EXPOSED: CRIMINALS CONTROL YOUR VOTE / MSM COVERS IT UP

[Pupil]

http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/71236.html

LHS Executive Ken Hajjar: "I mean, I don't pay attention to every little law. It's just, it's up to the Registrars [election officials]

1-9-08: New England voting machine firm has executive criminal record

They program every single voting machine in New Hampshire, Connecticut, almost all of Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine. But did state officials in five New England states ever do a criminal background check on this company's executives? Do the laws of these five states even ALLOW them to hire convicted criminals for services paid for by the state? What about over 500 local towns and municipalities?

According to my sources, LHS Marketing and Sales Director Ken Hajjar grew up with owner John Silvestro in Lawrence, Massachusetts. They both moved to Londonderry, New Hampshire, where Ken Hajjar was arrested, indicted, and pleaded guilty to "sale / CND" and sentenced to 12 months in the Rockingham County Correctional facility, and fined $2000. As things go for the politically connected, he was then given a deferred sentence and $1000 of his fine was suspended.

Hajjar doesn't limit his involvement in the voting machine business to sales. According to an interview conducted by Brad Friedman, Hajjar totes memory cards around in the trunk of his car and defends the boggling concept of swapping out memory cards during the middle of elections.

Hold onto your hats, there's more. Start with this YouTube video, if you haven't already seen it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiiaBqwqkXs

Then read this BradBlog story:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5320

(excerpt)
Other LHS staff members we spoke with, including Mike Carlson and Tom Burge, provided similar comments. They said they would open machines up during an election and swap memory cards as needed. This is illegal under Connecticut law and Deputy Secretary Mara told us she has since informed LHS that such actions were in violation of Connecticut election laws.

In 2006, as Hajjar argued in favor of their policy to change cards during elections, I asked him about about the laws which govern chain of custody issues. His response: "I mean, I don't pay attention to every little law. It's just, it's up to the Registrars. All we are is a support organization on Election Day".

He said he had three memory cards in the trunk of his car and, in the event they had to be used, the chain of custody issues wouldn't matter since, "once you run the [pre-election] test deck through, you're golden".

Black Box Voting has sent out 10 freedom of information requests, called "right to know requests" in New Hampshire, and public records requests elsewhere.

Hajjar's conviction was in 1987, but we have asked also for complaints filed on a threat allegedly made in recent years to a New Hampshire woman, and any other reports for Hajjar or LHS owner John Silvestro.

Until recently, LHS employees were listed on the company Web site. Now the pages identifying who programs New England voting machines have been taken down.

We want to know.

We want to know exactly what the secretaries of state/commonwealth know about LHS Associates.

Did they know of Hajjar's criminal background? If so, why's he toting voting machine cards around in the trunk of his car in case they are "needed" in live elections, and if not, why not?

Link to Kenneth Hajjar criminal record:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/LHS/hajjar.png

VOTING MACHINES - SKILLFULLY MANIPULATED - LEAVE NO EVIDENCE

The famous "Hursti Hack" of the memory card in the voting system version used in New Hampshire preloaded the card with minus and plus votes, passed the "zero test" at the beginning of the day, and after 6 no and 2 yes votes were fed through it, pronounced election totals of 7 yes and 1 no. Yes, these are the cards Hajjar totes in trunk.

Good news for the citizens of Connecticut. According to Brad Friedman, Hajjar was booted out of the state after he posted "You're full of shit" on BradBlog, a liberal political site that does kick-ass voting machine stories.

Whether Hajjar works in Connecticut or not, he works at LHS, and it is inside the Methuen, Massachusetts-based factory that the memory cards are programmed for Connecticut and the rest of New England.

[Dig]

NICE GRAB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

GET THIS EVERYWHERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

CRIMINALS CONTROL YOUR VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

CRIMINALS CONTROL YOUR VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

CRIMINALS CONTROL YOUR VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

CRIMINALS CONTROL YOUR VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

CRIMINALS CONTROL YOUR VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

CRIMINALS CONTROL YOUR VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Dig]

Keep it coming guys!

They blinked with New Hampshire and showed the fear in their eyes!

They continue to blink with these total morons on TV saying the vote was real.

The entire past 24 hours of TV will be documented as the spark that envigorated this country with so much anger against the Rockefeller machine of tyranny!

[Cruise4]

Cracking post. This is the right target.

[Pupil]

I'm actually on a low-speed connection right now... what's the YouTube video she links to about?

[Lannister]

I'm no legal expert, but cannot a legal injunction against using these machines in the next primary based on what we have seen, and hopefully will prove has been going on?  I would love to see the issue forced to hand counting...

[Tom Marvolo Riddle]

I don't know if this topic has been discussed here or not. I thought I would talk a little about this. There was once a government office under DARPA called The Total Information Awareness Office. Their job was to spy on the American public. As far as I know they would save all web searches done by people. But thats not all, they also collected all information about every person in America. Both public information like if you were in the news or newspaper and private information like web browsing and searches, IM chats, and email. Now don't take this for fact right here but from what I gather this office was shut down when it became public what they were doing. As a side note there logo was a pyramid and eye above it looking down on a globe, the western hemisphere part of the globe which gave the impression of spying on American citizens.
Now, when this office was closed these other corporate compines moved in doing the same thing as Total Information Awareness office did. One of these is called Choicepoint http://www.choicepoint.com/. They are a private company that collects all information on every American citizen. You can even go to their website and request to see all the information they have on you! I guess since it is illegal to this through a government agency they figured they could do it privately.
This is what I think, in order to go around the Constitution these guys just get what they want through private organizations. Look at Blackwater, murder for hire through a private company. What a solder cannot legally do Blackwater gets done. Choicepoint does what DARPA could not do. I wonder if Choicepoint is headed by a former government employee? If anyone does find that out could you post it here. Please, if you know of any other private companies doing what the government used to do but can not because it's illegal or companies working hand in hand with the government post them here if you can

[Dig]

go to bradblog.com

filled with info about dozens of criminals working for these companies.

but that was before the RP Revolution!

We are going to bust this wide open!!!!!!!!!!

[Dig]

Choicepoint/Voter Fraud in 2000 Election in Fahrenheit 911 and in Greg Palast's Book: Best Democracy Money Can Buy:

http://www.scribd.com/word/download/6503?extension=pdf

Page 18

[shirteesdotnet]

Sane, I have a brother living in Japan. He is a lot more political than I am (kucinich fan) and works closely with the "democrats abroad" group there and also sent me the Bradblog website and said this is going to explode now that it reached the Bradblog. I guess a lot of people read that site and if its on there, its big news.

So, even though Ive never heard of that site... this is good news!

[Tom Marvolo Riddle]

Choicepoint/Voter Fraud in 2000 Election in Fahrenheit 911 and in Greg Palast's Book: Best Democracy Money Can Buy:

http://www.scribd.com/word/download/6503?extension=pdf

Page 18

WTF!?? I'm on this link! I always try to verify information from as many sources as possiable. Thanks Sane!
Oh ok, I never seen that one before! I have had some doubts about Michael Moore.

[Dig]

Sane, I have a brother living in Japan. He is a lot more political than I am (kucinich fan) and works closely with the "democrats abroad" group there and also sent me the Bradblog website and said this is going to explode now that it reached the Bradblog. I guess a lot of people read that site and if its on there, its big news.

So, even though Ive never heard of that site... this is good news!

it is a trifecta and any missing piece would make it hard to bust open.

Bradblog/Bev Harris/RP Revolution

Bradblog and Bev Harris have been warning us for years.

But until the passionate American Citizens demanding their constitutional rights entered the picture, they were limited in keeping pressure on the establishment.

I am telling you these guys f-d up big time.

Especially with McCain/Clinton, I mean you gotta be fricking kidding me.

[Dig]

Today's Must Read
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004829.php
By Paul Kiel - December 5, 2007, 9:40AM

They're hard to keep straight, the various and sundry friends and business associates of Rudy Giuliani with legal problems. But here's one worth keeping an eye on: Hank Asher. ABC reports that Asher, a former drug-runner, as well as a business partner and "close friend" of Giuliani's, makes an appearance in the recent indictment of Orange County Sheriff Michael Carona on bribery charges.

Carona himself was once a rising star in the GOP, often mentioned as a potential candidate for lieutenant governor of California. Dubbed "America's Sheriff" by Larry King for how he handled the 2002 hunt for 5-year-old Samantha Runnion's kidnapper, he naturally endorsed America's Mayor Rudy Giuliani for president. According to news accounts, he's met Giuliani at least twice. He's also chums with Bernie Kerik.

The indictment alleges that Carona and five associates, including his wife (Deborah) and mistress (named Debra), accepted bribes and generally did what they could to get rich off Carona's position ($700,000 in bribes and kickbacks). Among the dozens of illicit gifts enumerated in the indictment is this one:
On or about December 19, 2002, defendant Deborah Carona and co-conspirator Jaramillo's wife [that's Carona's assistant Sheriff George Jaramillo] accepted as gifts from H.A., a businessman who owned a data mining software company, yellow gold and diamond Ladies Cartier Watches worth approximately $15,000 each.

"H.A.", according to ABC, is Hank Asher, who did indeed own a data mining software company called Seisint at the time (more about that later). Asher himself is worth "north of $700 million," based mostly on his success selling his data mining product, which is called Matrix (he's since sold it to LexisNexis). And yes, he did smuggle cocaine from Colombia to Florida aboard his private jet for eight months in 1980 and 1981. But he says he paid his dues by cooperating with federal agents to stop other runners.

But it sounds like Asher still likes to live large. During that same dinner meeting with the two wives at Carmine's here in New York, he apparently got a bit rambunctious:
When Hank Asher reached into the bag and pulled out the two $15,000 gold Cartier watches, the holiday crowd at Carmine's restaurant on 44th Street in Manhattan noticed, patrons recalled....

During the Carmine's dinner, when Asher's voice began to boom across the room, patrons recall him handing his black American Express card to the restaurant to pay for any inconvenience his boisterous party caused the other guests. He told the staff to buy everyone's dinners and drinks and then peeled off a few $100 bills to tip strolling carolers in the restaurant.

As ABC notes, Asher isn't named as a co-conspirator in the case, and "there is no allegation in the document that he attempted to influence any purchases or other decisions by the county." Maybe it was just a nice Christmas gift. But the timing is enough to raise eyebrows. Because that's when Asher was making a big push for law enforcement agencies to buy his product. Carona, famous as he was for tracking down child predators, would have been an asset to Asher, who was hawking a product designed to help authorities identify suspects by searching billions of public records. Carona and Asher would later serve together on the Board of Directors for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Certainly Asher had a broad strategy for selling his system. To help him sell to the federal government, his secret weapon was Rudy Giuliani, whom he'd hired for a staggering sum of money -- under a contract that the two of them kept secret for years. More about that in a bit.

[Dig]

Mayo Clinic + Giuliani corruption case?
http://postbulletin.typepad.com/kiger/2007/12/mayo-clinic-giu.html
This is an unusual linking for Mayo Clinic. An ABC investigative report focuses on Hank Asher, a business partner and supporter of presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, and Asher's involvement with a investigation of possible corruption of a sheriff.

