connecting*the*dots

All that we the people ask is that warrants are issued before tapping phone lines. That’s all the law asks as well.

Read Judge Anna Diggs Taylor’s ruling for yourself.

If the Democrats win back the house this November, they’d better apply some accountability to this executive branch.

ABC News: Judge orders halt to NSA wiretap program
Hammer of Truth: Freedom Wins a Round
Salon: The Bush doctrine under surveillance
The Discerning Texan: Runaway Judge attempts Coup d’Etat over Bush Wirtetaps

(photo by Majka en Thrall)

David Lazarus, San Francisco Chronicle
AT&T rewrites rules: Your data isn’t yours

AT&T has issued an updated privacy policy that takes effect Friday. The changes are significant because they appear to give the telecom giant more latitude when it comes to sharing customers’ personal data with government officials.

The new policy says that AT&T — not customers — owns customers’ confidential info and can use it “to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.”

The policy also indicates that AT&T will track the viewing habits of customers of its new video service — something that cable and satellite providers are prohibited from doing.

Moreover, AT&T (formerly known as SBC) is requiring customers to agree to its updated privacy policy as a condition for service — a new move that legal experts say will reduce customers’ recourse for any future data sharing with government authorities or others.

The company’s policy overhaul follows recent reports that AT&T was one of several leading telecom providers that allowed the National Security Agency warrantless access to its voice and data networks as part of the Bush administration’s war on terror.

[…]

If you have a broadband cable connection and you’re still using AT&T, you deserve to be wire-tapped. Between Vonage and SkypeOut & Voicemail, there are enough stable VoIP choices out there to get off of the telcom infrastructure of eavesdropping.

Now, if I had no choice and had to use AT&T or Verizon as a provider, I’d be in contact (via email of course) with the Electronic Frontier Foundation today, adding my name to a class action lawsuit.

I grew up with Cafferty on the local news scene in the NY-NJ metro area, and had no idea he was such a straight-shooting, righteous cat. Talk about “a change of scenery” doing someone good…

UPDATE: As it turns out, Specter was simply circumvented by Cheney and a bunch of spineless Republican Senators. Hopefully Cafferty gives him another look:

Rick Klein, Boston Globe
Specter ready to force showdown

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter emerged this week as a nemesis that the Bush White House hasn’t had to face: A subpoena-wielding member of Congress who is ready to force a showdown over what he sees as the Bush administration’s intrusion into legislative territory.

From President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program to the “signing statements” in which he selectively enforces portions of laws, Republicans in control of the House and Senate have been unwilling to challenge the White House.

Democrats have howled in protest but remain powerless to force changes because of their minority status in Congress.

Specter, however, seems willing to take Bush and his administration to task. A strong believer in the Senate’s institutional prerogatives, the Pennsylvania Republican has grown increasingly frustrated with a presidency that he believes is encroaching on Congress’s power — and lawmakers’ checks on the power of the White House.

That spurred the unusual letter Specter fired off Wednesday to Vice President Dick Cheney. Specter blasted the vice president, accusing him of going behind his back to derail a Senate investigation into the administration’s secret collection of Americans’ phone records to look for terrorist activity.

Specter has also made it clear that he is willing to use his post on the powerful judiciary committee to broaden his inquiry into other controversial White House policies. He is raising fresh concerns over Bush’s use of signing statements as well as Justice Department threats to prosecute reporters, and the recent FBI raid on a House member’s office; it is unclear, however, if he has enough support from other committee members.

Bush “doesn’t have a blank check. He’s not the final word. We have a Constitution,” Specter said Wednesday night on CNN. “I intend to press hard, because there are very fundamental values at issue here: civil rights and congressional oversight authority.”

Cheney’s response to Specter, however, offered no apologies — and did not address Specter’s questions about the wiretapping program or other White House actions. The vice president described his private conversations with Republican senators simply as “government at work.”

Despite their disagreements, “we should proceed in a practical way to build on the areas of agreement,” Cheney wrote. “We look forward to working with you, knowing of the good faith on all sides.”

[…]

UPDATE II: I fuckin’ hate politicians:

Glenn Greenwald
Specter falsely denied proposing amnesty for the Administration’s illegal eavesdropping

[…]

I have now obtained (with the help of the ACLU) a copy of Specter’s marked-up proposed legislation (.pdf), which makes quite clear that Specter simply was not telling the truth when he denied proposing amnesty to the administration. The bill in question was one which Specter substituted last week in the Judiciary Committee for the prior legislation he proposed back in March (the reason the new version was not available online was because — according to the ACLU — he introduced it only in the Committee, but not yet on the Senate floor).

