The Tyrannical History of Military Tribunals for Civilians

By Greg Robinson
October 5, 2009
Courtesy Of The History News Network

Mr. Robinson, a native of New York City, is associate professor of history at l'Université du Québec à Montréal and author of By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans. His latest book is: A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (Columbia University Press, July 2009).

Barack Obama was swept into office on a promise to close down the prison that the Bush administration created at Guantanamo in order to evade the constitutional protections offered prisoners in the United States. The new president nevertheless has approved the continuing use of military tribunals to try at least certain detainees. Faced with the difficult problem of defending the nation against terrorist attack, Obama and his advisers presumably hope that they can modify the structure of these courts so as to protect the innocent without making it impossible to hold the guilty. However, the clearest historical precedent is not reassuring in this regard. Rather, the military tribunals that operated in Hawaii during World War II created a shameful record of arbitrary justice, one which the U.S. Supreme Court subsequently rejected.

Army courts were part of the military government that took power in the then Territory of Hawaii following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Commanding General Walter Short (who browbeat the civilian governor into approving unlimited martial law) declared himself military governor, dissolved the elected legislature and suspended the U.S. Constitution. The military regime proceeded over the following weeks to issue decrees regulating all aspects of civilian life. Meanwhile, the army closed down all civilian courts. When the courts reopened one week after Pearl Harbor, they were restricted to considering civil cases, a network of military commissions and provost courts was established to try all criminal cases.

These military tribunals, presided over by armed officers without legal training, were classic examples of drumhead justice, unfettered by rules of evidence, presumption of innocence, or other constitutional safeguards. Juries were forbidden and lawyers discouraged or even barred. The courts were effectively rigged against defendants. Of the 22,480 trials conducted in provost court in Honolulu in 1942-1943, 99 percent ended in convictions—one officer who heard 819 cases issued convictions in all 819! Judges frequently issued severe sentences, including imprisonment and hard labor, for trivial offenses, and no machinery existed for appeals.

In March 1943, nine months after the American victory at Midway ended any real threat of a Japanese invasion of Hawaii, the Army restored certain governmental functions to civilian control. Yet habeas corpus remained suspended and military tribunals continued to judge criminal cases. When in July 1943 federal judge Delbert Metzger ordered General Robert Richardson, the new military governor, to produce two prisoners who had filed habeas corpus petitions, Richardson refused and issued orders threatening Judge Metzger with imprisonment at hard labor unless he abandoned all such proceedings. Ultimately the parties agreed to moot the case.

In February 1944, though, Lloyd Duncan, a civilian laborer, was arrested for assault on two Marine sentries. Summarily found guilty and sentenced to six months imprisonment by a military tribunal, Duncan challenged his conviction. Defying army authorities, Judge Metzger granted him a writ of habeas corpus and scheduled the case for trial. During the ensuing hearing, Richardson and Admiral Chester Nimitz insisted that military tribunals were essential because of the continuing danger of invasion from Japan. However, Duncan’s lawyers introduced evidence that Japan’s fleet had been destroyed, and under cross-examination Richardson and Nimitz admitted that any invasion was very improbable. Richardson and Justice Department lawyers arguing the case then changed strategy. Turning to racism to buttress their case for military tribunals, they alleged that Hawaii’s racial diversity, notably the presence of 150,000 Japanese Americans whose loyalty could never be trusted, made martial law imperative. In April 1944, Judge Metzger ruled in favor of Duncan and ordered him released. Since the ruling raised doubts about the validity of all military court sentences, the army appealed in federal court. In October 1944 President Franklin Roosevelt officially rescinded martial law in Hawaii, thereby dissolving all military tribunals, but the appeals continued.

In December 1945 the case, now called Duncan v. Kahanamoku, was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. Two months later, the Court definitively overturned the military tribunals. Justice Hugo Black, writing for the majority, expressed outrage over the army’s treating Hawaii like conquered territory: “Our system of government clearly is the antithesis of total military rule and the founders of this country…. were opposed to governments that placed in the hands of one man the power to make, interpret and enforce the laws.”

