Noe pleads guilty to illegally funneling donations to Bush

By Mike Wilkinson and Steve Eder

Former GOP fund-raiser Tom Noe admitted today that he used politicians, former aides to Gov. Bob Taft, coworkers, and friends to illegally pour thousands of dollars into the effort to reelect President Bush.

Noe entered a guilty plea before U.S. District Court Judge David Katz in Toledo to all three felony charges he faced for violating federal campaign finance law.

With the admission, Noe faces a maximum of five years in prison on each count, but likely faces 24-30 months in prison. He also faces a potential fine of nearly $1 million, and possibly probation.

John Pearson, an assistant U.S. Attorney in the public integrity section of the Justice Department, said he would seek an even harsher penalty for Noe because of the "potential loss of public faith in the presidential race."

The Noe probe identified several current and former politicians as "conduits," including Toledo City Councilman Betty Shultz, Lucas County Commissioner Maggie Thurber, former Toledo mayor Donna Owens, and former state representative Sally Perz.

All face potential state ethics charges for failing to disclose the money from Noe. He still faces more than four dozen other charges in Lucas County Common Pleas Court on allegations that he stole millions of dollars from two rare-coin funds he managed for the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation.

Continue reading this article...

Cosmos   •   Tags:   Politics · Ohio Politics · Tom Noe · Ohio Corruption · George W Bush · Culture Of Corruption · CoinGate

Take Action! -- Take Back America! - Indictment & Impeachment!

Laws violated by President George W. Bush, Vice-President Richard Cheney, public officials under their authority, and members of the U.S. military under their command, sufficient for impeachment.

The U. S. Constitution, Art. VI, para. 2, makes treaties adopted by the U.S. part of the “law of the land.” Thus, a violation of the U. N. Charter, Hague IV, Geneva Conventions, etc. is also a violation of U.S. federal law.

U.S. Federal Law 18 U.S.C. § 2441 (War Crimes Act of 1996) makes committing a war crime, defined as: " ...a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party... " punishable by fine, imprisonment, or death.

The following treaties and charters which define: wars of aggression, war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity.

Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague IV)

Art. 55. The occupying State shall be regarded only as administrator…of public buildings, real estate, forests, and agricultural estates belonging to the hostile State, and situated in the occupied country. It must safeguard the capital of these properties, and administer them in accordance with the rules of usufruct.

U.N. Gen. Assembly Res. 3314

Defines the crime of aggression as "... the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State... or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations..."

Nuremberg Tribunal Charter

(a) Crimes against peace: Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties;

(b) War crimes: ...murder, ill-treatment... of civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war, ...plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages...

(c) Crimes against humanity: Murder, extermination... and other inhuman acts done against any civilian population... when such acts are done... in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime."

Geneva Conventions

A) Protocol I, Article 75: "(1)...persons who are in the power of a Party to the conflict... shall be treated humanely in all circumstances... (2) The following acts are and shall remain prohibited... whether committed by civilian or by military agents: (a) violence to the life, health, or physical or mental well-being of persons... (b) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment, enforced prostitution and any form of indecent assault…and threats to commit any of the foregoing acts."

B) Protocol I, Art. 51: "The civilian population... shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited." Art. 57: (parties shall) "do everything feasible to verify that the objectives to be attacked are neither civilians nor civilian objects…an attack shall be cancelled or suspended if it becomes apparent that the objective is not a military one..."

C) Protocol I, Art. 70: "The Parties to the conflict... shall allow and facilitate rapid and unimpeded passage of all relief consignments, equipment and personnel... even if such assistance is destined for the civilian population of the adverse Party."

D) Protocol I, Art. 35: "In any armed conflict, the right of the Parties... to choose methods or means of warfare is not unlimited... It is prohibited to employ methods or means of warfare which are intended, or may be expected, to cause widespread, long-term and severe damage to the environment."

E) Convention I, Art. 3: "Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down theirarms... shall in all circumstances be treated humanely... To this end, the following acts (in addition to those listed in Art. 75, above) are and shall remain prohibited: ...the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."

F) Convention III, Art. 5: "Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy (are prisoners of war under this Convention), such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal."

G) Convention IV, Art. 33: "No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited."

Cosmos   •   Tags:   Politics · Impeach Bush Coalition · Veterans For Peace · George W Bush · US Constitution · Geneva Conventions · UN Charter · Nuremberg Tribunal Charter

Now, the White House's top spymaster can cite national security to exempt businesses from reporting requirements

President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the untrained eye.

