RED ALERT: Schumer, Dems and their Allies Ready to Support National ID Cards

RED ALERT: Influential Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer (NY), some Dems, some DC groups (I’ve interviewed a couple) and even the SEIU’s Mike Garcia appear ready and willing to support a NATIONAL ID CARD. According to the L.A.Times,

“As the immigration reform debate begins to heat up again, some observers expect that one of the biggest and most controversial new elements will be a proposed national worker identification card for all Americans.

A “forgery-proof” worker ID card, secured with biometric data such as fingerprints, is an idea favored by Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y), the new chairman of the immigration subcommittee. Schumer, who will lead the effort to craft the Senate’s comprehensive immigration overhaul legislation, called the card the best way to ensure that all workers were authorized.”

ACLU and others I’ve spoken with are already gearing up to condemn and fight this (if you want to understand why national ID’s are a big problem, see the ACLU’s “5 reasons” tip sheet). When I interviewed some, including national immigrant rights organizations in DC about this yesterday, their first tact was to prevaricate and confuse by saying something to the effect of “It’s not a national ID. it’s different.” Having covered the electronic surveillance beat when I first started doing journalism, I recognize when somebody’s BS’ing about these crucial, but complicated issues. Letting the DC operatives know that I know electronic surveillance caused a shift in the rhetorical strategy of folks like the person who told me, “Well, the bill is not out yet. So we can’t really argue about this now.” I truly hope that the “tradeoff” desperation of those who spent millions of dollars to get legalization for some undocumented is not so great that they are willing to lend themselves to support reactionary policies like the national ID proposals that’ve been rejected by people of many different political creeds time and time again. I really do.

This national ID move is either a labrynthine charade designed to give Obama and the Democrats a way out of their commitment to immigration reform-even the conservative, punitive “get tough approach of CIR”- or a very dangerous move to continue the Bush surveillance project under the guise “immigration reform.” Either way, this National ID proposal -and its supporters- must be roundly and rapidly condemned before they get Obama to back it with his wealth of political capital. And watch out for the MULTIBILLION dollar interests of Lockheed, Larry Ellison and Oracle, who have lobbied unsuccessfully for national ID cards for many years. It appears that the those eating and profiting at the anti-immigrant trough are now trying to turn a profit by denying fundamental rights to the non-migrant among us. Even many right wingers oppose national ID proposals as when Ellison shamelessly tried to promote his national ID project right after September 11th. He appeared to be “offering free of charge” the software to build such a national ID. But what he nor other backers of national ID didn’t and won’t tell you is that, like other open source software, Ellison and Oracle stand to make billions from upgrades to the national ID software. go figure.

In any case, some in DC will try to hide behind the “but there’s not even a proposal yet” logic that masks nefarious dealings in much the same way that that logic hid the disgusting parts of McCain-Kennedy. This stuff moves us beyond the neglect of detainee and deportee issues and into issues of state control of the entire populace. This needs a powerful push back , regardless of whether it’s backers speak Spanish or can say “Si Se Puede” to further eroding the fundamental rights of people in this country.

What to do Before and (If Necessary) After the Election is Stolen

When I hear the fear of first-time voters like 21-year-old Bertha Barrios, I hear the voice of a generation raised beneath the specter of questions about our last two elections.

“This is my first presidential vote,” says Bertha, a Salvadoran American college student who was holding her 2-year-old son, Joshua, while we spoke. “But, sometimes, I don’t feel like voting. Last time, a lot of people voted and it was for nothing. Bush wasn’t supposed to win [in 2000]. I remember the whole Florida vote scandal … They stole that election and the news reports make it seem like they want to do it again.”

Harkening back to the stories she’s heard about elections held under the military dictatorship that ruled El Salvador in the 1980s, she said: “In El Salvador, the right wing somehow would miraculously always win, and that seems like what they want to do here.

“So, what’s the point of voting if it really doesn’t count at the end?” she asks, her voice taking on the tough tones of her Salvadoran-Watts accent.

I was at once startled and pleased at the healthy and unhealthy dose of cynical wisdom I heard coming from someone I’d known since she was an 11 year-old soccer dynamo. Her pointed question and comparison turned what was supposed to be my reported piece about youth fears of fraud and suppression into an opinion piece about something many of us are feeling increasing urgency about: the serious possibility that the presidential election may be stolen – and what to do before and (if necessary) after the election is stolen.

