FLE

USDA Using Satellites to Monitor Farmers

Satellites have monitored crop conditions around the world for decades, helping traders predict futures prices in commodities markets and governments anticipate crop shortages. But those satellite images are now increasingly turning up in courtrooms across the nation as the Agriculture Department's Risk Management Agency cracks down on farmers involved in crop insurance fraud. The Agriculture Department's Farm Service Agency, which helps farmers get loans and payments from a number of its programs, also uses satellite imaging to monitor compliance. Across government and private industry alike, satellite imaging technology is being used in water rights litigation and in prosecution of environmental cases ranging from a hog confinement facility's violations of waste discharge regulations to injury damage lawsuits stemming from herbicide applications. The technology is also used to monitor the forestry and mining industries. "A lot of farmers would be shocked at the detail you can tell. What it does is keep honest folks honest," said G.A. "Art" Barnaby Jr., an agricultural economist at Kansas State University. Satellite technology, which takes images at roughly eight-day intervals, can be used to monitor when farmers plant their acreage, how they irrigate them and what crops they grow. If anomalies are found in a farm's insurance claim, investigators can search satellite photos dating back years to determine cropping practices on individual fields....

National uniform driver's license law is 'nightmare'

An anti-terrorism law creating a national standard for all driver's licenses by 2008 isn't upsetting just civil libertarians and immigration rights activists.
State motor vehicle officials nationwide who will have to carry out the Real ID Act say its authors grossly underestimated its logistical, technological and financial demands. In a comprehensive survey obtained by The Associated Press and in follow-up interviews, officials cast doubt on the states' ability to comply with the law on time and fretted that it will be a budget buster. "It is just flat out impossible and unrealistic to meet the prescriptive provisions of this law by 2008," Betty Serian, a deputy secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, said in an interview. Nebraska's motor vehicles director, responding to the survey by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, said that to comply with Real ID her state "may have to consider extreme measures and possibly a complete reorganization." And a record-sharing provision of Real ID was described by an Illinois official as "a nightmare for all states." The law also demands that states link their record-keeping systems to national databases so duplicate applications can be detected, illegal immigrants caught and driving histories shared. State licenses that fail to meet Real ID's standards will not be able to be used to board an airplane or enter a federal building. The law, which was attached to a funding measure for the Iraq war last May, has been criticized by civil libertarians who contend it will create a de facto national ID card and new centralized databases, inhibiting privacy....

Pentagon grilled over database on war critics

Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Thursday asked for answers on an obscure Pentagon agency that included reports on student anti-war protests and other peaceful civilian demonstrations in a database meant to detect terrorist activities. “Under what circumstances can peaceful protests at universities or by anti-war groups be monitored?” Feinstein, D-Calif., wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “What authorities, and under what regulations, do military counterintelligence units have to conduct investigations on U.S. persons?” she wrote. At issue is a classified database of information about suspicious people and activity inside the United States that’s maintained by a three-year-old Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, whose size and budget also are classified. The database, which a Pentagon fact sheet says is meant to capture information “indicative of possible terrorist pre-attack activity,” came to light a month ago when NBC News obtained details on its contents. The Pentagon acknowledged including information on anti-war activities and other meetings that should have been removed....

Bush Authorized Domestic Spying Before 9/11

The National Security Agency advised President Bush in early 2001 that it had been eavesdropping on Americans during the course of its work monitoring suspected terrorists and foreigners believed to have ties to terrorist groups, according to a declassified document. The NSA's vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups. In its "Transition 2001" report, the NSA said that the ever-changing world of global communication means that "American communication and targeted adversary communication will coexist." "Make no mistake, NSA can and will perform its missions consistent with the Fourth Amendment and all applicable laws," the document says. However, it adds that "senior leadership must understand that the NSA's mission will demand a 'powerful, permanent presence' on global telecommunications networks that host both 'protected' communications of Americans and the communications of adversaries the agency wants to target." What had long been understood to be protocol in the event that the NSA spied on average Americans was that the agency would black out the identities of those individuals or immediately destroy the information. But according to people who worked at the NSA as encryption specialists during this time, that's not what happened. On orders from Defense Department officials and President Bush, the agency kept a running list of the names of Americans in its system and made it readily available to a number of senior officials in the Bush administration, these sources said, which in essence meant the NSA was conducting a covert domestic surveillance operation in violation of the law....

Guantanamo lawyers criticise tribunals

US military officers ordered to defend accused war criminals at Guantanamo base in Cuba have joined the outcry of activists assailing the court system for human rights violations. “It was horrific to sit there and watch this happen,” said Army Major Tom Fleener, who represented a Yemeni prisoner in pretrial hearings at Guantanamo this week. The nine Guantanamo prisoners charged so far are accused of conspiring with the Al Qaeda group to kill Americans in the September 11 attacks and on the battlefield. “We live in a country where we’ve spent a couple hundred years putting together a good system of justice where people have rights to counsel (of their choosing), people have rights to confront accusers, people have rights to evidence,” Fleener said. “None of that stuff is present in these hearings.” The five military defence lawyers appointed so far have challenged every aspect of the tribunals. Navy Lt Cmdr Charles Swift, who represents another Yemeni prisoner, has asked the Supreme Court to rule that US President George W Bush lacked authority to create the new court system rather than try the prisoners under existing civilian or military law....