Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling

May 15, 2006 9:33 AM

Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells us the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources. "It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

We do not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls. Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen. Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials. People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.

Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers. The official who warned ABC News said there was no indication our phones were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded. A pattern of phone calls from a reporter, however, could provide valuable clues for leak investigators.

Schneier on Security
April 14, 2006
AT&T Assisting NSA Surveillance

Interesting details emerging from EFF's lawsuit

According to a statement released by Klein's attorney, an NSA agent showed up at the San Francisco switching center in 2002 to interview a management-level technician for a special job. In January 2003, Klein observed a new room being built adjacent to the room housing AT&T's #4ESS switching equipment, which is responsible for routing long distance and international calls.

"I learned that the person whom the NSA interviewed for the secret job was the person working to install equipment in this room," Klein wrote. "The regular technician work force was not allowed in the room." Klein's job eventually included connecting internet circuits to a splitting cabinet that led to the secret room. During the course of that work, he learned from a co-worker that similar cabinets were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.

"While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet (AT&T's internet service) circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal," Klein wrote. The split circuits included traffic from peering links connecting to other internet backbone providers, meaning that AT&T was also diverting traffic routed from its network to or from other domestic and international providers, according to Klein's statement.

The secret room also included data-mining equipment called a Narus STA 6400, "known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets," according to Klein's statement.

THREE Stage Terror Drill to Take Place in Chicago: May 2-4

Gary Franchi - Chicago, IL 4-20-06 One of our Loyal Lone Lanterns has just informed us that the National Guard will be doing a training assignment in Chicago. This field exercise will be to simulate a chemical attack, whereby the National Guard will coordinate with local police, fire depts, and hospitals. One of the hospitals participating will be Rush.

1) Exercise starts as a response to a pandemic spreading throughout Chicago. It could be anything from a terrorist attack to bird flu. Nobody knows.

2) As the different groups are responding to this pandemic, there is a dirty bomb attack which releases a chemical agent.

3) If all of that is not enough, the dirty bomb collapses a building.

We do not have an exact location where this is happening, the National Guard doesn’t even know. It is supposed to simulate a real life situation so, nobody knows until it starts.

It will be May 2-4.

Considering that "drills" were taking place the morning of 9/11 and 7/7 there is always the remote possibility that this is cover for another "inside job". We pray to God that it is not.

Chicago, be alert that Tuesday, May 2nd, Wednesday, May 3rd, and Thursday, May 4th.

11th Circuit Invokes _Bowers v. Hardwick_ to Reject Constitutional Challenge to Alabama Law Against Sex Toys


Any doubt that _Bowers v. Hardwick_, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), would continue to wreak havoc in the 21st century was dispelled in a new decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, _Williams v. Pryor_, 2000 WL 1513756 (Oct. 12). The court rejected a facial challenge to Alabama's statutory ban on the sale of devices that facilitate genital stimulation, because such devices could be used for constitutionally unprotected sexual pleasure by "homosexuals." The court reversed -- except as applied to four ostensibly heterosexual women -- District Judge C. Lynwood Smith, Jr.'s decision striking down the statute on its face as not rationally related to a legitimate government interest. In an opinion by Circuit Judge Black, the court interpreted _Bowers_ as permitting states to criminalize not only "homosexual sodomy" (the issue according to the Supreme Court's opinion in _Bowers_), but any activity, including masturbation, that might give gay men or lesbians sexual pleasure. In sharp contrast to this expansive reading of _Bowers_, the court dismissed _Romer v. Evans_, 517 U.S. 620 (1996), as having "no bearing" on the issue before it.


Two years ago, Alabama's legislature made it a crime to distribute for profit "any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for stimulation of human genital organs." A first offense is punishable by a fine and up to a year in prison or -- no kidding -- hard labor. Vendors of sexual devices and four women who use such devices joined together to challenge the statute. Plaintiffs alleged that the statute bore no rational relationship to a legitimate government interest and that it infringed -- both facially and as applied -- a fundamental constitutional right to sexual privacy.


Disposing of the first claim meant identifying a legitimate interest and finding a rational connection between the statute and that interest. Judge Black made short work of the first task, finding a legitimate state interest in the "safeguarding of public morality." (Specifically, the state had claimed the statute would discourage "autonomous sex.") The district court had relied on _Romer v. Evans_ in finding the state's goal illegitimate. But in the appeals court's view, _Romer_ dealt only with the unconstitutionality of "imposing an inability to obtain the protection of antidiscrimination laws." This, according to the court, had "no bearing" on the case before it.


