-Napolitano: Internet Monitoring Needed to Fight Homegrown Terrorism.

WASHINGTON — Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation’s homeland security chief said Friday.

As terrorists increasingly recruit U.S. citizens, the government needs to constantly balance Americans’ civil rights and privacy with the need to keep people safe, said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

But finding that balance has become more complex as homegrown terrorists have used the Internet to reach out to extremists abroad for inspiration and training. Those contacts have spurred a recent rash of U.S.-based terror plots and incidents.

“The First Amendment protects radical opinions, but we need the legal tools to do things like monitor the recruitment of terrorists via the Internet,” Napolitano told a gathering of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.

FULL STORY

-Obama internet ‘kill switch’ bill approved .

smh.com.au:

The US senators pushing a controversial new bill that some fear would give President Barack Obama the powers to seize control of and even shut down the internet have rejected claims it would give Obama a net “kill switch”.

The bill, titled Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, has been unanimously approved by the US Homeland Security committee and will be put to a vote on the Senate floor shortly.

Lobby groups and academics quickly rounded on the bill, which seeks to grant the President broad emergency powers over the internet in times of national emergency.

Any internet firms and providers must “immediately comply with any emergency measure or action developed” by a new section of the US Department of Homeland Security, dubbed the “National Centre for Cybersecurity and Communications”.

The critics said that, rather than combat terrorists, it would actually do them “the biggest favour ever” by terrorising the rest of the world, which is now heavily reliant on cyberspace.

Australian academics criticised the description in the bill’s title of the internet as a US “national asset”, saying any action would disrupt other countries as most of the critical internet infrastructure is located in the US.

This week, 24 privacy and civil liberties groups sent a letter raising concerns about the legislation to the sponsors, including that it could limit free speech and free inquiry, Computerworld reported.

“We are concerned that the emergency actions that could be compelled could include shutting down or limiting internet communications,” the letter reads.

But the architects of the plan, committee chairman Senator Joe Lieberman and Senator Susan Collins, have this week released a “Myth v. Reality” document that hits back at these criticisms.

They say the threat of a catastrophic cyber attack is real and not a matter of “if” but “when”. Cyber crime was also costing the US economy billions of dollars annually and the bill would “modernise the government’s ability to safeguard the nation’s cyber networks from attack and will establish a public/private partnership to set national cyber security priorities”.

The senators rejected the “kill switch” claim, arguing that the President already had authority under the Communications Act to “cause the closing of any facility or station for wire communication” when there is a “state or threat of war”.

They said under the new bill the President would be far less likely to use the broad authority he already has under current law to take over communications. It would provide “a precise, targeted and focused way for the President to defend our most sensitive infrastructure”.

Any action would be limited to 30-day increments and the President must use the “least disruptive means feasible” to respond to the threats. Action extended beyond 120 days would need Congressional approval.

The bill would not give the President the authority to take over the entire internet, target specific websites or conduct electronic surveillance.

“Only specific systems or assets whose disruption would cause a national or regional catastrophe would be subject to the bill’s mandatory security requirements,” the senators wrote.

-Joe Biden: Brussels ‘Capital of Free World’.

Long version:

-PDD 51 & New Executive Order Give Obama Dictator Power.

An Obama executive order that creates a council of state governors who will work with the feds to expand military involvement in domestic security, together with PDD 51, a Bush era executive order that gives the President dictatorial power in times of national emergency, eliminate the last roadblocks to declaring martial law in the United States.

The new order, which is entitled Establishment of the Council of Governors (PDF), creates a body of ten state governors directly appointed by Obama who will work with the federal government to help advance the “synchronization and integration of State and Federal military activities in the United States”.

The governors will liaise with officials from Northcom, Homeland Security, the National Guard as well as DoD officials from the Pentagon “in order to strengthen further the partnership between the Federal Government and State governments,” according to the executive order.

The exective order combines seamlessly with Presidential Decision Directive 51 to hand Obama dictator status in times of declared, and not necessarily genuine, national emergency.

FULL STORY

-Obama nominates ‘spooky’ Army general to head TSA.

Washington Post:

It’s hard to imagine that Harding, who spent three decades running top secret military intelligence operations before President Obama picked him to run the troubled Transportation Security Administration, told the White House about all this. It looks more like an episode of “I’ve Got a Secret.”

His was the second TSA nomination to get stopped at the gate. In January, former FBI agent Erroll Southers had trouble explaining his conducting background checks on his estranged wife’s boyfriend, and withdrew.

Harding seemed to have slalomed through all his own red flags as late as Thursday, following a week on Capitol Hill. But the discovery of his 2008 set-aside contract with the Army for a disability — which turned out to be sleep apnea — by The Post’s Robert O’Harrow, proved fatal.

The retired major general, who would have been the first African American to helm the TSA, withdrew his nomination late Friday night, saying he didn’t want to cause “distractions caused by my work as a defense contractor,” according to The Post’s Spencer S. Hsu and Ed O’Keefe.

Too late.

Washington’s chattering classes will spend days chewing on the administration’s latest TSA vetting miscue, surely noting that it follows on the national-security near-disaster of the Nigerian underwear bomber, not to mention reversals of fortune over closing Guantanamo and the planned Manhattan trial of self-avowed Sept. 11 hijacker Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

What a way to spoil the president’s victory party on health care.

How, the critics will ask, did the White House fail to see trouble brewing with Harding, in light of:

* His company’s $7.4 million Iraq interrogations contract with the Defense Intelligence Agency, where the nominee served as director of operations from 1996 to 2000.

Pentagon and congressional investigations found no ties between the interrogation abuses at Abu Ghraib and the work Harding Security Associates did for the Iraq Survey Group at Camp Slayer at Baghdad International Airport, but it was awfully close for comfort.

* The Pentagon audit that found HSA had over-billed the government for “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” according to one report, forcing it to pay back almost $2 million.

“A subsequent review by the Pentagon’s inspector general and others found no evidence of intentional wrongdoing,” The Post reported Saturday afternoon.

“The audit, which a Pentagon spokesman said … was completed by the Defense Contract Audit Agency in September 2006, has not been publicly released,” Congress Daily’s Chris Strohm reported March 19. “The agency declined to discuss it, referring all questions to the Defense Department.”

When Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who co-chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee began asking about it 10 days ago, the nomination looked shaky but still winnable, close observers said.

But when The Post’s O’Harrow started asking the White House about $99.7 million contract the Army awarded Harding’s company in 2008 as a “Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business Set-Aside,” he was done.

The disability? Sleep apnea, according to the contract O’Harrow dug up.

“It was not clear what effect the questions about his disabilities had on Harding’s decision to withdraw,” O’Harrow reported Saturday afternoon. “The White House declined to comment about the $100 million contract, awarded in July 2008, or about Harding’s disability, including its cause, diagnosis or impact on his work.”

Harding could not be reached at his home for comment.

In his confirmation hearing last week, Harding said his priority as TSA chief would be to “share intelligence” with everybody who does business with the agency, “”to help us not just meet the threat, but to stay ahead of the threat.”

In light of his doomed nomination, it looks like like the intelligence-sharing should have started the week before.