MEDIA ROOTS- Follow the money and you will always find the truth.

U.S. Marine Major General Smedley Butler, one of only 19 people to be twice awarded the Medal of Honor, wrote War is a Racket in 1935:

“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”

If General Butler were still alive, he would probably write, “The War on Terror is a Racket on Steroids.”

On Christmas Day in 2009, a young Nigerian man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded Delta Airlines Flight 253 bound to Detroit from Amsterdam. During the flight, he was caught trying to detonate explosives that he’d hidden in his underwear. His photo and story was instant “breaking news” and was broadcasted worldwide over and over again.

The hysteria built up by the media was immediate and non-stop. They constantly parroted that “the system didn’t work,” “he slipped through the cracks,”  and “they didn’t’ connect the dots”.

Janet Napolitano, the present Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), attempted to quell the hysteria by stating on CNN that the system did work.  She was immediately ridiculed and wasn’t seen on TV again for weeks- but she was absolutely correct. The system did work. She apparently didn’t get the memo of what the “official” government story was supposed to be.

On Jan 27, 2010, there was a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing titled “Flight 253: Learning Lessons from an Averted Tragedy.”

During the hearing, Patrick F. Kennedy, Secretary Management of the Department of State, stated that “They had the individual under investigation and our revocation action would have disclosed the U.S. Governments interest in the individual and ended our colleagues’ ability to quietly pursue the case and identify terrorists’ plans and co-conspirators.”

According to a recent article, “The revelation that U.S. intelligence agencies made a deliberate decision to allow Abdulmutallab to board the commercial flight, without any special airport screening, has been buried in the media. ‘Revocation action would have disclosed what they were doing,’ Kennedy said in the testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep his visa increased the chances that federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he was accused of working with, ‘rather than simply knocking out one solider in that effort.'”

Additionally, there were eye witness reports from passengers on Flight 253 that the suspect was escorted onto the aircraft by a “sharp dressed man.” Why wasn’t this information breaking news like the original story was? The politicians and the media didn’t want it to be, because they wanted to use this event to justify the enforcement of the new body scanners.

Even though DHS Secretary Napolitano had been silenced, former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff was featured on numerous news programs fear mongering the public into thinking that since the system failed, we now need these scanners to keep us safe.

One important thing he neglected to mention was that he works as a lobbyist for Rapiscan, the company that makes the body scanners.

The Washington Post reported that “Michael Chertoff, Former Department of Homeland Security, is the head of the Chertoff Group, the lead cheerleader for what is being called the Full Body Scanner Lobby.”

Furthermore, President Barack Obama recently handed Rapiscan a one billion dollar contract to deploy the scanners – no questions asked. On his recent trip to India, Obama traveled with Deepak Chopra, chairman and CEO of OSI Systems- the parent company of Rapiscan Systems. 

In the months leading up to Christmas of 2009, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) conveniently began removing the so-called “puffer machines” from U.S. airports at a cost of nearly one million dollars. Puffer machines are bomb detection machines that have been used for years, yet are suddenly now deemed unreliable. 

Thankfully, the American people are starting to wake up to these police state tactics and are now refusing to use these scanners. They are not yet mandatory, and you can still opt out of using them. But the TSA doesn’t advertise that little known fact.

Alarmingly, scientists are also warning that the full-body airport scanners pose serious health risks and could cause cancer.

On July 14, 2010,  two Senators proposed a bi-partisan bill, called “Securing Aircraft From Explosives Responsibly: Advanced Imaging Recognition, or the SAFER AIR Act”, which would make going through the scanners mandatory. The Democrats and Republicans can’t seem to agree on anything except forcing people to go through potentially cancer-causing X-ray machines in which the naked bodies of children and adults will be on display to everyone in the TSA.

Now, in a further attempt to intimidate flyers who refuse to submit to the scanners, the TSA has started a new much more invasive full body search much like the police do to criminals after arrest, which includes groping genitalia. However, flyers are reporting that even though they go through the scanners, they are still being subjected to physical “pat downs” as well.

In an attempt to dispel privacy fears, the TSA claimed that the scanners don’t and can’t store the naked body images. This is another lie. The simple fact is that the images are potential forensic evidence that must be kept and stored on record.

