Court approves warrantless searches of cell phones

Raw Story

(Reuters) – Police can search a cell phone for its number without having a warrant, a federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday.

Officers in Indiana found a number of cell phones at the scene of a drug bust, and searched each phone for its telephone number. Having the numbers allowed the government to subpoena the owners’ call histories, linking them to the drug-selling scheme.

One of the suspects, Abel Flores-Lopez, who was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, argued on appeal that the police had no right to search the phone’s contents without a warrant.

The U.S. Court of Appeal for the 7th Circuit rejected that argument, finding that the invasion of privacy was so slight that the police’s actions did not violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches.

The case gave the 7th Circuit an occasion to examine just how far police can go when it comes to searching electronic gadgets.

Bahraini ‘Reformers’ in Washington, Courtesy of American Spinmeisters

ProPublica
Justin Elliott

Earlier this month, a group of three young Bahrainis arrived in Washington to talk about reform in the small Persian Gulf nation, which has been rocked by Arab Spring protests for the last year. The delegation, including an NGO worker and a tech entrepreneur, both Western-educated, represented "the leading voice for change and reform" in Bahrain, as an email message from one of the group's representatives put it.

But these weren't leaders of the protest movement that has challenged the country's ruling Sunni monarchy. They were members of a "youth delegation" put together by a top American public relations firm, Qorvis, which has been working with Bahrain to shore up the country's image in the United States.

The youth delegation's modestly pro-reform message was mixed with sharp criticism of the opposition in Bahrain and complaints about negative media coverage in the U.S.

Last year, in the early weeks of Bahrain's violent crackdown on the largely Shia opposition protests, the minister of foreign affairs inked a contract [1] with Qorvis to provide public-relations services for $40,000 per month, plus expenses. One of the largest PR and lobbying firms in Washington, Qorvis employs a number of former top Capitol Hill staffers and also works for Bahrain's close ally, Saudi Arabia. The firm's work for Bahrain came under scrutiny last year when it defended [2] the government's raid [3] last year on a Doctors Without Borders office in Bahrain. Also in 2011, a Qorvis official wrote [4] pro-regime columns in The Huffington Post without revealing his affiliation with Qorvis.

Bahrain is an important American ally in the gulf, and its capital Manama is home to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet. An independent commission found [5] late last year that the government had systematically tortured detainees and used excessive force to put down the protests. While the unrest has fallen from the headlines, Bahrain continues to [6] suppress protests, sometimes violently. And while Bahrain has promised reforms, Human Rights Watch today released a report [7] finding "egregious violations of fair trial rights" in cases brought against opposition activists.

The Obama administration has largely stood by Bahrain, offering muted criticism while continuing to [8] sell arms to the government, though one weapons package remains on hold.

To counter negative press, Bahrain has made a major public-relations push in the U.S., employing Qorvis and several other firms [9]. The youth delegation dispatched to Washington, on the anniversary of the start of the protests, is the latest part of that effort.
In meetings and public appearances, the three-member Qorvis delegation has criticized opposition protesters as violent agitators.

Israeli PM demands Obama commit to military action if Iran sanctions fail

Guardian
Chris McGreal

Binyamin Netanyahu pressing for explicit threat from US ahead of crucial meeting with Obama next week in Washington

Israeli officials say that Binyamin Netanyahu is not happy
with Obama's 'vague assertion' that all options are on the
table in dealing with Iran.

Israel is pressing Barack Obama for an explicit threat of military action against Iran if sanctions fail and Tehran's nuclear programme advances beyond specified "red lines".

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is expected to raise the issue at a White House meeting on Monday after weeks of intense diplomacy in which Obama has dispatched senior officials – including his intelligence, national security and military chiefs – to Jerusalem to try and dampen down talk of an attack.

Diplomats say that Israel is angered by the Obama administration's public disparaging of early military action against Iran, saying that it weakens the prospect of Tehran taking the warnings from Israel seriously.

The two sides are attempting to agree a joint public statement to paper over the divide but talks will not be made easier by a deepening distrust in which the Israelis question Obama's commitment to confront Iran while the White House is frustrated by what it sees as political interference by Netanyahu to mobilise support for Israel's position in the US Congress.

"They are poles apart," said one diplomatic source. "The White House believes there is time for sanctions to work and that military threats don't help. The Israelis regard this as woolly thinking.

They see Iran as headed towards a bomb, even though they agree there is no evidence Tehran has made that decision yet, and they want the White House to up the ante. The White House has the Europeans behind its position but it's losing Congress."

