Senate Set to Introduce Bill for Broad Email Spying

A Senate proposal claiming to "protect" Americans' email privacy from unwarranted secret state intrusions "has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law," CNET revealed.

As provisions of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) are "updated" to better reflect the insatiable needs of our police state minders, law enforcement groups and corporate lobbyists are clamoring for greater access to our electronic communications.

While doe-eyed "progressives" claim that the reelection of war criminal Barack Obama portends an imminent "2.0 reset" by his administration, actions speak louder than words, particularly as they pertain to Americans' constitutional rights.

Most recently the Hope and Change™ fraudster signaled his intentions by giving Israel a green light to murder Palestinians in the open air prison of Gaza. The silence from "progressive" quarters was worse than deafening as writers Chris Floyd and Arthur Silber pointed out.

What about other "liberal icons," stalwart champions of civil liberties; what have they been up to since the election?

CNET investigative reporter Declan McCullagh informed us that "Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns," and that a "vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans' e-mail, is scheduled for next week."

Among the proposals found in the Leahy revisions are the following:

• Grants warrantless access to Americans' electronic correspondence to over 22 federal agencies. Only a subpoena is required, not a search warrant signed by a judge based on probable cause.

• Permits state and local law enforcement to warrantlessly access Americans' correspondence stored on systems not offered "to the public," including university networks.

• Authorizes any law enforcement agency to access accounts without a warrant--or subsequent court review--if they claim "emergency" situations exist.

• Delays notification of customers whose accounts have been accessed from 3 days to "10 business days." This notification can be postponed by up to 360 days.

Although a follow-up CNET article reported that Leahy, reacting to widespread opposition, has now "abandoned his controversial proposal that would grant government agencies more surveillance power--including warrantless access to Americans' e-mail accounts," given Congress's near universal embrace of the "Total Information Awareness" paradigm, it is a near certainty these measures will return in some form.

"It's an abrupt departure from Leahy's earlier approach," McCullough noted, one "which required police to obtain a search warrant backed by probable cause before they could read the contents of e-mail or other communications."

But in the best tradition of "bipartisanship," i.e., capitulation to the Security State, "after law enforcement groups including the National District Attorneys' Association and the National Sheriffs' Association organizations objected to the legislation," Leahy "pushed back the vote and reworked the bill as a package of amendments to be offered next Thursday."

The strongest objections to providing the public with privacy safeguards came, you guessed it, from officials within Obama's Department of Justice.

Earlier this year, CNET reported that the DOJ "offered what amounts to a frontal attack on proposals to amend federal law to better protect Americans' privacy."

"James Baker, the associate deputy attorney general, warned that rewriting a 1986 privacy law to grant cloud computing users more privacy protections and to require court approval before tracking Americans' cell phones would hinder police investigations."

During Senate testimony back in April, Baker claimed that requiring a search warrant "to obtain stored e-mail could have an 'adverse impact' on criminal investigations. And making location information only available with a search warrant, he said, would hinder 'the government's ability to obtain important information in investigations of serious crimes'."

In other words, even when there is no evidence a crime has been committed the Obama administration is asserting that constitutional safeguards on email stored in the cloud would get in the government's way and impose "an unnecessary burden" on state fishing expeditions by a multitude of law enforcement agencies.

Such fallacious claims come hot on the heels of administration efforts to convince Congress to rewrite wiretapping laws that would require internet firms such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to build backdoors into their infrastructure for government surveillance.

Earlier this month, Russia Today disclosed that although the FBI "has been adamant about withholding information about their plans to ensure the government can access any encrypted emails or messages sent over the Internet," a federal judge ordered the Bureau to "come clean."

"Washington," RT reported, "hopes to eventually roll out a program that will see that the FBI and other federal agencies are allowed backdoor access to any and all online communications."

The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg, in response to charges by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that a government stonewall hindered their Freedom of Information Act lawsuit on the FBI's "Going Dark" program, ordered the Department of Justice to conduct "further review of the materials previously withheld."

