Privacy concerns prompted Congress to kill the Pentagon's $54 million Total Information Awareness program last September, but government computers are still scanning a vast array of databases for clues about criminal or terrorist activity, the General Accounting Office found.

Overall, 36 of the government's 199 "data mining" efforts collect personal information from the private sector, a move experts say could violate civil liberties if left unchecked.

Several appear to be patterned after Total Information Awareness, which critics said could have led to an Orwellian surveillance state in which citizens have little privacy.

"I believe that Total Information Awareness is continuing under other names, and the (Defense Department) projects listed here might fit that bill," said Peter Swire, an Ohio State University law professor who served as the Clinton administration's top privacy official.

Defense Department officials did not respond to a request for comment.
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Lafky, a sugar mill worker and single mother in Bird Island, a farming community 90 miles west of St. Paul, became the first Minnesotan sued by name by the recording industry this week for allegedly downloading copyrighted music illegally.

The lawsuit has stunned Lafky, who earns $12 an hour and faces penalties that top $500,000. She says she can't even afford an offer by the record companies to settle the case for $4,000.

The ongoing music downloading war is being fought on one side by a $12 billion music industry that says it is steadily losing sales to online file sharing. On the other side, untold millions of people -- many of them too young to drive -- who have been downloading free music off file-sharing sites with odd names like Kazaa and Grokster and who are accusing the music industry of price gouging and strong-arm tactics.
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MOBILE phones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army installations in Iraq on orders from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, The Business newspaper reported today.

Quoting a Pentagon source, the paper said the US Defence Department believes that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones.

"Digital cameras, camcorders and cellphones with cameras have been prohibited in military compounds in Iraq," it said, adding that a "total ban throughout the US military" is in the works.

» NEWS.com.au | Rumsfeld bans camera phones (May 23, 2004)

    

Abuse whistleblower 'disciplined'
From correspondents in Washington
May 22, 2004

THE US Army has reportedly taken disciplinary action against a soldier in military intelligence who alleged the army was trying to cover up the extent of the Iraqi prison scandal.

Earlier this week, Sergeant Samuel Provance told America's ABC television that dozens of soldiers had been involved in the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. Only seven have been charged so far.

Today, ABC quoted Sgt Provance as saying that he had been stripped of his security clearance and told he may face prosecution over his comments.

Sgt Provance said he had been transferred to a different platoon and his record was officially "flagged", meaning he cannot be promoted or given awards or honours.

    

Bill Nevins, a New Mexico high school teacher and personal friend, was fired last year and classes in poetry and the poetry club at Rio Rancho High School were permanently terminated. It had nothing to do with obscenity, but it had everything to do with extremist politics.

The "Slam Team" was a group of teenage poets who asked Nevins to serve as faculty adviser to their club. The teens, mostly shy youngsters, were taught to read their poetry aloud and before audiences. Rio Rancho High School gave the Slam Team access to the school's closed-circuit television once a week and the poets thrived.

In March 2003, a teenage girl named Courtney presented one of her poems before an audience at Barnes & Noble bookstore in Albuquerque, then read the poem live on the school's closed-circuit television channel.

A school military liaison and the high school principal accused the girl of being "un-American" because she criticized the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's failure to give substance to its "No child left behind" education policy.

The girl's mother, also a teacher, was ordered by the principal to destroy the child's poetry. The mother refused and may lose her job.

    

NEW YORK (AP) - Before helping to launch the criminal information project known as Matrix, a database contractor gave U.S. and Florida authorities the names of 120,000 people who showed a statistical likelihood of being terrorists - sparking some investigations and arrests.

The "high terrorism factor" scoring system also became a key selling point for the involvement of the database company, Seisint Inc., in the Matrix project.
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"Assuming they have in fact abandoned the terrorist quotient, there's nothing that stops them from bringing it back," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union, which learned about the list of 120,000 through its own records request in Utah.

Matrix - short for Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange - combines state records and data culled by Seisint to give investigators fast access to information on crime and terrorism suspects. It was launched in 2002.

