More Diebold Scandal

How Dare You Actually Want Secure And Valid Elections?!?
from the take-that,-whistle-blower dept of Techdirt:

Back in December, a Florida county ran some hacking tests on Diebold's ballot counting machine and found them to have serious security issues, which made the county elections supervisor, Ion Sancho, ban the questionable machines. Diebold responded not by showing that their machines were secure, but by cracking jokes about the whole thing. Why were they so amused by the whole situation? Perhaps because they're the ones in the power position. They were able to get around a similar ban in California and now none of the approved voting machine vendors will even sell approved e-voting machines to Sancho, effectively punishing him for daring to make sure the machines were accurate and secure. This is a bit strange, as you'd expect the other two approved firms, Sequoia Voting Systems and Election Systems & Software, would jump at the chance to both replace Diebold and prove their machines accurate and secure. Instead, it sounds like the only firm that is even willing to negotiate with him... is Diebold. But, they want to put in a clause in the contract that would ban him from conducting any such tests again. Instead, he'd only be allowed to perform "authorized" tests -- because we all know that anyone involved in election fraud follows the "authorized" rules for hacking these machines. Diebold also spins things around by complaining that Sancho is responsible for undermining "the public's confidence in the security and accuracy" of Diebold machines. That's funny, we thought Diebold was doing a damn fine job of that entirely on its own.

Bush Feels Above the Law

In addendum to law, he says oversight rules are not binding

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | March 24, 2006

WASHINGTON -- When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.

The bill contained several oversight provisions intended to make sure the FBI did not abuse the special terrorism-related powers to search homes and secretly seize papers. The provisions require Justice Department officials to keep closer track of how often the FBI uses the new powers and in what type of situations. Under the law, the administration would have to provide the information to Congress by certain dates.

Bush signed the bill with fanfare at a White House ceremony March 9, calling it ''a piece of legislation that's vital to win the war on terror and to protect the American people." But after the reporters and guests had left, the White House quietly issued a ''signing statement," an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law.

In the statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law's requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would ''impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties."

Bush wrote: ''The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . "

The statement represented the latest in a string of high-profile instances in which Bush has cited his constitutional authority to bypass a law.

After The New York Times disclosed in December that Bush had authorized the military to conduct electronic surveillance of Americans' international phone calls and e-mails without obtaining warrants, as required by law, Bush said his wartime powers gave him the right to ignore the warrant law.

And when Congress passed a law forbidding the torture of any detainee in US custody, Bush signed the bill but issued a signing statement declaring that he could bypass the law if he believed using harsh interrogation techniques was necessary to protect national security.

Past presidents occasionally used such signing statements to describe their interpretations of laws, but Bush has expanded the practice. He has also been more assertive in claiming the authority to override provisions he thinks intrude on his power, legal scholars said.

Bush's expansive claims of the power to bypass laws have provoked increased grumbling in Congress. Members of both parties have pointed out that the Constitution gives the legislative branch the power to write the laws and the executive branch the duty to ''faithfully execute" them.

Several senators have proposed bills to bring the warrantless surveillance program under the law. One Democrat, Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, has gone so far as to propose censuring Bush, saying he has broken the wiretapping law.

Bush's signing statement on the USA Patriot Act nearly went unnoticed.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, inserted a statement into the record of the Senate Judiciary Committee objecting to Bush's interpretation of the Patriot Act, but neither the signing statement nor Leahy's objection received coverage from in the mainstream news media, Leahy's office said.

Yesterday, Leahy said Bush's assertion that he could ignore the new provisions of the Patriot Act -- provisions that were the subject of intense negotiations in Congress -- represented ''nothing short of a radical effort to manipulate the constitutional separation of powers and evade accountability and responsibility for following the law."

''The president's signing statements are not the law, and Congress should not allow them to be the last word," Leahy said in a prepared statement. ''The president's constitutional duty is to faithfully execute the laws as written by the Congress, not cherry-pick the laws he decides he wants to follow. It is our duty to ensure, by means of congressional oversight, that he does so."

