2011-06-30 "5 Outrageous Examples of FBI Intimidation and Entrapment; In the 10 years since the Sept. 11th attacks, the FBI has expanded its powers, transforming into a massive domestic spying agency." by Kevin Gosztola
[http://www.alternet.org/world/151468/5_outrageous_examples_of_fbi_intimidation_and_entrapment_/]
In 2010, the FISA court approved all 1,506 requests by the FBI to electronically monitor suspects [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/domestic-surveillance/]. They were also generous with granting “national security letters," which allow the FBI to force credit card companies, financial institutions, and internet service providers to give confidential records about customers’ subscriber information, phone number, email addresses and the websites they’ve visited. The FBI got permission to spy on 14,000 people in this way.
Do they really think there are 14,000 terrorists living in the US?
That's just the beginning.
Now, the FBI is claiming the authority to exercise more surveillance powers [http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/06/new-powers-fbi-just-granted-itself/38763/], which include undocumented database searches, lie detector tests, trash searches, surveillance squads, investigations of public officials, scholars and journalists and rules that would provide more freedom for agents and informants to not disclose participation in organizations that are targets of FBI surveillance.
Here are five cases of FBI abuse that show the FBI deserves more scrutiny, not a free pass to continue fighting the so-called “war on terror.”
1. FBI’s Use of Warrantless GPS Tracking -
Given the fact that Americans have a constitutional right to privacy, one might think you have to get a warrant to place a GPS device in a location that can track a suspect 24 hours a day. Yet, in many cases, law enforcement officers are attaching GPS devices without first getting a warrant.
In October 2010, 20-year old Arab-American student Yasir Afifi was concerned that he had found a pipe bomb when he noticed a “black, rectangular device” attached to his car. Upon finding the device, he posted photos to Reddit.com hoping someone could tell him what was on his vehicle. A couple days later, FBI agents showed up at his apartment to “retrieve the device.”
[http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/03/arab-american_sues_fbi_over_gps_tracking_device.php]
Turns out, the mysterious device resembling a bomb, which had understandably petrified Afifi, was a GPS device.
As a lawsuit filed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) details, “after requesting counsel, the FBI agents continued to make demands of Mr. Afifif and interrogate him…They asked him whether he was a national security threat, whether he was excited about an upcoming (but undisclosed) trip abroad, whether he was having financial difficulties, whether he had been to Yemen, why he traveled overseas, and many other questions.”
Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller are being sued for violating Afifi’s constitutional rights.
Nevertheless, the Obama administration has urged the Supreme Court to allow government to attach GPS devices on “suspects’ vehicles to track their every move.” According to the Justice Department [http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110627/pl_afp/usitjusticecrimeprivacy], “A person traveling on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another,” and that is why, as of April 2011, they wanted a lower court’s decision that reversed a conviction and life sentence for a drug dealer whose vehicle had a GPS attached without a warrant undone.
The ACLU of Delaware filed a brief at the end of May [http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/aclu-files-brief-arguing-warrantless-gps-tracking-unconstitutional] urging Delaware to uphold its ruling on the case of the drug dealer. The brief asserts, “The Fourth Amendment protects all persons, regardless of their location, from government searches, absent exigent circumstances, unless a court has issued a warrant upon proof of probable cause.” It adds, despite the rise in use of “sophisticated electronics,” the New York Court of Appeals, for example, does not find the public’s “socially reasonable expectation that our communications and transactions will remain to a large extent private” has diminished.
Additionally, the FBI’s use of warrantless GPS tracking is invasive, for the reason outlined by a Washington, DC, federal appeals court [http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/FF15EAE832958C138525780700715044/$file/08-3030-1259298.pdf]:
"A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts."
The US Supreme Court agreed on June 27 to hear the case on whether police can attach a GPS tracking devices to a suspect’s vehicle without obtaining a warrant [http://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech-national-security/warrantless-gps-tracking-case-heads-supreme-court]. The court’s decision could have profound implications for US citizens because a majority carry a “tracking device” every day—a cell phone. It could define whether the FBI would be able to circumvent traditional wiretapping guidelines and just use this loophole to tap citizens through their cell phones.
2. FBI Targeting WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning Supporters -
David House, co-founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network, has faced harassment since November 2010, when Department of Homeland Security agents detained him at O’Hare International Airport on his return trip from Mexico.
A press release posted by the Bradley Manning Support Network [http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/must-read/bradley-manning-support-network] described how House had his laptop seized and was “questioned extensively" about his support for alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning. House requested a copy of his research data from the computer that was seized. His request was denied.
House faced intrusive and intimidating tactics that included copying and possibly disseminating the contents of his USB drive, camera and laptop, all because he joined a lawful group.
“The search and seizure of my laptop has had a chilling effect on the activities of the Bradley Manning Support Network, by silencing once-outspoken supporters and causing donors to retreat. Our government should not be treating lawful activists like suspects,” House said. Days later, the FBI approached House at a computer conference.
The FBI has also been at the center of attempts to intimidate WikiLeaks supporters, especially those involved in organizing with the Bradley Manning Support Network, a grassroots group.
In April of this year, House sent a message on Twitter reporting that FBI agents had gone to “interrogate a West Coast friend at his place of work.” [http://www.correntewire.com/david_house_friend_manning_has_friends_hassled_work_fbi]
He described how his friend, who is not involved in computers or activism, was pressured to sign a non-disclosure agreement and was held for four hours after the interrogation. His friend was released after repeated banging on the interrogation room’s door. He had taken notes during the interrogation on “a scrap of magazine paper during his four-hour detention” but was made to surrender his notes before leaving his detention.
The friend said that the FBI agents wanted to know what he knew about House, his beliefs and his lifestyle. There were no questions about Manning.
The ACLU has come to House’s defense and filed a lawsuit against the DHS [http://www.aclum.org/house]. The ACLU has called for the “return or destruction of any of House’s personal data still in the custody of the government and disclosure of whether and to whom the data has been disseminated.” If not for the ACLU sending a letter to DHS, House would likely have not been able to get his seized laptop, camera and USB drive back after seven weeks.
The FBI recently subpoenaed House to appear before a federal grand jury empanelled to investigate WikiLeaks in Alexandria, Virginia. He pled the fifth and refused to answer questions on possible violations of the Espionage Act. House also has alleged that agents from various government agencies tried to bribe him for information on Boston-area hackers [http://firedoglake.com/2011/05/13/chat-with-david-house-about-new-aclu-lawsuit/].
Additionally, Jacob Appelbaum, a computer security researcher who represented WikiLeaks at the 2010 Hope conference, has been detained and searched regularly for nearly a year. On July 29, 2010, he was detained for three hours at the Newark airport. His bag was searched, receipts in his bag were photocopied and his laptop was inspected. Appelbaum refused to answer questions because he did not have a lawyer present. He was not allowed to make a phone call and three mobile phones he was carrying were seized and have yet to be returned.
Days later, he was approached by two FBI agents at a Defcon conference after he made a presentation about the Tor Project.
FBI agents wanted to chat but Appelbaum said he had nothing to say. An agent claimed he was interested in hearing how his rights were being trampled because “sometimes it’s nice to have a conversation to flesh things out.” The agents said they were at the conference for official and personal reasons.
Appelbaum continues to be detained at US airports. He was detained when returning from a vacation in Iceland on January 10 at the Seattle airport, in a Houston airport when returning from Siberia on April 12 and on June 14, he was subjected to detention without charge when he arrived at the Seattle airport from Iceland.
3. FBI Spied on Children While Using 'Roving Wiretaps,' Intentionally Misled Courts on Freedom of Information Act Requests -
The FBI Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), which is responsible for reviewing the activities of the US intelligence community [http://epic.org/foia/iob/default.html], found one instance where the FBI spent a week monitoring children. According to the IOB report, a language specialist listening to the wiretap knew the FBI did not have the right target, but continued to listen in to the children for five more days [http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/31/electronic-frontier-foundation-uncovers-patriot-act-abuses/].
The report [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/documents-obtained-eff-reveal-fbi-patriot-act] was obtained by digital rights advocacy organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) through its FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government (FLAG) Project. The FLAG Project requested records of intelligence violations from the FBI’s use of provisions of the PATRIOT Act that were due to expire, particularly Section 215. The request contained evidence of “multiple reports of potential violations,” but the FBI managed to keep most of the revelations secret by redacting a significant portion of the documents requested. The FBI's target is unknown and the aforementioned spying was only discovered after comparing the redacted documents to documents from a previous EFF FOIA request.
The incident involving the FBI listening to children constitutes a “roving wiretap” violation. Roving wiretaps are wiretaps that follow the surveillance target. They are typically used when it is believed a target is changing locations to deliberately avoid electronic surveillance.
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) has said that roving wiretaps are designed to allow law enforcement to track targets who evade surveillance by "frequently changing phones.” They used to only be permitted for criminal investigations but the PATRIOT Act has “insufficient checks to protect innocent Americans from unwarranted government surveillance.” Now under the PATRIOT Act the FBI does not have to know the target is present at the location being tapped.
Beyond the abuse of wiretapping, the FBI appears to be playing games with FOIA requests. It has improperly used “outside the scope” redactions to cover up misconduct.
A post by Jennifer Lynch of EFF [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/fbi-chastised-court-lying-about-existence] indicates the US District Court for the Central District of California found “the FBI lied to the court about the existence of records requested” under FOIA. The FBI “materially and fundamentally misled the court” on its filings related to the case of Islamic Shura Council of S. Cal v. FBI, a case related to the FBI surveillance of the Muslim organization.
Additionally, according to EFF, the FBI argued it was “allowed to mislead the court when it believed revealing information would ‘compromise national security.’”
The Court did not go along with this assertion by the FBI [http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2011/03/30/09-56035.pdf]:
[begin excerpt]
“The Government argues that there are times when the interests of national security require the Government to mislead the Court. The Court strongly disagrees. The Government’s duty of honesty to the Court can never be excused, no matter what the circumstance. The Court is charged with the humbling task of defending the Constitution and ensuring that the Government does not falsely accuse people, needlessly invade their privacy or wrongfully deprive them of their liberty. The Court simply cannot perform this important task if the Government lies to it. Deception perverts justice. Truth always promotes it.”
[end excerpt]
Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, containing the roving wiretaps provision was recently extended by Congress, despite a bipartisan alliance that attempted to challenge the extension of expiring provisions with little to no debate.
4. FBI Entrapment of Muslims -
When David Williams’ younger brother, Lord McWilliams, was hospitalized with liver cancer early in 2009, Williams, 24, was devastated. He had spent the last two years, after serving a five-year prison sentence for selling drugs, being a father figure for McWilliams.
Williams knew he had to find a way to make money so his younger brother could get a liver transplant. In April 2009, an acquaintance named James Cromitie told him that someone named Maqsood could give him $250,000, luxury cars and financing for a barbershop if he helped carry out a terrorist attack in the United States. Williams became part of the scheme because Cromitie allegedly had a plan for getting the money without carrying out a terror plot.
Maqsood was a paid informant named Shahed Hussain, who had spent the last eight months working to get Cromitie to plant bombs at a local synagogue. Hussain had done previous work for the FBI and was involved in a controversial case against a pizza-parlor owner and local imam in Albany, New York.
As a report published by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice of the New York University School of Law in May and titled, “Targeted and Entrapped: Manufacturing the ‘Homegrown Threat’ in the United States,” describes [http://www.chrgj.org/projects/docs/targetedandentrapped.pdf], “On May 13, 2009, at the FBI’s direction, Hussain drove Cromitie, David, and two others—Laguerre Payen and Onta Williams (no relation to David)—to the Bronx to conduct surveillance on various synagogues. Next he drove them to Connecticut to look at the Stinger missile they were to use. Unbeknownst to David and the others, the weapons were fake and supplied by the FBI.”
Hussain drove Cromitie, Payen and David and Onta Williams to the Bronx on May 20th. In front of the proposed targets, the FBI placed two cars. The four led by Cromitie were to place explosives in the cars’ trunks. Hussain dropped off David Williams, drove the other three men to the first car and then Hussain turned off a recording device he had been wearing. The men were arrested soon after.
The FBI raided Williams’ younger brother’s home immediately after the arrests. Williams was locked up in White Plains, where people would slip him notes calling him a terrorist. According to David’s aunt Alicia McWilliams, at the jury selection in White Plains, snipers were placed on the roof for “show,” making it seem like Williams’ trial might lead to an attempted terror attack.
McWilliams claims that Williams was “pulled into a political game. The case was directed, produced and scripted by the FBI and all they needed were puppets.”
The CHRGJ report looks at this case and two others to show the “profound toll government policies are taking on Muslim communities and families.” It details how “counterterrorism law-enforcement policies and practices are undermining U.S. human rights obligations to guarantee the rights to nondiscrimination; a fair trial; freedom of religion expression and opinion; as well as the right to an effective remedy when rights violations take place.”
Relaxed FBI guidelines have made it possible to rely on informants like Hussain. Guidelines put into place by former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey allowed the FBI to authorize informants and other surveillance techniques without any factual predicate or nexus to suspected criminal conduct,” which meant the FBI could have informants “gather names, emails, and phone numbers of particularly devout mosque attendees, without any particular nexus to suspected criminal activity.” And, under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, guidelines were established that did not explicitly prohibit using informants to engage in entrapment.
Informants present a particular problem because they may be receiving a benefit for helping the FBI target individuals (for example, a reduction in a criminal sentence or a change in immigration status, etc). They may also be receiving payment for their service. The “dangerous incentive structure,” inevitably helps to increase the possibility of abuse of authority by the FBI. As former FBI agent Mike German says:
[begin excerpt]
If the government targets somebody based on political advocacy, and can lure a few people into committing bad acts, then a successful prosecution in those cases justifies future targeting of people who are in the same position. . . Whether these cases could survive an entrapment defense is not the relevant question. It’s whether it’s appropriate for the government to act in a way where they’re aggrandizing the nature of the threat. It’s just difficult to understand what the legitimate government interest is in these cases.”
[end excerpt]
Williams and the other men were found guilty in October 2010. In May of this year, a judge denied the defendants’ motions for dismissal “on the basis of outrageous government conduct and entrapment.” The men are currently in the process of being sentenced for their participation in this scheme and prosecutors are pushing for life sentences for three of the four men, including Williams [http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110616/NEWS/106160321/-1/NEWS].
5. The Criminalization of Travel by the FBI -
At least 23 antiwar, labor and international solidarity activists have been subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in Chicago. Several of the activists from Chicago, the Twin Cities in Minnesota and other areas have had their homes raided by the FBI with documents, cell phones, storage disks, computers and children’s artwork seized.
The FBI alleges the activists have provided “material support for terrorism.” In the past months, it has been discovered the FBI used an informant named Karen Sullivan to spy on an antiwar organization for months as it made plans for the 2008 Republican National Convention. The FBI also flubbed the investigation when an agent left documents in the home of one of the subpoenaed activists.
A troubling aspect of the investigation is how it effectively criminalizes outspoken citizens who travel to other countries to meet groups that may have beliefs or agendas that are in conflict with US foreign policy. For example, Sarah Smith, a Jewish American woman and avid traveler who lives in Chicago, received a call from the FBI on December 3, 2010. The agent, Robert Parker, asked Smith to meet with him and answer some questions.
