FLE

U.S. Forest Service steps up enforcement On June 15 Joshua P. Geffre, age 19, and his girlfriend, age 17, of Lead were sentenced in Federal Court on charges of possession of alcohol and resisting or interfering with a Forest Service law enforcement officer. Geffre was also sentenced for operating a vehicle in a careless and reckless manner - an ATV -as well as failing to stop his vehicle when directed to do so by a Forest Service law enforcement officer. The court ordered Geffre to pay fines totaling $1,090 and sentenced him to 30 days in jail with 30 days suspended on the condition that Geffre not enter the Black Hills National Forest for a period of three years. Geffre was also ordered to not operate an ATV for a period of three years....and Kit Laney does time in the Federal pen. Thank you, David Iglesias.
Bush Blocked Eavesdropping Program Probe President Bush personally blocked a Justice Department investigation of the anti-terror eavesdropping program that intercepts Americans' international calls and e-mails, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday. Bush refused to grant security clearances for department investigators who were looking into the role Justice lawyers played in crafting the program, under which the National Security Agency listens in on telephone calls and reads e-mail without court approval, Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee. Without access to the sensitive program, the department's Office of Professional Responsibility closed its investigation in April. "It was highly classified, very important and many other lawyers had access. Why not OPR?" Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the committee chairman, asked Gonzales. "The president of the United States makes the decision," Gonzales replied. Later, at the White House, spokesman Tony Snow said the eavesdropping program is reviewed every 45 days by senior officials, including Gonzales. The president did not consider the Justice unit that functions as a legal ethics watchdog to be the "proper venue," Snow said....
U.S. Patriot Act OKs Business Wiretaps It has been found that when amending the Patriot Act this past March, the U.S. government added a clause permitting wiretaps and bugs for investigation of suspected antitrust law violations, such as price fixing. The revised law may cause significant damage to major Korean companies, the bulk of whose exports go to the U.S., as they could come under investigation on breaking antitrust laws by just making contact with competing firms. The Dong-A Ilbo confirmed the legislation data disclosed by the U.S. administration which shows that Section 113 of the Patriot Act amendments, passed by the U.S. Congress on March 7, now includes illegal monopolizing in trade and commerce, as stipulated in Sherman Anti-trust Act, in the list of crimes that fall under the Patriot Act. The amendments took effect two days later on March 9 with the signature by U.S. President George W. Bush. The revision, however, has not been advertised much in either the U.S. or Korea, so large Korean corporations have been unable to equip themselves for the change....
The Problem With Presidential Signing Statements Recently, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter, held a hearing about "presidential signing statements." Shortly thereafter, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in the Guantanamo Bay detainee case, Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, defining the balance of powers among this country's three branches of government. These may strike some as obscure legal niceties of little importance to Americans' daily lives. There is nothing new about a president adding a "statement on signing" to legislation he has approved. Since the country was founded, presidents have used these statements for relatively innocuous purposes: to thank supporters, explain their support for the bill or express satisfaction--or dissatisfaction--with legislation passed by Congress. What is new and troubling is the extraordinary frequency with which President Bush has used these statements, and the unorthodox way he uses them. The recent spate of presidential signing statements constitutes a threat to our country's system of checks and balances as surely as the Bush administration actions that the Hamdan ruling struck down did. Since he took office, Bush has used this device to object to more than 500 provisions in more than 100 pieces of legislation--nearly as many as the 575 signing statements issued by all of his predecessors combined. In these statements, the president often has claimed that the new laws violate the Constitution and signaled his intention not to enforce certain provisions, despite having signed them into law....
Judicial Supremacists Strike Again Who could have guessed that Osama bin Laden's driver/bodyguard would be one of the privileged few to be granted a hearing by the high and mighty U.S. Supreme Court justices! After refusing to hear appeals from thousands of Americans during the past year, the Court's liberals jumped at a chance to rule that President Bush was wrong. It wasn't compassion for Gitmo prisoner Salim Ahmed Hamdan. It was that Hamdan v. Rumsfeld offered an opportunity to proclaim judicial supremacy over both the other two branches of government and to slap the Bush Administration in the process. The Supreme Court had no business taking the Hamdan case. Congress had passed the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 withdrawing jurisdiction over Guantanamo prisoners' habeas corpus petitions from every "court, justice, or judge" except the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The Supreme Court did not, and could not, dispute Congress's power to do exactly that. The U.S. Constitution clearly grants this power to Congress. But the Court held that pending cases were exempt from this particular withdrawal of jurisdiction even though the law did not say that. Justice John Paul Stevens' majority decision ignored what Justice Scalia's dissent called a "plain directive," and (in the words of a primary sponsor of the Detainee Act, Senator Lindsey Graham) "made legal contortions to get the result the Court wanted."....
