Well we made it past 12-12-12
Politicians are amazing and they will say anything, most of the time without thinking. This person on the House floor says "entitlements are earned" which planet is she a representative of? sorry about the ad
Somethings only get worse
Homeland Security increasingly loaning drones to local police.
Far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, a Predator drone was summoned into action last year to spy on a North Dakota farmer who allegedly refused to return a half dozen of his neighbor’s cows that had strayed onto his pastures.
The farmer had become engaged in a standoff with the Grand Forks police SWAT team and the sheriff’s department. So the local authorities decided to call on their friends at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to deploy a multimillion dollar, unarmed drone to surveil the farmer and his family.
The little-noticed August 2011 incident at the Lakota, N.D., ranch, which ended peacefully, was a watershed moment for Americans: it was one of the first known times an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) owned by the U.S. government was used against civilians for local police work.
Since then, the Washington Guardian has confirmed, DHS and its Customs and Border Protection agency have deployed drones — originally bought to guard America’s borders — to assist local law enforcement and other federal agencies on several occasions.
The practice is raising questions inside and outside government about whether federal officials may be creating an ad-hoc, loan-a-drone program without formal rules for engagement, privacy protection or taxpayer reimbursements. The drones used by CPB can cost between $15 million and $34 million each to buy, and have hourly operational costs as well.
In addition, DHS recently began distributing $4 million in grants to help local law enforcement buy its own, smaller versions of drones, opening a new market for politically connected drone makers as the wars overseas shrink.
The double-barreled lending and purchasing have some concerned that federal taxpayers may be subsidizing the militarization of local police forces and creating new threats to average Americans’ privacy.
“We’ve seen bits and pieces of information on CBP’s Predator drones, but Americans deserve the full story,” said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that studies privacy issues and has sought information on drone use in the United States. “Drones are a powerful surveillance tool that can be used to gather extensive data about you and your activities. The public needs to know more about how and why these Predator drones are being used to watch U.S. citizens.”
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), another privacy advocate which is pursuing litigation to force the disclosure of more information from DHS on drones, says it has found that the government has no official policies for how the drones can be used by local police, does not seek compensation from local law enforcement to recoup taxpayers’ expenses and claims it doesn’t keep records on how many times its drones have been deployed for local use.
“CBP’s drone program is shrouded in secrecy and legal ambiguity. Despite a specific mission to protect the border from illegal immigration and drug smuggling, CBP continues to let other federal agencies and local law enforcement bureaus use (its drones) for unrelated purposes,” said Amie Stepanvich, Associate Litigation Counsel for EPIC.
Indeed, when the Washington Guardian inquired about how many times DHS or CPB lent drones to local authorities, officials responded they didn’t have a formal loan-a-drone program but did on occasion lend the UAVs to help local police. But they declined to provide an exact number or a list of localities.
“While CBP does not have a ‘loan a drone’ program, we do work with national and sometimes state and local agencies for assistance,” said Ian Phillips, a spokesman for Customs Border and Protection.
Such answers aren’t satisfying to members of Congress worried about the costs to taxpayers and the implications of letting machines built for war to potentially impact privacy inside the United States in the name of security.
“We should not run from our basic constitutional principles because we have fear. That’s the best way I know for us to lose liberty. And you eventually give up your liberty if fear is your No. 1 guide,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., an influential voice on the federal budget.
Local police departments, stretching from the Canadian border in the Midwest to the Mexican border in Texas, confirmed to the Washington Guardian they have summoned CPB drones to help in local police matters ranging from the service of arrest warrants to armed standoffs.
Local SWAT commanders, in fact, said DHS and CPB encouraged the use of the drones to give its unmanned pilots training opportunities. And they argue the collaborations and deployments have helped saved lives.
”CBP reached out to us for training. We have developed a relationship with them, and we can call them when we feel we need their help,” explained Sgt. Bill Macki, the leader of the Grand Forks, N.D., SWAT team that summoned the drone back in August 2011 at the North Dakota ranch during the farmer standoff.
Macki said his department has asked to use CPB drones three times –inclement weather prevented one of those deployments — and he personally knows of other local departments in the Dakotas that have also used the unmanned aerial vehicles in the last year.
“The Predator drone helps us pull back and (gives us) the ability to control the perimeter and de-escalate the scene significantly,” Macki explained. “The (drones) have been a tremendous asset to our high-risk operations.”
An added bonus for law enforcement is that so far federal officials haven’t asked the local cops to repay the costs. “We have not been charged by CBP for the use of the Predator drone,” Macki said.