The White House dismissed Leahy's concerns, saying Bush's signing statement was simply ''very standard language" that is ''used consistently with provisions like these where legislation is requiring reports from the executive branch or where disclosure of information is going to be required."

''The signing statement makes clear that the president will faithfully execute the law in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. ''The president has welcomed at least seven Inspector General reports on the Patriot Act since it was first passed, and there has not been one verified abuse of civil liberties using the Patriot Act."

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said the statement may simply be ''bluster" and does not necessarily mean that the administration will conceal information about its use of the Patriot Act.

But, he said, the statement illustrates the administration's ''mind-bogglingly expansive conception" of executive power, and its low regard for legislative power.

''On the one hand, they deny that Congress even has the authority to pass laws on these subjects like torture and eavesdropping, and in addition to that, they say that Congress is not even entitled to get information about anything to do with the war on terrorism," Golove said.
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Government spokesman says, "I don't understand the public’s fascination with World Trade Center Building Seven"

From the Muckraker Report:

March 21, 2006 – Michael E. Newman, Public and Business Affairs spokesman for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in a phone interview with the Muckraker Report on Monday, March 20th, said that he didn’t “understand the public’s fascination with World Trade Center Building Seven.” Newman was contacted by the Muckraker Report to discuss when the National Institute of Standards and Technology anticipated releasing its report regarding how World Trade Center Building Seven collapsed onto its footprint at 5:20p.m. EST on September 11, 2001.

What I found so interesting about my 30-minute conversation with Newman was how easily he discounted as unfounded conspiracies, the findings and opinions of scientists who are operating outside of the government’s payroll. He frequently used analogies to conspiracy theories and urban legends such as Bigfoot and UFO’s. At one point Newman said that he has joked with members of his Public and Business Affairs that they might as well conduct press conferences wearing “Bigfoot” costumes because “no matter what we say, some people will not believe the government”. Newman continued, “For some people, no matter what the government says about 9/11, they will still believe that the government is lying. Some people still believe the world is flat and there are UFO’s. There’s nothing the federal government can say to convince these people otherwise.”

When I mentioned to Newman that we’re not talking about nutcases from Kooksville, but rather credentialed scientists such as BYU Physics Professor, Stephen E. Jones, Claremont Professor Emeritus, David Ray Griffin, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Engineer, Jeff King, he said, “Just because a person is from MIT doesn’t mean that they know what they’re talking about.” Assuming that Newman is right, then it must be noted that the Lead Technical Investigator for the NIST National Construction Safety Team for WTC Investigation is a gentleman named Shyam Sunder, who incidentally, received his doctoral degree in structural engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1981.[1]

I asked Newman whether his agency had a compelling interest to produce a report regarding the collapse of the Twin Towers that substantiated the 9/11 Commission Report. He indicated that NIST had no such interest. When asked if NIST would produce and release a report on World Trade Center Building Seven, even if the Institute’s conclusions reveal that WTC-7 did in fact collapse as the direct result of a controlled demolition, Newman said that NIST would release such a report if that turns out to be its findings.

Intrigued by Newman’s ability to maintain a persona of impartiality and claimed dedication to truthfulness while he simultaneously scoffed, if not ridiculed any scientist who disagrees with the government’s scientists and their findings, I decided to test his dedication to impartiality and whether NIST had any predisposition towards finding a cause of collapse of WTC Building Seven that will coincide with the government’s account of 9/11. I asked him about the now infamous public statements made by Larry Silverstein, the controller of the World Trade Center Complex. Recall that on a PBS documentary that aired in September 2002, Silverstein said that he and the New York Fire Department decidedjointly to “pull” WTC-7. Here is the exact Silverstein quote from the 2002 PBS documentary.

“I remember getting a call from the ER, Fire Department Commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is ‘pull it.’ And they made the decision to ‘pull’ and we watched the building collapse.”