Recent polls showing a possible Obama landslide give Bertha and other voters some confidence. Me too. According to New York University media studies scholar Mark Crispin Miller – who is teaching a course this semester called “How to Steal an Election” – it’s harder to steal elections if there’s not a tight race.

But the flurry of reports coming out about numerous irregularities already seen in and around voting booths across the country leave open the possibility that millions of votes may not be counted in this presidential election. And John McCain and the GOP’s repeated attacks on voter-registration organization ACORN as a group that is “destroying the fabric of democracy,” seem to indicate that the diversionary BIG LIE required to cover-up and legitimate the illegitimate is in place.

A report in the New York Times found that in some states, including battleground states, for every new voter registered two other voters have been removed. Colorado, a state experiencing rapid and huge population increases, has seen more than 100,000 voters erased from its rolls. Reports from other states of suppression and fraud involving computerized voting systems, voter purges, unreasonable demands for voter documentation and other methods mean one thing: all of us must prepare to prevent and fight this.

Failure to fight voter suppression and fraud means more than just another lost election; it means that Bertha’s and other future generations may give in to the political resignation that the Salvadorization of our political system portends. And, so, given that the third strike of a questionable election will essentially institutionalize suppression and fraud, given that our inaction will communicate that we as a people are willing to accept whatever powerful interests impose on us, here are some things we must start planning—and doing—immediately:

1. Push for Major Turnout and Deliver a Historic Blowout: Experts say that large turnouts and a wide margin between candidates make fraud and suppression more difficult because of the number of votes that must be manipulated and erased. Large turnout and overwhelming victories also communicate to big political and economic interests our passionate desire to change our political system, including our maligned electoral process.

2. Monitoring on the Day of the Elections: Don’t just take your vote to the polls, take your cameras, notepads and cell phones so that you can document and report any irregularities you experience or see. Local and national election monitoring groups like Election Protection (1-866-OUR-VOTE), the country’s largest election monitoring operation, have set up systems for anyone to report irregularities.

3. Study Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004: Studying the irregularities of and responses to these two elections provide us with the best case studies of what to look for and, if necessary, how not to respond (i.e., just sit back and watch the election get stolen your TV set).

While we must work unceasingly to make sure that as many people as possible vote and that these votes are counted, we must also prepare for the possibility that irregularities seen in 2000 and 2004 (and already this year) will rear their ugly heads. Failure among all but a few of us to contest and protest the questionable results in 2000 communicated our willingness to accept not just stolen elections, but also anti-democratic behavior in the Executive Branch: the legitimation of torture, corporate and government secrecy coupled with decreased privacy and rights among the citizenry, the militarism in Iraq and, increasingly, within the borders of the country.

Given that we live in an era fraught with threats to democracy, we must, unfortunately, also prepare for the worst by responding with:

1. General Strike: History teaches us that nothing strikes fear into the hearts – and pocketbooks – of the powerful like people stopping business as usual. In the event of a stolen election, local and national work stoppages, school walkouts, protests, and other actions communicate to the government, to corporate interests, to Bertha and to the world that we will fight the decimation of democracy. If they haven’t already, labor unions, political organizers, bloggers and individuals should coordinate a global effort so that business stops, not just in the U.S., but also around the world. Even without a strong labor movement, the immigrant rights mobilization of 2006 – the largest simultaneous marches in U.S. history – proved that you can make a powerful statement simply by not showing up to work and marching instead.

2. Study the Florida Experience and Learn: We should study how, with a few notable exceptions, the Democrats allowed themselves – and our political future – to be dragged into the abyss of illegitimacy.

3. Foment Any and All Non-Violent Action: – As our country starts taking on the economic and political characteristics of El Salvador and other “Third World” countries that protested U.S. policy, our colossal crisis means we may have to start emulating their methods of protesting electoral and malfeasance: vigils, protests, hunger strikes, office takeovers (ie; government buildings), boycotts and other non-violent means.

Viewed from the historical perspective running from 2000 to the present – the view of Bertha Barrios’ generation – this election may, indeed, actually fit that clichéd slogan about this being the “most important election of our lives” not because we may elect Barack Obama, but because we must restore some semblance of integrity to our political process- and to ourselves.

