Pres. Obama Town Hall in Strasbourg, France

Following the G20 Economic Summit in London, Pres. Obama headed to Strasbourg, France, for a NATO Summit and memorial events. While in Strasbourg, the president spoke at a town hall meeting to local residents about international issues. Link to c-span for speech

North Central Texas "Terror" Fusion Center

The Texas Observer, The Collin County Observer and this blog has been posting about the Department Of Homeland Security funded North Central Texas Fusion System located in Collin County. (What is a "fusion center?") Forrest Wilder today posted another good story about this domestic intelligence gathering operation in the Texas Observer:

Dr. Bob's Terror Shop

The strange and scary story of the North Central Texas Fusion System.

By Forrest Wilder,
The Texas Observer
April 03, 2009

One morning in February, more than 2,000 cops, fire marshals, and public health officials in the Dallas-Fort Worth area received a memo—stamped “For Official Use Only”—that contained shocking information: Middle Eastern terrorists and “their supporting organizations” had gained a stronghold in America.

The memo warned:

A number of organizations in the U.S. have been lobbying Islamic-based issues for many years. These lobbying efforts have turned public and political support towards radical goals such as Shariah law and support of terrorist military action against Western nations. ... [T]he threats to Texas are significant.

Who were these Osama bin Lobbyists who had convinced Americans to support terrorism? Citing a grab bag of right-wing blogs and news sources, the memo [cites, among several concerns] that a class on Islamic finance taught at the U.S. Treasury Department “indicates the possibility that the [U.S.] government hopes to secure recycled petrodollars in exchange for conforming to [Islamic] Shariah economic doctrine.” The memo ends by calling on law enforcement to “report” the activities of [what it identified and listed as Islamic sympathizer] organizations.

The missive reads like a rant by a paranoid conspiracy nut. In fact, the so-called “Prevention Awareness Bulletin” is a weekly product of the North Central Texas Fusion System, a terrorism and crime-prevention intelligence center run by the Collin County Department of Homeland Security.

. . .The bulletin is written by the architect and operator of the fusion system, Bob Johnson, a former chief scientist for defense contractor Raytheon Co. Johnson has a background in data mining, the controversial, computer-aided practice of trolling massive quantities of data in pursuit of patterns and links.

. . .Among his critics in Texas, Bob Johnson is better known as “Son of Sam”—the son of U.S Rep. Sam Johnson, the conservative Republican congressman who has represented Collin and Dallas Counties [in the 3rd Congressional District of Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives] since 1992. [.The 3rd Congressional District includes the southwestern portion of Collin County and the Northeastern corner of Dallas County.]

. . .Since 2004, [Johnson and his wife Anita] have received $1.1 million in no-bid contracts. At least $80,000 of that money has been passed along, in the form of a subcontract, to Anita’s brother, Elbert Bassham, who runs a one-person consulting firm listed at a Marfa post-office box that he shares with a beauty salon.

“I’m not aware of any other fusion center that has a husband-and-wife team building, running, and managing it,” says James Paat, CEO of Sypherlink Inc., an Ohio-based data integration company that lost the subcontract. In a 2007 letter to Collin County, Mr. Paat accused ADB Consulting of rigging the scoring process and asked that the contract be rescinded.

Funding for the fusion system comes from state and federal Department Of Homeland Security grants as well as Collin County funds.

. . .It’s tempting to dismiss the fusion center as one man’s risible, if expensive, [tax payer funded] computer science project. But the U.S. Department of Homeland Security took [Johnson's] menacing February memo seriously enough that it sent a three-person team to train North Texas fusion personnel on federal rules [in accordance with the December 11, 2008 Department of Homeland Security State, Local, and Regional Fusion Center Initiative Privacy Impact Assessment directive.]

. . .In 2007, a former senior intelligence analyst for the Collin County fusion system described the center to an online trade publication as the “wild west,” a place where analysts could try out new technologies [at tax payer expense] before “politics” caught up with them.

. . . “We’ve built this network, and nobody’s policing it,” says Mike German, a former FBI agent now with the ACLU. “Nobody knows exactly what each fusion center is doing.” Part of the problem, German says, is that fusion centers fall in a “no-man’s-land” between federal and state governments. Such ambiguity can lead fusion centers to pick and choose which rules apply to them. A 2007 study by the Government Accountability Office found that one-third of all fusion centers reported a lack of guidance on the proper handling of information, including privacy and civil-liberties concerns.

