When the law chases the Internet | csmonitor.com

~~~ Cybercrime in Cyberspace.
The Internet will never be a totally safe place.
Just be careful out there !! ~~ TP

When the law chases the Internet | csmonitor.com: "And yet cybercrime is now considered a greater worry than physical crime among US businesses, according to a new IBM survey. Nearly 9 out of 10 companies experienced a computer security incident in 2005, the FBI has found, with viruses, computer theft, and other such crimes costing US firms more than $67 billion a year. And the latest worry to individual PC owners is a type of 'spyware' that can remotely follow a person's keystrokes to steal a password or other vital information.

Google itself is quite aware of potential abuse by new software, and how much governments, from Washington to Beijing, want to control or snoop on Google users.

It is primarily up to Congress to pass new laws that can provide the tools to fight cybercrime while also balancing privacy concerns.

One pending bill would provide national standards for companies to notify customers if personal data on their computers has been breached. About half the states have such laws. Another bill would provide protection against spyware intrusion on PCs."

F.B.I. Watched Activist Groups, New Files Show - New York Times

~~~ Not that this is really surprising. When i worked for GreenPeace in during the Reagan years, we knew that we were being monitiored. Strange thing is we had nothing to hide,, I mean we were publicity-hound-political-activists, who telegraphed to the media most everything we did or said. Why non-violent groups need to be "monitiored" is still really beyond me.

Either way the Bush Team is in trouble. If these domestic spying games the Administration is playing are found to be more than just unethical, but also to be illegal, some heads are going to have to roll. Being Scooter Libby already got indicted, maybe Dick Cheney is next, as he is the main powerplayer. { Don't tell me you really think Bush is in charge of this complicated stuff ! } ~~ ` TP
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F.B.I. Watched Activist Groups, New Files Show - New York Times: "the documents, coming after the Bush administration's confirmation that President Bush had authorized some spying without warrants in fighting terrorism, prompted charges from civil rights advocates that the government had improperly blurred the line between terrorism and acts of civil disobedience and lawful protest.

One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a 'Vegan Community Project.' Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group's 'semi-communistic ideology.' A third indicates the bureau's interest in determining the location of a protest over llama fur planned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
The documents, provided to The New York Times over the past week, came as part of a series of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. For more than a year, the A.C.L.U. has been seeking access to information in F.B.I. files on about 150 protest and social groups that it says may have been improperly monitored."

President Bush's Walkabout - New York Times

~ ~ Pretty heavy words from the NY Times editorial page.

I really do not like agreeing with NYT's editorials. Doing so often leaves me haunted that I may be mis-informed on the issue at hand.

But in this case, there is no mistake -- the Bush Presidency is a ticking time bomb of more disasters.

We are in a war that seems to have been engineered from even before Bush II took office. { I saw Jimmy Carter say that on TV , to promote his new book .}

A very serious change of both staff & policy is needed from the Oval Office before there are more wars & ill-handled natural disasters..

May G-d help America !!~~ ` TP
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"After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run."

"An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front.

But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long."

========================================

from :

President Bush's Walkabout - New York Times:

"Published: November 8, 2005

Data Mining Found to Flunk Privacy Rules -

Data Mining Found to Flunk Privacy Rules - Yahoo! News: "WASHINGTON - None of five federal agencies using electronic data mining to track terrorists, catch criminals or prevent fraud complied with all rules for gathering citizen information."

" As a result, they cannot ensure that individual privacy rights are appropriately protected, congressional investigators said Monday."

FBI and State claimed they were exempt from the assessments required by the E-Government Act of 2002, the FBI because it was a national security system and State because its data dealt with federal employees, not the public.

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~~~ I find this above hard to believe.

I mean the Government--

-- our Government , of the People , by the People , for the People --

would NEVER make a mistake like this,

over and over and over again !!