Smith asked what questions the agent had, and he said he was not at liberty to discuss the questions. This made Smith think she needed a lawyer. The agent told Smith that it was not necessary to have a lawyer because she was not in trouble. He claimed he had some routine questions about a trip and said, "I think you know which trip I'm talking about." Realizing Parker wanted to talk to her about the trip she took to Israel and Palestine in August, just months ago, she reached out to a lawyer with the National Lawyers Guild.
"We went on an educational trip in which we met with NGOs, teachers, nonviolent protesters," explains Smith. "We didn't meet with anyone who is on any terrorist list. We didn't give money to anyone that is on a terrorist list. We wanted to see what it was like for ourselves, to live in Israel with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank."
Suppressing the right of American groups to travel is not new to U.S. government policy. In 1992, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) mounted a case on behalf of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Geo-Vista Global Experiences and Veterans for Peace asserting regulations on group travel to Vietnam and Cambodia were "making it impossible to organize academic study groups, to travel with study groups, to travel with colleagues to assess humanitarian aid and to engage in group fact-finding trips."
Secretary of State James Baker eventually lifted the regulations, making it permissible for groups to travel to the two countries.
Tom Burke is another traveler alleged to have provided “material support to terror.” Burke was at home with his wife and daughter on September 24, 2010 and began to receive phone calls from people in Chicago and Minneapolis informing them the FBI had raided their homes. Burke thought the FBI might be coming to raid his house. He decided his daughter needed to get to kindergarten before the FBI entered his home. He left with his daughter.
Burke thought he needed to write a press release, took his computer and got in his car to go find a web café. On the way he noticed that his car was being followed. He called his wife and they agreed he should drive to the parking garage at her work. As Burke reached the parking garage, the car that had been following him sped off. An SUV sped into the road right behind him and followed him into the garage. Burke was served with a subpoena to appear before a grand jury. His wife was later served with a subpoena too.
"We've been doing solidarity work with people in other countries who get killed for doing what they do,” Burke explains. “When I went to Colombia in 2003 with a labor union delegation, at that time three Colombian trade unionists were being killed every single week. And that was the scariest week of my life." Burke was with the human rights director of the oil workers union. All week he had to have armed security, know who was with the group and whether they were in a safe place.
Months into targeting the activists, there is no evidence that any of these activists provided "material support for terrorism." [http://firedoglake.com/tag/green-is-the-new-red/]
Reminiscent of how animal rights and environmental activists have been targeted in recent years, the FBI is going after the activists, wrecking their lives, intimidating Americans who believe in their right to dissent. It is pressing on, widening its investigation despite a growing backlash against the investigation. And some of the activists fear indictments from the investigation may be coming soon.
2011-06-30 "5 Outrageous Examples of FBI Intimidation and Entrapment; In the 10 years since the Sept. 11th attacks, the FBI has expanded its powers, transforming into a massive domestic spying agency." by Kevin Gosztola
[http://www.alternet.org/world/151468/5_outrageous_examples_of_fbi_intimidation_and_entrapment_/]
In 2010, the FISA court approved all 1,506 requests by the FBI to electronically monitor suspects [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/domestic-surveillance/]. They were also generous with granting “national security letters," which allow the FBI to force credit card companies, financial institutions, and internet service providers to give confidential records about customers’ subscriber information, phone number, email addresses and the websites they’ve visited. The FBI got permission to spy on 14,000 people in this way.
Do they really think there are 14,000 terrorists living in the US?
That's just the beginning.
Now, the FBI is claiming the authority to exercise more surveillance powers [http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/06/new-powers-fbi-just-granted-itself/38763/], which include undocumented database searches, lie detector tests, trash searches, surveillance squads, investigations of public officials, scholars and journalists and rules that would provide more freedom for agents and informants to not disclose participation in organizations that are targets of FBI surveillance.
Here are five cases of FBI abuse that show the FBI deserves more scrutiny, not a free pass to continue fighting the so-called “war on terror.”
1. FBI’s Use of Warrantless GPS Tracking -
Given the fact that Americans have a constitutional right to privacy, one might think you have to get a warrant to place a GPS device in a location that can track a suspect 24 hours a day. Yet, in many cases, law enforcement officers are attaching GPS devices without first getting a warrant.
In October 2010, 20-year old Arab-American student Yasir Afifi was concerned that he had found a pipe bomb when he noticed a “black, rectangular device” attached to his car. Upon finding the device, he posted photos to Reddit.com hoping someone could tell him what was on his vehicle. A couple days later, FBI agents showed up at his apartment to “retrieve the device.”
[http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/03/arab-american_sues_fbi_over_gps_tracking_device.php]
Turns out, the mysterious device resembling a bomb, which had understandably petrified Afifi, was a GPS device.
As a lawsuit filed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) details, “after requesting counsel, the FBI agents continued to make demands of Mr. Afifif and interrogate him…They asked him whether he was a national security threat, whether he was excited about an upcoming (but undisclosed) trip abroad, whether he was having financial difficulties, whether he had been to Yemen, why he traveled overseas, and many other questions.”
Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller are being sued for violating Afifi’s constitutional rights.
Nevertheless, the Obama administration has urged the Supreme Court to allow government to attach GPS devices on “suspects’ vehicles to track their every move.” According to the Justice Department [http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110627/pl_afp/usitjusticecrimeprivacy], “A person traveling on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another,” and that is why, as of April 2011, they wanted a lower court’s decision that reversed a conviction and life sentence for a drug dealer whose vehicle had a GPS attached without a warrant undone.
The ACLU of Delaware filed a brief at the end of May [http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/aclu-files-brief-arguing-warrantless-gps-tracking-unconstitutional] urging Delaware to uphold its ruling on the case of the drug dealer. The brief asserts, “The Fourth Amendment protects all persons, regardless of their location, from government searches, absent exigent circumstances, unless a court has issued a warrant upon proof of probable cause.” It adds, despite the rise in use of “sophisticated electronics,” the New York Court of Appeals, for example, does not find the public’s “socially reasonable expectation that our communications and transactions will remain to a large extent private” has diminished.
Additionally, the FBI’s use of warrantless GPS tracking is invasive, for the reason outlined by a Washington, DC, federal appeals court [http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/FF15EAE832958C138525780700715044/$file/08-3030-1259298.pdf]:
"A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts."
The US Supreme Court agreed on June 27 to hear the case on whether police can attach a GPS tracking devices to a suspect’s vehicle without obtaining a warrant [http://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech-national-security/warrantless-gps-tracking-case-heads-supreme-court]. The court’s decision could have profound implications for US citizens because a majority carry a “tracking device” every day—a cell phone. It could define whether the FBI would be able to circumvent traditional wiretapping guidelines and just use this loophole to tap citizens through their cell phones.
2. FBI Targeting WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning Supporters -
David House, co-founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network, has faced harassment since November 2010, when Department of Homeland Security agents detained him at O’Hare International Airport on his return trip from Mexico.
A press release posted by the Bradley Manning Support Network [http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/must-read/bradley-manning-support-network] described how House had his laptop seized and was “questioned extensively" about his support for alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning. House requested a copy of his research data from the computer that was seized. His request was denied.
House faced intrusive and intimidating tactics that included copying and possibly disseminating the contents of his USB drive, camera and laptop, all because he joined a lawful group.
“The search and seizure of my laptop has had a chilling effect on the activities of the Bradley Manning Support Network, by silencing once-outspoken supporters and causing donors to retreat. Our government should not be treating lawful activists like suspects,” House said. Days later, the FBI approached House at a computer conference.
The FBI has also been at the center of attempts to intimidate WikiLeaks supporters, especially those involved in organizing with the Bradley Manning Support Network, a grassroots group.
In April of this year, House sent a message on Twitter reporting that FBI agents had gone to “interrogate a West Coast friend at his place of work.” [http://www.correntewire.com/david_house_friend_manning_has_friends_hassled_work_fbi]
He described how his friend, who is not involved in computers or activism, was pressured to sign a non-disclosure agreement and was held for four hours after the interrogation. His friend was released after repeated banging on the interrogation room’s door. He had taken notes during the interrogation on “a scrap of magazine paper during his four-hour detention” but was made to surrender his notes before leaving his detention.
The friend said that the FBI agents wanted to know what he knew about House, his beliefs and his lifestyle. There were no questions about Manning.
The ACLU has come to House’s defense and filed a lawsuit against the DHS [http://www.aclum.org/house]. The ACLU has called for the “return or destruction of any of House’s personal data still in the custody of the government and disclosure of whether and to whom the data has been disseminated.” If not for the ACLU sending a letter to DHS, House would likely have not been able to get his seized laptop, camera and USB drive back after seven weeks.
The FBI recently subpoenaed House to appear before a federal grand jury empanelled to investigate WikiLeaks in Alexandria, Virginia. He pled the fifth and refused to answer questions on possible violations of the Espionage Act. House also has alleged that agents from various government agencies tried to bribe him for information on Boston-area hackers [http://firedoglake.com/2011/05/13/chat-with-david-house-about-new-aclu-lawsuit/].
Additionally, Jacob Appelbaum, a computer security researcher who represented WikiLeaks at the 2010 Hope conference, has been detained and searched regularly for nearly a year. On July 29, 2010, he was detained for three hours at the Newark airport. His bag was searched, receipts in his bag were photocopied and his laptop was inspected. Appelbaum refused to answer questions because he did not have a lawyer present. He was not allowed to make a phone call and three mobile phones he was carrying were seized and have yet to be returned.
Days later, he was approached by two FBI agents at a Defcon conference after he made a presentation about the Tor Project.
FBI agents wanted to chat but Appelbaum said he had nothing to say. An agent claimed he was interested in hearing how his rights were being trampled because “sometimes it’s nice to have a conversation to flesh things out.” The agents said they were at the conference for official and personal reasons.
Appelbaum continues to be detained at US airports. He was detained when returning from a vacation in Iceland on January 10 at the Seattle airport, in a Houston airport when returning from Siberia on April 12 and on June 14, he was subjected to detention without charge when he arrived at the Seattle airport from Iceland.
3. FBI Spied on Children While Using 'Roving Wiretaps,' Intentionally Misled Courts on Freedom of Information Act Requests -
The FBI Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), which is responsible for reviewing the activities of the US intelligence community [http://epic.org/foia/iob/default.html], found one instance where the FBI spent a week monitoring children. According to the IOB report, a language specialist listening to the wiretap knew the FBI did not have the right target, but continued to listen in to the children for five more days [http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/31/electronic-frontier-foundation-uncovers-patriot-act-abuses/].
The report [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/documents-obtained-eff-reveal-fbi-patriot-act] was obtained by digital rights advocacy organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) through its FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government (FLAG) Project. The FLAG Project requested records of intelligence violations from the FBI’s use of provisions of the PATRIOT Act that were due to expire, particularly Section 215. The request contained evidence of “multiple reports of potential violations,” but the FBI managed to keep most of the revelations secret by redacting a significant portion of the documents requested. The FBI's target is unknown and the aforementioned spying was only discovered after comparing the redacted documents to documents from a previous EFF FOIA request.
The incident involving the FBI listening to children constitutes a “roving wiretap” violation. Roving wiretaps are wiretaps that follow the surveillance target. They are typically used when it is believed a target is changing locations to deliberately avoid electronic surveillance.
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) has said that roving wiretaps are designed to allow law enforcement to track targets who evade surveillance by "frequently changing phones.” They used to only be permitted for criminal investigations but the PATRIOT Act has “insufficient checks to protect innocent Americans from unwarranted government surveillance.” Now under the PATRIOT Act the FBI does not have to know the target is present at the location being tapped.
Beyond the abuse of wiretapping, the FBI appears to be playing games with FOIA requests. It has improperly used “outside the scope” redactions to cover up misconduct.
A post by Jennifer Lynch of EFF [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/fbi-chastised-court-lying-about-existence] indicates the US District Court for the Central District of California found “the FBI lied to the court about the existence of records requested” under FOIA. The FBI “materially and fundamentally misled the court” on its filings related to the case of Islamic Shura Council of S. Cal v. FBI, a case related to the FBI surveillance of the Muslim organization.
Additionally, according to EFF, the FBI argued it was “allowed to mislead the court when it believed revealing information would ‘compromise national security.’”
The Court did not go along with this assertion by the FBI [http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2011/03/30/09-56035.pdf]:
[begin excerpt]
“The Government argues that there are times when the interests of national security require the Government to mislead the Court. The Court strongly disagrees. The Government’s duty of honesty to the Court can never be excused, no matter what the circumstance. The Court is charged with the humbling task of defending the Constitution and ensuring that the Government does not falsely accuse people, needlessly invade their privacy or wrongfully deprive them of their liberty. The Court simply cannot perform this important task if the Government lies to it. Deception perverts justice. Truth always promotes it.”
[end excerpt]
Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, containing the roving wiretaps provision was recently extended by Congress, despite a bipartisan alliance that attempted to challenge the extension of expiring provisions with little to no debate.
4. FBI Entrapment of Muslims -
When David Williams’ younger brother, Lord McWilliams, was hospitalized with liver cancer early in 2009, Williams, 24, was devastated. He had spent the last two years, after serving a five-year prison sentence for selling drugs, being a father figure for McWilliams.
Williams knew he had to find a way to make money so his younger brother could get a liver transplant. In April 2009, an acquaintance named James Cromitie told him that someone named Maqsood could give him $250,000, luxury cars and financing for a barbershop if he helped carry out a terrorist attack in the United States. Williams became part of the scheme because Cromitie allegedly had a plan for getting the money without carrying out a terror plot.
Maqsood was a paid informant named Shahed Hussain, who had spent the last eight months working to get Cromitie to plant bombs at a local synagogue. Hussain had done previous work for the FBI and was involved in a controversial case against a pizza-parlor owner and local imam in Albany, New York.
As a report published by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice of the New York University School of Law in May and titled, “Targeted and Entrapped: Manufacturing the ‘Homegrown Threat’ in the United States,” describes [http://www.chrgj.org/projects/docs/targetedandentrapped.pdf], “On May 13, 2009, at the FBI’s direction, Hussain drove Cromitie, David, and two others—Laguerre Payen and Onta Williams (no relation to David)—to the Bronx to conduct surveillance on various synagogues. Next he drove them to Connecticut to look at the Stinger missile they were to use. Unbeknownst to David and the others, the weapons were fake and supplied by the FBI.”
Hussain drove Cromitie, Payen and David and Onta Williams to the Bronx on May 20th. In front of the proposed targets, the FBI placed two cars. The four led by Cromitie were to place explosives in the cars’ trunks. Hussain dropped off David Williams, drove the other three men to the first car and then Hussain turned off a recording device he had been wearing. The men were arrested soon after.
The FBI raided Williams’ younger brother’s home immediately after the arrests. Williams was locked up in White Plains, where people would slip him notes calling him a terrorist. According to David’s aunt Alicia McWilliams, at the jury selection in White Plains, snipers were placed on the roof for “show,” making it seem like Williams’ trial might lead to an attempted terror attack.
McWilliams claims that Williams was “pulled into a political game. The case was directed, produced and scripted by the FBI and all they needed were puppets.”
The CHRGJ report looks at this case and two others to show the “profound toll government policies are taking on Muslim communities and families.” It details how “counterterrorism law-enforcement policies and practices are undermining U.S. human rights obligations to guarantee the rights to nondiscrimination; a fair trial; freedom of religion expression and opinion; as well as the right to an effective remedy when rights violations take place.”
