tagged w/ Department of Homeland Security
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He wouldn't allow some Travel Suppression Agent to pat him down to make sure he wasn't with Al Qaeda.
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Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was detained Monday by the Transportation Security Administration in Nashville, Tenn., after refusing a full body pat-down, POLITICO has confirmed.
“I spoke with him five minutes ago and he was being detained indefinitely,” Paul spokesperson Moira Bagley said. “The image scan went off; he refused patdown.”
“My son @SenRandPaul being detained by TSA for refusing full body pat-down after anomaly in body scanner in Nashville. More details coming,” wrote the authenticated Twitter account of presidential candidate Ron Paul.
Like his father, Rand Paul has libertarian leanings and has been a fierce critic of TSA’s pat-downs of passengers at airports, which he views as government overreach. The senator grilled TSA Administrator John Pistole last year after a 6-year-old girl from Paul’s hometown, was patted down by airport security.
“I guess this little girl would be part of the random pat-downs, this little girl from Bowling Green, Kentucky, one of my constituents,” Paul said, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader. “They’re still quite unhappy with you guys as well as myself and a lot of other Americans who think you’ve gone overboard, you’re missing the boat on terrorism because you’re doing these invasive searches on six-year-old girls.”He wouldn't allow some Travel Suppression Agent to pat him down to make sure he... more
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The Radiation Database is an attempt to document the world’s most powerful RF radiation sources in addition to just about anything else “geeky.” It’s what you get when you mix George Jetson with Google Earth.
This file is a labor of love. My nickname is “Resonated” and I am fascinated with all things radiant, resonant, and electromagnetic. EMR is modern magic, useful in so many ways, and these facilities are performing modern magic. I love science, and I find many of the facilities contained herein intriguing. I hope you will as well.The Radiation Database is an attempt to document the world’s most powerful RF... more
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By Stephen C. Webster
Thursday, January 26, 2012 12:02 EST
If Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was acting “irate” during a recent visit to Nashville International Airport, it certainly hid it very well.
After being briefly detained by police officers on Monday, Paul appears to be getting some vindication in the form of a security camera’s video. Although police described him as “being irate” in an incident report, footage published Thursday shows Paul sitting calmly inside an airport checkpoint, and occasionally picking up his phone.
Paul reportedly set off an alarm on an x-ray machine designed to peer under fliers’ clothing, then refused the more aggressive search. He was briefly detained by local police before being released and re-booking his flight.
Paul has been a longtime critic of the TSA’s invasive search procedures. He told a Senate committee in June, 2011 that the TSA has “gone overboard” with “invasive searches on 6-year-old girls.”
At the time, a TSA spokesman told Raw Story that Paul was not detained, but merely “denied access to the secure gate area.” Paul returned a short time later and flew back to Washington, D.C. without incident. He’s since called for an investigation.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/01/26/security-video-shows-police-lied-about-rand-pauls-behavior/
This video is from Nashville International Airport, embedded courtesy of The Tennessean.
"In all Honesty, I really thought that, this whole thing was just a Ploy to make the Paul family look like ordinary citizens, I knew something wasn't correct!!!!"By Stephen C. Webster
Thursday, January 26, 2012 12:02 EST
If Sen. Rand Paul... more
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KB723
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added this
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17 days ago
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If this had been anyone else they would already been arrested with no bail.
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Atlanta, Georgia (CNN) -- The U.S. Secret Service is looking into a controversial column by an Atlanta Jewish newspaper publisher that mulled the assassination of an American president.
Andrew Adler, owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, wrote a January 13 column about the threat of Iran to Israel. He posed three options for the Jewish state to counter the Iranian regime.
The Atlanta Jewish Times, a weekly focused on the Atlanta Jewish community, was founded in 1925 as the Southern Israelite.
U.S. Secret Service spokesman George Ogilvie told CNN Saturday, "We are aware of it. We are taking the appropriate investigative steps."
Adler could not be reached for comment, but the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a wire service for Jewish newspapers in North America, quoted Adler on Friday as saying "I very much regret it. I wish I hadn't made reference to it at all."If this had been anyone else they would already been arrested with no bail.
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Cass Sunstein wrote a paper in 2008 advocating thought and speech control through goverment enforcement titled Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures.
In it, Sunstein recommends a number of bizarre ways in which the government could "ban conspiracy theories including “infiltrating” social network websites, chat rooms and message boards; called "cognitive infiltration,”
The find comes as a government document reportedly relates the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s command center routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report.
Sunstein said government agents “might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.”
Sunstein defined a conspiracy theory as “an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.”
