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 July 24 2001


By Ed Sutherland, www.NewsFactor.com
A measure requiring U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials to provide detailed reports on its use of the controversial Internet wiretap technique formerly known as Carnivore was passed Monday by the U.S. House of Representatives.



• Carnivore 'No Problem' for New E-Mail Encryption
• House Leader Presses U.S. on E-Mail Surveillance
• Ashcroft To Appoint Internet Privacy Aide -- But No Czar

The U.S. attorney general and FBI director would have to give lawmakers a yearly report showing how many times Carnivore (now renamed DCS1000) was used, for what crimes, where it was installed, and what information was gathered that was had not been okayed by court order.

The surveillance system created by the FBI to monitor suspects' e-mail and Web use has been loudly criticized by privacy advocates for possibly including innocent citizens in an electronic dragnet.

Good First Steps

"Although this is not the end of the story, these are two steps in the right direction," said Representative Dick Armey (R-Texas) of the legislation, which now goes to the Senate for consideration.

Chris Hoofnagle, legislative liaison for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), told NewsFactor Network that he is pleased with Monday's action, but says "greater protection will be needed to protect individual privacy."

Kevin Noonan, a privacy analyst at the Yankee Group, told NewsFactor that increasing the reporting required is a fine idea.

"Basically, [the legislation] keeps the animals at bay," Noonan told NewsFactor. "It gets the government into protecting the Internet backbone."

Used 25 Times

The FBI claims Carnivore had been used around 25 times in counterterrorism, drug trafficking and hacking cases up to September 2000. The agency says the surveillance system has been used in only 10 percent of court-ordered wiretaps, claiming that most of the time Internet service providers (ISPs) comply and use their own equipment.

The FBI would not comment on the proposed legislation. Attorney General John Ashcroft, in Silicon Valley to announce a new cybercrime-fighting initiative Friday, brushed aside questions about Carnivore, saying only that any snooping technology would have to be privacy neutral, according to reports.

"I'm pleased that Attorney General Ashcroft is performing a thorough legal review of Carnivore," Armey said Monday. Armey said the legislation "will provide additional accountability."

Advocates Find Openness

Last fall, a federal judge said the FBI must comply with EPIC's request for documents surrounding Carnivore. In April, David Sobel, general counsel for EPIC, met with Ashcroft.

Hoofnagle told NewsFactor that Ashcroft's appointment of a privacy officer, an internal investigation of Carnivore and his openness with advocacy groups "is contrary to our experience with previous attorneys general."

In November, material sent to EPIC included a letter showing that the FBI asked that Carnivore be tested to see whether the software could intercept and archive unfiltered electronic traffic through an ISP -- and if so, how such a capability could be legitimately used.

The revelation prompted the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee to call for more details from the FBI.

Earlier, the FBI attempted to shake off the Carnivore moniker by renaming the system "DCS1000." FBI spokesperson Paul Bresson in February said the new name had no real meaning.

A review of Carnivore by the Illinois Institute of Technology, commissioned by the U.S. Justice Department and completed last November, said the system was not a privacy concern.

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By Cara Branigan,
Assistant Editor, eSchool News
7-24-1

Starting this fall, some students will buy their lunch simply by looking at a web camera in the school cafeteria and saying their name, thanks to a food service company that is tapping face and voice recognition technology.

The most prevalent biometric authentication used in schools today is fingerprint scanning, but companies such as Food Service Solutions Inc. say they want to avoid the stigma attached to fingerprinting-especially in schools.

"You bring up the word 'fingerprinting,' and there's a connotation," said Mitch Johns, president of Food Service Solutions. In real life and on television, only "bad guys" are fingerprinted after being arrested by the police, Johns said.

"We feel like we're a leader in bringing new technology to the market, and we feel the new system is a more acceptable device," he said.

Some of Food Service's school clients do use fingerprint technology in the cafeteria, but according to feedback from these schools, fingerprinting is still too slow, Johns said. Even though the students don't have to fumble with change or swipe a card with their personal identification number (PIN), they still have to stop and touch the fingerprint reader.

With face and voice recognition, students merely position themselves in front of a web camera attached to computer monitor and say their name or any chosen word. Reportedly, the computer identifies the students instantly and deducts the meals from their accounts.

"For our system, it takes less then two seconds for the whole process," said Jeffrey Buechler, director of sales for BioID America Inc., the company that has partnered with Food Service Solutions on the system.

BioID's biometric authentication software recognizes a user's face, voice, and lip movement simultaneously.

"It measures speed, direction, and flow as you are speaking," Buechler said. "We take lots of points around your face and measure how they move."

To enroll, the student looks at the camera and says his or her name three times for verification. "If I'm saying 'Jeffrey,' I say my name the same way every time," Buechler said.

