Friday 08-27-10

What part of illegal do they not understand, they may have "no serious record" but what is the difference. To break the law is ok for this, but not for that.

Feds moving to dismiss some deportation cases
Critics assail the plan as a bid to create a kind of backdoor 'amnes

The Department of Homeland Security is systematically reviewing thousands of pending immigration cases and moving to dismiss those filed against suspected illegal immigrants who have no serious criminal records, according to several sources familiar with the efforts.

Culling the immigration court system dockets of noncriminals started in earnest in Houston about a month ago and has stunned local immigration attorneys, who have reported coming to court anticipating clients' deportations only to learn that the government was dismissing their cases.

Richard Rocha, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman, said Tuesday that the review is part of the agency's broader, nationwide strategy to prioritize the deportations of illegal immigrants who pose a threat to national security and public safety. Rocha declined to provide further details.

Critics assailed the plan as another sign that the Obama administration is trying to create a kind of backdoor "amnesty" program.

Raed Gonzalez, an immigration attorney who was briefed on the effort by Homeland Security's deputy chief counsel in Houston, said DHS confirmed that it's reviewing cases nationwide, though not yet to the pace of the local office. He said the others are expected to follow suit soon.

Gonzalez, the liaison between the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which administers the immigration court system, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said DHS now has five attorneys assigned full time to reviewing all active cases in Houston's immigration court.

Gonzalez said DHS attorneys are conducting the reviews on a case-by-case basis. However, he said they are following general guidelines that allow for the dismissal of cases for defendants who have been in the country for two or more years and have no felony convictions.

In some instances, defendants can have one misdemeanor conviction, but it cannot involve a DWI, family violence or sexual crime, Gonzalez said.

Massive backlog of cases
Opponents of illegal immigration were critical of the dismissals.

"They've made clear that they have no interest in enforcing immigration laws against people who are not convicted criminals," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for strict controls.

"This situation is just another side effect of President Obama's failure to deliver on his campaign promise to make immigration reform a priority in his first year," said U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. "Until he does, state and local authorities are left with no choice but to pick up the slack for prosecuting and detaining criminal aliens."

Gonzalez called the dismissals a necessary step in unclogging a massive backlog in the immigration court system. In June, there were more than 248,000 cases pending in immigration courts across the country, including about 23,000 in Texas, according to data compiled by researchers at Syracuse University.

'Absolutely fantastic'
Gonzalez said he went into immigration court downtown on Monday and was given a court date in October 2011 for one client. But, he said, the government's attorney requested the dismissal of that case and those of two more of his clients, and the cases were dispatched by the judge.

The court "was terminating all of the cases that came up," Gonzalez said. "It was absolutely fantastic."

"We're all calling each other saying, 'Can you believe this?' " said John Nechman, another Houston immigration attorney, who had two cases dismissed.

Attorney Elizabeth Mendoza Macias, who has practiced in Houston for 17 years, said she had cases for several clients dismissed during the past month and eventually called DHS to find out what was going on. She said she was told by a DHS trial attorney that 2,500 cases were under review in Houston.

"I had five (dismissed) in one week, and two more that I just received," Mendoza said. "And I am expecting many more, many more, in the next month."

Her clients, all previously charged with being in the country illegally, included:

An El Salvadoran man married to a U.S. citizen who has two U.S.-born children. The client had a pending asylum case in the court system, but the case was not particularly strong. Now that his case is terminated, he will be eligible to obtain permanent residency through his wife, Mendoza said.

A woman from Cameroon, who was in removal proceedings after being caught by the U.S. Border Patrol, had her case terminated by the government. She meets the criteria of a trafficking victim, Mendoza said, and can now apply for a visa.

Memo outlines priorities
Immigrants who have had their cases terminated are frequently left in limbo, immigration attorneys said, and are not granted any form of legal status.

"It's very, very key to understand that these aliens are not being granted anything in court. They are still here illegally. They don't have work permits. They don't have Social Security numbers," Mendoza said. "ICE is just saying, 'At this particular moment, we are not going to proceed with trying to remove you from the United States.' "

In a June 30 memo, ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton outlined the agency's priorities, saying it had the capacity to remove about 400,000 illegal immigrants annually — about 4 percent of the estimated illegal immigrant population in the country. The memo outlines priorities for the detention and removal system, putting criminals and threats to national security at the top of the list.

