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NEW FOREST SERVICE LAW ENFORCEMENT CHIEF LACKS CREDENTIALS

In an unprecedented step, the Chief of the U.S. Forest Service has appointed a new Director of Law Enforcement and Investigations who lacks any previous law enforcement experience, according to agency documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). To accommodate the move, the agency has hurriedly amended its manual to remove the requirement that the Director of Law Enforcement must be a peace officer, i.e., GS-1811 Criminal Investigator, and to allow the position "Top Secret access" without the normal background checks. On July 20, 2005, Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth named John Twiss, a long-time Forest Service employee who has spent a good portion of his career in staff positions within Washington. D.C. headquarters, as the Director of Law Enforcement and Investigations effective July 24. Twiss is the first person without any law enforcement qualifications or credentials to occupy the top law enforcement slot. In his new job, Twiss will oversee approximately 660 Special Agents and uniformed Law Enforcement Officers who investigate resource crimes, such as timber theft and fossil poaching, as well as a range of other crimes, such as clandestine drug labs, on 155 national forests and 20 national grasslands covering more than 193 million acres. In addition to his lack of experience, Twiss' appointment also reverses a decade of progress in increasing the professionalism of the Forest Service law enforcement program in that a civilian will be making decisions about how criminal and other sensitive investigations will be conducted. Twiss has also signaled he will seek to end the independence of the law enforcement program by making investigators answer to the forest supervisors and rangers who are often the subject of investigations or may be embarrassed by the outcomes of internal probes. After a series of scandals in the early 1990s involving cover-ups of timber-theft, illegal alien exploitation and prostitution, Congress mandated that the Forest Service law enforcement be independent of, or "stove-piped" from, the agency chain-of-command....

ATTACKS ON NATIONAL PARK LAW ENFORCEMENT HIT ANOTHER ALL-TIME HIGH

Threats, harassment and attacks against National Park Service rangers and U.S. Park Police officers reached a new record in 2004, according to agency records released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Chronically understaffed NPS law enforcement is facing growing homeland security needs and increasingly violent situations with static resources and little agency support. National Park Service commissioned law enforcement officers were victims of assaults 111 times in 2004, nearly a third of which resulted in injury. This figure tops the 2003 total of 106 assaults and the 2002 total of 98. Law enforcement work in the National Park Service is the most dangerous in federal service. National Park Service officers are 12 times more likely to be killed or injured as a result of an assault than FBI agents. Overall, NPS law enforcement has a morbidity rate triple that of the next worst federal agency....

Pentagon to Increase Domestic Surveillance for Counterterrorism

The Department of Defense has developed a new strategy in counterterrorism that would increase military activities on American soil, particularly in the area of intelligence gathering. The move is sparking concern among civil liberties advocates and those who fear an encroaching military role in domestic law enforcement. Critics say the fears raised by the Pentagon are being used as a justification for the military to conduct wider, more intrusive surveillance on American citizens. "Do we want, as a free people, with the notion of privacy enshrined in the Constitution and based on the very clear limits and defined role of government, to be in a society where not just the police, but the military are on the street corners gathering intelligence on citizens, sharing that data, manipulating that data?" asked former Rep. Bob Barr (search ), R-Ga., a constitutional law expert and civil libertarian. "This document provides a blueprint for doing just that." Barr said the new strategy is a back-door means of following through with a 2002 plan to create a massive, centralized information database using public and private records of individuals, called "Total Information Awareness." Congress killed TIA in 2003 because of civil liberties and privacy concerns....Go here(pdf) to view the new strategy....

