Undercover New York City police officers have conducted covert surveillance in the last 16 months of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident, a series of videotapes show. Until Sept. 11, the secret monitoring of events where people expressed their opinions was among the most tightly limited of police powers.
Rebuffing assurances from President George W. Bush, Republican and Democratic members of the U.S. Senate's Intelligence Committee called on Tuesday for an immediate inquiry into his authorization of spying on Americans. But the White House on Tuesday brushed aside calls for congressional hearings. "This is still a highly classified program and there are details that it's important not be disclosed," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
President Bush today offered his most elaborate defense yet of his administration's domestic eavesdropping program, saying he was legally and constitutionally authorized to implement it and obligated to do so in order to protect the country from a new kind of enemy. In a wide-ranging news conference this morning, Bush said his authority to have the National Security Agency eavesdrop without judicial involvement derived from his inherent constitutional powers as commander in chief as well as from the authorization for the use of military force approved by Congress in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The UMass Dartmouth student who claimed to have been visited by Homeland Security agents over his request for "The Little Red Book" by Mao Zedong has admitted to making up the entire story. The 22-year-old student tearfully admitted he made the story up to his history professor, Dr. Brian Glyn Williams, and his parents, after being confronted with the inconsistencies in his account.
Congressional leaders of both parties called for hearings and issued condemnations yesterday in the wake of reports that President Bush signed a secret order in 2002 allowing the National Security Agency to spy on hundreds of U.S. citizens and other residents without court-approved warrants. Bush declined to discuss the domestic eavesdropping program in a television interview, but he joined his aides in saying that the government acted lawfully and did not intrude on citizens' rights.
Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials. Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.
More stores are asking for phone numbers or other personal information, and that has some privacy experts concerned. Some say that data companies are trying to get customers acclimated to more invasions of privacy. Privacy advocates advise against revealing such information, because it can be the key to accessing more sensitive information about you.
Pentagon officials said yesterday they had ordered a review of a program aimed at countering terrorist attacks that had compiled information about U.S. citizens, after reports that the database included information on peace protesters and others whose activities posed no threat and should not have been kept on file. The move followed an NBC News report Tuesday disclosing that a sample of about 1,500 "suspicious incidents" listed in the database included four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, some aimed at military recruiting.
A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists a a Florida meeting of a small group of activists to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools as a �threat� and one of more than 1,500 �suspicious incidents� across the country over a recent 10-month period. The Defense Department document is the first inside look at how the U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection inside this country since 9/11, which now includes the monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups.
The European Parliament has approved rules forcing telephone companies to retain call and internet records for use in anti-terror investigations. Records will be kept for up to two years under the new measures. Police will have access to information about calls, text messages and internet data, but not exact call content.
Teams of undercover air marshals and uniformed law enforcement officers will fan out to bus and train stations, ferries, and mass transit facilities across the country this week in a new test program to conduct surveillance and "counter potential criminal terrorist activity in all modes of transportation," according to internal federal documents. The new teams will take positions in public areas along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor and Los Angeles rail lines; ferries in Washington state; and mass transit systems in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Viper teams will also patrol the Washington Metro system.
DirecTV Inc. will pay $5.34 million to settle charges that its telemarketers called households listed on the national do-not-call registry to pitch satellite TV programming, Federal Trade Commission officials said Tuesday. The proposed settlement, if approved by a federal judge in Los Angeles, would be the FTC's largest civil penalty in a consumer protection case. In all 17 previously settled no-call cases, the FTC assessed just $808,500 in penalties.
Just one U.S. airport -- in Orlando, Fla. -- has a Registered Traveler program, in which passengers who pay a fee and get a background check can bypass an airport's general checkpoint and use a special lane for security clearance. The Transportation Security Administration wants to expand the program nationally by summer, using private companies to sign up participants and run the checkpoints.
Most Americans carry cellphones, but many may not know that government agencies can track their movements through the signals emanating from the handset. In recent years, law enforcement officials have turned to cellular technology as a tool for easily and secretly monitoring the movements of suspects as they occur. But this kind of surveillance - which investigators have been able to conduct with easily obtained court orders - has now come under tougher legal scrutiny.