The mood is not helped by worsening distrust between the two leaders. Relations soured within weeks of Obama coming to power after he attempted to pressure Netanyahu to halt construction of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories.

Netanyahu told his weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday that Iran will dominate his talks with Obama.

"There is no doubt that one issue will be at the centre of our talks, and that is, of course, the continued strengthening of Iran and its nuclear programme," he said.

Planned Regime Change in Syria

Global Research
Stephen Lendman

Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Syria had peace and calm until Washington intervened belligerently.

Strategies and tactics vary. Objectives are consistent. They involve replacing independent regimes with pro-Western ones by any means, including war.

Three unwinnable ones rage. Nonetheless, Obama plans more. Syria's target one. For the past year, US-instigated violence ravaged parts of the country. Thousands have been killed, many others injured.

Syria's gripped by fear. Heavily armed killer gangs rage out of control, and direct foreign intervention looms. More on that below.

Assad's wrongly blamed. The blame game targets victims, not villains. As a result, ongoing conflict continues.

February 26 was potentially historic. Syrians overwhelmingly approved constitutional reform. Only the fullness of time will tell if promised change, in fact, happens. Western intervention may prevent it.

After 90% of Syrians supported draft constitutional changes, Assad issued decree No. 94 officially approving it, effective February 27.

Russia's Foreign Ministry said referendum results show Syrians support him. Moscow called on all sides to concur, stop violence, and engage in dialogue with no preconditions.

On February 27, in an article titled "Russia and the Changing World," Vladimir Putin noted similarities between Syria and Libya. He warned against foreign intervention.

He called Arab Spring changes replacement of one force for another. In other words, everything changed by stayed the same, and in countries like Egypt, got worse. He said "Moscow won't allow anyone to repeat the Libyan scenario in Syria."

Leon Panetta Claiming the Right of U.S. Government to Assassinate U.S. Citizens Deemed 'Terrorists'

‘Obama will have to back Iran strike to get re-elected’

The Gleick affair is further proof of the warmists' endless credulity

Editor's Note:  Gleick was suspected at first because of the similarities between the two-page strategy paper and Gleick's style of writing.  Gleik confesses, then claims that the emails he obtained were aimed at confirming the anonymously written strategy paper.  He still claims he didn't write the strategy paper despite the fact it was the Gleick-like writing in the strategy paper that implicated Gleick in the first place.  Gleick either thinks we are really stupid or is taking a position to soften the liability he is bound to incur.

That said, why is it so difficult to dig up dirt from an industry-funded nonprofit with an axe to grind?  That finding alone has no real comparison to the two sets of emails hacked at East Anglia.   Climate-gate emails (both the first and second batch) shine a light on the primary scientific body and source of analysis and data fed to the IPCC- a significant difference.


The Telegraph


Dr Peter Gleick provides more evidence that the supporters of the Cause will stop at nothing.

What a very odd situation we find ourselves in, due to the extraordinary transformation in recent years of the so-called debate over global warming. Last week, The Sunday Telegraph reported that, as part of Britain’s overseas aid budget, the Department for International Development is well on the way to spending £1.5 billion on a mass of climate-related projects across the world. These range from helping Indian farmers to irrigate their fields with foot-powered pumps rather than diesel-fuelled ones, to preventing the authority of Kenyan “rainmakers” from being undermined by the onset of “extreme weather events”.

This is bizarre enough – and it might be added that, according to the World Resources Institute, Britain is now spending far more on this kind of nonsense, under the UN’s $28 billion Fast Start Climate Change programme, than any country in the world apart from Japan. But even this is only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of billions Britain is hoping to spend, as a consequence of our Government’s unique obsession with global warming, on everything from climate-related research in our universities to building the 32,000 useless windmills that Chris Huhne was babbling about, before he ignominiously left office. We cannot recall often enough that our Climate Change Act commits us to spending more than £700 billion between now and 2050 – far more than any other country in the world.

Yet while successive British governments have plunged headlong into this madness, the “science” supposedly used to justify it has been falling apart in all directions. Global temperatures have signally failed to rise as the computer models, upon which the whole scare was based, said they should. And an endless succession of scandals has engulfed the senior scientists who did more than anyone else to promote the scare. These began with the exposure of the notorious “hockey stick” graph and then the Climategate emails which showed how they fiddled their data and stopped at nothing to discredit anyone who challenged what they called “the Cause”. The scandals continued with the revelations that much of the work of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the supreme champion of the Cause – had not been based on science at all but on scare stories dreamed up by environmental activists.