The Mayo link comes in the form of Jari Research, according to ABC's Richard Esposito.

In 2004, Asher formed JARI Research Foundation a philanthropic endeavor to support breakthrough cancer research. The foundation evolved into JARI Research Corporation a year later, in cooperation with the Mayo Clinic

Esposito says Giulani is Asher's partner in Jari. I'm checking on all of this with Mayo.

Here's a little from this story:

When Hank Asher reached into the bag and pulled out the two $15,000 gold Cartier watches, the holiday crowd at Carmine's restaurant on 44th Street in Manhattan noticed, patrons recalled. Later, so did the U.S. attorney in Orange County, Calif., and soon yet another of Rudy Giuliani's business partners was embroiled in a bribery case.

Asher, identified by the initials H.A. in Overt Act 59 of a federal grand jury indictment against Orange County sheriff Michael Carona, had handed the diamond-encrusted Cartier baubles to the wives of the sheriff and his deputy, and with that, assured himself a place in a federal indictment that was looming.

Asher is not charged with any crime in the indictment. But his expensive gifts are clearly part of the corruption investigation.

It was far from his first brush with controversy or the law.
---------------------
Since 2005, he has been Giuliani's partner along with the Mayo Clinic in Jari Research, a business set on finding a bone marrow cancer cure and making a profit.

Posted on December 06, 2007 at 08:09 AM |

[Dig]

http://suzieqq.wordpress.com/2007/12/06/were-15k-watches-part-of-rudy-buddys-lobbying-effort/

[Dig]

aaaaaaagghghhgghhghgh
http://securingamerica.com/ccn/node/11903

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to go back now to the issue of the government monitoring its own citizens. We're talking with Robert O'Harrow, Jr. His book is called No Place to Hide, but before we go back to him, just a clip of a documentary produced by Robert Greenwald called Unconstitutional.

NARRATOR: The ACLU is not the only organization that has been silenced by the PATRIOT Act.

ANNE TURNER: If librarians have been approached by the F.B.I., they, of course, can’t say that, because one of the rules in the PATRIOT Act is that you can’t tell, which is terrifying, really.

RYAN COONERTY: What it allows the government to do is to come in and subpoena your customer records to find out what books have been checked out or what books they have bought. It doesn't allow the bookstore to contact a lawyer to fight it. It's all done through Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and doesn't give us an opportunity to stand up for our customers.

ANNE TURNER: At least when you get a subpoena from a local court, because there's reasonable cause to suspect that someone has broken the law and their library records would contribute to the investigation, that's what the law used to be. At least you could tell anybody that you had responded to the subpoena.

NARRATOR: They don't even need reasonable suspicion to obtain records on you. Employment records, medical records and even banking records

DOUGLAS HELLER: The government has deputized the banking industry to spy on American consumers. What we see is the possibility that banks in their -- in doing their policing duty for the government are going to be looking at who we are, finding out more information than they ought to. It's a profitable place for them because they get to sell information about us. You just wonder, are you giving the wrong people too much authority?

NARRATOR: Government agents can now check on who you are sending email to, who you are getting email from, and what websites you visit by claiming it is relevant to an investigation.

DAVID COLE: It requires no showing that the individual whose records are being sought actually engaged in or had any connection to any kind of terrorist conduct. So, it basically makes all of us vulnerable.

FORMER REP. ROBERT BARR: When you look at the PATRIOT Act you are truck struck by the fact that many of its provisions are not limited to fighting terrorism. They affect federal criminal law and procedure generally.

ANTHONY ROMERO: Most Americans believe that the PATRIOT Act was focused on the war on terror. And yet they're surprised to find that there are portions of the PATRIOT Act that have nothing to do with the war on terror.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of the film Unconstitutional. Anthony Romero, the last voice, head of the ACLU. Before that, former republican Congress member Bob Barr, as well as constitutional lawyer, David Cole. Our guest in the Reuters studio in Washington, D.C., is Robert O'Harrow, Jr. A remarkable book he has written, No Place to Hide. Robert O'Harrow, you talk in the book about a company called Axiom. You say, “You may not know Axiom, but it knows a lot about you.” Tell us about this company.

ROBERT O’HARROW, JR.: Before I do that, let me make a remark on that film clip. People think that the PATRIOT Act is the front and center, and it is. One thing that I have found and that some of those same people who appeared on that would confirm is that at if the PATRIOT Act were to disappear tomorrow, companies like Axiom, ChoicePoint, Seisint, a lot of these companies would continue rushing ahead, and we would have as difficult an issue to deal with absent the PATRIOT Act as almost as we do with it, because there are really no rules that govern how the government uses these private companies, so that even if the PATRIOT Act strips away some of their ability to get records, the private companies would be able to collect them for the government, and in a sense, the government is outsourcing security and intelligence. Now, one other thing about -- before we get to Axiom is that -- just to sort of frame this a little differently, people may recall that Eisenhower warned about a military industrial complex in 1961. It's a great speech. It's very compelling stuff, because people see how much it applies to our era, if you change the word military industrial complex to security industrial complex. He warned about unaccountable power, and that's really what we're dealing with here. It's not, you know, there's no great Hoover that I have identified, but it's a systematic thing that's creating this power, so that if a Hoover comes along, it’s really going to be able – it’s going to make what Hoover did look like amateur hours as one of my specialists told me. Now, Axiom--

AMY GOODMAN: I could only imagine if J. Edgar Hoover got to vacuum up all this information.

ROBERT O’HARROW, JR.: Now, the power, compared to what they were doing when they were trying to undermine political opponents and anti-war activists and women's rights activists and such, the power to do that now is sort of infinitely beyond what they could do with their paper and the many files they collected and created. It's really -- you know, as I said, it's something -- it's awesome to behold. It's not being used in that way now. I don't see there's a Hoover out there. In fact, as I said before, I believe that a lot of the people taking advantage of this are working in the nation's interests, and they're earnest about it, but you have this partnership that is really remarkable, and few of us really understand it. My advocacy here is very journalistic. It's that we come to understand this, and deal with it as soon as possible. By the way, Viet Dinh, the author of the PATRIOT Act, Bob Barr, of course, who’s a very conservative civil libertarian, counterterrorism officials, all sorts of people agree with me exactly. And they advocate this, as well. Viet Dinh says the amount of information that’s out there is mind boggling and that the government's use of it is not properly limited. I just think that's amazing coming from the author of the PATRIOT Act. Now, Axiom. Axiom is an amazing company based in Little Rock. They are perhaps the largest aggregator of information about private Americans. And they work on behalf of all of the -- virtually all of the main banks. They work with retailers. They collect information from hundreds and hundreds of sources so that they have these billions of records that help companies to know you better, to find out more about you. And after 9/11, they reached out to former President Clinton and asked him to make a call to John Ashcroft to help sort of help out the government's war on terror and then to help ease the way for contracts.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Robert O'Harrow, author of No Place to Hide. Now let's talk about these government -- well, you call it the ‘security industrial complex.’ We are talking about Axiom, also Choicepoint, which people may know from the 2000 election, the ones who purged the voter database in Florida of what they said were felons; and, of course, many of them, of the people who should have been voting, were not felons. Choicepoint and these other companies like -- What is it, Seisint, Seismic Intelligence, Verint, Verifiable Intelligence?

ROBERT O'HARROW: Amazing stuff. I mean, these are public companies. You can go and look at their securities filings and read some of what they do. I did that intensively, and I went to these companies, and I looked at other records and lawsuits and all the stuff that I could get my hands on. And the portrait that emerges is that, in effect, what you have?And this is no exaggeration; it sounds a little goofy, but it's true, and I'll explain that in a minute. You have in effect the creation of private intelligence services that in many ways do what James Bond and his colleagues would have liked back in the 60's movies except they do it faster and better in terms of finding links among people, establishing patterns, you know, showing tendencies, risk assessment. Choicepoint, based outside of Atlanta, has collected -- has bought fifty-eight companies since 1997. They -- the companies include a genetic repository, biometrics, fingerprint; they are becoming a fingerprint specialist. They’ve got something like 19 billion records, and they have become, they say, the nation's largest background screener. So that when you try to get a job, there's a chance that the company is going to Choicepoint to check your background out. And so, if you had a – you know, if you wrote a bad check or if you had a bust for smoking pot when you were in college, or drunk driving or, you know, whatever, that kind of background is going to probably follow you forever now, and is going to be instantly available to anybody who’s willing to pay the $50 or $100 to check you out. And one fellow who's concerned about it called it that we're moving toward a “scarlet letter” society where you -- you are branded for life for whatever you did when you were 19 and foolish. But, more than that, Choicepoint is providing these intelligence services, and when I said I’d get back to it, it's this: I concluded in my book that Choicepoint was operating as a private intelligence service. And I was very excited in a sense and kind of awed by the idea of it. I took that to the company before I went to press with the book, and I said, ‘Here's what I’ve concluded you are and that you’re becoming;’ and the company said, ‘Well, yes, guess what? You're right.” And, so, using that, as well as more reporting, I wrote a story for the front page of the Washington Post basically declaring them a private intelligence service, and, you know, we'll see where that takes us. I think that's -- The idea of that, I'm hoping, will help people understand that we're not just dealing with a direct mailing list here anymore.

AMY GOODMAN: Bob O'Harrow, I was just at Heathrow airport last weekend and, as usual, I was pulled out of the line coming back to the United States. And the security woman --

ROBERT O'HARROW: Your obviously a threat.

AMY GOODMAN: The security woman said to me: ‘We would like to dose your body with low-level radiation. Can we have your permission, please? And I said, ‘What you are talking about? Is this a joke?’ And she said, ‘No. Can we have your permission? We'll do a low dose of radiation through your body.’ And I said, ‘Hell, no.’ I said, ‘Would you do this?’ And she said, ‘No.’ So I said, ‘Well then, I would like to go back in the line.’ She said, ‘Well, now that you’ve refused we’re going to do a particular -- almost a body cavity search or something. I said, ‘Yeah, you can do anything, but I'm not going to get my body dosed with radiation. And she said, ‘Okay, that is your choice.’ I said, ‘Will it be our choice in three months or five months? You're saying this is a test now, but–’ Do you know about this, and can you talk more broadly about the airlines and these lists?

more.............

[Dig]

ROBERT O'HARROW: I don't know anything about that, but I will tell you that I find it outrageous in the extreme. And I -- Kind of an interesting thing about the book here is that a lot of people talk about privacy and such, and I’ve written a lot about that, but as I’ve focused on this more and more in the last several years, I realized that it's not really about privacy; it's about this thing that we have known about for a couple of hundred years in the United States, which is autonomy, this notion to be free from people meddling with us and messing with us. And, to me, that's one of those things where if you say, ‘no,’ somehow you're suspect; but, you know, my response to that is: Go to hell. To me, a lot of this?the data collection, the use of it in ways that no one bothered to tell us about, the targeting us even for marketing or including us in the special deals or discounts, or whatever, and then especially the government using it in ways that we don't understand?is really about autonomy and it reminds me of when I was a little kid in Indiana hearing my relatives say, “Who gave them the right?” and it could have been about any issue, but, to me, it's: Who gave them the right to do this? Why isn’t – why aren't people telling us what's really happening here in terms of the data collection and the scrutiny of us as individuals and letting us engage in a real, honest debate about the parts that we really want to make us safer and the parts where there needs to be limit on these kinds of intrusions?