Although the DOJ's Criminal Division had located 8,425 pages of "potentially responsive information," they only released "one page in full and 6 pages in part, and withheld 51 pages in full." How's that for "transparency"!

And with new Justice Department guidelines allowing "counterterrorism officials" to "lengthen the period of time they retain information about U.S. residents, even if they have no known connection to terrorism" as The Washington Post reported earlier this year, any and every scrap of electronic detritus generated by the billions of cell phone calls, text messages, emails and web searches made by Americans every day is considered fair game by government snoops.

The trend towards retaining more and more data by intelligence agencies and local police has accelerated with technological advances. As The New York Times reported in August, "not so long ago even the most aggressive government surveillance had to be selective: the cost of data storage was too high and the capacity too low to keep everything."

"Not anymore." According to to John Villasenor, a "senior fellow" at the elitist Brookings Institution, as data storage costs plummet "it will soon be technically feasible and affordable to record and store everything that can be recorded about what everyone in a country says or does."

The Brookings analyst averred that "estimates ... to store the audio from telephone calls made by an average person in the course of a year would require about 3.3 gigabytes and cost just 17 cents to store, a price that is expected to fall to 2 cents by 2015."

"Tracking a person's movements for a year, collected from their cellphone, would take so little space as to carry a trivial cost," the Times averred. "Storing video takes far more space, but the price is dropping so steadily that storing millions of hours of material will not be a problem soon."

But wouldn't securocrats drown in these vast oceans of electronic data? Not really. A "parallel revolution in search technology" will soon allow even the dimmest bulb at DHS or the FBI "to efficiently find anything of interest in the data."

This "parallel revolution" was hinted at by investigative journalist James Bamford. In his March piece in Wired Magazine, Bamford described efforts by the National Security Agency to build "super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages."

In 2009, "they made a big breakthrough," a former "senior intelligence official" told Wired. "The NSA believes it's on the verge of breaking a key encryption algorithm--opening up hoards of data."

"That," the former official noted, "is where the value of Bluffdale, and its mountains of long-stored data, will come in," Bamford wrote.

"What can't be broken today may be broken tomorrow. 'Then you can see what they were saying in the past,' he says. 'By extrapolating the way they did business, it gives us an indication of how they may do things now.' The danger, the former official says, is that it's not only foreign government information that is locked in weaker algorithms, it's also a great deal of personal domestic communications, such as Americans' email intercepted by the NSA in the past decade."

And if it can be intercepted, mined and stored, it can be searched, giving government snoops an unprecedented window into our lives.

More troubling still, with ECPA "reform" on the horizon, CNET disclosed that "Leahy's rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies--including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission--to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant."

In addition to the SEC, civil subpoena authority would be granted to diverse agencies such as the "Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Maritime Commission, the Postal Regulatory Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Mine Enforcement Safety and Health Review Commission," McCullough wrote.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to infer that investigative digging by concerned citizens and journalists into the filthy shenanigans and "shitty deals" foisted on the public by banks, shady brokerage houses, mortgage lenders, defense corporations, petrochemical and mining interests, or unions out to "organize the unorganized," would be viewed as a dire threat to the current corporatist set-up.

According to draft proposals leaked to CNET we learn that if passed the new law "would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge."

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) reported last month, the organization "is seeking documents about DHS Internet monitoring that some Justice Department officials believe may 'run afoul of privacy laws forbidding government surveillance of private Internet traffic'."

"In February 2011," EPIC disclosed that "the Department of Homeland Security announced that the agency planned to implement a program that would monitor media content, including social media data."

The DHS initiative "would gather information from 'online forums, blogs, public websites, and messages boards' and disseminate information to 'federal, state, local, and foreign government and private sector partners'."

"The program would be executed, in part," EPIC also revealed, "by individuals who established fictitious usernames and passwords to create covert social media profiles to spy on other users. The agency stated it would store personal information for up to five years."