While ad hoc deployments continue, in May the Department of Homeland Security launched its “Air-based Technologies Program” to hand out grants to help underwrite local law enforcement purchases of their own drones, said John Appleby of DHS Science and Technology Directorate’s division.
The Texas Rangers, another local police agency, confirmed they too have summoned drones on several occasions from CPB, but said they do not keep records of how often.
A recent report by DHS’s inspector general, the agency’s internal watchdog, mentioned the Rangers’ use as one of several examples in which CPB has deployed its drones for outside police agencies – both at the federal and local level.
For instance, a CBP drone conducted surveillance for a sister federal agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, over a suspected smuggler’s tunnel. The mission yielded information that, according to an ICE representative, would have required many cars and agents to obtain, the report said.
The inspector general report warned that CBP has not implemented a formal process for participants to submit mission requests, and does not have agreements in place for reimbursement of the drone’s operational costs.
DHS is adding to its current drone fleet of 10 with the purchase of 14 more UAVs that will cost taxpayers $443 million. CBP officials have said they would like to ultimately fly the unpiloted aircraft to any part of the nation within a few hours at the request of other agencies to perform non-border security missions.
Safety in increasingly crowded American skies is also a concern. The Federal Aviation Administration has raised concerns about airport towers’ ability to recognize the UAVs.
Earlier this year Congress authorized the FAA Modernization and Reform Act that directed the FAA to accelerate the integration of unmanned aircraft into the national airspace system by 2015.
But numerous issues continue to dog the FAA’s progress of getting thousands of drones airborne. “Concerns about national security, privacy, and the interference in Global Positioning-System (GPS) signals have not been resolved and may influence acceptance of routine access for UAS (Unmanned Aerial Systems) in the national airspace system,” a September 2012 Government Accountability Office reported.
Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., also expressed his concern with U.S. drones taking to the skies.
“FAA does not appear to be prioritizing privacy and transparency measures in its plan to integrate nonmilitary drones into U.S. airspace,” Markey said recently. “While there are benefits to using drones to gather information for law enforcement and appropriate research purposes, drones shouldn’t be used to gather private information on regular Americans.”
Others in Congress are supporting the expansion of drones. At least 60 lawmakers have formed a caucus to support the industry.
“UAVs have been absolutely critical in the fight against terrorism overseas, significantly reducing the loss of U.S. lives in war zones, which is one reason why I joined the House caucus. Another reason is that UAVs are made right here in San Diego,” explained Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif.
The explosion within the drone industry can be seen in San Diego. One of the two drone manufacturing epicenters it provides California with a much-needed $1.3 billion infusion of revenue.
According to a National University System report, the industry has doubled in the last five years and industry analysts predict the drone marketplace will double again and has the ability to grow its domestic business potentially adding $12 billion to the San Diego economy.
One of the smaller San Diego upstart drone companies, Datron, sees a bright future for smaller drones that weigh fewer than four pounds. Its top-selling drone, the “Scout,” flies for 20 minutes and provides real-time color videos needed to assist law enforcement agencies.
“Our product is geared toward meeting the mission requirements of our tactical users,” said Christopher Barter, program manager for Datron. The Scout operates using a PC tablet computer that is pre-programed, and requires little training. Barter says, “The Scout is the perfect search and rescue UAV.” Also, the 20-minute flight time curtails some privacy issues raised by civil liberties activists, he said.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/10/homeland-security-increasingly-loaning-drones-to-l/#ixzz2Endg4DsG
A followup Americans Are The Most Spied On People In World History In a radio interview, Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin (who’s been one of the best at covering the surveillance state in the US) made a simple observation that puts much of this into context: the US surveillance regime has more data on the average American than the Stasi ever did on East Germans.Indeed, the American government has more information on the average American than Stalin had on Russians, Hitler had on German citizens, or any other government has ever had on its people.
The American government is collecting and storing virtually every phone call, purchases, email, text message, internet searches, social media communications, health information, employment history, travel and student records, and virtually all other information of every American.
Some also claim that the government is also using facial recognition software and surveillance cameras to track where everyone is going. Moreover, cell towers track where your phone is at any moment, and the major cell carriers, including Verizon and AT&T, responded to at least 1.3 million law enforcement requests for cell phone locations and other data in 2011. (And – given that your smartphone routinely sends your location information back to Apple or Google – it would be child’s play for the government to track your location that way.) If that’s not enough, the government is insisting that “black boxes” be installed in cars to track your location.