Up to 17,000 cases
On Tuesday, ICE officials provided a copy of a new policy memo from Morton dated Aug. 20 that instructs government attorneys to review the court cases of people with pending applications to adjust status based on their relation to a U.S. citizen. Morton estimates in the memo that the effort could affect up to 17,000 cases.

Tre Rebsock, the ICE union representative in Houston, said even if the efforts involve only a fraction of the pending immigration cases, "that's going to make our officers feel even more powerless to enforce the laws."

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7169978.html

EPA Considering Ban on Traditional Ammunition — Take Action Now
All Gun Owners, Hunters and Shooters:

With the fall hunting season fast approaching, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Lisa Jackson, who was responsible for banning bear hunting in New Jersey, is now considering a petition by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) – a leading anti-hunting organization – to ban all traditional ammunition under the Toxic Substance Control Act of 1976, a law in which Congress expressly exempted ammunition. If the EPA approves the petition, the result will be a total ban on all ammunition containing lead-core components, including hunting and target-shooting rounds. The EPA must decide to accept or reject this petition by November 1, 2010, the day before the midterm elections.

Today, the EPA has opened to public comment the CBD petition. The comment period ends on October 31, 2010.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) — the trade association for the firearms, ammunition, hunting and shooting sports industry — urges you to submit comment to the EPA opposing any ban on traditional ammunition. Remember, your right to choose the ammunition you hunt and shoot with is at stake.

The EPA has published the petition and relevant supplemental information as Docket ID: EPA-HQ-OPPT-2010-0681. If you would like to read the original petition and see the contents of this docket folder, please click here. In order to go directly to the ‘submit a comment’ page for this docket number, please click here.

NSSF urges you to stress the following in your opposition:

* There is no scientific evidence that the use of traditional ammunition is having an adverse impact on wildlife populations.

* Wildlife management is the proper jurisdiction of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the 50 state wildlife agencies.

* A 2008 study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on blood lead levels of North Dakota hunters confirmed that consuming game harvested with traditional ammunition does not pose a human health risk.

* A ban on traditional ammunition would have a negative impact on wildlife conservation. The federal excise tax that manufacturers pay on the sale of the ammunition (11 percent) is a primary source of wildlife conservation funding. The bald eagle’s recovery, considered to be a great conservation success story, was made possible and funded by hunters using traditional ammunition – the very ammunition organizations like the CBD are now demonizing.

* Recent statistics from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service show that from 1981 to 2006 the number of breeding pairs of bald eagles in the United States increased 724 percent. And much like the bald eagle, raptor populations throughout the United States are soaring.

Steps to take:

1. Submit comment online to the EPA.

2. Contact Lisa Jackson directly to voice your opposition to the ban:

Lisa P. Jackson
Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
1200 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20460
(202) 564-4700
Fax: (202) 501-1450
Email: jackson.lisa@epa.gov

3. Contact your congressman and senators and urge them to stop the EPA from banning ammunition. To view a sample letter, click here.

« Fortune names 100 fastest-growing companies, two of which are in firearms industry
http://www.nssfblog.com/epa-considering-ban-on-traditional-ammunition-take-action-now/

What Your PC Knows About You
If someone could secretly stand behind you and monitor everything you've done on your PC, what would they discover about you that you would prefer to keep private? Thanks to new technologies that secretly track everywhere you go on the Internet, that's an appropriate comparison of the threat you face unless you take advance precautions.

Perhaps you've never visited a Web site you wouldn't want your spouse, your children, your neighbors, or the FBI to know about. Perhaps you really do have "nothing to hide." But if you do, you'll want to understand the threat to your privacy—and what you can do to protect yourself.

The centerpiece of this threat is a tracking technology that records what Web sites you visit, what links you click on, and what types of search engine questions you ask. If you've entered personal information into applications that use these technologies, that data is stored as well. All of it is written to hidden directories on your hard disk. And there it stays—permanently—unless you know how to delete it.

