[dave at farber.net: [IP] Spies Among Us]

[Tyler Durden]

Bizarre. I still don't fully understand how the "Authorities" define who IS 
and who is NOT one of "them" and worthy to be surveilled.

Some of it must have something to do with having too much surveillance 
budget and too few actual terrorists to watch.

-TD


>From: Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>
>To: cypherpunks at jfet.org
>Subject: [dave at farber.net: [IP] Spies Among Us]
>Date: Tue, 2 May 2006 13:48:35 +0200
>
>----- Forwarded message from David Farber <dave at farber.net> -----
>
>From: David Farber <dave at farber.net>
>Date: Mon, 1 May 2006 19:25:01 -0400
>To: ip at v2.listbox.com
>Subject: [IP] Spies Among Us
>X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.749.3)
>Reply-To: dave at farber.net
>
>
>
>Begin forwarded message:
>
>From: Richard Forno <rforno at infowarrior.org>
>Date: May 1, 2006 7:22:56 PM EDT
>To: Blaster <rforno at infowarrior.org>
>Cc: Dave Farber <dave at farber.net>
>Subject: Spies Among Us
>
>Spies Among Us
>Despite a troubled history, police across the nation are keeping tabs on
>ordinary Americans
>
>By David E. Kaplan
>
>5/8/06
>
>In the Atlanta suburbs of DeKalb County, local officials wasted no time
>after the 9/11 attacks. The second-most-populous county in Georgia,
>the area
>is home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI's
>regional headquarters, and other potential terrorist targets. Within
>weeks
>of the attacks, officials there boasted that they had set up the
>nation's
>first local department of homeland security. Dozens of other communities
>followed, and, like them, DeKalb County put in for--and got--a series of
>generous federal counterterrorism grants. The county received nearly $12
>million from Washington, using it to set up, among other things, a
>police
>intelligence unit.
>
>The outfit stumbled in 2002, when two of its agents were assigned to
>follow
>around the county executive. Their job: to determine whether he was
>being
>tailed--not by al Qaeda but by a district attorney investigator
>looking into
>alleged misspending. A year later, one of its plainclothes agents was
>seen
>photographing a handful of vegan activists handing out antimeat
>leaflets in
>front of a HoneyBaked Ham store. Police arrested two of the vegans and
>demanded that they turn over notes, on which they'd written the
>license-plate number of an undercover car, according to the American
>Civil
>Liberties Union, which is now suing the county. An Atlanta
>Journal-Constitution editorial neatly summed up the incident: "So now we
>know: Glazed hams are safe in DeKalb County."
>
>Glazed hams aren't the only items that America's local cops are
>protecting
>from dubious threats. U.S. News has identified nearly a dozen cases
>in which
>city and county police, in the name of homeland security, have
>surveilled or
>harassed animal-rights and antiwar protesters, union activists, and even
>library patrons surfing the Web. Unlike with Washington's warrantless
>domestic surveillance program, little attention has been focused on
>the role
>of state and local authorities in the war on terrorism. A U.S.News
>inquiry
>found that federal officials have funneled hundreds of millions of
>dollars
>into once discredited state and local police intelligence operations.
>Millions more have gone into building up regional law enforcement
>databases
>to unprecedented levels. In dozens of interviews, officials across the
>nation have stressed that the enhanced intelligence work is vital to the
>nation's security, but even its biggest boosters worry about a lack of
>training and standards. "This is going to be the challenge," says Los
>Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, "to ensure that while getting bin
>Laden we don't transgress over the law. We've been burned so badly in
>the
>past--we can't do that again."
>
>< snip >
>
>
>http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060508/8homeland.htm
>
>
>
>
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>----- End forwarded message -----
>--
>Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
>______________________________________________________________
>ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
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