FLE

Memo Justified Warrantless Surveillance For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil didn't apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism. That view was expressed in a secret Justice Department legal memo dated Oct. 23, 2001. The administration on Wednesday stressed that it now disavows that view. The October 2001 memo was written at the request of the White House by John Yoo, then the deputy assistant attorney general, and addressed to Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time. The administration had asked the department for an opinion on the legality of potential responses to terrorist activity. The 37-page memo is classified and has not been released. Its existence was disclosed Tuesday in a footnote of a separate secret memo, dated March 14, 2003, released by the Pentagon in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union. "Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations," the footnote states, referring to a document titled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States." Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program. That program intercepted phone calls and e-mails on U.S. soil, bypassing the normal legal requirement that such eavesdropping be authorized by a secret federal court. The program began after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and continued until Jan. 17, 2007, when the White House resumed seeking surveillance warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court....
Centers Tap Into Personal Databases Intelligence centers run by states across the country have access to personal information about millions of Americans, including unlisted cellphone numbers, insurance claims, driver's license photographs and credit reports, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post. One center also has access to top-secret data systems at the CIA, the document shows, though it's not clear what information those systems contain. Dozens of the organizations known as fusion centers were created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to identify potential threats and improve the way information is shared. The centers use law enforcement analysts and sophisticated computer systems to compile, or fuse, disparate tips and clues and pass along the refined information to other agencies. They are expected to play important roles in national information-sharing networks that link local, state and federal authorities and enable them to automatically sift their storehouses of records for patterns and clues. Though officials have publicly discussed the fusion centers' importance to national security, they have generally declined to elaborate on the centers' activities. But a document that lists resources used by the fusion centers shows how a dozen of the organizations in the northeastern United States rely far more on access to commercial and government databases than had previously been disclosed. Those details have come to light at a time of debate about domestic intelligence efforts, including eavesdropping and data-aggregation programs at the National Security Agency, and whether the government has enough protections in place to prevent abuses. The list of information resources was part of a survey conducted last year, officials familiar with the effort said. It shows that, like most police agencies, the fusion centers have subscriptions to private information-broker services that keep records about Americans' locations, financial holdings, associates, relatives, firearms licenses and the like....
Military skirting law to spy The military is using the FBI to skirt legal restrictions on domestic surveillance to obtain private records of Americans' Internet service providers, financial institutions and telephone companies, the ACLU said Tuesday. The American Civil Liberties Union based its conclusion on a review of more than 1,000 documents turned over by the Defense Department after it sued the agency last year for documents related to national security letters, or NSLs, investigative tools used to compel businesses to turn over customer information without a judge's order or grand jury subpoena. "Newly unredacted documents released today reveal that the Department of Defense is using the FBI to circumvent legal limits on its own NSL power," said the ACLU, whose lawsuit was filed in Manhattan federal court. ACLU lawyer Melissa Goodman said the documents the civil rights group studied "make us incredibly concerned." She said it would be understandable if the military relied on help from the FBI on joint investigations, but not when the FBI was not involved in a probe. The FBI referred requests for comment Tuesday to the Defense Department. A department spokesman, Air Force Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder, said in an e-mail that the department had made "focused, limited and judicious" use of the letters since Congress extended the capability to investigatory entities other than the FBI in 2001. Goodman, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said the military is allowed to demand financial and credit records in certain instances but does not have the authority to get e-mail and phone records or lists of Web sites that people have visited. That is the kind of information that the FBI can get by using a national security letter, she said....
Defiant South Carolina Wins Real ID Extension Despite blasting a defiant last day letter to the Homeland Security Department over pending federal rules Monday, South Carolina Republican governor Mark Sandford secured South Carolinians the right to use their driver's licenses to board planes without being patted down, at least until 2010. Just hours after getting Sanford's jeremiad, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff signed the state's extension (.pdf) personally, writing that "like Montana, your letter sets forth in detail how South Carolina will in fact meet the principal security requirements of Real ID – as a matter of South Carolina's independent judgment, and not as an act of compliance." Like other rebellious states, South Carolina rejected Real ID mandates, saying the $4-$20 billion dollar program was an unfunded mandate that invaded citizens' privacy and put them at risk of identity theft due to massive, connected databases of sensitive information. Sanford's letter was extraordinary, however, since he used most of his words explaining why he thought Real ID was invasive, unfunded and dangerous. "Montana's letter smirked," Scannell said. "New Hampshire's was down right disrespectful and you could see the scotch tape from where they cut-and-pasted pages from their DMV handbook." "But Sanford's five-page letter was Fort Sumter-quality," Scannell said, referring to the South Carolina military installation where the Civil War started....