AMY GOODMAN: What about R.F.I.D.'s, radio frequency identification chips?

ROBERT O'HARROW: R.F.I.D. is a classic example that holds for a lot of this technology. It has a real use. Just like the information that we’ve been talking about has a real use and we like a lot of it. We like the discounts. We like the conveniences. And, in fact, I would argue that we have to use information technology to make us safer to some degree. R.F.I.D. is like that. It can be used to tag pallets of goods that are going from California to New York, and what it allows the logistical managers to do is to wave a wand over the R.F.I.D. chip, and the chip will have an i.d. code on it that bounces right back?it reflects the radio frequency?and the i.d. chip would tell you where the pallet of goods came from, where it's supposed to go, what's there, what's in it, because the i.d. that's on that chip is also in a computer that has all this information. The thing that's interesting is that, for all that utility, R.F.I.D. is going to be used more and more on people and on i.d.'s. And what it's going to do is accelerate the collection of information about people. So, once R.F.I.D. becomes more common, there's going to be readers presumably in doorways at airports; so, when you go through with your i.d., it’ll automatically record that Bob O'Harrow was there at a certain time. These readers presumably and almost surely will be placed into doorways where we're not told they're there. Initially, we will be, but eventually there will be some – become so common that we're just going to get used to them, and we'll forget to ask: Are there R.F.I.D. readers here? So that as we go about our live, it won't be just cameras which exist in far greater numbers than ever before, or the data, which exist in far greater numbers than ever before when we swipe our cards, use our credit card and so on. It will be these R.F.I.D. readers that automatically record as we move about in the world. Now, again, there's security there, because there's a certain level of security because they're going to know whose coming and going; but the question is: How are we going to limit the use of the information that's collected, and how are we going to insure that the government and these private companies aren’t being intrusive and undermining the sense of autonomy that I would argue we must have in a free society so that we can be politically active, so we can be creative, so we can be different if we choose to be, without being made to feel odd or peculiar.

AMY GOODMAN: Bob O’Harrow, can you talk more about biometrics like iris scans and fingerprinting?

ROBERT O'HARROW: Sure. The same – same thing. An R.F.I.D. chip is something that you carry with you or in some cases people are having, believe it or not, embedded in their bodies. Biometrics is something that you don't even have a choice.

AMY GOODMAN: Wait, wait, wait. Embedded in their bodies?

ROBERT O'HARROW: Yeah. There are R.F.I. -- People will recognize that their dogs have these R.F.I.D. chips in them in case the dogs go missing. And in some places it's a requirement. You have to have this thing, and it's injected in, and it's a chip that's embedded under the skin. Well, there's a company that has started doing this now for a number of different reasons. And it's kind of funny, they argue that it's to contain medical information and they argue that it -- if you put it in your children, if they go missing, that it will help you find them more quickly. But the reality is – and I know this because I’ve reported on it, is that it's moving toward a general identity system where, if you have that on your -- embedded in your skin or on an i.d. card, you're going to be able to get through the line, whether it's at work or the airport and such eventually more quickly than the people who choose not to do it, just as you chose not to have this radiation infusion, whatever that was. That cost you time. It made things inconvenient, because you’d opted not to do it. In the same way, if you choose not to have the R.F.I.D. on a card or embedded in your skin, you're not going to get through the fast line. Now, biometrics. It's the same sort of thing. I would argue in our lifetimes, we're going to have to share our fingerprints on i.d. cards and electronically to get into facilities, to go through the airport, to get into buildings. And that's just a fact of life. It's – a biometric is an immutable characteristics, like a fingerprint, your face, your voice. These are things that, for the most part, people can’t mimic. And it's an identity system. And the question isn't the use of the biometric, because the reality is biometrics could actually help prevent identity theft because it's hard to imitate someone's face to take on that identity. But once you have an identity system like that, that -- where a biometric is used universally whether it's your fingerprint or face print, once again it, makes – it creates enormous opportunities for private companies to track you, or to watch you for -- you know, mercantile purposes in ways that weren’t possible before. My argument is: How can we adopt the one which could help us without having rules to limit the use of the other, which is the tracking part of it? Why do I say that? It's a very simple, very old-fashioned idea. In a free society, we want people to be as non-conformist as possible. We want people to sort of feel free to express political opinions that are unpopular. We want them to be artistic. We want them to, you know, just be themselves. When you have a sense of being watched, a watched society where biometrics are used to watch everywhere you go, where your data is picked up, at some point we begin to realize in a way that we haven't to date how much we're being watched, and there’ll be the people who don't care, and they’ll do whatever; but the reality is that the rest of us are going to feel this chill that maybe if we misstep, we could be taken away for questioning, that -- you know, it might be recorded that we did something foolish. And so, to avoid embarrassment or those kinds of questions, or the sense that we're somehow suspect, we're going to all become a lot more conformist, which I think -- I know it seems amorphous, but I find that a tragic idea.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert O'Harrow, tell us very briefly (we only have a few more minutes, there's so much to talk about) but, who Hank Asher is.

ROBERT O'HARROW: Well, thank you for asking about Hank. I spent a fair amount of time with him, and he's an amazing character. Just in purely in terms of readability (to kind of plug the book here for a second) we ended up talking about computers and data and government power and all of that, but at root here is you have these amazing characters, and their stories that help understand this data revolution that we're going through. Hank Asher was a data pioneer. And he invented two systems now that have helped change the landscape of law enforcement surveillance, and the delivery of information about Americans. He created the system called D.B.T. that was sold to Choicepoint that was used in the Florida election. And he started out with almost nothing in the early 1990's, and created a system that collected -- when he sold his system and became wealthy in the late 1990's, it had 8 billion records. Well, now, D.B.T. is part of Choicepoint, which of course, has something like 19 billion or 20 billion records.

He also, after 9/11, had a company called Seismic Intelligence. Its name was Seisint, and it created a system called the matrix. A lot of people would have heard about the matrix, because it, for the first time to my knowledge, combined criminal investigative records and confidential investigative records from police and law enforcement and driver records and photographs with these 20 billion records that, you know, showed where we lived and the cars we owned and the assets that we have; and it did it in a way where I could make a query, if I were a cop, that had a partial license plate, a description of, you know, that I'm a white guy with -- six foot with brown hair, and a general location, and come up with everybody that fit that description within the snap of a finger. It was an amazing, amazing system. Now, Hank Asher is an especially interesting character, because in interviews with me, he acknowledged that in the early 1980's for a short time, he was a drug smuggler, and flew to and from South America and Central America with drugs. He didn't specify, but I obtained records under Freedom of Information that showed that the drugs, according to police, appeared to be cocaine and lots of pot. Hank Asher said that that was a short period of his life, he was an adventurer, and that he hadn’t done it since, and there's nothing to indicate that he has. What's interesting is that after he built the matrix system, spending at least $10 million and perhaps as much as $20 million of his own money, he was invited to the White House and escorted there by the President's brother, Jeb Bush, to demonstrate this system, which, in fact, from what I can tell, is a mind-blowing technology for Vice President Cheney, for soon to be Homeland Secretary Tom Ridge, and for others in the White House in the Roosevelt room. And after that he received funding from Homeland Security to help expand the use of this. Now, the matrix system is one of those things that a lot of people thinks was killed because a number of states dropped out both for concerns about privacy and the intrusion, as well as the cost. But the reality is, some states are still using it, and more importantly, last summer, Hank Asher's company was bought by Lexus Nexus, this giant company that nobody thinks of really in this realm because we all use them to get newspaper clips; but in fact, Lexus Nexus is one of the main players in the war on terror, and is sharing its information under contract with the government. Now, they bought the matrix system and Hank Asher's company, Seisint for three-quarters of a billion dollars. And it's a sure thing that the matrix technology is now being used for homeland security. And I would argue (I'm betting. I don’t know this for sure.) that it's going to be interwoven into the much larger, vastly larger company, Lexus-Nexus which has a – you know, a global scope because it's based out of the U.K. And so, it just becomes this incredible fascinating story that sounds like science fiction or Hollywood, but, in fact, is truer than most people probably want to recognize.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert O'Harrow, we're going to have to leave it there. I want to thank you very much for being with us and for writing this book. Doesn't make you feel very comfortable, but it's important information. No Place to Hide.

ROBERT O'HARROW: Well, if we -- Thank you so much.

AMY GOODMAN: Okay. Thank you. Robert O'Harrow, Jr. No Place to Hide.

[Dig]

Rudy's Firm Got $30 Million for Pimping Data-Miner
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/12/httpwwwtpmmuckr.html
By Noah Shachtman December 13, 2007 | 5:30:54 PM

It was never exactly clear how Hank Asher, the database whiz and former cocaine smuggler, managed to get some of the government's highest-ranking officials to back MATRIX, his controversial info mining project.  A 2004 Vanity Fair profile said that Florida governor Jeb Bush was Asher's "introducer" at a Roosevelt Room presentation that included in the audience Vice President Dick Cheney, FBI director Robert Mueller, Department of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge.  But the story didn't say how Asher was able to get the attention, in the first place.

Now, it appears, we have an answer. Rudy Guiliani hooked Asher up.

Time magazine reports that Guiliani Partners in December 2002 agreed to represent Asher's company, Seisint, for "$2 million a year, plus a percentage of revenue from company sales to government and corporate buyers."

In the first year, GP earned $6.5 million, Seisint records show, in part for what Brauser and Seisint's in-house lobbyist, Dan Latham, say were commissions for state and federal contracts. Giuliani "came through," says Brauser. "The doors were wide open. It was almost a flood of business opportunities." Latham says GP set up meetings in 2003 at the Department of Homeland Security at which Seisint executives pushed a data-mining program called the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, or MATRIX. The program looked like a promising law-enforcement tool that states could use in partnership with Seisint. The Federal Government spent $12 million to run the program, and eventually 13 states signed up to participate in it.

TPM Muckraker unearths a lawsuit which puts an even finer point on it: Giuliani was hired to use his "influence with the federal government to enable Mr. Asher to take an active role in Seisint as a chief executive officer despite the allegations about his drug dealing."

In the end, MATRIX never got too far off of the ground.  As Time notes:

The databases it searched contained personal histories of millions of Americans, their relatives, past addresses, property records and credit ratings. Civil-liberties groups said MATRIX would create detailed data profiles of innocent Americans. Georgia and Utah, which had signed up for MATRIX, launched investigations into the privacy concerns raised by the program's vast data files.