The Duncan ruling, like the larger history of military rule in Hawaii, has been largely obscured in current discussions of constitutional law. President Obama would do well, however, to consider the injustice meted out by past military tribunals in his native state.

Related Links

Nathan Williams: What Happened to the 8 Germans Tried by a Military Court in World War II?

Turning The US Army Against Americans

An antiwar activist has been accused of spying for the US army, raising legal questions the Obama administration must answer

By Dan Kennedy
Wednesday 5 August 2009 15.00 BST
Courtesy of The Guardian

It was an odd little story, tucked well inside the front section of this past Sunday's New York Times.

An antiwar activist in the state of Washington had been exposed as an undercover informant for the US army, stationed at massive Fort Lewis, south of Tacoma. And in one of those Kafkaesque twists for which our government is renowned, the army is now investigating itself to determine how such an arrangement came to pass.

Although the Times gave no credit, the story had been broken on 28 July by Democracy Now!, a leftwing television programme co-anchored by Amy Goodman, a longtime progressive journalist. For nearly an hour, two former associates of John Towery – a civilian employee of the army – explained how they learned their fellow activist was in fact a military spy.

"We hung out," said Brendan Maslauskas Dunn, who filed the public-records request that inadvertently outed Towery, who had been going by the name John Jacob. "We gave workshops together on grassroots direct democracy and anarchist struggle. I mean, he was a friend."

Fellow activist Drew Hendricks offered a weird twist, telling Goodman that, as far back as 2007, Towery identified himself as an army employee and offered to provide Hendricks with "observations and inside knowledge of operations on Fort Lewis".

The picture that emerges is worthy of a cheap spy novel. If Maslauskas Dunn and Hendricks are correct, then Towery truthfully told antiwar activists that he worked for the army, but lied about his name and real purpose: gathering intelligence on his new associates and what threat they might have posed. (According to the Times, antiwar groups in Washington have attempted to "disrupt military shipments".)

Moreover, Towery's alleged activities would almost certainly have been illegal. According to two lawyers whom Goodman interviewed, Larry Hildes of the National Lawyers Guild and Mike German of the American Civil Liberties Union, such spying would violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of American military forces for domestic law-enforcement operations. The law was weakened during the Bush years, though Hildes and German told Goodman that operations such as that attributed to Towery remain illegal.

Towery's alleged spying is yet another sign that Barack Obama's reluctance to come to terms with the legacy of George Bush and Dick Cheney's legacy is simply not tenable. By attempting to move on without accountability, Obama is becoming complicit in the very activities against which he ran.

The Bush-Cheney administration's obsession with running roughshod over constitutional and legal principles is by now well-established, with torture being just the most infamous example. Only a week ago, the New York Times revealed that Cheney had pushed hard in 2002 to send troops to suburban Buffalo in order to arrest several al-Qaida suspects. It's difficult to imagine why Cheney would want to do such a thing other than to set a precedent. In any event, Bush said no.

And as we know, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and their fellow neoconservatives weren't above casting institutions such as the military and even the CIA as weak and unpatriotic when it suited their purposes.

General Eric Shinseki, after all, was cashiered from his position as army chief of staff after he dared to tell the truth about how many troops would be needed to carry out a successful invasion and occupation of Iraq. (Shinseki is now Obama's secretary of veterans affairs.)

And when former diplomat Joseph Wilson, on a mission for the CIA, revealed he had found no evidence that Saddam Hussein sought to purchase uranium in Niger, Team Cheney retaliated by exposing his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, as an agency operative.

The Towery allegations are not the first time it's been reported that the goverment has infiltrated the rather impotent antiwar movement. A little more than a year ago, for instance, it was revealed that the Maryland state police had spied on peace activists in that state. But the alleged misuse of the army places this on a different level, both ethically and legally.

Not to get ahead of the story, but if the Towery story bears out, then it's difficult to imagine he was alone. In that sense this could prove to be reminiscent of Cointelpro, the FBI's secret, illegal programme, which kept tabs on dissidents from 1956 to1971. We need to know the truth about what happened during the Bush-Cheney years, and what may still be happening, with or without Obama's knowledge.