As the top spy chief at the U.S. National Security Agency explained this week, the American government is collecting some 100 billion 1,000-character emails per day, and 20 trillion communications of all types per year.
He says that the government has collected all of the communications of congressional leaders, generals and everyone else in the U.S. for the last 10 years.
He further explains that he set up the NSA’s system so that all of the information would automatically be encrypted, so that the government had to obtain a search warrant based upon probably cause before a particular suspect’s communications could be decrypted. But the NSA now collects all data in an unencrypted form, so that no probable cause is needed to view any citizen’s information. He says that it is actually cheaper and easier to store the data in an encrypted format: so the government’s current system is being done for political – not practical – purposes.
He says that if anyone gets on the government’s “enemies list”, then the stored information will be used to target them. Specifically, he notes that if the government decides it doesn’t like someone, it analyzes all of the data it has collected on that person and his or her associates over the last 10 years to build a case against him.
As we’ve previously documented, the spying isn’t being done to keep us safe … but to crush dissent and to smear people who uncover unflattering this about the government … and to help the too big to fail businesses compete against smaller businesses (and here).And as we point out at every opportunity, this is not some “post-9/11 reality”. Spying on Americans – and most of the other attacks on liberty – started before 9/11.
Senator Frank Church – who chaired the famous “Church Committee” into the unlawful FBI Cointel program, and who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – said in 1975:
Th[e National Security Agency's] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. [If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny ….
We can debate whether or not dictators are running Washington. But one thing is clear: the capacity is already here.
TechDirt points out:
While the Stasi likely wanted more info and would have loved to have been able to tap into a digitally connected world like we have today, that just wasn’t possible.
That’s true. The tyrants in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Stasi Eastern Europe would have liked to easedrop on every communication and every transaction of every citizen. But in the world before the internet, smart phones, electronic medical records and digital credit card transactions, much of what happened behind closed doors remained private.
(And modern tin pot dictators don’t have the tens of billions of dollars necessary to set up a sophisticated electronic spying system).
In modern America, a much higher percentage of your communications and transactions are being recorded and stored by the government.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/12/americans-the-most-spied-on-people-in-world-history.html I have said this for years, also. A very long article with a lot of past artcles attached, if you have some time to waste it is interesting. I Told You So! Of Course Washington will Steal Your Retirement Benefits Today the twin fake memes of a "Fiscal Cliff" and "Austerity" are combining to create a contrived excuse to tax and steal far more of your wealth and income, including your retirement benefits. The press is filled with articles and editorials like one recently at CNBC entitled "Amid Tax Talks, a cry of 'Save My 401(k)'."Many retirement, offshore and political experts including Jeff Berwick, Larry Grossman and others are now warning how government revenue needs and austerity measures by the Obama Administration today threaten the private retirement system and benefits of millions of successful Americans. Back on January 28, 2010 I wrote a report entitled "The Coming Obama Retirement Trap Has Started," published at LewRockwell.com, republished in its entirety below, for your review.
Over the last few weeks I've been inundated with emails similar to this one:
Ron,
In early 2010 you wrote an article called "Are you ready for the coming Obama retirement trap?"
Now, I find an article from National Seniors Council that there was a recent hearing sponsored by the Treasury and the Labor Department that marked the beginning of the Obama Administration's effort to nationalize the nation's pension system and to eliminate private retirement accounts including IRA's and 401k plans.
What is your thinking on this? Should one, even with a large IRA, consider cashing it in or doing something to keep it out of harm's way? Your response is appreciated.
In the 8,000-word report, I basically explored what Washington and the Obama Administration (note Romney would have followed the same actions) had in store for retirement plans and your benefits at the time of some real or fabricated crisis in the future. I wrote about how it would likely happen and what you could do to defend your pension, IRA or other retirement vehicle.
The final section of that report began, "Delay Could Be Fatal... The bottom line on all the strategies I've discussed above is they must be started and in place before the next major economic crisis and threat to your retirement assets occurs."
Now three years later in email after email readers want to know my opinion and advice on the news of the coming pension grab. They ask, "What will the government do?" Many are desperate for solutions, concerned they might have waited until it's too late.
My answer is, yes, you have probably waited too long to protect and defend your retirement plan. I wrote that "Delay Could Be Fatal" nearly three years ago, in January of 2010. In 2013 the government will do anything it damned well wants in order to generate tax revenue and cut your benefits and there is little you can do to prevent that now, at this late date.
http://www.thedailybell.com/28418/Ron-Holland-I-Told-You-So-Of-Course-Washington-will-Steal-Your-Retirement-Benefits
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