By 2005, it was pretty much dead.  "This may be the biggest victory for privacy since we and our allies from across the political spectrum shut down Total Information Awareness," the ACLU's Barry Steinhardt said in a statement, referring to a similarly Owrellian Pentagon program shuttered earlier by Congress.

Asher still made out like a bandit, though; Seisint was sold to LexisNexis in 2004 for $775 million.   And Guiliani did preety damn well, too.  His company nabbed $30 million for its efforts.  Nice work, if you can get it.

[Dig]

Wednesday, October 11, 2006
http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/10/fight-real-enemy.html
Fight the Real Enemy


Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches
I'll recruit my army from the orphanages - Bob Dylan

In the United States, in the forshortened weeks before its next post-modern election, every action appears to have an equal and opposite distraction. Telling one from the other, that's the hardest thing.

This time, the Democrats may do just well enough to revive faith that the system works and that its workings are of consequence. (Like Jonathan Richman sings in "Walter Johnson": "Boys, this game's no fun if you don't get a hit once in a while.") Simone Weil wrote that "imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life," and if we can't imagine a better world than this then we can be certain one will be imagineered for us. A bipartisan soft tyranny that rules by mass delusion will concede the odd happy ending, that is actually neither.

The quote is from Weil's essay "Some Thoughts on the Love of God." They're wartime words, written during the worst of it, and imagination and storytelling remain our best means to interpret our attenuated circumstance that already passes understanding.

And everywhere is war. Fourteen years ago, Sinead O'Connor's storytelling on Saturday Night Live sounded to many like hateful babbling, but I expect today it would sound to more like fearless love. The Pope's picture was remembered, but not the child's. Maybe now, because we know more, it would be.

Mark Foley, we know, had been the co-chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, which was formed to provide federal assistance to the National Center of the same name. Its Board of Directors includes Floridian cocaine smuggler Hank Asher who founded the corporation which purged his state's voter rolls in 2000. In 2003 he was hired to help identify potential terrorists for Florida's Department of Law Enforcement. ("This has been highly controversial, largely because of Asher's alleged past links to drug smuggling.") Foley himself played a leading role in suppressing the hand recount. So what are such men with such histories, and in such a state as Florida, doing orbiting about the issue of missing and exploited children?

(And it may be more curious still. A poster on the RI forum links Foley with Bush family favourite Mel Sembler's juvenille mind control enterprise "Straight," and connects Straight to Paul Bishop of the Johnny Gosch snake pit.)

"Don't get distracted - stay focused" - a lot of Don't Stop Thinkin' About Tomorrow Democrats will be saying that more than usual this month. Many of them think Foley represents a distraction, albeit a happy one. But perhaps it's the election itself that distracts Americans with a shiny hoax battlefield, away from the real war they would know better if they would heed the dis-ease of their storytellers.

posted by Jeff at 10/11/2006 06:11:00 AM

[Dig]

White House Hopeful Rudy Giuliani's South Carolina Campaign Chairman Indicted on Cocaine Charges
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,284637,00.html
Tuesday, June 19, 2007


COLUMBIA, S.C.  —  South Carolina Treasurer Thomas Ravenel, a former real estate developer and rising political star, was indicted Tuesday on federal cocaine charges. The millionaire — also the state chairman for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign — is accused of buying less than 500 grams of cocaine to share with other people in late 2005, U.S. Attorney Reggie Lloyd said. Ravenel, 44, is charged with distribution of cocaine, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million. Giuliani's campaign sent out a prepared statement saying Ravenel had stepped down. Giuliani spokesman Elliott Bundy said he did not know when Ravenel stepped aside. The investigation into Ravenel arose from a drug case last year in Charleston, Lloyd said. State Law Enforcement Division Chief Robert Stewart said his agents were aware of the allegations before Ravenel was elected in November. The case was turned over to the FBI on April 1 "when the investigation reached a certain level," Stewart said. "There was nothing we could take action on prior to the election," Stewart said. South Carolina agents turned the investigation over to the FBI because Ravenel is in charge of handling state financial decisions, Stewart said. Indicted along with Ravenel was Michael L. Miller, who Lloyd said sold the drugs to Ravenel. Miller is in jail on separate state charges. Information about his lawyer was not immediately available. Lloyd stressed that Ravenel isn't accused of selling drugs. Authorities would not discuss the relationship between Ravenel and Miller. They also wouldn't give any details about what Ravenel did with the drugs other than give cocaine to other people.

Ravenel will be allowed to turn himself in at a July 9 bond hearing. The treasurer's office referred all questions to Ravenel's lawyer Joel Collins, who did not return a message left at his office. Ravenel did not immediately respond to a message left on his cell phone. The treasurer's office referred all questions to Ravenel's lawyer Joel Collins, who did not return a message left at his office. Gov. Mark Sanford suspended Ravenel immediately based on the serious nature of the charge. The governor said he would name an interim treasurer soon. "These are obviously very serious allegations that we're constitutionally bound to act upon, and they'll ultimately be decided by the courts," Sanford said in a statement. If convicted, Ravenel would lose his office. His successor would be picked by lawmakers if they were in session and the governor if they were not meeting. Ravenel started his political career in 2004, funding his own campaign for a U.S. Senate seat. He finished a close third in the Republican primary. Ravenel was founder of the Ravenel Development Corp., a commercial real estate development company. His father, Arthur Ravenel Jr., was a powerful politician from Charleston who served eight years in the U.S. House and is a former state representative and state senator. State Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson said he supported the decision to suspend Ravenel. "This is a private and legal issue and we expect it to be taken care of judiciously and in a very quick manner," Dawson said. Ravenel is an embarrassment to the state, South Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler said in a news release. "In only a few months, Thomas Ravenel has gone from spoiled rich kid buying his way into office to common street criminal," she said.

[industria]

Rudy Giuliani’s buddies begin showing up in jail
http://fruitfly.wordpress.com/2007/12/07/rudy-giulianis-buddies-begin-showing-up-in-jail/

Posted on December 7, 2007 by fruitfly
RudyBy way of Norwegianity, TPM Muckraker is running a story on a guy named Hank Asher who, it turns out ran cocaine out of Columbia into Florida back in 1980 and is a very close friend of Rudy…That is “Rotten Rudy” Giuliani.


“H.A.”, according to ABC, is Hank Asher, who did indeed own a data mining software company called Seisint at the time (more about that later). Asher himself is worth “north of $700 million,” based mostly on his success selling his data mining product, which is called Matrix (he’s since sold it to LexisNexis). And yes, he did smuggle cocaine from Colombia to Florida aboard his private jet for eight months in 1980 and 1981. But he says he paid his dues by cooperating with federal agents to stop other runners.

Asher appears in court in regards to an indictment  [link] against Orange County Sheriff Michael Carona on bribery charges.


Carona himself was once a rising star [link] in the GOP, often mentioned as a potential candidate for lieutenant governor of California. Dubbed “America’s Sheriff” by Larry King for how he handled the 2002 hunt for 5-year-old Samantha Runnion’s kidnapper, he naturally endorsed America’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani for president. According to news accounts, he’s met Giuliani at least twice. He’s also chums with Bernie Kerik.

The base of the indictment? Here:

"The indictment [link]  alleges that Carona and five associates, including his wife (Deborah) and mistress (named Debra), accepted bribes and generally did what they could to get rich off Carona’s position ($700,000 in bribes and kickbacks).

Ahhhhh… Of course. Why would I think there wasn’t a “wench hiding in the pantry” for a story like this one? They’re all Republicans, so I should have known. Carona also had his top-aide, George Jaramillo’s sister-in-law, Erica Lynne Hill as his “snack on the side“ [link].

“Mike [Carona] has betrayed George and me,” Hill said at the time. “He’s not a faithful person to any of his women, but I don’t want to publicly embarrass him now. He has a wife and a son. I just want everyone to get on with their lives.”

Jaramillo has been fired and indicted on the same line of charges, but Carona told a bunch of detectives in 2004 that he caught Erica Hill and Jaramillo having sex. Yeah, that’s Jaramillo riding the hobby-horse with his sister-in-law. Even though she denies the allegation, she did reveal to a grand jury that as a 15 year old, Jaramillo had molested her repeatedly who is 11 years older than she is.

"What bothers Hill most now is Carona’s campaign to paint her as a woman prone to hurl wild, unfounded accusations. She wants the public to know she wasn’t the person who used his power to win sexual favors and then lie about it; she didn’t twice leak sex stories that have tainted her own image as well as Carona’s reputation as a “conservative Christian.” She is, in fact, the person who told me everything and then asked me not to reveal it—for fear that it would destroy Carona.

HAHAHAHHAH!! He’s a “conservative Christian.” What does that mean anymore?

"According to grand jury records, Hill consented to Carona’s advances. The sex allegedly occurred in the sheriff’s truck, at his campaign offices, in his home and—as his unsuspecting son and wife stood nearby—in a hotel suite during his first inaugural party in 1999.

The Orange County Register [link] has more on this story. Carona filed his “Not Guilty” plea on Nov 5 and his court date is on 12/18/2007.

The story is filled with lots of bling too. For example, Hank Asher shows up at Carmine’s in NYC and throws $100 bills at restaurant carolers, gives away two $15,000 Cartier gold watches, and apologizes to all of the guests at the restaurant for his boisterous party by picking up all of their dinner tabs on his black Amex.

However, the best website on this story is from the Laguna Journal [link] . You’ll find tons of mugshot photos of the players, links connecting Hank Asher and Michael Carona to strip-club owners in Las Vegas who donated cash to Carona’s campaign.

According to Open Secrets, Sheriff Michael Carona gave $1,000 to Republican Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) in 2004 and $1,000 to George W Bush.

“Henry” (Hank) Asher gave $950 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 1993.

Congressman Rohrabacher is all tangled up in this case against Carona as well. Jeffery Ray Nielson [link], a conservative political activist and associate of Rohrabacher, pleaded guilty to multiple felony of lewd acts with a 14 -year old boy and a 15 year old [link], even though Rohrabacher was stricken with a sever case of amnesia. Steven Maglivio of the California Majority Report says:

"In 2006, Carona barely won the GOP endorsement for re-election as Sheriff. U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who praised Carona’s efforts to combat illegal immigration, helped put Carona over the top, and he won re-election.

You can watch a counter-campaign television ad by clicking here. [link] Ralph Martin ran against Carona last year. He lost because Carona’s face is still on OCSD’s main website. Pretty rediculus considering Carona’s been stripped of his (Law Enforcement)  [link] National Security Clearance.

[industria]

Defense: No Prison for S.C. Ex-Treasurer
By MEG KINNARD – Dec 11, 2007
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gvDmvlgcSU0iRDveyEsbeS4xeh7AD8TFFDRG1

Thomas Ravenel suffered from "cocaine's spell" 



COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Former state Treasurer Thomas Ravenel suffered from "cocaine's spell" but never sold the narcotic, his attorneys said in arguing against prison time for him on a drug count.

"Ravenel was not a drug profiteer," they said in court documents filed Monday. "By contrast he was, at his own expense, sharing with a limited number of friends in various social settings. ... He was a man suffering cocaine's spell."

