Media bidding war starts for Guantanamo ex-detainee

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian David Hicks, the only Guantanamo Bay detainee convicted of terrorism charges, is at the centre of a worldwide media bidding war for his story, with a possible price tag of A$1 million (US$892,000), local media said.

Hicks, 32, has had 30 offers from television and publishing firms in Australia, the United States and Italy, his lawyer told The Australian newspaper.

Media analysts say Hicks' story could fetch A$1 million, the newspaper said on Friday, but Australian laws preventing people profiting from their crimes may deny Hicks any money.

Hicks' father, Terry, told The Australian that most of the money paid for his son's story would be donated to charity, but that he should keep some to compensate for his six years in prison.

Hicks is currently prevented from talking to the media until a U.S.-gag order expires on March 26.

Hicks, who is now free and living in his hometown of Adelaide, was released from an Australian prison in December after spending over six years behind bars, the majority in solitary confinement in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

He was captured in Afghanistan in late 2001 and spent over five years in Guantanamo before becoming the first person to be sentenced under the alternate war crimes tribunals created by President George W. Bush's administration to try non-American captives.

The former kangaroo skinner admitted training with al Qaeda and meeting its leader Osama bin Laden, whom he described as "lovely", according to police evidence given to the court.

Justice Nomination Seen as Snub to Democrats

The Justice Department lawyer who wrote a series of classified legal opinions in 2005 authorizing harsh C.I.A. interrogation techniques was renominated by the White House on Wednesday to a senior department post, a move that was seen as a snub to Senate Democrats who have long opposed his appointment.

The lawyer, Steven G. Bradbury, who has run the department’s Office of Legal Counsel without Senate confirmation for more than two years, has been repeatedly nominated to the job of assistant attorney general for legal counsel.

But the earlier nominations stalled in the Senate because of a dispute with the Justice Department over its failure to provide Congress with copies of legal opinions on a variety of terrorism issues. Under Senate rules that place a time limit on nominations, Mr. Bradbury’s earlier nominations expired.

Late last year, Democrats urged the White House to withdraw Mr. Bradbury’s name once and for all and find a new candidate for the post after it was disclosed in news reports in October that he was the author of classified memorandums that gave approval to harsh interrogation techniques, including head slapping, exposure to cold and simulated drowning, even when used in combination.

Mr. Bradbury’s memorandums were described by Democrats as an effort by the Bush administration to circumvent laws prohibiting torture and to undermine a public legal opinion issued by the Justice Department in 2004 that declared torture to be “abhorrent.”

The department and the White House have insisted that there are no contradictions between Mr. Bradbury’s legal opinions, which are still secret, and laws and rules governing interrogation techniques. A department spokesman, Peter A. Carr, said Wednesday that the department remained eager to see Mr. Bradbury confirmed.

“Steve Bradbury is a dedicated public servant and a superb lawyer, who has led with distinction the department’s Office of Legal Counsel,” Mr. Carr said. “He has proven invaluable to the department, and we will continue to work with the Senate to get him confirmed.”

Joe Shoemaker, a spokesman for Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said that by putting Mr. Bradbury’s name forward again as a nominee, “the president has thumbed his nose at Congress and chosen an individual who has been involved in authorizing some of the most controversial policies of this administration.”

Mr. Durbin led the previous efforts to reject Mr. Bradbury’s nomination and sits on the Judiciary Committee, which would have to approve the nomination.

Mr. Bradbury’s new nomination is almost certain to be a focus of questions next week when Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey is scheduled to appear before the Judiciary Committee for his first public hearing since his confirmation to the job in November.

Mr. Mukasey has suggested that he is a firm supporter of the Bush administration’s tough anti-terrorism policies, and his nomination was nearly derailed over criticism of his refusal to condemn as torture the interrogation practice known as waterboarding. He has since said he is studying its legality.

Mr. Durbin and the nine other Democrats on the Judiciary Committee joined in a letter on Wednesday asking Mr. Mukasey to clarify his views on waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques. The letter noted there had been “ample time for you to study this issue and reach a conclusion” and asked him to respond to the question: “Is the use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique illegal under U.S. law, including terrorism obligations?”

