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From the Los Angeles Times

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A key Sept. 11 legacy: more domestic surveillance

In one of the biggest changes to American life since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the government now collects vast quantities of information about its citizens.

by Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times

August 29, 2011

Reporting from Washington

Internet entrepreneur Nicholas Merrill was working in his Manhattan office when an FBI agent in a trench coat arrived with an envelope.

It was fall 2004, and federal investigators were using new legal authority they had acquired after Sept. 11, 2001. Merrill ran a small Internet service provider with clients including IKEA, Mitsubishi and freelance journalists.

The agent handed Merrill a document called a National Security Letter, which demanded that he turn over detailed records on one of his customers. The letter wasn't signed by a judge or prosecutor. It instructed him to tell no one.

"Not even my lawyer? Not even my business partners?" Merrill asked.

The agent shrugged and left.

Merrill had gotten a rare glimpse of the secret domestic intelligence gathering that is one of the most significant legacies of Sept. 11. U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies now collect, store and analyze vast quantities of digital data produced by law-abiding Americans. The data mining receives limited congressional oversight, rare judicial review and almost no public scrutiny.

Thanks to new laws and technologies, authorities track and eavesdrop on Americans as they never could before, hauling in billions of bank records, travel receipts and other information. In several cases, they have wiretapped conversations between lawyers and defendants, challenging the legal principle that attorney-client communication is inviolate.

Advocates say the expanded surveillance has helped eliminate vulnerabilities identified after the Sept. 11 attacks. Some critics, unconvinced, say the snooping undermines privacy and civil liberties and leads inevitably to abuse. They argue that the new systems have weakened security by burying investigators in irrelevant information.

"We are caught in the middle of a perfect storm in which every thought we communicate, every step we take, every transaction we enter into is captured in digital data and is subject to government collection," said Fred H. Cate, a professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law who has written extensively on privacy and security.

A robust debate on the intelligence gathering has been impossible, for the simple reason that most of the activity is officially secret. In lawsuits alleging improper eavesdropping, the Justice Department has invoked state secrecy to prevent disclosure of classified information and systems.

In May, two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee said that Americans would be disturbed if they knew about some of the government's data-gathering procedures. But Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) said they were prohibited from revealing the facts.

"When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted" surveillance law, "they will be stunned and they will be angry," Wyden said.

The National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on foreign targets, once had to get a court-approved warrant to monitor a U.S. citizen's communications over wires that traverse the United States. Now the agency is free to vacuum up communications by Americans and foreigners alike, as long as the target of the surveillance is a foreigner.

Exactly what records are kept and how they are used is not well understood even by lawmakers who oversee the intelligence agencies, said Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), who chaired the now-expired Select Intelligence Oversight Panel.

"The NSA finds it pretty easy to snow members of Congress by confusing them," Holt said in an interview.

Officials from the FBI and NSA say they follow strict rules to avoid abuses. But in 2007, the Justice Department's inspector general found that the FBI had engaged in "serious misuse" of its authority to issue National Security Letters, claiming urgency in cases where when none existed

Such letters, a kind of administrative subpoena, are key to the increased surveillance.

Courts have ruled that the government doesn't need a search warrant, which requires a judge's approval, to obtain records held by "third parties," such as hotels, banks, phone companies or Internet providers.

So the government has used National Security Letters to get the data, issuing 192,500 of the letters between 2003 and 2006, according to an audit by the Justice Department inspector general. The numbers have dropped sharply since then, but the FBI issued 24,287 National Security Letters last year for data on 14,212 Americans. That's up from a few thousand letters a year before 2001.

"It used to be the case that if the government wanted to find out what you read and what you wrote, it would have to get a warrant and search your home," said Daniel J. Solove, a law professor at George Washington University and the author of numerous books and articles on privacy law.

Now, "it just obtains your Amazon purchase records, your Facebook posts, your Internet browsing history — without you even knowing."

There is nothing necessarily wrong with that, advocates argue.

"As we put more data in the cloud, as we share more data online, we become less shocked when the police have access to it," said Stewart Baker, a former NSA general counsel and policy chief at the Homeland Security Department.

Privacy activists disagree.

"I think it's a world of difference between what a person decides to post publicly and what the FBI collects about them secretly," said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington-based civil liberties group.

U.S. intelligence officials insist that the new surveillance powers have been crucial to stopping terrorist plots.