Ravenel, 45, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine in September. He faces up to 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine, though his plea agreement calls for a reduced sentence because he is helping prosecutors with their investigation. No sentencing date has been scheduled yet.

Prosecutors don't dispute that Ravenel never sold cocaine, but are waiting for a presentencing report before formally requesting a reduced sentence.

Ravenel's attorneys also argue that federal sentencing guidelines that recommend about one year in prison are only advisory.

Ravenel, once seen as rising star in the Republican Party, resigned as treasurer in June. The multimillionaire developer is the son of former U.S. Rep. Arthur Ravenel. He has been to at least two treatment programs since he was indicted.

Ravenel's family has "imparted to him good core values and stands willing to assist his recovery," his attorneys said in the documents.

Friends, family and business associates also submitted 13 letters asking that Ravenel not be given prison time.

Rick Harmon, who served as assistant treasurer for debt management under Ravenel, said he was confident his former boss was never under the influence of drugs while acting as state treasurer.

Harmon said Ravenel's "legacy was too important to be overshadowed by a mistake in his personal life" and urged U.S. District Judge Joseph F. Anderson Jr. to use "discretion available within the guidelines to recognize his otherwise unblemished record of public service and the consequences he has already suffered."

[industria]

Sheriff Carona, wife, alleged mistress plead not guilty to corruption charges
[link]
Sheriff back in court today

SHERIFF MICHAEL CARONA & CO-CONSPIRATORS CHARGES AT A GLANCE


Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona's Troubled History
[link]

Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona has been indicted Oct 29, 2007
[link]

Carona allegedly steered deputy's widow to co-conspirator
Six years ago, Brad Warner slipped into a coma after routine knee surgery for an old injury that the twice-decorated Orange County sheriff's deputy suffered subduing a suspect. Sheriff Michael S. carona joined the family at the hospital in a vigil that ended with Warner's shocking death at age 46.
LA Times   Fri, 2 Nov 2007
[link]

Handcuffed OC sheriff goes to court
Five years ago, Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona became an overnight sensation when he looked into the cameras and told a 5-year- old's murderer, "Don't sleep. Don't eat. We're coming after you...
Los Angeles Herald   Thu, 1 Nov 2007
[link]

OC Sheriff appears in court on bribery charges
Orange County Sheriff Mike carona, his wife and alleged long-time mistress made their initial court appearances today on charges they accepted about $350,000 in cash and gifts from a wealthy businessm...
bignewsnetwork   Wed, 31 Oct 2007
[link]

Carona, in handcuffs, faces judge
Orange County sheriff, indicted on corruption charges, is ordered to surrender his passport. A federal magistrate sets bail at $20,000 each for the lawman and his wife, and $10,000 for his mistress. While wearing handcuffs in federal court this afternoon, indicted Orange County Sheriff Michael S. carona was ordered by Magistrate Robert Block to surrender his passport, to refrain from contacting witnesses in his corruption case, and to give the court 48 hours notice if he planned on leaving the state.
LA Times   Wed, 31 Oct 2007
[link]

O.C. sheriff and wife surrender
Orange County Sheriff Michael S. carona, his wife and his alleged former mistress surrendered today at the U.S. District Courthouse in Santa Ana, where they are facing federal corruption charges.
LA Times   Wed, 31 Oct 2007
[link]

O.C. sheriff charged with conspiracy
Not too long ago, Orange County Sheriff Michael S. carona was a media darling and a rising GOP star who hobnobbed with celebrities and politicians alike.Nowadays, the top cop in this county of 3 milli...
Los Angeles Herald   Wed, 31 Oct 2007
[link]

What hurts is an alleged betrayal right from the start
When Sheriff Michael S. carona came to office, he seemed trustworthy. If his indictment is accurate, he was bad from day one. What reverberates from the seven-count indictment against Orange County Sheriff Mike carona is that it depicts him as a fraud from the start. Gone is the notion that he was the family-values guy who came into office in 1999 as a wide-eyed innocent who looked you in the eye and told the truth -- only to be betrayed and corrupted by those who lurked in the dark forests of politics.
LA Times   Wed, 31 Oct 2007
[link]

Orange Co. Sheriff Indicted On Corruption Charges
(AP) SANTA ANA Orange County Sheriff Michael S. carona was charged with conspiracy, mail fraud and witness tampering in a wide-ranging indictment unsealed Tuesday that also implicates his wife, his ...
bignewsnetwork   Tue, 30 Oct 2007
[link]

California Sheriff Faces Federal Corruption Charges
Orange County Sheriff Mike carona has been indicted on federal corruption charges stemming from a lengthy investigation into allegations that he had misused his office for financial gain, law enforcem...
Los Angleles News   Tue, 30 Oct 2007
[link]

3/26/2006
LA Times: High Noon Is Near for Sheriff Candidates
[link]

3/26/2006
OCounty Register: Carona responds to his doubters
With scandals in the air, the man once dubbed `America`s sheriff` finds himself on the defense.
[link]

3/24/2006
OC Register: Jaramillo says he has evidence
Fired assistant sheriff holds up documents he says show sheriff misused helicopter. Jaramillo faces charge of misusing the copter. Assistant DA says she`ll look at evidence.
[link]

3/24/2006
OC Register: Complaint cites Carona donor
State commission accuses Gabbard of hiding source of $25,000 for sheriff`s campaign in 2000.
[link]

3/22/2006
LA Times: Carona Donor Broke the Law: Newport firm illegally sent $25,000 from its investors to the O.C. sheriff`s 2002 campaign, a state commission rules.
[link]

3/22/2006
LA Times: Carona Fails to Gain GOP Vote Support
Orange County party leaders decide not to endorse a third term for the sheriff. He faces multiple allegations of misconduct.
[link]

3/22/2006
OC Register: Carona denied nod from GOP
The Orange County sheriff falls one vote short of winning the official Republican Party endorsement for re-election to a third term.
[link]

3/21/2006
OC Register: No GOP endorsement for Sheriff Carona
31-17 vote falls just short of the required two-thirds majority.
[link]

3/21/2006
LA Times: State to Review Sheriff Badge Issue
The attorney general`s office will look at the practice of issuing IDs to campaign donors and others in several Southland counties.
[link]

3/17/2006
OC Register: Sheriff`s expenses are under review
Attorney general looks into claims that Carona violated campaign-finance law.
[link]

3/17/2006
OC Register: `Voter` to challenge Hunt`s campaign statement in court
Corona`s advisers enlist aid of political acquaintances.
[link]

3/17/2006
LA Times: Words Spark Suit in Sheriff Campaign
In O.C., a supporter of incumbent Carona calls harsh criticism of management in a rival`s ballot statement illegal.
[link]

Feb 18, 2006
OC Register: April 24 trial date set for O.C. sheriff`s captain
Carona campaign solicitations are crux of the case.
[link]

Feb 18, 2006
LA Times: Trial Ordered in O.C. Sheriff`s Captain`s Case
[link]

Jan 12, 2006[/b]
POTENTIAL CONFLICTS & SIGNED WAIVE
[link]

Jan 6, 2006[/b]
Carona Lawyer Fights Call to Testify
By Christine Hanley
State attorney general has subpoenaed the advisor in a case against a department captain.
[link]
 
Dec 9, 2005
O.C. Sheriff Lobbying for Volunteers' Badges
By Christine Hanley
Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona has been quietly championing an effort to change a state law to give sheriffs and police chiefs more leeway in giving badges to civilian volunteers who have no police powers.
[link]

Dec 7, 2005
Carona Ally Switches to Election Rival
By Christine Hanley
The O.C. sheriff, beset by controversies, seeks to keep his job. An influential business and political figure endorses candidate Bill Hunt.
[link]

Dec 7, 2005
O.C. Buys Sheriff's Dept. Legal Aid
Supervisors OK $100,000 for a law firm to assist the department on personnel matters, but Carona says not on matters involving him.
[link]

Dec 1, 2005
Sheriff seeks outside legal team
[link]

Dec 1, 2005
O.C. Sheriff Candidate Giving Special Favors?
[link]

Nov 29, 2005
Carona's colorful cast of campaign contributors
[link]

Nov 21, 2005
Few Want to Stay O.C. Reservists
By Christine Hanley
Sheriff fought to keep his deputy appointees as peace officers, but only 15 of the original 86 plan to meet a requirement to attend a police academy.
[link]

Nov 18, 2005
Rizzolo/Glusman try to buy a sheriff in Newport Beach
[link]

Nov 18, 2005
Shirley Grindle's crusade to get district attorney Tony Rackauckas to simply enforce the law.
[link]

Nov 17, 2005
news - Sheriff's captain says case against her is political
soliciting campaign contributions for Carona, seeks charges' dismissal. By PEGGY LOWE The Orange County Register
[link]

Nov 16, 2005
State Suspects Cover-Up in O.C. Donations Case
By Christine Hanley
[link]

Nov 15, 2005
Orange County D.A. Is Probing Donations to Sheriff's Rival
By Christine Hanley
The lieutenant, who is running against Carona, calls the investigation a 'misuse of authority.'
[link]

Nov 11,2005
The Orange County Register: Sheriff`s donor resigns from reserve
Ritz restaurateur accused of showing badge in Newport parking dispute.
[link]

Nov 4, 2005
Attorney pleads not guilty to bail-bond kickback charges
[link]

Nov 2, 2005
Rizzolo Contribution to Sheriff Carona under probe.
[link]

Oct 16, 2005
O.C. Reserves Hired Despite Red Flags
By Christine Hanley
Sheriff Carona made four appointments although background checks had turned up drug use, lack of training and more.
[link]

Oct 14, 2005
SEX BRIBES & SCAMS Go To: [link] 



Carona posing on four occasions with Erica Hill, who told the grand jury the sheriff sought and received sex after her husband applied for a deputy spot.

Oct 12, 2005
Sheriff's Captain Enters Plea in Solicitation Case
An Orange County sheriff's official pleaded not guilty Tuesday to illegally soliciting 16 colleagues for donations to the reelection campaign of Sheriff Michael S. Carona.
[link]

Oct 7, 2005
High-profile Defense lawyer Cavallo is indicted JUSTICE DEPT. FBI AND FEDERAL GRAND JURY MAY BE INVESTIGATING THE ORANGE COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPT AND OTHER COUNTY OFFICIALS

Oct. 6, 2005
Haidl attorney Cavallo indicted

Controversial attorney Joseph Cavallo, who defended Gregory Haidl against sexual-assault charges, has been indicted by the Orange County grand jury on conspiracy charges involving bail bondsmen.
[link]

Carona Makeover
[link]

Another day, another jail beating.
By R. Scott Moxley (Oct. 6, 2005)
O.C. Sheriff Is Accused a 2nd Time
[link]

Sept 29, 2005
A man alleges in a legal claim that Michael Carona sexually harassed his wife. The sheriff denies it, as he did an earlier accusation.
State to Probe Sex Assault Allegation Against Sheriff
[link]

Sept 21, 2005
O.C.'s Carona sought the move after a woman tied to an indicted ex-official said Carona made sex a condition of hiring her husband as a deputy
Lawyer Files Claim Against O.C. Sheriff
[link]

Sept 20, 2005
In a $5-million action, Cavallo accuses Carona of threatening him for representing ex-assistant sheriff Jaramillo in a bribery case.

