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N.H. Leads Revolt Against Federal ID Rules

New Hampshire has suddenly become a battleground in the fight over privacy rights versus homeland security, with state legislators voting against strict new federal standards for issuing driver's licenses. At issue is the federal Real ID Act, which is intended to keep terrorists from getting fake IDs. It requires states by 2008 to verify documents such as birth certificates, Social Security cards and passports when people apply for driver's licenses. State databases with driver information and photos will also be linked. Last month, the Republican-controlled New Hampshire House voted overwhelmingly to bar the state from participating in the program. A vote in the GOP-dominated Senate is expected in two weeks. Democratic Gov. John Lynch remains undecided. The move has won backing from the American Civil Liberties Union as well as conservative privacy advocates and Christian fundamentalists. "I think New Hampshire will set the dominoes falling in the states," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program of the ACLU, who testified against Real ID at a recent state Senate hearing alongside a member of the conservative Cato Institute. "Who's going to say, `The emperor has no clothes?' New Hampshire's in a good position to do that." Legislation in other states would condemn Real ID, but New Hampshire's bill is the toughest measure making real progress anywhere, Steinhardt said. Republican state Rep. Neal Kurk, author of the bill against Real ID, gave a stirring speech during the debate. "I don't believe the people of New Hampshire elected us to help the federal government create a national identification card," Kurk told the House. "We care more for our liberties than to meekly hand over to the federal government the potential to ennumerate, track, identify and eventually control."....

Leaks of Military Files Resume

Just days after U.S. troops were ordered to plug a security breach at their base here, the black market trade in computer memory drives containing military documents was thriving again Monday. Documents on flash drives for sale at a bazaar across from the American military base over the weekend contained U.S. officers' names and cellphone numbers and instructions on using pain to control prisoners who put up resistance. A study guide on one of the drives describes tactics for interrogating and controlling detainees by pinching or striking nerve and pressure points on their face, neck, arms and legs. Traders at the bazaar near Bagram's main gate were openly displaying pilfered U.S. military memory drives in their shops Monday, two weeks after the Los Angeles Times reported on the black market in computer equipment, some of which contained American military documents marked "Secret." U.S. soldiers spent thousands of dollars later that week buying scores of flash memory drives from the bazaar. The soldiers walked through the black market with a box of money, purchasing all the computer equipment they could find. For several days afterward, no more memory drives were available. But an 18-year-old Afghan man who works on the base said that by Friday, memory drives were being smuggled off the base again. The devices are smaller than disposable lighters. Several shopkeepers have said in recent days that they are eager for the military to return to the market so they can sell their new stock for premium prices. Some of the memory drives for sale earlier this month listed the names, addresses and photographs of Afghan spies providing information to U.S. Special Forces. Others that were also marked "Secret" included American military officials' view that the Taliban and their allies were using bases in Pakistan to launch attacks in Afghanistan. One had maps dated Dec. 1, 2001, the day after U.S. and Afghan militia forces began their offensive at Tora Bora, that described possible escape routes of Osama bin Laden. The routes in the maps start not at Tora Bora, where many had thought Bin Laden was at the time, but in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar. Some of the drives contained sensitive documents that had been deleted but could be retrieved with software available on the Internet....

Cleric Wins Appeal Ruling Over Wiretaps

An appellate court on Tuesday directed a lower court to consider statements by a Muslim cleric in northern Virginia that he had been illegally wiretapped under the warrantless eavesdropping program that President Bush authorized. The ruling opened the door to what could be the first ruling by a federal court on whether information obtained under the program, operated by the National Security Agency, had been improperly used in a criminal prosecution. The cleric, Ali al-Timimi, who was sentenced to life in prison last year for inciting his Muslim followers to violence, is challenging his conviction because he says he suspects that the government failed to disclosed illegal wiretaps of his e-mail messages and telephone conversations. In an order released on Tuesday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit did not rule on the merits of Mr. Timimi's assertions about the N.S.A. program, but sent the case back to the federal trial court in Alexandria, Va., for a rehearing. The appellate court gave the trial judge in the case, Leonie M. Brinkema, broad latitude, saying the trial court could "order whatever relief or changes in the case, if any, that it considers appropriate." A number of defendants in terrorism cases around the country have sought to challenge their prosecutions on the ground that evidence against them may have been garnered from undisclosed wiretaps. Mr. Timimi's case is the first to result in a rehearing on the challenges....

European Inquiry Says C.I.A. Flew 1,000 Flights in Secret

Investigators for the European Parliament said Wednesday that data gathered from air safety regulators and others found that the Central Intelligence Agency had flown 1,000 undeclared flights over European territory since 2001. Sometimes the planes stopped to pick up terrorism suspects who had been kidnapped to take them to countries that use torture, the investigators added. The operation used the same American agents and the same planes over and over, they said, though they could not say how many flights involved the transport of suspects. The investigation, by a committee looking into C.I.A. counterterrorism activities in Europe, also concluded that European countries, including Italy, Sweden and Bosnia and Herzegovina, were aware of the abductions or transfers and therefore might have been complicit. The report, the first of several planned by the Parliament, grew out of three months of hearings, including testimony by human rights advocates and individuals who said they had been kidnapped by United States agents and flown to other countries, including Egypt and Afghanistan, where they were tortured. As for the question of secret C.I.A. detention centers in Europe, the new report offered no hard evidence....