“The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) said documents it has obtained from DHS show the machines used by the department’s Transportation Security Administration at some U.S. airports also can record and store images from the body scanners even though they are slightly different from the scanners used at federal courts. When asked if TSA has stored any images from passengers, EPIC staff counsel Ginger McCall said TSA claims it has not stored such images, but EPIC believes that statement is false. She said the airport body scanners are not secure enough and voiced concern that the images stored on them could be transferred to an external device such as a USB flash drive.”

In another alarming revelation, Forbes reports that the government is now deploying mobile full body scanners in vans that look like normal delivery trucks.  These vans have the capability to see through your clothes as you walk down the street, into your car and even your house!

I implore everyone to refuse to go through the scanners. Write and call your representatives in Congress to let them know you are against any mandatory body scanning, invasive body groping searches and mobile body scanners.

If you are on Facebook, there’s a body scanner protest page with over 14,200 members called Facebook Against Airport Full Body Scanners. I urge you to join it and spread the word.

If these violations are not stopped, I predict these mobile body scanners will soon be deployed at the mall, movie theaters, sporting events – everywhere.

The most important question we should be asking is: Why? Why are they deploying these police state devices and tactics? I don’t believe these scanners are being used for our safety, but for our control. We are now all assumed to be guilty until proven innocent.

General Butler would be absolutely horrified at the ultimate racket that is the “terror industrial complex” and the destruction of the U.S. Constitution because of it.

Written by Nick

Body Scanners: Just the Beginning?

COMPUTER WORLD– While everyone is concerned about privacy violations from Facebook Places, government agencies may be using powerful new technology to violate Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches.

Here’s what the Fourth Amendment says: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The spirit of and the letter of this amendment is that government agencies are not allowed to go on hunting expeditions looking for violations or transgressions. If government officials want to search your property, they have to demonstrate good reason why they suspect you of committing a crime.

Let’s say a small town wanted to crack down on swimming pool permit violations. If local police went house to house, telling people they were going to look for swimming pools in everybody’s backyards, nobody would accept this because it would clearly violate the Fourth Amendment. However, if you do exactly the same thing using cameras in space, it’s somehow OK.

The town of Riverhead on Long Island used Google Earth to search all back yards in the town for illegal swimming pools.

They found about 250 pools built without permits and collected about $75,000 in fines. Critics say they did it for the money, but city officials said they’re concerned mainly about safety.

There’s no such ambiguity in Greece. Greek officials are spotting undeclared swimming pools — and they’re definitely doing it for the money. Faced with a budget crunch, Greece’s government is using Google Earth to hunt for swimming pools, giving officials a justification for collecting extra taxes.

The idea is this: Hey, we need more money. Let’s go find some.

The Greece example is similar in that respect to the use of Google Earth in the U.K. by fish thieves. In at least 12 documented cases, exotic-fish thieves used Google Earth to find backyard ponds. The crooks broke into the yards and stole expensive live fish that they intended to sell for big bucks.

The purpose of the Fourth Amendment is to prevent the U.S. government from doing what Greece’s government is doing, which is essentially what U.K. fish thieves are doing: Using arbitrary searches to hunt for opportunities to take something away from people.

Here’s the problem. If one town sets a precedent that’s it’s OK to violate Fourth Amendment protections as long as you use satellite imagery, then any government can do the same for any reason. And the technologies and methods for doing so are becoming very sophisticated.

A company called Remote Sensing Metrics is buying satellite pictures from privately owned satellite photography companies including DigitalGlobe and GeoEye, then it’s using those images to count cars in Wal-Mart parking lots and selling analysis of the data to hedge funds and other analysts. They’re selling it as a package discreetly billed as “satellite parking lot fill rate analysis.”

Other firms are monitoring crops to better predict commodity pricing for wheat, corn and so on.

The New York Police Department already uses satellite imagery to fight crime. It tracks crimes, looks for clusters where many crimes are occurring together and then floods those locations with police officers.

Those all sound like legitimate and creative uses for new technology. But where is it all going?

Once you combine all-seeing satellite imagery with sophisticated computerized number-crunching, you end up with massive potential for abuse — especially by government agencies.

One might imagine a dystopian future where automated systems constantly scan every house in the country to find all kinds of things, from heat escaping the house to backyard barbecues or the number of people coming and going from every house.

