Eideard

Federal officials said Wednesday they have found no evidence to support an initial state report that foreign hackers caused a water pump at an Illinois water plant to fail this month.

The preliminary report, collected by a statewide terrorist intelligence center in Illinois, had said that a Russian hacker had taken control of the operating system at the water plant in Springfield. The pump turned on and off repeatedly, burning out the motor, the report said…

But the Department of Homeland Security and FBI said they failed to confirm reports of a cyber­attack. DHS spokesman Chris Ortman called the Illinois state report nothing more than “raw, unconfirmed data.”

He said that the federal investigation also failed to confirm the report’s claim that hackers broke into a software company’s database and retrieved user names and passwords, which enabled access to the water plant system.

“In addition,” Ortman said, “DHS and FBI have concluded that there was no malicious traffic from Russia or any foreign entities, as previously reported.”

Officials from the state intelligence center did not return phone calls seeking comment…

Please, let’s don’t start letting reality, verifiable conclusions or facts stand in the way of Cold Warriors who are required by that alien implant in their brain to transform every possible SNAFU into an assault upon God, Apple Pie and the American Way of Life.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is permitted to include people on the government’s terrorist watch list even if they have been acquitted of terrorism-related offenses or the charges are dropped, according to newly released documents.

The files, released by the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act, disclose how the police are instructed to react if they encounter a person on the list. They lay out, for the first time in public view, the legal standard that national security officials must meet in order to add a name to the list. And they shed new light on how names are vetted for possible removal from the list.

Inclusion on the watch list can keep terrorism suspects off planes, block noncitizens from entering the country and subject people to delays and greater scrutiny at airports, border crossings and traffic stops.

The database now has about 420,000 names, including about 8,000 Americans, according to the statistics released in connection with the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. About 16,000 people, including about 500 Americans, are barred from flying.

Timothy J. Healy, the director of the F.B.I.’s Terrorist Screening Center, which vets requests to add or remove names from the list, said the documents showed that the government was balancing civil liberties with a careful, multilayered process for vetting who goes on it — and for making sure that names that no longer need to be on it came off…

Mr. Healey, true to the standards of the F.B.I., is a liar.

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Visitors to dozens of Web sites purportedly linked to illegal file sharing and counterfeit goods were greeted by this message.

The U.S. government has launched a major crackdown on online copyright infringement, seizing dozens of sites linked to illegal file sharing and counterfeit goods.

Torrent sites that link to illegal copies of music and movie files and sites that sell counterfeit goods were seized this week by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Department of Homeland Security. Visitors to such sites as Torrent-finder.com, 2009jerseys.com, and Dvdcollects.com found that their usual sites had been replaced by a message that said, “This domain name has been seized by ICE–Homeland Security Investigations, pursuant to a seizure warrant issued by a United States District Court…”

The seizures came after a Senate committee unanimously approved a controversial proposal earlier this month that would allow the government to pull the plug on Web sites accused of aiding piracy. The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) allows a Web site’s domain to be seized if it “has no demonstrable, commercially significant purpose or use other than” offering or providing access to unauthorized copies of copyrighted works.

The bill hasn’t been voted into law, however.

The proposal has garnered support from dozens of the largest content companies, including video game maker Activision, media firms NBC Universal and Viacom, and the Motion Picture Association of America and Recording Industry Association of America lobbying groups. However, critics such as…civil liberties groups say the COICA could balkanize the Internet, jeopardize free speech rights, and endanger legitimate Web sites.

Slimeballs like the MPAA aren’t deserving of anymore support than their forerunners in the RIAA. But, geeks who go out of their way to break archaic laws in the name of freedom are more than likely to get busted – in this land of liberty. It’s Congress and the courts who get to define what is liberty and what isn’t.

The next time you pull into a parking garage and the attendant gives you the once-over, he or she may be taking note of more than just the shiny rear spoiler on your new car. As part of a new government initiative, parking lot attendants and other transportation workers are being trained as the next line of defense in the fight against terrorism.

The First Observer program was introduced to parking lot professionals at a Las Vegas, Nevada, convention in May, days after a vendor in New York’s Times Square spotted a suspicious vehicle and helped thwart what could have been a deadly terrorist attack…

“No matter how banal it seems, if something seems different to you or suspicious, we want you to report it,” said Jeff Beatty, a former CIA and FBI agent.

And our government will tell you what is suspicious!

