NBC News: ‘Stop with the napping’: TSA workers caught sleeping on the job

The chairman of a congressional subcommittee on oversight and management efficiency Wednesday called on the Transportation Security Administration to crack down on “the napping, the stealing, the tardiness, and the disrespect” a day after a watchdog’s report revealed a spike in TSA misconduct.

The TSA investigated and closed 9,622 cases of employee misconduct between the years 2010 and 2012, according to a report released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office.

The figure marked a 26 percent increase in misconduct cases in a three-year period.

Thirty-two percent of the cases involved problems with workers showing up for their jobs, according to the report, and 20 percent had to do with security and screening.

The report was released ahead of a hearing before the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday morning that included representatives from the TSA and GAO.

In one case mentioned in the GAO report, an employee left an assigned checkpoint to help a family member get a bag — later found to contain “numerous prohibited items” — past screening. The employee was suspended for seven days, according to the report.

In another case from January 2012, two former employees of the TSA were sentenced to six months in jail after they admitted to have stolen $40,000 from a bag at John F. Kennedy Airport, NBC New York reported.

Of the more than 9,000 misconduct cases closed by the TSA over the three-year period, nearly half resulted in a letter of reprimand, while employees were suspended in 31 percent of cases, according to the report. Only 17 percent of the employees found to have engaged in misconduct were removed from their jobs.

Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., the chairman of the subcommittee on oversight and management efficiency, said on Wednesday that a few bad employees contributed to a poor public perception for the agency.

At a House hearing on TSA integrity and misconduct by airport security personnel, Chairman Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., called upon them to “stop with the napping, the stealing, the tardiness, and the disrespect. Earn Americans’ trust and confidence.”

“While I know that there are many thousands of hardworking, dedicated employees working at airports throughout the country, and it’s unfair to generalize to the whole workforce, unfortunately a few bad apples can ruin the bunch,” Duncan said. “These findings are especially hard to stomach since so many Americans todays are sick of being groped, interrogated, and treated like criminals when passing through checkpoints.”

“If integrity is truly a core value, then, TSA, it’s time to prove it. Stop with the napping, the stealing, the tardiness, and the disrespect, and earn America’s trust and confidence,” Duncan said.

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http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/31/19794519-stop-with-the-napping-tsa-workers-caught-sleeping-on-the-job?lite

Reason.com: California Student Who Had to Drink His Own Urine While in DEA Custody Settles With U.S. Gov for $4 Million

Daniel Chong, the California college student who nearly died after DEA agents put him in a holding cell in 2012 and then forgot about him for four days, will receive a $4.1 million settlement from the U.S. Government, according to the Associated Press. The AP also reports that “no one has yet been disciplined for the April 2012 incident and no criminal charges will be filed.”

Chong was arrested in April 2012 at a 4/20 party, and put in a DEA holding cell. In May 2012 NBC interviewed Chong about his experience:

In his desperation, he said he was forced to drink his own urine.

“I had to do what I had to do to survive….I hallucinated by the third day,” Chong said. “I was completely insane.”

Chong said he lost roughly 15 pounds during the time he was alone. His lawyer confirmed that Chong ingested a powdery substance found inside the cell. Later testing revealed the substance was methamphetamine.

After days of being ignored, Chong said he tried to take his own life by breaking the glass from his spectacles with his teeth and then carving “Sorry mom,” on his wrists. He said nurses also found pieces of glass in his throat, which led him to believe he ingested the pieces purposefully.

Chong said he could hear DEA employees and people in neighboring cells. He screamed to let them know he was there, but no one replied. He kicked the door, but no one came to get him.

By the time DEA officers found Chong in his cell Wednesday morning Chong was completely incoherent, said Iredale.

“I didn’t think I would come out,” Chong said.

The AP also reports that DOJ Inspector General is investigating Chong’s case.

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Click below for more over at Reason.com

http://reason.com/blog/2013/07/30/california-student-who-had-to-drink-his

Market Watch: Attempt to curb NSA surveillance defeated in House

House lawmakers on Wednesday defeated an attempt to drastically curb a national-security program that collects the phone records of millions of Americans, after a tense debate on the balance between privacy rights and
government efforts to find terrorists.

The measure was narrowly defeated, 205-217, after last-minute lobbying by the Obama administration and House members on the intelligence panel, who said the program was crucial to national security.

House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio), who doesn’t often cast a ballot, voted against the amendment, reflecting nervousness among opponents about whether they would be able to defeat the bill.

