A couple of years ago I made a trip to
Concord Mass to visit the gravesites
of Emerson and Thoreau .
Their gravesites lay near each other
in the town cemetery.
I had the area to myself as there was no other pilgrims
paying homage to these great thinkers.
I could see offerings laid at their gravesites
in the forms of money,personal notes and
other personal items.
for photos google
photos emerson gravesite thoreau gravesite
The Beat of a Different Drum
http://www.drwaynedyer.com/blog/the-bea ... rent-drum/Henry David Thoreau said, “If a man loses pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to
the music which he hears, however measured, or far away.” Not only is
this great advice for dealing gently with what other people want to
do, say, or think, but these words are also about our own
self-reliance. Be sure you’re stepping to the music you hear—no matter
what other people think. My understanding of the13th verse of the Tao
Te Ching is this: it’s crucial to remain independent of both the
positive and negative opinions of other people. If you gain their
approval, you’ll become a slave to outside words of praise. If you
gain disfavor, you’ll spend your life trying to change other people’s
minds about you. Either way, you lose your selfhood. If you want to
follow your passion, be independent of the good opinion of others.
Give yourself permission to two-step, march, waltz, or boogie to your
own beat
1.
DEA Employees Seek to Prevent Release of Videos of Lap Dances at Trial
DEA employees charged with lying during national security background
checks are trying to avoid the embarrassing release of lap dances
during their trial.
Civilian employees and a former officials of the DEA are accused of
lying about their ownership of a trip club in South Hackensack, N.J.
Now defense attorneys are trying to prevent the government from
introducing the lap dance video into evidence, the New York Times
reports.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/nyreg ... video.html“The prejudicial effect of the videos would be colossal if they are
introduced as evidence at trial,” defense lawyers argued in court
papers filed on Monday.
Prosecutors want to provide evidence that the defendants used largely
illegal immigrants as dancers.
The government wants to show the jury sexually graphic footage of four
lap dances rec
2.
Color of Surveillance
What the FBI actually learned from spying on Martin Luther King, Jr.
4/12/16 11:06 AM
http://fusion.net/story/289903/james-ba ... veillance/On Friday, Georgetown University’s law school hosted ‘The Color of
Surveillance,’ a conference about government monitoring of black
Americans. Two of the most anticipated speakers were James A. Baker,
the FBI’s general counsel, and David Garrow, an MLK biographer who has
documented the FBI’s unlawful surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr.
and other black Americans. The conversation, and the room, were
somewhat tense: Baker was cautious and Garrow sharp-tongued, though
the latter emphasized that the FBI of the 60s was the primary focus of
his ire.
In the 1960s, the FBI used wiretaps, bugs, and informants to dig
deeply into King’s personal life, because the United States government
felt that his peaceful activism for civil liberties was threatening.
Garrow said that much of the information gleaned from that government
spying on King remains unavailable, including the informants used.
Garrow said he had even been threatened with violating the Espionage
Act in the early 1980s (when he first started researching the FBI’s
surveillance of MLK) “because of the informant identities [he] had
managed to discover.”
Garrow said that the FBI at that time had “an organizational culture
of surveillance and of political control,” and that it wasn’t limited
to the FBI’s founding director J. Edgar Hoover, who remained its head
until his death in 1972 and is notorious for his abuses of power.
There were attempts at blackmail and encouragement of suicide. “There
is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is,” wrote an
FBI agent in a letter to King that detailed knowledge of his
extramarital sexual activity. The FBI also leaked the gossip to the
press, but it declined to report it.
Baker, who has been the FBI’s general counsel for a little over two
years, didn’t defend the agency’s actions in the 60s. He agreed with
Garrow and everyone else that spying on King as it was done was a
mistake, saying, “There were insufficient constraints on the
government’s authority to engage in national security surveillance.”
He repeated a story that FBI director James Comey told The Guardian
last year, about the director keeping attorney general Robert
Kennedy’s approval of the wiretap order for King on his desk as a
reminder of the agency’s mistakes.
So what the FBI really learned from spying on MLK is that it is
capable of making terrible mistakes and going too far when it comes to
surveillance. Baker, who teaches law school courses, said that the MLK
example is one he has used for the last decade as an example of the
agency’s overreach.
“You can’t understand the statutory framework in which [the FBI]
operates today…if you don’t understand the King case,” he said. He
referred specifically to Congressional oversight committees and the
1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] and the courts set
up under it to govern domestic surveillance, which were a response to
the Church Committee’s findings on the surveillance of King and
others.
“There is much more significant accountability and oversight
constraints with regards to the FBI’s surveillance activities than
there were in the past,” said Baker.