In sum, Specter’s legislation amends the provision of FISA which provides for criminal penalties, and then, astonishingly, makes those revisions retroactive all the way back to 1978 (when FISA was enacted). The effect and almost certainly the intent of those revisions is to immunize the President and anyone acting under his authority from criminal liability for violating FISA — just as the Post and the ACLU correctly reported, and just as Specter falsely denied.

[…]

Chris Fahey and I go back 12 years in the new media game:

• While I was designing CD-Rom games at LTI in 1995, Chris was working on a project at The Music Pen, just a few blocks uptown.
• One of the producers at his gig was a guy named Alan Robbins, who just so happened to teach with my father at Kean University.
• Alan and I became tight for a short period of time following my gig at LTI, as my father introduced us and we rapped about teaching — an interest of mine.
• My friend and colleague from LTI, Rebecca Rothstein, left the gig and took up shop at Rare Medium — one of the big bubble agencies from the mid-nineties.
• Chris happened to do the same, leaving The Music Pen for Rare Medium around the same time.
• A few months later, Rebecca referred me to Organic Online, where I took my first job as an information architect, proper.
• Chris and I both ended up up at the same information architect conventions, honing our craft, meeting new people and drinking flailing dotcom money at the free after-parties.
• Soon thereafter, we both became active participants of the SIG-IA list, participating with the IA community to solve data and interface issues.
• Last August, we had a lively discussion of my never-to-be-seen illustration for the Media Matters redesign.

After coming across one of Chris’ most recent posts regarding the government wiretapping and phone call pattern analysis programs (which was laced with some serious, righteous conviction), I left a comment along the lines that it’s our duty as trained information architects to perform a bit of Internal Affairs work — to help illustrate the potential damage these programs could do to our civil liberties.

You know, illustrate, say, the potential that crossed-path analysis has in generating false-positive relationship assumptions… such as the degree to which Chris and I kept close company over the past 12 years.

You see, we never formally met until last July.

If you get a moment, head over to his blog to review some of his recent thoughts on the matter.

This stuff is serious, folks.

I’m sorry, but listening to Howard Coble in a conversation about terrorism and my rights makes me sick to my stomach. The man may represent my district, but he does not represent me. His apparent zeal to throw my rights to the wind is cowardly and his position on the “war” on terror is idiotic.

I would never willingly give up my right to privacy. Too many men and women have worked themselves to the bone to establish these provisions of this republic, let alone the numbers who have given their lives to defend it, for me to simply shrug away my rights as an American. To toss these rights aside, simply because we have been smacked awake to the fact that we live in the same reality as the rest of the world, is both cowardly and criminal… at best.

Where I come from, such positions would be considered as spitting on the graves of the men and women that perished on 9/11. They may have died a premature, horrific death, but they were free Americans, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Or maybe that’s just how I was raised.

Photo by Emily Geoff

Associated Press (Newsvine)
Papers: Cheney Aide Says Bush OK’d Leak

WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney’s former top aide told prosecutors President Bush authorized the leak of sensitive intelligence information about Iraq, according to court papers filed by prosecutors in the CIA leak case.

Before his indictment, I. Lewis Libby testified to the grand jury investigating the CIA leak that Cheney told him to pass on information and that it was Bush who authorized the disclosure, the court papers say. According to the documents, the authorization led to the July 8, 2003, conversation between Libby and New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

There was no indication in the filing that either Bush or Cheney authorized Libby to disclose Valerie Plame’s CIA identity.

But the disclosure in documents filed Wednesday means that the president and the vice president put Libby in play as a secret provider of information to reporters about prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Bush’s political foes jumped on the revelation about Libby’s testimony.

“The fact that the president was willing to reveal classified information for political gain and put interests of his political party ahead of Americas security shows that he can no longer be trusted to keep America safe,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said.

Libby’s testimony also puts the president and the vice president in the awkward position of authorizing leaks — a practice both men have long said they abhor, so much so that the administration has put in motion criminal investigations to hunt down leakers.

The most recent instance is the administration’s launching of a probe into who disclosed to The New York Times the existence of the warrantless domestic surveillance program authorized by Bush shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The authorization involving intelligence information came as the Bush administration faced mounting criticism about its failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the main reason the president and his aides had given for going to war.

If this weren’t such blatent and reckless disregard for our National Security, I’d be fun to watch the right try to spin this bombshell into obscurity.

