CHICAGO -- The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is examining the use of RFID-tagged airline boarding passes that could allow passenger tracking within airports, a proposal some privacy advocates called a potentially "outrageous" violation of civil liberties.

Anthony "Buzz" Cerino, communications security technology lead at the TSA . . . spoke earlier this week at the RFID Journal Executive Conference here and said widespread use of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips boarding passes could enhance airport security by allowing security personnel to track all passengers in an airport. The RFID boarding passes would let security personnel "know people's whereabouts," Cerino said.

Cerino didn't say when or if the TSA would push for introduction of the RFID boarding passes or how such a project -- likely to require a massive, networked infrastructure -- would be funded.

The TSA has already started to work on deploying RFID boarding passes in Africa . . .

The government has decided not to warn parents a mercury-laced preservative virtually eliminated from other vaccines because of health concerns will be included in flu shots given to hundreds of thousands of infants and toddlers this fall.

The decision by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend the shots with the preservative thimerosal ? despite the pleas of parent activist groups ? apparently conflicts with recent federal heath warnings about exposure to mercury, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Thimerosal is about 50 percent ethyl Mercury, a potent neurotoxin
[...]
Rep. David Weldon, R-Fla., said the CDC's actions constitute "medical malpractice."

The congressman, a physician, plans to introduce a bill to ban thimerosal in childhood vaccines.

An Iraqi defector nicknamed Curveball who wrongly claimed that Saddam Hussein had mobile chemical weapons factories was last night at the centre of a bitter row between the CIA and Germany's intelligence agency.

German officials said that they had warned American colleagues well before the Iraq war that Curveball's information was not credible - but the warning was ignored.

It was the Iraqi defector's testimony that led the Bush administration to claim that Saddam had built a fleet of trucks and railway wagons to produce anthrax and other deadly germs.

In his presentation to the UN security council in February last year, the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, explicitly used Curveball's now discredited claims as justification for war. The Iraqis were assembling "mobile production facilities for biological agents", Mr Powell said, adding that his information came from "a solid source".

It has now emerged that Curveball is the brother of a top aide of Ahmad Chalabi, the pro-western Iraqi former exile with links to the Pentagon.

US and British intelligence officials have acknowledged since the war that much of the information supplied by Mr Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and other Iraqi groups was wrong. Yesterday, German sources said they were bemused by the idea that they had tricked the US. "We ask ourselves, what are they on about?" one said.

Legislation giving regulators the power to take over mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac if they became insolvent narrowly won approval Thursday in a partisan vote by a Senate panel. Prospects for Senate passage appeared dim, however.

The White House had urged such a provision for putting the two government-sponsored companies into receivership, as part of legislation tightening the reins on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and creating a new federal regulator to oversee them. The Republican-written bill was adopted by the Senate Banking Committee, 12-9, mostly along party lines.

The debate over receivership was kindled in February when Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warned that Fannie Mae and smaller rival Freddie Mac could pose a threat to the U.S. financial system if their ability to assume new debt isn't restrained.

A public inquiry set to begin in the next few weeks in Canada may reveal long-hidden secrets about the abuses of America's war on terror. Headed by a judge, it will investigate why Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was flying home to Montreal in 2002, was detained by the U.S. authorities at JFK Airport, and then escorted through Jordan to Syria, where he said he was tortured and kept in a grave-like cell for 10 months. Arar was finally cleared by a Syrian court and sent back to Canada, where he hasn't been charged with any crime.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents Arar in the U.S., filed a lawsuit on his behalf in late January that they have said is the first to challenge the legality of rendition.

"[F]ederal officials removed Mr. Arar to Syria under the Government's 'extraordinary renditions' program precisely because Syria could use methods of interrogation to obtain information from Mr. Arar that would not be legally or morally acceptable in this country or in other democracies," the group charged.

"Plenty of renditions were not to the U.S. We just facilitated the renditions," said one former CIA official about terrorism suspects captured by the agency in the 1990s. "We'd arrest them and send them to Jordan or Egypt, and they'd disappear." The men were not brought to the U.S., said the former official, "because the evidence against them would never hold up in court."

"It shouldn't matter whether a person is guilty or not," Arar told the Voice. "A human being should be respected. They should not be sent for torture. The principle behind any free society is due process.

"What is really at stake," he continued, "is the message the U.S. government, which talks about democracy, is sending to third-world countries."

Almost immediately after last Thursday?s attacks, in which at least 200 people were killed, the Justice Department offered to assist the Spanish by dispatching a team of FBI and other U.S. law-enforcement agents to the scene.
But the Spanish government appears to have rejected the U.S. offer and has instead invited other European law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to help in the case?an apparent snub of the Bush administration that U.S. officials tell NEWSWEEK may be an ominous portent for the future.
As a result, U.S. officials say, they have effectively been frozen out of the biggest terrorist case in Europe since September 11, despite mounting evidence that the perpetrators were part of a much larger network of Islamic militants that may well have links to Al Qaeda.....
there is a trail of apparent connections between some of the suspects and known terrorist networks such as Moroccan Salafists and Ansar Al-Islam that have links to Al Qaeda.....
The key suspect arrested so far in the case, a Moroccan cell-phone salesman named Jamal Zougam, had first come to the attention of Spanish authorities as early as two and a half years ago. At that time, police secretly recorded him talking to Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas (also known as Abu Dahdah), the accused leader of an Al Qaeda cell in Spain who has since been indicted in that country for complicity in the September 11 attacks.

