[Stoner]

Originally posted by Mulder:
Stoner,

Weren't you also concerned about the progress of the Iraq war? About how our supply lines were being cutoff? How badly the war was going? Didn't you post the same type of hyped up crap then? Did you not learn your lesson? I'm trying to help you here, my confused friend!

____________________

Hi you silly Pumpkin!

I had a lot of concerns at the beginning of the Iraq war. When the US supply lines were disrupted and the Pentagon had to re map the war, I remember being very concerned.

I remember starting a thread to list news sites that quickly posted the ongoing events of the war.

I remember you chose to add__________nothing to that list.

I remember that rather to discuss the events, many neo-conservatives chose to castigate anyone that viewed the events in anything less than the 'Blitzkrieg' it was planned to be.

I remember spending a day trying to get you to list your sources so that I could share your view of the events.

I remember there was only ONE news gathering site in your short list and the Pentagon wound up getting p!ssed at its 'star' reporter--Geraldo.

I remember listing a site ,at the TOP of my list of web sites(Debka.com), that is now used by the Library of Congress , as it's record of events of the Iraq War.

I also remember that the ousted dictator was supported by the same political and industrial powers of the early 1980's that are again profiteering from the ouster of said dictator.

you said:
_________________

Weren't you also concerned about the progress of the Iraq war? About how our supply lines were being cutoff? How badly the war was going? Didn't you post the same type of hyped up crap then?
_________________

How true, how true. And how un-American that would have been to intentionally try to expose the US to weakness in it's time of conflict in order to out the evil intent of the neo-conservative intelligentsia.
Once the war started, the greater good was the ouster of the monster Saddam Hussein.

The Iraq war is over.
And now, I'm discussing the evil brought on the American public in the false illusion of Patriotism.

My friend, I fear you have destroyed too much of the ozone layer over California and have cooked your brains into believing the right wing mush that you constantly hype.
I suggest you start using a powerful UV blocker and carry an umbrella when you venture out into the California sunshine.



I fear for your mental health!

Jack

[Stoner]

Going from secretly enacted Constitutional legislation to illegal collecting of detailed personal information on the populations of foreign countries and all done by the same company that was

"responsible for bungling an overhaul of Florida's voter registration records, with the result that thousands of people, disproportionately black, were disenfranchised in the 2000 election. Had they been able to vote, they might have swung the state, and thus the presidency".

and on retainer by the Bush administration for further 'abuses'.
This is but another corrupt practice the Bushites would like to see become invisible in the new 'Republic', (IMO)




http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/...949709,00.html

Firm in Florida election fiasco earns millions from ~~~~~ on foreigners

Oliver Burkeman in Washington and Jo Tuckman in Mexico City
Monday May 5, 2003
The Guardian

A data-gathering company that was embroiled in the Florida 2000 election fiasco is being paid millions of dollars by the Bush administration to collect detailed personal information on the populations of foreign countries, enraging several governments who say the records may have been illegally obtained.
US government purchasing documents show that the company, ChoicePoint, received at least $11m (£6.86m) from the department of justice last year to supply data - mainly on Latin Americans - that included names and addresses, occupations, dates of birth, passport numbers and "physical description". Even tax records and blood groups are reportedly included.

Nicaraguan police have raided two offices suspected of providing the information. The revelations threaten to shatter public trust in electoral institutions, especially in Mexico, where the government has begun an investigation.

The controversy is not the first to engulf ChoicePoint. The company's subsidiary, Database Technologies, was responsible for bungling an overhaul of Florida's voter registration records, with the result that thousands of people, disproportionately black, were disenfranchised in the 2000 election. Had they been able to vote, they might have swung the state, and thus the presidency, for Al Gore, who lost in Florida by a few hundred votes.

Legal experts in the US and Mexico said ChoicePoint could be liable for prosecution if those who supplied it with the personal information could be proven to have broken local laws. That raises the possibility that any person whose data was accessible to American officials could take legal action against the US government.

"Anybody who felt they were affected by this could take the US government to court," said Julio Tellez, an expert in Mexican information legislation at the Tec de Monterrey University. "We could all do it ... We are not prepared to sell our intimacies for a fistful of dollars."

How the US is using the information remains mysterious, although its focus on Latin America suggests obvious applications in targeting illegal immigrants. Whatever the reasons, its commitment to ChoicePoint is long-term: last year's $11m payment was part of a contract worth $67m that runs until 2005.

ChoicePoint denied breaking any laws. "All information collected by ChoicePoint on foreign citizens is obtained legally from public agencies or private vendors," it said. It also denied purchasing "election registry information" from Mexico.

[Stoner]

More on Checkpoint and their 'close' ties to the Bush family and their implication in the Florida Presidential vote fraud .



http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30556.html

Europe too? US acquires hundreds of millions of Latino citizens' data
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 05/05/2003 at 08:32 GMT


The President's favorite database company, Choicepoint Inc., has acquired personal data on hundreds of millions of citizens in ten Latin American countries without their knowledge or consent. Data includes Mexico's Federal Electoral Register, details of drivers in Mexico City and Columbia.

"This is a corporation that works hand in glove with, and is politically connected to the administration, and does things that the US dare not do," Greg Palast, who uncovered Choicepoint's role in the 2000 election, told The Register last week. Choicepoint had been given a $67 million contract for data gathering on September 25, 2001. The contract lasts until 2005.

"It's doing this everywhere," said Palast, "but in Mexico it was caught out,".

The scandal broke three weeks ago after an investigation by Mexican newspaper Milenio, although it received scant attention Stateside. But a report in today's Guardian should give it fresh impetus.

From the Guadalajara Times we learn that the company has been active in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua. However, the Times reports that Choicepoint has discontinued its role in Argentina, "due to lack of demand and a strict new law relating to privacy".

But ChoicePoint isn't shy about boasting of its Latino assets.

"You know the value of ChoicePoint's domestic data," begins a 2001sales brochure for its 'AutoTrack XP' product uncovered by privacy group EPIC under the Freedom of Information Act. "Now you can locate and identify business assets in foreign countries with ChoicePoint's new International searches".

"ChoicePoint gives you the most comprehensive online International data available, with individual and business information from Mexico, Colombia, Argentina [oops? - ed.] Brazil and Costa Rica."

