Patriot Act // Current TV

GLOBAL POLITICAL AWAKENING: Does TSA Behavior Fall under Definition of Terrorism?

Are agents of the Transportation Security Administration engaging in behavior that falls under the Patriot Act’s definition of domestic terrorism? The question may sound preposterous until you consider the following.
Air travelers in the U.S. are being presented with a choice when passing through airport security: either submit to being scanned by an extremely invasive and potentially hazardous machine, or have your genitals groped by agents of the Transportation Security Administration.
Many are deciding that they’d rather pass through the naked body scanner than suffer the humiliation of having their genitals manually probed. In other words, they’re being coerced .
Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, recently got a TSA agent to admit that the prospect of genital groping is being used as a means of coercion. In an Oct. 29 posting, Goldberg wrote:
I pointed out to the security officer that 50 percent of the American population has no balls (90 percent in Washington, D.C., where I live), so what is going to happen when the pat-down officer meets no resistance in the crotchal area of women? “If there’s no resistance, then there’s nothing there.”
“But what about people who hide weapons in their cavities? I asked. I actually said “vagina” again, just to see him blush. “We’re just not going there,” he reiterated.
I asked him if he was looking forward to conducting the full-on pat-downs.“Nobody’s going to do it,” he said, “once they find out what we’re going to do.”
In other words, people, when faced with a choice, will inevitably choose the Dick-Measuring Device over molestation? “That’s what we’re hoping for. We’re trying to get everyone into the machine.” He called over a colleague. “Tell him what you call the back-scatter,” he said. “The Dick-Measuring Device,” I said. “That’s the truth,” the other officer responded.
Section 802 of the U.S. Patriot Act, titled “Definition of Domestic Terrorism,” provides several definitions of domestic terrorism, including this one:
“The term `domestic terrorism’ means . . . activities that appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.”
You may read the pertinent passage by going to the text of the Patriot Act hereand searching for “Sec. 802.”
People passing through airport security certainly qualify as a “civilian population,” and at least one TSA agent has admitted that this population is being deliberately coerced. Many air travelers who have experienced these violations would say that they have been intimidated as well.
So do the practices of the Transportation Security Administration qualify as domestic terrorism as defined by the Patriot Act? We take no position on the matter but simply invite you to draw your own conclusions.Are agents of the Transportation Security Administration engaging in behavior that... more

GLOBALPOLITICAL
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What will be the final lie before the next preemptive attack on Iran?

The Xmas Crotch Bomber, the Shoe Bomber of ten years ago and the NY Times Square... more

Radical_Centrist
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2 comments

The End of America. 10 Steps To Fascism. Documentary film adapted from Naomi Wolfs book

A MUST see film!

Radical_Centrist
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1 year ago
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Obama To Ease Warantless Wiretapping, Wants To Include Gmail, Facebook, BlackBerry and Skype

Talk about money going down the drain... make sure you check out the New York Times link included in this article.

Article:
"An Obama administration taskforce is seeking to overhaul a federal law requiring telephone and broadband carriers to ensure their networks can be wiretapped, The New York Times reported Tuesday (link).

Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials from the Justice and Commerce Departments, the FBI and other federal agencies told the Times tougher legislation was necessary because some telecommunications firms have launched new services and system upgrades that impede surveillance.

As part of their draft legislation to expand and strengthen the 1994 law, the officials want more legal incentives and penalties to push AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and other carriers to make sure any changes to their networks will not disrupt efforts to conduct wiretaps, the report added.

According to the Times, President Barack Obama's administration intends to submit a package of draft legislation to Congress next year. Citing officials familiar with the deliberations, it noted there was still no agreement over the details.

Officials cited two previously undisclosed episodes during which major carriers struggled for weeks or months when they tried to comply with court-approved wiretap orders in criminal or terrorism investigations.
Story continues below...

The newspaper said the FBI spends about 20 million dollars a year on efforts to help companies fix such problems.

Last month, the Times reported that the White House is also pushing to require all online services that enable communications -- such as Gmail, Facebook, BlackBerry and Skype -- to be technically capable of complying with a wiretap order, bringing them under the law's mandate for the first time.

Among proposals floated by the Obama administration, one would increase the likelihood that a firm would pay a fine for wiretapping lapses, while another would create incentives for companies to show new systems to the FBI before implementing them, the Times said."

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/ease-telecom-wiretapping-report/Talk about money going down the drain... make sure you check out the New York Times... more

shanklinmike
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(VIDEO) Conspiracy Theories Jesse Ventura: 9/11 WTC ‘That’s A Building Exploding, It Didn’t Collapse’…

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It’s time to revisit the balance between freedom and security

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ACLU Sues Over Laptop Border Searches

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BlackBerrys and encryption: Spies, secrets and smart-phones

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BP and U.S. Government Turning Gulf States into Police States

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csmonut
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3 comments

Is a Prison "Safe?"

Giving away liberty in response to perceived threats is cowardly and unamerican.

Progresshiv
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Librarian Tells a Patriot Act Story

Besides the Shakespeariana and Elizabethan maritime rarities on display, the highlight of the evening was the story former ALA President Carol Brey-Casiano told—for the first time in its entirety, she said—about an experience she described as the worst in her professional career. It involved a Texas Ranger, a lawyer named Paco, the Patriot Act, and the Merritt Fund.

Shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001, two men came into the El Paso (Tex.) Public Library where Brey-Casiano was (and still is) director. One man, wearing a white cowboy hat and a huge belt buckle, identified himself as a Texas Ranger. He told her a threat had been sent recently from one of the library computers and demanded to see the sign-up sheets. Brey-Casiano replied that she could not release patron records without a court order and that, in any case, the sign-up sheets were shredded every night. The ranger’s sidekick began citing the USA Patriot Act as authority, but she reminded him that it was a federal law, which cannot be invoked by a state law enforcement official.

The two men left, but the next morning a court order arrived asking for specific sign-up sheets—ones that could not be handed over because they had already been shredded. The following Monday, Brey-Casiano got a call from the mayor of El Paso, who accused her of withholding information (a felony in Texas) and told her he was putting her on administrative leave. Knowing her rights, she insisted she had done nothing wrong and followed proper legal procedures. The mayor admitted it was out of his hands, since the Texas Ranger had filed the complaint. He agreed to let her stay on the job as long as she told no one about the situation—effectively a gag order—during the course of an official investigation of her actions.

She immediately called the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, which advised her to find a lawyer quickly. OIF Director Judith Krug told her she should apply for assistance from the Merritt Fund. She applied and received a grant of $1,000, which helped her pay for her lawyer, an El Paso attorney named Francisco “Paco” Domínguez.

“The investigation was more far-reaching than I could ever have imagined,” Brey-Casiano told the audience. “Police interrogated all 140+ of my staff members, asking about my character but without saying why they wanted to know. Some of them came to me in tears, and others refused to answer any questions at all.”

Finally, after months of this intimidation the El Paso police chief (whom she considered a friend) gave her some reassuring signals, and Paco called to say that the District Attorney had decided not to prosecute her for withholding information. She found out later the decision was due largely to the response of her staff, all of whom had said, “Carol would not do that.”

All of this, she said, resulted in her “increased dedication to intellectual freedom and the privacy of users.” In addition, every year her staff reviews the library procedures for handling requests for documents and information from the police. “If it had not been for OIF and the Merritt Fund, it could have been 10 times worse,” she concluded. And she did repay the Merritt Fund the money it had provided her.Besides the Shakespeariana and Elizabethan maritime rarities on display, the highlight... more

bdungg
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Real ID Act of 2005 - Yesterday's Law, Today’s Problem

By David P Shirk A third of the people seem to be indifferent to... more

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2 years ago
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11 comments

More American Expatriates Give Up Citizenship

It's not a vast amount of folks, just 500 or so per quarter, and it's mostly... more

ampersand
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1 comment

Unconstitutional Detention Grows in U.S.

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Progresshiv
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Terrifying Video: "I Don't Need a Warrant, Ma'am, Under Federal Law" or "We don't got to show you no stink'in badges!

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Admirable
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88 comments

Left-Wing Icon: America Is Still Headed Towards Fascism Under Obama

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Patriot Act vs. Constitution

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Hedges: Is America Yearning for Fascism? | | AlterNet

We can laugh at the desperate people who threaten violence against elected officials. But they are not the fools. We are.

March 31, 2010 |

The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.

"We are ruled not by two parties but one party," Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket, told me. "It is the party of money and war. Our country has been hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those who have hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded."

The Democrats and their liberal apologists are so oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country that they think offering unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their nonexistent health care policies is a step forward. They think that passing a jobs bill that will give tax credits to corporations is a rational response to an unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent. They think that making ordinary Americans, one in eight of whom depends on food stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable. They think that the refusal to save the estimated 2.4 million people who will be forced out of their homes by foreclosure this year is justified by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity. The message is clear. Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our anemic democracy die.

The unraveling of America mirrors the unraveling of Yugoslavia. The Balkan war was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia. The petty criminals and goons who took power harnessed the anger and despair of the unemployed and the desperate. They singled out convenient scapegoats from ethnic Croats to Muslims to Albanians to Gypsies. They set in motion movements that unleashed a feeding frenzy leading to war and self-immolation. There is little difference between the ludicrous would-be poet Radovan Karadzic, who was a figure of ridicule in Sarajevo before the war, and the moronic Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. There is little difference between the Oath Keepers and the Serbian militias. We can laugh at these people, but they are not the fools. We are.

The longer we appeal to the Democrats, who are servants of corporate interests, the more stupid and ineffectual we become. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, and they are right. Only 25 percent of those polled said the government can be trusted to protect the interests of the American people. If we do not embrace this outrage and distrust as our own it will be expressed through a terrifying right-wing backlash.

"It is time for us to stop talking about right and left," McKinney told me. "The old political paradigm that serves the interests of the people who put us in this predicament will not be the paradigm that gets us out of this. I am a child of the South. Janet Napolitano tells me I need to be afraid of people who are labeled white supremacists but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not afraid of white supremacists. I am concerned about my own government. The Patriot Act did not come from the white supremacists, it came from the White House and Congress. Citizens United did not come from white supremacists, it came from the Supreme Court. Our problem is a problem of governance. I am willing to reach across traditional barriers that have been skillfully constructed by people who benefit from the way the system is organized."We can laugh at the desperate people who threaten violence against elected officials.... more

Monkey_Films
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Journalists Describe Police Run-Ins

http://www.salon.com/news/2010/03/16/us_new_orleans_police_taping/index.html... more

rodstradamus
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2 years ago
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FBI Uses Fake Profiles on Social Networks to Track Suspects

The FBI and other federal agencies are going undercover on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace... more

rodstradamus
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2 years ago
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71 comments

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