Relaxed FBI guidelines have made it possible to rely on informants like Hussain. Guidelines put into place by former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey allowed the FBI to authorize informants and other surveillance techniques without any factual predicate or nexus to suspected criminal conduct,” which meant the FBI could have informants “gather names, emails, and phone numbers of particularly devout mosque attendees, without any particular nexus to suspected criminal activity.” And, under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, guidelines were established that did not explicitly prohibit using informants to engage in entrapment.
Informants present a particular problem because they may be receiving a benefit for helping the FBI target individuals (for example, a reduction in a criminal sentence or a change in immigration status, etc). They may also be receiving payment for their service. The “dangerous incentive structure,” inevitably helps to increase the possibility of abuse of authority by the FBI. As former FBI agent Mike German says:
[begin excerpt]
If the government targets somebody based on political advocacy, and can lure a few people into committing bad acts, then a successful prosecution in those cases justifies future targeting of people who are in the same position. . . Whether these cases could survive an entrapment defense is not the relevant question. It’s whether it’s appropriate for the government to act in a way where they’re aggrandizing the nature of the threat. It’s just difficult to understand what the legitimate government interest is in these cases.”
[end excerpt]
Williams and the other men were found guilty in October 2010. In May of this year, a judge denied the defendants’ motions for dismissal “on the basis of outrageous government conduct and entrapment.” The men are currently in the process of being sentenced for their participation in this scheme and prosecutors are pushing for life sentences for three of the four men, including Williams [http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110616/NEWS/106160321/-1/NEWS].
5. The Criminalization of Travel by the FBI -
At least 23 antiwar, labor and international solidarity activists have been subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in Chicago. Several of the activists from Chicago, the Twin Cities in Minnesota and other areas have had their homes raided by the FBI with documents, cell phones, storage disks, computers and children’s artwork seized.
The FBI alleges the activists have provided “material support for terrorism.” In the past months, it has been discovered the FBI used an informant named Karen Sullivan to spy on an antiwar organization for months as it made plans for the 2008 Republican National Convention. The FBI also flubbed the investigation when an agent left documents in the home of one of the subpoenaed activists.
A troubling aspect of the investigation is how it effectively criminalizes outspoken citizens who travel to other countries to meet groups that may have beliefs or agendas that are in conflict with US foreign policy. For example, Sarah Smith, a Jewish American woman and avid traveler who lives in Chicago, received a call from the FBI on December 3, 2010. The agent, Robert Parker, asked Smith to meet with him and answer some questions.
Smith asked what questions the agent had, and he said he was not at liberty to discuss the questions. This made Smith think she needed a lawyer. The agent told Smith that it was not necessary to have a lawyer because she was not in trouble. He claimed he had some routine questions about a trip and said, "I think you know which trip I'm talking about." Realizing Parker wanted to talk to her about the trip she took to Israel and Palestine in August, just months ago, she reached out to a lawyer with the National Lawyers Guild.
"We went on an educational trip in which we met with NGOs, teachers, nonviolent protesters," explains Smith. "We didn't meet with anyone who is on any terrorist list. We didn't give money to anyone that is on a terrorist list. We wanted to see what it was like for ourselves, to live in Israel with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank."
Suppressing the right of American groups to travel is not new to U.S. government policy. In 1992, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) mounted a case on behalf of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Geo-Vista Global Experiences and Veterans for Peace asserting regulations on group travel to Vietnam and Cambodia were "making it impossible to organize academic study groups, to travel with study groups, to travel with colleagues to assess humanitarian aid and to engage in group fact-finding trips."
Secretary of State James Baker eventually lifted the regulations, making it permissible for groups to travel to the two countries.
Tom Burke is another traveler alleged to have provided “material support to terror.” Burke was at home with his wife and daughter on September 24, 2010 and began to receive phone calls from people in Chicago and Minneapolis informing them the FBI had raided their homes. Burke thought the FBI might be coming to raid his house. He decided his daughter needed to get to kindergarten before the FBI entered his home. He left with his daughter.
Burke thought he needed to write a press release, took his computer and got in his car to go find a web café. On the way he noticed that his car was being followed. He called his wife and they agreed he should drive to the parking garage at her work. As Burke reached the parking garage, the car that had been following him sped off. An SUV sped into the road right behind him and followed him into the garage. Burke was served with a subpoena to appear before a grand jury. His wife was later served with a subpoena too.
"We've been doing solidarity work with people in other countries who get killed for doing what they do,” Burke explains. “When I went to Colombia in 2003 with a labor union delegation, at that time three Colombian trade unionists were being killed every single week. And that was the scariest week of my life." Burke was with the human rights director of the oil workers union. All week he had to have armed security, know who was with the group and whether they were in a safe place.
Months into targeting the activists, there is no evidence that any of these activists provided "material support for terrorism." [http://firedoglake.com/tag/green-is-the-new-red/]
Reminiscent of how animal rights and environmental activists have been targeted in recent years, the FBI is going after the activists, wrecking their lives, intimidating Americans who believe in their right to dissent. It is pressing on, widening its investigation despite a growing backlash against the investigation. And some of the activists fear indictments from the investigation may be coming soon.
[http://www.alternet.org/world/151468/5_outrageous_examples_of_fbi_intimidation_and_entrapment_/]
In 2010, the FISA court approved all 1,506 requests by the FBI to electronically monitor suspects [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/domestic-surveillance/]. They were also generous with granting “national security letters," which allow the FBI to force credit card companies, financial institutions, and internet service providers to give confidential records about customers’ subscriber information, phone number, email addresses and the websites they’ve visited. The FBI got permission to spy on 14,000 people in this way.
Do they really think there are 14,000 terrorists living in the US?
That's just the beginning.
Now, the FBI is claiming the authority to exercise more surveillance powers [http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/06/new-powers-fbi-just-granted-itself/38763/], which include undocumented database searches, lie detector tests, trash searches, surveillance squads, investigations of public officials, scholars and journalists and rules that would provide more freedom for agents and informants to not disclose participation in organizations that are targets of FBI surveillance.
Here are five cases of FBI abuse that show the FBI deserves more scrutiny, not a free pass to continue fighting the so-called “war on terror.”
1. FBI’s Use of Warrantless GPS Tracking -
Given the fact that Americans have a constitutional right to privacy, one might think you have to get a warrant to place a GPS device in a location that can track a suspect 24 hours a day. Yet, in many cases, law enforcement officers are attaching GPS devices without first getting a warrant.
In October 2010, 20-year old Arab-American student Yasir Afifi was concerned that he had found a pipe bomb when he noticed a “black, rectangular device” attached to his car. Upon finding the device, he posted photos to Reddit.com hoping someone could tell him what was on his vehicle. A couple days later, FBI agents showed up at his apartment to “retrieve the device.”
[http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/03/arab-american_sues_fbi_over_gps_tracking_device.php]
Turns out, the mysterious device resembling a bomb, which had understandably petrified Afifi, was a GPS device.
As a lawsuit filed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) details, “after requesting counsel, the FBI agents continued to make demands of Mr. Afifif and interrogate him…They asked him whether he was a national security threat, whether he was excited about an upcoming (but undisclosed) trip abroad, whether he was having financial difficulties, whether he had been to Yemen, why he traveled overseas, and many other questions.”
Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller are being sued for violating Afifi’s constitutional rights.
Nevertheless, the Obama administration has urged the Supreme Court to allow government to attach GPS devices on “suspects’ vehicles to track their every move.” According to the Justice Department [http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110627/pl_afp/usitjusticecrimeprivacy], “A person traveling on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another,” and that is why, as of April 2011, they wanted a lower court’s decision that reversed a conviction and life sentence for a drug dealer whose vehicle had a GPS attached without a warrant undone.
The ACLU of Delaware filed a brief at the end of May [http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/aclu-files-brief-arguing-warrantless-gps-tracking-unconstitutional] urging Delaware to uphold its ruling on the case of the drug dealer. The brief asserts, “The Fourth Amendment protects all persons, regardless of their location, from government searches, absent exigent circumstances, unless a court has issued a warrant upon proof of probable cause.” It adds, despite the rise in use of “sophisticated electronics,” the New York Court of Appeals, for example, does not find the public’s “socially reasonable expectation that our communications and transactions will remain to a large extent private” has diminished.
Additionally, the FBI’s use of warrantless GPS tracking is invasive, for the reason outlined by a Washington, DC, federal appeals court [http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/FF15EAE832958C138525780700715044/$file/08-3030-1259298.pdf]:
"A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts."
The US Supreme Court agreed on June 27 to hear the case on whether police can attach a GPS tracking devices to a suspect’s vehicle without obtaining a warrant [http://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech-national-security/warrantless-gps-tracking-case-heads-supreme-court]. The court’s decision could have profound implications for US citizens because a majority carry a “tracking device” every day—a cell phone. It could define whether the FBI would be able to circumvent traditional wiretapping guidelines and just use this loophole to tap citizens through their cell phones.
2. FBI Targeting WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning Supporters -
David House, co-founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network, has faced harassment since November 2010, when Department of Homeland Security agents detained him at O’Hare International Airport on his return trip from Mexico.
A press release posted by the Bradley Manning Support Network [http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/must-read/bradley-manning-support-network] described how House had his laptop seized and was “questioned extensively" about his support for alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning. House requested a copy of his research data from the computer that was seized. His request was denied.
House faced intrusive and intimidating tactics that included copying and possibly disseminating the contents of his USB drive, camera and laptop, all because he joined a lawful group.
“The search and seizure of my laptop has had a chilling effect on the activities of the Bradley Manning Support Network, by silencing once-outspoken supporters and causing donors to retreat. Our government should not be treating lawful activists like suspects,” House said. Days later, the FBI approached House at a computer conference.
The FBI has also been at the center of attempts to intimidate WikiLeaks supporters, especially those involved in organizing with the Bradley Manning Support Network, a grassroots group.
In April of this year, House sent a message on Twitter reporting that FBI agents had gone to “interrogate a West Coast friend at his place of work.” [http://www.correntewire.com/david_house_friend_manning_has_friends_hassled_work_fbi]
He described how his friend, who is not involved in computers or activism, was pressured to sign a non-disclosure agreement and was held for four hours after the interrogation. His friend was released after repeated banging on the interrogation room’s door. He had taken notes during the interrogation on “a scrap of magazine paper during his four-hour detention” but was made to surrender his notes before leaving his detention.
The friend said that the FBI agents wanted to know what he knew about House, his beliefs and his lifestyle. There were no questions about Manning.
The ACLU has come to House’s defense and filed a lawsuit against the DHS [http://www.aclum.org/house]. The ACLU has called for the “return or destruction of any of House’s personal data still in the custody of the government and disclosure of whether and to whom the data has been disseminated.” If not for the ACLU sending a letter to DHS, House would likely have not been able to get his seized laptop, camera and USB drive back after seven weeks.
The FBI recently subpoenaed House to appear before a federal grand jury empanelled to investigate WikiLeaks in Alexandria, Virginia. He pled the fifth and refused to answer questions on possible violations of the Espionage Act. House also has alleged that agents from various government agencies tried to bribe him for information on Boston-area hackers [http://firedoglake.com/2011/05/13/chat-with-david-house-about-new-aclu-lawsuit/].
Additionally, Jacob Appelbaum, a computer security researcher who represented WikiLeaks at the 2010 Hope conference, has been detained and searched regularly for nearly a year. On July 29, 2010, he was detained for three hours at the Newark airport. His bag was searched, receipts in his bag were photocopied and his laptop was inspected. Appelbaum refused to answer questions because he did not have a lawyer present. He was not allowed to make a phone call and three mobile phones he was carrying were seized and have yet to be returned.
Days later, he was approached by two FBI agents at a Defcon conference after he made a presentation about the Tor Project.
FBI agents wanted to chat but Appelbaum said he had nothing to say. An agent claimed he was interested in hearing how his rights were being trampled because “sometimes it’s nice to have a conversation to flesh things out.” The agents said they were at the conference for official and personal reasons.
Appelbaum continues to be detained at US airports. He was detained when returning from a vacation in Iceland on January 10 at the Seattle airport, in a Houston airport when returning from Siberia on April 12 and on June 14, he was subjected to detention without charge when he arrived at the Seattle airport from Iceland.
3. FBI Spied on Children While Using 'Roving Wiretaps,' Intentionally Misled Courts on Freedom of Information Act Requests -
The FBI Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), which is responsible for reviewing the activities of the US intelligence community [http://epic.org/foia/iob/default.html], found one instance where the FBI spent a week monitoring children. According to the IOB report, a language specialist listening to the wiretap knew the FBI did not have the right target, but continued to listen in to the children for five more days [http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/31/electronic-frontier-foundation-uncovers-patriot-act-abuses/].
The report [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/documents-obtained-eff-reveal-fbi-patriot-act] was obtained by digital rights advocacy organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) through its FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government (FLAG) Project. The FLAG Project requested records of intelligence violations from the FBI’s use of provisions of the PATRIOT Act that were due to expire, particularly Section 215. The request contained evidence of “multiple reports of potential violations,” but the FBI managed to keep most of the revelations secret by redacting a significant portion of the documents requested. The FBI's target is unknown and the aforementioned spying was only discovered after comparing the redacted documents to documents from a previous EFF FOIA request.
The incident involving the FBI listening to children constitutes a “roving wiretap” violation. Roving wiretaps are wiretaps that follow the surveillance target. They are typically used when it is believed a target is changing locations to deliberately avoid electronic surveillance.
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) has said that roving wiretaps are designed to allow law enforcement to track targets who evade surveillance by "frequently changing phones.” They used to only be permitted for criminal investigations but the PATRIOT Act has “insufficient checks to protect innocent Americans from unwarranted government surveillance.” Now under the PATRIOT Act the FBI does not have to know the target is present at the location being tapped.
Beyond the abuse of wiretapping, the FBI appears to be playing games with FOIA requests. It has improperly used “outside the scope” redactions to cover up misconduct.
A post by Jennifer Lynch of EFF [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/fbi-chastised-court-lying-about-existence] indicates the US District Court for the Central District of California found “the FBI lied to the court about the existence of records requested” under FOIA. The FBI “materially and fundamentally misled the court” on its filings related to the case of Islamic Shura Council of S. Cal v. FBI, a case related to the FBI surveillance of the Muslim organization.
Additionally, according to EFF, the FBI argued it was “allowed to mislead the court when it believed revealing information would ‘compromise national security.’”
The Court did not go along with this assertion by the FBI [http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2011/03/30/09-56035.pdf]:
[begin excerpt]
“The Government argues that there are times when the interests of national security require the Government to mislead the Court. The Court strongly disagrees. The Government’s duty of honesty to the Court can never be excused, no matter what the circumstance. The Court is charged with the humbling task of defending the Constitution and ensuring that the Government does not falsely accuse people, needlessly invade their privacy or wrongfully deprive them of their liberty. The Court simply cannot perform this important task if the Government lies to it. Deception perverts justice. Truth always promotes it.”
[end excerpt]
Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, containing the roving wiretaps provision was recently extended by Congress, despite a bipartisan alliance that attempted to challenge the extension of expiring provisions with little to no debate.
4. FBI Entrapment of Muslims -
When David Williams’ younger brother, Lord McWilliams, was hospitalized with liver cancer early in 2009, Williams, 24, was devastated. He had spent the last two years, after serving a five-year prison sentence for selling drugs, being a father figure for McWilliams.
Williams knew he had to find a way to make money so his younger brother could get a liver transplant. In April 2009, an acquaintance named James Cromitie told him that someone named Maqsood could give him $250,000, luxury cars and financing for a barbershop if he helped carry out a terrorist attack in the United States. Williams became part of the scheme because Cromitie allegedly had a plan for getting the money without carrying out a terror plot.