Port Workers to Undergo Background Checks

Following months of criticism about security gaps at the nation's seaports, the Bush administration is requiring background checks for port workers to look for links to terrorism and ensure they are legal U.S. residents. The heightened scrutiny — which will begin immediately — drew praise Tuesday from some lawmakers and port associations that said the checks were long overdue. Others jeered the security measures as either too weak or too invasive of workers' privacy rights. Names of an estimated 400,000 employees who work in the most sensitive areas of ports will be matched against government terror watch lists and immigration databases, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said. They will be among roughly 750,000 workers — including truckers and rail employees — who have unrestricted access to ports and will be required to carry tamper-resistant identification cards by next year. "What this will do is it will elevate security at our ports themselves so that we can be sure that those who enter our ports to do business come for legitimate reasons and not in order to do us harm," Chertoff said. The background checks will not examine workers' criminal history, although Chertoff left open that possibility for the future. How much the background checks will cost was not immediately available. The Bush administration has been under fire for months for what critics call holes in security measures at ports, which were highlighted after a Dubai company's purchase of a British firm gave it control of six American ports. An outcry in Congress led the Dubai company, DP World, to decide to sell the U.S. operations to an American firm. Congress is considering port security legislation this week, prompting some to question the sincerity and timing of Chertoff's announcement....

Rumsfeld sued over Pentagon's recruiting database

Six New York teen-agers sued Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld on Monday, alleging the U.S. Department of Defense broke the law by keeping an extensive database on potential recruits. The suit in federal court in Manhattan follows a series of allegations last year of misconduct by recruiters, who have experienced difficulty meeting targets because of the war in Iraq. The Pentagon last year acknowledged it had created a database of 12 million Americans, full of personal data such as grades and Social Security numbers, to help find potential military recruits. The Pentagon has defended the practice as critical to the success of the all-volunteer U.S. military, and said it was sensitive to privacy concerns. But the suit alleges the Pentagon improperly collected data on people as young as 16 and kept it beyond a three-year limit, and said that the law does not allow for keeping records on race, ethnicity, gender or social security numbers. Although the database was created in 2003, before the U.S. military started missing recruiting targets, the Pentagon first revealed the program in the federal register last year just has it was hit by other recruiting scandals. The plaintiffs -- all 16- and 17-year-old students from the New York area -- were approached by military recruiters even after demanding that their information be stricken from the database, Lieberman said....

Federal Victory in Terror Case May Prove Brief, Experts Say

Despite predictions that their victory might not hold up on appeal, federal prosecutors on Wednesday savored their victory in a Sacramento courtroom, where a jury a day earlier convicted an American born in Pakistan of providing support to a terrorist group and lying to investigators. McGregor W. Scott, the United States attorney who oversaw the prosecution, said in a telephone interview Wednesday that the conviction of the man, Hamid Hayat, 23, showed that the government was capable of winning a jury trial on terrorism charges after a number of high-profile failures elsewhere. "In this post-9/11 context, those of us in law enforcement have been tasked with preventing new acts of terrorism, trying to stop something from happening, rather than after the fact trying to establish what happened," Mr. Scott said. "This is a difficult task and a new mission. We have shown in this case and this trial and conviction that we can succeed in that mission." But legal experts said the prosecution's celebration might be short-lived because a federal appeals court had twice ruled unconstitutional some aspects of the law on which Mr. Hayat was convicted. They also said Mr. Hayat's reported confessions to F.B.I. agents could be challenged on the ground they were coerced from a frightened suspect with a limited command of English. Professor Cole said the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which sits in San Francisco and covers the Sacramento federal court district, had twice ruled the material-support law unconstitutionally vague because it did not require proof of any overt act....

Airlines balk at epidemic safeguards

Concerned about bird flu, federal health officials want airlines to collect personal information about domestic and international passengers to help track a potential epidemic. Financially strapped airlines say creating such a database would impose staggering new costs. "What we're asking for is the authority to collect the information in the context of modern travel on airlines," Dr. Marty Cetron, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's director of global migration and quarantine, said Tuesday in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "There's just a number of conditions where acting quickly with electronic access to passenger information is going to make a lot of difference," Cetron said. The CDC wants to be able to easily find, notify and recommend treatment to airline passengers who have been exposed to bird flu as well as such diseases as plague, dengue fever or SARS — even if the travelers' symptoms don't appear while they're traveling. The CDC plan calls for airlines to ask passengers their full name and address, emergency contact numbers and detailed flight information. Airlines would have to keep the data for 60 days and, if asked, transmit it to the CDC within 12 hours. The Air Transport Association, which represents major airlines, said the plan "represents an unwarranted and insupportable burden on an industry sector that can ill afford it." ATA lawyer Katherine Andrus said in an interview that the CDC plan wouldn’t work because of cost, technological difficulty and the time needed to fill out the forms. “We don’t think that, as proposed, this is a workable approach,” Andrus said....