A watchlist of possible terror suspects distributed by the US government to airlines for pre-flight checks is now 80,000 names long, a Swedish newspaper reported, citing European air industry sources. The classified list, which carried just 16 names before the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington had grown to 1,000 by the end of 2001, to 40,000 a year later and now stands at 80,000, Svenska Dagbladet reported.
More than 8,000 people have been mistakenly tagged for immigration violations as a result of the Bush administration's strategy of entering the names of thousands of immigrants in a national crime database meant to help apprehend terrorism suspects, according to a study released on Thursday. The study found that the national crime database was wrong in 42 percent of the cases in which it identified immigrants stopped by the local police as being wanted by domestic security officials.
WASHINGTON--About 30,000 airline passengers have discovered since last November that their names were mistakenly matched with those appearing on federal watch lists, a transportation security official said Tuesday. Jim Kennedy, director of the Transportation Security Administration's redress office, revealed the errors at a quarterly meeting convened here by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee.
School officials in Salem, Mass., said yesterday they will try to contact parents of children whose private records were mistakenly posted on the Internet. Administrators met yesterday morning to plan a response to the disclosure last week that dozens of confidential student psychological reports were available online for months. The documents were removed from the Internet last week. Parents were not notified when the files were first discovered in October, nor were they immediately told when the files were rediscovered by a Salem News reporter two weeks ago.
Officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation mishandled a Florida terror nvestigation, falsified documents in the case in an effort to cover repeated missteps and retaliated against an agent who first complained about the problems, Justice Department investigators have concluded. The agent who first alerted the F.B.I. to problems in the case, a veteran undercover operative named Mike German, was "retaliated against" by his boss, who was angered by the agent's complaints and stopped using him for prestigious assignments in training new undercover agents, the draft report concluded.
A federal appeals court that included Judge Samuel Alito Jr. yesterday dismissed a lawsuit against a Bergen County school district over a survey that asked students about their sexual activities and drug and alcohol use. The three-judge appeals court unanimously concluded the anonymous survey -- given to students in the seventh through 12th grades -- did not violate the constitutional privacy rights of either the students or their parents.
A federal government worker who abused her access to sensitive consumer data to try to stave off a prostitution investigation has been sentenced to four months' home confinement with another four years of probation. Candice "Candy" Smith, 44, of Blue Springs, Mo., pleaded guilty to making unauthorized inquiries into data aggregator LexisNexis's database of non-public information on millions of consumers, such as driver's license and address information. Many people might assume that only cops can look up this type of information, but Smith was granted access to the database by virtue of her job as a bill collector for the Center for Medicaid Services, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Missouri transportation officials approved a controversial contract Friday that will allow a private corporation to track signals from motorists' cell phones to map traffic snarls and highway congestion on major roads throughout the state. As early as next week, that company, the National Engineering Technology Corp. (NET), will start monitoring thousands of cell phones in Kansas City and St. Louis, using their movements to test how to relay traffic conditions to the public in real time.
Canadian pharmacists are being advised to collect a woman's name, address, phone number and sensitive details about her sexual activity before dispensing the so-called morning-after pill. The guidelines, put out by the Canadian Pharmacists Association, have drawn concern from women's health groups, which say the rules are discriminatory and raise privacy issues. The guidelines include giving women a screening form to fill out that asks for personal identification, the time when they last had unprotected sex, the number of times they have had unprotected sex since their last menstrual period, and what form of birth control they use. The information should be stored in the pharmacy's computer, the guidelines state.
In a case involving a California high school girl who was openly gay at school, a federal judge has ruled that the girl, Charlene Nguon, may proceed with a lawsuit charging that her privacy rights were violated when the principal called her mother and disclosed that she is gay. Judge James V. Selna of the Central District Court of California ruled Monday that Ms. Nguon had "sufficiently alleged a legally protected privacy interest in information about her sexual orientation."