The measure, from Rep. Justin Amash (R., Mich.), would have blocked funding for the National Security Agency to collect phone records unless they pertained to a particular person under investigation. The program came to public attention due to disclosures by Edward Snowden, the former NSA employee who recently released details of two classified programs.

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http://www.marketwatch.com/story/attempt-to-curb-nsa-surveillance-defeated-in-house-2013-07-25?siteid=yhoof2

NY Times: The Pros and Cons of a Surveillance Society

Here are three topics much in the news these days: Prism, the surveillance program of the national security agency; the death of Trayvon Martin; and Google Glass and the rise of wearable computers that record everything.

Although these might not seem connected, they are part of a growing move for, or against, a surveillance society.

On one side of this issue we have people declaring that too much surveillance, especially in the form of wearable cameras and computers, is detrimental and leaves people without any privacy in public. On the other side there are people who argue that a society with cameras everywhere will make the world safer and hold criminals more accountable for their actions.

But it leaves us with this one very important question: Do we want to live in a surveillance society that might ensure justice for all, yet privacy for none?

In the case of Mr. Martin, an unarmed black teenager who was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, the most crucial evidence about how an altercation between the two began — one that ultimately led to Mr. Martin’s death — came down to Mr. Zimmerman’s word.

As the trial showed, eyewitness accounts all differed. One neighbor who was closest to the altercation saw a “lighter-skinned” man on the bottom during a fight that ensued. Two other neighbors believed that Mr. Zimmerman was on top during the fight. One said she saw the man on top walk away after the fight.

Clearly the memory of one or all of those neighbors had been spoiled by time, confusion and adrenaline. But if one of those witnesses — including Mr. Martin or Mr. Zimmerman — had been wearing Google Glass or another type of personal recording device, the facts of that night might have been much clearer.

“Whenever something mysterious happens we ask: ‘Why can’t we hit rewind? Why can’t we go to the database?’” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. “We want to follow the data trail and know everything that we need to know. The big question is: Who is going to be in control of that recording and data?”

Prism, the highly secretive government program that was brought to light last month by a government whistleblower, is an example of a much larger scale of recording and data. President Obama has defended the government’s spying programs, saying they help in the fight against terrorists and ensure that Americans stay safe.

But critics say it goes too far. Representative James Sensenbrenner, the longtime Republican lawmaker from Wisconsin, compared today’s government surveillance to “Big Brother” from the Geroge Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Michael Shelden, author of “Orwell: The Authorized Biography,” told NPR earlier this month that today’s surveillance society is just like the book.

Orwell, Mr. Shelden said, “could see that war and defeating an enemy could be used as a reason for increasing political surveillance.” He added, “You were fighting a never-ending war that gave you a never-ending excuse for looking into people’s lives.”

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http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/the-pros-and-cons-of-a-surveillance-society/?partner=yahoofinance&_r=0

Roll Call: GOP Leaders Face Libertarian Revolt Over NSA, Egypt, Syria

House GOP leaders are scrambling to quell a quiet libertarian rebellion that threatens to block consideration of the Defense appropriations bill.

A small group of Republicans are holding the spending bill hostage until they get votes on several controversial amendments.

“We’ve conveyed to the whip team that we won’t vote for the rule if they don’t allow debate and votes,” Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said Friday. “We don’t need all the amendments to be allowed. We need at least one substantial amendment on three things: Egypt, Syria and NSA.”

Massie has two amendments before the Rules Committee: one that would defund military operations in Syria and one that would defund military operations in Egypt. Another leader in the Republican rebellion, Justin Amash of Michigan, has an amendment that would end funds for the National Security Agency’s blanket collection of telephone call records in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaking of the program.

Rules Committee member Rich Nugent, R-Fla., has a similar NSA amendment, but the libertarian lawmakers say it insufficiently addresses the issue.

GOP leaders have been coming off a string of impressive victories lately — from passing the farm bill without a single Democratic vote to navigating a No Child Left Behind rewrite. But the Rules Committee postponed their meeting Thursday on the Defense appropriations bill, and leaders are still figuring out if they have the votes to squash the Republican revolt.

Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has pleaded with lawmakers in the group to not shoot down the rule and, consequently, shoot Republicans in the foot.

According to an aide to one lawmaker in the group threatening to vote down the rule, leadership has used “every tool in the toolbox” to block the amendments. The aide said they have faced a number of procedural roadblocks, from leadership saying their amendments legislate on an appropriations bill to having their amendments submitted to the Congressional Budget Office for a score. The aide said it has been a “concerted effort.”

But the lawmakers have cleared the hurdles, they say, and they want votes. They are drafting a letter calling for the opportunity to vote on their amendments, and they are seeking signatories.