Since his inauguration more than six months ago, Obama has been half-hearted, at best, about exposing his predecessor's wrongdoing. Maybe he's right – maybe he can't investigate the Bush White House and govern the country at the same time.

But if that is the case, then Obama should quietly encourage officials like Vermont senator Patrick Leahy, who has made it clear that he'd like to conduct a no-holds-barred investigation.

Much as Obama would like to put it all behind us, he can't. And he shouldn't.

The FBI's Department Of PreCrime

By Tom Burghardt
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Courtesy of Anti-Fascist Calling

As they walked along the busy, yellow-lit tiers of offices, Anderton said: "You're acquainted with the theory of precrime, of course. I presume we can take that for granted." -- Philip K. Dick, The Minority Report

From COINTELPRO to the illegal targeting of antiwar activists and Muslim-Americans, the FBI is America's premier political police agency. And now, from the folks who brought us Wi-Fi hacking, viral computer spyware and al-Qaeda triple agent Ali Mohamed comes the Bureau's Department of Precrime!

A chilling new report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reveals the breadth and scope of the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW), the Bureau's massive data-mining project.

With more than a billion records "many of which contain information on American citizens," EFF is calling on Congress to demand FBI accountability and strict oversight of this Orwellian project. By all accounts IDW is huge and growing at a geometric pace. According to the Bureau's own narrative,

The IDW received its initial authority to operate in September 2005, and successfully completed a Federal Information Security Management Act audit in May 2007. As of September 2008, the IDW had: 7,223 active user accounts; 3,826 FBI personnel trained on the system, and 997,368,450 unique searchable documents. The IDW transitioned to the operations and maintenance phase during FY 2008. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Investigative Data Warehouse," no date)

EFF notes that "the Library on Congress by way of comparison, has about 138 million (138,313,427) items in its collection."

Kurt Opsahl, EFF's Senior Staff Attorney and the author of the new report said: "The IDW includes more than four times as many documents as the Library of Congress, and the FBI has asked for millions of dollars to data-mine this warehouse, using unproven science in an attempt to predict future crimes from past behavior. We need to know all of what's in the IDW, and how our privacy will be protected."

In 2008, the National Academy of Science's National Research Council issued a stinging report that questioned the efficacy of data-mining as an investigative tool for combatting terrorism.

That report, "Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Assessment," concluded that automated programs such as IDW that collect and mine data should be evaluated for their impact on the privacy rights of citizens. An NRC press release stated candidly:

Far more problematic are automated data-mining techniques that search databases for unusual patterns of activity not already known to be associated with terrorists, the report says. Although these methods have been useful in the private sector for spotting consumer fraud, they are less helpful for counterterrorism precisely because so little is known about what patterns indicate terrorist activity; as a result, they are likely to generate huge numbers of false leads. Such techniques might, however, have some value as secondary components of a counterterrorism system to assist human analysts. Actions such as arrest, search, or denial of rights should never be taken solely on the basis of an automated data-mining result, the report adds.

The committee also examined behavioral surveillance techniques, which try to identify terrorists by observing behavior or measuring physiological states. There is no scientific consensus on whether these techniques are ready for use at all in counterterrorism, the report says; at most they should be used for preliminary screening, to identify those who merit follow-up investigation. Further, they have enormous potential for privacy violations because they will inevitably force targeted individuals to explain and justify their mental and emotional states. (National Academy of Science, National Research Council, "All Counterterrorism Programs That Collect and Mine Data Should Be Evaluated for Effectiveness, Privacy Impacts," Press Release, October 7, 2008)

Noting that the Bureau is withholding critical information from public scrutiny, and that mining data gleaned from dozens of disparate sources is at the heart of IDW, EFF reports that the FBI "has identified only 38 of the 53 'data sources' that feed into the IDW," and has refused to hand over remaining documents, the result of a 2006 Freedom of Information Act request.

In a subsequent court action over the Bureau's document stonewall, the civil liberties' group reported that the Department of Justice told the court that "no additional material will be disclosed," despite Obama administration assertions that it has "new policies on open government."

