Grumpasaurus.com

Every day these fuckers aren’t in front of a jury is a black mark on our nation’s reputation. No surprise, it was Cheney pushing for this.

Some of the advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants.
…
A decision to dispatch troops into the streets to make arrests has few precedents in American history, as both the Constitution and subsequent laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property.

The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures without probable cause. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from acting in a law enforcement capacity.

In the discussions, Mr. Cheney and others cited an Oct. 23, 2001, memorandum from the Justice Department that, using a broad interpretation of presidential authority, argued that the domestic use of the military against Al Qaeda would be legal because it served a national security, rather than a law enforcement, purpose.

“The president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States,” the memorandum said.

The memorandum — written by the lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty — was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked the department about a president’s authority to use the military to combat terrorist activities in the United States.

For those that don’t know, the use of the military on American soil against American citizens is unconstitutional and illegal six ways from Sunday. It has not been done since the Civil War. And yet, Cheney is a free man and Yoo still a tenured professor at UC Berkeley (though he has to teach elsewhere now).

One guy can get impeached for a blowjob.

Fifty can’t even get a dirty look for shredding the constitution and considering turning our country into a literal police state.

Yeah, that makes sense.

The Gates kerfluffle is silly, but this is the takeaway: in today’s America, you can be arrested for sassing police officers. Correction: arrested and/or tasered.

The historical sweep of the last 20 years, with the Bush era as a particular catalyst, combined with the advent of technological marvels that can subdue people without leaving marks has us hurtling toward an authoritarian state faster than I thought it possible.

Shorter version: small men in power + culture of fear + tasers == police state.

and she is Michelle “I heart Bush big time” Bachmann

It just ducked its head for a while

So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national media and little outcry from anyone. And it’s not difficult to see why. As the recent “overhaul” of the 30-year-old FISA law illustrated — preceded by the endless expansion of surveillance state powers, justified first by the War on Drugs and then the War on Terror — we’ve essentially decided that we want our Government to spy on us without limits. There is literally no police power that the state can exercise that will cause much protest from the political and media class and, therefore, from the citizenry.

And the last two have resulted in the complete destruction of your basic civil liberties.

Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Your data will never, ever be disappeared. This is essentially the newest ultimate expression of the fascist panopticon. Welcome to your GOP overlords.

Suggestions: If you must travel across borders with your laptop, use a high-security system (Linux, or in a pinch, a Mac) and if stopped, refuse to hand over your password or log in. You’ll almost certainly lose your laptop (for a bit), but your data will still be yours and what passes for privacy these days still secured… until quantum computers come out, that is.

Alternatively, pack a blank hard drive and hide your second. So long as your second (real) hard drive is still encrypted and not in obvious plain sight where it will be seized, you’ll be fully up and running as soon as you get out of Der Homeland’s sites… and they’ll be stuck with useless, false information.

I’m sensing a new business opportunity in database-destroying false information hard drives to savvy consumers. a) profit; b) privacy; c) civil liberties; and d) if we poison the database with bad information, it will lose all value. Any interested angel investors out there, give me a call.

I should point out that the policy is not all that new, just the publishing of it. Schneier has some other suggestions on how you can hide your data (encryption within encryption, among others)

You know, the one granting the executive the right to spy on American citizens without a warrant and granting all telecom companies retroactive immunity for helping this occur while the practice was patently illegal?

Also: fuck you, Democrats. We expect that from the GOP, but you guys? Screwed the pooch. I want my Constitution back!

or that free speech isn’t an illusion?

Watch as a 61 year old librarian gets “escorted” off of public property and ticketed for carrying a sign that says “McCain = Bush.”

Anyone? … *crickets*

The Bush Admnistration was directly involved in the method, extent, and forms of torture used against captured persons of (possible) interest.

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The fact that these people are still (mostly) running our government instead of being behind bars is probably the most accurate snapshot, and indictment, of our country today. Ruled by a clutch of undemocratic totalitarians, the America I grew up with is gone and our moral authority with it.

Jose Padilla sentenced to 17 years in prison

Jose Padilla, once accused of plotting with al Qaeda to blow up a radioactive “dirty bomb,” was sentenced Tuesday to 17 years and four months on terrorism conspiracy charges that don’t mention those initial allegations.