On Friday, Jim McGovern, D-Mass., who will be controlling the Defense appropriations rule on the floor for the Democrats, said the Republican Conference is “just chaos.”

“They can’t seem to get their act together. So they got a problem,” McGovern said. “The Republican leadership long ago lost the ability to lead.”

McGovern, who is also a Rules panel member, said Democrats were initially told the Rules Committee was delaying its Thursday meeting on the Defense appropriations bill “out of deference to us” so Democrats could vote in the ranking member of the Natural Resources election, even though no Democrat asked the committee to delay the hearing.

“And then they delayed for another hour, and then they delayed it indefinitely and never told us why,” McGovern said. “We all know why: It’s because of these NSA votes.”

The Rules Committee plans to mark up the rule for the Defense appropriations bill at 5 p.m. on July 22, and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said Friday that the House will consider the DOD appropriations bill next week.

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http://blogs.rollcall.com/goppers/gop-leaders-face-libertarian-rebellion/

Yahoo News: NSA spying under fire: ‘You’ve got a problem’

Robert S. Litt, general counsel in the Office of Director of National Intelligence testifies during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Wednesday, July 17, 2013. Six weeks after a leaked document exposed the scope of the government's monitoring of Americans' phone records, the House Judiciary Committee calls on key administration figures from the intelligence world to answer questions about the sweeping government surveillance of Americans in war on terrorism. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

In a heated confrontation over domestic spying, members of Congress said Wednesday they never intended to allow the National Security Agency to build a database of every phone call in America. And they threatened to curtail the government’s surveillance authority.

Top Obama administration officials countered that the once-secret program was legal and necessary to keep America safe. And they left open the possibility that they could build similar databases of people’s credit card transactions, hotel records and Internet searches.

The clash on Capitol Hill undercut President Barack Obama’s assurances that Congress had fully understood the dramatic expansion of government power it authorized repeatedly over the past decade.

The House Judiciary Committee hearing also represented perhaps the most public, substantive congressional debate on surveillance powers since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Previous debates have been largely theoretical and legalistic, with officials in the Bush and Obama administrations keeping the details hidden behind the cloak of classified information.

That changed last month when former government contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents to the Guardian newspaper revealing that the NSA collects every American’s phone records, knowing that the overwhelming majority of people have no ties to terrorism.

Civil rights groups have warned for years that the government would use the USA Patriot Act to conduct such wholesale data collection. The government denied it.

The Obama administration says it needs a library of everyone’s phone records so that when it finds a suspected terrorist, it can search its archives for the suspect’s calling habits. The administration says the database was authorized under a provision in the Patriot Act that Congress hurriedly passed after 9/11 and reauthorized in 2005 and 2010.

The sponsor of that bill, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., said Wednesday that Congress meant only to allow seizures directly relevant to national security investigations. No one expected the government to obtain every phone record and store them in a huge database to search later.

As Deputy Attorney General James Cole explained why that was necessary, Sensenbrenner cut him off and reminded him that his surveillance authority expires in 2015.

“And unless you realize you’ve got a problem,” Sensenbrenner said, “that is not going to be renewed.”

He was followed by Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., who picked up where his colleague left off. The problem, he said, is that the administration considers “everything in the world” relevant to fighting terrorism.

Later, Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, asked whether the NSA could build similar databases of everyone’s Internet searches, hotel records and credit card transactions.

Robert S. Litt, general counsel in the Office of Director of National Intelligence, didn’t directly answer, saying it would depend on whether the government believed those records — like phone records — to be relevant to terrorism investigations.

After the phone surveillance became public, Obama assured Americans that Congress was well aware of what was going on.

“When it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program,” he said.

Whether lawmakers willingly kept themselves in the dark or were misled, it was apparent Wednesday that one of the key oversight bodies in Congress remained unclear about the scope of surveillance, more than a decade after it was authorized.

The Judiciary Committee’s senior Democrat, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, noted that the panel had “primary jurisdiction” over the surveillance laws that were the foundation for the NSA programs. Yet one lawmaker, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, said some members of Congress wouldn’t have known about the NSA surveillance without the sensational leaks: “Snowden, I don’t like him at all, but we would never have known what happened if he hadn’t told us.”

The NSA says it only looks at numbers as part of narrow terrorism investigations, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

For the first time, NSA deputy director John C. Inglis disclosed Wednesday that the agency sometimes conducts what’s known as three-hop analysis. That means the government can look at the phone data of a suspect terrorist, plus the data of all of his contacts, then all of those people’s contacts, and finally, all of those people’s contacts.