Economic 9-11: The Shrinking of Political Space

(photo by Jamie Denise Lahane)

New America Media, News analysis, Roberto Lovato, Posted: Sep 26, 2008 a2a_linkname=document.title;a2a_linkurl=location.href;

Editor’s Note: Behind the economic bailout is a looming specter of government as Big ‘Banker’ Brother, and activists are protesting for fear of further erosion of civil liberties, reports NAM contributor Roberto Lovato.

NEW YORK – Arun Gupta stood between the throngs of tourists and the small army of activists squeezing onto the narrow concrete island occupied largely by the 7,000 pound bronze Wall Street bull and declared, “We’re here to say no to the bailout.”

Gupta is an editor at the New York Indypendent newspaper whose open letter opposing the Bush administration’s $700 billion bailout is largely credited with inspiring the protests on Wall Street in other cities. “But we’re also here because, in times of economic decline like ours, the natural inclination of government is to close down political space,” he noted.

Gupta, along with a host of other observers from across the political spectrum, believes that the debate about the Bush administration’s bailout plan obfuscates another looming threat: how the bailout behind the economic crisis could further erode free speech, the right to protest, the right to privacy – all repressive measures instituted after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

At that time, many believed that the Bush administration was using the symbolism of Ground Zero to narrow political space – curtailing civil liberties – in an effort to silence opposition to the Iraq invasion. Today, Gupta and others believe that the government is preparing for another domestic war, a war on the poor and middle class – the sector of the population that is most affected by today’s economic realities – by controlling their economic and political freedom. Gupta fears that the government, as Big ‘Banker’ Brother, could play the dual roles of financier (who may or may not provide loans to its citizens) and cop (who will quell complaints about any rejections).

Even staunch conservatives with deep roots in Wall Street are alarmed at the possible political effects of the current economic policy. Paul Craig Roberts, former Reagan administration assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury, who is also a former associate editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial page, sounded an economic and political alarm that echoed in the financial canyons around Wall Street when he wrote a column titled “Has Deregulation Sired Fascism?”

“The real issue is whether we, the people, allow powerful interests to use the economic collapse to create an even more unaccountable executive branch,” he said during our interview. “History teaches us that it’s easier for government to give us our money back than it is for them to give us back the freedoms and civil liberties government takes.”

On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared to share these concerns when she said that the fiscal catastrophe was “a tragedy they [the Bush administration] must have known was coming and were very late in coming to Congress on.” Pelosi also stated that the administration sought “an expansive power for the (Treasury) secretary that was almost laughable.”

The physical, legal and political space had already been shrinking as a result of government actions in the aftermath of 9-11: public streets severely narrowed by the now ubiquitous steel fencing; decorative bulwarks and defensive walls put up by government and private sector interests; “permanent emergency” laws passed by both Democrats and Republicans; laws like the Patriot Act that criminalize forms of protest that were previously legal and which also unleashed powerful data-mining technology and other unprecedented surveillance powers of local, state and federal government; bipartisan legislation that gives the government the power to break into citizens’ homes and conduct secret searches and police raids. Add to this the made-for-TV-ratings arrests carried out against independent journalists like Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman while covering the Republican National Convention.

Gupta and others see the potential for the current economic crisis to facilitate government actions like those denounced by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) shortly after 9-11, when they released a report that stated, “The nation’s highest-ranking law enforcement officer is using his bully pulpit to shut down dissent and debate.”

Located next to the Hudson River and a brisk walk from the bronze bull and Ground Zero, is the ACLU headquarters, born from government threats to civil rights in times of economic crisis. After the economic unrest during and after WWI, the liberal Wilson Administration led several initiatives – including the Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918 and other laws – to enable the rash of warrantless raids, massive surveillance and widespread criminalization of protest. In response, Roger Nash Baldwin, Jeannette Rankin and other New York activists launched the ACLU in 1920.

Baldwin, Rankin and their peers were fighting to maintain political space in the industrial age. Now Gupta and his fellow activists see themselves as doing the same in the digital age.

“What we’re witnessing is an interesting dynamic between the analog and digital worlds in terms of how we combine mobilization with technology,” said Gupta. “Email helped spread word of this protest like wildfire. At first I received responses to my open letter from a huge number of activists. But then it kept growing in concentric circles of impact extending to more than 100 cities. That’s a lot of political space that would not have been created otherwise – and we need to keep it up if we’re going to get out of this crisis.”