Maqsood was a paid informant named Shahed Hussain, who had spent the last eight months working to get Cromitie to plant bombs at a local synagogue. Hussain had done previous work for the FBI and was involved in a controversial case against a pizza-parlor owner and local imam in Albany, New York.
As a report published by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice of the New York University School of Law in May and titled, “Targeted and Entrapped: Manufacturing the ‘Homegrown Threat’ in the United States,” describes [http://www.chrgj.org/projects/docs/targetedandentrapped.pdf], “On May 13, 2009, at the FBI’s direction, Hussain drove Cromitie, David, and two others—Laguerre Payen and Onta Williams (no relation to David)—to the Bronx to conduct surveillance on various synagogues. Next he drove them to Connecticut to look at the Stinger missile they were to use. Unbeknownst to David and the others, the weapons were fake and supplied by the FBI.”
Hussain drove Cromitie, Payen and David and Onta Williams to the Bronx on May 20th. In front of the proposed targets, the FBI placed two cars. The four led by Cromitie were to place explosives in the cars’ trunks. Hussain dropped off David Williams, drove the other three men to the first car and then Hussain turned off a recording device he had been wearing. The men were arrested soon after.
The FBI raided Williams’ younger brother’s home immediately after the arrests. Williams was locked up in White Plains, where people would slip him notes calling him a terrorist. According to David’s aunt Alicia McWilliams, at the jury selection in White Plains, snipers were placed on the roof for “show,” making it seem like Williams’ trial might lead to an attempted terror attack.
McWilliams claims that Williams was “pulled into a political game. The case was directed, produced and scripted by the FBI and all they needed were puppets.”
The CHRGJ report looks at this case and two others to show the “profound toll government policies are taking on Muslim communities and families.” It details how “counterterrorism law-enforcement policies and practices are undermining U.S. human rights obligations to guarantee the rights to nondiscrimination; a fair trial; freedom of religion expression and opinion; as well as the right to an effective remedy when rights violations take place.”
Relaxed FBI guidelines have made it possible to rely on informants like Hussain. Guidelines put into place by former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey allowed the FBI to authorize informants and other surveillance techniques without any factual predicate or nexus to suspected criminal conduct,” which meant the FBI could have informants “gather names, emails, and phone numbers of particularly devout mosque attendees, without any particular nexus to suspected criminal activity.” And, under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, guidelines were established that did not explicitly prohibit using informants to engage in entrapment.
Informants present a particular problem because they may be receiving a benefit for helping the FBI target individuals (for example, a reduction in a criminal sentence or a change in immigration status, etc). They may also be receiving payment for their service. The “dangerous incentive structure,” inevitably helps to increase the possibility of abuse of authority by the FBI. As former FBI agent Mike German says:
[begin excerpt]
If the government targets somebody based on political advocacy, and can lure a few people into committing bad acts, then a successful prosecution in those cases justifies future targeting of people who are in the same position. . . Whether these cases could survive an entrapment defense is not the relevant question. It’s whether it’s appropriate for the government to act in a way where they’re aggrandizing the nature of the threat. It’s just difficult to understand what the legitimate government interest is in these cases.”
[end excerpt]
Williams and the other men were found guilty in October 2010. In May of this year, a judge denied the defendants’ motions for dismissal “on the basis of outrageous government conduct and entrapment.” The men are currently in the process of being sentenced for their participation in this scheme and prosecutors are pushing for life sentences for three of the four men, including Williams [http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110616/NEWS/106160321/-1/NEWS].
5. The Criminalization of Travel by the FBI -
At least 23 antiwar, labor and international solidarity activists have been subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in Chicago. Several of the activists from Chicago, the Twin Cities in Minnesota and other areas have had their homes raided by the FBI with documents, cell phones, storage disks, computers and children’s artwork seized.
The FBI alleges the activists have provided “material support for terrorism.” In the past months, it has been discovered the FBI used an informant named Karen Sullivan to spy on an antiwar organization for months as it made plans for the 2008 Republican National Convention. The FBI also flubbed the investigation when an agent left documents in the home of one of the subpoenaed activists.
A troubling aspect of the investigation is how it effectively criminalizes outspoken citizens who travel to other countries to meet groups that may have beliefs or agendas that are in conflict with US foreign policy. For example, Sarah Smith, a Jewish American woman and avid traveler who lives in Chicago, received a call from the FBI on December 3, 2010. The agent, Robert Parker, asked Smith to meet with him and answer some questions.
Smith asked what questions the agent had, and he said he was not at liberty to discuss the questions. This made Smith think she needed a lawyer. The agent told Smith that it was not necessary to have a lawyer because she was not in trouble. He claimed he had some routine questions about a trip and said, "I think you know which trip I'm talking about." Realizing Parker wanted to talk to her about the trip she took to Israel and Palestine in August, just months ago, she reached out to a lawyer with the National Lawyers Guild.
"We went on an educational trip in which we met with NGOs, teachers, nonviolent protesters," explains Smith. "We didn't meet with anyone who is on any terrorist list. We didn't give money to anyone that is on a terrorist list. We wanted to see what it was like for ourselves, to live in Israel with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank."
Suppressing the right of American groups to travel is not new to U.S. government policy. In 1992, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) mounted a case on behalf of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Geo-Vista Global Experiences and Veterans for Peace asserting regulations on group travel to Vietnam and Cambodia were "making it impossible to organize academic study groups, to travel with study groups, to travel with colleagues to assess humanitarian aid and to engage in group fact-finding trips."
Secretary of State James Baker eventually lifted the regulations, making it permissible for groups to travel to the two countries.
Tom Burke is another traveler alleged to have provided “material support to terror.” Burke was at home with his wife and daughter on September 24, 2010 and began to receive phone calls from people in Chicago and Minneapolis informing them the FBI had raided their homes. Burke thought the FBI might be coming to raid his house. He decided his daughter needed to get to kindergarten before the FBI entered his home. He left with his daughter.
Burke thought he needed to write a press release, took his computer and got in his car to go find a web café. On the way he noticed that his car was being followed. He called his wife and they agreed he should drive to the parking garage at her work. As Burke reached the parking garage, the car that had been following him sped off. An SUV sped into the road right behind him and followed him into the garage. Burke was served with a subpoena to appear before a grand jury. His wife was later served with a subpoena too.
"We've been doing solidarity work with people in other countries who get killed for doing what they do,” Burke explains. “When I went to Colombia in 2003 with a labor union delegation, at that time three Colombian trade unionists were being killed every single week. And that was the scariest week of my life." Burke was with the human rights director of the oil workers union. All week he had to have armed security, know who was with the group and whether they were in a safe place.
Months into targeting the activists, there is no evidence that any of these activists provided "material support for terrorism." [http://firedoglake.com/tag/green-is-the-new-red/]
Reminiscent of how animal rights and environmental activists have been targeted in recent years, the FBI is going after the activists, wrecking their lives, intimidating Americans who believe in their right to dissent. It is pressing on, widening its investigation despite a growing backlash against the investigation. And some of the activists fear indictments from the investigation may be coming soon.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
2011-06-29 "FCC Decries Lack of Media Diversity, Stymies Low Power TV" by Eric K. Arnold
[http://www.themediaconsortium.org/2011/06/27/the-wavelength-fcc-decries-lack-of-media-diversity-stymies-low-power-tv/]
Local coverage and diversity are in short supply in today’s media landscape — especially when it comes to broadcast and cable TV. But there is hope. In markets like the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, Low Power TV (LPTV) has emerged as a viable alternative to network and cable TV, offering 24-hour programming and locally-produced news shows for ethnic communities in their own languages.
While LPTV offers incredible opportunities for ethnic communities, as I reported here [http://newamericamedia.org/2011/06/next-steps-for-ethnic-media----fighting-for-low-power-tv.php] and here [http://newamericamedia.org/2011/06/barriers-to-digital-diversity----the-threat-to-low-power-tv.php] for New America Media, these stations face considerable challenges, including an unfriendly regulatory landscape and the weighty influence of the big-bucks telecommunications industry, which just wants LPTV to go away so it can claim the full digital spectrum.
Moreover, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) considers LPTV a secondary service with no legal protection from interference or displacement by broadcasters –- which makes it difficult, if not impossible, for LPTV to thrive, since its future is uncertain.
Localism Lacking, FCC Study Says -
Ironically, the very same FCC that is preventing LPTV from gaining a stronger foothold recently issued a report, titled “The Information Needs of Communities,” which lays out how localism has suffered from media consolidation. In her analysis of the FCC study, Truthout’s Nadia Prupis found [http://www.truth-out.org/fcc-report-finds-local-journalism-severe-decline/1307720114] that “Local journalism has not been able to keep up with a changing media landscape, leading to a significant drop in quality in-depth reporting.”
Shared News is Bad News for Localism -
Futhermore [http://www.freepress.net/press-release/2011/6/22/new-campaign-exposes-covert-consolidation-newsrooms], according to Free Press, a nonpartisan media advocacy group, “Across the country, hundreds of TV stations have quietly merged newsrooms, circumventing the Federal Communications Commission’s media ownership limits at the expense of independent, local journalism.” As noted in the FCC study, almost one-third of local news airing on full-power TV stations is actually produced by other stations. According to Free Press, there are nearly 80 markets “where these deals are in place, involving more than 200 stations.”
Free Press’ newest campaign, “Change the Channels,” includes an interactive map highlighting eight markets where this practice is especially egregious [http://www.savethenews.org/changethechannels].
Echoing Corporate Media-Speak -
AlterNet’s Don Hazen spotlights products of the right-wing echo chamber — and how those messages impact public conversations. Hazen gives two examples [http://www.alternet.org/story/151378/the_inner_secrets_of_the_right_wing_echo_chamber]: “The first message is: ‘We must raise the retirement age or the economy will collapse.’ And two: ‘Social security is bankrupt.’ These two statements have been repeated thousands of times in and on American media. Yet there is not one scintilla of evidence that either one is accurate. But they have lodged themselves into the mainstream of American thought, constantly repeated by corporate media, as if they are obvious truths.”
The men behind the curtain are the Koch brothers, conservative billionaires who have usurped America’s political agenda by using the media as an echo chamber — themes that are explored in a new documentary produced by Brave New Films.
More Scrutiny For AT&T Merger -
State agencies are increasingly concerned about the potential harm the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger would wreak on consumers. As Public News Service’s Mark Scheerer writes [http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/20771-2], “In a filing with the Federal Communications Commission, New York’s Public Service Commission (PSC) has asked the government to ‘carefully evaluate’ whether it will harm the public interest by stifling competition.”
A PSC spokesman says this is a “significant” concern to the agency.
Less competition, Scheerer explains, “could lead to higher rates or a lack of incentive to improve wireless broadband service.” The article also notes that the merger is under investigation in three states, including New York.
Merger Supporters Paid Off With Corporate Cash -
AlterNet’s David Rosen and Bruce Kushnick analyze GLAADgate [http://www.alternet.org/media/151360/shills_r_us:_organizations_that_get_at&t_cash_endorse_its_mega-merger_with_t-mobile_], which erupted after GLAAD’s president Jarrett Barrios was forced to resign after signing a statement of GLAAD’s support for the AT&T/T-Mobile deal with the FCC despite GLAAD’s board voicing opposition to the merger. After the statement was released, it was revealed that AT&T contributed $50,000 to GLAAD in what’s looking like a quid pro quo.
But that’s just the tip of the cash-for-shills iceberg. Rosen and Kushnick note that AT&T has leveraged more than 300 nonprofit groups, including “labor unions, trade associations, state and local politicians, and private corporations” into supporting the merger. These groups include the American Foundation for the Blind, National Conference of Black Mayors, National Puerto Rican Coalition, United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, The Communications Workers of America and the AFL-CIO. The NAACP, for instance, received over $1 million from AT&T in 2009 alone.
AT&T can do this because they have “deep pockets,” as Rosen and Kushnick explain:
In 2009, the AT&T Foundation doled out over $60 million to nonprofits and other causes. In addition, in 2010, AT&T paid out nearly $20 million to influence the political process and legislative decisions; it contributed $3.7 million to America’s two major political parties (56% to Republicans) and another $15.4 million to lobbying activities. During the first three months of 2011, AT&T spent $6.8 million on lobbyists and in to lawyers related to the T-Mobile deal.
But, Rosen and Kushnick write, a larger question remains: by taking AT&T’s cash, and then singing the company’s praises, are these organizations violating guidelines which state a tax-exempt entity “may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities”?
Is Facebook Censoring Political Speech?
Social media network Facebook has been widely praised for its role in Arab Spring — the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt that have brought political change to the Middle East — but it may be engaging in censorship in the United Kingdom.
As Mother Jones’ Nick Baumann reports [http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/06/why-did-facebook-block-uk-strike-website], “Labor unions and student activists in the United Kingdom are organizing a massive strike of public workers to protest cuts planned by Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative-led government. They’re hoping to draw tens or even hundreds of thousands of supporters into the streets to join the workers in an across-the-pond version of the Wisconsin demonstrations that captured national attention in March [http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/whats-happening-wisconsin-explained].
“But over the past few days, as activists worked to promote their plan, they ran into a problem: Facebook…was blocking the strike organizers’ website, www.j30strike.org.” [http://www.j30strike.org/]
Facebook has since responded with an official “oops, we didn’t mean it.” But, as Baumann points out, “as an increasingly important means of communication and social and political organizing, it’s important — for Facebook and its users — that the company be seen as a neutral party in debates over political issues.”
[http://www.themediaconsortium.org/2011/06/27/the-wavelength-fcc-decries-lack-of-media-diversity-stymies-low-power-tv/]
Local coverage and diversity are in short supply in today’s media landscape — especially when it comes to broadcast and cable TV. But there is hope. In markets like the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, Low Power TV (LPTV) has emerged as a viable alternative to network and cable TV, offering 24-hour programming and locally-produced news shows for ethnic communities in their own languages.
While LPTV offers incredible opportunities for ethnic communities, as I reported here [http://newamericamedia.org/2011/06/next-steps-for-ethnic-media----fighting-for-low-power-tv.php] and here [http://newamericamedia.org/2011/06/barriers-to-digital-diversity----the-threat-to-low-power-tv.php] for New America Media, these stations face considerable challenges, including an unfriendly regulatory landscape and the weighty influence of the big-bucks telecommunications industry, which just wants LPTV to go away so it can claim the full digital spectrum.
Moreover, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) considers LPTV a secondary service with no legal protection from interference or displacement by broadcasters –- which makes it difficult, if not impossible, for LPTV to thrive, since its future is uncertain.
Localism Lacking, FCC Study Says -
Ironically, the very same FCC that is preventing LPTV from gaining a stronger foothold recently issued a report, titled “The Information Needs of Communities,” which lays out how localism has suffered from media consolidation. In her analysis of the FCC study, Truthout’s Nadia Prupis found [http://www.truth-out.org/fcc-report-finds-local-journalism-severe-decline/1307720114] that “Local journalism has not been able to keep up with a changing media landscape, leading to a significant drop in quality in-depth reporting.”