Some “conspiracy theories” recommended for ban by Sunstein include:
•“Holocaust denial"
•“Anti-Israel sentiments"
•“9/11 Truth"
•“The theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud”
•“The view that the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy”
•“The 1996 crash of TWA flight 800 was caused by a U.S. military missile”
•“The Trilateral Commission is responsible for important movements of the international economy”
•“That Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by federal agents”
•“The moon landing was staged and never actually occurred”Cass Sunstein wrote a paper in 2008 advocating thought and speech control through... more
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Janet Napalitano doesn't inspire any confidence in her bloated bureaucracy's ability, or possibly lack-there-of to protect the nation's most critical infrastructure. Perhaps she is in the wrong line of work.
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U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano discusses the importance of bilateral and multilateral security efforts with the Council on Foreign Relation's (CFR) James M. Lindsay, detailing some of her department's most recent international collaborations in Europe and the Middle East.
"The things we know about don't keep me up at night as much as the things that are the unknown," Napolitano said, identifying themost concerning security threats as "the safety of travels, the security of cargo moving around the world, the ability to spot potential terrorists early before they can be successful, the ability to respond to a terrorist attack, and then the whole area of the protection of cyberspace."Janet Napalitano doesn't inspire any confidence in her bloated bureaucracy's... more
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Could you ever imagine that something like this could ever happen under a president who claims to be a constitutional lawyer? Add this to the fact that we don't have a documented case where any agent of the TSA has ever caught a terrorists, but we do have much documentation on TSA engaging in criminal activity.
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The TSA's 25 "viper" teams — for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response — have run more than 9,300 unannounced checkpoints and other search operations in the last year. Department of Homeland Security officials have asked Congress for funding to add 12 more teams next year.
According to budget documents, the department spent $110 million in fiscal 2011 for "surface transportation security," including the TSA's viper program, and is asking for an additional $24 million next year. That compares with more than $5 billion for aviation security.
TSA officials say they have no proof that the roving viper teams have foiled any terrorist plots or thwarted any major threat to public safety. But they argue that the random nature of the searches and the presence of armed officers serve as a deterrent and bolster public confidence.
"We have to keep them [terrorists] on edge," said Frank Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington. "We're not going to have a permanent presence everywhere."Could you ever imagine that something like this could ever happen under a president... more
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A petition to abolish the TSA has appeared on the White House.gov website. The petition already has almost 8,000 signatures, and has already passed the 5,000 mark required for it to receive some kind of response from WhiteHouse.gov.
It is entitled “Abolish the TSA, and use its monstrous budget to fund more sophisticated, less intrusive counter-terrorism intelligence,” and the full text reads as follows.
The Transportation Security Administration has been one of the largest, most expensive and most visible blunders of the post-9-11 homeland security reformation. It has violated countless constitutional rights of average Americans, caused miserable and expensive delays in an already-overburdened air travel system, and allowed multiple known instances of harassment, theft, extortion and sexual abuse by its employees. It has failed approximately 70% of undercover efficacy tests, and for all its excesses, has been unable to catch even a single terrorist since its creation. In our current economic situation, we can no longer afford to continue wasting taxpayer dollars on this kafkaesque embarrassment. Let us instead invest in saner, more effective solutions.A petition to abolish the TSA has appeared on the White House.gov website. The... more
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Remember when Obama undoing what Bush did and getting back to the Consitution was cool and popular? Turns out Obama has still been as bad as Bush and even worse in some cases.
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Last week, the top lawyer and 34-year-veteran of the CIA, John Rizzo, explained to PBS' Frontline that Obama has "changed virtually nothing" from Bush policies in these areas, and this week, the ACLU explains that "most [Bush] policies remain core elements of our national security strategy today."
At some point very soon, this basic truth will be impossible to deny with a straight face even for the most hardened loyalists of both parties, each of whom have been eager, for their own reasons, to deny it (and even the two differences cited there, though positive, are wildly exaggerated by Obama defenders: the torture techniques authorized by Bush were no longer in use and the CIA black sites were empty by the time Obama was inaugurated; by contrast, there is ample evidence that the Obama administration continues to use torture by proxy and rendition/CIA-black-sites by proxy as well).
The report is broken down into sections/chapters, and here are a few highlights:
The ACLU then devotes an entire chapter to the way in which immunity for America's torturers -- bestowed jointly by President Obama and a judicial branch meekly deferential to his and Bush's claims of state secrecy -- has contaminated and degraded the entire justice system and made the future reintroduction of torture a virtual inevitability:
This Surveillance State, like most other Bush/Obama Terrorism policies, is justified by a never-ending orgy of fear-mongering. But other than the enrichment of the private Security State industry (see here and here).