But it would seem that the U.S. government as a whole hasn’t taken the
King case to heart. Last year, The Intercept revealed that the
Department of Homeland Security has been monitoring Black Lives Matter
activists, sometimes at “gatherings that seem benign and even
mundane.”
The FBI’s current most high-profile attempt to more easily investigate
threats and peer into the lives of Americans is its legal wrangling
with Apple over the San Bernardino shooter’s encrypted iPhone in
California and a drug dealer’s phone in New York. After Apple refused
to build a backdoor into the iPhone, the FBI managed to hack its way
into the phone, though it’s still fighting the New York case in court.
The recent legal fight was on Baker’s mind Friday. “We love
encryption. It helps us in so many ways as a society,” he said. “But
it has a cost. We need to think about it as a society: how will we
deal with that cost?”
Sadly, the panel did not address the times that the constraints which
grew out of King’s surveillance have been abused, bypassed, or
ignored. After 9/11, FISA courts were heavily abused by the NSA. The
FBI has used tools like national security letters to circumvent FISA
court decisions which go against them, which is incredibly rare in the
first place. There’ve been calls for change, but a FISA reform bill
introduced in 2015 was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee,
where it languished. (That bill’s co-sponsor, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)
is currently behind draft legislation that would effectively outlaw
encryption.)
Baker also held up the legal standard of “probable cause,” which FISA
court applications must meet, as a bulwark against abuse of
surveillance. But as The Intercept and others have reported, it’s
impossible to tell how the courts interpret that standard because
“only the Justice Department and the FBI are permitted to attend its
proceedings on domestic surveillance.”
As a lawyer for the Justice Department in the mid-2000s who reportedly
“shared…reservations and aided the judges” concerned about NSA spying
and its legality, Baker is certainly aware of the possibility for
abuse. But now he’s more concerned with information the FBI doesn’t
have, saying electronic surveillance is becoming less effective
because of data being guarded by strong encry
2.
Muslim-American Talks About Being Surveilled By Feds, Coming To
Vermont
April 12 2016
http://nhpr.org/post/muslim-american-ta ... ng-vermont Faisal Gill worked for the Department of Homeland Security, but
ultimately resigned after being unable to shake suspicions raised by
the media largely based on his religion.
Faisal Gill worked for the Department of Homeland Security, but
ultimately resigned after being unable to shake suspicions raised by
the media largely based on his religion.
Kathleen Masterson / VPR
Originally published on April 12, 2016 12:17 pm
Listen
Listening...
It's come up repeatedly in recent political debates: the idea of
monitoring U.S. residents based solely on their religion.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas defended his idea of having law enforcement
patrol Muslim neighborhoods in the wake of the terrorist attacks in
Brussels. And candidate Donald Trump, on the Republican side also, has
called for surveillance of certain mosques in the United States. But
according to a report by a journalist working with former CIA employee
turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden, the United States government
already has monitored prominent Muslim-Americans – by probing their
e-mails.
That alleged surveillance has up-ended the lives of some of the
targeted U.S. citizens, casting suspicion on them and dogging their
personal, political and professional lives.
Faisal Gill knows about this firsthand. Despite being cleared of any
wrongdoing or suspicious activity, he was ultimately compelled to
resign from government service in Washington, D.C. All of this, he
says, happened before he decided to move to Vermont, making his new
home in Winooski, where he now lives. VPR visited him there recently
to hear his story.
Gill says it wasn’t until 2014 that he learned the federal government
had allegedly been screening his emails. He was contacted by Glenn
Greenwald, the news reporter to whom Edward Snowden gave all the
documents that he took from the National Security Agency (NSA).
“So I went to New York to meet with Glenn Greenwald. And that's where
he told me that, 'Hey, I'm sorry to tell you this, but between the
years of 2006 and 2008 the NSA was monitoring your e-mails.
Gill says one of the many frustrations was that he never had any
indication why covert surveillance by NSA and FBI took place. He says
permission to surveil his email was likely granted by the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which operates in secret.
“If you look at the statute, there are four or five categories for why
they do surveil people. And they're all fairly, you know, ominous
sounding: If you have connections with a foreign government; if you
are an agent a foreign government; if you are suspected of terrorist
activities. Categories like that, and you know, I had nothing like
that.”
Gill says because the court meets in secret, there’s no way to know
what it counts as reasonable suspicion.
“The prosecutors and the FBI agents go down [to court] and they issue
out an affidavit and say we suspect this person. And then we don't
know what happens. What we do know is, 98 percent or 99 percent of all
the warrants are approved. And if you go down to Chittenden County
Superior Court here and you ask how many ones are approved, I doubt
it's that many.”