Usually what's recorded is innocuous. You might not mind that your hard disk has a record of the movies you've rented, the fact that you're interested in photography, or that you want to take pilot lessons. And you might not object to the fact that the companies that create these hidden directories sell the information. For instance, a company selling photographic supplies would surely be interested in presenting an advertisement for its services to someone with a proven interest in photography.

However, perhaps your interests are a bit more controversial. Or even if they're not, perhaps someone with access to your PC has less conventional preferences than you. In that event, the data in the hidden directories could possibly come back to haunt you, should your PC ever be compromised—or searched by law enforcement.

Say, for instance, that you—or someone with access to your PC—watch a controversial video on the Internet. Guess what? The Web site serving up the video to your browser most likely plants a tracking beacon on your hard drive, where it stays—potentially, forever. Erasing "cookies" in your browser will NOT delete these beacons!

The largest offender in this regard is probably a program called Adobe Flash Player (AFP). Many Web sites use AFP to deliver audio and visual content. But AFP also creates a hidden directory on your hard disk to track the Web sites you visit, especially those with interactive or multimedia features. Companies that plant the beacons use them to personalize your browsing experience, and also sell the data they contain to direct marketing companies.

Since you can't delete these files from your browser, the most practical way to deal with them is to install a browser add-on program to manage and delete them. One such program is "Better Privacy," an add-on for Firefox. You can download it at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623/.
I've configured Better Privacy to delete all AFP beacons when I shut down my browser.

I also suggest that you configure AFP to minimize tracking altogether. You can adjust its settings using a virtual control panel at: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/help09.html.

I've adjusted the settings on my PC to always deny access to my PC's camera or microphone, never storing any content, and deleting all records of Web sites I've visited that use AFP. Those settings, together with the Better Privacy add-on, seem to have rid my PC of "beacons"—at least those from AFP. These settings limit functionality on some Web sites, but so long as you configure AFP to allow programs to ask you for permission to store content, you can control which ones have access to your PC. When you exit your browser, Better Privacy deletes them.

Incidentally, none of AFP's tracking software violates any U.S. law; at least none of which I'm aware. And don't look to the government for help—law enforcement agencies surely find beacons on your PC a highly informative tool to track your Web browsing behavior.

With big business and big government collaborating to invade your online privacy, you have only one resource to depend upon—yourself. So if you don't want permanent records of your online life residing on your hard drive, don't call your Congressman for help. You alone must take responsibility for protecting your online privacy.

http://nestmannblog.sovereignsociety.com/2010/08/what-your-pc-knows-about-you.html

Silently Self-Profiling - YOU - from www.privacyworld.com
A couple of readers have asked me lately "Is there some stuff on your
mind that's bothering you? You sound kinda bleak lately." Well,
yeah, kinda sorta maybe. Let me share just one of those things that's
been bothering me; perhaps you'll understand. Here's what's going on:

It starts off simply enough...you get an email from a friend and it
says something like: "OMG You have to see this video about [fill in
the blank]. Because you're very interested in [fill in the blank] as
a topic, you click over to the link to see what's a highly charged
video about [fill in the blank] and the video urges you to 'tell all
your friends about this video and send them the link...'.

If you're not computer/military/PowersThatBe savvy, you're likely to
pass on the link without giving it a second thought. But you should
give it some serious thought whenever you follow links because when
you follow links you may be self-profiling yourself to the government.

Amazing? Well, no, pretty simple programming exercise, really. And,
if you had the 'summer of hell/2009' coming up due to all kinds of
social stresses and the breakdown of the social contract, right about
now if you were trying to defend the existing social paradigm, you'd
be doing the same thing, too.

It's called 'memeering' and according to our predictive linguistics
friends at www.halfpasthuman.com the program is already underway.
Toward what end? Well, what's a low-cost way to find out who is what
kind of potential threat to your paradigm? I'll show you how it
works, step-by-step so you 'get it'. It begins with a government
setting up a web site with an emotionally charged video about
something like 'black powder' or 'inter-racial relations'. Then a
series of postings is put out on the net in places where such a video
would likely get a lot of attention. Say, in a 'black powder' kind of
video they will post something emotionally compelling to a bunch of
gun web sites and discussion groups. Next, when someone goes to the
web site involved, it's a simple matter for the site to log your
internet protocol address. Skeptical? go to www.whatismyip.com and
your 'net address comes up.