Shared News is Bad News for Localism -
Futhermore [http://www.freepress.net/press-release/2011/6/22/new-campaign-exposes-covert-consolidation-newsrooms], according to Free Press, a nonpartisan media advocacy group, “Across the country, hundreds of TV stations have quietly merged newsrooms, circumventing the Federal Communications Commission’s media ownership limits at the expense of independent, local journalism.” As noted in the FCC study, almost one-third of local news airing on full-power TV stations is actually produced by other stations. According to Free Press, there are nearly 80 markets “where these deals are in place, involving more than 200 stations.”
Free Press’ newest campaign, “Change the Channels,” includes an interactive map highlighting eight markets where this practice is especially egregious [http://www.savethenews.org/changethechannels].
Echoing Corporate Media-Speak -
AlterNet’s Don Hazen spotlights products of the right-wing echo chamber — and how those messages impact public conversations. Hazen gives two examples [http://www.alternet.org/story/151378/the_inner_secrets_of_the_right_wing_echo_chamber]: “The first message is: ‘We must raise the retirement age or the economy will collapse.’ And two: ‘Social security is bankrupt.’ These two statements have been repeated thousands of times in and on American media. Yet there is not one scintilla of evidence that either one is accurate. But they have lodged themselves into the mainstream of American thought, constantly repeated by corporate media, as if they are obvious truths.”
The men behind the curtain are the Koch brothers, conservative billionaires who have usurped America’s political agenda by using the media as an echo chamber — themes that are explored in a new documentary produced by Brave New Films.
More Scrutiny For AT&T Merger -
State agencies are increasingly concerned about the potential harm the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger would wreak on consumers. As Public News Service’s Mark Scheerer writes [http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/20771-2], “In a filing with the Federal Communications Commission, New York’s Public Service Commission (PSC) has asked the government to ‘carefully evaluate’ whether it will harm the public interest by stifling competition.”
A PSC spokesman says this is a “significant” concern to the agency.
Less competition, Scheerer explains, “could lead to higher rates or a lack of incentive to improve wireless broadband service.” The article also notes that the merger is under investigation in three states, including New York.
Merger Supporters Paid Off With Corporate Cash -
AlterNet’s David Rosen and Bruce Kushnick analyze GLAADgate [http://www.alternet.org/media/151360/shills_r_us:_organizations_that_get_at&t_cash_endorse_its_mega-merger_with_t-mobile_], which erupted after GLAAD’s president Jarrett Barrios was forced to resign after signing a statement of GLAAD’s support for the AT&T/T-Mobile deal with the FCC despite GLAAD’s board voicing opposition to the merger. After the statement was released, it was revealed that AT&T contributed $50,000 to GLAAD in what’s looking like a quid pro quo.
But that’s just the tip of the cash-for-shills iceberg. Rosen and Kushnick note that AT&T has leveraged more than 300 nonprofit groups, including “labor unions, trade associations, state and local politicians, and private corporations” into supporting the merger. These groups include the American Foundation for the Blind, National Conference of Black Mayors, National Puerto Rican Coalition, United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, The Communications Workers of America and the AFL-CIO. The NAACP, for instance, received over $1 million from AT&T in 2009 alone.
AT&T can do this because they have “deep pockets,” as Rosen and Kushnick explain:
In 2009, the AT&T Foundation doled out over $60 million to nonprofits and other causes. In addition, in 2010, AT&T paid out nearly $20 million to influence the political process and legislative decisions; it contributed $3.7 million to America’s two major political parties (56% to Republicans) and another $15.4 million to lobbying activities. During the first three months of 2011, AT&T spent $6.8 million on lobbyists and in to lawyers related to the T-Mobile deal.
But, Rosen and Kushnick write, a larger question remains: by taking AT&T’s cash, and then singing the company’s praises, are these organizations violating guidelines which state a tax-exempt entity “may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities”?
Is Facebook Censoring Political Speech?
Social media network Facebook has been widely praised for its role in Arab Spring — the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt that have brought political change to the Middle East — but it may be engaging in censorship in the United Kingdom.
As Mother Jones’ Nick Baumann reports [http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/06/why-did-facebook-block-uk-strike-website], “Labor unions and student activists in the United Kingdom are organizing a massive strike of public workers to protest cuts planned by Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative-led government. They’re hoping to draw tens or even hundreds of thousands of supporters into the streets to join the workers in an across-the-pond version of the Wisconsin demonstrations that captured national attention in March [http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/whats-happening-wisconsin-explained].
“But over the past few days, as activists worked to promote their plan, they ran into a problem: Facebook…was blocking the strike organizers’ website, www.j30strike.org.” [http://www.j30strike.org/]
Facebook has since responded with an official “oops, we didn’t mean it.” But, as Baumann points out, “as an increasingly important means of communication and social and political organizing, it’s important — for Facebook and its users — that the company be seen as a neutral party in debates over political issues.”
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
2011-06-28 "A Little House of Secrets on the Great Plains", reporting by Kelly Carr in Cheyenne and Brian Grow in Atlanta; additional reporting by Dan Levine in San Francisco, Jen Rogers and Jaime Hellman in Cheyenne; research by Mary Kivimaki of Westlaw; editing by Claudia Parsons and Michael Williams
[http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/113032/little-house-secrets-great-plains-reuters]
The secretive business havens of Cyprus and the Cayman Islands face a potent rival: Cheyenne, Wyoming.
At a single address in this sleepy city of 60,000 people, more than 2,000 companies are registered. The building, 2710 Thomes Avenue, isn't a shimmering skyscraper filled with A-list corporations. It's a 1,700-square-foot brick house with a manicured lawn, a few blocks from the State Capitol.
Neighbors say they see little activity there besides regular mail deliveries and a woman who steps outside for smoke breaks. Inside, however, the walls of the main room are covered floor to ceiling with numbered mailboxes labeled as corporate "suites." A bulky copy machine sits in the kitchen. In the living room, a woman in a headset answers calls and sorts bushels of mail.
A Reuters investigation has found the house at 2710 Thomes Avenue serves as a little Cayman Island on the Great Plains. It is the headquarters for Wyoming Corporate Services, a business-incorporation specialist that establishes firms which can be used as "shell" companies, paper entities able to hide assets.
Wyoming Corporate Services will help clients create a company, and more: set up a bank account for it; add a lawyer as a corporate director to invoke attorney-client privilege; even appoint stand-in directors and officers as high as CEO. Among its offerings is a variety of shell known as a "shelf" company, which comes with years of regulatory filings behind it, lending a greater feeling of solidity.
"A corporation is a legal person created by state statute that can be used as a fall guy, a servant, a good friend or a decoy," the company's website boasts. "A person you control... yet cannot be held accountable for its actions. Imagine the possibilities!"
Among the entities registered at 2710 Thomes, Reuters found, is a shelf company sheltering real-estate assets controlled by a jailed former prime minister of Ukraine, according to allegations made by a political rival in a federal court in California.
The owner of another shelf company at the address was indicted in April for allegedly helping online-poker operators evade a U.S. ban on Internet gambling. The owner of two other firms there was banned from government contracting in January for selling counterfeit truck parts to the Pentagon.
CASTING THE FIRST STONE
All the activity at 2710 Thomes is part of a little-noticed industry in the U.S.: the mass production of paper businesses. Scores of mass incorporators like Wyoming Corporate Services have set up shop. The hotbeds of the industry are three states with a light regulatory touch-Delaware, Wyoming and Nevada.
The pervasiveness of corporate secrecy on America's shores stands in stark contrast to Washington's message to the rest of the world. Since the September 11 attacks in 2001, the U.S. has been calling forcefully for greater transparency in global transactions, to lift the veil on shadowy money flows. During a debate in 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama singled out Ugland House in the Cayman Islands, reportedly home to some 12,000 offshore corporations, as "either the biggest building or the biggest tax scam on record."
Yet on U.S. soil, similar activity is perfectly legal. The incorporation industry, overseen by officials in the 50 states, has few rules. Convicted felons can operate firms which create companies, and buy them with no background checks.
No states license mass incorporators, and only a few require them to formally register with state authorities. None collect the names and addresses of "beneficial owners," the individuals with a controlling interest in corporations, according to a 2009 report by the National Association of Secretaries of State, a group for state officials overseeing incorporation. Wyoming and Nevada allow the real owners of corporations to hide behind "nominee" officers and directors with no direct role in the business, often executives of the mass incorporator.
"In the U.S., (business incorporation) is completely unregulated," says Jason Sharman, a professor at Griffith University in Nathan, Australia, who is preparing a study for the World Bank on corporate formation worldwide. "Somalia has slightly higher standards than Wyoming and Nevada."
An estimated 2 million corporations and limited liability companies are created each year in the U.S., according to Senate investigators. The Treasury Department has singled out LLCs as particularly vulnerable to being used as shell companies, as they can be owned by anyone and managed anonymously. Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming had 688,000 LLCs on file in 2009, up from 624,000 in 2007.
Treasury and state banking regulators say banks have flagged billions of dollars in suspicious transactions involving U.S. shell companies in recent years. On June 10, a federal judge in Oregon ordered a company registered there to pay $60 million for defrauding a Ukrainian government agency through sham transactions involving shell companies. The civil lawsuit described a network of U.S.-registered shells connected to fraud in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan.
A growing niche in the shell business is shelf corporations. Like paper-only shells, which enable the secrecy-minded to hide real ownership of assets, shelf companies are set up by firms like Wyoming Corporate Services, then left "on the shelf" to season for years. They're then sold later to owners looking for a quick way to secure bank loans, bid on contracts, and project financial stability. To speed up business activity, shelf corporations can often be purchased with established bank accounts, credit histories and tax returns filed with the Internal Revenue Service.
"They just slot in your names, and you walk away with the company. Presto!" says Daniel E. Karson, executive managing director at investigative firm Kroll Inc. "The purpose is to conceal ownership."
On its website, Wyoming Corporate Services currently lists more than 700 shelf companies for sale in 37 states. The older they are, the more expensive, like Scotch whisky. Brookside Management Inc., formed in December 2004, sells for $5,995, while Knotty Management LLC, formed in May, costs just $645. In Delaware, incorporator Harvard Business Services markets First Family LLC, created in May 1997, for $10,000.
"If they're signing a large contract, they may not want it to look like they've just formed a company," said Brett Melson, director of U.S. sales at Harvard Business Services. But he added: "Unsavory characters can do a lot of bad things with the companies."
Shell and shelf companies do serve legitimate purposes. They provide a quick and cheap way for entrepreneurs to jump into business and create jobs. Businesses can use them to protect trade secrets. Politicians or other public figures may use a shell company to hold their home so that people with ill intent have a harder time locating them.
The state of Wyoming says it cracked down on incorporation services in 2009 after discovering that nearly 5,700 companies were registered to post-office boxes. New laws require companies to have a physical presence in the state through an owner or a registered agent, and make it a felony to submit false filings.
"What we want to have is good, quality legitimate businesses," said Patricia O'Brien, Wyoming's Deputy Secretary of State. "We don't regulate what the business itself does, but we are not recruiting businesses here that are questionable or illegal."
Wyoming Corporate Services is run by Gerald Pitts, its 54-year-old founder and president. On paper, he is a prolific businessman. Incorporation data provided by Westlaw, a unit of Thomson Reuters, show that Pitts is listed as a director, president or principal for at least 41 companies registered at 2710 Thomes Avenue.
Another 248 firms name Edge Financial Inc., another incorporation service, as their "manager." Gerald Pitts is the president of Edge Financial, according to records on file with the Wyoming secretary of state's office.
Companies registered at 2710 Thomes Avenue have been named in a dozen civil lawsuits alleging unpaid taxes, securities fraud and trademark infringement since 2007, a review of Westlaw data shows. State and federal tax authorities have filed liens against companies registered at the address seeking to collect more than $300,000 in unpaid taxes, according to Westlaw.
Pitts says Wyoming Corporate Services fully complies with the law and doesn't have any knowledge of how clients use the companies he registers. "However, we recognize that business entities (whether aged, shell or traditional) may be used for both good and ill," Pitts wrote in an email to Reuters. "WCS will always cooperate with law enforcement agencies who request information or assistance. WCS does not provide any product or service with the intent that it be used to violate the law."
THE UKRAINE CONNECTION
Gerald Pitts and his own incorporation firms have never been sued or sanctioned, according to federal and state court records. Wyoming officials said Wyoming Corporate Services operates legally. "If they do it by cubby holes and they are really representing each person, they meet the law," said O'Brien, the deputy secretary of state.
But clients of his have run into trouble.
Among those registered at the little house in Cheyenne are two small companies formed through Wyoming Corporate Services that sold knock-off truck parts to the U.S. Department of Defense, according to a Reuters review of two federal contracting databases and findings from an investigation by the Pentagon's Defense Logistics Agency. The owner of those firms, Atilla Kan, awaits sentencing on a 2007 conviction for wire fraud in a related matter.
Also linked to 2710 Thomes is former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, who was once ranked the eighth-most corrupt official in the world by watchdog group Transparency International. He is now serving an eight-year jail term in California for a 2004 conviction on money-laundering and extortion charges. According to court records, that scheme used shell companies and offshore bank accounts to hide stolen Ukrainian government funds.
Court records submitted in Lazarenko's criminal case and documents from a separate civil lawsuit, as well as interviews with lawyers familiar with the matter, indicate Lazarenko controls a shelf company incorporated in Cheyenne that owns an estimated $72 million in real estate in Ukraine through other companies.
The U.S. government continues to seek more than $250 million from bank accounts in Antigua, Barbuda, Guernsey and other countries that it says were controlled by Lazarenko and his associates, according to a forfeiture action filed by the Department of Justice.
The paper trail linking Lazarenko to the real estate in Ukraine is labyrinthine. At the heart of it is a shelf company called Capital Investments Group, registered at 2710 Thomes Avenue.
U.S. lawyers for a Ukrainian businessman named Gennady Korban submitted documents claiming that Lazarenko is the true owner of Capital Investments Group and other U.S. companies.
Lazarenko and Korban are rivals in Ukraine, and for years have traded allegations of corruption and assassination. An organization chart accompanying Korban's submission alleges Capital Investments Group owns 99.99 percent of a Ukrainian firm called OOO Capital Investments Group. That company, the chart claims, is the owner of another company, OOO Ukrainsky Tyutyun, where Pavlo Lazarenko is a director. Each of the firms and several others are used as corporate fronts to control properties in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, the filing alleges.
Seven properties are named in the 2009 filing by Korban, including 55 Pushkin Street and 58 Komsomolskaya Street. The dossier on Capital Investments Group claims that other directors of the alleged front companies include Lazarenko's wife, son and mother-in-law.
Federal prosecutors successfully urged the court in late 2009 to disregard Korban's submissions, arguing that it would take too much time to vet his account and thus delay his resentencing after a lengthy appeal.
A few months later, in February 2010, Capital Investments Group sued Korban and others in federal court in Delaware. That lawsuit claims two properties in the Ukraine controlled by Capital Investments Group - 55 Pushkin Street and 58 Komsomolskaya Street - were stolen from it using forged documents.
The lawsuit says Capital Investments was formed in September 2005. It is registered at 2710 Thomes Avenue, and Gerald Pitts, the court documents say, is "President, Secretary, Chairman and director."
But Capital Investments Group doesn't disclose the name of its owners. Daniel Horowitz and Martin Garbus, attorneys for the company, have represented Pavlo Lazarenko in other U.S. and Ukrainian litigation. They declined to provide the owners' names, citing client confidentiality, and wouldn't comment on Lazarenko's links to CIG.
