DarkGovernment

More Federal Intelligence Changes Planned

The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.

Uncle Sam Spying

Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.

Moving on, the aforementioned executive order was issued by President Bush on July 31, and is in the words of one official, “exceptionally complex,” 26 or 28 pages long, single-spaced (”depending on how you print it”). It is a sweeping revision of an order issued by Ronald Reagan in 1981, which laid out the structure and responsibilities of U.S. intelligence offices.

In a phone call with reporters the day the order was issued, a senior White House official (who refused to be identified) said, “the President is anxious to institutionalize a number of important tools that he and his successors are going to need to fight and win the war on terrorism.” He described it as being in the same vein as the recently passed FISA law (”an important milestone”). This is “another significant step in that direction.”

If you didn’t see much about this rather important executive order — the senior official called it a “foundational document” — that’s no accident. Reporters were not even provided a copy before the weirdly anonymous briefing. (”This conference call would have been much more useful … if we’d had this in advance,” said one reporter.) Despite (or perhaps because of) its significant implications for U.S. intelligence, many in Congress were not even aware of it until the day it was issued.

“We were only shown the document after it was complete and on its way to the president for his signature,” Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), chairman of the House intelligence committee told the Washington Post. “After seven years of a go-it-alone presidency, perhaps I should expect nothing more from this White House. But this order will be binding on future administrations as well.”

I have not read all 26 to 28 pages of the executive order. But among its revisions is a clause stating that the CIA must “provide specialized equipment, technical knowledge or assistance of expert personnel” to local law enforcement. As a member of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, one of several groups who it was recently revealed were being spied on by Maryland police in the past few years, and living in a city whose police infiltrated activist groups across the country in the run-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention, it is chilling to think how these resources could be used against groups that are exercising their right to dissent. To say nothing of the potential implications for Arabs or Muslims.

According to the Post, The DOJ proposal, which was also released on July 31, says that “law enforcement agencies would be allowed to target groups as well as individuals, and to launch a criminal intelligence investigation based on the suspicion that a target is engaged in terrorism or providing material support to terrorists.”

“They also could share results with a constellation of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and others in many cases.”

“Criminal intelligence data starts with sources as basic as public records and the Internet, but also includes law enforcement databases, confidential and undercover sources, and active surveillance.”

Read the full article. This is more than a last power grab for the Bush administration. It is a massive codification of the executive overreach implemented under the so-called “war on terror.”

Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush’s successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.

The deputy executive director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police would disagree. The DOJ initiative simply “moves what the rules were … to the new world we live in,” he told the Post — “but it maintains civil liberties.”

According to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, these are just “some of the tools necessary to keep us safe.”

Tags: department of justice, doj, fbi, Intelligence, police, spying

DOJ Biased Hiring Practices

Top candidates were rejected for cherry picked Justice Department jobs two years ago because of their liberal leanings or objections to Bush administration politics, a government report concluded Tuesday.

In one case, a Harvard Law student was passed over after criticizing the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. In another, a Georgetown University student who had previously worked for a Democratic senator and congressman didn’t make the cut.

Even senior Justice Department officials flinched at what appeared to be hiring decisions based _ improperly and illegally _ on politics, according to the internal report.

“Individuals at the department were rejecting any of our candidates who could be construed as left-wing or who were perceived, based on their appearances and resumes and so forth, as being more liberal,” Kevin Ohlson, deputy director of the department’s executive office of immigration review, complained to Justice investigators.

The report marked the culmination of a yearlong investigation by Justice’s inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility into whether Republican politics were driving hiring polices at the once fiercely independent department.

The investigation is one of several that examine accusations of White House political meddling within the Justice Department. Those accusations were initially driven by the firings of nine U.S. attorneys in late 2006 and culminated with the ouster of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general last September.

The report issued Tuesday concluded that politics and ideology disqualified a significant number of newly graduated lawyers and summer interns seeking coveted Justice jobs in 2006.