Ironically enough, in October the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a report, Federal Support for and Involvement in State and Local Fusion Centers, which found "that DHS-assigned detailees to the fusion centers forwarded 'intelligence' of uneven quality--oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens' civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism."

"Despite reviewing 13 months' worth of reporting originating from fusion centers from April 1, 2009 to April 30, 2010," Senate staff averred, "the Subcommittee investigation could identify no reporting which uncovered a terrorist threat, nor could it identify a contribution such fusion center reporting made to disrupt an active terrorist plot."

In their Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against DHS, the privacy watchdogs obtained nearly three hundreds pages of documents which revealed that the sprawling bureaucracy "is monitoring political dissent." According to EPIC, the documents described widespread surveillance by the agency and included "contracts and statements of work with General Dynamics for 24/7 media and social network monitoring and periodic reports to DHS. The documents reveal that the agency is tracking media stories that 'reflect adversely' on DHS or the U.S. government."

Meanwhile, Senate Subcommittee investigators also found that the agency's disbursement practices were so shoddy that "DHS revealed that it was unable to provide an accurate tally of how much it had granted to states and cities to support fusion centers efforts, instead producing broad estimates of the total amount of Federal dollars spent on fusion center activities from 2003 to 2011, estimates which ranged from $289 million to $1.4 billion."

But as I have pointed out many times, the machinery of state repression is lubricated with cold cash bestowed by taxpayers on privileged corporate insiders. Earlier this month, Washington Technology reported that "the top 20 contractors at the Homeland Security Department represent more than a third of all business done by contract at the department during fiscal 2011."

According to the report, "DHS spent $5.1 billion with the top 20 companies, and $14.2 billion on all contractors," with "IT and systems integration firms," integral to constructing and running the secret state's panopticon, topping the list.

• • •

Since the 9/11 provocation, intrusive surveillance of the American people by a host of shadowy government agencies and private corporations clearly demonstrates there is broad ruling class consensus for expanding authoritarian and dictatorial forms of rule under an unconstitutional "Unitary Executive."

Recent revelations by The Washington Post that the Obama regime "has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the 'disposition matrix'," starkly reveals that when the president can spy on or kill whomever he pleases, on his own initiative and without the checks and balances enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights is effectively a dead letter.

While we do not know what form a "new and improved" ECPA will take when it emerges from the bipartisan congressional snake pit, the prospects for ever emerging from America's "friendly fascist" nightmare are growing dimmer.

Another Day, Another Shameful Ruling on Police State Spying

Recently, federal district court Judge Cormac J. Carney of the Central District of California, dismissed a civil rights lawsuit filed against the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on grounds of bogus "state secrets privilege" claims made by the Obama administration.

That suit, Fazaga v. FBI, was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The plaintiffs forcefully argued that the Bureau illegally spied on Muslim residents in southern California, targeting them for "special handling" solely on the basis of their religious beliefs.

The atrocity played out in Carney's court against a citizens' right to due process under the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, constitutional guarantees that extend to all government actions and proceedings that can result in harm to an individual either civilly or criminally, is only the latest in a long line of capitulatory rulings by a diminished Judicial Branch.

Under Bush, and now Obama, the Justice Department demanded that Fazaga be thrown out on the most specious grounds: that presidential authority in all matters relating to national security cannot be challenged by those who are the victims of predatory actions, regardless of their egregious nature, by the secret state.


Denouncing Carney's cave-in to the Justice Department, Ahilan Arulanantham, the deputy legal director for the ACLU of Southern California said: "Under today's ruling dozens of law-abiding Muslim Americans in Southern California will never know if the government violated their constitutional rights. Every American should be deeply troubled when the government can win dismissal of a case involving the most basic constitutional rights by claiming that it is acting, in secret, in the interests of national security. The notion that our basic safety requires relinquishing our most cherished liberties is as inconsistent with the Constitution as it is frightening."