The software can be set up to add a new recording daily, weekly, or monthly to compensate for students' growth spurts, Buechler said. Students can opt out if they want to; it's completely voluntary.

Like other biometric authentication technologies, face- and voice-recognition technology lets students buy meals at school without cash, passwords, or meal tickets. It also prevents students who participate in the free or reduced-priced lunch program from being identified.

"It will definitely reduce the stigma attached to subsidized lunch programs. No one will know," Buechler said.

Johns said voice recognition keeps pass cards from being forgotten, stolen, or lost. It also remedies the problem of students giving out their PINs.

"Our technology enables kids to get their meals without a password, without PINs, and without cards. There's absolutely nothing for a child to pass to another child," Buechler said.

It's also an easier system for young students. "If you have a kindergarten student, you have to teach them and train them to remember and use the number," Johns said.

If students fool around or try to beat the system, they just won't get lunch.

"You have to want to get authenticated. I could put my hand over my face, but then I wouldn't be identified," Buechler said. "They only have 45 minutes for lunch. I don't think they'll fool around that much."

Privacy concerns

BioID's face and voice recognition system "is unlike other biometrics systems in that it protects users' privacy," Buechler said. An algorithm built into the software program prevents the data from being used for anything else.

"It's taking a photograph and breaking it down into ones and zeroes using a special algorithm, so there's no actual recording kept," Buechler said.

But privacy advocates say face- and voice-recognition technologies raise even greater privacy concerns-and the less information you give to others, the better.

"Privacy advocates always follow the idea that one should minimize the amount of data about oneself held by other parties," said Chris Hoofnagle, legislative counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

According to Hoofnagle, there's not much schools can do to keep this kind of data from the police. "Undoubtedly, law enforcement will enter and ask the school for the student data as soon as a crime occurs," he said.

Earlier this year, at Super Bowl XXXV in Tampa, police used face-recognition technology to match mug shots of wanted criminals with people in the crowd. In a nightlife section of Tampa, called Ybor City, police have set up surveillance so they can continually match people's faces to their archive of wanted criminals.

Hoofnagle worries that by using this technology in school, children will become accustomed to it and will give out this kind of personal information without thinking twice. If they grow up using this technology, perhaps they won't question why the grocery store and government offices use it as well.

"With the use of biometrics, you begin to breed children that are used to the system," Hoofnagle said. "Especially when you start with young people, you can easily begin to [develop] a surveillance state."

Johns doesn't consider this to be an issue in a school setting, because students choose to use the system and are aware that the scanning is taking place.

"In my opinion, giving over [your social security number] can cause far more damage than being in a school lunch line," Johns said. "This type of technology is already here, and its use is going to be more prevalent."

Eventually, Johns said, Food Service Solutions will expand the use of voice- and face-recognition technology to the library and for taking attendance.

Before that happens, the company will see how students respond to the technology. "We will be looking for acceptance from the students, because they are going to have to use it," Johns said.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/showstory.cfm?ArticleID=2839

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Shadow Government Is at Work in Secret
 

By Barton Gellman and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 1, 2002; Page A01

President Bush has dispatched a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work secretly outside Washington, activating for the first time long-standing plans to ensure survival of federal rule after catastrophic attack on the nation's capital.

Execution of the classified "Continuity of Operations Plan" resulted not from the Cold War threat of intercontinental missiles, the scenario rehearsed for decades, but from heightened fears that the al Qaeda terrorist network might somehow obtain a portable nuclear weapon, according to three officials with firsthand knowledge. U.S. intelligence has no specific knowledge of such a weapon, they said, but the risk is thought great enough to justify the shadow government's disruption and expense.

Deployed "on the fly" in the first hours of turmoil on Sept. 11, one participant said, the shadow government has evolved into an indefinite precaution. For that reason, the high-ranking officials representing their departments have begun rotating in and out of the assignment at one of two fortified locations along the East Coast. Rotation is among several changes made in late October or early November, sources said, to the standing directive Bush inherited from a line of presidents reaching back to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Officials who are activated for what some of them call "bunker duty" live and work underground 24 hours a day, away from their families. As it settles in for the long haul, the shadow government has sent home most of the first wave of deployed personnel, replacing them most commonly at 90-day intervals.

The civilian cadre present in the bunkers usually numbers 70 to 150, and "fluctuates based on intelligence" about terrorist threats, according to a senior official involved in managing the program. It draws from every Cabinet department and some independent agencies. Its first mission, in the event of a disabling blow to Washington, would be to prevent collapse of essential government functions.

Assuming command of regional federal offices, officials said, the underground government would try to contain disruptions of the nation's food and water supplies, transportation links, energy and telecommunications networks, public health and civil order. Later it would begin to reconstitute the government.