Unbeknownst to almost all of Washington and the financial world, Bush and every other President since Jimmy Carter have had the authority to exempt companies working on certain top-secret defense projects from portions of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. Administration officials told BusinessWeek that they believe this is the first time a President has ever delegated the authority to someone outside the Oval Office. It couldn't be immediately determined whether any company has received a waiver under this provision.

The timing of Bush's move is intriguing. On the same day the President signed the memo, Porter Goss resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency amid criticism of ineffectiveness and poor morale at the agency. Only six days later, on May 11, USA Today reported that the National Security Agency had obtained millions of calling records of ordinary citizens provided by three major U.S. phone companies. Negroponte oversees both the CIA and NSA in his role as the administration's top intelligence official.

AUTHORITY GRANTED. William McLucas, the Securities & Exchange Commission's former enforcement chief, suggested that the ability to conceal financial information in the name of national security could lead some companies "to play fast and loose with their numbers." McLucas, a partner at the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr in Washington, added: "It could be that you have a bunch of books and records out there that no one knows about."

The memo Bush signed on May 5, which was published seven days later in the Federal Register, had the unrevealing title "Assignment of Function Relating to Granting of Authority for Issuance of Certain Directives: Memorandum for the Director of National Intelligence." In the document, Bush addressed Negroponte, saying: "I hereby assign to you the function of the President under section 13(b)(3)(A) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended."

A trip to the statute books showed that the amended version of the 1934 act states that "with respect to matters concerning the national security of the United States," the President or the head of an Executive Branch agency may exempt companies from certain critical legal obligations. These obligations include keeping accurate "books, records, and accounts" and maintaining "a system of internal accounting controls sufficient" to ensure the propriety of financial transactions and the preparation of financial statements in compliance with "generally accepted accounting principles."

Cosmos   •   Tags:   Politics · SEC · Presidential Powers · Bush Administration · BusinessWeek Online

Former AT&T technician Mark Klein is the key witness in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class-action lawsuit against the telecommunications company, which alleges that AT&T cooperated in an illegal National Security Agency domestic surveillance program.

In a public statement Klein issued last month, he described the NSA's visit to an AT&T office. In an older, less-public statement recently acquired by Wired News, Klein goes into additional details of his discovery of an alleged surveillance operation in an AT&T building in San Francisco.

Klein supports his claim by attaching excerpts of three internal company documents: a Dec. 10, 2002, manual titled "Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco," a Jan. 13, 2003, document titled "SIMS, Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure" and a second "Cut-In and Test Procedure" dated Jan. 24, 2003.

Here we present Klein's statement in its entirety, with inline links to all of the document excerpts where he cited them. You can also download the complete file here (pdf). The full AT&T documents are filed under seal in federal court in San Francisco.

Cosmos   •   Tags:   Politics · SpyGate · NSA · Domestic Spying · Illegal Wiretaps · Bush Administration · Wired News

LISTENING IN
by Seymour M. Hersh

Posted 2006-05-22

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was clear that the intelligence community needed to get more aggressive and improve its performance. The Administration, deciding on a quick fix, returned to the tactic that got intelligence agencies in trouble thirty years ago: intercepting large numbers of electronic communications made by Americans. The N.S.A.'s carefully constructed rules were set aside.

The N.S.A. also programmed computers to map the connections between telephone numbers in the United States and suspect numbers abroad, sometimes focussing on a geographic area, rather than on a specific person-for example, a region of Pakistan. Such calls often triggered a process, known as "chaining," in which subsequent calls to and from the American number were monitored and linked. The way it worked, one high-level Bush Administration intelligence official told me, was for the agency "to take the first number out to two, three, or more levels of separation, and see if one of them comes back"-if, say, someone down the chain was also calling the original, suspect number. As the chain grew longer, more and more Americans inevitably were drawn in.

But the point, obviously, was to identify terrorists. "After you hit something, you have to figure out what to do with it," the Administration intelligence official told me. The next step, theoretically, could have been to get a suspect’s name and go to the fisa court for a warrant to listen in. One problem, however, was the volume and the ambiguity of the data that had already been generated. ("There's too many calls and not enough judges in the world," the former senior intelligence official said.) The agency would also have had to reveal how far it had gone, and how many Americans were involved. And there was a risk that the court could shut down the program.