But in a collapsing Empire, where the indefinite detention or even the liquidation of "terrorism" suspects, alongside illegal warrantless spying, the trampling of First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly, the persecution of government whistleblowers who bring high state crimes to light, are now deemed unreviewable by any court by a quasi-fascist "Unitary Executive."

According to a case summary posted by the ACLU of Southern California, Peter Bibring informed us: "From the term 'state secrets,' you might think the case involved spies, hush-hush arrangements with foreign governments, or people detained at secret foreign prisons--as some state secrets cases do. But this one involves the FBI's investigation into law-abiding U.S. citizens and residents in Orange County, California, called 'Operation Flex'."

"In June 2006," Bibring wrote, "FBI agents recruited Craig Monteilh, a man with a file full of felony convictions, to pose as a convert to Islam at one of the largest mosques in the area. The FBI paid Monteilh to spend the next fourteen months meeting as many members of the Muslim community as he could. He made audio recordings of every interaction, as he gathered names, telephone numbers, e-mails, political and religious views, travel plans, and other information on hundreds of individuals in the Muslim community. According to Monteilh's own sworn statement, he was told to pay special attention to community leaders and those who seemed especially devout."

FBI snitch Monteilh, a steroid-enhanced "fitness freak" and con man, who the Orange County Weekly reported had once told an unwitting dupe of one of his scams, "my body is my business card," that is, before "liberating" her of tens of thousands of dollars even as he pocketed upwards of a quarter million more from the Bureau, was eventually sent back to state prison for grand-theft.

"When asked if the FBI had particular targets in the Muslim community that they wanted to have investigated, Monteilh said, 'No. They said the targets would come to me.' In other words," Bibring averred, "Operation Flex was a fishing expedition that targeted people because of their religion. But in the end, after Monteilh began incessantly about jihad and violence, members of the community did exactly what you're supposed to do: they reported him to the FBI. After hundreds of hours of Monteilh's time and thousands of taxpayer dollars 'Operation Flex' resulted in zero criminal convictions. No one was ever even charged with a terrorism offense."

Monteilh's "cover" was blown when members of the Islamic Center of Irvine grew increasingly suspicious--and disturbed--by his provocative chatter about "jihad" and "terrorism." Two members of the Orange County mosque contacted Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR's Southern California chapter, and told him that during a car ride Monteilh said he "wanted to blow up buildings."

Ayloush contacted J. Stephen Tidwell, an FBI assistant director who mendaciously told a gathering at the Islamic Center of Irvine in 2006 that the FBI "would never spy on mosques."

"'I am calling to report a possible terrorist'," Ayloush told the assistant director, the Weekly disclosed. "'He is a white convert in Irvine.' As soon as Ayloush uttered those words, he says Tidwell cut him off. 'Okay,' he reportedly replied. 'Thanks for letting us know'."

"Ayloush offered to provide the FBI with the man's name and address, but, he says, Tidwell told him to give the information to the Irvine P.D., which he promptly did. 'Neither the FBI nor the Irvine P.D. ever bothered to talk to the guy after he was reported,' Ayloush says."

Instead of "preventing terrorism" however, Operation Flex like a score of other filthy entrapment exercises run by the FBI worked precisely as intended: as a means to terrorize the Muslim community and let the "hajis" know who's boss.

As Pulitzer Prize winning Associated Press investigative journalists Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo reported last week, the New York City Police Department's sinister Demographics Unit, tasked with "spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques ... never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation."

"The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program," Goldman and Apuzzo wrote, and was "built with help from the CIA." With millions of taxpayer-provided "homeland security" handouts, the unit "assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames."

"But in a June 28 deposition as part of a longstanding federal civil rights case," AP reported, "Assistant Chief Thomas Galati said none of the conversations the officers overheard ever led to a case."

"'Related to Demographics,' Galati testified that information that has come in 'has not commenced an investigation'."

But when it comes to evidence of widespread FBI abuse uncovered in Fazaga, we're supposed to believe that none of this can be discussed, let alone litigated in open court, since to do so would let the "terrorists" win!