On being profiled as a Muslim
Gill believes without question that the only reason he was surveilled
is because he is a Muslim-American.
“I was born in Pakistan and, you know, and I hate to say this, but I
don't know what else to say, is that I'm active. You know,
politically, and I'm out there as a Muslim-American and I think that
was probably one of the reasons that I was surveilled.”
On the wall in his Winooski apartment, Gill has photos of his three
children, and of himself with President Obama, Vice President Joe
Biden and other government officials.
Credit Kathleen Masterson / VPR
Gills says during the years his emailed was being screened, in 2006
and 2008, he was running as a Republican candidate for the Virginia
House of Delegates.
"And I was pretty, always involved in local community, always involved
in Muslim advocacy groups. And if you look at all the folks who are
involved in Muslim advocacy groups, the list that of the [people] that
were surveilled, they're all folks who are fairly active in the Muslim
advocacy community. So I think that that kind of had something to do
with it.
On profiling affecting his personal and professional life
"From a personal level, when my kids go somewhere, I mean everybody
these days Googles you, right? … When they Google me, all this stuff
comes up and they don't know what to make of it. So it's affected my
kids … I've had you know school officials say, 'Yeah, we Googled you,
and it was kind of interesting.'
Professionally, Gill says once he left Depar
3.
http://whowhatwhy.org/2014/04/09/media- ... ok-review/Media Fail
April 9, 2014 | Steve Weinberg
How the Media Conned the Public into Loving the FBI: Book Review
1A review of “Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Estate: The Campaign to Control the Press and the Bureau’s Image” by Matthew Cecil, University Press of Kansas, 355 pages, $34.95
Matthew Cecil, a communications professor at Wichita State University, has resolved a conundrum that’s bedeviled me since 1970, when I was a fledgling investigative reporter.
I had just completed my first interaction with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the supposedly crackerjack national law enforcement agency. But the crackerjack part escaped me. My initial experience suggested an agency that produced inaccurate information inefficiently, failed to respect the constitutional liberties of U.S. citizens, and often resorted to intimidation and lies to get their way. Yet many of my journalistic “betters” told me I was misguided.
Smart people who think they are well informed about a subject—say, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s role as the nation’s elite law enforcement agency—usually “know” what they think they know based on exposure to mass media—television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books. But when mass media have been corrupted, the reliability of the “knowledge” becomes suspect. That’s the case with the FBI.
As “Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Estate: The Campaign to Control the Press and the Bureau’s Image” shows, the performance of supposedly first-rate FBI agents has been dismal time and again when the citizens of the United States needed them most, including perhaps most notably the run-up to the events of September 11, 2001.
1Readers of WhoWhatWhy will be familiar with our frequent reports of problems with FBI operations (see for example this, this and this). And may be asking themselves: why don’t I see this in the media? The answer is in this book.
What the FBI excelled at, especially under its long-time chief J. Edgar Hoover, was a non-stop public relations campaign that portrayed the agency as a heroic band of G-men who skillfully tracked and felled dangerous criminals.
“Tales of the FBI’s infallible laboratory and army of honest and professional agents became part of popular culture,” Cecil writes. Thanks to mass media, “the FBI was widely considered to be an indispensable government agency.”
In fact, in all too many cases, dangerous criminals were eluding capture, while that “infallible” forensic laboratory wrongly analyzed evidence again and again, leading to the pursuit and convictions of innocent individuals.
J. Edgar’s 48-Year Reign
The publicity juggernaut to gild the FBI’s image began during the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover. He died in 1972, after 48 years at the helm. But the campaign he initiated was so pervasive, and the propaganda he peddled so appealing, that the image of incorruptible, invincible agent-heroes lives on in perpetuity.
Only gradually, since Hoover’s death, has the true story of the FBI begun to emerge. As Cecil explains, the course of events and countless investigations have exposed “a lawless and uncontrolled Bureau that expended enormous amounts of time and resources policing political thought rather than investigating violations of federal law… Hoover had ultimately transformed the Bureau into an American secret police force, even as he convinced the public and many in the news media that he was a trustworthy defender of civil liberties.”
Cecil says he wanted his book to reveal “how, in a nation so proud of its watchdog press, a high-profile federal agency managed to hide the reality of its activities for so long. The answer is as complex as the FBI’s decades-long deception, but it surely includes failings entrenched in the ideology of journalism and in readers’ and viewers’ often uncritical acceptance of news as truth.”
The reference to the “watchdog press” is central here. Yes, starting in the first decade of the twentieth century, what today we call “investigative reporting” began to take root in the U.S. media. But no more than a handful of media organizations ever practiced serious investigative journalism. The vast majority of journalists were too untrained or lazy or gullible or corrupt to seek the truth behind the FBI’s public-relations façade.