"ChoicePoint is the only vendor capable of providing online access to the following data sets and/or functionality:


a) complete listings of all Mexican, Columbian and Argentine citizens
b) inclusion of unlisted numbers in telephone ~~~~~ in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina
c) inclusion of Mexican vehicle and driver license data
d) complete listing of Columbian company data
e) inclusion of personal identification information for Brazilian business people
f) full usability in English language

(Go here [200kb PDF] and here [292kb PDF] for the documents.)

The second document records that the US Department of Justice paid $11m for "access to ChoicePoint databases."

Now, you might ask, doesn't the US have official agencies that are supposed to undertake a much more focused version of this intelligence gathering? Indeed, it does, and being conscientious government agencies, the staff (in our experience) take information integrity pretty seriously. The value that ChoicePoint's places on data integrity is quite germane, as we shall see.

Who is Choicepoint Inc.?

In a letter to SEC last year, ChoicePoint described itself as "a leading information company with a long history of developing products and services for federal and state government agencies to locate individuals, businesses, and assets and to authenticate individuals' identities."

That long history goes back less than six years to August 1997, when Choicepoint was spun off from Equifax, where it was Equifax's Insurance Services Group.

An early earning statement described how "in business and government markets" it provided services including "pre-employment and drug testing, public records information, UCC search and filing."

A more recent statement is both fuzzier and warmer:

"ChoicePoint (NYSE :CPS) is the leading provider of identification and credential verification services for making smarter decisions in today's fast-paced world, serving the information needs of business, government and individuals."

"ChoicePoint is committed to protecting personal privacy and promoting the responsible use of information to help create a safer world."

But ChoicePoint's credentials as a responsible user of information were tested in its role in Florida, in the 2000 Election - a story that's probably more familiar to readers outside the United States than in.

ChoicePoint was given a contract to maintain Florida's electoral rolls and conveniently managed to scrub as many as 91,000 voters most of whom were poor or black. A complex and determined effort to disenfranchise a small number of people.

Standards body

But ChoicePoint has another role to play in a quite unexpected way. It's the guardian of our commercial data integrity. The "Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism" (PATRIOT) Act 2001 blessed the company as a kind of standards setter. Banks have been instructed to issue data in a format ChoicePoint likes, which will come as a surprise to the IETF, or the W3C, or OASIS, next time a web standard has to be set. But there you go. And ChoicePoint was singled out by name.

The commercial potential of this new PATRIOT-compatible standard was illustrated here by Sybase which is suddenly falling over itself to help the Homeland. Over at Choicepoint there's a handy compliance brochure you can read advising you how to comply with the PATRIOT Act. And not to complicate the picture too much, Marv Bush, one of the aforementioned Bush family, channeled money to Sybase via his job as a VC at Winston Partners. So you can see how they gamble, these Bushes.

With an essential part of US intelligence gathering now privatized, which we didn't know before - what else does this tell us? Palast reminds us that the state can now demand and control information flows without a warrant. Which is one of those nice 'Thank You's' that we expect. ®

[Stoner]

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,58774,00.html

Feds Doing More Secret Searches

By Julia Scheeres | Also by this reporter Page 1 of 1


02:00 AM May. 09, 2003 PT

A record number of searches and wiretap orders granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2002 underscores a growing trend of reliance on the secret court in government investigations, privacy advocates say.

The number of FISA orders jumped more than 30 percent to 1,228 last year, compared to 934 the year before. The FBI uses the warrants in investigations of suspected terrorists and spies to eavesdrop on communications and conduct physical searches.

Since FISA's inception in 1978, the court has approved every FBI application it has received, despite disclosing last year in a report (PDF) that the agency had misled FISA judges in 75 cases.

"Increasingly, FISA is becoming the surveillance weapon of choice," said Barry Steinhardt, who directs the American Civil Liberty Union's Technology and Liberty program.

Steinhardt and others point to the fact that the increase in FISA orders corresponded with a 9 percent dip in the number of Title III wiretaps authorized by federal and state courts in 2002.

Last year, state and federal judges approved 1,359 wiretap applications, compared to 1,491 in 2001, according a report (PDF) published by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

"The main thing we're seeing is a greater reliance on FISA procedures for surveillance in the United States, and that doesn't bode well for civil liberties or government openness," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The FBI couldn't be reached for comment.

Applications for FISA warrants receive less scrutiny than Title III wiretaps despite the fact that they are much more intrusive. While Title III wiretaps allow investigators to eavesdrop on the oral and electronic communications of suspects, FISA orders include these wiretapping techniques as well as physical searches of residences, automobiles and belongings.

Furthermore, while the government publishes a yearly report detailing how Title III wiretaps are employed -- including types of surveillance, resulting arrests and convictions, and reasons for the intercept orders -- the corresponding FISA report is a dry two-paragraph summation of the number of orders that the secret court granted.

The FISA court, comprised of seven district court judges appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, meets every two weeks inside a windowless room at the Justice Department to review the department's warrant applications.

The FISA records are sealed and the court's proceedings secret; even people who are prosecuted using those orders cannot access the material used against them.

"It's ridiculously opaque to figure out what it all means," said Beryl Howell, who served as general counsel for the Senate judiciary committee from 1993 to 2003 before retiring to become a security consultant. "Whereas the government prepares elaborate reports for wiretaps, when it comes to FISA, there are virtually no reporting requirements."

A bipartisan bill introduced in February would increase congressional oversight of FISA and require the court to disclose more information about the surveillance activities it authorizes.

_______________
end

[Stoner]

Without vigilance, without discussion, and without complaint, The following headline wouldn't be in print!! Never stop questioning authority. If you do, you'll lose the ability to correct the 'wrongs'.



http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/09/in...ner=ALTAVISTA1

Senate Deal Kills Effort to Extend Antiterror Act
By ERIC LICHTBLAU


ASHINGTON, May 8 — Senate Republicans backed down today from an effort to make permanent the sweeping antiterrorism powers in a 2001 act, clearing the way for passage of a less divisive measure that would still expand the government's ability to spy on foreign terrorist suspects in the United States.

Advertisement


In an agreement finalized over the last week, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, dropped his effort to extend provisions of the 2001 legislation, the Patriot Act, whose broad powers to investigate and track terrorist suspects are scheduled to expire in 2005.

As a result, the Senate voted 90 to 4 to approve a measure expanding the government's ability to use secret surveillance tools against terrorist suspects who are not thought to be members of known terrorist groups.