Race, Politics & the Deadly Rise of (Corporate) Media Sovereignty

For the more than 10,000 attending the 4-day Unity Journalists of Color conference-the largest single gathering of journalists in the United States- one theme overwhelmingly dominated all others: how the thousands of under and unemployed journalists attending the conference signal a colossal crisis of U.S. journalism-and U.S. democracy. Whether it was the many traumatized and fear-filled workers we encountered , or the obvious humiliation of Truth in Journalism we heard on panels or the unprecedented lack of government transparency we discussed, the hallways of Unity were buzzing with devastatingly bad news.

The primary source of the bad news?: the sinister and extremely anti-democratic concentration of media ownership and power in fewer and fewer hands. Many of us are returning home clear of how one of the great threats to any democratic functioning is the deadly rise of Corporate Media Sovereignty. Nowhere was the threat more palpable than around that most critical of media issues of our time, Net Neutrality, the struggle to keep the internet open and free from the clutches of the exploiters of journalists, the purveyors of candy-coated UnTruth and enablers of government secrecy: Big Media.

I for one return from Chicago more convinced of the need to support the Death Penalty, the Corporate Death Penalty as applied to those companies that devastate the public good. We need to get back to those days when bad corporations lost their legal right to exist for violating the Public Good. This was the case from the foundation of the country until the late 19th century and we need to bring back the power of the people to apply the Death Penalty to corporations by denying them what in legal terms is known as “corporate personhood.”

This interview on Democracy Now explores these issues in the context of the interplay between race, media and politics. We discuss how, for example, Janet Murguia and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) -the same folks who supported the nomination of war criminal Alberto Gonzalez, are silent on Iraq and accept money from and promote the Pentagon- have been silenced and neutralized around Net Neutrality by the money they get from telecommunications companies eager to control the Internet. So check out how DN co-host (and now NAHJ Hall of Famer) Juan Gonzalez and author Amy Alexander and I explore these and other issues. Enjoy!

Electronic Dragnet for Undocumented Nets Citizens

New America Media, News Report, Roberto Lovato, Posted: Apr 08, 2008

Editor’s Note: Electronic programs to verify employment eligibility are meant to detect those working in the United States illegally. But an unlikely coalition of unions, business organizations and conservatives fear that error-filled databases might end up impacting citizens as well. NAM editor Roberto Lovato is a writer based in New York.

Two hours after starting his new job at a food processing plant in 2006, Fernando Tinoco got fired. “I went to work, felt really good to have a new job and started going to it,” says Tinoco, a 53-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen who lives in Chicago. “And then they called me into the office and told me that my Social Security number was fake,” he adds, “And then they fired me.” Apparently, Tyson Foods Inc., Tinoco’s former employer, was one of the more than 52,000 companies voluntarily participating in “E-Verify”, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program designed to identify undocumented workers by electronically verifying their employment eligibility.

After the Kafkaesque experience of being hired, fired and trying to maneuver through the famously overstretched bureaucracy of the Social Security Administration to re-confirm status, Citizen Tinoco has become an outspoken critic of U.S. immigration laws’ impact on citizens. “I think that citizens need to be as careful of these new immigration laws,” says Tinoco, who now works at a school, adding, “they can ruin our lives too.” Tinoco found his concerns echoed by Jim Harper of the conservative Cato Institute, who recently wrote that “If E-Verify goes national, get used to hearing that Orwellian term: ‘non-confirmation.’”

That is why E-Verify is opposed by an unlikely alliance that includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, major unions, Republican legislators and others. But it is only one of a growing number of legislative and administrative immigration control initiatives that Tinoco and many critics believe will negatively impact not just non-citizens, but citizens as well. This week, for example, Congress is considering the Secure America through Verification and Enforcement (SAVE) Act, which includes provisions that mandate a national verification system like that of the more voluntary state programs like E-Verify. Also causing intense fear is last week’s announcement by the Bush administration of revisions to its “No Match letter” plan, which requires the Social Security Administration (SSA) to send out 140,000 letters demanding that employers fire workers whose Social Security numbers did not match those in their records. Advocates are concerned that, like the E-Verify program and SAVE Act, the new No Match regulations will affect other U.S. citizens and authorized workers thanks to the same kind of faulty record keeping that led to Tinoco’s firing.