Read the full story in the Texas Observer....

Time Warner Cable Introducing Tiered And Metered Internet Pricing

According to new reports today, Time Warner Cable is introducing a new pricing structure for Austin-area Internet users. Under the new plan, consumers would be placed on a tiered and metered billing system, and charged for the amount of bandwidth they use. The DFW area Internet users will likely be next for Time Warner Cable Tiered And Metered Internet Use Pricing!

From BurntOrangeReport.com: Lee Leffingwell released the following statement earlier today:

This approach, and Time Warner’s specific plan, should be of grave concern to Austin. Right now we need to be encouraging, rather than stifling, economic recovery and growth in Austin. This plan moves us in the wrong direction. It potentially puts Austin at a disadvantage as we compete against other communities to attract, retain, and grow prosperous businesses.

I’m obviously concerned about the impact this plan would have on individuals and families, who would have to begin to monitor their Internet use. The new pricing system would have a significant impact on anybody who uses the Internet to watch videos, download music, movies, or television shows.

But I’m deeply concerned about the impact of the plan on business owners, especially those working in creative industries that require regular access to broadband Internet service. Introducing an economic disincentive for Austin businesses to use the Internet to communicate, collaborate, innovate, and deliver services is very worrisome at best, and catastrophic at worst.

If Time Warner believes that is has no choice but to introduce usage caps, I would call on them to propose caps that are realistic and reasonable. The usage caps proposed in their new plan are neither realistic nor reasonable.

For example, if a consumer downloads Season 1 of “Friday Night Lights” in high definition from iTunes, they will have used 30.86 gigabytes of transfer. This one purchase would put that consumer over the limit of all but the most expensive tier that Time Warner is offering under the new plan. It’s easy to see how the costs associated with the ongoing, high volumes of Internet use that many businesses require be could be astronomical.

Internet access should be expanded, not constrained. Innovation and creativity should be unleashed by the Internet, not shackled by draconian usage caps. This is vital to Austin’s economic recovery. I hope that Time Warner will work with City officials and the community at large to reconsider this bad plan.

Voter Photo ID: A Flawed Solution To A Made-Up Problem

With its requirement that voters present a government-issued photo ID or specified substitutes along with their voter registration card at the polls, the voter photo ID bill’s stated goal is to prevent voter fraud. No one favors voter fraud, but to this day proponents of voter ID have not shown convincing evidence that such fraud is a problem or has even occurred in Texas.

Requiring voters to present a government-issued photo ID to vote is a flawed solution to a made-up problem. Republican maneuvering has every appearance of a disparate scheme devised to stack the deck in favor of Republicans in the 2010 legislative elections. Republicans are anxious to maintain control of the Texas House and Senate to give them the upper hand in the federal and state redistricting decisions that the Legislature is scheduled to make in 2011 following the 2010 U.S. census.

The Texas photo Voter ID bill is part of the Republican agenda to keep Republicans in office by suppressing the vote of groups that tend to vote Democratic. In the 10 states that have already passed voter picture ID laws, voter participation is down about 3 percent. However, black and Hispanic voter participation is down more than 10 percent in those states. The success of Democratic voter registration drives among these Texas groups in 2008 threatens to tip the balance of power away from Republican candidates in future elections. As the tide of Democratic voters continues to grow across Texas, voter ID legislation would be an effective way for Republicans to hold back the tide.

Republicans, who hold a 19-12 majority in the Senate, voted on the second day of the current session to change Senate rules to cut Democrats out of the legislative process so they could ram the voter photo ID bill through that legislative body. Then they proceeded to do so when Republicans passed the Senate Voter Photo ID bill (SB362) in a party line 19-12 vote on March 11.

SB362 will be taken up by the House Elections Committee next week where the Republican committee chairman is solidly on the Republican side of the aisle in wanting to pass the bill into law. There is a slim chance to stop the bill in the House given Republicans hold only a slim 76-74 majority in the House and two of those Republicans sided with Democrats on the issue in the last legislative session in 2007.

You can help convince those House Republicans of good conscience to vote no again by testifying and speaking out against the photo id requirement when the House Elections Committee takes public comment on the legislation next Tuesday.

If you are able to travel to Austin next Tuesday, April 7th to speak out during the House Elections Committee afternoon hearing, please sign up by clicking here.

Read more here