Unfortunately, as Cecil points out, many, probably most, consumers of news cannot or will not distinguish the excellent journalists from the untrained, lazy, gullible and corrupt ones and therefore have no idea whom to believe about the FBI. Through wise choice of media outlets and via pure luck, some consumers of mass media inevitably learned the ugly truth about the FBI—while most never did.
In the book’s Introduction, Cecil renders the abridged history of the FBI public relations campaign:
“After a few tentative steps into the realm of publicity during the late 1920s, the Bureau became a key element of FDR’s New Deal war on crime in the mid-1930s. Two journalists, independent author Courtney Ryley Cooper and Neil (Rex) Collier, collaborated with Hoover and his top lieutenants to create a template for FBI news stories emphasizing responsibility and science and featuring Hoover as America’s always careful and reliable top law enforcement officer. With the creation of the public relations-oriented Crime Records Section in 1935 and the establishment of clear lines of public communication authority, Hoover had both a public relations message and a management team to amplify and enforce it.”
During the mid-1930s, Collier, a Washington Star reporter, oversaw a comic strip called “War on Crime” that ran for two years in 80 newspapers across the United States.
Cecil summarizes the first six weeks of the strip: “Week one of ‘War on Crime’ focused on Hoover, who, Collier wrote in the comic strip’s text, ‘had the vision of a man twice his age.’ Hoover had cleaned up the Bureau, and ‘now he had men of unassailable integrity’ in the field.”
After touting the agents’ grueling training regimen and the cutting-edge science of the FBI’s crime-fighting laboratory, the strip focused on the Agency’s success in capturing criminals: “In the morgue of the Fingerprint Division are the cancelled records of criminals removed from circulation such as Dillinger, Floyd, and Nelson.”
J. Edgar Hoover (left) with Sumner Blossom, Editor of The American Magazine, and journalist Courtney Ryley Cooper
J. Edgar Hoover (left) with Sumner Blossom, Editor of The American Magazine, and journalist Courtney Ryley Cooper
Cooper had worked as a publicist for a circus before turning to newspaper feature writing. He met Hoover in 1933, while rewriting a profile of the FBI chief for American Magazine. After completing the rewrite, Cooper suggested a more permanent arrangement to Hoover. Soon, articles ghost-written by Cooper about the FBI began appearing in magazines and newspapers under Hoover’s byline. Other pieces appeared under Cooper’s name after FBI staff had carefully vetted them. Among the influential periodicals that published such public relations material as “news” were the respectable magazines Cosmopolitan and Saturday Evening Post.
Cecil notes:
“At a time when Americans were desperate for government to do something right, the FBI’s pursuit and elimination of John Dillinger and the other ‘Robin Hood’ outlaws of the Midwest provided a compelling hook on which to hang the Bureau’s reputation. Hoover built on that narrative, erecting an FBI built not only on real law enforcement innovation but also on a manufactured public relations foundation that hid mistakes and excesses from public view for nearly 40 years.”
Accused bank robber Bennie Dickson, for example, died on a St. Louis street during 1939 after he supposedly threatened to unload his weapon in the direction of four FBI agents. Cecil, relying in part on previously undisclosed FBI reports, shows that Dickson was actually trying to flee the scene when a trigger-happy agent shot him in the back.
The evidence appears overwhelming that in the aftermath of Dickson’s death, FBI agents coordinated their accounts, offered perjured testimony and threatened a key witness into silence after she had told the truth.
Cecil says that holes first began to appear in the FBI’s holier-than-thou image around 1940. Media accounts of agents falsifying testimony, conducting illegal wiretaps and raiding homes of Americans involved in the Spanish Civil War brought the agency unwanted attention.
Hoover found ways to fight back. His staff maintained lists of hundreds of journalists, and categorized each as friend or foe. Foes were denied access to FBI information, while friends, like famed columnist Walter Winchell, got “insider” tips they could use, often unattributed, to spin coverage of specific investigations and to burnish the FBI’s overall reputation.
While most major media outlets willingly joined the pro-FBI chorus, low-circulation intellectual magazines like The Nation and The New Republic probed deeper.
Fred Cook’s critical reporting about the FBI filled the entire 58 pages of The Nation magazine for October 18, 1958. Cook questioned the American public’s “worship” of an agency that was “part heroic fact” to be sure, but also “part heroic myth.” Cook would expand the magazine tour de force into a 1964 book, “The FBI Nobody Knows.”
While trying without success to refute Cook’s facts, Hoover and his supporters accused him, and other critics, of being un-American—a charge that bore considerable weight during the Communist-hunting hysteria of the 1950s.
