POST CONSTITUTIONAL AMERICA

YET ANOTHER REASON NOT TO FLY

REBECCA MORELLE, BBC NEWS - Electronically tagging passengers at
airports could help the fight against terrorism, scientists have said.
The prototype technology is to be tested at an airport in Hungary, and
could, if successful, become a reality "in two years". . . . Dr Paul
Brennan, an electrical engineer, is leading the tagging project, known
as Optag. He said: "The basic idea is that airports could be fitted with
a network of combined panoramic cameras and RFID (radio frequency ID)
tag readers, which would monitor the movements of people around the
various terminal buildings.". . . The tags do not store any data, but
emit a signal containing a unique ID which could be cross-referenced
with passenger identification information. In the future, added Dr
Brennan, this could incorporate biometric data. . .

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6044310.stm

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

ARMY CENSORING TROOP WEBSITES BIG TIME

DEFENSE TECH - "Big Brother is not watching you, but 10 members of a
Virginia National Guard unit might be," according to the Army. The
Manassas-based Guardsmen are on a one-year assignment to clamp down on
both "official and unofficial Army Web sites for operational security
violations."

The team, working "under the direction of the Army Web Risk Assessment
Cell" hunts for "documents, pictures and other items that may compromise
security" -- and then orders the parties to take the offensive content
offline. Not that the material is top secret or anything, an Army News
Service article notes.

The most common operational security violations found on official sites
are For Official Use Only FOUO documents and limited distribution
documents, as well as home addresses, birthdates and home phone numbers.

Unofficial blogs often show pictures with sensitive information in the
background, including classified documents, entrances to camps or
weapons. One soldier showed his ammo belt, on which the tracer pattern
was easily identifiable.

Since the relatively wide-open days following the Iraq invasion in 2003,
the Pentagon has been slowly tightening the screws on military bloggers.
Officers started busting frontline diarists for their websites. In Iraq,
new rules required bloggers to check with their commanders before
posting. Then, in August, a message came highest levels of the military
that "EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY, NO INFORMATION MAY BE PLACED ON WEBSITES
THAT ARE READILY ACCESSIBLE TO THE PUBLIC UNLESS IT HAS BEEN REVIEWED
FOR SECURITY CONCERNS AND APPROVED IN ACCORDANCE WITH DEPUTY SECRETARY
OF DEFENSE MEMORANDUM WEB SITE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES, DECEMBER 7,
1998."

"So much for military blogging," said one officer, deployed in Iraq,
when the ruling came down. Not that the officer -- an active blogger
back in the States -- was doing much public writing while on the front
lines. "The Army's guidance on OPSEC has been broad and ambiguous enough
to chill my speech," he wrote to me. "Discretion is clearly the better
part of valor where OPSEC rules are concerned, because the sensitivity
of any particular detail is in the eye of the beholder."

Other soldiers, even ones stationed back home, took similar measures.

As of today, May 5th, 2006, I am officially shutting down my blog...
There are certin [sic] commands out there that do NOT want me to blog...
they have been trying very hard to find out who I am and shut me down...
I really don't want to end my military career over a blog - it has
gotten THAT bad!

Others -- thousands of others -- have continued on, trying to stay
within the rules. . .

http://www.defensetech.org/

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

MOST AMERICANS DON'T CARE ABOUT CIVIL LIBERTIES COLLAPSE

CNN - Most Americans do not believe the Bush administration has gone
too far in restricting civil liberties as part of the war on terror, a
new CNN poll released Thursday suggests. While 39 percent of the 1,013
poll respondents said the Bush administration has gone too far, 34
percent said they believe the administration has been about right on the
restrictions, according to the Opinion Research Corp. survey. Another 25
percent said the administration has not gone far enough.

Asked whether Bush has more power than any other U.S. president, 65
percent of poll respondents said no. Thirty-three percent said yes. Of
those who said yes, a quarter said that was bad for the country.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/10/25/poll.bush/index.html

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||