The U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco declined to comment. Asked about his association with Lazarenko and Capital Investments Group, Gerald Pitts declined to provide information on specific clients. Pitts said he is aware of the Delaware lawsuit and "is cooperating fully with authorities in the matter."
POKER EMPIRE
Another man linked to 2710 Thomes is Ira N. Rubin. Prosecutors allege he created a Rube Goldberg-style network of shell and shelf corporations to further his scams.
In December 2006, the Federal Trade Commission sued Rubin for fraud in federal court in Tampa. Documents in the civil lawsuit allege Rubin used at least 18 different front companies to obscure his role as a credit-card processor for telemarketing scams.
These operations, the FTC alleged, offered subprime credit cards that charged an upfront fee debited from customers' bank accounts, but the cards were never delivered. The complaint also alleged Rubin processed payments for online gambling rings and pharmacy websites selling controlled substances.
One company in that network was Elite Funding Group Inc. It was registered at 2710 Thomes Avenue in August 2004 and offered for sale by Wyoming Corporate Services for $1,095. Gerald Pitts was listed in public documents as the original director, wrote an investigator hired by the FTC in a January 2007 report filed in federal court in Tampa. Pitts had resigned six months earlier as director and was replaced by Rubin, according to court records.
Rubin's maze-like network served as the back office for alleged consumer scams operating from Canada, the Philippines, Cyprus and the U.S., with names like Freedom Pharmacy and Fun Time Bingo. His companies took consumer bank account information obtained by the clients, charged the accounts via an electronic transactions network that enables direct debits, kept a portion of the proceeds, and forwarded the rest to the alleged fraudsters, according to documents in the FTC's civil lawsuit.
To minimize scrutiny, Rubin used at least 18 different firms to handle his operations. A firm called Global Marketing Group processed payments for telemarketers offering bogus credit cards, the FTC alleged. Elite Funding, the Wyoming shelf corporation, was a subsidiary of Global Marketing. Rubin used Elite to open bank accounts with Wells Fargo Bank which held more than $300,000 in proceeds from the payment processing, according to court records.
Just hours after Rubin was visited by a court-appointed receiver in the case in December 2006, $249,000 vanished from the Wells Fargo account. Rubin refused to say if he transferred the money, citing his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. At least $125,000 then made its way to a bank account in Chennai, India, and has never been recovered, according to documents in the civil lawsuit.
Why use a shelf company? "To hide who they are and what they are doing. In the case of Ira Rubin, he had a payment processing empire that worked on behalf of many different industries, all of which were engaged in illegal conduct," said James Davis, an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission. "It was to his benefit to make it as difficult as possible for law enforcement to connect these companies back to him."
In 2008, Rubin fled to Costa Rica to avoid arrest for contempt in the civil case. Authorities allege he went on to run another payment-processing operation from abroad: This March 10, he and 10 others were indicted in New York for allegedly running a massive scheme to hide payments made by U.S. customers to the three largest online-poker websites, in violation of a ban passed by Congress in 2006. He was extradited from Guatemala the same month. On June 8, a New York judge denied bail for Rubin.
Stuart Meissner, an attorney for Rubin, said his client was not available for comment. Pitts declined to comment.
AMERICAN LOOPHOLES
The loopholes in U.S. disclosure of bank-account and shell-company ownership have drawn fire.
The U.S. was declared "non-compliant" in four out of 40 categories monitored by the Financial Action Task Force, an international group fighting money laundering and terrorism finance, in a 2006 evaluation report, its most recent. Two of those ratings relate to scant information collected on the owners of corporations. The task force named Wyoming, Nevada and Delaware as secrecy havens. Only three states - Alaska, Arizona and Montana - require regular disclosure of corporate shareholders in some form, according to the 2009 report by the National Association of Secretaries of State.
Some lawmakers want tighter rules. Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee's Permanent Subcommittee for Investigations, has introduced the Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement Assistance Act each year since 2008. The bill would require states to obtain and update information about the real owners of companies, and impose civil and criminal sanctions for filing false information.
"Criminals use U.S. shell companies to commit financial fraud, drug trafficking, even terrorist financing, in part because our states don't require anyone to name the owners of the companies they form," Levin said in an email to Reuters.
The bill has been beaten back by a coalition of state officials and business groups, citing concerns about the cost of implementing the new law and federal government infringement on state incorporation rights.
A leading opponent is the National Association of Secretaries of State. Kay Stimson, a spokeswoman, said in an email that the Levin bill "would have placed new burdens upon states and legitimate, law-abiding businesses-many of which are struggling to stay afloat during these difficult financial times-while continuing to provide lawbreakers with the means to evade the law."
An aide for Levin said the bill is expected to be re-introduced soon. The new bill will add provisions requiring incorporation agents who sell shelf companies to provide beneficial owner data, said a Senate aide familiar with it.
CAT AND MOUSE
Shell companies remain a headache for law-enforcement authorities. Officials say court-ordered subpoenas served on incorporators of shell and shelf corporations generally do deliver the names of the real owners hiding behind nominees. But if the owners are not U.S. citizens or companies, the investigation often hits a dead-end, they say.
There are additional hurdles. Wyoming Corporate Services charges $2,500 per year to supply an attorney who can provide an extra shield. Cheyenne attorney Graham Norris Jr. tells prospective clients sent to him by WCS that he will create a company on their behalf. That way, he says, he can invoke attorney-client privilege-adding a layer of privacy anytime there is an inquiry about their identities.
"When you do need to contact Wyoming Corporate Services, you may do so through me," advises a June 13 "Dear Client" letter supplied by Norris to Reuters. "If you contact them directly, there is a greater risk they may disclose that information in response to a subpoena; remember there is no privilege with Wyoming Corporate Services, only with your attorney."
For a fee, clients can request that Norris file a motion to quash any subpoena, the letter says. It warns that in cases where fraud or criminal conduct is alleged, a court might order Norris to name the owners. Still, after any inquiry about identity, the letter says, Norris must inform the client-and "I must also decline to answer the inquiry."
Investigators say they are sometimes loath to use subpoenas for the very reason highlighted in Norris' letter-fear of tipping off targets. "In the initial stages of investigation, when we encounter a domestic shell corporation, we know we can't subpoena the company that sold the corporation to the end users, because we don't want the target to find out they are being investigated," says FTC attorney James Davis.
Other U.S. agencies raise similar complaints about shells. The 2006 U.S. Money Laundering Threat Assessment, prepared by 16 federal agencies, devotes a chapter to the ways U.S. shell companies can be attractive vehicles to hide ill-gotten funds. It includes a chart to show why money launderers might like to create shells in Wyoming, Nevada or Delaware, which offer the highest levels of corporate anonymity.
The information in the chart is credited to the Web site of a firm called Corporations Today-an incorporation service run by Gerald Pitts in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
---
The building at 2710 Thomes Avenue, is pictured in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in this undated photograph.
[http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/113032/little-house-secrets-great-plains-reuters]
The secretive business havens of Cyprus and the Cayman Islands face a potent rival: Cheyenne, Wyoming.
At a single address in this sleepy city of 60,000 people, more than 2,000 companies are registered. The building, 2710 Thomes Avenue, isn't a shimmering skyscraper filled with A-list corporations. It's a 1,700-square-foot brick house with a manicured lawn, a few blocks from the State Capitol.
Neighbors say they see little activity there besides regular mail deliveries and a woman who steps outside for smoke breaks. Inside, however, the walls of the main room are covered floor to ceiling with numbered mailboxes labeled as corporate "suites." A bulky copy machine sits in the kitchen. In the living room, a woman in a headset answers calls and sorts bushels of mail.
A Reuters investigation has found the house at 2710 Thomes Avenue serves as a little Cayman Island on the Great Plains. It is the headquarters for Wyoming Corporate Services, a business-incorporation specialist that establishes firms which can be used as "shell" companies, paper entities able to hide assets.
Wyoming Corporate Services will help clients create a company, and more: set up a bank account for it; add a lawyer as a corporate director to invoke attorney-client privilege; even appoint stand-in directors and officers as high as CEO. Among its offerings is a variety of shell known as a "shelf" company, which comes with years of regulatory filings behind it, lending a greater feeling of solidity.
"A corporation is a legal person created by state statute that can be used as a fall guy, a servant, a good friend or a decoy," the company's website boasts. "A person you control... yet cannot be held accountable for its actions. Imagine the possibilities!"
Among the entities registered at 2710 Thomes, Reuters found, is a shelf company sheltering real-estate assets controlled by a jailed former prime minister of Ukraine, according to allegations made by a political rival in a federal court in California.
The owner of another shelf company at the address was indicted in April for allegedly helping online-poker operators evade a U.S. ban on Internet gambling. The owner of two other firms there was banned from government contracting in January for selling counterfeit truck parts to the Pentagon.
CASTING THE FIRST STONE
All the activity at 2710 Thomes is part of a little-noticed industry in the U.S.: the mass production of paper businesses. Scores of mass incorporators like Wyoming Corporate Services have set up shop. The hotbeds of the industry are three states with a light regulatory touch-Delaware, Wyoming and Nevada.
The pervasiveness of corporate secrecy on America's shores stands in stark contrast to Washington's message to the rest of the world. Since the September 11 attacks in 2001, the U.S. has been calling forcefully for greater transparency in global transactions, to lift the veil on shadowy money flows. During a debate in 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama singled out Ugland House in the Cayman Islands, reportedly home to some 12,000 offshore corporations, as "either the biggest building or the biggest tax scam on record."
Yet on U.S. soil, similar activity is perfectly legal. The incorporation industry, overseen by officials in the 50 states, has few rules. Convicted felons can operate firms which create companies, and buy them with no background checks.
No states license mass incorporators, and only a few require them to formally register with state authorities. None collect the names and addresses of "beneficial owners," the individuals with a controlling interest in corporations, according to a 2009 report by the National Association of Secretaries of State, a group for state officials overseeing incorporation. Wyoming and Nevada allow the real owners of corporations to hide behind "nominee" officers and directors with no direct role in the business, often executives of the mass incorporator.
"In the U.S., (business incorporation) is completely unregulated," says Jason Sharman, a professor at Griffith University in Nathan, Australia, who is preparing a study for the World Bank on corporate formation worldwide. "Somalia has slightly higher standards than Wyoming and Nevada."
An estimated 2 million corporations and limited liability companies are created each year in the U.S., according to Senate investigators. The Treasury Department has singled out LLCs as particularly vulnerable to being used as shell companies, as they can be owned by anyone and managed anonymously. Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming had 688,000 LLCs on file in 2009, up from 624,000 in 2007.
Treasury and state banking regulators say banks have flagged billions of dollars in suspicious transactions involving U.S. shell companies in recent years. On June 10, a federal judge in Oregon ordered a company registered there to pay $60 million for defrauding a Ukrainian government agency through sham transactions involving shell companies. The civil lawsuit described a network of U.S.-registered shells connected to fraud in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan.
A growing niche in the shell business is shelf corporations. Like paper-only shells, which enable the secrecy-minded to hide real ownership of assets, shelf companies are set up by firms like Wyoming Corporate Services, then left "on the shelf" to season for years. They're then sold later to owners looking for a quick way to secure bank loans, bid on contracts, and project financial stability. To speed up business activity, shelf corporations can often be purchased with established bank accounts, credit histories and tax returns filed with the Internal Revenue Service.
"They just slot in your names, and you walk away with the company. Presto!" says Daniel E. Karson, executive managing director at investigative firm Kroll Inc. "The purpose is to conceal ownership."
On its website, Wyoming Corporate Services currently lists more than 700 shelf companies for sale in 37 states. The older they are, the more expensive, like Scotch whisky. Brookside Management Inc., formed in December 2004, sells for $5,995, while Knotty Management LLC, formed in May, costs just $645. In Delaware, incorporator Harvard Business Services markets First Family LLC, created in May 1997, for $10,000.
"If they're signing a large contract, they may not want it to look like they've just formed a company," said Brett Melson, director of U.S. sales at Harvard Business Services. But he added: "Unsavory characters can do a lot of bad things with the companies."
Shell and shelf companies do serve legitimate purposes. They provide a quick and cheap way for entrepreneurs to jump into business and create jobs. Businesses can use them to protect trade secrets. Politicians or other public figures may use a shell company to hold their home so that people with ill intent have a harder time locating them.
The state of Wyoming says it cracked down on incorporation services in 2009 after discovering that nearly 5,700 companies were registered to post-office boxes. New laws require companies to have a physical presence in the state through an owner or a registered agent, and make it a felony to submit false filings.
"What we want to have is good, quality legitimate businesses," said Patricia O'Brien, Wyoming's Deputy Secretary of State. "We don't regulate what the business itself does, but we are not recruiting businesses here that are questionable or illegal."
Wyoming Corporate Services is run by Gerald Pitts, its 54-year-old founder and president. On paper, he is a prolific businessman. Incorporation data provided by Westlaw, a unit of Thomson Reuters, show that Pitts is listed as a director, president or principal for at least 41 companies registered at 2710 Thomes Avenue.
Another 248 firms name Edge Financial Inc., another incorporation service, as their "manager." Gerald Pitts is the president of Edge Financial, according to records on file with the Wyoming secretary of state's office.
Companies registered at 2710 Thomes Avenue have been named in a dozen civil lawsuits alleging unpaid taxes, securities fraud and trademark infringement since 2007, a review of Westlaw data shows. State and federal tax authorities have filed liens against companies registered at the address seeking to collect more than $300,000 in unpaid taxes, according to Westlaw.
Pitts says Wyoming Corporate Services fully complies with the law and doesn't have any knowledge of how clients use the companies he registers. "However, we recognize that business entities (whether aged, shell or traditional) may be used for both good and ill," Pitts wrote in an email to Reuters. "WCS will always cooperate with law enforcement agencies who request information or assistance. WCS does not provide any product or service with the intent that it be used to violate the law."
THE UKRAINE CONNECTION
Gerald Pitts and his own incorporation firms have never been sued or sanctioned, according to federal and state court records. Wyoming officials said Wyoming Corporate Services operates legally. "If they do it by cubby holes and they are really representing each person, they meet the law," said O'Brien, the deputy secretary of state.
But clients of his have run into trouble.
Among those registered at the little house in Cheyenne are two small companies formed through Wyoming Corporate Services that sold knock-off truck parts to the U.S. Department of Defense, according to a Reuters review of two federal contracting databases and findings from an investigation by the Pentagon's Defense Logistics Agency. The owner of those firms, Atilla Kan, awaits sentencing on a 2007 conviction for wire fraud in a related matter.
Also linked to 2710 Thomes is former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, who was once ranked the eighth-most corrupt official in the world by watchdog group Transparency International. He is now serving an eight-year jail term in California for a 2004 conviction on money-laundering and extortion charges. According to court records, that scheme used shell companies and offshore bank accounts to hide stolen Ukrainian government funds.
Court records submitted in Lazarenko's criminal case and documents from a separate civil lawsuit, as well as interviews with lawyers familiar with the matter, indicate Lazarenko controls a shelf company incorporated in Cheyenne that owns an estimated $72 million in real estate in Ukraine through other companies.
The U.S. government continues to seek more than $250 million from bank accounts in Antigua, Barbuda, Guernsey and other countries that it says were controlled by Lazarenko and his associates, according to a forfeiture action filed by the Department of Justice.
The paper trail linking Lazarenko to the real estate in Ukraine is labyrinthine. At the heart of it is a shelf company called Capital Investments Group, registered at 2710 Thomes Avenue.