Instead, the N.S.A. began, in some cases, to eavesdrop on callers (often using computers to listen for key words) or to investigate them using traditional police methods. A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or the other. "In the old days, you needed probable cause to listen in," the consultant explained. "But you could not listen in to generate probable cause. What they're doing is a violation of the spirit of the law." One C.I.A. officer told me that the Administration, by not approaching the FISA court early on, had made it much harder to go to the court later.

On May 11th, President Bush, responding to the USA Today story, said, "If Al Qaeda or their associates are making calls into the United States, or out of the United States, we want to know what they are saying." That is valid, and a well-conceived, properly supervised intercept program would be an important asset. "Nobody disputes the value of the tool," the former senior intelligence official told me. "It's the unresolved tension between the operators saying, 'Here's what we can build,' and the legal people saying, 'Just because you can build it doesn't mean you can use it.' "It's a tension that the President and his advisers have not even begun to come to terms with.



Note :: Added emphasis - mine

Cosmos   •   Tags:   Politics · SpyGate · NSA · Domestic Spying · Illegal Wiretaps · Bush Administration · Seymour Hersh

Consumers Union.org

FDA gets failing grade on protecting patient safety
Congress needs to act now!

The government's own investigative arm has found that the FDA has no clear policy for dealing with drug safety problems, and doesn't even have any real power to require drug makers to conduct safety studies when needed.

In fact, investigators found when a drug safety problem comes to light, the FDA lacks a system for deciding what actions to take and when.

So serious is the problem that the Government Accountability Office is recommending that Congress expand the FDA's authority over drug companies. Yet bills that would give the agency that power, as well as require drug studies be made public, languish on Capitol Hill.

Tell Congress you want to know why they aren't making drug safety a priority. Two bi-partisan bills that would require drug companies to release studies showing dangerous side effects, conduct further safety studies when problems arise, and allow quicker FDA safety warning labeling haven’t even had a hearing.

Act now! Ask Congress to hold hearings and vote on these bills, so we can have faith that the FDA is putting patient safety first.

Cosmos   •   Tags:   Politics · Drug Safety · FDA · Food and Drug Administration Safety Act · Fair Access to Clinical Trials Act · Drug Companies · Pharmaceutical Companies · Bush Administration

TIA (aka Topsail) unveiled: the real scope of the NSA's domestic spying program

5/11/2006 by Hannibal

Communications metadata and The Big Database in the Sky

The new USA Today article reveals that the NSA has been collecting and archiving "transactional information" on all domestic calls made within the US—who called whom, when, from where, etc. The transactional data is acquired from cooperating telcos (AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth, but not Qwest) and fed it into a massive database so that the NSA can analyze the collected calling patterns for clues as to possible terrorist activity. Contrary to what the government has publicly claimed about the NSA's massive signals intelligence (SIGINT) vacuum, there is no requirement here that one end of the call be located in a foreign country; we're talking about calls between me and my grandmother, and in fact about every call I've ever made over the past few years.

Probable cause

You might recall from our earlier coverage of a related instance of law enforcement overreach that government access to phone call transactional data is regulated by 18 USC 2703, which stipulates that the government doesn't need to show "probable cause" when petitioning for a court order to obtain this information on a customer. The standard that the government must meet is set at a lower threshold than probable cause, but it's not set at zero.

Crucially, the NSA's data-mining program not only dispenses with probable cause, but it dispenses entirely with the court order and thus with the lowered standard of evidence.

Think about that for a moment: the program is secret, and there is no judicial or congressional oversight (as of today, there's not even any executive branch oversight from the Justice Department), so the national security establishment has arrogated to itself carte blanche to snoop your phone activity and possibly to detain you indefinitely without a warrant based on what they find.

More to come

The original revelations about the NSA's SIGINT vacuum were just the tip of the iceberg, and the new revelations show us just a little bit more of the beast. Based on a few fairly recent stories we've run here at Ars, it appears there's probably more that we've yet to see. Much more.

Exhibit A is the story I linked above, about the feds getting a judicial ruling that extends the definition of "transactional information" to the data about your physical location that cell phone records contain. Law enforcement can now track your physical location via your cell phone without showing probable cause, so the precedent here is that, in the absence of clear laws governing this specific type of data (i.e., cell phone location data) the definition of "transactional data" is being stretched to fit new types of communications "metadata."

