ACLU

The documents, released yesterday by the American Civil Liberties Union ahead of a lawsuit, total nearly 10,000 pages of courts martial summaries, transcripts and military reports about 22 incidents.

The killings include the drowning of a man soldiers pushed from a bridge into the Tigris river as punishment for breaking curfew, and the suffocation during interrogation of a former Iraqi general believed to be helping insurgents.

WASHINGTON -- The United States is threatened by its fetish for secrecy, an expanding and often arbitrary impulse that adds 40,000 new documents each day to the federal government's mountain of "classified" papers. That conclusion comes not from the ACLU or Moveon.org, though both organizations agree. It comes from Rep. Dave Reichert, a Republican from Bellevue and a former King County sheriff who is working on legislation that would refine the government's process for deciding which documents remain secret.

Bob Denny had no idea there was a “black box” in his late model car. “I’ve heard of them on airplanes but wasn’t aware of them on cars,” said the retired State Farm Insurance Cos. employee.

Denny, who was waiting for his car at a Bloomington-Normal auto repair shop, isn’t alone.

“I think it’s a safe assumption that many people don’t know,” said Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which will require manufacturers to notify vehicle owners of the presence of devices by 2011.

 

A Williams Elementary-Middle School newsletter has raised student privacy concerns with at least one Williams resident and attracted the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona.

The November 2006 edition of the newsletter contained an announcement under "Cafeteria News" that the school would soon begin using fingerprint scanning technology to identify students in the school lunch line.

The government's top intelligence agency is building a computerized system to search very large stores of information for patterns of activity that look like terrorist planning. The system, which is run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is in the early research phases and is being tested, in part, with government intelligence that may contain information on U.S. citizens and other people inside the country.

It encompasses existing profiling and detection systems, including those that create "suspicion scores" for suspected terrorists by analyzing very large databases of government intelligence, as well as records of individuals' private communications, financial transactions, and other everyday activities.

1. Why is the United States government spending millions of dollars to track down critics of George W. Bush in the press? And why have major American universities agreed to put this technology of tyranny into the state's hands?

At the most basic level, of course, both questions are easily answered: 1) Power. 2) Money. The Bush administration wants to be able to root out—and counteract—any dissenting noises that might put a crimp in its ongoing crusade for "full spectrum dominance" of global affairs, while the august institutions of higher learning involved—the universities of Cornell, Pittsburgh and Utah—crave the federal green that keeps them in clover.