A separate chapter is devoted to what the ACLU calls "A Massive and Unchecked Surveillance Society." It explains: "Using Patriot Act authority, the Bush Administration started -- and the Obama Administration has continued -- to conduct wholesale 'preventive' surveillance of innocent Americans without judicial review." And "the result is a national surveillance society in which Americans’ right to privacy is under unprecedented siege." But little is known about exactly what is being done by this purely unaccountable hidden government -- what The Washington Post calls "Top Secret America" -- because of this:
Pointing to that core theory of both presidencies, the ACLU dispatches one of the most misleading claims of Obama defenders: that the President's failure to close Guantanamo is due exclusively to Congressional obstructionism; in fact, long before Congress acted at all with regard to that camp, the President announced his intention to continue its core injustice -- indefinite detention -- albeit in a different locale:
During the Bush era, the actions and condemnations of the ACLU received ample positive attention from progressives. That, of course, is no longer true, and this damning report will likely be ignored in most of those circles, just as this truly remarkable comment from the ACLU's Executive Director has been. And, as usual, anyone urging that attention be paid to these facts will be met with demands that eyes be diverted instead to how scary Sarah Palin Christine O'Donnell Michele Bachmann Rick Perry is, and then this will all blissfully fade away in a cloud of partisan electioneering even with the election more than a year away.
Either way, this creeping unchecked authoritarianism marches forward unabated, and is now -- rather than the province of the right-wing GOP -- fully bipartisan consensus. I really don't understand how progressives think they'll be taken seriously the next time there is a GOP President and they try to resurrect their feigned concern for these matters; they'll be every bit as credible as conservatives who pretend to be deficit-warriors and defenders of restrained government only when the other party is in power.Remember when Obama undoing what Bush did and getting back to the Consitution was cool... more
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"There were a number of reasons I retrieved and posted the 4 page police report from the East Rutherford, NJ P.D. on the 9-11-2001 Dancing Israelis incident. If any 9-11 researchers had seen the report, they failed to make it available for public scrutiny. As a consequence, some individuals have concluded that the Dancing Israelis were an "urban legend", based only on researchers' opinions and a slew of seemingly disparate facts."
The FBI's investigation of the Dancing Israelis is close to 450 pages long. Many sections are blanked out, some pages have been withheld, and it won't be completely declassified until 2030 at the earliest. The report is in 6 sections. The PDF "search" option does not seem to be working. A brief synopsis of some findings are below, section by section."There were a number of reasons I retrieved and posted the 4 page police report... more
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FEMA Partners with Homeland Security on Psyops Campaign.
Homeland Security gives the Metropolitan Transportation Authory $10,000,000 ($10 MILLION DOLLARS) for Psyops Ad Campaign. These ads are part of the ‘If you see something say something’ program.FEMA Partners with Homeland Security on Psyops Campaign.
Homeland Security gives... more
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– The Department of Homeland Security plans to spend more than $300 million over the next four years on radiation-detection equipment that has not been fully tested and may not work, according to a budget request and an unreleased report by the Government Accountability Office.– The Department of Homeland Security plans to spend more than $300 million over... more
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A week after U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) grilled Transportation Security Administration Chief John Pistole over the absurdity of his agency's random pat-down system (which results in 6-year-old girls getting frisked while suspects on the terrorist watch list board planes unperturbed), the TSA is in the news again for another seemingly nonsensical body search.
A Florida woman, Jean Weber, says her wheelchair-bound, 95-year-old mother was forced to take off her adult diaper at Northwest Florida Regional Airport.
“It’s something I couldn’t imagine happening on American soil,” Weber told the News-Herald. “Here is my mother, 95 years old, 105 pounds, barely able to stand, and then this.”
Weber described the TSA officer's statements to her on CNN:
"They came out and told me it had something to do with her 'Depends,'" she said. "That it was wet and it was firm and they couldn't check it thoroughly. They would have to remove it. ... She said she could not complete the security check without taking the 'Depends' off."
Perhaps most amazingly, TSA defends the actions "Our officers acted professional and according to the proper procedure."
But it's the "proper procedure" that's the problem. Any system that produces absurd results needs to changed....
continued at:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/bthesite/the-ridiculous-report-blog/bal-tsa-defends-search-of-95yearold-womans-adult-diaper-20110627,0,932180.story?track=rssA week after U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) grilled Transportation Security... more
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Dagum
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8 months ago
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In a hearing about rail security Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul pressed Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole on the agency's controversial pat-downs at airport security checkpoints.