The court then -- in perhaps the weakest part of its opinion -- disposed of claims that the statute, because it ignored the health-related uses of genital-stimulating devices (which, the court conceded, are prescribed in sexual and relationship counseling), is not rationally related to the public-morality purpose. It also rejected the district court's finding that the government's interest in reducing "sexual-stimulation . . . unrelated to marriage, procreation or familial relationships" is not rationally served by a statute that also affects possibilities for genital stimulation within marriage. According to Judge Black, "The criminal proscription on the distribution of sexual devices certainly is a rational means for eliminating commerce in the devices, which itself is a rational means for making the acquisition and use of the devices more difficult." Thus, the court explained (both tautologicallly and redundantly), "the statute is not constitutionally irrational under rational basis scrutiny because it is rationally related to the State's legitimate power to protect its view of public morality." (Protecting its view of public morality is about the only thing the court accomplished!) In other words, the state's assertion that "autonomous sex" is immoral can justify any law expected to decrease the frequency (or perhaps the effectiveness) of such behavior.


Black then turned to a separate claim that the statute infringed a fundamental right to sexual privacy (both facially and as applied). The court characterized a series of Supreme Court right-to-privacy decisions, including _Griswold_, _Casey_, and _Roe v. Wade_, as dealing with the right to make decisions about procreation, not sexual conduct. "Extending the constitutional right to privacy to include a broad fundamental right to all sexual autonomy," wrote Black, "is directly precluded by <_Bowers v. Hardwick_>." In other words, "In light of _Bowers_, there would be no violation of any fundamental constitutional right to the extent application of Alabama's statute infringed upon the sexual activity of homosexuals." (By referring to "the sexual activity of homosexuals," rather than "homosexual activity" or "homosexual sodomy," the court apparently meant to include the aforementioned "autonomous sex." That phrase, incidentally, has no apparent precedent in American case law.) In an ironic footnote, the court conceded that 15 years ago it had recognized exactly such a right, in _Hardwick v. Bowers_ (as the case was called at the circuit court level), only to be slapped down by the Supreme Court. (However, in a construction used selectively to distance itself from past holdings it now regrets, the court attributed its earlier decision not to "this court" but to "a panel of this Court.")


Finally, the court turned to the as applied challenge, where it offered heterosexual genital stimulators some hope. The court made reference to the presumed sexual orientation of the four individual plaintiffs, noting that "Betty Faye Haggermaker and Alice Jean Cope are married women who use sexual devices with their husbands. Sherry Taylor-Williams and Jane Doe began using sexual devices in marital intimacy but both are now single." In the court's view, "the as-applied challenge raised by the plaintiffs, married or unmarried, implicate interests in sexual privacy different from those rejected in _Bowers_." (Could the court somehow believe that masturbation is gay when performed by some people, and straight when performed by others?) In any event, the court noted that application of the law to the four female users had been insufficiently explored below (the case was "tried" on the basis of stipulated facts).


It remanded to the district court for further consideration of whether the women had a fundamental right to use sexual devices. The upshot: To buy sexual devices in Alabama, women may now have to prove their heterosexuality, perhaps by marrying the ex-husbands of Doe or Taylor-Williams. Even that possibility, however, could be foreclosed: To find in the women's favor, the district court will have to determine the right in question to be "objectively, deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition." What evidence would convince the court that the right to use dildos and vibrators is deeply rooted it didn't say, but there should be no shortage of experts willing to testify on the point. _Fred A. Bernstein_

The Billion-Dollar Baghdad Embassy
by Leigh Saavedra
From www.oldamericancentury.org



That's the estimate, though only half of it has been appropriated so far, a billion dollars to build a new embassy in Iraq. It will be the largest on the globe, the largest the world has ever seen, the size of Vatican City in Italy.

U.S. embassies typically cover ten acres. This one, a 104-acre complex, will be comprised of 21 buildings, its own water wells, an electricity plant and waste water-treatment facility that makes the huge compound completely independent of Iraq ,whose "interim government" sold the land to the U.S. in October 2004. Terms of the agreement do not appear to be readily accessible.*

{snip}

In this case, the devil is less in the details than in the monumental size and cost of the endeavor. The likeness to a small fortified city is frightening to those who object to a permanent presence of the U.S. in Iraq, already destroyed by American bombs and depleted uranium, and the core of such fear lies in the question of WHY the U.S., already dangerously in debt back home and dangerously despised in Iraq and most of the mideast, is pounding its chest with such a noisy bravado. Is this the finale of "Shock and Awe"?

{snip}

This is a notable expenditure. It costs as much as it does to bomb mud huts in the desert each week. We, the dwindling middle class, are paying for it, and paying through the teeth. And we're not paying sums like this for something that's meant to be temporary....Of our neocon acquaintances and non-political friends we might ask: Can you read about this construction, look at the numbers involved, think of the homeless, disease-ridden people of Iraq, suffering from the highest unemployment of their lives and often having difficulty finding clean water, and then truly believe that the U.S. went to the Garden of Eden to help the Iraqi people?

...more here...

* (Thanks to AP correspondent Charles Hanley for providing the statistics and descriptions of the new embassy. See his full report at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060414/ap_on_... )