Sex Bomb
[link]


Erica Hill says OC's "Christian conservative" Sheriff Mike Carona traded sex for favors. By R. Scott Moxley (Sept. 19, 2005)

[link]

Hill Case Demands Scrutiny, Answers

Sept 18, 2005
Dana Parsons
By the time Erica Hill's letter landed on the desks of political potentates, two disturbing possibilities existed.

Carona Names 2 New Assistants
[link]

Sept 17, 2005
O.C. sheriff picks department veterans after earlier hires raised controversy

9/7/2005
OC REGISTER: Campaign charges filed
Sheriff`s Capt. Christine Murray is accused of illegally asking colleagues for contributions to Sheriff Mike Carona`s re-election bid. She denies wrongdoing.
[link]

8/13/2005
LA TIMES: Another O.C. Assistant Sheriff to Step Down
[link]

8/13/2005
OC REGISTER: Carona to lose another aide
Assistant Doug Storm`s retirement leaves 3 top spots open in Sheriff`sDepartment.
[link]

July 23, 2005
Report faults Carona rival Candidate Hunt
[link] 

[industria]

How Giuliani made $30 million without even trying
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/13913.html
December 13th, 2007

Rudy Giuliani has quite a few questionable relationships [link] with a motley crew of dubious characters, but Hank Asher [link], a former drug-runner, business partner, and “close friend” [link] of Giuliani’s, bears special attention right now.

Giuliani and Asher met in 2002 when Asher demonstrated his Matrix database software for the former mayor, who was reportedly impressed enough to strike a business deal: Giuliani Partners would represent Asher’s company, Seisint, as part of a very lucrative arrangement [link]. GP got $2 million per year, a commission on Seisint’s government sales, plus stock options that were worth a bundle after LexisNexis bought Seisint in 2004.

Giuliani’s association with Asher became somewhat controversial lately, after Asher’s name popped up in a California public corruption indictment. But the business partnership looks even more interesting today, in light of this report in Time [link].

          GP pulled in more than $30 million for just one year’s work on Seisint’s behalf, company records show…. But the Seisint deal wasn’t as perfect as it seemed. One problem: the payment of percentages or commissions to “solicit or secure” government contracts is prohibited by federal law and laws of some states. Tom Susman, ethics chairman of the American League of Lobbyists, says the bar on commissions is intended to eliminate incentives for middlemen to bend the rules to land a contract. A GP official who refused to be named insists that the firm never received “commissions” from Seisint — despite what Brauser and Latham remember and despite the fact that payments to GP are labeled “commissions” in both the minutes of a Seisint board meeting and a key financial statement.

         Instead, says the official, GP earned “special bonuses” based on the achievement of corporate “milestones.”

Please. Giuliani’s firm lobbied to help Seisint secure lucrative government contracts. Seisint, in turn, paid the firm “commissions.” But now Giuliani’s team want to redefine the word, in order to make it legal — they weren’t “commissions,” they were “special bonuses.” Even by Giuliani standards, this kind of lying is just insulting.

Wait, it gets worse.

Seisint was using Giuliani’s name to open doors and secure contracts, but Giuliani insists he was never a lobbyist, and never registered as a lobbyist.

But this doesn’t add up [link]. Giuliani’s firm pulled in $30 million thanks to Seisint. How, exactly, does Giuliani justify all of this money? If it wasn’t money earned by commission, and it wasn’t generated by lobbyist fees, what was Seisint paying $30 million for?

         Rudy never registered as a lobbyist because even though he and his clients were using his name to advance their interests with the federal and state governments, he claimed he never actually lobbied. And now the commissions he got for securing government contracts through his savvy “not lobbying” aren’t really commissions but “special bonuses.”

        Nice work if you can get it. Unless it all turns out to be illegal.

Which, in this case, given all the lobbying Giuliani did [link], it might very well be.

This is exactly why Giuliani has tried to keep his business work secret and free of public scrutiny. His client list, that we know of, includes the makers of OxyContin (Giuliani personally met with the DEA chief when the agency launched a criminal investigation of the company), an official in Qatar with known ties to Osama bin Laden and other terrorists, and a cocaine smuggler with a database company that apparently paid Giuliani $30 million for work he claims not to have done.

How Giuliani even has the chutzpah to run for public office (worse yet, the presidency) with this record is amazing. And how any thinking person could even consider voting for him is a mystery.

[industria]

FDLE hires former drug smuggler
http://www.sptimes.com/Channel10/2003/08/02/State/FDLE_hires_former_dru.htm

The computer expert with strong ties to law enforcement will help the state track terrorists.

By LUCY MORGAN
© St. Petersburg Times
published August 2, 2003

TALLAHASSEE - In an attempt to identify potential terrorists, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is using the services of a former drug smuggler turned millionaire.

Hank Asher, 48, a computer technology expert who lives in a $3-million Boca Raton house, has founded several companies that retrieve huge amounts of electronic information about individuals.


Note: London developers were treated to a cruise aboard Hank Asher's yacht, which reportedly costs $71 per minute to run. - S

He also has become a close friend to former FDLE director James T. "Tim" Moore.

"Hank Asher has done more to facilitate intelligence and information sharing for police in the country than anyone I've ever known. He's a patriot, a true friend," Moore told recently told the crowd at his FDLE retirement party.

Asher's initial company, DBT Online Inc., bought Asher out for $147-million in 1999 after the FBI and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration ended contracts with the company because of Asher's past drug smuggling ties.

Federal officials were concerned that any investigation could be compromised if Asher or others knew the target of the investigation.

While Asher never has been a witness in several drug cases after he was implicated in a Bahamas drug smuggling ring in the mid-1980s.

FDLE files say informants identified Asher as a person who provided police protection for smuggling operations in the Bahamas.

Asher was listed as a witness in drug trials from Gainesville to Chicago, and once was represented by famed attorney F. Lee Bailey.

Documents filed by prosecutors in Chicago said Asher was a pilot and former smuggler who lived on Great Harbour near Cistern Cay, a small island airport once used by smugglers.

After severing ties with DBT Online, Asher created other companies and grew even closer to law enforcement officials.

In 1999, he merged two companies into Seisint Inc. The new company supplies Accurint, a database that provides detailed information on individuals. Seisint also supplies specialized information to law enforcement agencies around the country.

FDLE began doing business with Asher's first company in 1993.

It is clear from 1993 records that FDLE officials knew they were dealing with a drug smuggler. Some officers questioned whether Asher's company could be trusted. No additional background check was conducted in 2001, when the relationship grew closer.

Seisint now has two contracts with the state government, both awarded without competitive bidding.

One of them, completed Friday by FDLE, will pay Seisint $1.6-million to help create an antiterrorism network. The other is with the state Department of Management Services, the agency that supplies administrative services for state government.

Asher also has made several significant contributions to political parties.

In the past five years he's donated more than $735,000 to Democratic and Republican parties and candidates. Most of his money has gone to Democrats: $505,000 in the past five years and $65,000 to U.S. Sen. Bob Graham's 2002 initiative campaign to re-establish the state Board of Regents.

"He's a good fella," said Moore, who retired Thursday from FDLE.

Asher was the only non-law enforcement official on the program at Moore's July 15 retirement ceremony in Tallahassee. That upset some law enforcement agents who are bombarding the governor and Cabinet with anonymous complaints.

But Moore and others have supported Asher.

Paul Cameron, president of Seisint, said he was impressed with Asher. Cameron, a former officer with Accenture, the accounting firm, joined Seisint three years ago and said he was unaware of Asher's past brush with the law.

"Hank is the founder of the company and has an impeccable reputation," Cameron said. "He's won awards for the things he does like help save lives and recover missing children. It's amazing how one individual has such a mind for using data."

Cameron said Asher was fishing this week and could not be reached for comment. Martha Barnett, a Tallahassee lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association, also is on Seisint's board. She praised Asher on Friday, calling him "a creative genius" in information technology.

Barnett said she had heard of allegations in the past but knows nothing about them.

"The truth is, it's not about Hank Asher any more," she said. "He's come up with a terribly important product."

Asher is wealthy, in part because of the forced sale of his 4.7-million shares in DBT in 1999.

He doesn't have to work, Cameron noted, but he remains on Seisint's board of directors and works with law enforcement agencies and the National Society for Exploited and Missing Children.

He has received awards for his efforts from the missing children's group and the Florida Police Chief's Association.

Moore dismissed questions about Asher's past. Moore once introduced Asher to Gov. Jeb Bush for a demonstration of his information services. A spokesman for the governor said Moore vouched for Asher's background.

Questions about Asher and his relationship to Moore and others at FDLE are being raised as Bush and members of the Cabinet interview applicants to replace Moore, who has had the job since 1987.

Daryl McLaughlin, interim director at FDLE and a finalist to succeed Moore, said Asher has not charged FDLE for many of his services and has allowed them to demonstrate it to other states and even Vice President Dick Cheney.

Late Friday, McLaughlin said he now believes FDLE's background on Asher and his company was not sufficient. He has asked FDLE officials in Miami to conduct a complete background.

"I have reviewed the review and you have told me stuff we didn't know," McLaughlin told the Times. "We should know more about a company we are doing business with."

Seisint, the company Asher founded, is now participating in an operation called Matrix, a multistate antiterrorism task force. The system will link about a dozen states so they can exchange information on terrorism suspects.

Officials at FDLE said Asher came to them after terrorists with Florida connections crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They said Asher demonstrated how much information he could make available through his data company.

- Times researchers Caryn Baird and Kitty Bennett contributed to this report which included information from the files of the Chicago Tribune and Miami Herald.

[industria]

Giuliani's Client List
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/12/28/politics/animal/main3653103.shtml
By Steve Benen
Dec 28, 2007

(Political Animal) GIULIANI'S CLIENT LIST....A year ago, the senior managing director for Rudy Giuliani's consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, said, "We bend over backwards and are very careful about who we do business with, for the most obvious reasons -- from the beginning, Rudy's brand of integrity and ethics always had to be preserved."

In retrospect, the comment seems almost comical. The latest dubious client to draw scrutiny is Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of OxyContin. The NYT's report details the extent to which the former mayor went to bat for the OxyContin makers, in exchange for a small fortune, lobbying prosecutors, meeting with DEA officials, persuading lawmakers, and winning public-relations battles, all for a company led by executives who later pleaded guilty to criminal charges.

For those keeping score at home, the list of controversial clients, none of which Giuliani is willing to acknowledge publicly, is getting pretty long. There's the Hank Asher controversy, the business relationship with a Qataran emir accused of sheltering dangerous terrorists (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), and the Hong Kong organized crime figure with reported ties to North Korea, among others.