Because the system includes information on people with no criminal record as well as known criminals, Matrix has drawn objections from liberal and conservative privacy groups. Utah and at least eight other states have pulled out, leaving Florida, Connecticut, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The AP has received thousands of pages of Matrix documents in records requests this year, including meeting minutes and presentation materials that discuss the project in detail.

Not one indicates that Matrix planners decided against using the statistical method of determining an individual's propensity for terrorism.

    

Unitarian Universalists have for decades presided over births, marriages and memorials. The church operates in every state, with more than 5,000 members in Texas alone.

But according to the office of Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, a Denison Unitarian church isn't really a religious organization -- at least for tax purposes. Its reasoning: the organization "does not have one system of belief."

Never before -- not in this state or any other -- has a government agency denied Unitarians tax-exempt status because of the group's religious philosophy, church officials say. Strayhorn's ruling clearly infringes upon religious liberties, said Dan Althoff, board president for the Denison congregation that was rejected for tax exemption by the comptroller's office.
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Strayhorn's ruling, as well as a similar decision by former Comptroller John Sharp, has left the comptroller's office straddling a sometimes murky gulf separating church and state.

What constitutes religion? When and how should government make that determination? Questions that for years have vexed the world's great philosophers have now become the province of the state comptroller's office.

    

Donna Huanca works as a docent at the Art Car Museum, an avant-garde gallery in Houston. Around 10:30 on the morning of November 7, before she opened the museum, two men wearing suits and carrying leather portfolios came to her door.

"I told them to wait until we opened at 11:00," she recalls. "Then they pulled their badges out."

The two men were Terrence Donahue of the FBI and Steven Smith of the Secret Service.

"They said they had several reports of anti-American activity going on here and wanted to see the exhibit," she says. The museum was running a show called "Secret Wars," which contains many anti-war statements that were commissioned before September 11.

    

DENVER -- The head of Colorado's second-largest Roman Catholic diocese says he will deny Communion to Catholics who vote for politicians who support abortion rights, stem-cell research, euthanasia and gay marriage.

In one of the strongest statements yet from a U.S. bishop in the debate over how faith should influence Catholics in this election year, Bishop Michael Sheridan of Colorado Springs said Communion will be allowed only for such voters if they recant and repent in the confessional.

    

May 17 Issue - Donald Rumsfeld likes to be in total control. He wants to know all the details, including the precise interrogation techniques used on enemy prisoners. Since 9/11 he has insisted on personally signing off on the harsher methods used to squeeze suspected terrorists held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The conservative hard-liners at the Department of Justice have given the secretary of Defense a lot of lee-way. It does not violate the spirit of the Geneva Conventions, the lawyers have told Rumsfeld, to put prisoners in ever-more-painful "stress positions" or keep them standing for hours on end, to deprive them of sleep or strip them naked. According to one of Rumsfeld's aides, the secretary has drawn the line at interrogating prisoners for more than 24 hours at a time or depriving them of light.

If it were possible to be a true war god, to aim every arrow that flies, to smite every foe and avenge every wrong, maybe Donald Rumsfeld would be that man. But it is not, and in Greek tragedies the gods themselves are brought low by pride. In Washington, where the assassin's weapon is usually a well-placed leak, Rumsfeld last week was left explaining, with uncharacteristic pitifulness, that hehad not seen the actual pictures that appalled the world until eight days after the images first appeared on CBS's "60 Minutes II."

    

The night of the Madrid train bombing, Mona and Brandon Mayfield were watching the Disney Channel with their children, when their program was interrupted by breaking news from the deadly devastation in Spain.

"He turned to me and said -- 'Those Goddamn terrorists. I'm sick and tired of them harming civilians,'" said Mona Mayfield, 35, remembering her husband's response.

Nearly two months later, her husband, thirty-seven-year-old Brandon Mayfield, a Portland attorney, became the first American to be arrested in connection with the Madrid bombing.

He is a former Army lieutenant who lives in a modest home in a Portland suburb, a convert to Islam who attends a mosque in nearby Beaverton and a native of Oregon who grew up in Kansas.

His family adamantly denies any connection to the train bombing.