The court, caving-in to arguments made by Hope and Change™ fraudster Barack Obama's Justice Department, tossed the case on the basis of assertions made by government attorneys that to allow the plaintiffs their day in court "would require or unjustifiably risk disclosure of secret and classified information regarding the nature and scope of the FBI's counterterrorism investigations, the specific individuals under investigation and their associates, and the tactics and sources of information used in combating possible terrorist attacks on the United States and its allies."

In ruling against victims of the Bureau's anti-Muslim witchhunt, Judge Carney averred that "the state secrets privilege is specifically designed to protect against disclosure of such information that is so vital to our country's national security."

"The state secrets privilege strives to achieve a difficult compromise between the principles of national security and constitutional freedoms," Carney wrote.

But as Shahid Buttar, the executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee BORDC), wrote: "First, by invoking the state secrets privilege, the decision extends the judiciary's capitulation to executive lawlessness across the Bush & Obama administrations. Since initially emerging as a narrow evidentiary doctrine (in a 1953 case that ultimately proved to be part of a Pentagon coverup), federal courts have recently accepted the privilege as a wholesale immunity doctrine, a 'get out of jail free' card for executive abuses of various kinds."

If we were inclined to believe the good judge (we're not), with logic worthy of a Monty Python skit, Carney claimed that "The state secrets privilege can only be invoked and applied with restraint, in narrow circumstances, and infused with judicial skepticism. Yet, when properly invoked, it is absolute--the interest of protecting state secrets cannot give way to any other need or interest."

Accordingly, Carney, appointed to the federal bench by that champion of civil liberties and human rights, George W. Bush, asserted that "the proper application of the state secrets privilege may unfortunately mean the sacrifice of individual liberties for the sake of national security."

Seeking to immunize himself from charges that he is little more than a toady for Executive Branch mandarins, Carney went to great lengths to cover his juridical ass-ets: "Plaintiffs raise the specter of Korematsu v. United States... and protest that dismissing their claims based upon the state secrets privilege would permit a 'remarkable assertion of power' by the Executive, and that any practice, no matter how abusive, may be immunized from legal challenge by being labeled as 'counterterrorism' and 'state secrets.' But such a claim assumes that courts simply rubber stamp the Executive's assertion of the state secrets privilege. That is not the case here."

Perish the thought! After all, only anti-patriotic, terrorist-loving, constitutional "extremists" would countenance otherwise! Never mind that the Bush and Obama regimes have raised the specter of "state secrets" to dismiss a score of cases relating to kidnapping and forced disappearance ("extraordinary rendition"), indefinite detention, torture, illegal wiretapping and state murder.

Last year, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, filed a declaration on the case which claimed that various aspects of the case would be "too sensitive" to be aired in open court. Indeed, according to Holder several categories of information that would be presented by plaintiffs' attorneys "could reasonably be expected to cause significant harm to the national security."

This is the same Eric Holder who as Deputy Attorney General under President Clinton, pimped himself out to secure the last-minute pardon of fugitive financier and Democratic Party moneyman Marc Rich before the Great Triangulator left office.

Commenting on Holder's role in securing Rich's pardon, investigative journalist Jim Hougan wrote: "Other than Richard Nixon, I can think of no other felon, or quasi-felon, who has been pardoned for his crimes without having first been convicted of them. Perhaps the explanation is that Rich and [Pinky] Green have been helping their countries--the United States and Israel--behind the scenes. Like Hollywood tycoon Arnan Milchan, who is widely alleged to have long used his businesses to help finance the operations of the Mossad, former 20th Century Fox honcho Rich may well have done the same...if not for the Mossad, then perhaps for the CIA."

But wait, there's more!

Proving once again that crime pays, if you're well-connected, upon leaving office Holder, a shrewd operator who knows which side his bread is buttered, joined the white shoe law firm of Covington & Burling. From his D.C. perch, Holder helped negotiate an agreement with the Justice Department over charges that Chiquita Brands International had ponied-up "protection money" to the drug-dealing Colombian death squad, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC.