Under current law, federal officials must establish a link to a foreign terrorist group in order to secure or request a secret warrant.

The day's developments represented a major test of the balancing act between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberties, and the result delivered a mixed verdict as many lawmakers expressed reservations about giving law enforcement officials too much power to fight terrorism.

"There's a delicate balance between liberty and security," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who was one of the authors of the so-called "lone wolf" counterterrorism measure. "It's a seesaw, and that's the debate that we're seeing now in Congress."

The overwhelming passage of the measure masked intense behind-the-scenes maneuverings in recent weeks over the powers that the federal government has been given to fight terrorism.

Mr. Hatch, Republican of Utah, led a push beginning last month to attach to the bill an amendment that would have repealed time restrictions built into the 2001 measure.

Mr. Hatch adopted this tactic because he was said to believe that some Democrats on the Judiciary Committee were seeking to water down the bill by attaching amendments that would impose tougher legal standards and greater reporting requirements on law enforcement officials in their use of their new counterterrorism powers. Many Democrats have complained in recent months that the Justice Department has kept them in the dark about its counterterrorism activities since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Mr. Hatch's effort to make the Patriot Act permanent set off immediate criticism from civil liberties groups and lawmakers, including some Republicans, who said Congress needed more time to scrutinize how the act was working — and whether law enforcement officials were abusing it. Some of the Republican opposition has come from lawmakers concerned about reach of "big government."

Jeff Lungren, a spokesman for Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Wisconsin Republican who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said that extending the life of the Patriot Act "will happen over his dead body."

As part of a tentative deal reached last week and completed over the last several days, Republicans on the Judiciary Committee agreed not to seek a repeal of the act's sunset provisions at today's vote on the terrorism bill if Democrats pulled some of their own amendments that the Republicans considered objectionable.

"The Democrats weren't going to give us a vote on the thing unless there were no Hatch amendments, period," said a Republican Senate aide who demanded anonymity. "A lot of the Democrats hated the Patriot Act even though they voted for it, and they certainly didn't want to see it made permanent. It's an ongoing, simmering debate."

Margarita Tapia, a spokeswoman for Mr. Hatch, said that the senator was satisfied with the final result.

"Since a compromise was worked out, we decided not to offer" the amendment repealing the act's time restrictions, she said. "But that doesn't change his position. He continues to be opposed to the sunset provisions of the Patriot Act," Ms. Tapia said.

(second page)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/09/in...ner=ALTAVISTA1


Senate Deal Kills Effort to Extend Antiterror Act
(Page 2 of 2)



Indeed, Democrats said they remain concerned that Mr. Hatch and other Republicans would continue to look for other legislative vehicles to help repeal the time restrictions — an idea that Justice Department officials said they supported.

In the meantime, civil liberties advocates were heartened by the defeat of the proposal.

"This is a major victory," said Timothy Edgar, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "Hatch wanted to intimidate the Democrats into not offering their amendments, and that ploy didn't work because there is widespread concern that the government has already gone too far with the Patriot Act. His salvo may have backfired."




With the debate tabled for the moment, focus will shift back to the more limited counterterrorism measure that was approved by the Senate today, officials said.

The measure, which was sponsored by Senators Schumer and Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, has received the backing of the Justice Department, but its fate in the House remains uncertain.

"We'll wait to take a look at the Senate bill and see what we're going to do," said a senior Republican aide in the House.

The Senate bill's supporters deemed the measure a way of fixing the problems that arose in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was jailed on immigration charges in the summer of 2001 after taking flight classes in the Minneapolis area.

Law enforcement officials have maintained that the F.B.I.'s inability to show conclusively that Mr. Moussaoui was linked to Al Qaeda or a known terrorist group — as the current law for foreign intelligence surveillance requires — prevented them from securing a warrant against him. Searches of Mr. Moussaoui's computer and belongings only after the Sept. 11 attacks revealed evidence linking him to Al Qaeda, and he is now charged with being a part of the terrorist conspiracy.

"These people don't have cards identifying themselves as members of these organizations," Mr. Kyl said. "The bottom line is, it's very difficult, sometimes impossible, to prove that they're affiliated with a specific group. In some cases they're not. They're simply acting on their own, but they are still foreign terrorists."

Mr. Schumer suggested that if the foreign link requirement had not been in place in the summer of 2001 and the F.B.I. had gotten a secret warrant against Mr. Moussaoui, "perhaps 9/11 might have not have occurred. That's the anguish that we all face."

Some legal experts have challenged that assertion, saying the F.B.I. had the opportunity to get a warrant against Mr. Moussaoui but botched it.

____________
end

[Stoner]

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff05142003.html

Fighting the Patriot Act
Now It's Alaska!
By DAVID LINDORFF

The Bush Administration and Attorney General John Ashcroft may have been able to pull a fast one in the wake of 9/11, winning passage of the draconian and grotesquely named USA PATRIOT Act, but a grass-roots resistance movement is starting to blow up in the administration's face.

As of today, 104 towns, cities and even the state of Hawaii, have passed resolutions in defense of the Bill of Rights which in often forceful language instruct state and local law enforcement not to participate in the act's assaults on civil liberties. The latest jurisdiction to consider such fight-back legislation is the state of Alaska, a bastion of conservative libertarianism. The city of Fairbanks has already passed its own resolution, and another is being considered in Anchorage, where key sponsors are representatives of the NAACP and the NRA.

But the language of the bill just passed by the state's House of Representatives, and now being debated by the state Senate, is powerful indeed.



House Joint Resolution No. 22 reads, in part:

"It is the policy of the State of Alaska to oppose any portion of the USA PATRIOT Act that would violate the rights and liberties guaranteed equally under the state and federal constitutions; and S in accordance with Alaska state policy, an agency or instrumentality of the State of Alaska, in the absence of reasonable suspicion of criminal activity under Alaska State law, may not (1) initiate, participate in, or assist or cooperate with an inquiry, investigation, surveillance, or detention, (2) record, file, or share intelligence information concerning a person or organization, including library lending and research records, book and video store sales and rental records, medical records, financial records, student records, and other personal data, even if authorized under the USA PATRIOT Act, (3) retain such intelligence information; (and that) an agency or instrumentality of the state may not, (1) use state resources or institutions for the enforcement of federal immigration matters, which are the responsibility of the federal government; (2) collect or maintain information about the political, religious, or social views, associations, or activities of any individual, group, association, organization, corporation, business, or partnership, unless the information directly relates to an investigation of criminal activities and there are reasonable grounds to suspect the subject of the information is or may be involved in criminal conduct; (3) engage in racial profiling; law enforcement agencies may not use race, religion, ethnicity, or national origin as factors in selecting individuals to subject to investigatory activities except when seeking to apprehend a specific suspect whose race, religion, ethnicity, or national origin is part of the description of the suspect."

