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Mandatory deportation has illegals on the run Thousands of Hispanics have fled the Tulsa, Okla., area in the shadow of a looming state law that limits benefits and mandates deportation for illegal aliens, according to a report from KTUL television in Tulsa. The state of Oklahoma recently approved a new law that requires deportation for illegal aliens who are arrested, and limits benefits and jobs to those individuals. The report said in East Tulsa, where a community of Hispanics has grown over recent years, there's been a sudden drop in population. Business owner Simon Navarro has been in business there 11 years, and said the tough law has chased away 30 percent of the state's Hispanic population. "Two months ago I heard 25,000 Hispanics have left Oklahoma," he told the station. "They are leaving. A lot have already left. "People are leaving," he said. "They're scared of the sheriff." Deputies from the Tulsa County sheriff's office are going through training to handle the apprehension and deportation procedures that are being set up. Their training will prepare them to handle the multiple duties of deputy sheriff as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. When they are finished they will be prepared to identify illegal aliens who commit crimes, and make sure they are deported. Officials say many of those departing apparently are heading either to Kansas or Arkansas. But that may not be for long, since Arkansas is about to adopt a law similar to Oklahoma's, and Kansas is considering a similar move....
New hiring law spurs identity-theft fears The fake-document trade is booming in Arizona. It's about to get even bigger. Hundreds of operations around the Valley churn out fake green cards, Social Security cards and driver's licenses by the thousands, authorities say. Their chief customers: illegal immigrants. Some are trying to land jobs in Arizona. Some are passing through Phoenix, a major smuggling hub, on the way to other states. Most of the fake documents bought on the street by undocumented immigrants are made with bogus numbers. But authorities fear the industry will grow as migrants look for ways to circumvent the state's new employer-sanctions law and a new Bush administration crackdown on illegal workers. The push for more documents, especially with authentic numbers, is expected to spur more identity theft....
Justice comes 40 years late as judge blames FBI for two men's wrongful murder convictions For three decades, Marie Salvati and Olympia Limone essentially lived as widows, struggling to make ends meet as each raised four children on her own. Their husbands grew old behind bars after being convicted of a murder the FBI knew they did not commit. Now the women hope a judge's ruling awarding them and two other families nearly $102 million (€76 million) marks the end of their struggle in a long story of love, devotion and survival. For many years, the two women would see each across the visiting room of a state prison. Usually, they just waved or asked after each other's families; they didn't really need words to understand the sad lives they shared. In the days after the judge's ruling last month blaming the FBI for the men's wrongful convictions, the two women and their husbands spoke to The Associated Press about living apart for so long, and the bonds that kept them together. The judge found two Boston FBI agents had allowed Barboza to frame the men because Barboza and his friend, Vincent "Jimmy" Flemmi, one of Deegan's killers, were FBI informants who provided evidence in the agency's highly publicized war against crime bosses....
Editorial - Eye on the Homeland POWERFUL intelligence satellites have been used domestically for years on an ad hoc basis -- for example, to assess damage after a natural disaster, to help with security at major events or for scientific studies. The FBI called in spy satellite help when tracking the Washington area snipers. Now, the Bush administration is forming a unit within the Department of Homeland Security to enable more routine domestic use of satellite imagery -- for purposes such as protecting the borders and helping local law enforcement. The administration's plan makes sense. But it is essential that these capabilities be used carefully, with due regard for Americans' privacy concerns and with careful monitoring, including congressional oversight. There is, we agree with civil libertarians, a creepy, Big Brother feel to the notion of an invisible eye snapping pictures from above. But this kind of technology is less invasive than surveillance cameras in public places, which proved their usefulness after terrorist bombings in London. The intrusive capacity of the spy satellites may be greater than that of the satellites that produce images used by Google Earth, but officials insist that they are nowhere near the detect-activity-through-walls powers imagined by producers of television dramas. "We're not looking inside bunkers, we're not looking inside houses," Charles Allen, chief intelligence officer for the Department of Homeland Security, told us. The greater use of this technology must be accompanied, however, by robust protections for privacy and civil liberties. It must be carefully reviewed within the executive branch and by Congress. Some capabilities may need to remain classified, but a change this significant ought to be publicly debated to the fullest extent possible, and there should be continued public disclosure about how much surveillance is being conducted for what purposes....