Almost immediately after I finished referencing Silverstein as saying that the “smartest thing to do is pull it”, Newman responded with a condescending chuckle to remind me that the federal government is always right, and the people, always wrong. He then said, “Silverstein already explained that what he meant was that they decided to pull the firefighters and emergency rescue workers from World Trade Center Building Seven.” One can only hope that NIST doesn’t consider its investigation into what Silverstein meant by his usage of the words, “pull it” as complete, solely on an ambiguous clarification offered years later by a man (Silverstein) that certainly has a financial and personal interest in the government’s official account of 9/11 prevailing.

After Newman finished minimizing the value of the Silverstein comment as essentially worthless, I pointed out to him the fact that organizations such as Scholars for 9/11 Truth and 9/11 Revisited certainly seemed to be presenting thoughtful and scientific information that refuted much of the work by the government’s scientists at NIST. I expressed to him my concern that more than half of all Americans now believe the U.S. government has some complicity if not culpability regarding 9/11, with many people now believing that 9/11 is nothing more than a massive government cover-up; a public perception Newman did not refute. However, when I suggested that a possible method to reconcile the division in the United States between the government and its people might be for a series of televised national debates between his thirty scientists assigned to investigate how World Trade Center Buildings – 1, 2, & 7 collapsed onto their footprints on September 11, 2001, I was abruptly interrupted and told that none of the NIST scientists would participate in any public debate.

Curious, I asked why the National Institute of Standards and Technology would avoid public debate, particularly if it was confident in its work. Newman responded, “Because there is no winning in such debates.” When I pointed out that such a debate between the thirty scientists who worked on the NIST 9/11 Investigation and thirty equally-qualified scientists who dispute, and claim to be able to refute the NIST findings; that such a public, televised debate might actually help answer many of the public’s questions and possibly restore some national unity, the NIST spokesman emphatically insisted that such a debate will never occur.

As precociouslyas Michael E. Newman presented himself as a government man, and therefore trustworthy, the inconsistencies in his agency’s work pertaining to how the Twin Towers collapsed will persist if NIST and its lot of government scientists don’t publicly debate with non-government scientists that are presently and publicly disputing the government’s findings.

Glaring evidence of a fallible, if not predisposed government agency is found on the National Institute of Standards and Technology web site. For example, NIST lists as one if its main 9/11 investigation objectives as to determine:

* Why and how World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7 collapsed after the initial impact of the aircraft[2]

Note: In the event that NIST changes the aforementioned misleading language on its web site, go here http://teamliberty.net/id236.html to see how the web page read as of March 20, 2006.

Why is the false statement on the NIST web site? The National Institute of Standards and Technology knows, along with the rest of the world, that no aircraft impacted WTC-7. Yet on its web site, it uses language that suggests that WTC-7 was also collided into by an aircraft. Is it any wonder why Americans are struggling to accept the government’s 9/11 story when a federal agency intended to set the standard is demonstrating to the world that its own standard of accuracy regarding the dissemination of information is woefully inadequate?

This lack of standards is demonstrated again in the National Institute of Standards and Technology - Executive Summary, which is a portion of its report regarding how the Twin Towers collapsed. Listed as Finding 59, NIST reported:

* NIST found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to September 11, 2001. NIST also did not find any evidence that missiles were fired at or hit the towers. Instead, photographs and videos from several angles clearly showed that the collapse initiated at the fire and impact floors and that the collapse progressed from the initiating floors downward, until the dust clouds obscured the view.
Amazingly, the government sees the dust clouds produced during the collapse of the Twin Towers as an obstruction of view, while scientists, outside the government’s control, see the volume, density, and speed of outward projection from the buildings during the collapse that the dust clouds demonstrated, as evidence of secondary explosive devices. Whether secondary explosive devices caused or assisted the collapse of the Twin Towers or not, the dust clouds were and remain compelling evidence that the government, by their own admission, missed or ignored.