Close allies of former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, three of whose relatives were recently extradited to the United States where they face cocaine trafficking charges, only after American taxpayers had doled out billions of dollars to "fight drugs" under Plan Colombia that is, Chiquita hired far-right AUC killers to murder trade unionists, peasant activists and human rights' campaigners to protect their blood-soaked "investments."

According to case files, Chiquita arranged payments totaling millions of dollars during a 1997 meeting between late AUC, Israeli-trained führer Carlos Castaño and officials from Chiquita subsidiary Banadex.

At the time, Colombia's attorney general, Mario Iguarán, charged that Chiquita had used one of its ships to smuggle some 3,400 AK-47 assault rifles and 4 million rounds of ammunition to AUC drug lords. Although Iguarán had sought the extradition of Chiquita executives over these charges, none were. It is unknown whether or not cocaine was transported into the United States by that ship on its return voyage. In the wake of the $25 million "settlement" with the Justice Department, Holder then represented Chiquita in a civil action that followed the criminal case.

More recently, as financial journalist Matt Taibbi pointed out in Rolling Stone, Holder's "predictable decision" not to criminally pursue Goldman Sachs for massive fraud is "not just because Holder has repeatedly proven himself to be a spineless bureaucrat and obsequious political creature masquerading as a cop, and not just because rumors continue to circulate that the Obama administration--supposedly in the interests of staving off market panic--made a conscious decision sometime in early 2009 to give all of Wall Street a pass on pre-crisis offenses."

"No," Taibbi wrote, "the real reason this wasn’t surprising is that Holder's decision followed a general pattern that has been coming into focus for years in American law enforcement. Our prosecutors and regulators have basically admitted now that they only go after the most obvious and easily prosecutable cases."

Like the persecution of Muslims, antiwar activists, national security whistleblowers or anyone else who's rocked the boat: easy prey for an FBI stitch-up.

Oops, Sorry: FBI E-Mail Snooping "A Technical Glitch"

Today's New York Times reports that the FBI's Engineering Research Facility (ERF) gained access to e-mail messages from an entire computer network rather than the single e-mail address approved by the secretive FISA court.

Under color of a "national security investigation" the incident was described as "a technical glitch" and "apparent miscommunication" with an unnamed internet provider.

Doubtless the guilty party is one of the telecom giants seeking retroactive immunity via BushCo's "Protect America Act" -- an onerous piece of corporatist flotsam solely designed to alleviate industry anxieties that outraged citizens would actually defend their rights through the courts.

Claiming that Bureau spies noticed a "surge" in the e-mail activity they were monitoring, the FBI alleges the provider "had mistakenly set its filtering equipment to trap far more data than a judge had actually authorized."

Times' reporter Eric Lichtblau avers,

The episode is an unusual example of what has become a regular if little-noticed occurrence, as American officials have expanded their technological tools: government officials, or the private companies they rely on for surveillance operations, sometimes foul up their instructions about what they can and cannot collect.

The problem has received no discussion as part of the fierce debate in Congress about whether to expand the government's wiretapping authorities and give legal immunity to private telecommunications companies that have helped in those operations.

Nor would we expect there to be any "discussion," let alone a "fierce debate" in Congress when it comes to protecting Americans' fourth amendment rights. Treated as mere "technical glitches" best left to "experts," our masters demand we change the channel and move along.

