FLE

Border drug smugglers threaten deputy's family

Likely drug gangsters have threatened the families of county sheriff's deputies in Texas who thwarted two recent smuggling operations at the U.S.-Mexico border. The San Antonio Express-News quotes Hudspeth County Chief Deputy Mike Doyal as saying three men inside a black and red Ford Bronco approached the wife of one of the deputies last Thursday and made a threat before driving across the Rio Grande into Mexico. As WorldNetDaily reported, in the last several days, there have been two incursions into the U.S. about 50 miles east of El Paso, Texas, by armed men thought to be Mexican troops. The incident on Jan. 23 involved Mexican military Humvees towing what appeared to be thousands of pounds of marijuana across the Rio Grande. Thirty American agents were part of that standoff, including the sheriff's deputies. Speaking of last Thursday's threat to a deputy's wife, Doyal said, "They told her that her husband and the other officers needed to stay off the river down there." On Friday, a Hudspeth deputy in the Fort Hancock area received information a cartel was talking about putting together a "death squad" to target the deputies, Doyal told the Express-News. According to the report, the three deputies who were targeted were the same who witnessed the failed Jan. 23 incursion. On that day, Border Patrol agents called for backup after seeing that apparent Mexican army troops had several mounted machine guns on the ground more than 200 yards inside the U.S. border....
Texas boosts border watch

Gov. Rick Perry, declaring Thursday that Texans must combat escalating crime and drug violence along the Mexican border, announced "Operation Rio Grande" to ramp up law enforcement from El Paso to Brownsville. "There is a great concern that the drug trade is becoming more aggressive, but also terrorist organizations are seeking to exploit our porous border," Perry said, flanked by dozens of border-area sheriffs and deputies wearing cowboy hats and star-shaped badges. The governor also placed the State Operations Center on highest alert, meaning members of four state agencies will work around the clock supporting the new operation. The emergency status is typically reserved for natural disasters such as hurricanes. Perry declined to reveal the cost of Operation Rio Grande or how many extra law enforcement officers it deploys to the border. The new initiative follows his December announcement of $10 million in state aid for "Operation Linebacker," which lets local law enforcement provide greater support to U.S. border officers....

Border violence alarms Chertoff

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, concerned about rising border violence, said yesterday nearly $1 billion in next year's proposed $42.7 billion department budget will be used for new U.S. Border Patrol agents, upgraded electronic security measures, and more fences, roads, and detention beds. "There has been an over-100 percent increase in the last fiscal year in border violence aimed at our Border Patrol agents, and that ranges from gunshots fired across the border to rocks being thrown, sometimes flaming rocks, and let me tell you, rockings are serious," Mr. Chertoff said at a press conference in Washington. "We are not going to tolerate this kind of behavior ... if they think they're going to back us down or chase us away, the answer to that is no. Our Border Patrol is properly trained. They have rules of engagement. They are entitled to defend themselves. They will defend themselves. We will support them in applying these rules of engagement," he said. Border Patrol Chief David V. Aguilar noted there had already been 192 assaults on his agents since the start of the new fiscal year in October. Mr. Chertoff said much of the border violence has been the result of increased enforcement efforts by the U.S. government, but that the department was committed to securing the nation's borders as part of the strategy that "involves not only apprehensions at the border, but detention, removal and more vigorous work site enforcement." The new budget calls for $458.9 million for 1,500 new Border Patrol agents, doubling the number of agents added to 3,000 since 2005. This represents a 42 percent increase in the agent work force since the September 11 attacks....

Patriot Act Compromise Clears Way for Senate Vote

Efforts to extend the USA Patriot Act cleared a major hurdle yesterday when the White House and key senators agreed to revisions that are virtually certain to secure Senate passage and likely to win House approval, congressional leaders said. The proposal would restrict federal agents' access to library records, one of the Patriot Act's most contentious provisions. A form of secret subpoena known as a National Security Letter could no longer be used to obtain records from libraries that function "in their traditional capacity, including providing basic Internet access," Sununu and others said in a statement. But libraries that are "Internet service providers" would remain subject to the letters, Durbin said. The Senate proposal would no longer require National Security Letter recipients to tell the FBI the identity of their lawyers. The compromise bill also addresses "Section 215 subpoenas," which are granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. Recipients of such subpoenas originally were forbidden to tell anyone about the action. The proposed Senate measure would allow them to challenge the "gag order" after one year, rather than the 90-day wait in earlier legislation. Sununu said the administration insisted on the longer waiting period. "You now have a process to challenge the gag order," he said, defending the concession. "That didn't exist before." Sununu said he and his allies were disappointed that the compromise does not require agents to "show a connection to a suspected terrorist or spy" before obtaining a Section 215 subpoena. Instead, a FISA judge would have to agree that there are reasonable grounds to believe the items being sought are relevant to an investigation into terrorism....

US plans massive data sweep

The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity. The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy. The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year. A major part of ADVISE involves data-mining - or "dataveillance," as some call it. It means sifting through data to look for patterns. If a supermarket finds that customers who buy cider also tend to buy fresh-baked bread, it might group the two together. To prevent fraud, credit-card issuers use data-mining to look for patterns of suspicious activity. What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as "entities" - linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va. The storage requirements alone are huge - enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities, the report estimated. If each entity were a penny, they would collectively form a cube a half-mile high - roughly double the height of the Empire State Building. But ADVISE and related DHS technologies aim to do much more, according to Joseph Kielman, manager of the TVTA portfolio....