Indeed, a May 12, 2005 email obtained by EFF from "an unidentified employee in the FBI's Office of the General Counsel to FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni" notes that the author was "nervous about mentioning PIA [Privacy Impact Assessment] in context of national security systems."

The author admitted that "It is true the FBI currently requires PIAs for NS [national security] systems as well as non-NS systems." EFF reports that the author "thought that the policy might change." Accordingly the anonymous writer "recommend[ed] against raising congressional consciousness levels and expectations re NS PIAs." Caproni's response is short: "ok."

However, "congressional consciousness levels" were raised after an August 30, 2006 Washington Post piece exposed the intrusive nature of the IDW system.

The Bureau's response? Several emails revealed the FBI's desire to play down privacy concerns, noting cynically: "I'm with [Redacted] in view that if everyone [Redacted] starts running around with their hair on fire on this, they will just be pouring gas on something that quite possibly would just fade away if we just shrug it off."

Given the corporate media's snail-like attention span when it comes to anything other than puppies trapped in a well or the shenanigans of various "celebrities," it's a sure-fire bet something as mundane as the rights of ordinary citizens "would just fade away."

IDW: A Web-Based Panopticon and Cash Cow for Corporate Spooks

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's report, citing the Bureau's own description, characterizes the Investigative Data Warehouse as "the FBI's single largest repository of operational and intelligence information."

In 2005, FBI Section Chief Michael Morehart said that "IDW is a centralized, web-enabled, closed system repository for intelligence and investigative data." Unidentified FBI agents have described it as "one-stop shopping" for FBI agents and an "uber-Google." According to the Bureau, "[t]he IDW system provides data storage, database management, search, information presentation, and security services."

Documents released to EFF show that the FBI began spending funds on IDW in 2002 and that "system implementation was completed in FY 2005." Version 1.1 was released in July 2004 "with enhanced functionality, including batch processing capabilities."

But as with all things related to "national security," early-on in the game the FBI forged a "public-private partnership" with spooky corporations in the defense and security industry, including Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), Convera and Chiliad to develop the project.

As the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) notes in their Federal Contractor Misconduct Database, the San Diego-based SAIC has paid out some $14.5 million in fines on $5.3 billion in revenue largely derived from contracts in the defense, intelligence and security fields.

Misconduct ranged from false claims and defective pricing to conflict of interest violations. Last August, SAIC was forced to drop its bid with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for the agency's TOPOFF 5 national disaster drill "after allegations of improprieties in the contracting process" were uncovered, according to Washington Technology.

Indeed, SAIC had been hired by the FBI to build an early version of IDW known as the Virtual Case File (VCF). According to Washington Technology, SAIC was contracted by the Bureau in 2001 to build VCF "but pulled the plug in 2005 after realizing the system would not work."

The 2007 appropriations bill directed the Bureau to "retrieve as much as $104 million from the defaulted VCF contract" and in unusual language for the Senate, "expects FBI to use all means necessary, including legal action, to recover all erroneous charges from the VCF contractor," Washington Technology revealed.

Federal Computer Week reported in 2005 that Aerospace, an independent contractor hired to evaluate the system concluded that SAIC "did a poor coding job" and that it was "virtually impossible to update the system."

Despite these revelations, the San Diego defense and security giant has cornered billions of dollars in new contracts from the Defense, Homeland Security and Justice Departments.

Convera, describing itself as "the leading technology provider of intelligent search," the Vienna, Virginia corporation claims it is "an established leader in the business of search technologies." Apparently, the company is less than sanguine about trumpeting its products for the FBI. A search of their website returned zero hits on the terms "FBI-IDW."

However, Washington Technology revealed in 2004, Convera won a contract worth more than $2 million to "provide an agency-wide search and discovery platform for the FBI."

The contract "covers a perpetual license for the company's RetrievalWare software as the search technology." The 2004 award was "a follow-on from an earlier contract worth approximately $1.5 million ... for search and categorization software for the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse," the technology insider publication reported.

On the other hand Chiliad avers that they will help "organizations realize the full business value of all of their disparate information resources," and their innovative products "in enterprise search and analysis technology, and virtual information sharing" will "help organizations 'Connect the Dots' and arrive at truly actionable intelligence." In this spirit, Chiliad boasts that the FBI as the lead agency for "domestic counterterrorism" has purchased a "worldwide enterprise license to Chiliad's software."

