andrew Speaker was famously quarantined in 2007 for flying on international flights while infected with tuberculosis. The last reported federal quarantine before that was in 1963.

In recent months, American and British school groups — even New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin — have been quarantined in China by officials targeting swine flu. “They’ve gotten a lot of criticism from public health authorities,” Nuzzo said.

In April 2003, as severe acute respiratory syndrome spread through Asia, President George W. Bush issued an executive order adding that illness to the list of diseases that are grounds for a quarantine.

In April 2005, when avian flu hit hard overseas, Bush listed “influenza caused by novel or re-emergent influenza viruses that are causing, or have the potential to cause, a pandemic.” A variety of fearsome diseases were already subject to quarantine, including cholera, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox and viral hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola.

The CDC followed that November with the proposed regulations the Obama administration is now finalizing.

Bush administration officials said their proposal would have created a new appeals process for those served with quarantine orders. However, the proposed rules included no new judicial mechanism for review of quarantine orders. Those who objected to being held against their will should file habeas corpus petitions in federal court, guidance accompanying those rules suggested.

Officials said the proposed regulations focused mainly on detaining small numbers of individuals. However, the rules also discussed scenarios “when it is necessary to provisionally quarantine a large group of persons on a very short time frame.”

While any discussion of quarantine may stoke public fears of barbed wire camps filled with infected Americans or closures of international borders, public health experts said that sort of approach to H1N1 flu would not be effective.

“Particularly for flu, the disease is transmitted very rapidly. Within a few days, it’s all over the place,” Nuzzo said.

Critics also objected to a provision in the proposed rules that appeared to require anyone who knows that he or she has been exposed to or is suffering from a communicable illness to seek a “travel permit” from the director of the CDC before taking a train, a plane or even an automobile across state lines.

Agencies across the federal government are making preparations to deal with a serious flare-up of the H1N1 flu this winter. The Food and Drug Administration is overseeing expedited production of vaccines. And the military is considering a plan to give transportation and laboratory help to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the event of a major outbreak, CNN reported last week.

When the swine flu first grabbed headlines earlier this year, Obama administration officials deflected all questions about quarantines.

“Most quarantine authority is held at the local and state level, and we’re nowhere near that sort of a decision,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said at a news briefing in April.

Issuance of the new rules by the business-friendly Bush administration may have bogged down over the possible financial impact of forcing the travel industry to collect and keep more tracing data about passengers. CDC estimated that cost at between $118 million and $425 million.

In May, the airline industry wrote to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, asking her to enact the new quarantine rules while delaying the data collection provisions pending further review.

An HHS representative did not respond to requests for comment on the letter.

The still-pending proposed rules from 2005 can be viewed here.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0809/25814.html

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