Paul (R-Ky.) said Pistole and other TSA defenders had the wrong outlook on transportation security.
"This kind of gets back to this whole idea of what what are willing to...give up as a country," he said. "In your interview with ABC News...you said 'I see flying as a privilege.' Well, there are those of us who see it otherwise, including the Supreme Court."
Paul said recent reports that TSA had given children pat-downs made him feel less safe.
"It makes me think you’re clueless, if you think she’s going to attack our country and you’re not doing your research on the people who want to attack our country," he said....
Continued at:
http://thehill.com/blogs/transportation-report/tsa/167835-sen-rand-paul-goes-after-tsa-pat-downsIn a hearing about rail security Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul pressed Transportation... more
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Dagum
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8 months ago
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The recent call by U.S. Senator Charles Schumer for increased rail safety funding and the creation of a “no-ride” list for Amtrak trains is yet another reminder of just who is stoking fear of Muslims in America.
In an interview last year with a Jewish radio talk show in New York, Senator Schumer said he believed that HaShem (an Orthodox Jewish term for “God”) gave him the name “Schumer” — which means “guardian” — so that he could fulfill his “very important” role in the U.S. Senate as a “guardian of Israel.” Presumably, Schumer’s God-given role also includes turning the country he is actually paid to represent — the United States — into an Islamophobicpolice state.
Americans wondering what happened to their freedoms since 9/11 need to understand the key role played by ardent pro-Israelis like Schumer in undermining their civil liberties under the guise of protecting them from terrorism.
On October 11, 2001, exactly one month after 9/11, Senator Joe LIEberman introduced a bill to establish the Department of Homeland Security. Since then, “the No. 1 pro-Israel advocate and leader in Congress” has been the main mover behind such draconian legislation as the Protect America Act of 2007, the Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010, and the proposed Terrorist Expatriation Act, which would revoke the citizenship of Americans accused of providing “material support” to a foreign terrorist organization,
LIEberman, who was Barack Obama’s mentor when he entered the Senate, has even proposed a bill which would give the president the power to kill the Internet in the event of a so-called “national cyber-emergency.”The recent call by U.S. Senator Charles Schumer for increased rail safety funding and... more
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The governments got a PLAN. This PLAN’s origins were not in the halls of congress, but in the Department of Homeland Security’s baby FEMA, and the FCC. Before I begin, just keep in mind that neither of those bodies has to go to congress before taking action – they just do as they think as best, without the say so of any kind of vote at all.
PLAN – Personal Localized Alerting Network. This is an act that will allow the FCC and FEMA to send alerts to your phone in case of an impending emergency in your area. Cell phone providers such as AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon will be using it even ahead of the proposed schedule. The media has been playing this off as something that only the President will have control over, making it appear that we the people actually have a say. This is simply not true according to the FCC and FEMA – http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/personal-localized-alerting-network-plan and http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id=54882 .
To those who know nothing about IT, this ma........
http://peacefreedomprosperity.com/5189/governments-new-tracking-system-plan/The governments got a PLAN. This PLAN’s origins were not in the halls of... more
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"Bill Murray saw his shadow on Groundhog Day. That means we're in for another year of artsy-fartsy movies." Stand-up comedian Chris Martin is ready for spring February 28, 2011 at Cafe Diem Comedy Night in Richmond, VA. Andrew Pauley is the MC.
http://chrismartincomedy.com"Bill Murray saw his shadow on Groundhog Day. That means we're in for... more
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"He puts the 'ha' in 'Stendhal Syndrome.'" MC Gradt Mutge introduces stand-up comedian Chris Martin at the Midnight Suggestion, presented by Johnny Hugel and Steady Sounds February 24, 2011 in Richmond, VA.
http://chrismartincomedy.com"He puts the 'ha' in 'Stendhal Syndrome.'" MC Gradt... more
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"I'm going to read the fictional memoirs of a lovable alcoholic. I haven't decided whether it's going to be Snooki or George W. Bush." Stand-up comedian Chris Martin eases into 2011 in this set February 23 at Strange Matter in Richmond, VA.
http://chrismartincomedy.com"I'm going to read the fictional memoirs of a lovable alcoholic. I... more
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On September 1, 2001 a gaggle of terrorists caught the early flight out of Portland, ME and the rest is history. Every pundit and politician talked about how, "Our world changed forever." That sure turned out a gross understatement and we're not going back anytime soon.On September 1, 2001 a gaggle of terrorists caught the early flight out of Portland,... more
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