Specter wants special court to supervise surveillance

A special federal court would be given power to supervise the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program under a bill being written by a key Senate Republican. Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in an interview Wednesday that he wants to "assert Congress' constitutional authority" while allowing the anti-terrorism program to continue under court supervision. Specter said he hopes to work with President Bush on the bill but is trying to build a bipartisan coalition to override a potential presidential veto. Bush and Specter haven't discussed the bill, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. On Monday, Specter held a Judiciary Committee hearing in which he and other senators told Attorney General Alberto Gonzales they had doubts about the program's legality. "We welcome ideas that they have," McClellan said. Specter said his proposal would empower the court established by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to review the National Security Agency's domestic anti-terrorist surveillance every 45 days to ensure it does not go beyond limits described by the administration. Currently, Bush himself reviews the program and signs off on its continuation every 45 days....

Judge Gives U.S. Wiretap Response Deadline

A federal judge gave the government two months to respond to an Ohio trucker's request that his terrorism conviction be thrown out on grounds that the government illegally spied on him. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema cited "the potentially weighty issues raised in the defendant's motion" in an order Wednesday that set a 60-day timetable for the government to respond to Iyman Faris' arguments. Faris' challenge is among the first to seek evidence of warrantless electronic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, a practice that began after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Government officials have reportedly credited eavesdropping with uncovering terrorist plots, including one by Faris to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. Critics say President Bush didn't have authority to order the wiretaps, but he has staunchly defended the practice. At his sentencing, prosecutors acknowledged that federal agents were led to Faris by a telephone call intercepted in another investigation....

Passenger Security Check Program Scrapped

An ambitious program to check every domestic airline passenger's name against government terrorist watch lists may not be immune from hackers, a congressional investigator said Thursday. And because of security concerns, the government is going back to the drawing board with the program called Secure Flight after spending nearly four years and $150 million on it, the Senate Commerce Committee was told. Transportation Security Administration chief Kip Hawley did not say whether any security breaches had been discovered. An agency spokeswoman, Amy von Valter, told reporters, "We don't believe any passenger information has been compromised." Cathleen Berrick, the investigator for the Government Accountability Office, said in written testimony that "TSA may not have proper controls in place to protect sensitive information." Currently, airlines check the names of passengers against watch lists that the government gives them. Under Secure Flight the government would take over from the airlines the task of checking names against watch lists. According to the GAO testimony, Secure Flight was given formal authority to go live in September, but a government team found that the system software and hardware had 82 security vulnerabilities....

Overkill: The Latest Trend in Policing

On Jan. 24, a SWAT team in Fairfax shot and killed Salvatore J. Culosi Jr., an optometrist who was under investigation for gambling. According to a Jan. 26 front-page story in The Post, Culosi had emerged from his home to meet an undercover officer when a police tactical unit swarmed around him. An officer's gun discharged, killing the suspect. Culosi, police said, was unarmed and had displayed no threatening behavior. It's unlikely that the officer who shot Culosi did so intentionally. But it's also unlikely that the investigation into this shooting will address why police sent a military-style unit to arrest an optometrist under investigation for a nonviolent crime and why the officers had their guns drawn when approaching a man with no history of violence. This isn't the first time a SWAT team in Virginia has killed someone while serving a gambling warrant. In 1998 a team in Virginia Beach conducted a 3 a.m. raid at a private club believed to be involved in organized gambling. Security guard Edward C. Reed was sitting in a parked car outside the club, which had been robbed a few months earlier. As the black-clad police team raided, a few officers confronted Reed, who had fallen asleep. Reid awoke and, probably startled by the sight of armed men outside his car, reached for his gun. The SWAT team shot and killed him. Reed's last words were, "Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book." During the past 15 years, The Post and other media outlets have reported on the unsettling "militarization" of police departments across the country. Armed with free surplus military gear from the Pentagon, SWAT teams have multiplied at a furious pace. Tactics once reserved for rare, volatile situations such as hostage takings, bank robberies and terrorist incidents increasingly are being used for routine police work. Eastern Kentucky University's Peter Kraska -- a widely cited expert on police militarization -- estimates that SWAT teams are called out about 40,000 times a year in the United States; in the 1980s, that figure was 3,000 times a year. Most "call-outs" were to serve warrants on nonviolent drug offenders....

First duty is to yourself

The law says you must act like a coward. In your own home. Even when your life is threatened. Many states have criminal-friendly "duty to retreat" laws. A victim in his house is mandated to retreat from an attacker until he is cornered. Only then is the prey allowed to use lethal force on the predator. Prosecutors in those states have been known to victimize the victim (such as charging him with manslaughter) who prefers to fire back rather than to back off. The National Rifle Association has been trying to end the insanity state by state. Florida came to its senses last year. It enacted a law based on the "Castle Doctrine" -- that one's home is one's castle. A person now is not legally required to be hunted down room by room by an intruder before the victim pulls the trigger. The law allows the victim to shoot back without fear of being prosecuted for being overzealous about protecting his life. And it prohibits criminals from suing their more aggressive victims. All their victims, actually. "Somebody should not be twice victimized, first by the assailant and then by the legal system trying to destroy his life," says Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, the largest organization representing gun owners after the NRA. But the Florida law does more. Car-jackers beware; now one's car is his mobile castle. And better still, if a victim is not in a home or car, now he legally can use deadly force. Sunshine State criminals without a death wish might want to consider career counseling. Or take Horace Greeley's advice to go west. But if they do, they had better hurry. Wyoming is the latest battleground. The NRA is lobbying there and in 11 other states to repeal duty-to-retreat laws....