Retaliation Case Of Arab Specialist At FBI Advances The Justice Department has concluded there is "reasonable cause" to believe that senior FBI officials retaliated against the bureau's highest-ranking Arabic speaker for complaining that he was cut out of terrorism cases despite his expertise. An internal investigation by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility found "sufficient circumstantial evidence" that Special Agent Bassem Youssef was blocked from a counterterrorism assignment in 2002 after he and U.S. Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) met with FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to discuss Youssef's complaints. Mueller had approved a transfer for Youssef just days before the meeting, but it never occurred and Youssef was never informed of Mueller's decision, according to the report. Investigators also said the FBI "has provided no rationale" for its failure to promote Youssef, although one former senior FBI manager said Mueller was "appalled" that Youssef had complained to a congressman about his treatment. "We found both the awareness of senior management and the timing of the failure to implement the placement to be circumstantial evidence of retaliation," the report said. The 12-page report, dated last month and provided to The Washington Post yesterday by the office of Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), represents a rare endorsement of a whistle-blower's allegations by the Justice Department's internal review office. It also represents another setback for the FBI as it struggles to attract Arabic speakers and informants in its fight against Islamic extremists. "Because of this retaliation, we lost four years of expertise for the war on terror from a highly qualified Arab-American agent," Grassley said in a statement....
Homeland Security Department Is Accused of Credit Card Misuse Flat-bottomed rescue boats at double the retail price, $68,500 worth of unused dog booties, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of computers that somehow disappeared and a $227 beer brewing kit. These are just a few of the questionable purchases that Congressional auditors have found by digging through half a year of credit card records from the Homeland Security Department, including records for the months immediately after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last year. The audit, by the Government Accountability Office, which is due to be released Wednesday, concluded that the credit card misuse could probably have been avoided had the department completed a long-planned rulebook for its more than 9,000 employees who spent $420 million last year using government-issued credit cards. Instead, “due to a lack of leadership” at the department, the draft manual has never been finished, creating accounting weaknesses that “leave D.H.S. highly vulnerable to fraudulent, improper and abusive activity,” the audit says. The result is that in the five months examined, the investigators found that 45 percent of purchases did not have appropriate preauthorization by supervisors and that 63 percent did not include documentation stating whether the goods or services had been received. Congressional leaders, who requested the investigation, said they were once again disappointed at the lack of oversight of taxpayer dollars at the Homeland Security Department, which has already been blamed for up to $2 billion of waste and fraud related to the hurricanes last year....
To Agency Insiders, Cyber Thefts And Slow Response Are No Surprise Every day, an electronic wall guarding the Agriculture Department's servers is probed for holes 2,000 times by potential hackers and data thieves. The probes usually can't get through that wall. But on the first weekend in June, a hacker made it deep into one server, prompting an announcement late last month that personal information on 26,000 Washington area employees, contractors and retirees may have been compromised. To government officials responsible for information security and to outside experts, the intrusion -- and several recent security incidents at other agencies -- was no surprise. For the past five years, the department had received failing grades on a congressional report card for its information-security practices. The overall grade for federal agencies in 2005 was D-plus. In the past few weeks, the Agriculture incident was joined by cases of potentially compromised data at Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, the Federal Trade Commission, the Government Accountability Office, Housing and Urban Development, the Navy, and the Energy Department. The State Department also suffered a series of hacking attacks. The VA incident, with a loss of data on 26.5 million veterans and military personnel, drew the sharpest public attention. The data were later recovered. But officials and experts say that the frequency of the recent security incidents is not unusual, and that much more work needs to be done in the federal government to implement effective cybersecurity policies....See, there really is no problem with the Feds gathering and storing more and more date on each one of us. Really, no problem at all.
A Specter Is Haunting America The "findings" that precede Arlen Specter's National Security Surveillance Act are full of tough-sounding rhetoric about the limits of executive power, including former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's observation that "a state of war is not a blank check for the President." Unfortunately, the National Security Surveillance Act is. Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, portrays his legislation as a way of reasserting the roles of Congress and the courts in an area where President Bush has claimed unilateral authority. But if enacted, the bill would give a statutory blessing to warrantless surveillance and encourage the president's habit of doing whatever he considers appropriate to fight terrorism, regardless of what the other two branches say. No wonder the bill has been endorsed by the White House. The National Security Surveillance Act ostensibly would subject the monitoring of telephone calls and e-mail messages in terrorism investigations to judicial review. But instead of seeking approval for eavesdropping on particular suspects, as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (a law the president has been ignoring), the administration could ask the secret court established by that statute to authorize entire "electronic surveillance programs," which might involve thousands of unnamed targets. Unlike the administration's description of the warrantless surveillance the National Security Agency already is conducting, the communications monitored by these programs need not involve anyone outside the U.S.; they could be entirely domestic. And they need not involve suspected agents of terrorist organizations; a person "reasonably believed to have communication with or be associated with" a suspected agent of a terrorist organization would do. Hence anyone who talks to or spends time with a suspected terrorist, even unknowingly, would thereby become a legitimate target, and any communication between that person and anyone else could be monitored without a warrant. You could never safely assume your phone calls or e-mail messages were private, since either you or the person on the other end might have had inadvertent contact with a suspected terrorist. In case this understanding of permissible surveillance is not broad enough for the government's eavesdropping to pass judicial muster, Specter's bill also says the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court "may dismiss a challenge to the legality of an electronic surveillance program for any reason" (emphasis added). So even if there were valid statutory or constitutional arguments against a program, the court could dismiss them because it did not like the tie worn by the lawyer presenting them. Could the reason really be that frivolous? Since this court does not produce public opinions, we might never know. And did I mention that the bill allows the attorney general to move all lawsuits challenging the government's surveillance programs to the one court that can secretly dismiss them on a whim?....