This has to just another one of those vailed liberal media

attacks on the Bush administration

that my hero ,

Rush "I only do pharmaceutical drugs" Limbaugh,

keeps telling me about !! ~~

~ ` ` ~ tp
=

No question: John Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in history.

june 15, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/15/opinion/15KRUG.html
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Travesty of Justice

By PAUL KRUGMAN

o question: John Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in history.

For this column, let's just focus on Mr. Ashcroft's role in the fight against terror. Before 9/11 he was aggressively uninterested in the terrorist threat. He didn't even mention counterterrorism in a May 2001 memo outlining strategic priorities for the Justice Department. When the 9/11 commission asked him why, he responded by blaming the Clinton administration, with a personal attack on one of the commission members thrown in for good measure.

We can't tell directly whether Mr. Ashcroft's post-9/11 policies are protecting the United States from terrorist attacks. But a number of pieces of evidence suggest otherwise.

First, there's the absence of any major successful prosecutions. The one set of convictions that seemed fairly significant — that of the "Detroit 3" — appears to be collapsing over accusations of prosecutorial misconduct. (The lead prosecutor has filed a whistle-blower suit against Mr. Ashcroft, accusing him of botching the case. The Justice Department, in turn, has opened investigations against the prosecutor. Payback? I report; you decide.)

Then there is the lack of any major captures. Somewhere, the anthrax terrorist is laughing. But the Justice Department, you'll be happy to know, is trying to determine whether it can file bioterrorism charges against a Buffalo art professor whose work includes harmless bacteria in petri dishes.

Perhaps most telling is the way Mr. Ashcroft responds to criticism of his performance. His first move is always to withhold the evidence. Then he tries to change the subject by making a dramatic announcement of a terrorist threat.

For an example of how Mr. Ashcroft shuts down public examination, consider the case of Sibel Edmonds, a former F.B.I. translator who says that the agency's language division is riddled with incompetence and corruption, and that the bureau missed critical terrorist warnings. In 2002 she gave closed-door Congressional testimony; Senator Charles Grassley described her as "very credible . . . because people within the F.B.I. have corroborated a lot of her story."

But the Justice Department has invoked the rarely used "state secrets privilege" to prevent Ms. Edmonds from providing evidence. And last month the department retroactively classified two-year-old testimony by F.B.I. officials, which was presumably what Mr. Grassley referred to.

For an example of changing the subject, consider the origins of the Jose Padilla case. There was no publicity when Mr. Padilla was arrested in May 2002. But on June 6, 2002, Coleen Rowley gave devastating Congressional testimony about failures at the F.B.I. (which reports to Mr. Ashcroft) before 9/11. Four days later, Mr. Ashcroft held a dramatic press conference and announced that Mr. Padilla was involved in a terrifying plot. Instead of featuring Ms. Rowley, news magazine covers ended up featuring the "dirty bomber" who Mr. Ashcroft said was plotting to kill thousands with deadly radiation.

Since then Mr. Padilla has been held as an "enemy combatant" with no legal rights. But Newsweek reports that "administration officials now concede that the principal claim they have been making about Padilla ever since his detention — that he was dispatched to the United States for the specific purpose of setting off a radiological `dirty bomb' — has turned out to be wrong and most likely can never be used in court."

But most important is the memo. Last week Mr. Ashcroft, apparently in contempt of Congress, refused to release a memo on torture his department prepared for the White House almost two years ago. Fortunately, his stonewalling didn't work: The Washington Post has acquired a copy of the memo and put it on its Web site.

Much of the memo is concerned with defining torture down: if the pain inflicted on a prisoner is less than the pain that accompanies "serious physical injury, such as organ failure," it's not torture. Anyway, the memo declares that the federal law against torture doesn't apply to interrogations of enemy combatants "pursuant to [the president's] commander-in-chief authority." In other words, the president is above the law.

The memo came out late Sunday. Mr. Ashcroft called a press conference yesterday — to announce an indictment against a man accused of plotting to blow up a shopping mall in Ohio. The timing was, I'm sure, purely coincidental.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/15/opinion/15KRUG.html

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company