U.S. lawyers for a Ukrainian businessman named Gennady Korban submitted documents claiming that Lazarenko is the true owner of Capital Investments Group and other U.S. companies.
Lazarenko and Korban are rivals in Ukraine, and for years have traded allegations of corruption and assassination. An organization chart accompanying Korban's submission alleges Capital Investments Group owns 99.99 percent of a Ukrainian firm called OOO Capital Investments Group. That company, the chart claims, is the owner of another company, OOO Ukrainsky Tyutyun, where Pavlo Lazarenko is a director. Each of the firms and several others are used as corporate fronts to control properties in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, the filing alleges.
Seven properties are named in the 2009 filing by Korban, including 55 Pushkin Street and 58 Komsomolskaya Street. The dossier on Capital Investments Group claims that other directors of the alleged front companies include Lazarenko's wife, son and mother-in-law.
Federal prosecutors successfully urged the court in late 2009 to disregard Korban's submissions, arguing that it would take too much time to vet his account and thus delay his resentencing after a lengthy appeal.
A few months later, in February 2010, Capital Investments Group sued Korban and others in federal court in Delaware. That lawsuit claims two properties in the Ukraine controlled by Capital Investments Group - 55 Pushkin Street and 58 Komsomolskaya Street - were stolen from it using forged documents.
The lawsuit says Capital Investments was formed in September 2005. It is registered at 2710 Thomes Avenue, and Gerald Pitts, the court documents say, is "President, Secretary, Chairman and director."
But Capital Investments Group doesn't disclose the name of its owners. Daniel Horowitz and Martin Garbus, attorneys for the company, have represented Pavlo Lazarenko in other U.S. and Ukrainian litigation. They declined to provide the owners' names, citing client confidentiality, and wouldn't comment on Lazarenko's links to CIG.
The U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco declined to comment. Asked about his association with Lazarenko and Capital Investments Group, Gerald Pitts declined to provide information on specific clients. Pitts said he is aware of the Delaware lawsuit and "is cooperating fully with authorities in the matter."
POKER EMPIRE
Another man linked to 2710 Thomes is Ira N. Rubin. Prosecutors allege he created a Rube Goldberg-style network of shell and shelf corporations to further his scams.
In December 2006, the Federal Trade Commission sued Rubin for fraud in federal court in Tampa. Documents in the civil lawsuit allege Rubin used at least 18 different front companies to obscure his role as a credit-card processor for telemarketing scams.
These operations, the FTC alleged, offered subprime credit cards that charged an upfront fee debited from customers' bank accounts, but the cards were never delivered. The complaint also alleged Rubin processed payments for online gambling rings and pharmacy websites selling controlled substances.
One company in that network was Elite Funding Group Inc. It was registered at 2710 Thomes Avenue in August 2004 and offered for sale by Wyoming Corporate Services for $1,095. Gerald Pitts was listed in public documents as the original director, wrote an investigator hired by the FTC in a January 2007 report filed in federal court in Tampa. Pitts had resigned six months earlier as director and was replaced by Rubin, according to court records.
Rubin's maze-like network served as the back office for alleged consumer scams operating from Canada, the Philippines, Cyprus and the U.S., with names like Freedom Pharmacy and Fun Time Bingo. His companies took consumer bank account information obtained by the clients, charged the accounts via an electronic transactions network that enables direct debits, kept a portion of the proceeds, and forwarded the rest to the alleged fraudsters, according to documents in the FTC's civil lawsuit.
To minimize scrutiny, Rubin used at least 18 different firms to handle his operations. A firm called Global Marketing Group processed payments for telemarketers offering bogus credit cards, the FTC alleged. Elite Funding, the Wyoming shelf corporation, was a subsidiary of Global Marketing. Rubin used Elite to open bank accounts with Wells Fargo Bank which held more than $300,000 in proceeds from the payment processing, according to court records.
Just hours after Rubin was visited by a court-appointed receiver in the case in December 2006, $249,000 vanished from the Wells Fargo account. Rubin refused to say if he transferred the money, citing his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. At least $125,000 then made its way to a bank account in Chennai, India, and has never been recovered, according to documents in the civil lawsuit.
Why use a shelf company? "To hide who they are and what they are doing. In the case of Ira Rubin, he had a payment processing empire that worked on behalf of many different industries, all of which were engaged in illegal conduct," said James Davis, an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission. "It was to his benefit to make it as difficult as possible for law enforcement to connect these companies back to him."
In 2008, Rubin fled to Costa Rica to avoid arrest for contempt in the civil case. Authorities allege he went on to run another payment-processing operation from abroad: This March 10, he and 10 others were indicted in New York for allegedly running a massive scheme to hide payments made by U.S. customers to the three largest online-poker websites, in violation of a ban passed by Congress in 2006. He was extradited from Guatemala the same month. On June 8, a New York judge denied bail for Rubin.
Stuart Meissner, an attorney for Rubin, said his client was not available for comment. Pitts declined to comment.
AMERICAN LOOPHOLES
The loopholes in U.S. disclosure of bank-account and shell-company ownership have drawn fire.
The U.S. was declared "non-compliant" in four out of 40 categories monitored by the Financial Action Task Force, an international group fighting money laundering and terrorism finance, in a 2006 evaluation report, its most recent. Two of those ratings relate to scant information collected on the owners of corporations. The task force named Wyoming, Nevada and Delaware as secrecy havens. Only three states - Alaska, Arizona and Montana - require regular disclosure of corporate shareholders in some form, according to the 2009 report by the National Association of Secretaries of State.
Some lawmakers want tighter rules. Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee's Permanent Subcommittee for Investigations, has introduced the Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement Assistance Act each year since 2008. The bill would require states to obtain and update information about the real owners of companies, and impose civil and criminal sanctions for filing false information.
"Criminals use U.S. shell companies to commit financial fraud, drug trafficking, even terrorist financing, in part because our states don't require anyone to name the owners of the companies they form," Levin said in an email to Reuters.
The bill has been beaten back by a coalition of state officials and business groups, citing concerns about the cost of implementing the new law and federal government infringement on state incorporation rights.
A leading opponent is the National Association of Secretaries of State. Kay Stimson, a spokeswoman, said in an email that the Levin bill "would have placed new burdens upon states and legitimate, law-abiding businesses-many of which are struggling to stay afloat during these difficult financial times-while continuing to provide lawbreakers with the means to evade the law."
An aide for Levin said the bill is expected to be re-introduced soon. The new bill will add provisions requiring incorporation agents who sell shelf companies to provide beneficial owner data, said a Senate aide familiar with it.
CAT AND MOUSE
Shell companies remain a headache for law-enforcement authorities. Officials say court-ordered subpoenas served on incorporators of shell and shelf corporations generally do deliver the names of the real owners hiding behind nominees. But if the owners are not U.S. citizens or companies, the investigation often hits a dead-end, they say.
There are additional hurdles. Wyoming Corporate Services charges $2,500 per year to supply an attorney who can provide an extra shield. Cheyenne attorney Graham Norris Jr. tells prospective clients sent to him by WCS that he will create a company on their behalf. That way, he says, he can invoke attorney-client privilege-adding a layer of privacy anytime there is an inquiry about their identities.
"When you do need to contact Wyoming Corporate Services, you may do so through me," advises a June 13 "Dear Client" letter supplied by Norris to Reuters. "If you contact them directly, there is a greater risk they may disclose that information in response to a subpoena; remember there is no privilege with Wyoming Corporate Services, only with your attorney."
For a fee, clients can request that Norris file a motion to quash any subpoena, the letter says. It warns that in cases where fraud or criminal conduct is alleged, a court might order Norris to name the owners. Still, after any inquiry about identity, the letter says, Norris must inform the client-and "I must also decline to answer the inquiry."
Investigators say they are sometimes loath to use subpoenas for the very reason highlighted in Norris' letter-fear of tipping off targets. "In the initial stages of investigation, when we encounter a domestic shell corporation, we know we can't subpoena the company that sold the corporation to the end users, because we don't want the target to find out they are being investigated," says FTC attorney James Davis.
Other U.S. agencies raise similar complaints about shells. The 2006 U.S. Money Laundering Threat Assessment, prepared by 16 federal agencies, devotes a chapter to the ways U.S. shell companies can be attractive vehicles to hide ill-gotten funds. It includes a chart to show why money launderers might like to create shells in Wyoming, Nevada or Delaware, which offer the highest levels of corporate anonymity.
The information in the chart is credited to the Web site of a firm called Corporations Today-an incorporation service run by Gerald Pitts in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
---
The building at 2710 Thomes Avenue, is pictured in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in this undated photograph.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
2011-06-26 "Kansas State Government In Bed With Dirty Power Companies" by Beth Buczynski
[http://www.care2.com/causes/kansas-state-government-in-bed-with-dirty-power-companies.html]
A local news outlet recently discovered that the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) got a little too friendly with a power company that applied to build an 895 MW coal-fired power plant in the state.
Internal emails uncovered by the Kansas City Star [http://www.kansascity.com/2011/06/18/2959875/kansas-agency-power-company-worked.html] demonstrate that the KDHE consulted with Sunflower Electric Power Corp. officials to determine how they should respond to over 6,000 public comments opposing construction of the plant.
“Some of the responses KDHE produced as their own work were nearly verbatim copies of the responses suggested by Sunflower. KDHE even helped Sunflower set up a computer program to process the questions,” reports Earthjustice [http://earthjustice.org/blog/2011-june/collusion-in-kansas-force-feeds-coal-power].
And that wasn’t the only time the state agency, which is charged with protecting the health of all Kansans and upholding the Clean Air Act, depended on the power company to tell it what to do.
The Kansas City Star found [http://www.kansascity.com/2011/06/18/2959875/kansas-agency-power-company-worked.html#ixzz1QQYnZX2G] that “during the months the department was writing the 275-page permit — which will determine emissions releases for years to come — staffers were in almost daily contact with Sunflower Electric Power Corp. officials.
Tell the state of Kansas that people are more important than coal profits!
An editorial in The KC Star lays the blame for this scandal squarely at the feet of former governor Mark Parkinson, and his fellow coal advocates.
“The permit process is a shameful legacy of former Kansas governor Mark Parkinson. The Democrat reversed the refusal of his Democratic predecessor, Kathleen Sebelius, to grant a permit for a coal-burning plant in western Kansas. Sebelius and her secretary of health and environment, Roderick Bremby, said the plant would pollute Kansas air while generating most of its power for Colorado. Parkinson fired Bremby in early November after Sunflower officials said they thought he was slowing down the permit process. With Bremby gone, regulators worked nights and weekends to process Sunflower’s permit.”
Proponents of the proposed plant near Holcomb in western Kansas say it will bring crucial new jobs to a depressed area, but studies have shown that the coal industry only delivers a fraction of the jobs promised when seeking approval for new power plants [http://www.care2.com/causes/jobs-promised-by-coal-fired-power-plants-are-bogus.html].
While many Kansans are outraged at this blatant violation of the public trust, Republicans in the state seem unable to see anything wrong with the KDHE’s actions:
“Being cozy with business is not necessarily bad,” said Rep. Scott Schwab, an Olathe Republican [http://cjonline.com/news/2011-06-20/report-kdhe-had-close-ties-sunflower]. “Kansas needs to be open for business. We don’t have mountains. We don’t have oceans. If we don’t allow for people to make it easy to make a profit in Kansas, there really is no reason to come here.”
Well, Rep. Schwab, filthy air and polluted waterways make it difficult for people to live there. So which is more important, profit or people? It’s time to do your job and take a stand for the health and happiness of the Kansans that you were elected to serve.
[http://www.care2.com/causes/kansas-state-government-in-bed-with-dirty-power-companies.html]
A local news outlet recently discovered that the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) got a little too friendly with a power company that applied to build an 895 MW coal-fired power plant in the state.
Internal emails uncovered by the Kansas City Star [http://www.kansascity.com/2011/06/18/2959875/kansas-agency-power-company-worked.html] demonstrate that the KDHE consulted with Sunflower Electric Power Corp. officials to determine how they should respond to over 6,000 public comments opposing construction of the plant.
“Some of the responses KDHE produced as their own work were nearly verbatim copies of the responses suggested by Sunflower. KDHE even helped Sunflower set up a computer program to process the questions,” reports Earthjustice [http://earthjustice.org/blog/2011-june/collusion-in-kansas-force-feeds-coal-power].
And that wasn’t the only time the state agency, which is charged with protecting the health of all Kansans and upholding the Clean Air Act, depended on the power company to tell it what to do.
The Kansas City Star found [http://www.kansascity.com/2011/06/18/2959875/kansas-agency-power-company-worked.html#ixzz1QQYnZX2G] that “during the months the department was writing the 275-page permit — which will determine emissions releases for years to come — staffers were in almost daily contact with Sunflower Electric Power Corp. officials.
Tell the state of Kansas that people are more important than coal profits!
An editorial in The KC Star lays the blame for this scandal squarely at the feet of former governor Mark Parkinson, and his fellow coal advocates.
“The permit process is a shameful legacy of former Kansas governor Mark Parkinson. The Democrat reversed the refusal of his Democratic predecessor, Kathleen Sebelius, to grant a permit for a coal-burning plant in western Kansas. Sebelius and her secretary of health and environment, Roderick Bremby, said the plant would pollute Kansas air while generating most of its power for Colorado. Parkinson fired Bremby in early November after Sunflower officials said they thought he was slowing down the permit process. With Bremby gone, regulators worked nights and weekends to process Sunflower’s permit.”
Proponents of the proposed plant near Holcomb in western Kansas say it will bring crucial new jobs to a depressed area, but studies have shown that the coal industry only delivers a fraction of the jobs promised when seeking approval for new power plants [http://www.care2.com/causes/jobs-promised-by-coal-fired-power-plants-are-bogus.html].
While many Kansans are outraged at this blatant violation of the public trust, Republicans in the state seem unable to see anything wrong with the KDHE’s actions:
“Being cozy with business is not necessarily bad,” said Rep. Scott Schwab, an Olathe Republican [http://cjonline.com/news/2011-06-20/report-kdhe-had-close-ties-sunflower]. “Kansas needs to be open for business. We don’t have mountains. We don’t have oceans. If we don’t allow for people to make it easy to make a profit in Kansas, there really is no reason to come here.”
Well, Rep. Schwab, filthy air and polluted waterways make it difficult for people to live there. So which is more important, profit or people? It’s time to do your job and take a stand for the health and happiness of the Kansans that you were elected to serve.
2011-06-26 "Rethink or go crazy: Guess what the GOP chose" by Gene Lyons from "Arkansas Democrat-Gazette" newspaper
Have you ever sensed that conservative talk radio hosts are reading from a script written by somebody else? Well, you're right. According to a well-documented report in Politico, such fearless, independent thinkers as Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are taking millions in payola to promote the policy ideas of the Heritage Foundation without necessarily letting listeners in on the secret.
OK, scratch "payola" -- make that "sponsorship fees." Payola's what you call it when disc jockeys take cash under the table to play certain songs. It's illegal only when that income goes unreported to the IRS.
Nobody's saying Hannity and Limbaugh are doing that.
But what they are doing is weaving praise for Heritage Foundation pronouncements seamlessly into their programs without letting on that they're being paid a small fortune to do so: $2 million a year in Limbaugh's case; $1.3 million in Hannity's.
"The point that people don't realize," said Michael Harrison of media trade publication TALKERS Magazine, "is that (big-time political talk show hosts) are radio personalities -- they are in the same business that people like Casey Kasem are in -- and what they do is no different than people who broadcast from used car lots or restaurants or who endorse the local roofer or gardener."