They cite the case of Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan American who planned to bomb New York City subways in 2009. Warrants were obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to search Zazi's vehicle and eavesdrop on his calls. The evidence was used to secure his guilty plea to terrorism charges.

Unlike a search warrant in a criminal case, obtaining a FISA warrant does not require convincing a judge that there is probable cause to believe a crime was committed. Instead, the government must show probable cause that the target is an agent of a foreign power. Because of the different legal standard, information gathered from FISA warrants tended not to be used in criminal cases a decade ago.

Now that line has been blurred. In the Zazi case, the wiretapped conversations were revealed during pretrial discovery and are believed to have helped persuade him to plead guilty.

"Zazi is a very good example of the melding of intelligence authorities and criminal authorities," said a senior law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We needed to move quickly, and we never could have done it like that" before Sept. 11.

The Zazi case revealed another new reality. Earlier this year, the government disclosed it had recorded 43 conversations between Zazi's codefendant, Adis Medunjanin, and his lawyer, Robert Gottlieb. With rare exceptions, such conversations are off-limits to investigators in criminal cases — unless they obtain a FISA warrant.

FISA warrants also enabled the FBI to bug the phones and break into the home of Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield, a convert to Islam, after a faulty FBI fingerprint analysis linked him to the 2004 Madrid train bombings.

The FBI initially refused to tell Mayfield or his family why or where he was being held. He wasn't released until Spanish authorities announced that the fingerprint belonged to an Algerian suspect.

Two years later, the U.S. government formally apologized to Mayfield and paid him a reported $2-million settlement.

A federal judge later ruled in Mayfield's favor that provisions of the Patriot Act, allowing the FBI to use FISA to conduct "surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable-cause requirements of the 4th Amendment," were unconstitutional. The ruling was overturned on appeal in 2009.

By then, the Obama administration had largely embraced the surveillance strategies and systems developed under President George W. Bush.

Bush gave the NSA the authority to eavesdrop on Americans communicating with foreigners abroad without first obtaining a FISA warrant, deeming the process too slow.

As a U.S. senator, Obama condemned the so-called wireless wiretapping after the New York Times made it public in 2005. But when he ran for president in 2008, Obama voted for legislation that granted retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that had secretly helped the government eavesdrop.

The law also retroactively legalized other forms of surveillance, former intelligence officials say, including "bulk" monitoring that allows the government to intercept all email traffic between America and a range of suspect email addresses in, say, Pakistan.

The government's goal is "to find the kind of patterns that maybe will lead them to evidence of some kind of terrorist plot, and maybe thereafter they can then zero in on a suspect," said Joel Margolis, a regulatory consultant for Subsentio, a Colorado firm that helps telecommunications companies comply with law enforcement requests. "It's just the opposite of what we've done in our tradition of law, where you start with a suspect."

Privacy advocates say the government should acknowledge how many Americans have had their communications intercepted in recent years. But after Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee requested that information, the Obama administration responded in July that it was "not reasonably possible to identify the number."

Merrill, the Internet entrepreneur, was so disturbed by the FBI's demand for his customer's records that he became an anonymous plaintiff in a legal challenge to the Patriot Act provisions on National Security Letters.

A federal judge in New York ruled parts of the law unconstitutional in 2004 and again in 2007, calling it "the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering." Last year, Merrill won the right to identify himself as the recipient of a letter, although he is still prohibited from saying much about it. But the FBI withdrew its request for his customer's data, so higher courts didn't rule on whether the request itself was constitutional.

"I want the America back that I was taught about in school," Merrill said. "The one where there's checks and balances, and where one branch of government can't do everything on its own."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/september11/la-na-911-homeland-security-surveillance-20110830,0,7114660,print.story

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Get ready, California counties, here come the inmates

Where hopeful reformers see a new smart-on-crime paradigm, L.A. County supervisors sense an all-too-familiar inadequately funded offloading of state problems onto the counties.

August 30, 2011

Beginning Oct. 1, inmates from 33 California prisons who are released on parole will begin reporting to county probation officers rather than state parole agents. The new local authority over "post-release community supervision" will apply only to those whose convictions were for non-serious, nonviolent, non-sex-related offenses. On the same date, newly convicted "non-non-non" offenders will be remitted to county custody — to jail, or to community programs or other sentencing alternatives — instead of being sent to state prison. And newly accused defendants without outstanding warrants who need to be monitored until their trial dates may be required to wear electronic ankle bracelets in lieu of being incarcerated.