As early as 2002, career Justice employees complained to department officials that Bush administration political appointees had largely taken over the hiring process for summer interns and so-called Honors Program jobs for newly graduated law students. For years, job applicants had been judged on their grades, the quality of their law schools, their legal clerkships and other experiences.

But in 2002, many applicants who identified themselves as Democrats or were members of liberal-leaning organizations were rejected while GOP loyalists with fewer legal skills were hired, the report found. Of 911 students who applied for full-time Honors jobs that year, 100 were identified as liberal _ and 80 were rejected. By comparison, 46 were identified as conservative, and only four didn’t get a job offer.

The political filtering of applicants ebbed for the three years between 2003 and 2005, the inquiry found, then resumed by 2006.

Of 602 Honors candidates that year, 150 were identified as liberal _ including 83 who were cut. Five of 28 self-described conservatives were rejected.

Investigators blamed two political appointees on a three-person screening committee for the preferential treatment. It also singled out one of them, former deputy attorney general staff chief Michael Elston, for failing to make sure the hirings were proper _ and giving evasive and misleading answers about why they were not.

An attorney for Elston, who is now in private practice, did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Although federal law prohibits discriminating against government job applicants based on their politics, it’s unlikely that any of those involved in the hiring process will be penalized since they no longer work at the department. A Justice official said the department is not considering pressing criminal charges or taking or civil actions against them.

Democrats quickly seized on the report to bludgeon the Bush administration for playing politics with a department sworn to uphold the law fairly.

“This is the first smoking gun,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “We believe there will be more to come. This report shows clearly that politics and ideology replaced merit as the hiring criteria at one of our most prized civil service departments.”

Under Gonzales, the Justice Department last year moved to prevent politics from influencing the hiring screening process. His successor, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, said Tuesday he “will continue to make clear that the consideration of political affiliations in the hiring of career department employees is impermissible and unacceptable.”

Tags: bias, doj, jobs

D.O.J Banned From Wikipedia

Department of Justice banned from Wikipedia

Wikipedia has temporarily blocked edits from the US Department of Justice after someone inside the government agency tried to erase references to a particularly-controversial Wiki-scandal.

Early last week, the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) was accused of organizing a secret campaign to influence certain articles on the “free encyclopedia anyone can edit”. Just days later, the DoJ’s IP range was used to edit the site’s entry on the Pro-Israel “media-monitoring group,” lifting a new section that detailed the controversy.

The DoJ did not respond to our requests for comment. But odds are, the edits were made by a single individual acting independently. Wikipedia’s ban on the department’s IP is due to be lifted today.

On April 21, the Pro-Palestine site Electronic Intifada published a series of emails in which CAMERA Senior Research Analyst Gilead Ini seems to enlist volunteers to help “keep Israel-related entries on Wikipedia from becoming tainted by anti-Israel editors”. Ini asks these volunteers to avoid forwarding his emails to the news media and invites them onto a Google Group called “Isra-pedia.”

In an email to The Reg, Ini declined to say if the messages published by Electronic Intifada were genuine, but he acknowledged that CAMERA recently ran an email campaign meant to promote edits that “ensure accuracy” on certain Wikipedia articles.

Electronic Intifada
On the alleged Isra-pedia thread - also published by Electronic Intifada - one longtime Wikipedia editor gives volunteers a primer on how to become a site administrator. “There is in Wikipedia the ability by an administrator to set significant limits on other editor [sic],” he writes. “One or more of you who want to take this route should stay away from any Israel realted [sic] articles for month [sic] until they [sic] interact in a positive way with 100 Wikipedia editors who would be used later to vote you as an administrator.”

This Wikipedia editor, known as “Zeq,” and several others involved with the CAMERA emails were subsequently sanctioned. Some were barred from editing topics involving the Arab-Israeli conflict, and at least one - “Gni,” believed to be Ini - was banned from the site entirely.

Tags: department of justice, doj, wikipedia