Also Wednesday, Vice President Dick Cheney offered a broad and impassioned defense of the administration’s antiterrorism efforts as he urged Congress to act quickly in reauthorizing broad wiretapping powers for the National Security Agency and in giving broad immunity to phone companies involved in the wiretaps.

The vice president, who was closely involved in the N.S.A.’s program of eavesdropping without warrants from its inception weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, depicted the vote in the Senate as a matter of national security.

“It is a fact,” Mr. Cheney told a friendly audience at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington, “that the danger to our country remains very real, and that the terrorists are still determined to hit us.”

Democrats concede that they probably lack the votes to stop a White House-backed plan to give immunity to phone carriers that assisted in the N.S.A. program, and they urged President Bush anew on Wednesday to agree to a one-month extension in the law to allow time for a full debate.

Can your iPhone be searched without a warrent? // Current

Can your iPhone be searched without a warrent? // Current: "Can your iPhone be searched without a warrent?"

FBI Wiretaps Dropped Due to Unpaid Bills

Telephone companies cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time, according to a Justice Department audit released Thursday.

The faulty bookkeeping is part of what the audit, by the Justice Department's inspector general, described as the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. Poor supervision of the program also allowed one agent to steal $25,000, the audit said.

More than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance in five unidentified FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report shows. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.

And at least once, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation - the highly secretive and sensitive cases that allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies - "was halted due to untimely payment."

"We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence," according to the audit by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.

FBI Recorded 27 Million FISA 'Sessions' in 2006

From Wired:


At the end of 2006, the FBI's Telecommunications Intercept and Collection Technology Unit compiled an end-of-the-year report touting its accomplishments to management, a report that was recently unearthed via an open government request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Strikingly, the report said that the FBI's software for recording telephone surveillance of suspected spies and terrorists intercepted 27,728,675 sessions.

Twenty-seven million is a staggering number given that the FBI only got 2,176 FISA court orders in 2006 from a secret spy court using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

According to the math that means each court order resulted in 12,742 "sessions," all in regards to phone, not internet, surveillance.

FISA watchers have long wondered whether FISA warrants covered more than one person. Knowing how many calls or text messages the FBI captured could add a piece to the puzzle.

Unfortunately, nothing in the documents turned over yet to the Electronic Frontier Foundation explain what a session is. Does it refer to one session of listening in on a target's conversation, even if it is minimized for not being relevant? Does it include text messages? Does the incoming call number and the recording of the call count as two sessions? Do cell phone pings that reveal the general location of a target count as a session? Unknown.

Steven Aftergood, who runs Secrecy News for the Federation of American Scientists, says it's an odd, and not so useful statistic:

I've never seen a number like that. When I hear 27 million sessions that sounds like they are talking about individual communications that were monitored for each individual target.
Aftergood thinks that if you take the number of targets and add them up, it's not that crazy a number. He also suspects that there are likely less than 2,100 foreign surveillance targets and that each target likely gets multiple orders - one for a fax line, one for a cell phone, one for a secret house search, etc.

It's a surprising statistic to keep because it doesn't tell you much. What you want to know is how many of the foreign intelligence surveillance sessions were of significance. If only three out of 27 million were useful, that would tell you something, but one number without the other is meaningless.
Of note is that the software at issue, the DCS-5000 gets information from carriers after they turn on surveillance on their switches once they get a court order (CALEA mandates the switches be wiretap-compliant). That means this number ostensibly has nothing to do with the government's secret warrantless wiretapping program, or the government's data-mining of billions of call records.

Fact-checking the FISA debate.

Sen. Russ Feingold’s office has put out a fact sheet on the Dodd-Feingold amendment to strike retroactive immunity. One common myth:

Myth: The bill’s provision is necessary to extend immunity to telephone companies that responded in good faith to a government request.

Reality: Existing law already immunizes telephone companies that respond in good faith to a government request, as long as that request meets certain clearly spelled-out statutory requirements. This carefully designed provision protects the companies and Americans’ privacy by encouraging the companies to comply with legitimate requests but not to comply with requests that don’t meet the requirements laid out in the law.