“By viewing these initiatives through the narrow lens of ‘immigration policy’ sold to us by politicians many fail to see that many of these programs will have direct impacts on many citizens,” says Michele Waslin, senior research analyst with the Immigration Policy Center. To support their claims, Waslin and other critics point to several reports like one by the SSA’s Office of Inspector General that found that there are 17.8 million discrepancies in the SSA’s records relating to lawful American workers. The report also found that 70 percent or 12.7 million of those inconsistencies belong to native-born (as opposed to naturalized) U.S. citizens.

Some advocates like Harper of the Cato Institute are fighting the proposals because they believe that there are no checks against government error or abuse against citizens in the programs ostensibly targeting those here illegally. “Once built,” wrote Harper, “this government monitoring system would soon be extended to housing, financial services, and other essentials to try to get at illegal immigrants. It would also be converted to policy goals well beyond immigration control.” Waslin agrees. “These programs will do nothing to deal with undocumented immigrants because people will simply go further underground,” says Waslin. “But they will eventually lead to a situation that will force every single person to ask the government for permission to work. We have to ask ourselves, ‘Is it really worth it?’”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest business federation, answers Waslin’s question with a resounding ‘no’, a ‘no’ accompanied by lawsuits, letter-writing and lobbying.

For their part, DHS representatives say that concerns about the effects on citizens are misplaced. The number of citizens mistakenly impacted by programs like No Match and E-Verify programs, says DHS spokesperson Amy Kudwa, “are a small portion of the population. Ninety-two percent of all E-verify queries are returned without incident in less than eight seconds and only 1 percent of them are contested. These are important tools in fighting illegal immigration.”

But advocates point out that, despite being run on trial basis, E-Verify and other programs have already demonstrated disconcerting flaws that are rooted in the unreliability of the technology and the databases like that of SSA.

In the face of so many legislative proposals and administrative initiatives, Tinoco says his obligation to speak only grows because of his concern for his fellow immigrants – and fellow citizens. “I still don’t understand: how can this happen here? It’s like a movie, a very bad movie.” Asked what message he has for his fellow citizens, Tinoco answers, “This can happen to you too.”

Telcos, U.S. Government Collecting Phone Records of Thousands of Latinos and others Calling Latin América

This article in yesterday’s New York Times (NYT) reports on how major telecommunications companies are helping U.S. intelligence agencies collect the phone records of thousands of citizens and non-citizens that call Mexico, Colombia and other Latin American countries. According to the report,

“To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified.”

The National Security Agency(NSA), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and other government agencies have been gathering the phone records for several years. News of the telecommunications industry-government collaboration is coming out now because Congress is currently considering legislation that will shield the companies from lawsuits stemming from their support of government eavesdropping.

Reports of U.S. government snooping on Latino and other citizens are nothing new. While the government has likely included Latinos in its intelligence gathering activities since such activities were organized by agencies like Herbert Hoover’s FBI, documentation of the snooping began in earnest only until relatively recently. As reported on this blog previously,

“While (Lyndon) Johnson was signing into law the official celebration of Latinos (Hispanic Heritage month) in 1968, he also signed documents authorizing the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program or “COINTELPRO” to give another big government abrazo (embrace) to the growing chorus of dissident Latino voices. Cesar Chavez, student groups, the Brown Berets, the Young Lords and those who yelled “Viva!” during the “Walkout” in Los Angeles were but a few of those greeted by COINTELPRO during that first year of Hispanic Heritage.”

What is new are the numerous and growing number of ways the private sector collaborates with and benefits from the electronic surveillance components of what critics call the “national security state” apparatus being built since before 9-11. Again, even the NYT article hints at the bigger issues when it says,

“But the battle is really about something much bigger. At stake is the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime.”

Further on, the article explains the technological reasons behind the government’s urgent need of telecommunications and other companies collaboration in designing the surveillance systems of the post-industrial age,

“The federal government’s reliance on private industry has been driven by changes in technology. Two decades ago, telephone calls and other communications traveled mostly through the air, relayed along microwave towers or bounced off satellites. The N.S.A. could vacuum up phone, fax and data traffic merely by erecting its own satellite dishes. But the fiber optics revolution has sent more and more international communications by land and undersea cable, forcing the agency to seek company cooperation to get access. “

As Peter Swire, former chief counselor for privacy at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget under the Clinton administration, told me a couple of years ago, “We used to think of Big Brother as things like government wiretaps, where government is directly receiving the information”. “Today,” says Swire, “the datafeed doesn’t come from a government telescreen like in 1984. The datafeed now comes from your phone calls, your tax records, your bank transactions, your social security number, your grocery purchases, your insurance claims, your credit history, your medical records.” So, Latinos aren’t alone in this one.

