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Judge postpones hearing for agent accused of killing Mexican man A judge on Friday postponed a hearing in which prosecutors were to present evidence telling him why a U.S. Border Patrol agent should be charged with murder for killing an illegal immigrant during a confrontation in January. Judge David C. Morales continued the preliminary hearing until Aug. 6 after Agent Nicholas Corbett's attorney said he had not received usable audio recordings of witness statements. Attorney Sean Chapman said he also had not received all the transcripts of witness statements. Cochise County Attorney Ed Rheinheimer filed a range of charges against Corbett, including first- and second-degree murder, manslaughter and negligent homicide. But the prosecutor left it to Morales to decide which charge is supported by the evidence. Investigators say Corbett, 39, shot Francisco Javier Dominguez Rivera, 22, on Jan. 12 as he tried to capture Dominguez, his two brothers and a sister-in-law outside Naco. The shooting drew condemnation from Mexico's government. Corbett says he acted in self-defense....
Guardsmen on border accused of running smuggling ring Three National Guardsmen assigned to the Texas-Mexico border were accused of running an immigrant smuggling ring after 24 immigrants were found inside a van that one of them was driving, a U.S. attorney said Monday. The three, arrested late Thursday and Friday, were arraigned Monday on a federal charge of conspiring to transport illegal immigrants. Pfc. Jose Rodrigo Torres, 26, and Sgt. Julio Cesar Pacheco, 25, both of Laredo, and Sgt. Clarence Hodge Jr., 36, of Fort Worth, were arrested near Laredo. A Border Patrol agent found 24 illegal immigrants inside a van Torres was driving along Interstate 35 near Cotulla, Texas, about 68 miles north of the border, prosecutors said. Torres was in uniform at the time of his arrest Thursday. The van was leased by the National Guard, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Prosecutors accused Hodge of helping Torres pass through a Border Patrol checkpoint on the highway by making it look like the two were conducting Guard business. Pacheco was accused of recruiting soldiers to transport the migrants for $1,000 to $3,500 a trip. He and Hodge were arrested Friday....
Arizona-Mexico Discussion Focuses on Border Violence For more than 50 years the governments of Arizona and its Mexican neighboring state, Sonora, have gathered regularly to strike agreements, pledge cooperation and bask in border bonhomie. But meeting here over two days, as border violence and drug trafficking have swelled and the United States Senate considers the most significant changes to immigration law in 20 years, a deep sense of urgency, even anxiety, hung over the proceedings. While describing cooperation between the two states as good, Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona, a Democrat, said she remained concerned about an increase in drug seizures along the border and the recent spate of violence. Most alarming, Ms. Napolitano said, was a firefight last month among rival drug cartels and the police in the Sonoran city of Cananea, about 100 miles south of here. Nearly two dozen people were killed....
FBI Name Check Cited In Naturalization Delays Jin Ju Yoo, a stay-at-home mother who immigrated from South Korea in 1990 and applied for U.S. citizenship in 2002, would seem a minimal security risk. So say friends in Clarksburg, Md., where Yoo, 36, plays drums at a Presbyterian church and raises three children with her husband, a flooring contractor. Her husband and children are citizens. The would-be American is still waiting for approval, however, because the FBI has not completed a security check of her name against its more than 86 million investigative files. Neither the bureau nor the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency will say why. Since 2005, the backlog of legal U.S. immigrants whose applications for naturalization and other benefits are stuck on hold awaiting FBI name checks has doubled to 329,160, prompting a flood of lawsuits in federal courts, bureaucratic finger-pointing in Washington and tough scrutiny by 2008 presidential candidates. At a time when Congress is intensely focused on border security, the growing backlog is one of the most visible signs of the U.S. immigration system's breakdown, current and former government officials said....
Judge Orders FBI to Turn Over Thousands of Patriot Act Abuse Documents Just one day after a news that an internal audit found that FBI agents abused a Patriot Act power more than 1000 times, a federal judge ordered the agency Friday to begin turning over thousands of pages of documents related to the agency's use of a powerful, but extremely secretive investigative tool that can pry into telephone and internet records. The order for monthly document releases commencing July 5 came in response to a government sunshine request by a civil liberties group, which sued in April over the FBI's foot-dragging on its broad request. The April request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked the FBI to turn over documents related to its misuse of National Security Letters, self-issued subpoenas that don't need a judge's approval and which can get financial, phone and internet records. Recipients of the letters are forbidden by law from ever telling anyone other than their lawyer that they received the request. Though initially warned initially to use this power sparingly, FBI agents issued more than 47,000 in 2005, more than half of which targeted Americans. Information obtained from the requests, which need only be certified by the agency to be "relevant" to an investigation, are dumped into a data-mining warehouse for perpetuity. An Inspector General report in March found rampant errors in the small sample of NSLs examined and systemic underreporting of the powers usage to Congress. The report also found that agents issued more than 700 "expedited" letters, some containing materially false sworn statements. These letters had no legal basis and essentially asked companies to turn over data by pretending there was an emergency in order to get the data necessary to get a proper NSL. One former FBI agent says its clear the FBI violated the law....