Now let's look at Exhibit B, which is an article on an AT&T whistleblower who spilled the beans on the NSA's secret surveillance rooms at major telco hubs. Inside these surveillance rooms is NSA network traffic analysis equipment, which is hooked into the fiber optic feeds of the main network via splitters that can siphon off signal for the NSA to snoop. The NSA then passes this siphoned signal through some heavy-duty traffic analysis equipment from a company called Narus. Here are just a few things that one of the Narus products can do, according to the product web page:

* Universal data collection from links, routers, soft switches, IDS/IPS, databases, etc. provides total network view across the world's largest IP networks.
* Normalization, Correlation, Aggregation and Analysis provide a comprehensive and detailed model of user, element, protocol, application and network behaviors, in real time.
* Unparalleled extensibility - NarusInsight's functionality can easily be configured to feed a particular activity or IP service such as security, lawful intercept or even Skype detection and blocking.

And here's what the "intercept suite" add-on module lets you do with this device:

* CALEA- and ETSI-compliant modules for lawful intercept featuring a robust warrant management system. Capabilities include playback of streaming media (for example, VoIP), rendering of Web pages, examination of e-mails and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols.
* Proprietary directed analysis monitoring and surveillance module offering seamless integration with the NSS or other DDoS, intrusion or anomaly detection systems, securely providing analysts with real-time, surgical targeting of suspect information (from flow to application to full packets).

USA, meet TIA
Let's recap:

* Law enforcement has shown that they consider any transactional data arising from voice communications—either POTS (plain old telephone system), cellular, or VoIP—to be fair game and to be covered by a much lower threshold than "probable cause." * In the absence of up-to-date laws, the POTS-based definition of "transactional information" is being stretched to fit new forms of data arising from new forms of communication (e.g. location data arising from cell phone calls). * The NSA, for its part, has gone further and demonstrated that they consider such transactional data to be theirs to snoop, aggregate, and mine without any kind of court order at all. * This transactional data can be correlated to specific end users by indexing their phone number(s) into a wide array of commercially available databases that cover many other aspects of our financial and private lives. * The NSA also has in place the ability to collect "transactional information" for IP-based communications, like Web sessions, email, FTP, VoIP, and more.

Now, does anyone seriously think that the NSA is not collecting transactional data (at a minimum) for Web, email, FTP and other IP-based communications, and/or that they're not tying all of this data to individual users?

Just in case you're not convinced that the NSA is, right now—not at some unspecified point in the future, but at this very moment—compiling a complete and customized voice and data communications profile of every US citizen and mining all of those profiles for "terrorist activity," take a look at these paragraphs from a 2002 Wired article that we linked in this post.

It's a system which, it hopes, will ferret out terrorists' information signatures -- clues available before an attack, but usually not correctly interpreted until afterwards -- and decode them prior to an assault...

According to the IAO's blueprint, TIA's five-year goal is the "total reinvention of technologies for storing and accessing information ... although database size will no longer be measured in the traditional sense, the amounts of data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes."

Our own coverage also pulled this quote from the now-defunct DARPA page for TIA:

According to DARPA, such data collection "increases information coverage by an order of magnitude," and ultimately "requires keeping track of individuals and understanding how they fit into models."

The USA Today report, in conjunction with other reports on the nature and scope of the NSA's communications surveillance activities, paints a picture of a massive data collection program that is in operation right now and is essentially an implementation of the very same TIA initiative that Congress has repeatedly tried to stop. Contrary to what DARPA claimed when they publicly started taking bids from companies to get involved with TIA, this program apparently does not require some "revolutionary" technology that's years in the future. It is being done now, with today's technology.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention. Earlier this year, we linked a Newsweek article that reported that TIA was still around in the form of a program called Topsail. Late last month, Technology Review reported that this program had at some point been moved from DARPA to the NSA, and magazine asked the question:

"Has the NSA been employing those TIA technologies in its surveillance within the United States? And what exactly is the agency doing, anyway?"

Well, now we know that the answer to the former question is a definitive "yes," and we have parts of the answer to the latter question.

Continue Reading this article...

Cosmos   •   Tags:   Politics · TIA · Total Information Awareness · Topsail · NSA · DARPA · Domestic Spying · Customer Phone Numbers · Narus · PhoneGate · Bush Administration

Karl Rove Indicted on Charges of Perjury, Lying to Investigators

By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report

Saturday 13 May 2006

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than half a day Friday at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm representing Karl Rove.