Known internally as the COG, for "continuity of government," the administration-in-waiting is an unannounced complement to the acknowledged absence of Vice President Cheney from Washington for much of the pastfive months. Cheney's survival ensures constitutional succession, one official said, but "he can't run the country by himself." With a core group of federal managers alongside him, Cheney -- or President Bush, if available -- has the means to give effect to his orders.

While the damage of other terrorist weapons is potentially horrific, officials said, only an atomic device could threaten the nation's fundamental capacity to govern itself. Without an invulnerable backup command structure outside Washington, one official said, a nuclear detonation in the capital "would be 'game over.' "

"We take this issue extraordinarily seriously, and are committed to doing as thorough a job as possible to ensure the ongoing operations of the federal government," said Joseph W. Hagin, White House deputy chief of staff, who declined to discuss details. "In the case of the use of a weapon of mass destruction, the federal government would be able to do its job and continue to provide key services and respond."

The Washington Post agreed to a White House request not to name any of those deployed or identify the two principal locations of the shadow government.

Only the executive branch is represented in the full-time shadow administration. The other branches of constitutional government, Congress and the judiciary, have separate continuity plans but do not maintain a 24-hour presence in fortified facilities.

The military chain of command has long maintained redundant centers of communication and control, hardened against thermonuclear blast and operating around the clock. The headquarters of U.S. Space Command, for example, is burrowed into Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, Colo., and the U.S. Strategic Command staffs a comparable facility under Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.

Civilian departments have had parallel continuity-of-government plans since the dawn of the nuclear age. But they never operated routinely, seldom exercised, and were permitted to atrophy with the end of the Cold War. Sept. 11 marked the first time, according to Bush administration officials, that the government activated such a plan.

Within hours of the synchronized attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Military District of Washington helicopters lifted off with the first wave of evacuated officials.

Witnesses near one of the two evacuation sites reported an influx of single- and twin-rotor transport helicopters, escorted by F-16 fighters, and followed not long afterward by government buses.

According to officials with first-hand knowledge, the Bush administration conceived the move that morning as a temporary precaution, likely to last only days. But further assessment of terrorist risks persuaded the White House to remake the program as a permanent feature of "the new reality, based on what the threat looks like," a senior decisionmaker said.

Few Cabinet-rank principals or their immediate deputies left Washington on Sept. 11, and none remained at the bunkers. Those who form the backup government come generally from the top career ranks, from GS-14 and GS-15 to members of the Senior Executive Service. The White House is represented by a "senior-level presence," one official said, but well below such Cabinet-ranked advisers as Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Many departments, including Justice and Treasury, have completed plans to delegate statutory powers to officials who would not normally exercise them. Others do not need to make such legal transfers, or are holding them in reserve.

Deployed civilians are not permitted to take their families, and under penalty of prosecution they may not tell anyone where they are going or why. "They're on a 'business trip,' that's all," said one official involved in the effort.

The two sites of the shadow government make use of local geological features to render them highly secure. They are well stocked with food, water, medicine and other consumable supplies, and are capable of generating their own power.

But with their first significant operational use, the facilities are showing their age. Top managers arrived at one of them to find computers "several generations" behind those now in use, incapable of connecting to current government databases. There were far too few phone lines. Not many work areas had secure audio and video links to the rest of government. Officials said Card, who runs the program from the White House, has been obliged to order substantial upgrades.

The modern era of continuity planning began under President Ronald Reagan.

On Sept. 16, 1985, Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 188, "Government Coordination for National Security Emergency Preparedness," which assigned responsibility for continuity planning to an interagency panel from Defense, Treasury, Justice and the Office of Management and Budget. He signed additional directives, including Executive Order 12472, for more detailed aspects of the planning.

In Executive Order 12656, signed Nov. 18, 1988, Reagan ordered every Cabinet department to define in detail the "defense and civilian needs" that would be "essential to our national survival" in case of a nuclear attack on Washington. Included among them were legal instruments for "succession to office and emergency delegation of authority."

The military services put these directives in place long before their civilian counterparts. The Air Force, for example, relies on Air Force Instruction 10-208, revised most recently in September 2000.

Civilian agencies gradually developed contingency plans in comparable detail. The Agriculture Department, for example, has plans to ensure continued farm production, food processing, storage and distribution; emergency provision of seed, feed, water, fertilizer and equipment to farmers; and use of Commodity Credit Corp. inventories of food and fiber resources.

What was missing, until Sept. 11, was an invulnerable group of managers with the expertise and resources to administer these programs in a national emergency.

Last Oct. 8, the day after bombing began in Afghanistan, Bush created the Office of Homeland Security with Executive Order 13228. Among the responsibilities he gave its first director, former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, was to "review plans and preparations for ensuring the continuity of the Federal Government in the event of a terrorist attack that threatens the safety and security of the United States Government or its leadership."

Staff researcher Mary Lou White contributed to this report.