But we will not "move along" as we reflect here on earlier examples of FBI "technical glitches" -- or worse -- that led directly to the 9/11 attacks; the alleged trigger for the imposition of the Bush crime family's police state agenda and the "retroactive immunity" granted their Saudi and capitalist paramours:

From the Center for Cooperative Research's Complete 9/11 Timeline:

January 15-Early February 2000: Suspected Advance Man Helps 9/11 Hijackers Settle in San Diego
  
Hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar arrive in Los Angeles and stay there for two weeks. Omar al-Bayoumi, a suspected al-Qaeda advance man and possible Saudi agent, arrives in Los Angeles and visits the Saudi Consulate there. According to Newsweek, "Law-enforcement officials believe al-Bayoumi may [have] a closed-door meeting with Fahad al Thumairy, a member of the consulate's Islamic and Culture Affairs Section." [NEWSWEEK, 7/28/2003] (In March 2003, al Thumairy is stripped of his diplomatic visa and barred from entry to the US, reportedly because of suspected links to terrorism. [WASHINGTON POST, 11/23/2003]

The FBI's "best source" in San Diego says that al-Bayoumi "must be an intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia or another foreign power." A former top FBI official working on the al-Bayoumi investigation claims: "We firmly believed that he had knowledge [of the 9/11 plot], and that his meeting with them that day was more than coincidence." [NEWSWEEK, 7/28/2003]

Former senator Bob Graham (D-FL), whose Congressional investigation was blocked by the Bush regime and the FBI to protect "ally" Saudi Arabia, informs us:

The FBI did not even canvass its own counterterrorism sources, among whom was the informant in San Diego who knew both of the men [Alhazmi and Almihdhar] and had housed one of them. Had the Bureau simply sent a directive to all its field offices, telling them to check the two names with their sources, it is quite possible they would have come across vital information and been able to interdict the attack. Thus was lost the twelfth such opportunity. (Intelligence Matters, New York: Random House, 2004, p. 75) [emphasis added]

Was an electronic "driftnet" necessary prior to 9/11? After all, a Bureau mole had penetrated the plot and yet, the FBI failed to act. Why?

Investigative journalists Greg Palast and David Pallister writing in The Guardian tell us:

FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington say they were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family in the US before the terrorist attacks of September 11.

FBI documents shown on BBC Newsnight last night and obtained by the Guardian show that they had earlier sought to investigate two of Osama bin Laden's relatives in Washington and a Muslim organisation, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), with which they were linked.

The FBI file, marked Secret and coded 199, which means a case involving national security, records that Abdullah bin Laden, who lived in Washington, had originally had a file opened on him "because of his relationship with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth -- a suspected terrorist organisation".

But the FBI files were closed in 1996 apparently before any conclusions could be reached on either the Bin Laden brothers or the organisation itself. High-placed intelligence sources in Washington told the Guardian this week: "There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis".

They said the restrictions became worse after the Bush administration took over this year. The intelligence agencies had been told to "back off" from investigations involving other members of the Bin Laden family, the Saudi royals, and possible Saudi links to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan.

"There were particular investigations that were effectively killed." ("FBI claims Bin Laden inquiry was frustrated. Officials told to 'back off' Saudis before September 11," The Guardian, November 7, 2001)

I could continue with this line of inquiry but I think my point is clear. There were political reasons why pre-9/11 investigations were halted at the highest levels and they had nothing to do with preparing the ground for any alleged "inside job."

For reasons of state (read: unlimited profits for the oil multinationals and preparations for the coming invasion of Iraq) the gangsters occupying the White House could care less whether or not the Afghan-Arab database al-Qaeda would attack the American people. Why would they?

Before 9/11, the U.S. and NATO were utilizing their intelligence assets in the Balkans, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and the Bosnian al-Mujahid Brigade, as well as criminal syndicates and dodgy charities funded by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait -- allied with al-Qaeda and international drug trafficking networks -- for offensive action against neighboring Macedonia.

Is it any different today? The national security state's "Protect America Act" is an oxymoronic exercise in deceit and mendacity by propaganda specialists well-schooled in the black arts of deception. Commenting on the "unintentional" error on the part of its internet spies, FBI spokesman Michael Kortan told The New York Times, "The system worked exactly the way it's designed."

I couldn't agree more.

InfraGard: The FBI's "New Patriotic Alliance" with Corporate Criminals

In the old days, before a band of radical citizens raided the Media, PA offices of the FBI and exposed the Bureau's COINTELPRO operations against the left, federal gumshoes "partnered" with a host of "patriotic" groups and vigilante outfits to keep the rabble in line.