Bush and Cheney consistently play to the American voter’s fear of a National Security breech, creating a hardline image of them being the “protectors” of leaking classified information to the media.

So when someone else leaks classified information (regarding the NSA warrantless wiretapping program authorized by the President of the United States) they launch a criminal investigation. Fair enough. They wanna play hardball and they have the Justice Department in their pocket to do so.

But I do hope they fully realize that they’ve now set a precedent. If they go after the “leaker” of the NSA program with any degree of vigor, they had better damn well be ready to accept accountability for this authorized leak of classified information.

The difference between the two?

This leak didn’t lead to the uncovering of a questionable government wiretapping program; it directly fed the propaganda machine that greased the skids for launching the war in Iraq.

All I want for Christmas is an article of impeachment.

UPDATE: It looks like the administration is going to argue that when the president tells someone to leak information, the process of declassifying the information is automatic and understood. Or some bullshit like that.

Andy sent me an email requesting this song as a Lyricist Wednesday post, and while the message of the lyrics absolutely fits the vibe of c*t*d, the artist is, well, a bit too folksy to land between GZA and T-K.A.S.H. (that’s a hint for next week). So, I figured I’d go the extra yard and post the video he shot at Guilford College a bit ago.

Bloomberg.com
Senate Panel Rejects Proposal to Probe Eavesdropping

March 7 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee rejected a proposal to investigate the Bush administration’s program of conducting electronic eavesdropping without warrants, while agreeing to create new congressional panels to increase oversight.

Lawmakers from both parties have been pressing for more information on the wiretapping without court orders since it was disclosed by the New York Times in December.

Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the panel, proposed the probe of the Bush administration’s wiretapping of communications between the U.S. and other countries without court approval. President George W. Bush has said he authorized the eavesdropping of communications linked to terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“This committee is basically under control of the White House,” Rockefeller told reporters after the two-hour meeting today in Washington. “It’s an unprecedented bout of political pressure from the White House.”

Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts said any inquiry would be detrimental to national security.

“We should fight the enemy, not fight each other,” Roberts, a Kansas Republican said. “The program is extremely important.”

After negotiations with the Bush administration, the panel voted to create a new subcommittee whose seven members, out of the committee’s 15 total lawmakers, would receive full briefings on the program. Those briefings had been limited to just Rockefeller and Roberts.

“What we need is oversight,” Republican Mike DeWine of Ohio, one of the new subcommittee members said. “What we need is to get into this program.”

I hate to break the news to Pat Roberts, but if Congressional inquiries become the equivalent of shit shooting through a duck, in the end, we the people are straight up fucked.

For those of you out there that think that checks and balances are still in order, well, it’s time to wake up. There’s apparently no such thing as a moderate Republican, or to use another phrase, one that gives a shit about our Constitutional rights.

Guardian Unlimited
Tape: Bush, Chertoff Warned Before Katrina

[…]

Six days of footage and transcripts obtained by The Associated Press show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.

Linked by secure video, Bush’s bravado on Aug. 29 starkly contrasts with the dire warnings his disaster chief and a cacophony of federal, state and local officials provided during the four days before the storm.

A top hurricane expert voiced “grave concerns” about the levees and then-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown told the president and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that he feared there weren’t enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome.

“I’m concerned about … their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe,” Brown told his bosses the afternoon before Katrina made landfall.

Some of the footage conflicts with the defenses that federal, state and local officials have made in trying to deflect blame and minimize the political fallout from the failed Katrina response:

-Homeland Security officials have said the “fog of war” blinded them early on to the magnitude of the disaster. But the video and transcripts show federal and local officials discussed threats clearly, reviewed long-made plans and understood Katrina would wreak devastation of historic proportions. “I’m sure it will be the top 10 or 15 when all is said and done,” National Hurricane Center’s Max Mayfield warned the day Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast.

“I don’t buy the `fog of war’ defense,” Brown told the AP in an interview Wednesday. “It was a fog of bureaucracy.”

-Bush declared four days after the storm, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” that gushed deadly flood waters into New Orleans. But the transcripts and video show there was plenty of talk about that possibility - and Bush was worried too.

Just in case you didn’t catch that deceitful declaration, here it is:

Forget the lies surrounding the Iraqi War.

Forget the illegal wiretapping of American citizens.

President Bush’s complete lack of leadership, responsiveness, honesty, hell, simple caring… regarding Katrina is more than enough grounds for impeachment.

At least on moral grounds.