Senators Fault DHS Pressure On Real ID Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee criticized the Department of Homeland Security yesterday for pressuring reluctant states to adopt new federally approved driver's licenses, with one accusing Secretary Michael Chertoff of "bullying" the states into compliance under a threat of blocking citizens' travel. "We ought to engage in a fairer, more productive negotiated rule-making with the states," the committee's chairman, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), told Chertoff. "Maybe people want to have a national ID card in their state. In my state, they don't." Leahy spoke at a hearing that touched on a range of homeland security issues, from the border fence to the backlog in the naturalization process. But, several times, the conversation between the secretary and the senators circled back to the initiative for a uniform driver's license, known as the Real ID program. Conceived as a security measure after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, it is meant to strengthen the authenticity of driver's licenses and make it tougher to use them as fraudulent proof of identity. Many states have bristled, saying it poses privacy concerns and creates a financial burden. DHS has estimated the cost at $3.9 billion. "Bullying the states is not the answer, nor is threatening their citizens' rights to travel," Leahy told Chertoff. "From Maine to Montana, states have said no." Seventeen states passed legislation rejecting Real ID, and DHS has given them until May to comply with the law or find that their driver's licenses would no longer be accepted as federal identification, meaning their residents would have to show passports as proof of identity before boarding planes....
Immigration agent shifts blame Federal immigration agent Cory Voorhis sat at the defense table in federal court Tuesday, but opening statements by his lawyer indicated that the legal team would try to put the actions of Gov. Bill Ritter and the city of Denver on trial. Bill Taylor, attorney for the special agent, said his client was "shocked, angered, and yes, bewildered" when he read statements by Ritter, then a candidate for governor, in an August 2006 newspaper article saying that when he was Denver district attorney, his office had always been tough on illegal immigration. Voorhis' experience as an immigration agent, and as someone who worked at the Denver County Jail for three years, was that illegal immigrants were regularly pleaded out by Ritter's office from the crimes they actually committed — which could lead to deportation — to a fictional charge of agricultural trespass — a non-deportable offense. (Records show Denver defendants, including illegal immigrants and U.S. citizens, were given this plea 152 times from 1998 through 2004). "Defense attorneys asked the jail to put immigration holds on their clients because they would get better deals," Taylor told the jury, and an alternate, made up of nine men and four women. "U.S. citizens claimed to be illegal immigrants to get a better deal."....
Along U.S.-Mexican border, an erratic patchwork fence After driving 10 miles along the expanded US-Mexican border fence near her farm, Dawn Garner offers her dour assessment: "Anyone can plainly see this wouldn't stop a flea, let alone a migrant or terrorist." A jagged patchwork of metal mesh, corrugated steel, vertical bollards, chest-high railroad rails, and waist-high barbed wire has been cobbled together along the southern border east of Naco by various National Guard units over the past summer. Hard-hatted workers from a general contractor, Sundt Inc., continue to dig ditches and grade terrain across plains of fluorescent-green prairie grass framed by saw-toothed mountains. "This [fence] is just too easy to cut into, climb over, or go under or around," says Ms. Garner. Twenty to 40 illegal migrant workers cut across her five-acre farm daily, she says. Unlike in San Luis, Ariz., and San Diego, where double-and- triple metal walls are backed by lighting and cameras, the fencing being built along this part of the US-Mexican border is piecemeal. Such a fence is pointless, say local ranchers. The border patrol, however, contends that it is cost-effective, and more potent than it seems. Here in Naco, the wall is being built on mostly federally-owned land. So there is little of the outrage over fair compensation and invasion of private property as there is in Texas, or complaints about cutting landowners off from land that falls on the Mexican side of the wall, as in the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation to the west. "We don't want a Berlin Wall or anything, just something that keeps migrants from flooding our backyards," says Garner, accelerating her bright yellow Jeep down the gravel road that runs alongside the newly-built fencing stretching east from the tiny border crossing at Naco toward New Mexico. As Garner drives, an eclectic array of fence styles and materials flutter by in the bright sun....