The bill goes on to say the state legislature implores the United States Congress "to correct provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act and other measures that infringe on civil liberties, and opposes any pending and future federal legislation to the extent that it infringes on Americans' civil rights and liberties."

If passed by the state legislature's upper house, copies of resolution--a powerful slap at the civil liberties assault by the federal government--will be officially sent to the President Bush, Attorney General Ashcroft, the governor of Alaska, Frank Murkowski, and to the state's three-member congressional delegation.

Ashcroft and his minions appear to be worried about the wildfire civil liberties defense movement that has sprung up against his campaign to gut the Bill of Rights. When Ithaca, NY's city council recently passed its own version of a Bill of Rights defense resolution, it promptly received a letter from the FBI's Albany regional office claiming that the bill was not needed, since "As you know, FBI investigations are scrutinized by the courts to ensure that proper Constitutional standards are maintained," and that "Unlike foreign intelligence services, FBI investigative techniques must be sanctioned by judges."

Of course, this is a blatant falsehood, since Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act expressly allows G-men to rifle through library and video store records without a warrant and without showing "probably cause"--precisely the kind of thing that has prompted all these state and local resolutions.

The strategy behind the Bill of Rights protection movement is to present congressional delegations with evidence of widespread support for civil liberties, so that they will develop the spine needed to overturn the USA PATRIOT Act, or at least let it expire in 2004. So far over 11 million Americans live in jurisdictions which have passed such resolutions, and the campaign is scarcely a year old as yet.

[Stoner]

http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/West/...atriot.act.ap/

Town criminalizes compliance with Patriot Act



ARCATA, California (AP) -- More than 100 cities and one state have passed resolutions condemning the USA Patriot Act, saying it gives the federal government too much snooping power. But in this liberal fold of Northern California's Redwood Curtain, a simple denouncement just doesn't go far enough.

To cooperate with the act, the City Council says, is criminal.

Starting this month, a new city ordinance would impose a fine of $57 on any city department head who voluntarily complies with investigations or arrests under the aegis of the Patriot Act, the anti-terrorism bill passed after September 11.

Arcata's law is mostly symbolic, since federal law trumps any local ordinance. Still, the notion of civic disobedience is drawing plenty of attention.

"We knew we were doing something a little bit bold," says Dave Meserve, the councilman who sponsored the ordinance. "It certainly did not occur to me that it would catch the imagination of the American public."

In Arcata, the ordinance is the latest in a long line of actions that set the former mill town apart from the flannel-clad conservatism of California's North Coast.

Home to about 16,000 and nearly 300 miles up the coast from San Francisco, Arcata made waves in the early 1990s as the first city with a Green Party majority. Greens now hold two of five seats on the council, which recently issued a proclamation against war in Iraq.

At Northtown Books, one of several businesses lining Arcata's charming town square, employees have followed reaction to the ordinance with interest.

"Some of the reports of what's going on here have made it seem like, 'Oh, it's those crazy hippies in Arcata,"' Jay Herzog said.

The USA Patriot Act gives the government new powers to use wiretaps, electronic surveillance and other information gathering. Opponents say it violates civil liberties; supporters say it has helped fight terrorism.

"The Patriot Act has been an invaluable tool in the government's efforts to prevent terrorist attacks," said Justice Department spokesman Jorge Martinez, who said the act is constitutional and is being used only against people suspected of acting as agents of a foreign power or foreign terrorist organizations.

But Martinez calls the groundswell of resolutions "merely symbolic. We haven't had an instance where localities are not complying."

[Stoner]

This is a loss of civil rights to the extreme_________the finale- death.
The actions of the police reflect the militarization of civilian law enforcement.



http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N16314558.htm

NEWSDESK


16 May 2003 22:23:40 GMT
New York police raid wrong apartment; woman dies

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NEW YORK, May 16 (Reuters) - Police kicked down the wrong door at a New York apartment house on Friday and a woman with a heart condition died on the way to the hospital.

A bungled tip about a drug dealer's cache led police to kick down the door and toss a stun grenade into the apartment of a woman with a heart condition; she died of a heart attack within an hour, police said.

"This is a tragedy. This should not have happened. No doubt about that," said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

Police were led to the apartment of city employee Alberta Spruill, 57, by a registered, but apparently untested, informant, officials said. The dealer they sought lived in the same building but had been arrested by a different police unit four days earlier, they explained.

Spruill had just dressed for work, where she certified eligibility for civil service candidates, when the raiding party executed its "No Knock" warrant at 6 a.m., broke down her door, tossed in the grenade and handcuffed the stunned woman to a chair.

Police soon realized the mistake, took off the handcuffs and called an ambulance to take her to a hospital for observation.

While on the way to Harlem Hospital she suffered a heart attack and was pronounced dead on arrival.

Kelly said the "flash bang" grenades are usually used to dislodge barricaded suspects. He said that police have executed more than 1,900 warrants this year and four of those were at the wrong addresses.

The lieutenant who ordered use of the grenade in the misguided raid was put on administrative leave, officials said.

[Stoner]

http://www.sptimes.com/2003/05/18/Co...Act__com.shtml

With Patriot Act, companies forced to play informant on customers

BLUMNER
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
E-mail:
Click here
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive
By ROBYN E. BLUMNER, Times Perspective Columnist
© St. Petersburg Times
published May 18, 2003

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We all know homeland security is an expensive proposition. Assault-weaponed forces standing guard in front of all the bridge and tunnel entrances in New York City don't come cheap. And the cost for airport inspectors from the Transportation Security Administration to fill barrels full of confiscated cuticle scissors at the nation's airports runs upwards of $5.8-billion annually.

But what you may not have realized is just how much of the expense of our antiterrorism efforts is being borne by private industry. The USA Patriot Act, well known as a law that sacrificed civil liberties in the name of national security, may also be one of the largest unfunded mandates on private business since Social Security.