(via The News Blog)

Artist: Public Enemy
Song: Louder Than A Bomb

==========

Professor Griff:
They claim we’re products from the bottom of hell,
‘Cause the black is back and it’s bound to sell.
Picture us coolin’ out on the fourth of July,
And if you heard we were celebrating that’s a world wide lie!
Yo Chuck!
The fed-dead-arals, man, trying to pull a 2-2-6 on ya G,
Yo man,
Show ‘em what you got!
Sh-Show ‘em what you got!

Chuck D:
This style seems wild.
Wait before you treat me like a stepchild!
Let me tell you why they got me on file,
‘Cause I give you what you lack,
Come right and exact,
Our status is the saddest,
So I care where you at, black!
And at home I got a call from Tony Rome,
The FBI was tappin’ my telephone.
I never live alone.
I never walk alone.
My posses always ready, and they’re waitin’ in my zone.
Although I live the life that of a resident,
But I be knowin’ the scheme that of the president,
Tappin’ my phone whose crews abused,
I stand accused of doing harm.
‘Cause I’m louder than a bomb.

C’mon, C’mon.
Louder! Louder. (C’mon, C’mon…C’mon)
Louder! Louder. (C’mon, C’mon…C’mon)
Louder! (C’mon Track Cut)

Professor Griff:
Hey yo D!
Show ‘em you on the block
Show ‘em you on the block, D!

Chuck D:
I am,
A rock hard trooper,
To the bone, the bone, the bone.
Full grown - consider me - stone!
Once again and,
I say it for you to know.
The troop is always ready.
I yell `Geronimo’.
Your CIA, you see I ain’t kiddin’.
Both King and X they got ridda’ both.
A story untold, true, but unknown.
Professor Griff knows…
“Yo, I ain’t milk toast!”
And..
And not the braggin’ or boastin’ and plus,
It ain’t no secret why they’re tappin’ my phone,
although I can’t keep it a secret,
So I decided to kick it, yo.
And yes it weighs a ton, I’ll say it once again,
I’m called the enemy - I’ll never be a friend,
Of those with closed minds, don’t know I’m rapid,
The way that I rap it,
Is makin’ ‘em tap it, yeah.
Never servin ‘em well, ’cause I’m an un-Tom.
It’s no secret at all.
Cause I’m louder than a bomb.

C’mon, C’mon.
Louder! Louder. (C’mon, C’mon…C’mon) (X6)
Louder! (C’mon Track Cut)

Professor Griff:
That’s right boy
The D is on the block, boy
Don’t forget it!
Kick that shit, D!
(It’s Yours)

Chuck D:
Cold holdin’ the load,
The burden breakin’ the mold.
I ain’t lyin’ denyin’, because they’re checkin’ my code.
Am I buggin’ ’cause they’re buggin’ my phone,
for information,
No tellin’ who’s sellin’ out or power buildin’ the nation so…
Joinin’ the set, the point blank target,
Every brothers inside - so least not, you forget, no.
Takin’ the blame is not a waste,
Here taste,
A bit of the song so you can never be wrong.
Just a bit of advice, ’cause we be payin’ the price,
‘Cause every brother mans life is like swingin’ the dice, right?
Here it is, once again
this is,
The brother to brother,
The Terminator, the cutter.
Goin’ on an’ on - leave alone the grown
Get it straight in ‘88, an’ I’ll troop it to demonstrate
The posse always ready,
98 at 98.
My posse come quick,
because my posse got velocity.
Tappin’ my phone,
Never leave me alone,
I’m even lethal when I’m un-armed.
‘Cause I’m louder than a bomb.

C’mon, C’mon.
Louder! Louder. (C’mon, C’mon…C’mon) (X7)

Professor Griff:
Tell ‘em what happened, D!
Prove ‘em, man
Go and prove ‘em, man
That’s right, go and prove ‘em, D
Show ‘em all what’s hot, D
Yeah.
Haha.
Tell ‘em how loud you is, D
They can’t mess with you, D
Yeah!
(All Right)

Chuck D:
‘Cause the D is for dangerous,
You can come and get some of this.
I teach and speak,
So when its spoke, it’s no joke.
The voice of choice,
The place shakes with bass,
Called one for the treble
The rhythm is the rebel
Here’s a funky rhyme that they’re tappin’ on.
Just thinkin’ I’m breakin’ the beats I’m rappin’ on.
CIA, FBI, all they tell us is lies.
When I say it they get alarmed.
‘Cause I’m louder than a bomb!

[…]