***
But even Fred Cook’s hard-hitting expose could not come close to neutralizing the Bureau-friendly “journalism” of Don Whitehead.
Whitehead had established his credentials as a newspaper reporter and war correspondent by the time he completed an “authorized” history of the FBI in 1956. “The FBI Story: A Report to the People” became a big seller. Whitehead had no qualms about FBI censors vetting his manuscript. In discussing the agency’s propensity for tapping telephones and bugging private homes and offices, Whitehead compared these actions to a potential employer examining “every possible source for information as to the honesty and reliability of a prospective employee.”
As Cecil sees it, “Whitehead sold out his own journalistic credibility to the heroic history of the FBI. Hoover counted on the public’s logical conclusion that a famed, objective journalist had reviewed the evidence and verified the Bureau’s history as it had always been told.”
1In 1959, Whitehead’s book “became the basis for a popular motion picture, also titled ‘The FBI Story,’ starring Jimmy Stewart. And when Hoover moved th
4.
FBI Agents Speak on Making Local Connections
Posted: Wed 6:57 PM, Apr 13, 2016
http://www.wtok.com/home/headlines/FBI- ... 28791.htmlTwo FBI agents out of Jackson stopped by the WTOK-TV station to talk a
little more about their work in this area.
Meridian, Miss. Two FBI agents out of Jackson stopped by the WTOK-TV
station to talk a little more about their work in this area.
They explained how making connections is a critical part of their
day-to-day job. Agent Donald Alway says he recently spoke with
Meridian's police chief about the problems officers see and
also see
FBI agent Lee drops by
http://www.therotundaonline.com/feature ... f3f32.htmlPosted: Wednesday, April 13, 2016 8:00 am | Updated: 11:39 am, Wed Apr
13, 2016.
While initially, it may seem unconventional to have a federal
government agent give a talk to a student in an English class, it may
not be when considering the issue of social media.
This semester, the theme of English 400 courses is discussing the pros
and cons of a social media presence. To give more of a professional
outlook on the topic, Professor Elise Green of the English and Modern
Language department brought FBI Special Agent in Charge Adam Lee to
her English classes and others to talk about the consequences of being
active in social media. In addition, he also held recruitment info
session, where he discussed his life and work within the bureau.
After spending several years as a legislative attorney in California,
Lee became an FBI agent in 1996 and underwent training at Quantico
(which he joked was a lot less sexier than the TV show). He worked for
several years in their national cyber security program during his
early stages. In addition, he also managed the public corruption and
civil rights programs within the bureau during the Trayvon Martin
incident, the IRS/Tea Party case and the trial of former Virginia
Governor Bob McDonald. Currently, Lee works in the Richmond division
where he runs all the FBI operations in Virginia, excluding the
Norfolk and D.C. areas.
During his talk he explained the concept of the FBI and what they do.
The bureau is essentially three agencies in one: national security,
criminal investigation and intelligence. The FBI’s first priority is
“to prevent the next terrorist attack in the United States.” Their
second priority is to prevent other countries from spying and gaining
intelligence on the U.S, followed by national cyber security,
investigating the corruption of elected officials (public corruption)
and the violations of civil rights.
“I liked the way he connected social media and how they used it to
hire people. Everyone knows the bad it can do, but not the good. Like
you can make a virtual resume by posting everything you’re involved
in,” said Alex Reuschling, one of the students in the English 400
class, “Another thing I liked was the way he explained how the FBI was
nothing like I expected.”
Lee emphasized that the FBI is not a law enforcement agency but often
helps local law enforcement agencies with their cases, such as the
Richmond branch helped with the Hannah Graham case.
When it comes to numbers, the bureau is one quarter the size of the
New York Police Department, as they want to remain effectively small
and not be a large Gestapo. Lee stated that one big common
misconception among the public is that the FBI is “Big Brother”
watching everyone.
“We are threat-focused and threat-driven and to the extent we expend
one once of effort on something that is not a credible threat we are
wasting
4.
Businessman at Center of NYPD Investigation Served As Chaplain of
County Police Department
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bro ... -1.2597220A Brooklyn businessman who is a target in the widening federal
investigation of the NYPD also served as a chaplain for the
Westchester County police, the New York Daily News reports.
But the discovery that he was at the center of the investigation
prompted the police department to suspend Jeremy Reichberg from his
nonpaying chaplain job.
Reichberg, 42, is suspected of giving gifts to city cops in exchange
for a host of favors.
Just three months after county Executive Rob Astorino received a
$25,000 donation from Reichberg’s friend, Jona Rechnitz, he