Section upon section of the law imposes new obligations on businesses to produce the personal records of their customers, or to spy and snitch on their customers as a condition of operating. Million-dollar fines and criminal liability are punishment for noncompliance.

For example, under Section 215, one of the more notorious parts of the Patriot Act - the one librarians have been raising a ruckus over - the FBI has the power to obtain library records, e-mail logs and entire business databases of all sorts just by claiming that the information is relevant to a counterterrorism or counterespionage investigation. Before the law, to obtain business records law enforcement would have to demonstrate to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court that the records related to an individual who had connections to terrorism or a foreign government. But the Patriot Act strikes down these particularity constraints, promoting instead a fishing expedition. And since it makes no provision for reimbursing businesses ordered to produce the records, there is little cost to the FBI for demanding far more information than is necessary.

According to the December 2002 issue of CSO - chief security officer - magazine, 45 percent of the 797 businesses surveyed have given law enforcement or the government data on their customers, employees or business partners. Internet service providers, financial institutions and telephone companies especially are repeated targets. BellSouth, for example, received 32,370 subpoenas and 636 court orders for information on customers last year and has an entire team of people who do nothing but respond to law enforcement.

Tim Lynch, director of the Cato Institute's Project on Criminal Justice, who is concerned about this burden on business, recently wrote in Forbes magazine about a wireless carrier that received a subpoena in 2001 that listed 50 pages of telephone numbers. The carrier had five days to come up with customer records for every number listed.

And this is not the worst of it. There is another part of the Patriot Act that markedly expands the kinds of companies expected to spy on their customers. Banks have had to do this for decades, but the new law extends this responsibility to a vast array of businesses - anywhere there is a potential for money laundering - such as insurance companies, brokerage firms and even casinos, pawn brokers and jewelers. These businesses are now expected to know their customers' identity and financial habits, and report suspicious activities to the government.

The rules are so difficult to implement that a cottage industry of compliance products has come on the market. Mike Ernst, product line director for Sybase Inc., a California-based software company that offers Patriot Act compliance software, explains that his product will help companies thoroughly scrutinize every transaction with every customer in every part of the companies' business. "A bank may have an insurance or credit card division and is required to review a customer's activities across all these institutions," Ernst says. "You have to do a 360-degree customer review to make sure you're in compliance with the act."

He estimates Sybase's potential market for this software and technical guidance is 10,000 financial institutions - about 10 percent of all depository institutions. Multiply that by the $200,000 it costs on average to implement the Sybase system and you have a $2-billion market. And this is just a sliver of the number of businesses now obliged to act as spooks.

All this might be good news for Ernst and Sybase but it is not so happy news for private industry stuck with the bill, nor, of course, for the privacy of customers. Suddenly, nearly every business we interact with is acting as an extension of the FBI. And businesses that don't comply are hit hard.

Western Union and its parent company recently paid a combined $11-million to settle charges stemming out of its failure to have a system in place to report whether customers were wiring more than $10,000 in one day from different locations.

One would have thought the business-friendly Bush administration would have been a little more sensitive to the expensive burdens it was creating under the Patriot Act. But no. When it comes to eradicating Americans' privacy no price is too high

[Stoner]

http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,...0Search%20Plan

Pentagon Defends Data Search Plan

By Ryan Singel

02:00 AM May. 21, 2003 PT

The Pentagon submitted a report to Congress on Tuesday that said the Total Information Awareness program is not the centralized spying database its critics say it is.

In fact, according to the report, the Total Information Awareness program is not even the Total Information Awareness program anymore.

Instead, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which administers the program, has changed the name to "Terrorism Information Awareness."

The agency said the original name "created in some minds the impression that TIA was a system to be used for developing dossiers on U.S. citizens," according to its website.

The 108-page report (pdf) and summary (pdf) offer details on various components of the program, which has been shrouded in controversy due to concerns about its impact on civil liberties.

The report stresses that "safeguarding the privacy and civil liberties of Americans is a bedrock principle." It also says the project is still in its early stages of development, although it revealed that the Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery project, part of TIA, has been used to analyze and find relationships in information received from interrogations of Guantanamo Bay detainees.

However, some critics of the plan were not convinced by promises to protect against abuses.

"The report is disappointing -- after more than a hundred pages, you don't know anything more about whether TIA will work or whether your civil liberties will be safe against it," said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "DARPA is constantly trying to assuage privacy concerns. Their mantra is 'We always operate within current law.'"

The purpose of TIA is to identify potential terrorists by comparing information in a broad range of databases that might offer clues, according to DARPA.

DARPA has often cited the example of using TIA to prevent a truck bomb attack by searching for patterns indicating a group of foreigners who are traveling together, renting trucks and buying materials that could be used as explosives.

Testing such a scenario would require the system to have access to credit-card records, airline itineraries and car-rental records.

An amendment by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-O.R.) required the Department of Defense to submit an accounting of the programs' objectives, components and privacy implications by Tuesday. If DARPA had failed to do so, the program's funding would have been cut off.

Wyden's amendment also prohibited the government's use of the system on Americans without first getting Congressional approval, a stipulation unaffected by Tuesday's report.

TIA's broad-based opposition, which ranges from the American Civil Liberties Union on the left to the American Conservative Union on the right, says the system could be misused to spy on American citizens, that data in commercial and government databases are notoriously incorrect and that even the slightest percentage of false positives in the system could lead to thousands of Americans being erroneously investigated.

"It goes against our very character as a nation to accept that anybody is guilty until proven innocent in America," said Lori Waters, executive director of the Eagle Forum, a conservative political organization. "And, that's exactly what Total Information Awareness does. It makes us all summary suspects, and does so without any guarantee that it will catch the bad guys."

The report denied that the government is using records of Americans' daily lives to test the system.

"TIA's research and testing activities are conducted using either real information that the Federal Government has already legally obtained under existing legal regimes, or synthetic, wholly artificial information generated in the laboratory about imaginary persons engaged in imaginary transactions."

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), one of the leading Republicans pushing for oversight of the project, seemed satisfied after an initial review.

"It's a good sign that DARPA appears to have embraced, in its words, 'safeguarding the privacy and the civil liberties of Americans [as] a bedrock principle,'" said Grassley. "I'll continue my aggressive oversight of this project to make sure that DARPA continues to live by this principle."