The Heritage Foundation, in turn, is one of those Scrooge McDuck-style "think tanks" largely funded by right-wing billionaires like the late Joseph Coors and the Koch brothers. Its "resident scholars" churn out one half-baked study after another proving that economic prosperity depends upon plutocrats paying little or no taxes.
See, like Uncle Scrooge, some of these jokers are pathologically addicted to hoarding. It's not enough that the top 1 percent of income earners in the United States own 40 percent of the nation's wealth. They'd really like it all.
But I digress. Glenn Beck's unacknowledged Sugar Daddy is an outfit called FreedomWorks. Mark Levin's is Americans for Prosperity, another Koch brothers production, which, along with tax cuts, devotes itself to complaints about burdensome regulations preventing energy producers like Koch Industries from disposing of drilling waste in convenient nearby streams.
"Defending the American Dream," they call it.
Granted, it's hard to feel sorry for gullible listeners who hear Beck ranting about how Armageddon approaches, so they should hoard canned goods and buy gold. This on a program sponsored by Goldline. Somebody's going to con them out of their savings, so it may as well be Beck.
Shoot, they can always fall back on Social Security until President Michele Bachmann does away with it.
"I wish more of the grassroots knew the reality that this wasn't Rush or Sean or Beck saying these things out of the goodness of their hearts," said one conservative who decided the payola was too expensive and ethically dubious. "If the grassroots found out that these guys were getting paid seven figures a year to say this stuff, it might leave a bad taste in their mouth."
I have every confidence, however, that the grassroots talk radio audience can rise above such niggling concerns -- and for the same reason that a failed "end of days" prophet's deluded followers patiently await his recalculations.
After the catastrophic Bush presidency, the Republican right had two choices: rethink or go crazy. A disturbing number chose to double-down on dogma. As a consequence, the estimable Fareed Zakaria argues in Time, the GOP has become as dependent upon abstract ideology as its worst enemies.
"They resemble the old Marxists, who refused to look around at actual experience," Zakaria writes. "'I know it works in practice,' the old saw goes, 'but does it work in theory?'" Indeed, watching the cast of Republican presidential candidates in their recent CNN debate reminded me of the ferocious certitude of Kremlin apparatchiks depicted in Vassily Aksyonov's brilliantly satirical novel "Generations of Winter."
No more "compassionate conservatism" for them. The GOP candidates competed to describe an imaginary paradise of sweeping tax cuts, vastly reduced spending, an end to government regulation, the bolstering of state's rights, and burgeoning prosperity for all. It's as if the presidency of George W. Bush never happened.
"Does anyone think," Zakaria asks, "we are really going to get federal spending to the level it was at under Calvin Coolidge, as Paul Ryan's plan assumes?"
Every single candidate in the New Hampshire debates pretended to. Tim Pawlenty even went Ryan one better. Why, simply by eliminating capital gains taxes altogether -- rendering unto Scrooge that which is Scrooge's -- we'll have 10 years of 5 percent growth, something never approached in U.S. history.
Never mind President Barack Obama. The real class enemy is Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Back to the Roaring '20s!
Have you ever sensed that conservative talk radio hosts are reading from a script written by somebody else? Well, you're right. According to a well-documented report in Politico, such fearless, independent thinkers as Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are taking millions in payola to promote the policy ideas of the Heritage Foundation without necessarily letting listeners in on the secret.
OK, scratch "payola" -- make that "sponsorship fees." Payola's what you call it when disc jockeys take cash under the table to play certain songs. It's illegal only when that income goes unreported to the IRS.
Nobody's saying Hannity and Limbaugh are doing that.
But what they are doing is weaving praise for Heritage Foundation pronouncements seamlessly into their programs without letting on that they're being paid a small fortune to do so: $2 million a year in Limbaugh's case; $1.3 million in Hannity's.
"The point that people don't realize," said Michael Harrison of media trade publication TALKERS Magazine, "is that (big-time political talk show hosts) are radio personalities -- they are in the same business that people like Casey Kasem are in -- and what they do is no different than people who broadcast from used car lots or restaurants or who endorse the local roofer or gardener."
The Heritage Foundation, in turn, is one of those Scrooge McDuck-style "think tanks" largely funded by right-wing billionaires like the late Joseph Coors and the Koch brothers. Its "resident scholars" churn out one half-baked study after another proving that economic prosperity depends upon plutocrats paying little or no taxes.
See, like Uncle Scrooge, some of these jokers are pathologically addicted to hoarding. It's not enough that the top 1 percent of income earners in the United States own 40 percent of the nation's wealth. They'd really like it all.
But I digress. Glenn Beck's unacknowledged Sugar Daddy is an outfit called FreedomWorks. Mark Levin's is Americans for Prosperity, another Koch brothers production, which, along with tax cuts, devotes itself to complaints about burdensome regulations preventing energy producers like Koch Industries from disposing of drilling waste in convenient nearby streams.
"Defending the American Dream," they call it.
Granted, it's hard to feel sorry for gullible listeners who hear Beck ranting about how Armageddon approaches, so they should hoard canned goods and buy gold. This on a program sponsored by Goldline. Somebody's going to con them out of their savings, so it may as well be Beck.
Shoot, they can always fall back on Social Security until President Michele Bachmann does away with it.
"I wish more of the grassroots knew the reality that this wasn't Rush or Sean or Beck saying these things out of the goodness of their hearts," said one conservative who decided the payola was too expensive and ethically dubious. "If the grassroots found out that these guys were getting paid seven figures a year to say this stuff, it might leave a bad taste in their mouth."
I have every confidence, however, that the grassroots talk radio audience can rise above such niggling concerns -- and for the same reason that a failed "end of days" prophet's deluded followers patiently await his recalculations.
After the catastrophic Bush presidency, the Republican right had two choices: rethink or go crazy. A disturbing number chose to double-down on dogma. As a consequence, the estimable Fareed Zakaria argues in Time, the GOP has become as dependent upon abstract ideology as its worst enemies.
"They resemble the old Marxists, who refused to look around at actual experience," Zakaria writes. "'I know it works in practice,' the old saw goes, 'but does it work in theory?'" Indeed, watching the cast of Republican presidential candidates in their recent CNN debate reminded me of the ferocious certitude of Kremlin apparatchiks depicted in Vassily Aksyonov's brilliantly satirical novel "Generations of Winter."
No more "compassionate conservatism" for them. The GOP candidates competed to describe an imaginary paradise of sweeping tax cuts, vastly reduced spending, an end to government regulation, the bolstering of state's rights, and burgeoning prosperity for all. It's as if the presidency of George W. Bush never happened.
"Does anyone think," Zakaria asks, "we are really going to get federal spending to the level it was at under Calvin Coolidge, as Paul Ryan's plan assumes?"
Every single candidate in the New Hampshire debates pretended to. Tim Pawlenty even went Ryan one better. Why, simply by eliminating capital gains taxes altogether -- rendering unto Scrooge that which is Scrooge's -- we'll have 10 years of 5 percent growth, something never approached in U.S. history.
Never mind President Barack Obama. The real class enemy is Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Back to the Roaring '20s!
Friday, June 24, 2011
2011-06-24 "Another Republican Attempt To Gut the Clean Water Act" by Gina-Marie Cheeseman
[http://www.care2.com/causes/another-republican-attempt-to-gut-the-clean-water-act.html]
The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee approved a bill on June 22, 2011 which would gut the Clean Water Act. The bill, H.R. 2018, the Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act of 2011 would amend the Federal Water Pollution Control Act to preserve the authority of each State to make determinations relating to the State’s water quality standards, and for other purposes.
The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) lists what the bill would do [http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/sfleischli/another_clean_water_act_rollba.html]:
* Limit the EPA's ability to effectively implement or make necessary improvements to state water quality standards to deal with modern pollution challenges
* Prevent the EPA from improving numeric criteria for pollutants that have led to dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay and Gulf of Mexico
* Restrict the EPA from upgrading standards for toxic pollutants where narrative standards only provide very limited protection, with the example of state standards that prohibit the discharge of toxic pollutants in toxic amounts.
* Prevent the EPA from vetoing state-issued Clean Water Act permits even if the EPA concludes those permits are not protective of water quality.
* Block the EPA's ability to withhold federal funding to states even if the EPA determines the state's implementation of water quality standards is not protective of water quality
The EPA's Technical Assessment of the bill says it would overturn almost 40 years of federal legislation by preventing EPA from protecting public health and water quality:
"This bill is a recipe for increased pollution, dirtier waters and more mountaintop removal mining, said Jon Devine, senior attorney in the water program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Its supporters seem intent on taking us back to the good old days when rivers like the Cuyahoga caught fire and Lake Erie was declared dead. We will continue to fight it vigorously if it comes to the House floor."
John H. Adams of NRDC states in a blog post [http://rss.nrdcfeeds.org/~r/switchboard_all/~3/MS7hdayWcgI/dont_water_down_the_clean_wate.html] that "the bill would allow states eager to attract or appease big polluters to effectively veto improvements in the water quality standards we’ve worked for decades to put into place." Adams also states that the bill would give governors "a green light to local polluters and influential donors that want to dump dangerous levels of coal waste, industrial chemicals, municipal sewage and agricultural runoff into waters we share as a nation."
[http://www.care2.com/causes/another-republican-attempt-to-gut-the-clean-water-act.html]
The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee approved a bill on June 22, 2011 which would gut the Clean Water Act. The bill, H.R. 2018, the Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act of 2011 would amend the Federal Water Pollution Control Act to preserve the authority of each State to make determinations relating to the State’s water quality standards, and for other purposes.
The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) lists what the bill would do [http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/sfleischli/another_clean_water_act_rollba.html]:
* Limit the EPA's ability to effectively implement or make necessary improvements to state water quality standards to deal with modern pollution challenges
* Prevent the EPA from improving numeric criteria for pollutants that have led to dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay and Gulf of Mexico
* Restrict the EPA from upgrading standards for toxic pollutants where narrative standards only provide very limited protection, with the example of state standards that prohibit the discharge of toxic pollutants in toxic amounts.
* Prevent the EPA from vetoing state-issued Clean Water Act permits even if the EPA concludes those permits are not protective of water quality.
* Block the EPA's ability to withhold federal funding to states even if the EPA determines the state's implementation of water quality standards is not protective of water quality
The EPA's Technical Assessment of the bill says it would overturn almost 40 years of federal legislation by preventing EPA from protecting public health and water quality:
"This bill is a recipe for increased pollution, dirtier waters and more mountaintop removal mining, said Jon Devine, senior attorney in the water program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Its supporters seem intent on taking us back to the good old days when rivers like the Cuyahoga caught fire and Lake Erie was declared dead. We will continue to fight it vigorously if it comes to the House floor."
John H. Adams of NRDC states in a blog post [http://rss.nrdcfeeds.org/~r/switchboard_all/~3/MS7hdayWcgI/dont_water_down_the_clean_wate.html] that "the bill would allow states eager to attract or appease big polluters to effectively veto improvements in the water quality standards we’ve worked for decades to put into place." Adams also states that the bill would give governors "a green light to local polluters and influential donors that want to dump dangerous levels of coal waste, industrial chemicals, municipal sewage and agricultural runoff into waters we share as a nation."
2011-06-24 "Some of Virginia’s “Brown v. Board” College Grants Go to White Students" by Amelia T.
[http://www.care2.com/causes/some-of-virginias-brown-v-board-college-grants-go-to-white-students.html]
I grew up in Virginia with the painful knowledge that my elementary school was one of the many public schools that closed rather than integrate after the historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. The state is now offering compensation to people whose schooling was interrupted during that period. Scholarship recipients, who are usually in their mid-60s, get “anywhere from $300 to $10,000 a year for courses of their choosing.” Since 2004, the state has awarded the scholarships to about 70 people, according to the Washington Post [http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/some-of-vas-brown-v-board-college-grants-go-to-whites/2011/06/02/AGMWK8bH_story.html]. A significant number of these people were, however, white. And the scholarship program says that it wants to do outreach to encourage more white people to apply.
“Both black and white students lost an opportunity because of the state’s decision, and both deserve this aid,” said Brenda Edwards, who administers the scholarships. “White people hear Brown v. Board, and they think they’re not eligible. We’re trying to change that perception…We want more people to get the education they missed out on years ago.”
This news inspired a variety of reactions, from incredulity to downright anger. Some wondered whether the beneficiaries of the grants came from families that defied the integration order. Others pointed out that while students of all races, particularly white students in poorer areas, faced educational barriers during the upheaval of “massive resistance,” it’s unquestionably true that black students were most disadvantaged.
Over at the Root [http://www.theroot.com/buzz/brown-v-board-college-grants-go-whites-fair], a blogger points out that giving grants to white students as well as black students is an illustration of the fact that while “it may appear that black people are the only ones who are hurt when racism and fear motivate policy decisions, but in the long term, all Americans suffer.”
As someone who attended Virginia public school for more than ten years, however, I find that analysis to be too optimistic. Virginia is still a state with enormous racial tension and inequity, where only last year, the governor thought it was appropriate to declare April “Confederate History Month.” [http://www.care2.com/causes/youre-celebrating-what-virginia-governor-declares-april-confederate-history-month.html]
While it’s fair to say that many people’s educational opportunities were disrupted by massive resistance, regardless of their race, these grants should be going to the people who were most adversely affected by the refusal to integrate schools.
[http://www.care2.com/causes/some-of-virginias-brown-v-board-college-grants-go-to-white-students.html]
I grew up in Virginia with the painful knowledge that my elementary school was one of the many public schools that closed rather than integrate after the historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. The state is now offering compensation to people whose schooling was interrupted during that period. Scholarship recipients, who are usually in their mid-60s, get “anywhere from $300 to $10,000 a year for courses of their choosing.” Since 2004, the state has awarded the scholarships to about 70 people, according to the Washington Post [http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/some-of-vas-brown-v-board-college-grants-go-to-whites/2011/06/02/AGMWK8bH_story.html]. A significant number of these people were, however, white. And the scholarship program says that it wants to do outreach to encourage more white people to apply.
“Both black and white students lost an opportunity because of the state’s decision, and both deserve this aid,” said Brenda Edwards, who administers the scholarships. “White people hear Brown v. Board, and they think they’re not eligible. We’re trying to change that perception…We want more people to get the education they missed out on years ago.”
This news inspired a variety of reactions, from incredulity to downright anger. Some wondered whether the beneficiaries of the grants came from families that defied the integration order. Others pointed out that while students of all races, particularly white students in poorer areas, faced educational barriers during the upheaval of “massive resistance,” it’s unquestionably true that black students were most disadvantaged.
Over at the Root [http://www.theroot.com/buzz/brown-v-board-college-grants-go-whites-fair], a blogger points out that giving grants to white students as well as black students is an illustration of the fact that while “it may appear that black people are the only ones who are hurt when racism and fear motivate policy decisions, but in the long term, all Americans suffer.”
As someone who attended Virginia public school for more than ten years, however, I find that analysis to be too optimistic. Virginia is still a state with enormous racial tension and inequity, where only last year, the governor thought it was appropriate to declare April “Confederate History Month.” [http://www.care2.com/causes/youre-celebrating-what-virginia-governor-declares-april-confederate-history-month.html]
While it’s fair to say that many people’s educational opportunities were disrupted by massive resistance, regardless of their race, these grants should be going to the people who were most adversely affected by the refusal to integrate schools.