With quaint monikers such as the American Defense Society, American Protective League, American Vigilant Intelligence Foundation and the Legion of Justice--fascist before the word was coined by that old corporatist himself, Benito Mussolini--spying, provocation and, when necessary, extreme violence, were the handmaids of the "100% Americanism" touted by the Bureau's cross-dressing Director and his acolytes.

Though times have changed, some verities are eternal. "Since the business of government is business," it stands to reason that the FBI and their hapless competitors over at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), would modernize the state's collaboration with our masters: an updated "public-private partnership" for the 21st century clampdown.

Enter InfraGard, a spiffy brand for a fully operational network of private "security" specialists and "select" citizens keen on defending the "homeland."

In an exclusive piece in The Progressive magazine, Matthew Rothschild drops a dime on this sinister crew. Boasting some 23,000 members nationwide, including some "350 of our nation's Fortune 500," Rothschild writes,

The members of this rapidly growing group ... receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does--and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to "shoot to kill" in the event of martial law.

Among the perks available to this exclusive club of corporate grifters, InfraGard members, "Gain access to an FBI secure communication network complete with VPN encrypted website, webmail, listservs, message boards, and much more." According to its website InfraGard,

is a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) program that began in the Cleveland Field Office in 1996. It was a local effort to gain support from the information technology industry and academia for the FBI's investigative efforts in the cyber arena. The program expanded to other FBI Field Offices, and in 1998 the FBI assigned national program responsibility for InfraGard to the former National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) and to the Cyber Division in 2003. InfraGard and the FBI have developed a relationship of trust and credibility in the exchange of information concerning various terrorism, intelligence, criminal, and security matters [emphasis added].

One might reasonably ask: whose security and what matters are being attended to here?

While "infrastructure protection" sounds innocuous enough, do safeguards "meet[ing] the challenges America face in protecting against criminal, terrorist, and intelligence threats," mean curtailing a citizens' right to know when one of InfraGard's tony "partners" cut safety corners down at the local petrochemical plant or introduce silent and sinister cyber-monitoring tools on the latest version of a popular web browser? Phyllis Schneck, chairwoman of the board of directors of the group's National Members Alliance and vice president of research integration at Secure Computing, told Rothschild "People are happy to be in the know."

Make that some people.

In November 2001, InfraGard members were apprized of a vague "terrorist" threat (one of an endless stream as the Bush regime cranked-up its fear factory into full-production mode) to California bridges and other critical infrastructure. Rothschild reports,

The alert went out to the InfraGard membership. Enron was notified, and so, too, was Barry Davis, who worked for Morgan Stanley. He notified his brother Gray, the governor of California.

"He said his brother talked to him before the FBI," recalls Steve Maviglio, who was Davis's press secretary at the time. "And the governor got a lot of grief for releasing the information. In his defense, he said, 'I was on the phone with my brother, who is an investment banker. And if he knows, why shouldn't the public know?'"

Indeed, but perhaps the governor, whose post would soon be "terminated" by Rovian agents of "new thinking," hadn't gotten the message: this was America's Year Zero, when "everything changed"...except the Bushist grab for loot and power.

If this isn't troubling enough, it gets worse...much worse. An InfraGard whistleblower who had attended a "partnership for protection" meeting told Rothschild,

"The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage," he says. "From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we'd be given specific benefits." These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out.


But that's not all.

"Then they said when--not if--martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn't be prosecuted," he says. ... "I have nothing to gain by telling you this, and everything to lose," he adds. "I'm so nervous about this, and I'm not someone who gets nervous."

But as Jeff Wells over at Rigorous Intuition, writing on the "new reality" of an America in terminal mode cautions, "The harder truth may be that this is our destination. And they're not coming for us; they're here already, and they've always had us."

InfraGard: like new pod people, they're here already...