FBI warns of potential terror attacks on public buildings

"It is not appropriate for the current administration to make such sweeping changes to FBI procedures at this late date, only a month before the election," House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., said in a statement. He said they should be provided "as suggestions (for) the new administration to consider early next year."

The new rules, currently scheduled to come into force on Dec. 1, were published Friday after a contentious process during which the Justice Department engaged in what officials say was an unprecedented consultation effort to hear concerns from lawmakers as well as advocates for privacy and civil liberties.

Officials said Monday the consultation had pushed back the schedule for implementation two months already and that since the rewrite had been initiated at the request of career FBI officials and not political appointees, no further delay would be appropriate.

"The implementation date has been set," department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse told UPI. "It's Dec. 1."

The new rules are consolidated guidelines from the attorney general on the bureau's domestic operations, merging three previous sets of guidance and providing for the first time a single set of rules governing the full gamut of FBI activities, from criminal investigations to counterintelligence operations and intelligence gathering about and assessment of national security threats.

Bureau Director Robert Mueller and Attorney General Michael Mukasey said in a joint statement that the new guidelines "provide more uniform, clearer and simpler rules" designed to help "the FBI to become, among other things, a more flexible and adept collector of intelligence," as recommended by the Sept. 11 Commission and the president's Weapons of Mass Destruction Intelligence Commission.

The guidelines govern the circumstances under which FBI agents are allowed to initiative certain activities -- surveillance, for example, or public records searches -- potentially bringing the bureau's extensive panoply of information-gathering capabilities to bear on an individual or group.

The guidelines redefine a category of FBI activity called "assessment" -- introduced in 2003 as a proactive effort by agents to identify potential terrorist threats or other dangers to national security.

The new guidelines say assessments designed to lead to a criminal investigation can be undertaken without a factual predicate -- evidence that a crime has been committed or is being planned -- or approval from FBI supervisors, except under certain conditions that the FBI will spell out.

According to the guidelines, "The methods authorized in assessments are generally those of relatively low intrusiveness, such as obtaining publicly available information, checking government records, and requesting information from members of the public."

The guidelines give as an example of assessment activities "proactively surfing the Internet to find publicly accessible Web sites and services through which recruitment by terrorist organizations and promotion of terrorist crimes is openly taking place."

But the list of "authorized methods" that can be used by agents conducting assessments includes "observation or surveillance not requiring a court order," the "use and recruit(ment of) human sources" or informants, and "grand jury subpoenas for telephone or electronic mail subscriber information."

Critics said the new rules lowered the bar for agents to target Americans too far. The chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont, said they gave the bureau "broad new powers to conduct surveillance and use other intrusive investigative techniques on Americans without requiring any indication of wrongdoing or any approval even from FBI supervisors."

Leahy said the rules "continue the pattern of this administration of expanding authority to gather and use Americans' private information without protections for privacy or checks to prevent abuse and misuse."

ACLU Legislative Counsel Michael German, himself a former FBI agent, added, "Not since J. Edgar Hoover ran the place has the FBI claimed the right to investigate American citizens without a factual predicate," calling it "extraordinarily dangerous."

"Any FBI agent can launch one of these assessments against anyone, so long as it is for (what the guidelines call) an 'authorized purpose.' There is no requirement for any factual connection between the target and that purpose."

He said the absence of a requirement for approval from FBI supervisors was "stunning ¿¿ even from a management point of view," given the bureau's record of mismanaging other authorities it had been granted, such as National Security Letters.

He warned that the new rules could give rise to a series of open-ended investigations based on hunches or grudges that would be "a tremendous waste of resources, aside for the potential for abuse" of civil liberties and constitutional rights.

At a briefing about an earlier draft of the guidelines last month, a senior FBI official described the way that the proactive assessment process would work, citing the hypothetical example of a university that had defense research contracts in an area that was known was the target of foreign efforts at intelligence collection and technology theft.

With the cooperation of the university authorities and the State Department, the local FBI chief finds that there are a large number of students from a country that "has a history of stealing technology from the United States."

Under existing guidelines, the official said, agents would be limited to operating overtly and tapping current informants about what they already know. "You can't recruit a new source or task him, or task any of your existing sources against any of these students, because recruiting and tasking sources under the (old) guidelines is prohibited unless you've got a preliminary investigation open," and "to open an investigation, you have to have information or an allegation that the person is or may be a terrorist or a spy or a criminal. We don't have that. All we know is they're from a foreign country."

German said the way the guidelines were written continued to raise concerns about the potential for race and religion to be used as factors in deciding whom to investigate.

"It would have been very simple to include ¿¿ a clear ban" on the use of race or religion, he said, noting instead that the guidelines refer to earlier rules on racial profiling, which themselves have exclusions for national security investigations. "This convoluted language ¿¿ leaves the impression that (the rules) are designed to create a loophole."