Padilla, an American citizen, was taken on U.S. soil (with Ashcroft holding a press conference to announce the grab of the dirty bomber), held without charges for 3.5 years,¹ in solitary confinement, denied access to an attorney, and tortured.² I’ve mentioned this before.

Without even going to the elements of what appears on the surface to be a Thought Crime more than an actual crime, there is no conceivable way by which this trial could be imagined to have been fair or Padilla’s civil rights upheld. Any one of the elements above would be sufficient in a system still beholden to the rule of law to create a mistrial; taken together the are a nightmare of coercion, duress, and authoritarianism.

This verdict is a black eye on the Department of Justice, the prosecuting attorneys who did not resign rather than try this case, the judge, the judicial system, the media, the Bush administration, and America.

Just fucking embarrassing.

I’m sure my shame and anger will comfort the now-physically and mentally broken Padilla while he’s in solitary confinement and on suicide watch for the next 17 years.

The Bush administration and the DoJ forwarded an argument in this case, and one that has apparently stood, that the President has the power to declare anyone – even a United States citizen – to be an enemy combatant and outside the jurisdiction of our system of laws. Again, I’ve talked about this before. Gentle reader, from the results of this case, you too could be deemed an enemy combatant. At any time. In any place.

I hope you like Uzbekistan. Or at least windowless rooms in hot climates. I also hope you aren’t too attached to your fingernails, skull, or skin.

Note: unlike John Cole, I don’t think this sentence is a rebuke to the Bush government. To reach that stage, you first have to accept the Bush-DoJ interpretation of enemy combatant and that this was a fair trial. A real rebuke would have dismissed the case. This is just mealy halfassed reasonableness by the judge.

Military Is Expanding Its Intelligence Role in U.S.

The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering.

The C.I.A. has also been issuing what are known as national security letters to gain access to financial records from American companies, though it has done so only rarely, intelligence officials say.

Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions receiving the letters usually have turned over documents voluntarily, allowing investigators to examine the financial assets and transactions of American military personnel and civilians, officials say.
…
But it was not previously known, even to some senior counterterrorism officials, that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have been using their own “noncompulsory” versions of the letters. Congress has rejected several attempts by the two agencies since 2001 for authority to issue mandatory letters, in part because of concerns about the dangers of expanding their role in domestic spying.

What we’ve got here is an agency that is forbidden from spying on citizens… spying on citizens… without a warrant… keeping the information in a database (read: forEVER)… and using this information in completely unaccountable, untold ways. Oh, and the Pentagon, NSA, and FBI are also in the act.

This is unconstitutional, illegal, and exceedingly dangerous. Whatever remained of our democracy is teetering on the brink of elimination.

Interesting how the righty jackasses screaming about jackbooted thugs in powder blue helmets are totally OK with this when there’s a Republican administration in charge. Idiots. Don’t you know that your names too are going to be on the list eventually?

… oooh, American Idol’s on!

Peter Gutmann does a cost analysis of Vista’s DRM and comes away… unimpressed.

Executive Summary

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called “premium content”, typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it’s not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista’s content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

Executive Executive Summary

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

…

Disabling of Functionality

Vista’s content protection mechanism only allows protected content to be sent over interfaces that also have content-protection facilities built in. Currently the most common high-end audio output interface is S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format). Most newer audio cards, for example, feature TOSlink digital optical output for high-quality sound reproduction, and even the latest crop of motherboards with integrated audio provide at least coax (and often optical) digital output. Since S/PDIF doesn’t provide any content protection, Vista requires that it be disabled when playing protected content. In other words if you’ve invested a pile of money into a high-end audio setup fed from a digital output, you won’t be able to use it with protected content. Similarly, component (YPbPr) video will be disabled by Vista’s content protection, so the same applies to a high-end video setup fed from component video.