All this has left the debate over climate change in a depressingly fetid state, as supporters of the orthodoxy lash out with increasing desperation, forlornly trying to defend their crumbling faith. A further example of this was the strange little scandal that erupted last week, with the release on the internet of various documents from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think-tank long vilified by the warmists for organising conferences attended by hundreds of distinguished scientists from across the world who dare to be sceptical of the orthodoxy.

The documents were entirely innocuous except for one, which stood out from the rest because it purported to be a secret “strategy paper” that outlined Heartland’s plans to get the teaching of the science of climate change outlawed in America’s schools. This seemingly damning revelation aroused much excitement among warmists on both sides of the Atlantic. The Guardian published no less than nine separate items about it.

Facebook will Require Social Security Number for Member Log In

Editor's Note:  First the monopoly, then the squeeze.

Free Wood Post
Ronnie Morrow

February seemed to be the month of Facebook, with new updates and new privacy settings. Today, Facebook announced a new procedure to address the recent wave of spam that has plagued the website. Starting April 2nd, users will be required to enter their social security numbers to log in to their Facebook accounts. Facebook’s media relations department released this statement.

The new member log in format will be both safe and efficient for our users who fear having their Facebook identity stolen. The requirement for users to enter their social security numbers during log in, will completely take away the element of spam from unauthorized access. With cooperation from the United States government, we have compiled a database to verify that each person’s social security is accurate. Also, the last four digits of each users social will be displayed in their info section of their profile. Further upgrades to security are currently being planned, and will be announced as more information is given.

The announcement will for sure create outrage across the internet, where tensions are already high due to Facebook’s new privacy policies. Google has also hinted to a similar procedure to verify user identification.

Calls to the Facebook corporate offices have not been returned.

Senators accuse Saudi Arabia of 9/11 involvement

Editor's Note:  Let's watch this carefully as they seemed 'mighty attuned' to Saudi Arabia when 125 Israeli Mossad agents were arrested on that day. 

Russia Today

Two former American senators involved in federal inquiries that dealt with the September 11 terrorist attacks are asking the US to re-examine the possibility that Saudi Arabia played a pivotal role in the tragedy.

Both Bob Graham and Bob Kerrey, two former senators for the states of Florida and Nebraska, respectively, have filed statements with the Federal Court for the Southern District of New York in which they suggest that the Saudi government had a substantial role in the 9/11 attacks. Senator Graham previously served as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on 9/11 and Kerrey was a member of the bi-partisan National Commission on Terrorist Acts Upon the United States, commonly referred to as the "9/11 Commission.”

Explaining his renewed involvement in the matter, Senator Graham says, “I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the September 11th attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia.” Graham adds that an "…issue deserving of further attention and investigation concerns the involvement of Saudi based charities in the provision of financial and other support to al Qaeda, and the precise character of the relationships between those charities and the government of the Kingdom."

In a statement filed with the court this week, both senators say the US was too quick to exonerate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Saudi High Commission from involvement in the terrorist attacks. The District Court in New York will hear arguments later this month to see if it is viable to reintroduce the Saudis as a defendants in the In Re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 litigation. That case, which concluded in 2008, ended with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, several Saudi princes, a Saudi banker and a Saudi charity being removed from charges that they were involved in the terrorist attacks.

Despite allegations of Saudi involvement in 9/11, the US government has remained close with the country since they were exonerated from any connection. As recently as this past December, the Obama administration announced plans to move $30 billion worth of fighter jets and other weaponry to the kingdom. Andrew Shapiro, assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, told reporters at the time, “This sale will send a strong message to countries in the region that the United States is committed to stability in the Gulf and broader Middle East.”

Journalists Mike Murphy of NBC and Donna Brazile of CNN to speak at conference promoting Iran war

MondoWeiss

AIPAC's list of confirmed speakers for its upcoming policy conference includes some network journalists-- notably liberal commentators Paul Begala of CNN and Donna Brazile of CNN and ABC. Brazile formerly headed the Voting Rights Institute. I wonder what she's going to say about Palestinian rights. And there's Mike Murphy of NBC, a Republican strategist hired by the network as a political analyst.

All these folks will be speaking at a gathering that will be pushing war on Iran... As the Forward reports (thanks Annie Robbins):

A proposed Senate resolution, supported by the pro-Israel lobby, would shift America’s red line in dealing with Iran from preventing the Islamic Republic’s acquisition of nuclear weapons to stopping it before it achieves “nuclear capabilities.”

The resolution, now gaining signatures in the Senate, will be the legislative centerpiece of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as it convenes for its annual Washington conference, to take place in early March.

What are the networks' ethics policies on this sort of appearance?
Oh and AIPAC denied my application for credentials.