Beatty led the First Observer program’s pilot training session Monday in Atlanta, Georgia. He and a team of Transportation Security Administration officials trained some 60 parking lot officials and representatives on how to spot suspicious vehicles carrying hazardous materials or other activity that may signal the planning phases of a terrorist attack…

The training is part of a $15.5 million program funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and administered by the Transportation Security Administration…

“We like who you are as parking lot professionals. We want you to ‘observe, assess and report.’ “

Har!

What stinks is when paranoia becomes institutionalized. When peering under your bed at night becomes part of education, law and policing.

The Harper government has quietly presented a bill in the House of Commons that would give U.S. officials final say over who may board aircraft in Canada if they are to fly over the United States en route to a third country.

“Canadian sovereignty has gone right out the window,” Liberal transport critic Joe Volpe told The Gazette in recent telephone interview. “You are going to be subject to American law…”

At present, airlines are only required to give passenger information to the U.S. government on flights landing in the United States…

If you are on a no-fly list or have the same name as someone on a no-fly list, you could be questioned, delayed or even barred from the flight. If your name does not match, Homeland Security tells the airline you may have a boarding pass.

Currently, Canadian airlines check names against no-fly lists provided by the United States and Canadian governments. But the airlines decide who gets a boarding pass.

Volpe noted that Bill C-42 does not refer specifically to the United States, adding that “with a stroke of the pen” the government is agreeing to provide data on Canadian passengers to any foreign government.

“They just opened the door to everybody without even so much as, ‘Hello, why are you doing this?’

“They can harass our airlines, harass our passengers, anything they want to.”

RTFA. Especially if you’re one of our Canadian readers.

Living inside the belly of a bully doesn’t make me feel any safer.

Traditional surveillance cameras can be of great assistance to law enforcement officers for a range of scenarios—canvassing a crowd for criminal activity during a Fourth of July celebration, searching for who left a suitcase bomb beneath a bench, or trying to pick out a terrorist who has fled the scene and blended into a teeming throng in the subway. But there are shortfalls. For starters, once they zoom in on a specific point of interest, they lose visual contact with the rest of the scene.

But a new video surveillance system currently being developed by the Department of Homeland Security…may soon give law enforcement an extra set of eyes. The Imaging System for Immersive Surveillance (or ISIS) takes new video camera and image-stitching technology and bolts it to a ceiling, mounts it on a roof, or fastens it to a truck-mounted telescoping mast.

Like a bug-eyed fisheye lens, ISIS sees v-e-r-y wide. But that’s where the similarity ends. Whereas a typical fisheye lens distorts the image and can only provide limited resolution, video from ISIS is perfectly detailed, edge-to-edge. That’s because the video is made from a series of individual cameras stitched into a single, live view—like a high-res video quilt.

“Coverage this sweeping, with detail this fine, requires a very high pixel count,” says program manager Dr. John Fortune, of S&T’s Infrastructure and Geophysical Division, “ISIS has a resolution capability of 100 megapixels.” That’s as detailed as 50 full-HDTV movies playing at once, with optical detail to spare. You can zoom in close…and closer…without losing clarity.

The stitching together of several images isn’t exactly cutting-edge magic…ISIS is quilting video—in real time! And a unique interface allows you to maintain the full field of view, while a focal point of your choice can be magnified…

As in any aspect of security control – the critical quality is who is in charge? What will they do with what they see and learn? And the ever-popular – who is charged with protecting individual privacy rights?

Dangerous band of Insurgents

In Vermont, the federal government plans to seize a farmer’s land to build a $5 million border post on a quiet country road. The community is fiercely opposed, and the Department of Homeland Security is under fire for planning expensive projects that some say isn’t needed.

The hamlet of Morses Line is just a dot on the Canadian border in the small northern Vermont town of Franklin. A quiet country road leads to the existing brick border station at the edge of a hayfield.

In about two hours on a recent afternoon, one truck and two cars go by. One was a Customs officer arriving for his shift.

“Last night was a little busier because you had bingo at the church in the neighboring town,” says Brian Rainville. The land the U.S. government wants is part of his family’s dairy farm. Rainville goes through a box full of documents and pulls out the architectural drawings for the new border post.

“So we’re looking at putting in a storm water pond, a traffic turnaround, covered parking, three designated traffic lanes, two stages of radiation detectors, a two-story building with a fitness center on the second floor. It all strikes me as a little much for Morses Line,” he says.