Founded in 1999, the Washington, D.C.-based firm's customer base include such spooky corporations as defense giant BAE, Booz Allen Hamilton, described by investigative journalist Tim Shorrock in Spies For Hire as a "revolving door" connecting the corporate security world and agencies such as NSA, General Dynamics, ITT, Northrop Grumman, SAIC and many, many more!

According to EFF, the FBI is busily putting these products to the test.

In addition to storing vast quantities of data, the IDW provides a content management and data mining system that is designed to permit a wide range of FBI personnel (investigative, analytical, administrative, and intelligence) to access and analyze aggregated data from over fifty previously separate datasets included in the warehouse. Moving forward, the FBI intends to increase its use of the IDW for "link analysis" (looking for links between suspects and other people--i.e. the Kevin Bacon game) and to start "pattern analysis" (defining a "predictive pattern of behavior" and searching for that pattern in the IDW's datasets before any criminal offence is committed--i.e. pre-crime). (Kurt Opsahl, "Report on the Investigative Data Warehouse," Electronic Frontier Foundation, April 2009)

Accordingly, EFF revealed that then-Assistant Director for the Counterterrorism Division, Willie Hulon said in 2004 that the FBI was "introducing advanced analytical tools" that would "make the most" of IDW data.

Hulon went on to state that when IDW is completed, "Agents, JTTF [Joint Terrorism Task Force] members and analysts," using the new data-mining technology "will be able to search rapidly for pictures of known terrorists and match or compare the pictures with other individuals in minutes rather than days. They will be able to extract subjects' addresses, phone numbers, and other data in seconds, rather than searching for it manually. They will have the ability to identify relationships across cases. They will be able to search up to 100 million pages of international terrorism-related documents in seconds." EFF notes that since 2004, "the number of records has grown nearly ten-fold."

According to an April 1 press release from the American Civil Liberties Union, FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces and the related national nexus of Fusion Centers, comprised of the FBI, local police, the military (U.S. Northern Command) and private outfits in the corporate security world, relying heavily on data-mining and link analysis "have experienced a mission creep in the last several years, becoming more of a threat than a security device."

Indeed, the ACLU noted that Fusion Centers have routinely targeted activists across the political spectrum, relying on specious data-mining techologies as well as paid provocateurs and informants (HUMINT) that label any and all government critics as "extremists" to be monitored and indexed in national security databases. The civil liberties' group averred: "From directing local police to investigate non-violent political activists and religious groups in Texas to advocating surveillance of third-party presidential candidate supporters in Missouri, there have been repeated and persistent disclosures of troubling memos and reports from local fusions centers."

Since 2004, EFF has identified 38 separate data sources feeding the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse. In addition to the FBI's Automated Case System (ACS), soon to be replaced by the Sentinel Case Management System after the $170 million "Virtual Case File" fiasco briefly described above, IDW compiles information from the following sources:

Secure Automated Messaging Network (SAMNet). SAMNet consists of all message traffic sent by the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, including Intelligence Information Reports (IIRs) and Technical Disseminations (TD) to the FBI. These include Secret classified information but not those designated Top Secret and above, including Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI), the highest security classification.

Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry (JICI) Documents of "all FBI documents related to Islamic extremist networks between 1993 and 2002."

Open Source News, collected from the MiTAP system run by San Diego State University. EFF describes MiTAP as a "system that collects raw data from the internet, standardizes the format, extracts named entities, and routes documents into appropriate newsgroups. This dataset is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization (TIDES) Open Source Data project."

Violent Gang and Terrorist Organization File (VGTOF), provided by the FBI National Crime Information Center (NCIC). It includes "biographical data and photos" of individuals "who the FBI believes to be associated with violent gangs and terrorism." However, numerous abuses of the VGTOF classification system have been uncovered by the ACLU. According to the ACLU of Colorado, the FBI's JTTF added anarchists and eight separate categories of "extremists" to the VGTOF, including "environmental extremist" and "Black extremist." Indeed, Colorado antiwar activist Bill Sulzman, a campaigner against the weaponization of space, was listed in the VGTOF as a "terrorist," according to an article in the Colorado Springs Independent.