These three new approaches to dealing with criminal offenders and defendants are the primary components of AB 109, also known as public safety realignment. The bill, signed into law this year, is Sacramento's response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Plata, which ordered the sharp reduction of the state prison population to reduce overcrowding and address medical inadequacies that were so severe as to violate the 8th Amendment's strictures against cruel and unusual punishment.

To reformers, realignment represents a landmark transition from a generation's worth of tough-on-crime policies to a new, less expensive, more enlightened and more effective "smart on crime" approach. Prisoners now get little in the way of rehabilitation behind bars and little in the way of "reentry" support — such as substance-abuse treatment and counseling, medical attention, mental healthcare and housing — when they are paroled. Thus unprepared for life as healthy, productive and contrite citizens, they re-offend at an astonishing rate of 67.5%. In theory — in theory, mind you — counties are better equipped than the state to supervise and support low-level offenders, and are prepared to do it for less money.

But Los Angeles County supervisors are worried. And they should be. They have a checkered track record in oversight and administration. And they have knowledge of and experience with Sacramento and past attempts at realigning funds and services. Where hopeful reformers see a new smart-on-crime paradigm, the supervisors sense an all-too-familiar inadequately funded off-loading of state problems onto the counties.

Yes, Sacramento is supposed to cover the new county costs, but the state's commitment is limited to the current fiscal year. Lawmakers and Gov. Jerry Brown have spoken a lot this year about a constitutional amendment to cement the state funding guarantee for future years, but as of now there is no such amendment and no sign of one in the offing.

Even for this year, the state makes no commitment to cover all new county costs. To reformers, that's a necessary part of any epic reorientation on crime: Supervisors must be discouraged from blowing their scarce new state dollars on costly incarceration or they'll have no incentive to seek, implement and evaluate alternative programs. But to county officials, it looks an awful lot like the state is wiping its metaphorical hands and closing its virtual eyes. Best of luck to you county folks.

But even with adequate funding, Los Angeles County has shown that it has hardly mastered the art and science of prisoner reentry. The Probation Department, which will take the lead in implementing AB 109 here, is a shambles, under scrutiny by the U.S. Department of Justice, unable to prevent fights and injuries at its juvenile facilities, incapable of effectively managing its employees. The Sheriff's Department, which will also have a leading role, has similar and perhaps even more severe problems with wayward deputies and abuse of inmates. Real wraparound services involving multiple county agencies, geared at ending cycles of failure for the chronically homeless and for gang-age youth, have been ventured for only small numbers of people participating in exceedingly modest county programs.

This is not reentry, at least not as longtime reformers and activists have envisioned it. And that's a shame, because reformers are right when they assert that this is California's big chance to get smart on crime. With adequate time, attention and resources, it can work here. But when done on the fly and on the cheap, it increases the likelihood of a major failure, such as a high-profile violent crime committed by an offender under county supervision. Just one such crime can sometimes be enough for an impatient public to demand a second U-turn and return to the just-lock-them-up mind-set that got us in our current fix. In a nation in which Texas and other conservative jurisdictions have become the progressive leaders of the smart-on-crime movement, reactionary California will continue to bring up the rear.

This is not even realignment. Not really. True realignment requires more than the state merely unburdening itself and handing off responsibility to counties. It requires counties to win back their power over tax money collected locally, without first sending it to Sacramento for the state to get its cut. It requires a re-linking of decisions made here at the ballot box in local elections with spending decisions made at the county Hall of Administration.

But this is government, and this is California. There is no pulling over to the side of the road to wait until conditions are perfect. Supervisors on Tuesday are scheduled to adopt an AB 109 implementation plan to cover how the county will track, manage and re-integrate the returning population of prisoners. Is the plan adequate? Of course not. There's no way it could be.

