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Only 12 Miles of Real Border Fence Done Despite Law and May Deadline Two years after President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act into law, requiring 700 miles of double-layer fencing to be constructed along five stretches of the southern U.S. border by May 2008, only 90 miles of fencing have been built -- and just 12 miles of it is double-layered. "By eliminating the double-fence requirement, the Democratic Congress is going to make it easier for drug and human smugglers to cross our Southern land border," Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), who wrote the original fencing specification in the Secure Fence Act, said when the U.S. House passed a resolution altering the language of the act, including eliminating the double-layer requirement for the fencing. The resolution also said that "at least" 370 miles of fencing should be built, with no time table given. Now, with a new administration coming in eight months, the future of the border fence may be linked to who wins the presidency....
Neb. AG refuses to sue for immigrants' fair housing rights Anne Hobbs was angry. The head of the Nebraska Equal Opportunity Commission had just learned of a Hispanic couple who said their landlord asked for their driver's licenses - but didn't ask the same of non-Hispanic tenants. Hobbs said it sounded like the couple were "treated differently than everybody else because of national origin," and sent the case to the state's top prosecutor, hoping he would sue on their behalf under fair housing laws. When Attorney General Jon Bruning received the case, he was angry, too - for a different reason than Hobbs. "I'm not going to use taxpayer dollars to file lawsuits for illegal aliens," said Bruning after learning the couple was in the U.S. illegally. "You're not going to get a free lawyer" from his office, he said, "if you're not a citizen of this country." Critics say Bruning's legal rationale is so off-base that he may end up in court after all - and not as a prosecutor. Immigration activists suggest they may be laying the groundwork for a first-of-its kind lawsuit, with Bruning as the defendant....
Break-ins plague targets of US Attorneys In two states where US attorneys are already under fire for serious allegations of political prosecutions, seven people associated with three federal cases have experienced 10 suspicious incidents including break-ins and arson. These crimes raise serious questions about possible use of deliberate intimidation tactics not only because of who the victims are and the already wide criticism of the prosecutions to begin with, but also because of the suspicious nature of each incident individually as well as the pattern collectively. Typically burglars do not break-into an office or private residence only to rummage through documents, for example, as is the case with most of the burglaries in these two federal cases. In Alabama, for instance, the home of former Democratic Governor Don Siegelman was burglarized twice during the period of his first indictment. Nothing of value was taken, however, and according to the Siegelman family, the only items of interest to the burglars were the files in Siegelman's home office. Siegelman's attorney experienced the same type of break-in at her office. In neighboring Mississippi, a case brought against a trial lawyer and three judges raises even more disturbing questions. Of the four individuals in the same case, three of the US Attorney’s targets were the victims of crimes during their indictment or trial. The main target of the indictment, attorney Paul Minor, had his office broken into, while Mississippi Supreme Court Justice, Oliver E. Diaz Jr., had his home burglarized. According to police reports and statements from Diaz and from individuals close to Minor, nothing of value was taken and the burglars only rummaged through documents and in Minor’s case, also took a single computer from an office full of expensive office equipment....
Telecoms and the Bush administration talked about how to keep their surveillance program under wraps The Bush administration is refusing to disclose internal e-mails, letters and notes showing contacts with major telecommunications companies over how to persuade Congress to back a controversial surveillance bill, according to recently disclosed court documents. The existence of these documents surfaced only in recent days as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by a privacy group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The foundation (alerted to the issue in part by a NEWSWEEK story last fall) is seeking information about communications among administration officials, Congress and a battery of politically well-connected lawyers and lobbyists hired by such big telecom carriers as AT&T and Verizon. Court papers recently filed by government lawyers in the case confirm for the first time that since last fall unnamed representatives of the telecoms phoned and e-mailed administration officials to talk about ways to block more than 40 civil suits accusing the companies of privacy violations because of their participation in a secret post-9/11 surveillance program ordered by the White House....
Court-Approved Wiretapping Rose 14% in '07 Last year might have been a rough year for U.S. home prices, but growth in government wiretaps remained healthy, with the eavesdropping sector posting a 14% increase in court orders compared to 2006. In 2007, judges approved 4,578 state and federal wiretaps, as compared to 4,015 in 2006, according to two new reports on criminal and intelligence wiretaps. State police applied for 27% more wiretaps in 2007 than in 2006, with 94% of them targeting cell phones, according to figures released by the U.S. Courts' administrator. In 2007, state judges approved 1,751 criminal wiretap applications, without turning any of them down, according to the report (.pdf). That's a near-three fold increase in state wiretaps since 1997. Federal criminal wiretaps remained fairly constant -- hovering around 500 -- though exact numbers aren't known since the Justice Department has begun withholding information from the administrators of the U.S. court regarding sensitive investigations. As for wiretaps aimed at suspected spies and terrorists, the feds applied for 2,370 orders for wiretaps and physical searches from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, according to a separate annual wiretap report (.pdf) to Congress. The court modified 86 of these, and rejected three. The number of approved applications are up 9% from 2006, when the government approved 2,176 applications. It's unclear how many people these orders applied to since they can name more than one target, and in January 2007, the Bush Administration began getting so-called basket warrants from the secret court, in order to reduce the political heat over its warrantless wiretapping program. Those orders, which the administration described as "innovative," likely covered many individuals or entire geographic regions and required periodic re-authorization from the court....
Post Carrier Accused of Warning Customer About 'Mail Cover' Surveillance Here's a good reason to remember your postal carrier at Christmas time. Apparently, he or she can tell you if the government is secretly monitoring your mail. Federal prosecutors in Detroit say letter carrier Darlene Cry illegally tipped off a postal customer that he was the subject of a "mail cover" -- a form of warrantless surveillance in which the envelope information on every card and letter received is secretly recorded by the Post Office, then passed to federal law enforcement or intelligence officials. "From on or about April 22, 2005 thought on or about May 21, 2005, a mail cover was conducted for all mail pieces addressed to an individual residing on Lauder Street in Detroit, Michigan who was, at all times relevant to the Information, the subject of an ongoing federal criminal investigation," reads the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan on Friday. On July 8th of that year, Cry "did disclose to the subject … that his mail was monitored by the Postal Service," the complaint alleges, violating a federal law against disclosing confidential government information, a misdemeanor. Courts have ruled that Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the address information on their mail, and mail covers have a long and storied history in the annals of domestic surveillance. In the 1970s, the Church Committee found that the CIA and FBI had used the mail cover program as a front to secretly open, copy and re-seal some 215,000 letters, in a single spying operation run from an office in New York....