Terror Suspect List Yields Few Arrests The government's terrorist screening database flagged Americans and foreigners as suspected terrorists almost 20,000 times last year. But only a small fraction of those questioned were arrested or denied entry into the United States, raising concerns among critics about privacy and the list's effectiveness. A range of state, local and federal agencies as well as U.S. embassies overseas rely on the database to pinpoint terrorism suspects, who can be identified at borders or even during routine traffic stops. The database consolidates a dozen government watch lists, as well as a growing amount of information from various sources, including airline passenger data. The government said it was planning to expand the data-sharing to private-sector groups with a "substantial bearing on homeland security," though officials would not be more specific. Few specifics are known about how the system operates, how many people are detained or turned back from borders, or the criteria used to identify suspects. The government will not discuss cases, nor will it confirm whether an individual's name is on its list. Slightly more than half of the 20,000 encounters last year were logged by Customs and Border Protection officers, who turned back or handed over to authorities 550 people, most of them foreigners, Customs officials said. FBI and other officials said that they could not provide data on the number of people arrested or denied entry for the other half of the database hits. FBI officials indicated that the number of arrests was small. The government says the database is a powerful tool for identifying and tracking suspected terrorists and for sharing intelligence, and that its purpose is not necessarily to make arrests. But the new details about the numbers, disclosed in an FBI budget document and in interviews, raise questions about the database's effectiveness and its impact on privacy, critics said. They argued that the number of hits relative to arrests was alarmingly high and indicated that the threshold for including someone on a watch list was too low, potentially violating thousands of Americans' civil liberties when they are stopped....
Telecom Firms Helped With Government's Warrantless Wiretaps The Bush administration acknowledged for the first time that telecommunications companies assisted the government's warrantless surveillance program and were being sued as a result, an admission some legal experts say could complicate the government's bid to halt numerous lawsuits challenging the program's legality. "[U]nder the president's program, the terrorist surveillance program, the private sector had assisted us," Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said in an interview with the El Paso Times published Wednesday. His statement could help plaintiffs in dozens of lawsuits against the telecom companies, which allege that the companies participated in a wiretapping program that violated Americans' privacy rights, former Justice Department officials said. Warrantless surveillance began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and was placed under supervision of a special court in January. An appeals court in San Francisco is weighing the government's argument that these cases should be thrown out on the grounds that the subject matter is a "state secret" and that its disclosure would jeopardize national security. The government has repeatedly asserted that any relationship between the telecommunications firms and the National Security Agency's spy program is classified. The firms' alleged cooperation and other details of the program, government lawyers have argued, are so sensitive that they cannot be disclosed. The government has argued the lawsuits against the telecom firms must be dismissed....
Defense Department drops TALON The U.S. Department of Defense has announced it plans to shut down the TALON reporting system because of a drop in the number of reports. The DoD says it will maintain a record copy of the collected data in accordance with intelligence oversight requirements after TALON closes down by Sept. 17. In 2005 the system came under fire for the improper storage of information about some civilian individuals and non-government-affiliated groups in its database. After a review the DoD removed the information that was deemed unnecessary from the database. Established in 2002, TALON stands for Threat and Local Observation Notices. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz created the system as a way to collect and evaluate information about possible threats to U.S. service members and defense civilians at stateside and overseas military installations. A replacement for TALON is currently under way. All information concerning force protection threats in the interim will go to the FBI’s Guardian reporting system, Keck said....
C.I.A. Details Errors It Made Before Sept. 11 A report released Tuesday by the Central Intelligence Agency includes new details of the agency’s missteps before the Sept. 11 attacks, outlining what the report says were failures to grasp the role being played by the terror mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and to assess fully the threats streaming into the C.I.A. in the summer of 2001. The 19-page report, prepared by the agency’s inspector general, also says 50 to 60 C.I.A. officers knew of intelligence reports in 2000 that two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, may have been in the United States. But none of those officers thought to notify the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the potential domestic threat, the report says, evidence of what it calls a systemic failure. The inspector general recommended that several top agency officials, including former director George J. Tenet, be held accountable for their failure to put in place a strategy to dismantle Al Qaeda in the years before Sept. 11, 2001. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the current C.I.A. director, and his predecessor, Porter J. Goss, have declined to seek disciplinary action against Mr. Tenet and others named in the report....