It’s the ol’ slippery slope argument, but it must be taken seriously. If it’s OK for municipal officials to peek into every backyard in Riverhead to find a handful of pool-permit violators, why would it not be acceptable for other agencies to look at all homes and businesses in the nation for a much wider variety of potential violations?

And if it’s OK to do that using satellite imagery, what about using other technologies?

A company called American Science and Engineering sells a high-end, tricked-out security vehicle called the Z Backscatter Van. Its sole purpose, if used by government agencies, is to violate the Fourth Amendment.

The van sits there by the side of the road and X-rays cars passing by. It’s like a full-body scan at the airport, but for cars. The manufacturer brags about the fact that the van keeps a “low profile.” The Web site says: “The system is unobtrusive, as it maintains the outward appearance of an ordinary van.”

What the van does is conduct unreasonable searches without probable cause and without the knowledge of the person who owns the property being searched. That’s its only function.

American Science and Engineering would no doubt argue that it’s selling the van to private companies, which raises yet another question. Is it acceptable for private companies to engage in activity that would be a Fourth Amendment violation if it were done by a government agency?

Private security companies can’t search your home without a warrant, and they can’t pull you over and search your car. So why can they search your car with an X-ray scanner?

Within a few years, we’ll have technology that can see through walls on a large scale. We’ll be able to feed the data into supercomputers and get information about trends and other analysis.

We need to figure out what’s OK and what isn’t. The first step is to apply the Fourth Amendment to searches conducted without probable cause via Google Earth.

Riverhead officials should be forced to give back all fees collected for unpermitted swimming pools, for example, and banned from future hunting expeditions.

Technology should not be used to exempt government agencies from the Constitution. Unfortunately, technology empowers governments to violate our rights with ruthless efficiency.

I wonder if satellites can detect America’s Founding Fathers rolling over in their graves?

Mike Elgan writes about technology and global tech culture. Contact Mike at [email protected], follow him on Twitter @mike_elgan, or read his blog, The Raw Feed.

© COMPUTER WORLD, 2010

EAST BAY EXPRESS– On a gloomy recent morning in West Oakland, tenants at the David Gray Building — or, Off-Ramp Studios, as everyone who lives there calls it — stood in the hallways outside their lofts. They gathered around their doors in nervous clusters and spoke in hushed tones, wondering aloud whether they should head to work or stay and observe while two Oakland police officers, two building services code enforcers, a fire inspector, and three property management representatives entered all of their units one by one.

Traditionally the entire procedure would have required a search warrant. But on this day, the group of cops and city officials were operating under a little-known Oakland city program, called “SMART” — Specialized Multi-Agency Response Team — that some legal experts say may be unconstitutional. That’s because they enter people’s homes without consent or a warrant.

At the Off-Ramp Studios, they also entered one loft when no one was home. It was Unit 103. They knocked on the locked door and got no response. After about a minute of waiting, the building manager, who was carrying a tray of keys, opened the door, and everyone entered.

Inside were the remnants of a large, multi-level grow operation, including what appeared to be psilocybin mushroom caps and potted marijuana plants that had been sawed off. There also was evidence of methamphetamine production, according to fire inspector Vincent Crudele, who called the unit a potential felony crime scene. The officers hauled away large Ziplock bags filled with evidence seized from the inspection, and Crudele ordered the unit to be completely cleaned out by property management within 48 hours.

A week prior to the search, Crudele showed up at the Off-Ramp for a preliminary check in response to complaints from one tenant about an open party being planned by another tenant, said Frank Flores, director of development for Madison Park, the building’s leasing agent. Crudele said he noticed the smell of marijuana emanating from one particular unit — 103 — and decided then to schedule the SMART inspection for one week later.

For Crudele, having police officers accompany city inspectors during a SMART inspection ensures security in potentially volatile situations. “It’s a safety issue for us,” he said. “We have limited policing capabilities. If part of the populace is doing something illegal — that creates a problem for me. They may not want to cooperate.”

However, Northern California ACLU staff attorney Michael Risher questioned the legality of searching people’s homes without a warrant or consent. He also argued that it’s not all that burdensome to go down to the courthouse, swear-out an affidavit, and get a legitimate search warrant to look for illegal drugs or real safety hazards.

Read full article HERE.

© EAST BAY EXPRESS, 2010