Congratulations! You have just gotten yourself into a government
database of people who have an 'interest in black powder'. Since you
probably don't spend as much 'head space' as we do, thinking about
such computer applications, what this looks like in database set
theory can be visualized this way:

So far, so good. Now, let's further suppose that want to narrow down
the kind of people that would also be interested in anti-establishment
direct action. Next step? Another video (or web site) only this
time, we are going to use a topic like, oh, say "Startling New WTO
video!" Such that folks going to this second vid site will likely
include some people who also have an interest in black powder, like
so:

Now, it becomes a simple matter to say "Hey! See that IP Address
12.191.191.5? That shows up in BOTH groups. This intersection
between sets in database operations is the vesica pisces.

But now, let's take it one step further, because so far, it's still
far too many people to round up and throw in special 'camps' should
the country get into a period of social unrest; say over a 'summer of
hell/2009' period. So we will put up another site, only this time it
might be something like "List of upcoming "Tea Party" events. Like
so:

So, you see, it's all very simple, once you get the basis concept
down: How will you be self-selecting whether you get judged a 'threat'
or not is a simple matter of keeping track of which links you followed
to get where.

More important? There's also a simple way to build 'social networks'
this way because not only is your IP address logged, but so is the
time of your visit. So as this kind of data snooping continues - as
long as lots of folks don't understand it, when you forward one of
these sites, you are then in effect telling whatever government "Hey,
I am linked to Joe your bother-in-law over here"...and pretty quick
not only do they know who has an interest in guns, WTO demonstrations,
and upcoming Tea Party events, but they also know that when your IP
address shows up, in say half a dozen such exercises, that "Joe your
brother-in-law" shows up within a day or two, and he's already on
their 'threats to society' list because he actually carried a sign and
was ID'ed at some other kind of event...maybe an environmentalist
affair of some kind. And they get all Joe your brother-in-laws
connections, too, until pretty quick you get a map in a social
networking application that might look like this:

So here's my bottom line: When you do any kind of social networking,
be extremely careful with whom you associate. Or, in the case of
Cliff and me, simply don't follow unknown links. Nothing wrong with
YouTube and Google video, but even there, the IP snooping that goes on
at the phone company level is pretty awesome,; which is what the
privacy people get all worked up about.

Why am I bringing this up today? Because the web bot project has been
running across more of these kinds of memeering operations lately
which means one of these days, one or more of them will show up in
your email. And, as they do, no matter how tempting it may seem to
follow this emotionally highly-charged link just remember that in the
process you are self-sorting yourself into some kind of a government
profile as part of 'total information awareness' programs designed to
enable preemptions, national security rating, and in a worst of all
cases scenario, your round-up priority if you've identified yourself
as a 'risk' to the existing paradigm.

Although it may be too late to do anything about it, if you've already
gotten such emails and followed them. But WTF, its easier to explain
it now than waiting till the October-November period when there is a
small, but non-zero, chance some rounding up will be done.

Oh...one more thing: If you think you can 'beat the system' by using
an open access proxy server somewhere? Are you kidding? Those would
be almost the very first people to round up because they're smart
enough to 'get it' and therefore are the most threatening there are to
the existing paradigm, are you kidding?

Yes, this is exactly what the electronic freedom fighters are all
about, but that battle's been over for a long time. Sorry. You lost.
Oh sure, something like the Google Street View controversy seems like
the right fight, but are you kidding? Hell no, it's a minor
distraction to keep the public off the real deal memeering.

All plausibly deniable, too. How so? There are something like 27
levels of security classifications above even the President of these
United States. So you just know how far down the food chain Congress
and watchdog agencies are. But then you knew that, too, or at least
you should have. Or, maybe you don't. And maybe there really are no
PowersThatBe, no shadow government, above the elected, and acting as
self-appointed caretakers for the existing way things are because it
sorta works. Of course.

Then again, you might inspect those links to web sites that aren't on
the beaten path, and even then, you gotta wonder what the phone
companies are really up to in their central office frame rooms, and
why that's so important to 'national security'. Except now you know.

http://www.frankahearn.com/