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FBI Raids Liberty Dollar

November 16, 2007

Alert Send on Nov 15 2007

US Mint - Paper is legal (Click to View PDF)

Affidavit of Probable Cause (Click to View PDF) NEW! Posted 11/18/2007

Search Warrent (Click to View PDF)

Seizure Warrent (Click to View PDF)

Agent Information (Click to View PDF)

Friday, November 16, 2007: Make no mistake, the FBI and Secret Service raid on the Liberty Dollar at 8:00 AM on Wednesday, was a direct assault against the US Constitution and your right to own and use gold and silver in any way you chose.

I personally spoke to FBI agent Andrew Romagnuolo shortly after he and his gang invaded the peaceful home of the Liberty Dollar. He told me that the raid was related to the US Mint's warning and the beginning of a criminal investigation. This is the first battle of a long war that I intend to win!

Please note the Search Warrant, Seizure Warrant and Agent info is now posted. Click HERE for that info. If that link does not work the URL is: http://www.libertydollar.org/ld/legal/raid.htm.

Also posted is the correspondence between US Senator Bill Nelson of Florida and Edmond C Moy, Director of the US Mint. Of particular interest is Moy's statement that the paper Certificates are not covered by the Title 18, Section 486 and hence legal. So there was no need to raid Sunshine Mint and confiscate all the gold and silver that backs the paper and digital currencies.

No need, unless the government knew their 486 case didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning and needed to expand their case into the never-never land of mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering as mentioned in the Seizure Warrant. I anticipate being arrested on any one or all of these charges.

But I see my arrest and trial as a golden opportunity to win and return our great country to a value based currency. I sincerely believe that the right creative marketer could orchestrate an effective counter attack and win big. I believe the Liberty Dollar will win and become one of the great institutions in America. I have devoted the past ten year to the Liberty Dollar and am willing to risk a few years in federal prison to vindicate it. Winning is certainly possible, even probable with your help.

Winning will require good, dedicated legal support and your support. First, if you are angry and resent the government's assault on your right to own and use gold as you please then call the agents and express your displeasure of their actions in a polite way. Don't kill the messenger, just tell them they are wrong. Add your voice to this movement.

Second: If you are owed an order and want to get your money back or have paper certificates or digital Liberty Dollars, I urge you to demand redemption or the return of your money by joining the Class Action Lawsuit. Your participation is absolutely critical. If you don't join the CAL you will not get your money back. Please click HERE to sign up for the Class Action Lawsuit. If that link does not work, the URL is:
http://www.libertydollar.org/classaction/index.php.

Third: A Legal Defense Fund will be established very soon. Its purpose is to win the criminal case and get your money back. It will take money to make it successful. So your contribution is also critical. Please don't let the government steal your money.

So if you have an existing order, want to redeem your paper Certificates or digital Liberty Dollars, please join the fight to defend our right to own and use gold as you so chose and sign up for the Class Action Lawsuit. This is the only way you will get your stolen property back.

If you have no standing and want to finally get involved, no problem. There is still $20 million Liberty Dollars in circulation. Simply get some paper Liberty Dollars and sign up for the Class Action Lawsuit. There is still time for all the thick-headed Lewrockwellites, Markskousenites, Dougcaseyites and Agoraites to pull your head out and get 'right' on this important issue.

I regret to inform you that the Liberty Dollar office is now closed. The government boys took everything except for the desks and chairs. We have no stock, no records, no money. I can't even change the phone message because they took the phone manuals. Nor can I answer the thousands of email and calls from a national organization that now numbers into the hundreds of thousands. I am the last man standing. I need your help.

Thank you for your many offers of help. Now is the time for us to help our selves and our great country as it faces the greatest monetary challenge since the Revolutionary War. Buying gold and silver is good for you, but it will not solve our country's problems.

Government requires participation. The problems we have today are because our parents did not participate. Please keep using the Liberty Dollar. Keep the ideals and benefits of real money alive. Gold and silver is going to be very rewarding as the US dollar disintegrates. Please join the Class Action Lawsuit and give something to the Legal Defense Fund when it is established.

But you don't have to wait. Donations can be sent to the old address as the mail is now being forwarded. Of course we will still accept Liberty Dollars, but unfortunately due to the current situation, the attorneys require those dreaded depreciating US dollars.

Please make your check or money order out to me as there is no other bank account and mail it to: Liberty Dollar, 225 N. Stockwell Road. Evansville. Indiana. 47715.

Now is the time to band together and support our fight for value based currency as never before. Now is the time to throw off the yoke of a manipulated monetary/tax system and generate a peaceful and prosperous society.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for your offer of help, prayers and support.
The Liberty Dollar and our great country sincerely needs your support.

God bless you and our great country!

Bernard von NotHaus
Monetary Architect

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