Others were less convinced by the Pentagon report.

"If TIA is relying on personal information contained in databases to determine whether someone is a suspect, what recourse does the person have whose information has been entered incorrectly?" asked Lisa Dean, director of Technology Policy at Free Congress Foundation. "They would be labeled a suspect by an all-knowing system that made a mistake in what it knows."

James X. Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said Congress should be applauded for requiring this report. "But this is only the beginning of the oversight process," he said. "Before any data mining is implemented, Congress needs to ensure that it is subject to clear rules and checks and balances. Currently, the privacy laws simply don't address this kind of thing."

[Stoner]

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,58909,00.html



A Spy Machine of DARPA's Dreams

By Noah Shachtman | Also by this reporter Page 1 of 2 next »


02:00 AM May. 20, 2003 PT

It's a memory aid! A robotic assistant! An epidemic detector! An all-seeing, ultra-intrusive spying program!

The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index all the information and make it searchable.

What national security experts and civil libertarians want to know is, why would the Defense Department want to do such a thing?

The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone call made, every TV show watched, every magazine read.

All of this -- and more -- would combine with information gleaned from a variety of sources: a GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person went, audio-visual sensors to capture what he or she sees or says, and biomedical monitors to keep track of the individual's health.

This gigantic amalgamation of personal information could then be used to "trace the 'threads' of an individual's life," to see exactly how a relationship or events developed, according to a briefing from the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, LifeLog's sponsor.

Someone with access to the database could "retrieve a specific thread of past transactions, or recall an experience from a few seconds ago or from many years earlier ... by using a search-engine interface."

On the surface, the project seems like the latest in a long line of DARPA's "blue sky" research efforts, most of which never make it out of the lab. But DARPA is currently asking businesses and universities for research proposals to begin moving LifeLog forward. And some people, such as Steven Aftergood, a defense analyst with the Federation of American Scientists, are worried.

With its controversial Total Information Awareness database project, DARPA already is planning to track all of an individual's "transactional data" -- like what we buy and who gets our e-mail.

While the parameters of the project have not yet been determined, Aftergood said he believes LifeLog could go far beyond TIA's scope, adding physical information (like how we feel) and media data (like what we read) to this transactional data.

"LifeLog has the potential to become something like 'TIA cubed,'" he said.

In the private sector, a number of LifeLog-like efforts already are underway to digitally archive one's life -- to create a "surrogate memory," as minicomputer pioneer Gordon Bell calls it.

Bell, now with Microsoft, scans all his letters and memos, records his conversations, saves all the Web pages he's visited and e-mails he's received and puts them into an electronic storehouse dubbed MyLifeBits.

DARPA's LifeLog would take this concept several steps further by tracking where people go and what they see.

That makes the project similar to the work of University of Toronto professor Steve Mann. Since his teen years in the 1970s, Mann, a self-styled "cyborg," has worn a camera and an array of sensors to record his existence. He claims he's convinced 20 to 30 of his current and former students to do the same. It's all part of an experiment into "existential technology" and "the metaphysics of free will."

DARPA isn't quite so philosophical about LifeLog. But the agency does see some potential battlefield uses for the program.

"The technology could allow the military to develop computerized assistants for war fighters and commanders that can be more effective because they can easily access the user's past experiences," DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker speculated in an e-mail.

It also could allow the military to develop more efficient computerized training systems, she said: Computers could remember how each student learns and interacts with the training system, then tailor the lessons accordingly.

John Pike, director of defense think tank GlobalSecurity.org, said he finds the explanations "hard to believe."

"It looks like an outgrowth of Total Information Awareness and other DARPA homeland security surveillance programs," he added in an e-mail.

Sure, LifeLog could be used to train robotic assistants. But it also could become a way to profile suspected terrorists, said Cory Doctorow, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In other words, Osama bin Laden's agent takes a walk around the block at 10 each morning, buys a bagel and a newspaper at the corner store and then calls his mother. You do the same things -- so maybe you're an al Qaeda member, too!

"The more that an individual's characteristic behavior patterns -- 'routines, relationships and habits' -- can be represented in digital form, the easier it would become to distinguish among different individuals, or to monitor one," Aftergood, the Federation of American Scientists analyst, wrote in an e-mail.

In its LifeLog report, DARPA makes some nods to privacy protection, like when it suggests that "properly anonymized access to LifeLog data might support medical research and the early detection of an emerging epidemic."

But before these grand plans get underway, LifeLog will start small. Right now, DARPA is asking industry and academics to submit proposals for 18-month research efforts, with a possible 24-month extension. (DARPA is not sure yet how much money it will sink into the program.)

The researchers will be the centerpiece of their own study.

Like a game show, winning this DARPA prize eventually will earn the lucky scientists a trip for three to Washington, D.C. Except on this excursion, every participating scientist's e-mail to the travel agent, every padded bar bill and every mad lunge for a cab will be monitored, categorized and later dissected.

[Stoner]

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,...404202,00.html

Contracts to spy on public issued despite outrage
By Jennifer Beauprez, Denver Post Business Writer
Public outrage didn't stop the government from pressing on with plans to create a giant database that spied on Americans - or dozens of companies from trying to help, according to documents obtained by a national privacy advocacy group.

Critics lashed out against the Pentagon last spring after news leaked out that the agency was creating a Total Information Awareness Project.

The project's mission? To comb through public and private databases and identify people who might be terrorists.

To address public fears of invasive Big Brother, Congress planned to halt funding until the Pentagon issued a detailed report. That report was released Tuesday.

But documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, show that even before those concerns were addressed, the Pentagon marched forward with its plans for the database. The government awarded $95 million in contracts to defense firms and academic institutions, despite public outcry.

Researchers at Colorado State University and at TRW's Aurora operations attempted to win some of those bids, but they were rejected by the Department of Defense, according to letters obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the nonprofit EPIC.

CSU researchers offered to build a software filter, and TRW offered to develop databases and to detect immunological terrorist threats.

Program directors at CSU and TRW did not return phone calls Tuesday.

Privacy advocates say the contracts show the Pentagon has pressed on with its project, despite a year of public concern that it would violate privacy and unfairly track individuals.

"A lot of people got the impression that this program was dead, but it couldn't be further from the truth," said Jay Stanley, communications director for the technology and liberties union American Civil Liberty Union. "Americans need to know that this research is moving forward."