If the average person calls 40 unique people, three-hop analysis could allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist.

Rep Randy Forbes, R-Va., said such a huge database was ripe for government abuse. When Inglis said there was no evidence of that, Forbes interrupted:

“I said I wasn’t going to yell at you and I’m going to try not to. That’s exactly what the American people are worried about,” he said. “That’s what’s infuriating the American people. They’re understanding that if you collect that amount of data, people can get access to it in ways that can harm them.”

The government says it stores everybody’s phone records for five years. Cole explained that because the phone companies don’t keep records that long, the NSA had to build its own database.

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http://news.yahoo.com/nsa-spying-under-fire-youve-got-problem-164530431.html

Openmarket.org: DHS Secretary Napolitano Resigns, TSA Body Scanner Scandal Remains Unresolved

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is resigning to become president of the University of California system. Republican politicians such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Tex.) quickly praised Napolitano when news of her resignation broke, with McCain saying she “served our nation with honor” and McCaul touting her as “someone who does not underestimate the threats against us.”

Fortunately, not all Republican members of Congress are as enthusiastic when it comes to America’s bloated and malignant security state. “Secretary Napolitano’s departure comes not a minute too soon,” said Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.). “Now is a good time for Congress to consider dismantling the monstrous Department of Homeland Security and replacing it with a smaller security focused entity that is realistically capable of connecting the dots of threats posed to our national security.” Hear, hear, Rep. Mica.

News of Napolitano’s resignation deserves one response from civil libertarians and those in favor of risk-based security policy: Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Among other unsavory deeds, for her entire tenure, she allowed the Transportation Security Administration to illegally deploy whole-body imaging scanners in airports. Until a court ordered the TSA in July 2011 to conduct the legally mandated regulatory proceeding, officials at the Department of Homeland Security maintained that such basic lawful administrative procedures were unnecessary and the public had no right to officially comment on the use of the machines. It then took over a year and a half for the TSA to open the regulatory proceeding in March 2013, something it should have done in 2009 before deploying the scanners in the first place.

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http://www.openmarket.org/2013/07/12/dhs-secretary-napolitano-resigns-tsa-body-scanner-scandal-remains-unresolved/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Openmarketorg+%28OpenMarket.org%29

Reason.com: Nevada Cops Commandeer Private Homes, Arrest Residents for Objecting

Henderson police arrested a family for refusing to let officers use their homes as lookouts for a domestic violence investigation of their neighbors, the family claims in court.

Anthony Mitchell and his parents Michael and Linda Mitchell sued the City of Henderson, its Police Chief Jutta Chambers, Officers Garret Poiner, Ronald Feola, Ramona Walls, Angela Walker, and Christopher Worley, and City of North Las Vegas and its Police Chief Joseph Chronister, in Federal Court.

Henderson, pop. 257,000, is a suburb of Las Vegas.

The Mitchell family’s claim includes Third Amendment violations, a rare claim in the United States. The Third Amendment prohibits quartering soldiers in citizens’ homes in times of peace without the consent of the owner. …

“Although plaintiff Anthony Mitchell was lying motionless on the ground and posed no threat, officers, including Officer David Cawthorn, then fired multiple ‘pepperball’ rounds at plaintiff as he lay defenseless on the floor of his living room. Anthony Mitchell was struck at least three times by shots fired from close range, injuring him and causing him severe pain.” (Parentheses in complaint.)

Officers then arrested him for obstructing a police officer, searched the house and moved furniture without his permission and set up a place in his home for a lookout, Mitchell says in the complaint.

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http://reason.com/24-7/2013/07/04/nevada-cops-commandeer-private-homes-arr

Happy Fourth of July America: Video: 4th of July DUI Checkpoint – Drug Dogs, Searched without Consent, Rights Taken Away, while Innocent

A man was pulled over and searched by police on the 4th of July at a DUI checkpoint in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Although the man repeatedly exercised his constitutional rights to not be searched and followed the law, the officers bullied him and forced him out of the vehicle despite committing no crime. The motorist’s car was then searched by a K-9 unit who was given a false alert signal by the police officer in order to search the vehicle for drugs.

From the video:

Tennessee State Trooper AJ Ross orders me to pull over and get out of my car, bullies me around, gets the drug sniffing K-9, lies about me having “Illegal Drugs” in the car, searches without consent, and tells me that it is ok to take away my freedom. All while not being detained. All this harassment because my window was not lowered enough to his preference. I broke no laws whatsoever. All of this on a day that we are supposed to be celebrating freedom and liberty. This checkpoint was in Murfreesboro, TN.