Seeing as NIST scientists couldn’t see the fact that the dust clouds were themselves, evidence, and not obstructions, is it possible for the National Institute of Standard and Technology to be taken seriously, let alone, trusted? Why is the public so fascinated with WTC-7 Mr. Newman? We are so fascinated by it because the events of September 11, 2001 were a national tragedy with many valid and unanswered questions remaining in the public mind.

If there is a weak link in a government cover-up, World Trade Center Building Seven is it. If WTC-7 is found to have collapsed as a result of a controlled demolition, than the NIST report on the Twin Towers will be aggressively scrutinized because the question of how and when explosive devices were wired into WTC-7 would have to be answered. By answering that question, a new truth regarding WTC-1 and WTC-2 might be revealed.

Does NIST have a compelling interest to report that WTC-7 defied the laws of physics also on September 11, 2001 and miraculously collapsed at freefall speed as the result of office fires? You bet it does! Can the National Institute of Standards and Technology be trusted as a competent federal agency that will deliver an untainted, truthful analysis of WTC-7 regardless of what that truth might be? I’ll leave the answer to that question up to you.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] National Institute of Standards and Technology, Project Leaders, National Construction Safety Team for WTC Investigation, Shyam Sunder, http://wtc.nist.gov/pi/wtc_profiles.asp?lastname=sunder, [Accessed March 20, 2006]
[2] NIST & The World Trade Center, Fact Sheets, http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs.htm, [Accessed March 20, 2006]

FBI Wasting Money

From Techdirt:

No Email, But At Least The FBI Has Really Sweet Pens To Write Letters
from the take-a-memo dept

Okay, so we already noted that the FBI is having problems giving all of its agents email accounts, saying that it's just too expensive. However, it appears that they have no problem at all spending $50,000 on "custom-made highlighters and pens," which we hope their agents are using wisely in place of those email accounts. This was among the $10 million in "questionable contractor costs" that a new audit has discovered, not to mention the hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on the useless computer system they had to throw out. Hope those FBI agents have good penmanship.

First Amendment Being Breached Nationwide?

According to Steve Watson,

Cindy Sheehan, who drew international attention when she camped outside President Bush's ranch to protest the Iraq war, was arrested again yesterday during a demonstration demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Sheehan and company were participating in a march to the US mission to the United Nations in order to deliver a petition with more than 60,000 signatures urging the "withdrawal of all troops and all foreign fighters from Iraq."

Ann Wright, a former U.S. Army colonel and U.S. diplomat, said in a statement issued by the Women Say No to War group that the U.S. Mission refused to send someone to meet with the women "whose lives and families have been shattered by this destructive and immoral war." The protesters refused to leave without delivering the petition, she said.

So the police arrested Miss Sheehan and three other women for "criminal trespassing".

Since when has standing outside a building in a peaceful protest been "criminal trespassing"?

It's important to note that she was also arrested for resisting arrest. That is probably what seperates her movement from the Civil Rights movement of the last century, but it still begs the question, "Why are so many American citizens being arrested for protesting?" After all, the first Amendment guarentees this right as long as it's peaceful.

Some other injustices listed in the article:

Earlier this year Cindy Sheehan was also arrested in the House gallery after refusing to cover up a T-shirt bearing an anti-war slogan before President Bush's State of the Union address.

Just as disturbing was the fact that, U.S. Rep. Bill Young, R-Florida, spoke on the House floor saying his wife, Beverly, had been "ordered to leave" the gallery during the speech for wearing a shirt that said, "Support Our Troops."

Cindy Sheehan was also arrested last September at a protest outside the White House for refusing to obey police orders to leave.

I would recommend that Sheehan begin not to resist arrest, like the Civil Rights Movement leaders of the last century, but still, it's shocking what the United States authorities are doing these days. As long as the protests don't get physical, and therefore stay peaceful, what's wrong with having them? According to the law, absolutely nothing. According to those in power right now, it would appear to be everything.

Step up. Take back your rights.

Maryland Bans Diebold Voting Machines

A good choice for one of this decade's few blue states. Read more here.