Iran could spark Mideast nuclear arms race: British FM

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband. Photo courtesy AFP.

by Staff Writers
London (AFP) Oct 7, 2008
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband warned Tuesday of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East if Iran was allowed to press ahead unchecked with a uranium enrichment programme.

Speaking a day after Iran's nuclear negotiator protested over the West's attitude to Tehran's atomic programme, he said Britain was "very concerned" about Iran's refusal to be frank with the International Atomic Energy Authority Agency (IAEA), the UN's nuclear watchdog.

"We are making a serious offer to Iran for economic, cultural, and scientific co-operation which I think is the way forward," he said in an exchange with lawmakers in the House of Commons.

"But it's not a way forward while they continue to defy not just the UN Security Council but also the (IAEA) which has continuing serious concerns about their programme and the refusal of the Iranian government to come clean about it."

He added: "We must be insistent that a uranium enrichment programme, in defiance not just of the UN Security Council but also of Iran's obligations under the non-proliferation treaty, is a serious danger not just to stability in the Middle East but in the world.

"The Middle East has enough problems without a nuclear arms race," he added.

On Monday Iran's nuclear negotiator Said Jalili sent a protest to EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana over the West's attitude to his country's atomic programme.

In the letter he complained that the West's "approach has harmed the constructive process of negotiations between the two parties," according to a Iranian official, who declined to be named.

The UN Security Council has slapped three rounds of sanctions on Iran for refusing to suspend uranium enrichment, a process which can be used to make the fissile material for a nuclear bomb.

Iran says it has a right to enrich uranium to make nuclear fuel as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and denies allegations of seeking atomic weapons.

iRobot Receives Order From TARDEC For iRobot Warrior 700

The iRobot Warrior 700

by Staff Writers
Bedford MA (SPX) Oct 08, 2008
iRobot has announced that the company has received a $3.75 million research and development contract from the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC), the nation's laboratory for advanced military automotive technology.

Work under this contract will result in the delivery of two iRobot Warrior 700 platforms.

A powerful and rugged robot, the iRobot Warrior can perform a variety of critical missions such as evaluating danger zones and inaccessible areas, providing real-time video, audio and sensor readings to warfighters and SWAT teams.

The robot will feature an advanced digital architecture and a multi-mission chassis that supports up to 150-pound (68 kg) payloads.

"We are confident that the iRobot Warrior will secure a strong foothold within infantry, first responders and combat engineers," said Joe Dyer, president of iRobot Government and Industrial Robots.

"The Warrior is another example of iRobot's product line expansion, which continues to evolve as the need for unmanned ground vehicles grows worldwide."

NKorea fires short-range missiles: Yonhap

"North Korea appears to have fired KN-02 or Styx missiles into the international sea from North Korean waters."

by Staff Writers
Seoul (AFP) Oct 8, 2008
North Korea has fired two short-range missiles into international waters in the Yellow Sea as part of a routine military drill, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said early Wednesday, quoting a defence source.

The missile launch in waters adjoining China comes amid intense efforts to save a nuclear disarmament agreement which is in danger of collapsing because of a dispute over verification of the North's declared nuclear programme.

"We understand that North Korea fired about two missiles in the Yellow Sea in the afternoon of the seventh (of October)," the unnamed source was quoted by Yonhap as saying.

"It seems that the missiles were fired as part of their routine drill."

Yonhap said it was the first missile launch by the North since March.

"North Korea had designated an off-limit zone for vessels in the Yellow Sea before it fired missiles," the source said.

"North Korea appears to have fired KN-02 or Styx missiles into the international sea from North Korean waters."

The drill follows reports last week that the North has been upgrading a missile launch site on its east coast in preparation to test a new long-range missile.

The North alarmed its neighbours by test-launching a Taepodong-1 from the Musudan-ri launch site on the east coast in 1998 over Japan. It test-launched a Taepodong-2 from the same site in 2006 but the missile failed.

The latest missile launch comes after chief US nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill visited Pyongyang last week to try to rescue the six-nation disarmament deal.

North Korea is bridling at a US-inspired verification plan which reportedly calls for the secretive communist state to give access to undeclared suspected nuclear facilities and to let inspectors take samples of material.

Pyongyang accepted the aid-for-disarmament deal in February 2007, just four months after staging a nuclear weapons test.

It shut down its Yongbyon nuclear complex in July last year and began disabling it in November. And in June it handed over a declaration of nuclear activities to China.

But now the North is angry that the US failed to respond by removing it from a terrorism blacklist, as required under the accord. It says it will soon begin work to restart a plutonium reprocessing plant.

Before delisting occurs, the US demands that the North agree on inspection procedures to ensure it is telling the truth in its declaration.

The North says verification is not part of this stage of the agreement, and accuses Washington of seeking Iraq-style "house searches" for atomic material.