During the course of that meeting, Fitzgerald served attorneys for former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove with an indictment charging the embattled White House official with perjury and lying to investigators related to his role in the CIA leak case, and instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 hours to get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said Saturday morning.

Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, did not return a call for comment. Sources said Fitzgerald was in Washington, DC, Friday and met with Luskin for about 15 hours to go over the charges against Rove, which include perjury and lying to investigators about how and when Rove discovered that Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert CIA operative and whether he shared that information with reporters, sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said.

It was still unknown Saturday whether Fitzgerald charged Rove with a more serious obstruction of justice charge. Sources close to the case said Friday that it appeared very likely that an obstruction charge against Rove would be included with charges of perjury and lying to investigators.

An announcement by Fitzgerald is expected to come this week, sources close to the case said. However, the day and time is unknown. Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the special prosecutor was unavailable for comment. In the past, Samborn said he could not comment on the case.

The grand jury hearing evidence in the Plame Wilson case met Friday on other matters while Fitzgerald spent the entire day at Luskin's office. The meeting was a closely guarded secret and seems to have taken place without the knowledge of the media.

Cosmos   •   Tags:   Politics · PlameGate · Rove · Valerie Wilson · Bush Administration

Dear Representative,

•   I respectfully ask you to vote AGAINST the COPE Act of 2006 (HR5252). This damaging and poorly designed legislation will negatively impact life for tens of millions of Americans in every community of our country.

1) Please vote against the COPE Act or any legislation that weakens or ends Public, Educational and Governmental (PEG) TV! PEG TV is a cornerstone of local government, education, and our democracy - any new telecommunication laws must guarantee current or increased levels of funding for Public Access TV - and current or increased numbers of channels!

2) Please vote against the COPE Act or any legislation that does not guarantee local control and local design of PEG TV - PEG TV is America's local television service, it must reflect the needs the local communities!

3) Please vote against the COPE Act or any legislation that does not include Build Out requirements - preventing the 'redlining' of low income, rural and minority communities - these communities must have equal access to data, voice and video services!

4) Please vote against the COPE Act or any legislation that does not contain Net Neutrality requirements - the Internet must continue to carry content equally and democratically - and continue to be a marketplace-of-ideas for all people!

Other Actions to Save Our Internets
Save Access
Assoc For Community Networking
Save The Internet
FreePress :: Net Freedom Now
FreePress :: Stop Fake News
MoveOn :: Save The Internet
Consumers Union :: Save The Internets
Common Cause :: Provisions of COPE
'Clear And Present Danger' For Telecom Reform Bill
Benton Foundation :: Senate Telcom Bill
New Telephony :: Telcom Reform Bill

Cosmos   •   Tags:   Politics · Congress · Save The Internet · Net Neutrality · PEG TV · COPE · Telecom Reform Bill

Tell Ney, Jefferson, Doolittle and Burns to resign

I am writing to ask that you resign from your Congressional position immediately so the public can elect honest replacements.

The best thing for you to do right now is to come clean, confess to any illegal or unethical acts you committed, and ask for forgiveness from the American people.

If you do not resign, the scandals will continue to swirl around you - impairing your ability to represent the public. For the good of your constituents, and the country, I urge you to resign from Congress immediately.

Cosmos   •   Tags:   Politics · Congress · Corruption

Let's Impeach The President
by Neil Young

Let's impeach the president for lying
And leading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door

He's the man who hired all the criminals
The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors
And bend the facts to fit with their new stories
Of why we have to send our men to war

Let's impeach the president for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones

What if Al Qaeda blew up the levees
Would New Orleans have been safer that way
Sheltered by our government's protection
Or was someone just not home that day?

Let's impeach the president
For hijacking our religion and using it to get elected
Dividing our country into colors
And still leaving black people neglected

Thank god he's cracking down on steroids
Since he sold his old baseball team
There's lot of people looking at big trouble
But of course the president is clean
Thank God

Impeach Bush Links
Don't Attack Iran.org Impeach Bush Coalition ImpeachPAC.org	Impeach Bush.org ImpeachCentral.com Imprison Bush

Cosmos   •   Tags:   Politics · Impeachment Links · Impeach Bush · Bush Adinistration

Cosmos   •   Tags:   Politics · Signing Statements · Unitary President · Bush Adinistration