CIA Intelligence Information Reports (IIR) and Technical Disseminations (TD), "designed to provide the FBI with the specific results of classified intelligence collected on internationally-based terrorist suspects and activities, chiefly abroad."

Eleven IntelPlus scanned document libraries "related to FBI's major terrorism-related cases."

Eleven Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) Databases.

Selectee List: Copies of a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) "list of individuals that the TSA believes warrant additional security attention prior to boarding a commercial airliner."

Terrorist Watch List (TWL): according to EFF, the "FBI Terrorist Watch and Warning Unit (TWWU) list of names, aliases, and biographical information regarding individuals submitted to the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) for inclusion into VGTOF and TIPOFF watch lists. Also called the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB), the database 'contained a total of 724,442 records as of April 30, 2007'." The TWL has balooned to 1,192,000 names as of May 3, 2009.

According to the ACLU, "members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other 'suspicious characters' ... have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape." Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU Technology and Liberty Project said last summer: "Putting a million names on a watch list is a guarantee that the list will do more harm than good by interfering with the travel of innocent people and wasting huge amounts of our limited security resources on bureaucratic wheel-spinning. I doubt this thing would even be effective at catching a real terrorist." While true enough as far as it goes, perhaps the list's true intent is not to prevent terrorism but rather to terrorize the American people.

At the heart of these systems is data mining, that is, the deployment of a vast infrastructure capable of receiving, processing, managing and analyzing data flowing into the system from disparate sources. Indeed, documents released to EFF disclosed that the Bureau's 2008 budget justification explained that "[t]he Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW), combined with FTTTF's [Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force] existing applications and business processes, will form the backbone of the NSB's [National Security Branch] data exploitation system." The FBI also requested "$11,969,000 ... for the National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC)." The FBI claimed:

Once operational, the NSAC will be tasked to satisfy unmet analytical and technical needs of the NSB, particularly in the areas of bulk data analysis, pattern analysis, and trend analysis. … The NSAC will provide subject-based "link analysis" through the utilization of the FBI's collection datasets, combined with public records on predicated subjects. "Link analysis" uses datasets to find links between subjects, suspects, and addresses or other pieces of relevant information, and other persons, places, and things. This technique is currently being used on a limited basis by the FBI; the NSAC will provide improved processes and greater access to this technique to all NSB components. The NSAC will also pursue "pattern analysis" as part of its service to the NSB. "Pattern analysis" queries take a predictive model or pattern of behavior and search for that pattern in datasets. The FBI's efforts to define predictive models and patterns of behavior will improve efforts to identify "sleeper cells."

When this request was submitted to Congress, NSAC said it would "bring together nearly 1.5 billion records created or collected by the FBI and other government agencies," expected to quadruple by 2012. The House Science and Technology Committee was so alarmed that they demanded that the Government Accountability Office investigate the National Security Branch Analysis Center.

ABC News' Brian Ross reported that lawmakers are "questioning whether a proposed FBI anti-terrorist program is worth the price, both in taxpayer dollars and the possible loss of Americans' privacy."

Noting that the the FBI has a history "of improperly--even illegally--gathering personal information on Americans, most recently through the widespread abuse of so-called National Security Letters," ABC reported that congressional investigators are demanding to know "whether there are protections in place to make sure all the data in the program was legally collected."

Given the track record of the Bureau when it comes to targeting political opponents, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Two years later, EFF notes in a letter to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) that the FBI has refused to release documents filed under the Freedom on Information Act and that the Bureau "has published neither a 'system of records notice' (as required by the Privacy Act) nor a 'privacy impact assessment' (as required by the E-Government Act) for the IDW, thus depriving the public of the kind of accountability that usually comes with the creation and maintenance of large database systems containing sensitive personal information."

Citing Leahy's own assertion that the IDW is a "system ripe for abuse," EFF has called on the Judiciary Committee to examine IDW closely and "provide the public with needed assurances concerning its potential impact on the privacy rights of citizens."

Stay tuned...