To ease fears over privacy, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, issued a report to Congress. In the report, the agency changed the program's name to Terrorist Information Awareness Project and outlined the need for software to comb through public and private databases and link relevant information and agencies so decision-makers have advance information about terrorist planning.

The report said the old name - Total Information Awareness Project - "created in some minds the impression that TIA was a system to be used for developing dossiers on U.S. citizens. That is not DOD's intent in pursuing this program."

Rather, the goal is "to protect U.S. citizens by detecting and defeating foreign terrorist threats before an attack" and the new name was chosen "to make this objective absolutely clear."

DARPA, in its report, promised privacy and civil liberties would be a top priority. The report said the agency would create systems to keep out hackers and track and identify all searches and systems users to prevent abuse.

DARPA's report did not appease critics, who worry the project will create technologies and institutions that inevitably will be abused or wrongly flag innocent people as terrorists.

"It could be the inconvenience of being hassled at the airport to being denied a job or even arrested," said Stanley of the ACLU.

He said government access to private data, ranging from shopping purchases to bus passes, is not protected by privacy laws.

"We have a gap in our privacy laws," he said. "The Total Information Awareness Project would drive a truck through that gap and set up camp, creating institutions that would permanently inhabit that space."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

[Stoner]

An update on the Patriot Act.
This paragraph is the key to this discussion:
____________
"What we're concerned about is you have a situation where the government, because there is less accountability, can engage in more surveillance without people knowing about it," Tien said.
_____________



http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,59150,00.html

DOJ Net Surveillance Under Fire

By Joanna Glasner | Also by this reporter Page 1 of 2 next »


02:00 AM Jun. 10, 2003 PT


The Justice Department's statements -- and what it did not say -- in a congressional inquiry on the use of broadened surveillance powers authorized after the Sept. 11 attacks is raising a red flag among civil liberties groups. A central concern is the lack of clarity regarding the scope of Internet surveillance powers granted in the controversial USA Patriot Act.

In response to testimony last week by Attorney General John Ashcroft before the House Judiciary Committee, the American Civil Liberties Union published a memo criticizing the government's attempts to apply the methodology for tracing phone calls to tracking Internet use.

Timothy Edgar, an ACLU legislative counsel and the report's author, argued that so-called "trap and trace" devices, traditionally used to capture telephone numbers but not the content of conversations, could potentially violate a subject's privacy if it's used to watch Web activity.

On the Internet, investigators use "trap and trace" technology to monitor e-mail, Web surfing and other activity to search for clues about potentially illegal activity.

The problem, according to Edgar, is that a URL, unlike a phone number, provides detailed information about the content a person is obtaining. "It isn't always technologically feasible to separate content information from routing information," said Edgar.

An overly intrusive application of tracing devices online was one of several Internet-related red flags raised by civil rights advocates following Ashcroft's testimony and the release last month of a Justice Department document answering lawmakers' questions about the Patriot Act.

Another Net-related concern in the ACLU memo is the potential use of Web-surfing records in data-mining projects, allowing investigators to fish for illicit activity unrelated to the original inquiry.

The ACLU also criticized the paucity of information provided by the Justice Department regarding what Internet content it considers off-limits in searches. It also questioned the application of some surveillance technologies in garden-variety criminal cases.

The critique comes as the Justice Department is expected to seek an extension of authorities granted under the Patriot Act.

The agency has not said when it will seek Congressional approval of a Patriot Act extension. But a draft proposal laying out a wish list of new powers, nicknamed "Patriot II," surfaced earlier this year, indicating that the Justice Department has already expended considerable effort planning its appeal. The proposal would broadly expand the government's surveillance and detention powers, including extending authorization periods for secret wiretaps and Internet surveillance.

The Justice Department has a limited time to seek a follow-up bill. Many of the authorities granted under the original Patriot Act -- enacted two months after the Sept.11 attacks -- expire at the end of 2005.

But before approving broad new powers for federal investigators, civil rights groups say Congress must ensure that the government is doing what it can to see that existing powers are applied responsibly.

That could be a difficult task, considering that thus far the Justice Department has been tight-lipped about Patriot Act-related activities, said Lee Tien, attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

As far as Internet surveillance is concerned, Tien said the Justice Department's preference for minimal disclosure is aided by the fact that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act covers authorization for communications monitoring in anti-terrorism cases. Under FISA, investigators obtain authorization to conduct surveillance through a secret court, leaving the public out of the loop.

"What we're concerned about is you have a situation where the government, because there is less accountability, can engage in more surveillance without people knowing about it," Tien said.
The ACLU, meanwhile, says it would like to see more disclosure regarding the amount and types of data investigators obtain when monitoring Internet use. So far, the Justice Department has provided limited guidance on this subject. A memo (PDF) authored last year by Deputy Attorney General Larry D. Thompson states that the policy of the Justice Department is to use "reasonably available technology" in order to avoid collection of any content when trap and trace devices are employed. If content still gets collected, the memo states that "no affirmative investigative use may be made of that content."

But the ACLU's Edgar maintains that the Patriot Act does not clearly define what constitutes content in the context of the Internet. For example, he notes, it is unclear whether an investigator, without probable cause, would find out only that a subject has visited the Google website, or also that he or she entered the search terms "Bush" and "Halliburton," or "Clinton" and "Whitewater."

Edgar said the Department of Justice also failed to clarify whether or not it considers subject lines in e-mail messages to be content, as he has recommended. Moreover, the ACLU notes that trap-and-trace powers have not been limited to terrorism investigations, and have been applied to track Internet use in drug- and fraud-related cases.

Mark Corallo, a Justice Department spokesman, said that in the overwhelming majority of cases, powers granted under the Patriot Act have been used for the purpose of combating terrorism. And while the act does address monitoring of Internet activities, it does not provide a blank check to federal investigators to spy on ordinary Americans.

"What the Patriot Act allows us to do is to go to the FISA court and seek a warrant from a judge to monitor the Internet usage of the target of an investigation," he said. "It doesn't authorize the FBI to just go to the Internet and look at who's looking at what."