Of course, these are just the ones we already know about. Why, pray tell, won't Giuliani come clean about the others? Jonathan Chait takes a look today at the former mayor's list of excuses.

    Giuliani's first defense is that he cannot divulge his clients because they asked to sign confidentiality agreements. In fact, Giuliani Partners, not its clients, is the party that requests confidentiality.Giuliani also says we shouldn't worry, because most of his clients have been revealed in the press, anyway. "Just about every single client of Giuliani Partners, which is my security company, has been discussed, has been examined, certainly every significant one," he told Russert. Just about every client? This is approximately as reassuring as a murder suspect who tells the police they can search just about every room in his house.

    Giuliani has further insisted that every one of his clients is upstanding. "None of them," he told Russert, "amount to anything other than ethical, lawful, decent work done by both companies, sometimes of the highest standards, always ethical and decent." Not only is this obviously false, if you think about it, it has to be false. Giuliani is in the business of selling his reputation. What sort of firms need to buy that product? Not the Boy Scouts of America. It's drug smugglers, scandal-plagued firms, and others who need the imprimatur of Giuliani's 9/11 halo.

But that's fine, of course, because "Rudy's brand of integrity and ethics always had to be preserved." Please.

[stymo1]

New Docs: Exec at NH's Diebold Vote Counting Firm Convicted of Narcotics Trafficking

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5537

Ken Hajjar, Director of Diebold's Exclusive Sales & Service Provider in New England Pled Guilty to Criminal Charges in 90's

Does the Sec. of State of NH --- or CT or MA or VT or ME --- Even Know About It?...
Does the Secretary of State of New Hampshire have any idea that a key executive in the private firm that programs and "counts" 80% of the state's ballots on hackable, error-prone Diebold voting machines is a convicted narcotics trafficker?

In 1990, Ken Hajjar, the Director of Sales and Marketing for LHS Associates, and childhood friend of company owner John Silvestro, was arrested and pled guilty to charges which earned him a 12 month sentence, according to documents received via a public records request and posted this evening at BlackBoxVoting.org.

LHS Associates, as BBV's Bev Harris points out, programs "every single voting machine in New Hampshire, Connecticut, almost all of Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine."

Hajjar himself is also the the guy who showed up in BRAD BLOG comments, at one point last summer, to let us know we are "totally full of shit" and "deluded...paranoid...looney idealogues" to boot. Well, maybe. But at least we don't have a secret felony conviction, even while owning almost complete control over every vote cast and "counted" in New England.

The newly-revealed felon's impolitic rant here earned him the boot from the Secretary of State of Connecticut, where he is now barred from working, as guest blogger Dori Smith pointed out in another BRAD BLOG story last November, detailing the horrors that are LHS Associates, Silvestro and Hajjar.

When Smith asked Hajjar about his admission that he and his company regularly replace voting machine memory cards (the keys to the kingdom!) at will, in the middle of elections, he told her, "I mean, I don't pay attention to every little law."

We'll say!

Go check out Harris' new article tonight, which includes more details and the arrest record --- along with the note that "until recently, LHS employees were listed on the company Web site. Now the pages identifying who programs New England voting machines have been taken down."

Now ya know why.

Even if you still don't know who actually won the New Hampshire Primary.

(What say we actually count the ballots and put the questions to rest? Just sayin'...)

[industria]

The Establishment's Voting Machines
http://www.rense.com/general79/vmm.htm
By Ted Lang  1-4-8
 
While researching my last effort, and knowing that The Establishment now intends to pull out all stops in its final efforts to disenfranchise the American people from its government as well as to nullify our nation's sovereignty, I came upon Dan Rather's efforts exposing the fiasco of America's electronic voting machines.  The Establishment is making itself known and is following the pattern described by Adolf Hitler in Germany back in 1926.  The enemy is finally boldly stepping from the shadows and identifying itself, just as Hitler predicted would be the case.  New World Order communism is now upon US!
 
All across the nation today, police departments at all levels are digging in with an "us versus them" bunker mentality, killing innocent Americans, threatening families that are merely traveling through their jurisdictions while either visiting family or friends or while on vacation.  Police are tasering, torturing, manhandling law-abiding innocent Americans, and in some cases killing citizens for the mere crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And our national criminal government, comprised of the organized gangsters of our political class, is the instigator and provocateur of this police paranoia.  Paraphrasing Hitler, terrorism must be fought with terrorism.  Cheney and Bush are forcibly ushering in NWO communism via domestic police state fascism.
 
America and its citizens are on notice by machine-gun-toting and razor wire-deploying cops that they are not to demonstrate, not to gather near political convention centers, not to protest, and not to challenge or shout at presidential candidates during the latter's speeches and "public meetings."  The Establishment cannot tolerate any such unpatriotic behavior. Violators now know they will be shot, beaten or tasered.  Never during my younger years could anyone ever have convinced me of this scenario now in place in America today and occurring in my lifetime.
 
As offered in my previous report, Dan Rather, in a video produced by HDTV/HDNet entitled, "The Trouble With Touch Screens," and produced in August 2007, reveals a shabby, incompetent, amateur, international "manufacturing" operation in which electronic voting machines are produced in a sweatshop in Manila, Philippines, for use by American voters.  It shows the reverence the United States Congress has for the American voter and taxpayer.  And considering the growing popularity of grassroots anti-Establishment candidate Ron Paul, there is no doubt in this writer's mind that absolutely nothing will be done about this on the federal level.
 
The unified connected effort by the federal government to negate the collective will of the American people will have to translate to controllable and tamper-prone electronic voting machines to ensure the success of the power elite's picks; and as Internet-informed news readers know, "differences" between Democrats and Republicans are only for purposes of distracting a dumbed-down American voter.
 
Rather's exposé was launched by the Florida campaign of one Christine Jennings, a Democrat running for the House of Representatives in the District 13 election of November, 2006. Jennings was frustrated in her bid running for Congress, and she and her campaign staff pointed out a vote count anomaly: approximately 13 percent of the registered voters weren't represented, or roughly 18,000 votes were unaccounted for.  There could be many explanations for this unusually poor voter turnout, nonetheless of which could be attributable to either bad weather or even the reality of voter apathy or outright rejection of Jennings' candidacy.  But neither possible cause is of any relevance.
 
What is relevant is that whether or not an inquiry was actually justified, one did result.  Jennings lost by only a few hundred votes, and this while missing votes of approximately 18,000.  Jennings sued the state of Florida, the manufacturer of the electronic voting machines, and filed an election challenge with the House of Representatives.  The matter came up in Congress in the Senate, and California Senator Dianne Feinstein conducted a hearing and charged the Government Accountability Office [GAO] and the National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST] to look into the matter.   
 
The GAO, in earlier investigations in response to electoral curiosities involving those related to the "hanging chad" fiasco in Florida during the 2000 presidential elections, as well as the Ohio curiosity relative to the 2004 along with the publicized guarantee offered by a Diebold voting machine manufacturing executive to incumbent George Bush that Ohio will wind up in his column, produced a short laundry list of actual electronic voting machine vulnerabilities.  Additionally, the GAO confirmed, relative to the Ohio anomaly in 2004, that a small group of individuals could indeed tamper with the electronic balloting results to manipulate the outcome of an election.  Democratic Congressman John Conyers, Jr. of Michigan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, initiated hearings looking into Ohio electronic voting irregularities in December 2004.   Checking Congressman Conyers" homepage, mention of both the inquiry and the results are strangely missing.
 
In spite of the findings of the GAO, the Conyers "investigation" launched by literally thousands of letters from concerned and outraged Democratic voters, the outcome and bottom line results are zip: nothing, nichts, nada!  In typical Establishment MSM propaganda-for-the-herd mentality, elapsed time and the out-of-sight-out-of mind big media approach has been brought into play once again.  Our "elected representatives" and the MSM, stooges for the shadow government's Establishment, drown out both representative responsibility and accountability to the American people and American voters.  We are now a disenfranchised citizenry, enslaved by a totally unrepresentative political class of paid-off stooges, and controlled by the big money of corporate conglomerate monopolies and their lobbies.
 
The Jennings inquiry brought Dan Rather into the picture.  His media vehicle, "Dan Rather Reports" produced by HDNet, uncovered the corporate arrangement that sends the clear and unmistakable message that our entire election system and its electronic and vote counting methods and systems are a total fraud.  The company Jennings sued was ES&S, Election Systems and Software, headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska.  The machines used to count the votes in the Florida elections during which Christine Jennings ran for Congress, are, once again, strongly suspect as triggered by the missing 18,000 votes.  The electronic voting machine used was a product of ES&S, identified as an "Votronic."  More information on this equipment can be found here.
 
The iVotronic has been used to count votes electronically in 22 states in the US, and ES&S, a privately held corporation, claims to be the largest manufacturer of voting machines inAmerica.  The company offers that it has delivered 97,000 machines across the country which were used to count 67 million votes in the November 2006 elections.
 
After the Jennings campaign and the ensuing election complaint and lawsuit, Rather's inquiry cited numerous complaints from voters using the iVotronic.  For example, several voters complained on the video that after having digitally marked their ballots on the electronic touch-screen, the vote summarization display, when brought up by the voter, showed no vote at all!  Other problems determined by the vote verification screen display showed that the opposing candidate or a third party was selected by the voter.  These problems, and many more, served as the material basis for Jennings' complaint and challenge.
 
Rather's investigation into the matter exposed the disjointed, discombobulated global corporate cluster that produces these inferior vote counting machines so vital to the MSM's contention of the importance of the participation by the American voter in this country's democratic processes.  Even Rather's introductory remarks to the report emphasized the importance of voting to ensure "democracy."  Yet, the big media has left the Conyers inquiry open-ended and has summarily ignored the iVotronic controversy completely.  This MSM collective spike of the serious anomaly in the American voting system has been totally ignored by the big media's gatekeeper, The New York Times, and therefore TV broadcast and cable [cabal?] "news" as well.  This includes NBC's White House Chief David Gregory and NBC anchor Brian Williams.
 
It may be recalled that "journalist" Brian Williams whined that he had "worked extremely hard" to achieve his senior exalted status as NBC's top "reporter."  He offered this complaint: "You're going to be up against people who have an opinion, a modem, and a bathrobe.  All of my life, developing credentials to cover my field of work, and now I'm up against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx who hasn't left the efficiency apartment in two years."
 
NBC "journalist" David Gregory, the so-called White Chief Correspondent, offered that news interviews at the White House, and in fact all politically-related interviews, are seen through a prism by the news consumer.  He offers that it is the public that is biased and polarized, and this has been caused by the evil Internet.  Yet Rush Limbaugh has always offered that the "liberal" media reports news through a politically biased "template."  And of course, they are both wrong.  The failure to report on this critical electronic voting issue proves the error in both views, and presents precisely how The Establishment uses MSM personalities to deliberately distract the public using the worse-than-usless fraud of two opposing political parties.
 