Still, it will have to do, subject to mid-course corrections. "They're going to be coming fast and furious," Supervisor Gloria Molina said recently of returning offenders. "We need to be ready." That's true for the supervisors, for the Probation Department, the sheriff, reform advocates and county contractors who will do much of the work of trying to re-integrate offenders into the community. It's equally true for all county residents, who must come to terms with the failure of tough-on-crime policies, and both the promise and pitfalls of the new order.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-re-entry-20110830,0,1366103,print.story

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From the Department of Homeland Security

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TSA Remembers 9/11: Stories From Our Workforce

by Blogger Bob, TSA

Each individual employee's personal story is priceless to our legacy. It's important for an agency to know how far they've come and who has helped pave the way. TSA's Historian Project realized the importance of this and built an online tool called StoryLine to capture these stories. StoryLine allows our employees to share their stories via an internal page viewable by all TSA and DHS employees. The first installment of StoryLine stories are centered on 9/11 and how the day inspired people to make the decision to work for TSA.

The stories posted were so good that we wanted to share some of them with our readers. Here are few excerpts:

“I mostly remember the flags that clear bright September day. I know that sounds odd, and I should have remembered something more striking or sacred, or feelings of vengeance perhaps, but the flags spoke and expressed my feelings in a way I could not.” (Read the entire story)

“Grey concrete dust was thick, covering every surface including the trees and sound was muffled by the virtual insulation which was maybe six inches deep. The scene was surreal.” (Read the entire story)

“We asked the photographers to help us dig. To their credit they put their cameras down and helped us. We went to an NYPD emergency truck that was blown sideways like a toy. We grabbed some shovels and pickaxes and dug frantically until we realized the futility of it.” (Read the entire story)

"When the first tower collapsed it was so surreal. This wasn't happening, I had to leave and go home. When the second tower collapsed I felt emptiness, a disconnection from my husband. I waited by the phone to hear from my husband.... The only communication was from our cable TV. Friends and neighbor would stop by, hoping that my husband would call.” (Read the entire story)

“Being an Army-trained Combat Lifesaver, I immediately ran toward the destruction – as so many of us did. Rendering emergency first aid, carrying casualties, everything and anything to help in this disaster is what we did. For 22 straight hours, we did whatever we could on that HeliPad.” (Read the entire story)

“Germany became hauntingly quiet. A despondency swept the nation. German nationals stopped Americans on the street to shake their hands and offer condolences… often without words. Yet language differences did not inhibit understanding.” (Read the entire story)

“We were assigned a photography mission to further document the devastation. I nearly became fixated while circling in a steep bank to allow a State Police photographer to document the core of the destruction. The sight was, at once, exhilarating, mesmerizing and woeful. To know what had been there, and to now see into the bowels of the Trade Center's core was overwhelming. I had to fight myself back into reality and remember I was piloting a helicopter in extreme conditions at low level!!” (Read the entire story)

We selected a total of 28 stories to share from all across the US and surrounding territories. You can read the rest of the stories here .

I could go on about how these stories are examples of the patriotism and dedication our employees share for TSA's mission, but I think the stories will speak for themselves.

http://blog.dhs.gov/2011/08/tsa-remembers-911-stories-from-our.html

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Tips for during and after a flood Posted by: Public Affairs

Tropical storm Irene continues to affect much of the East Coast, bringing significant rainfall and potential flooding/flash flooding to the affected areas. We encourage all those in communities that have been or may be impacted to follow the direction of local officials and take shelter inside during the storm.

As Irene continues through the East Coast, stay tuned to the radio and television for information, and remember that flash flooding can occur at a moment's notice. Here are some additional flood safety tips in case your community, or that of a friend/loved one, may be affected by the heavy rains of Irene.

During a flood:

• Be aware of streams, drainage channels, canyons, and other areas known to flood suddenly. Flash floods can occur in these areas with or without such typical warnings as rain clouds or heavy rain.
• Secure your home. If you have time, bring in outdoor furniture. Move essential items to an upper floor.
• Do not walk through moving water. Six inches of moving water can make you fall. If you have to walk in water, walk where the water is not moving. Use a stick to check the firmness of the ground in front of you.
• Do not drive into flooded areas. If floodwaters rise around your car, abandon the car and move to higher ground if you can do so safely. You and the vehicle can be quickly swept away.

• Listen for news reports to learn whether the community's water supply is safe to drink.
• Avoid floodwaters; water may be contaminated by oil, gasoline, or raw sewage. Water may also be electrically charged from underground or downed power lines.
• Avoid moving water.
• Stay away from downed power lines, and report them to the power company.
• Use extreme caution when entering buildings; there may be hidden damage, particularly in foundations.

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