…

Denial-of-Service via Driver Revocation

Once a weakness is found in a particular driver or device, that driver will have its signature revoked by Microsoft, which means that it will cease to function (details on this are a bit vague here, presumably some minimum functionality like generic 640×480 VGA support will still be available in order for the system to boot). This means that a report of a compromise of a particular driver or device will cause all support for that device worldwide to be turned off until a fix can be found. Again, details are sketchy, but if it’s a device problem then presumably the device turns into a paperweight once it’s revoked. If it’s an older device for which the vendor isn’t interested in rewriting their drivers (and in the fast-moving hardware market most devices enter “legacy” status within a year of two of their replacement models becoming available), all devices of that type worldwide become permanently unusable.

Not that Apple’s any better with their horrendous DRM schemas. FOSS, people, it’s all about the FOSS. Right down to the hardware.

The DRM is all about the money. Money for gigantic corporations that try to limit the when, where, and what you can see, read, or listen to. If they could patent eyeball glue and tie it to your corporate-logo’d monitor with criminal penalties if you looked away or blinked… they would.

Crippleware doesn’t have a history of success, and I’m confident that the community will find ways around this… but Vista is exhibit #50113 of how MSFT cares not a whit for the consumer… but immensely for the cash streams content providers.

Jose Padilla is an American citizen. With our current administration, what has happened to him could happen to any one of us at any time.

“Today is May 21,” a naval official declared to a camera videotaping the event. “Right now we’re ready to do a root canal treatment on Jose Padilla, our enemy combatant.”

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

The videotape of that trip to the dentist, which was recently released to Mr. Padilla’s lawyers and viewed by The New York Times, offers the first concrete glimpse inside the secretive military incarceration of an American citizen whose detention without charges became a test case of President Bush’s powers in the fight against terror. Still frames from the videotape were posted in Mr. Padilla’s electronic court file late Friday.

This is what the Bush administration believes is in its power to do to American citizens, particularly those dusky hued ne’er do wells.

Now lawyers for Mr. Padilla, 36, suggest that he is unfit to stand trial. They argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of “truth serums.”

…

In the brig, Mr. Padilla was denied access to counsel for 21 months. Andrew Patel, one of his lawyers, said his isolation was not only severe but compounded by material and sensory deprivations. In an affidavit filed Friday, he alleged that Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, “as part of an interrogation plan.”

Yes, the current administration believes that it can hold American citizens in detention indefinitely, without access to counsel or habeas corpus. They feel they can do this to anyone Bushigula decides is an “enemy combatant.”

Mr. Padilla’s situation, as an American declared an enemy combatant and held without charges by his own government, was extraordinary and the conditions of his detention appear to have been unprecedented in the military justice system.

The post 9/11 bedwetters in the public, aided by a timorous and sycophantic media, enabled the unelected authoritarians in the Bush administration (and the FBI and DoJ who had their wet dream laws all typed up and ready to go) to piss all over the Constitution.

Dr. Angela Hegarty, director of forensic psychiatry at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, N.Y., who examined Mr. Padilla for a total of 22 hours in June and September, said in an affidavit filed Friday that he “lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense.”

“It is my opinion that as the result of his experiences during his detention and interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation,” Dr. Hegarty said in an affidavit for the defense.

This could be you. Or your uncle. Or your mother. Or your nephew. Or your daughter.

What pressure that could be brought to bear has been with the result that Padilla has finally been charged… as a new defendant to an ongoing case in Miami (read: they did not have the evidence to file an independent case against him). Nowhere in this indictment are any of the big propaganda scare story accusations present.

Mr. Padilla was added as a defendant in a terrorism conspiracy case already under way in Miami. The strong public accusations made during his military detention — about the dirty bomb, Al Qaeda connections and supposed plans to set off natural gas explosions in apartment buildings — appear nowhere in the indictment against him. The indictment does not allege any specific violent plot against America.

Mr. Padilla is portrayed in the indictment as the recruit of a “North American terror support cell” that sent money, goods and recruits abroad to assist “global jihad” in general, with a special interest in Bosnia and Chechnya. Mr. Padilla, the indictment asserts, traveled overseas “to participate in violent jihad” and filled out an application for a mujahedin training camp in Afghanistan.

This could be you.

“During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body,” Mr. Patel said. “The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel.”

but Nicaragua is now officially on the Grumpy boycott list

Hopes among women’s groups in Nicaragua that President Enrique Bolaños would stop one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Latin America from taking effect have been dashed, as the president signed it into law late Friday.