[Stoner]

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20...1720-5150r.htm

Report stirs fears of privacy violations


By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES



A report from the Terrorism Information Awareness program contains a major loophole that allows the government to data mine "everything under the sun" including medical and credit records, says the top Senate Democrat on privacy issues.
The report said the program to track terrorists will use information collected and analyzed that is "legally obtained and usable by the federal government under existing law."
Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said vast amounts of data can be legally obtained, including consumer information purchased from private companies.
"That's basically everything under the sun, all kinds of stuff can be bought from private firms. All of that can be obtained legally, and that would just be some of it," Mr. Wyden said.
Congress mandated the report on the program — labeled by some critics as a "supersnoop" — that is under design by the Pentagon to track terrorists. The program became such a magnet of criticism from civil-liberty advocates that when the report came due May 20, the program's name was changed from Total Information Awareness to Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA).
"I will fight strongly the proposition that TIA will be used to analyze everything collected in a legal fashion. That loophole is so big you could drive five trucks through it," Mr. Wyden said.
The report was required under legislation authored by Mr. Wyden and also requires congressional approval before the program can use new technology.
In a letter yesterday to Anthony Tether, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Mr. Wyden said the report failed to address numerous privacy and civil-liberty issues, including whether U.S. citizens will be used voluntarily or involuntarily when technologies are tested.
The program would collect personal information from driver's licenses, airline tickets, arrest reports, visas and work permits to analyze and predict terrorist attacks.
In one description, the report said "social interaction, financial transactions and telephone calls" will be analyzed. Mr. Wyden wants to know if that includes credit-card and automated teller machine activity, wire transfers, loan applications or credit reports.
"Will this information be obtained from U.S. persons? What privacy protections will be in place for this information?" Mr. Wyden asked in the letter.
The Next Generation Face Recognition program, also part of TIA, will be tested with "experimentation on databases of at least one million individuals" and Mr. Wyden asked if that will also include U.S. citizens and be voluntary.
In spite of the Pentagon's report, Mr. Wyden said he remains "very deeply concerned that TIA technology will be used to plow through large amounts of private information on individual Americans in search of hypothetical threat situations."
"Your report states that 'the TIA program is not attempting to create or access a centralized database that will store information gathered from various publicly or privately held databases.' Nonetheless, it is clear that the TIA program will access any number of such databases and then sort through the information," Mr. Wyden said in the letter.
Mr. Wyden said he is also concerned that "data inaccuracies are not truly a concern" within the TIA program.
"I am concerned that a tool providing decision-makers with information obtained without consideration for inaccuracies is begging for bad decisions to be made — decisions that may jeopardize the lives of individual Americans," he said.

[Stoner]

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...ar/6347567.htm


Posted on Mon, Jul. 21, 2003

Report outlines Justice Department violations of USA Patriot Act
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times

WASHINGTON - A new report by internal investigators at the Justice Department has identified dozens of cases in which employees have been accused of serious civil rights and civil liberties violations.

The cases involved enforcement of the sweeping federal antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act.

The inspector general's report, which was presented to Congress last week and is awaiting public release, is likely to raise new concern among lawmakers about whether the Justice Department can police itself when its employees are accused of violating the rights of Muslim and Arab immigrants and others swept up in terrorism investigations under the 2001 law.

The report said that during the six-month period that ended on June 15, the inspector general's office had received 34 complaints of civil rights and civil liberties violations by department employees that it considered credible, including accusations of beatings of Muslim and Arab immigrants in federal detention centers.

The accused workers are employed in several of the agencies that make up the Justice Department, with most of them assigned to the Bureau of Prisons, which oversees federal penitentiaries and detention centers.

The report said that credible accusations also were made against employees of the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Most of the immigration agency was consolidated earlier this year into the Department of Homeland Security.

A Justice Department spokeswoman, Barbara Comstock, said on Sunday night that the department "takes its obligations very seriously to protect civil rights and civil liberties, and the small number of credible allegations will be thoroughly investigated."

Comstock noted that the department was continuing to review accusations made last month in a separate report by the inspector general, Glenn A. Fine.

While most of the accusations in the new report are still under investigation, the report said a handful of others had been substantiated, including those against a federal prison doctor who was reprimanded after reportedly telling an inmate during a physical examination that "if I was in charge, I would execute every one of you" because of "the crimes you all did."

The report did not otherwise identify the doctor, who received a verbal reprimand from his superiors, or name the federal detention center where he worked.

The report said that the inspector general's office was continuing to investigate a separate case in which about 20 inmates at a federal detention center, which was not identified, had recently accused a corrections officer of abusive behavior, including ordering a Muslim inmate to remove his shirt "so the officer could use it to shine his shoes."

In that case, the report said, the inspector general's office was able to obtain a statement from the officer admitting that he had verbally abused the Muslim inmate and that he had been "less than completely candid" with internal investigators from the Bureau of Prisons.

The report is the second in recent weeks from the inspector general to focus on the way the Justice Department is carrying out the broad new surveillance and detention powers it received under the Patriot Act, which was passed by Congress a month after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In the first report, which was made public on June 2, Fine, whose job is to act as the department's internal watchdog, found that hundreds of illegal immigrants were mistreated after they were detained following the attacks.

A copy of the new report, which was dated July 17 and provided to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, was made available to The New York Times by the office of Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House panel.

"This report shows that we have only begun to scratch the surface with respect to the Justice Department's disregard of constitutional rights and civil liberties," Conyers said in a statement. "I commend the inspector general for having the courage and independence to highlight the degree to which the administration's war on terror has misfired and harmed innocent victims with no ties to terror whatsoever.`

The new report is Fine's evaluation of his efforts to enforce provisions of the Patriot Act that require his office to investigate complaints of abuses of civil rights and civil liberties by Justice Department employees.

The report draws no broad conclusions about the extent of abuses by Justice Department employees, although it suggests that the relatively small staff of the inspector general's office has been overwhelmed by accusations of abuse, many filed by Muslim or Arab inmates in federal detention centers.

The inspector general said that from Dec. 16 through June 15, his office received 1,073 complaints "suggesting a Patriot Act-related" abuse of civil rights or civil liberties.

The report suggested that hundreds of the accusations were easily dismissed as not credible or impossible to prove. But of the remainder, 272 were determined to fall within the inspector general's jurisdiction, with 34 raising "credible Patriot Act violations on their face."

In those 34 cases, it said, the accusations "ranged in seriousness from alleged beatings of immigration detainees to BOP correctional officers allegedly verbally abusing inmates."