In March 2004, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales made a now-famous late-night visit to the hospital room of Attorney General John Ashcroft, seeking to get Ashcroft to sign a certification stating that the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program was legal. According to people familiar with statements recently made by Gonzales to federal investigators, Gonzales is now saying that George Bush personally directed him to make that hospital visit.

Related story:
The Case of the Gonzales Notes

Published in Jonathan V. Wright, MD, Nutrition and Healing Newsletter, Vol. 13, Issue 5, June 2006.

(Washington, D.C.) – As congressional negotiations over bailout legislation continue, an extraordinary movement of organizations from across the ideological spectrum, representing millions of Americans, is demanding that Congress in its waning days pass legislation to strengthen whistleblower protections for government and corporate employees.

Tiny computer chips called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags that transmit information about us can be embedded in driver's licenses, student ID's and other government issued cards without our knowledge. These “human identification systems” pose clear information security risks that can threaten individual privacy and public safety.

Baggage searches are SOOOOOO early-21st century. Homeland Security is now testing the next generation of security screening — a body scanner that can read your mind.

Most preventive screening looks for explosives or metals that pose a threat. But a new system called MALINTENT turns the old school approach on its head. This Orwellian-sounding machine detects the person — not the device — set to wreak havoc and terror.

The Bush administration has overturned a 22-year-old policy and now allows customs agents to seize, read and copy documents from travelers at airports and borders without suspicion of wrongdoing, civil rights lawyers in San Francisco said Tuesday in releasing records obtained in a lawsuit.

By Joe Davidson
Wednesday, September 24, 2008; D04

Amid the swirl of activity on Capitol Hill surrounding legislation for a $700 billion bailout of financial giants is a little-noticed effort to protect Frank and Flo Fed if they reveal things their agencies are doing wrong.

Good-government groups have long wanted to strengthen protection for whistle-blowers and they had a good chance to get such legislation passed before the financial markets took a dive. Now that all the attention is on rushing the bailout through Congress, those groups are trying to get on board.

Concerned the FBI is already following proposed guidelines

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:(202) 675-2312 or media@dcaclu.org

Congress is busy dealing with the current financial crisis, but it is not so busy that Congress can neglect other pressing priorities like passing a strong federal whistleblower protection bill (especially since comprehensive whistleblower protections are essential to avoid the kind of corruption that has gotten America into this crisis).

The House and the Senate passed bills to protect federal employees who blow the whistle on waste, fraud and abuse by veto proof margins last year (H.R. 985, S. 274), but have yet to agree on a final bill.