I’ve written previously on how these ongoing and expanding collaborations between government and the private sector in the network age make nakedly obvious the inadequacy of the industrial age”Big Brother” metaphor. At a time when digital technology has turned everyone from parents with camera-embedded teddy bears to world’s largest employers into snoopers and eavesdroppers, we should be talking not solely about “Big Brother” state surveillance but also about nano-cousins, Little Teddy’s, micro-brothers and other descendants of the now thoroughly dead surveillance systems depicted in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” in the analog era (see “Enemy of the State” to get a more contemporary sense of what decentralized surveillance looks and feels like). The private sector, not “Big Brother” is now the hands-down largest collector of information about human beings regardless of their legal status.

And Latino Immigrants and Latin migration provide another rationale for further investment in the covert gathering of information on citizens and non-citizens. Allegedly designed to “control” immigrants, laws like the REAL ID Act of 2005, for example, will end up creating what the Electronic Privacy and Information Center calls a “de facto national identification card” that will make rich companies like national ID cheerleader Larry Elllison’s Oracle even richer.  Last year, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe offered (and later “calirified”)to put microchips in seasonal workers coming to the U.S. Up until 2003, U.S.-based database company Choicepoint was selling the U.S. government the personal information of more than 65 million Mexicans. This year witnessed the further implementation of the multi-billion ($8 billion or more) electronic surveillance components of the Secure Borders Initiative (SBI) by military industrial companies like Boeing.

So, this recent report of U.S. government snooping on Latinos and others comes atop a colossal, growing mountain of private information about migrants, citizen and others. Find out more about the privacy policies of telcom and other companies you deal with because they just may be selling your privacy to the government or some other bidder.

AGAINST FORGETTING: SUPPORT THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE RESOLUTION

(Survivors of Armenian genocide perpetrated by Turks in Congress yesterday)

The 92-year struggle to secure official condemnation of the mass killings of Armenians by Turkey during World War I as an act of genocide won an important victory in Congress yesterday. A proposal presented to a House subcommittee by Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA) passed by a vote of 27 to 21 and is causing great consternation among the more reactionary sectors of the globe, including the Bush Administration and its ally, Turkey, which has threatened to pull its support for US bases used to invade Iraq if the measure passes beyond the subcommittee.

This tragic, longstanding refusal to acknowledge atrocities committed by the then-declining Ottoman Empire provides an object lesson in the politics of memory, the geopolitics of genocide. Those of us interested in and pursuing justice here in the US should study closely and support strongly the efforts of Armenians in Glendale, CA and other parts of the country to gain official recognition. In addition to being just and necessary, the pursuit of these kinds of re-vindications paves the way for some kind of psychic closure of the abysmal wounds inflicted on Armenians everywhere. It’s also important to note the Bush Administration’s resistance to the resolution. While this NYT story links the Bush Administration’s opposition to Iraq, it fails to note that maintaining such a state of public, official amnesia enables the constant state of pillage, war and genocide that began with the erasure and spin surrounding the genocide against native Americans in this country. And we wonder why Bush won’t do the right thing? It’s business, strictly (war) business.

Such a situation calls to mind these words by Czech writer Milan Kundera,

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

THANK YOU FOR FLYING PROFILER AIRLINES: HOMELAND SECURITY TRACKS RACE, READING HABITS, ASSOCIATES OF AIRLINE PASSENGERS

( Copy of document showing that Dept. Homeland Security tracks the race of travelers)

Documents obtained by privacy watchdog, the Identity Project (IP), reveal that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) keeps detailed records documenting such things as the race, reading habits, associates and other airline passenger data. The documents came to light as part of a Privacy Act request by IP and is included in a report titled “Homeland Security’s Data Vacuum Cleaner in Action”.

This part of the document shows the how DHS’s once-secret Automated Targeting Project kept records of books read by a passenger:

And this part of another document reveals that they also monitor where travelers go even after deboarding and with whom:

For further information on the important work of John Gilmore and the Identity Project you can visit their website at http://www.unsecureflight.com/.

Happy travels!