"The man chiefly responsible for making connections among this mosaic of activists, militants and sympathizers was Binalshibh, now suspected of being a field coordinator of the Sept. 11 plot. Binalshibh traveled constantly, meeting fellow believers from the Netherlands, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf....
One week the members were intent on fighting in Kosovo, the next in Chechnya. They wanted to fight; they didn't know which war."

"the Salafi Jihadi projects bin Laden, the blind sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the founder of the Egyptian al-Gama al-Islamiya, now undergoing imprisonment in the US in connection with the New York World Trade Center explosion of February,1993...as worthy of emulation.
The Salafi Jihadi...is headed by Ahmed Raffiki, a former male nurse of Casablanca. In the 1980s and the 1990s, he was active as a recruiter of volunteers from Morocco for the jihad in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Dagestan, Bosnia and Kosovo."

A [brilliant] professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has suggested using radio tags in credit cards as a kind of virtual signature.

Professor Ted Selker said the way someone moved their finger over the card would alter the radio transmission, producing a signal unique to that person.

Mastercard has been experimenting with the technology, known as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). Last year it ran a nine-month pilot in the US, involving some 15,000 consumers.

Selker said, "Wouldn't it be nice if something better than my signature would be transmitted without me having to use an external device?"

Civil rights groups have expressed concerns about RFID technology for some time. They worry it means people could, in theory, be tracked by the tags.

"You don't necessarily want a credit card that can be detected when you are not using it," said technology expert Bill Thompson. "You want a button that can turn it off or on."

"Otherwise imagine if you are a thief, you just wander around with a RFID detector looking for people with these credit cards."

BOSTON -- TechEn Inc. has received funding from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) for the development of Continuous Brain Monitoring. TechEn, an electronic design center, received the award for advanced research and further development of a real-time, wireless brain monitoring device, which utilizes near-infrared spectroscopy technology (NIRS). The device measures the change in blood oxygen, allowing researchers to monitor brain activity non-invasively and continuously. This technology offers significant potential for improved understanding of brain functions . . .

Device allows patients to be more comfortable and even mobile, performing various functions as the device collects data continuously in real time.

[CEO:] "The funding provided by DARPA represents significant investment, paving the way for breakthroughs in brain research. Within a very short period of time, we have made great strides in technological advancements in brain monitoring instruments."

On Wednesday, four U.S. contractors were brutally murdered in Fallujah. They all worked for a private military contractor firm called Blackwater, which has boasted that it wants to build the largest private army in the world. It marked the most gruesome attack on U.S. interests captured on film since the start of the US Invasion.

Blackwater is one of a growing number of for-profit companies hired by the U.S. military to do work traditionally performed by soldiers. In August of last year, Blackwater was awarded a $21 million no-bid contract to supply security guards and two helicopters for Paul Bremer, the head of the U.S. occupation in Iraq. The company also provides security for food shipments in the Fallujah area.


BARRY YEOMAN (Mother Jones): Blackwater is a small player in a very big field. We have seen ten-fold growth in private military firms since 1991 when we were in the first Gulf War, we typically hear about Halliburton and Dyncorp. They really are big players. However, Blackwater is a small company that has very big dreams. It was founded by a group of Navy Seals. It's headed by a former Navy Seal, who told me his goal was to build the largest private army in the world. He has talked about expanding to serve militaries in France and other places, and right now has contracts that he says are so secret that he is not able to tell one branch of the Feds that he's working for a different branch of the Feds. They provide all sorts of military services. As you know, with no-bid contracts sometimes. They stop short of combat, but it's often hard to see the line between what's combat and what's not combat.

The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks isn't getting a full picture of former President Bill Clinton's terrorism policies because the Bush administration won't forward all of Clinton's records to the panel, a lawyer said.

Though presidential records are sealed by law for five years after a president leaves office, an exception was made to allow early access for the Sept. 11 commission. But the National Security Council and Bush administration attorneys decided to turn over just a fraction of Clinton's documents, Bruce Lindsey (Clinton's legal representive) said.

Jim Hoffman has discovered a document which I believe may be very important to the 911 skeptic movement. This document superseded earlier DOD procedures for dealing with hijacked aircraft, and it requires that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is personally responsible for issuing intercept orders. Commanders in the field are stripped of all authority to act. This amazing order came from S.A. Fry (Vice Admiral, US Navy and Director, Joint Staff) so it appears to me that responsibility for the US armed forces "Failure to Respond" rests directly with Fry for issuing this instruction, as well as with Donald Rumsfeld for failing to execute his responsibility to issue orders in a timely fashion.


Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction CJCSI 3610.01A (dated 1 June 2001) was issued for the purpose of providing "guidance to the Deputy Director for Operations (DDO), National Military Command Center (NMCC), and operational commanders in the event of an aircraft piracy (hijacking) or request for destruction of derelict airborne objects." This new instruction superseded CJCSI 3610.01 of 31 July 1997.

This CJCSI states that "In the event of a hijacking, the NMCC will be notified by the most expeditious means by the FAA. The NMCC will, with the exception of immediate responses asauthorized by reference d, forward requests for DOD assistance to the Secretary of Defense for approval."

Reference D refers to Department of Defense Directive 3025.15 (Feb. 18, 1997) which allows for commanders in the field to provide assistance to save lives in an emergency situation -- BUT any requests involving "potentially lethal support" (including "combat and tactical vehicles, vessels or aircraft; or ammunition") must still be approved by the Secretary of Defense. So again, the ability to respond to a hijacking in any meaningful fashion, is stripped from the commanders in the field.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction CJCSI 3610.01A - AIRCRAFT PIRACY (HIJACKING) AND DESTRUCTION OF DERELICT
AIRBORNE OBJECTS