Chertoff: Privacy fears not justified

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday that Americans need to ease their concerns about turning over personal information to the government - especially if they want to fly safe from terrorism. Chertoff said there is too much worry over a plan by the Transportation Security Administration to collect passengers' full names and birth dates before they board. "The average American gives information up to get a CVS (drugstore discount) card that is far more in-depth than TSA's going to be looking at," Chertoff told reporters and editors at USA TODAY's headquarters in McLean, Va. "But I actually make that case that giving up a little bit more information protects privacy." "Would you rather give up your address and date of birth to a secure database and not be pulled aside and questioned," he said, "or would you rather not give it up and have an increased likelihood that you're going to be called out of line and someone's going to do a secondary search of your bag and they're going to ask you a lot of personal questions in the full view of everybody else?" Chertoff vowed to implement Secure Flight, a plan by the federal government to screen out potential terrorists by scrutinizing the backgrounds of passengers....

Civil-liberties board struggles into existence

A civil-liberties board ordered by the U.S. Congress last year has never met to discuss its job of protecting rights in the fight against terrorism, and critics say it is a toothless, underfunded shell with inadequate support from President Bush. Lawmakers including some Republicans, civil-rights advocates, a member of the Sept. 11 Commission and a member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board have expressed concerns. Lanny Davis, the only prominent liberal among the five people Bush nominated after a six-month delay, said he had not received a call from anyone related to the board since it was formally announced in June. Davis said he could not comment on specifics because the members had not yet met. The inactivity comes at a time when Congress is nearing reauthorization of several provisions of the Patriot Act, a controversial law that gave the government new powers to go after suspected terrorists. The intelligence reform law of December 2004 called for the oversight board in response to a recommendation from the Sept. 11 Commission, which feared increased governmental powers needed to fight terrorism could erode civil liberties....

Big Brother and the Bureaucrats

In April, Mr. Bolton told Congress that when he was an under secretary at the State Department, he repeatedly circumvented the privacy protections that govern federal eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant. In Mr. Bolton's defense, it emerged that his actions were in keeping with a widespread - though unacknowledged - practice in Washington. This was fairly shocking news even to those with long experience overseeing or reporting on our security agencies, and it flies in the face of three decades of assurances by the government that it does not spy on its own citizens. Congress cannot let the controversy be rendered moot by Mr. Bolton's recess appointment. It should begin a broader investigation immediately. But even as enshrined in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the prohibition on domestic spying without a warrant has always been something of a legal fiction: the standard practice is to go ahead and eavesdrop on the conversations of foreigners, even if the party on the other end of the line is an American citizen. Summaries of these conversations are then routinely distributed throughout the relevant government agencies. The privacy of the American citizens involved is putatively preserved by replacing their names with the phrase "U.S. person" in the summary. During the Bolton hearings, however, it emerged that when he was at the State Department, Mr. Bolton on several occasions received summaries of intercepts between foreigners and "U.S. persons" and requested that the spy agency tell him who those Americans were. Without asking Mr. Bolton to show any cause for his request or going through a review process, the agency complied. Following this revelation, Newsweek discovered that from January 2004 to May 2005, the National Security Agency had supplied names of some 10,000 American citizens in this informal fashion to policy makers at many departments, other American intelligence services and law enforcement agencies....

Ex-lawmaker blasts Patriot Act

Most people would be hard-pressed to fill a room with card-carrying members of the National Rifle Association along with the American Civil Liberties Union without a shot being fired. But that's what former Republican Congressman Bob Barr did Tuesday night at Pensacola Junior College when he warned conservatives and liberals alike about the dangers of the USA Patriot Act. Some provisions of the law enacted in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks will expire in December. Congress, however, is expected to vote on renewing those provisions, which include unlimited roving wiretaps, home invasions without warrants, seizure of personal finance and medical records -- even what magazines you buy. He told those in attendance Tuesday that those "sunset provisions" violate the Bill of Rights and urged them to call their legislators. "We all lose," Barr said to about 100 people ranging from teens to senior citizens. "They have the right to invade your privacy, gain access to your information without a reasonable suspicion that you have done wrong. That's the essence of privacy and freedom." Retired special agent David A. Akerman, 59, joined the ACLU when President Bush signed the Patriot Act. "I spent 30 years dealing with terrorism insurgency and U.S. government security operations, and I see no need for it," Akerman said. "I never had trouble getting a warrant from a judge."....

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