Returning to the issue of inferior electronic voting machines forced upon the American voter by The Establishment, Election Systems and Software Corporation, the primary manufacturer and supplier of these poorly working and extremely inaccurate voting machines, contracted for the manufacture of these base electronic recording units, which I will refer to henceforth as the BRU, with a company called Pivot International, headquartered in Alexa, Kansas.  Pivot, headed by Edwin Ching, owns the majority interest in a Manila, Philippines factory, TeleTech, a high pressure sweat shop that was contracted by ES&S to produce the BRUs.
 
The Ching family, noted for questionable business ethics relating to business practices, tax evasion, real estate manipulations, and other shady deals, has consistently been investigated by the government of the Philippines.  No convictions against their operations resultant from criminal prosecutions has thus far been recorded.  But as Rather offered, the Ching family, bolstered by political connections, has prospered enormously while their workers at the Manila factory suffered under sweatshop conditions and were paid coolie wages.
 
In spite of the reliance upon seemingly disinterested foreign factory workers, Filipinos bucked their own culture and reported and complained of the inferior components of mylar plastic touch-screens produced in the USA by The Bergquist Company.  Bergquist produced the plastic screens to be used by the Pivot-produced BRUs which they sent to the ManilaPivot corporation for the manufacture and incorporation into the final BRU product.  Manila factory workers complained of quality control failures involving the touch-screens.  The problem was that the plastic touch-screens "floated;" that is, they were visibly disconnected from the glass containing the electronic sensors such that "bubbles" and air-filled rolls and waves seperated the screen from the sensors by a margin causing a quarter inch calibration distortion that could actually translate to the success of a candidate with lesser votes.
 
This was the assessment of Gene Hinspeter, an Elections Operations Specialist employed by Lee County, Florida.  Hinspeter stated that 1,800 of the iVotronic units were returned to ES&S due to confirmed inaccuracies in the BRU tabulations.  Hinspeter stated in the Dan Rather interview that the iVotronic machines were totally unreliable.
 
Additionally, a lawsuit initiated by Hartford Insurance Co. against Bergquist, contesting the indemnified revenue loss claims by Bergquist due to the lost revenue from the inferior quality of the touch-screens they supplied to Pivot, would have created devastatingly bad press for the company.  And since America has a very bad press to begin with, this vital information needed by the American voting public, was once again spiked and suppressed by the MSM and its gatekeeper, The New York Times.
 
The irony in all this is that these electronic touch-screen voting machines were to replace the inaccurate and "obsolete" paper ballot machines made famous during the vote counts in Florida in the 2000 presidential election.  But Rather's investigation exposed the fact that exceedingly poor quality paper ballot card stock was used by Sequoia Voting Systems of Exeter, California.  In order to reduce costs, or so it would seem, the management of Sequoia ignored warnings and official chain-of-command quality control safeguards that were attempted by employees and used inferior paper in spite of vehement employee objections.  Sequoia management knowingly used inferior paper that quality control at their factory proved well before the fact would not punch cleanly thereby creating major problems.  And these revelations were made to Sequoia management in the late 1990s and long before the 2000 election.
 
The paper ballot system was exrtremely accurate ­ it failed because inferior quality tab card paper was substituted.  And to remedy the problem, the paper ballot machines were replaced by the electronic BRUs and their touch-screen systems manufactured by ES&S.  And now that the ES&S electronic voting systems have been proven to be unbelievably unreliable, these too are being replaced by yet better machines.  The better machines?  Optical electronic scanners will now replace the touch-screen technology.  The manufacturer? You guessed it: Election Systems & Software Corporation!
 
In an article by the Associated Press published Monday, December 31st, and entitled "Vote machine flaws force scramble," the report opens: "With the presidential race in full swing, some U.S. states have found critical flaws in the accuracy and security of their electronic voting machines, forcing officials to scramble to return to the paper ballots they abandoned after the 2000 Florida debacle."  But the AP totally ignores the fact that "officials" have had more than seven years to both look into the problem and to determine its root cause: the use of inferior tab paper.
 
The article goes on: "In December alone, top election officials in Ohio and Colorado declared that widely used voting equipment is unfit for elections.  'Every system that is out there, one state or another has found that they are no good,' said John Gideon of the advocacy group Voters Unite.  'Everybody is starting to look at this now and starting to realize that there is something wrong.'"
 
I had warned readers of this coming "surprise" as far back as August 2007, at about the time Dan Rather broadcast his exposé.  Isn't it amazing that "everybody is starting to look at this now?"  And just look at what the AP offers at this time: "Florida's unclearly marked ballots in the disputed 2000 race between Al Gore and George W. Bush exposed the imperfection of paper ballot counting and helped lead to a $3 billion government initiative to bring voting to the digital age.  The Help America Vote Act of 2002 required that states have electronic equipment in place by 2008."  But the real problem was only in the inferior paper used, not the machine or the system.
 
This is what happens when a cause and effect analysis is not undertaken to get to the real root cause of a problem; not only does it not get solved, but government mandates by bubbleheaded government buffoons makes the problem worse while needlessly squandering our tax dollars to boot!  Yet further, "researchers in Ohio and Colorado found that electronic voting systems could be corrupted with magnets or with Treos and other similar handheld devices.  In Colorado, two kinds of Sequoia Voting Systems electronic voting machines used in Denver and three other counties were decertified because of security weaknesses, including lack of password protection.  Equipment made by Election Systems and Software had programming errors.  And optical scanning machines, made by Hart InterCivic, had an error rate of one out of every 100 votes during tests by the state."  But the error factor due to Bergquist-manufactured screens was at 50 percent or more!
 
It is clear that no one and no agency in American government gives a damn about the accuracy of voting in America.  The Establishment's propaganda arm, the MSM, gives only lip service to the importance of voting.  It is only important to them in terms of the huge revenues and advertising profits they accumulate from the American election farce and vote fraud. These problems have existed for more than seven years, yet only now the MSM and The Establishment shills in government are looking into the matter.  These revelations are not news; they are the MSM's prepatory conditioning for the American voter to get ready for yet another round of shaky voting results.  So don't be too surprised if Ron Paul only gets three votes in the upcoming GOP primaries!

[industria]

Action Alert: Protect the South Carolina Primary
http://www.bleedingheartland.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=D324E00F927867F89DEE0CE0F98A4D89?diaryId=802
by: Sean Flaherty
Thu Dec 20, 2007 at 09:16:46 AM CST

Iowans have to step up to protect the South Carolina primary. Most do not know it, but the primary will be conducted on a statewide touch screen system without a paper trail. And not just any touch screen: South Carolina uses an extremely insecure system that Ohio's Secretary of State recommended scrapping just last week, and which Colorado's Secretary of State decertified on Monday. Iowans should educate the Presidential candidates, and call on them to act.

"It's worse than I anticipated." Those are the words of Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner used to describe the security of voting systems in her state, following a top-to-bottom review by a corporate-academic team. Brunner has recommended that Ohio scrap all direct-recording electronic touch screen systems. 

Sean Flaherty :: Action Alert: Protect the South Carolina Primary
Brunner's review included the iVotronic, the statewide system to be used in the South Carolina primaries on January 19 and January 26.

In a recent article, I wrote that South Carolina's primary will depend on the reliability of the less than reliable iVotronic. Ohio's review team confirms Brunner's statement: the system is worse than we thought. In the wake of the Ohio findings, Ed Felten, who is head of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton wrote of the iVotronic:

    Even if you don't think anyone would try to steal an election, this should still scare you. A machine with so many design errors must also be susceptible to misrecording or miscounting votes due to the ordinary glitches and errors that always plague computer systems. Even if all poll workers and voters were angels, this machine would be too risky to use.

What did the Ohio reviewers find? The Ohio academic team found that the iVotronic's internal memory can be accessed, and its firmware compromised, by a person using magnet and personal digital assistant - see page 69 of the pdf (page 51 of the physical document):

    Anyone with physical access to polling station PEBs can easily extract or alter their memory. This requires only a small magnet and a conventional IrDA-based palmtop computer (exactly the same kind of readilyavailable hardware that can be used to emulate a PEB to an iVotronic terminal). Because PEBs themselves enforce no passwords or access control features, physical contact with a PEB (or sufficient proximity to activate its magnetic switch and IR window) is sufficient to allow reading or writing of its memory. The ease of reading and altering PEB memory facilitates a number of powerful attacks against a precinct's results and even against county-wide results. An attacker who extracts the correct EQC, cryptographic key, and ballot definition can perform any election function on a corresponding iVotronic terminal, including enabling voting, closing the terminal, loading firmware, and so on.

How difficult would potential attackers find it to actually do this?

Page 22 of the academic report pdf (document page 4):

    "The review teams were able to subvert every voting system we were provided in ways that would often lead to undetectable manipulation of election results. We were able to develop this knowledge within a few weeks. However, most of the problems that we found could have been identified with only limited access to voting equipment. Thus, it is safe to assume that motivated attackers will quickly identify - or already have- these and many other issues in these systems. Any argument that suggests that the attacker will somehow be less capable or knowledgeable than the reviewer teams, or that they will not be able to reverse engineer the systems to expose security flaws is not grounded in fact."

This is the machine that will count the votes in primary that will be make or break for as much as a majority of the candidates in both parties.

The South Carolina situation cannot go unchallenged.  It is almost certainly too late for South Carolina to purchase new voting equipment. But the state does require emergency paper ballots in case of equipment failure.  The state can simply decide that in light of new evidence, the iVotronic is not appropriate for use in a Presidential primary. Many counties have central-count scanners for absentee ballots, so there would be options short of a hand count. Update: If paper ballots are counted with central-count scanners, there must also be a random hand audit to check the electronic tallies.

What can you do? Contact the Presidential candidates and educate them.The candidates may be the only people who can turn this situation around. If the South Carolina Electoral Commission feels pressure from them, they may do the responsible thing. So call on your candidate to ask South Carolina not to use the iVotronic in the primary, and if they use computer tabulation of paper ballots, to do a random, transparent hand audit of the ballots. Download a flyer on the iVotronic. Show them Professor Felten's blog post linked above. Show them the Ohio report.

Contact the Democratic and Republican candidates. Who wants to see any candidates find themselves unable to raise money, drop out, or emerge triumphant after the iVotronic primary?

[Dig]

wow, what a great system for democratically elected leaders to be decided.

[yuri22]

Find out who the arresting officer was and interview him.

[stymo1]

The fraud news is spreading:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/opedne_rob_kall_080110_do_new_hampshire_vot.htm

http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_pokey_an_080109_the_surprising_democ.htm

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_bob_koeh_080109_primary_concerns.htm

http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_amydemic_080110__22hey_ron_paul_2c_i_m_i.htm

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_andi_nov_080110_alarms_should_go_off.htm

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_rady_ana_080109_inherent_uncertainty.htm

http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_bev_harr_080109_criminal_record_of_k.htm

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_emily_le_080110_how_john_edwards_can.htm

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_mary_how_080109_getting_the_framing_.htm

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ron_corv_080109_new_hampshire_electi.htm

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_allen_l__080109_clinton_tainted_vict.htm