Saturday, October 29, 2011

Saturday 10-29-11

John Mica Attacks TSA 'Chat-Downs' As 'Idiotic,' Says Screening Failures Are 'Off The Charts'

The chairman of the House committee that oversees the Transportation Security Administration blasted the agency's recent test of "chat-downs" of airline passengers, calling the pilot program "idiotic."

House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) told reporters during a briefing Monday that the TSA's experiment at Boston's Logan International Airport -- in which officers engaged passengers in brief conversations to help detect suspicious behavior -- is "a mess."

"This is no joke," said Mica, who has pummeled the TSA as a bloated bureaucracy with a mission he believes could be carried out more efficiently and cheaply by private companies under federal government supervision.

Mica laced into the pilot program, slated to be tested next in Detroit before rolling out to airports nationwide, as a pale imitation of the interrogations routinely conducted by Israeli security at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv. He noted that the expanded behavior detection pilot builds on an existing program that the Government Accountability Office said lacked scientific validity and has cost "a quarter billion" to hire thousands of screening officers.

During a recent visit to Logan to observe the pilot, Mica said he watched about a dozen officers quiz passengers in the terminal. "I put my ear up and listened to some idiotic questions," he said of the questions that delved into where travelers were coming from, why they'd been there and where they were going.

"I talked to them about their training, which was minimal," he said of his conversations with security personnel. He went on to say that even though passengers selected for further screening were supposed to go through hi-tech scanners, on the day he visited the machines were out of service because there weren't enough trained personnel to run them.

"It's almost idiotic," Mica said. "It's still not a risk-based system. It's not a thinking system."

This isn't the first time Mica has denounced the agency he helped to create in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- on Monday he even trashed the TSA's blue uniforms and badges. But his latest harsh criticisms offered a preview of an upcoming committee report on the TSA's first decade.

The assessment will likely recount TSA's controversial record of using imaging technology that has raised the hackles of privacy advocates and has proven less than effective in spotting the dangerous materials they were designed to detect.

"The failure rate (for imaging equipment) is classified but it would absolutely knock your socks off," Mica told reporters. The number of times TSA pat-downs failed to detect contraband is also secret but, according to the chairman, is "off the charts."

Mica said the report, due out in the next couple of weeks, would be "sort of like the record of the Marx Brothers."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/24/john-mica-tsa_n_1028898.html

Of course have to keep a scert of all the things we do, i thought this administration was about change, not the same old smae old. They want to just continue to lie like normal?

Justice Department Proposes Letting Government Deny Existence of Sensitive Documents

A longtime internal policy that allowed Justice Department officials to deny the existence of sensitive information could become the law of the land -- in effect a license to lie -- if a newly proposed rule becomes federal regulation in the coming weeks.

The proposed rule directs federal law enforcement agencies, after personnel have determined that documents are too delicate to be released, to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests "as if the excluded records did not exist."

Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, says the move appears to be in direct conflict with the administration's promise to be more open.

"Despite all the talk of transparency, I can't think of what's less transparent than saying a document does not exist, when in fact, it does," Sekulow told Fox News.

Justice Department officials say the practice has been in effect for decades, dating back to a 1987 memo from then-Attorney General Edwin Meese.

In that memo, and subsequent similar internal documents, Justice Department staffers were advised that they could reply to certain FOIA requests as if the documents had never been created. That policy never became part of the law -- or even codified as a federal regulation -- and it was recently challenged in court.

Earlier this year, in a case involving the Islamic Council of Southern California brought against the FBI after the plaintiffs learned about the existence of documents denied by the FBI, a federal judge in California expressed great concern about the agency using the internal policy not only in response to the FOIA but to mislead the court.

"The government, cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the court. … The court simply cannot perform its constitutional function if the government does not tell the truth," the judge wrote in a stinging rebuke.

A final version of the proposal could be issued by the end of 2011. If approved, the new rule would officially become a federal regulation with the force of law.

But the Justice Department got so much pushback in response to the proposal that it took the unusual step of re-opening the public comment period after it had already been closed. That second comment period closed last week.

When the new comment period began, the American Civil Liberties Union became one of the most vocal critics of the proposal. Mike German, Policy Counsel with the ACLU, authored a lengthy letter in opposition.

"It's shocking that you would twist what is supposed to be a statute -- that's supposed to give people access to what the government is doing -- in a way that would allow the government to actually mislead the American public," German told Fox News.

Melanie Ann Pustay, director of the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy, said the entire consideration process for the proposal "has been open and transparent."

She also notes that sensitive information requires special consideration.

"To ensure that the integrity of the exclusion is maintained, agencies must ensure that their responses do not reveal the existence of excluded records," Pustay said.

Sekulow says he is not buying that argument, and argued that FOIA requesters who get a response telling them that officials can neither confirm or deny the existence of documents now can at least go to court to sue for more information.

If they're told that no documents exist, there is no basis for a legal challenge at all, Sekulow said.

"The real concern is here is it changes the entire dynamic of what the law was intended to do, and really gives the Department of Justice the upper hand in area where they shouldn't have it."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/10/26/justice-department-proposes-letting-government-deny-existence-sensitive/#ixzz1c3mxFuTP

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