New FBI rules urge stronger review to protect privacy The FBI is warning its agents to protect privacy rights by carefully reviewing all personal data collected from Americans in terror investigations and to remember that such evidence may not remain secret. The warning was given in draft FBI guidelines to be issued to correct abuses of so-called national security letters, or NSLs, that were revealed in a Justice Department audit three months ago. The letters allow investigators to subpoena records, without court approval, in terrorism and spy cases. But the stern reminder has not appeased civil-liberties advocates, who want Congress to rein in the FBI's power to obtain consumers' telephone, Internet, and financial records. "The government should have never had such expansive power to begin with," Caroline Fredrickson, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's legislative office in Washington, said yesterday. "Current and past administrations have demonstrated that government power exercised in secret will always be abused."....
Military personnel prime targets for ID theft U.S. military personnel have emerged as prime identity theft targets. The Department of Defense since the late '60s has used Social Security numbers for everything from dog tags to chow-line rosters. Now, data thieves and con artists have begun to increasingly target military personnel, data security experts say. "Thieves know this is the Achilles' heel of the system," says Todd Davis, CEO of identity theft detection firm Lifelock. Data thieves in the past year have grabbed computers containing sensitive data for nearly 30 million active and retired service members from four Veterans Affairs offices. That's a big portion of the more than 100 million personal records reported lost or stolen in the USA since 2006, based on a USA TODAY analysis of data compiled by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse....
Nifong defense: Too busy to supply evidence The district attorney in charge of the Duke University lacrosse rape case told the North Carolina State Bar he failed to turn over evidence favoring the defense because he was busy campaigning for office, a disciplinary panel was told Thursday. Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong told bar investigators that as he faced "an unprecedented number of challengers" in his first election campaign, "I was not always able to give the case my full attention." Nifong cited his campaign in a letter to the bar as one of several reasons that "may possibly have contributed to my inadvertent failure to provide the evidence in question." Portions of the letter were read aloud at the third day of a trial in Raleigh that will determine if Nifong will lose his license to practice law. Earlier in the day, defense attorney Brad Bannon said he had deciphered 1,844 pages of raw DNA data to discover what Nifong had withheld — that the DNA of multiple unidentified men was on the accuser and her underwear. That finding eventually prompted Nifong to hand the investigation over to State Attorney General Roy Cooper, who declared David Evans, Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty innocent of all charges and denounced Nifong as a "rogue prosecutor." None of their DNA had been found on the accuser....
ACLU presses case to unseal Bush papers The American Civil Liberties Union renewed its challenge Thursday against the Bush administration's filing of secret materials to a federal appeals court that will rule on its warrantless surveillance program. The government has filed the papers with the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and the ACLU wants those documents unsealed. The court is considering the administration's appeal of a Michigan federal judge's decision last year that the program was unconstitutional because it violated privacy and free speech rights and the separation of powers. The government has said the case involves state secrets and disclosure would threaten national security. Under the program, the National Security Agency monitors international phone calls and e-mails to or from the United States in which one party is believed to be linked to terrorism. "It would be completely improper - not to mention unprecedented - for important constitutional issues to be decided on the basis of secret arguments," Jameel Jaffer, lead ACLU attorney in the case, said in a statement....
Lab managers accused of security breach Officials with the contractor that runs Los Alamos National Laboratory sent top-secret data regarding nuclear weapons through open e-mail networks, the latest potentially dangerous security breach to come to light at the birthplace of the atomic bomb, two congressmen said. The breach was investigated by the National Nuclear Security Administration, which rounded up laptop computers from Los Alamos National Security LLC's board members and sanitized them. But NNSA and lab officials who subsequently appeared before a congressional committee investigating security problems at the nuclear weapons lab never mentioned it, according to a letter the congressmen sent Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. Reps. John Dingell, D-Mich., chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Bart Stupak, D-Mich., who heads the panel's oversight subcommittee, called that "unacceptable" and demanded an explanation. "This facility's mind-bogglingly poor track record makes me repeat my question: What do we do at Los Alamos that we cannot do elsewhere?" Stupak said Thursday. The northern New Mexico lab has been plagued by security lapses, from missing data storage devices to the Wen Ho Lee case to the discovery of classified data on a computer found during a drug bust at a former lab contract worker's trailer....
Don't Fall for Jury Duty Scam The phone rings, you pick it up, and the caller identifies himself as an officer of the court. He says you failed to report for jury duty and that a warrant is out for your arrest. You say you never received a notice. To clear it up, the caller says he'll need some information for "verification purposes"-your birth date, social security number, maybe even a credit card number. This is when you should hang up the phone. It's a scam. Jury scams have been around for years, but have seen a resurgence in recent months. Communities in more than a dozen states have issued public warnings about cold calls from people claiming to be court officials seeking personal information. As a rule, court officers never ask for confidential information over the phone; they generally correspond with prospective jurors via mail....

Update....Prosecutor in Duke Rape Case Found Guilty of Ethics Breaches A disciplinary hearing panel found Michael B. Nifong, the Durham County district attorney, guilty today of ethical violations arising from his pretrial statements and handling of DNA evidence while pressing a false accusation of sexual assault against three former Duke University lacrosse players. Six of the charges involved “dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation,” the most serious of the accusations against Mr. Nifong. The three-member panel now enters a penalty phase in the five-day ethics trial, which could result in Mr. Nifong’s suspension or disbarment later today. In tearful testimony on Friday, Mr. Nifong said he will voluntarily resign from office but insisted he did not lie about evidence, the most serious charges against him. When asked what he thinks happened in the case, he said, “a nonsexual assault, an intimidation — something happened to make everybody leave that scene very quickly.” The remark outraged the lacrosse parents, defense attorneys and supporters watching the ethics hearing. Roy A. Cooper, North Carolina’s attorney general, has said there is no credible evidence of any crime....