“I’m not quite sure how Morses Line, with a traffic rate of 2 1/2 cars an hour, is a matter of national security and utmost budgetary importance…”

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Not looking too polished for court

A former top official for the US Department of Homeland Security in Boston violated a law she had taken an oath to uphold by encouraging a Brazilian housekeeper who was an illegal immigrant to stay in the country, a federal prosecutor…

Lorraine Henderson — who is suspended without pay from her job as regional director of Homeland Security, Customs, and Border Protection — was caught on a wire worn by her housekeeper, Fabiana Bittencourt, advising Bittencourt not to leave the United States because she would not be let back in, said Assistant US Attorney Diane C. Freniere.

The housekeeper was secretly cooperating with authorities. She had allegedly cleaned Henderson’s Salem condominium for several years, even though a co-worker who had also employed Bittencourt later warned Henderson that the housekeeper was in the country illegally, Freniere said.

“Lorraine Henderson violated the same immigration law that she had taken an oath to uphold,’’ Freniere said in her opening statement to jurors in US District Court in Boston…

The trial is expected to last six to eight days.

When Henderson was arrested on Dec. 5, 2008, prosecutors characterized the case as an extraordinary example of hypocrisy by a law enforcement official who managed 190 armed officers who oversee ports of entry in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

Can you possibly imagine that we might have government officials who are hypocrites, who would violate the laws they are charged to protect, who are greedy and selfish enough to ignore their mandate?

I mean – other than Congress.

The Transportation Security Administration…has on its Web site a “mythbuster” that tries to reassure the public.

Myth: The No-Fly list includes an 8-year-old boy. Buster: No 8-year-old is on a T.S.A. watch list.

“Meet Mikey Hicks,” said Najlah Feanny Hicks, introducing her 8-year-old son, a New Jersey Cub Scout and frequent traveler who has seldom boarded a plane without a hassle because he shares the name of a suspicious person. “It’s not a myth.”

Michael Winston Hicks’s mother initially sensed trouble when he was a baby and she could not get a seat for him on their flight to Florida at an airport kiosk; airline officials explained that his name “was on the list,” she recalled.

The first time he was patted down, at Newark Liberty International Airport, Mikey was 2. He cried.

After years of long delays and waits for supervisors at every airport ticket counter, this year’s vacation to the Bahamas badly shook up the family. Mikey was frisked on the way there, then more aggressively on the way home.

“Up your arms, down your arms, up your crotch — someone is patting your 8-year-old down like he’s a criminal,” Mrs. Hicks recounted. “A terrorist can blow his underwear up and they don’t catch him. But my 8-year-old can’t walk through security without being frisked…”

On the way home last Friday, Mikey’s boarding pass showed four giant red S’s at the airport in Nassau. “Oh, random screening,” Mrs. Hicks said…Mrs. Hicks said she wanted to take pictures of her son being frisked but was told it was against the rules.

The worst kind of bureaucrat is the robot whose artificial brain can’t see beyond obeying “The Rules”. There is nothing more important in their diminutive lives than the fracking rule book. So, the stupidity governing this kid’s ability to travel continues.

Nada Alkhaddar and her son in their Chicago apartment

Nada Alkhaddar spends her days at the Muslim Women Resource Center helping refugees and immigrants deal with government and commercial bureaucracies that can make life in the United States seem about as easy as computing the Alternative Minimum Tax…

Despite her skills at navigating the obstacles immigrants face, Ms. Alkhaddar cannot seem to help the person closest to her and her three children — her husband, Ahmed Alrais — who is trying to get a green card.

Mr. Alrais came to the United States in the spring of 2008 after his life had been threatened for working as an interpreter for the United States Army in Iraq. Unable to find a job during the recession and without a green card, he returned in February to the country he had fled to work again for the Army through a private contractor.

Federal officials at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security, will not give Mr. Alrais credit for the time he has spent on a United States military base overseas so he can fulfill an American residency requirement to get the green card. His application was denied in November.

Mr. Alrais, 51, struggles to understand a system that would have given him a green card if he had stayed in the United States for the full year without a job, instead of working with American forces in Iraq…

Fred Tsao, policy director at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said Mr. Alrais’s ordeal to secure a green card was “crazy.”

“To go back and face the dangers while serving this country and then be denied a green card seems really unfair,” Mr. Tsao said. “It’s an awful deterrence to making a contribution to the country that took you in. Something is terribly wrong here.”

RTFA. There is nothing here that will surprise many of you.

In light of the service these people have given and continue to give to the U.S. Military and people in need – you might expect the slightest crack of sunlight and warmth to reach the icy hearts of bureaucrats. Unaccustomed though they may be to using their heads for anything other than supporting a hat with earflaps.