Abortion has been illegal in Nicaragua for more than a century, and most women who decide to end unwanted pregnancies seek procedures at underground clinics. But the new law strikes out a clause that made it possible for a woman to obtain an abortion legally when three doctors certified that unless she did, her own life would be in danger.

For months, the proposed law has drawn fierce criticism from several local women’s groups, the country’s association of gynecologists, the United Nations, the World Health Organization and Human Rights Watch, among others.

“This is a throwback to the Middle Ages for women’s rights,” Juana Jiménez, the leader of the Women’s Autonomous Movement in Nicaragua, said after the law was passed.

Why mixing poor security design with a new technology the bureaucrats don’t understand and combining them with highly important, personally-identifying, required travel documents is a really, really bad combination

Six months ago, with the help of a rather scary computer expert, I deconstructed the life of an airline passenger simply by using information garnered from a boarding-pass stub he had thrown into a dustbin on the Heathrow Express. By using his British Airways frequent-flyer number and buying a ticket in his name on the airline’s website, we were able to access his personal data, passport number, date of birth and nationality. Based on this information, using publicly available databases, we found out where he lived, his profession, all his academic qualifications and even how much his house was worth.

It would have been only a short hop to stealing his identity, committing fraud in his name and generally ruining his life.

Great news then, we thought, that the UK had just begun to issue new, ultra-secure passports, incorporating tiny microchips to store the holder’s details and a digital description of their physical features (known in the jargon as biometrics). These, the argument went, would make identity theft much more difficult and pave the way for the government’s proposed ID cards in 2008 or 2009.

Today, some three million such passports have been issued, and they don’t look so secure. I am sitting with my scary computer man and we have just sucked out all the supposedly secure data and biometric information from three new passports and displayed it all on a laptop computer.

I have, of course, mentioned how the US is switching to RFID passports in the near future. Also, how to make a RFID jammer wallet… for what good it will do you.

The passage of the Torture Act Military Commissions Act continues to be a shame on America’s history and a danger to our civil liberties daily. Take, for example, the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri.

In 2001, al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar, was in the United States legally, on a student visa. He was a computer science graduate student at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, where he had earned an undergraduate degree a decade earlier. In Peoria, he lived with his wife and five children.

In December, 2001 he was detained as a “material witness” to suspected acts of terrorism and ultimately charged with various terrorism-related offenses, mostly relating to false statements the FBI claimed he made as part of its 9/11 investigation. Al-Marri vehemently denied the charges, and after lengthy pre-trial proceedings, his trial on those charges was scheduled to begin on July 21, 2003.

But his trial never took place, because in June, 2003 — one month before the scheduled trial — President Bush declared him to be an “enemy combatant.” As a result, the Justice Department told the court it wanted to turn him over to the U.S. military, and thus asked the court to dismiss the criminal charges against him, and the court did so (the dismissal was “with prejudice,” meaning he can’t be tried ever again on those charges). Thus, right before his trial, the Bush administration simply removed Al-Marri from the jurisdiction of the judicial system — based solely on the unilateral order of the President — and thus prevented him from contesting the charges against him.

Instead, the administration immediately transferred al-Marri to a miltiary prison in South Carolina (where the administration brings its “enemy combatants” in order to ensure that the executive-power-friendly 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has jurisdiction over all such cases). Al-Marri was given the “Padilla Treatment” — kept in solitary confinement, denied all contact with the outside world, including even his own attorneys, not charged with any crimes, and given no opportunity to prove his innocence. Instead, the Bush administration simply asserted the right to detain him indefinitely without so much as charging him with anything.

Last month, Congress endorsed this behavior and expressly vested the President with the power of indefinite, unreviewable detentions when it enacted the so-called Military Commissions Act of 2006.

If this doesn’t shock you into action or revolt your sense of justice and what it means to be American, then nothing will. As Greenwald notes, the US Department of Justice is now officially claiming that immigrants seized on our shores can be held indefinitely, with no recourse to any element of our judicial system. No habeas corpus, no open trials, no advocates for their cause, no fair trials.

I’m proud to be an American.

I have no idea what this country I’m currently residing in should be called.