"I think it's crazy -- we haven't been outside the country for 10 years," said his wife, who met her husband on a blind date at Fort Lewis army base near Tacoma, Wash. in 1987. "They found only a part of one fingerprint. It could be anybody. He was in the army and they're just trying to fit a certain profile."

    

(CNN) -- Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has said the Walt Disney Company is blocking distribution of his new film critical of U.S. President George W. Bush. He spoke to CNN anchor Hala Gorani about the controversy.

Gorani: What was your communication with Disney?

Moore: Almost a year ago after we'd started making the film, the chairman of Disney, Michael Eisner, told my agent that he was upset that Miramax had made the film -- Disney owns Miramax -- and he will not distribute this film.

Miramax said don't worry about that, keep making the film, we'll keep funding it. The Disney money kept flowing to us for the last year. We finished the film last week, and we take it to the Cannes film festival next week.

On Monday of this week we got final word from Disney that they will not distribute the film. They told my agent they did not want to upset the Bush family, particularly Gov. Bush of Florida because Disney was up for a number of tax incentives, abatements ... whatever. The risk of losing this -- we're talking about tens of millions of dollars -- they didn't want to risk it over a little documentary.

    

Bush won't fire Rumsfeld despite criticism

By John J. Lumpkin
The Associated Press

May 6, 2004, 3:07 PM EDT

WASHINGTON -- President Bush said Thursday that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "will stay in my Cabinet" despite Democratic calls for his departure over abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners by American military guards.
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Bush spoke as his administration sought to counter a worldwide wave of revulsion over photographs showing Iraqi prisoners, some of them hooded, naked and in sexually humiliating poses, in an American-run prison in the Baghdad area.

    

$25 Billion More Sought to Fund Wars
White House Hoped to Delay Request Until After Election

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 6, 2004; Page A01

The White House yesterday asked Congress for an additional $25 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the fiscal year that begins in October, reversing course on its plan to wait until after the election to seek more money.
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"While we do not know the precise costs for operations next year, recent developments on the ground and increased demands on our troops indicate the need to plan for contingencies," President Bush said in a statement. "We must make sure there is no disruption in funding and resources for our troops."

    

...
If many members of Congress failed to read the Patriot Act during its swift passage, it is in part because that act is almost unreadable. The Patriot Act is written as an extended sequence of additions to and deletions from previously existing statutes. In making these alterations, it often instructs the bewildered reader to insert three words into paragraph X of statute Y without ever providing the full sentence that is altered either in its original or its amended form. Only someone who had scores of earlier statutes open to the relevant pages could step painstakingly through the revisions.
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The hundreds of additions and deletions do, despite appearances, have a coherent and unitary direction: many of them increase the power of the Justice Department and decrease the rights of individual persons. The constitutional rights abridged by the Patriot Act are enumerated in the town resolutions, which most often specify violations of the First Amendment guarantee of free speech and assembly, the Fourth Amendment guarantee against search and seizure, the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of due process, and (cited somewhat less often) the Sixth and Eighth Amendment guarantees of a speedy and public trial and protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

    

Expert Says E-Voting Is 'Terrible'

Wednesday May 5, 2004 7:16 PM
By HOPE YEN
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - A computer science expert criticized electronic voting systems planned for the November election as highly vulnerable and flawed, saying on Wednesday a backup paper system is the only short-term solution to avoid another disputed presidential election.

"On a spectrum of terrible to very good, we are sitting at terrible,'' Aviel D. Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. "Not only have the vendors not implemented security safeguards that are possible, they have not even correctly implemented the ones that are easy.''

    

Jan. 12 -- Following is the transcript of a speech delivered May 8, 1999, at Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C., by then-Sen. John Ashcroft, R-Mo. Ashcroft is President-elect George W. Bush's nominee for attorney general.

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A slogan of the American Revolution which was so distressing to the emissaries of the king that it was found in correspondence sent back to England was the line, "We have no king but Jesus." Tax collectors came, asking for that which belonged to the king, and colonists frequently said, "We have no king but Jesus." It found its way into the fundamental documents of this great country. You could quote the Declaration with me. "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." Unique among the nations, America recognized the source of our character as being godly and eternal, not being civic and temporal. And because we have understood that our source is eternal, America has been different. We have no king but Jesus.