We have concentration camps right here in the USA

The Deportation System’s ‘Lock-up Quota’ Is Just As Bad as It Sounds

Lockup quotas are tearing apart immigrant communities and lining the pockets of private prison corporations.

The Era of Stupid

Reflected in this:

Republican Congressional Candidate Says 'Holocaust Never Happened 

Art Jones, who hopes to challenge Democrat Dan Lipinski in Illinois' 3rd Congressional District, neither denies nor repudiates his past affiliation with the neo-Nazi Party.

Do you think that maybe Art Jones actually passing his high school history class might have helped?

We could see it coming...

But nobody could be bothered to do anything about it. People are making money.

Private Prison Corporations Are Modern Day Slave Traders

Update 5/2:  Steve Bates in comments connects me to this horribly excellent article on the subject.

Life goes on...

Veterans Day.

Remnants of the Big Bang.

Under attack from Rove, Elizabeth Warren doubles down. More of her kind, please.

I hadn't thought of it, but the Personhood Amendment would have changed everybody's birthdays and horoscopes! This explains why they never get it right!

Nightsticks are useful when there are no cameras.

James Murdoch's serfs forgot to pretend to not inform the boss what they were doing that he told them to do... or something.

Pictures of the Great War, as the landscape is today.

A discovered Leonardo.

Tracking Japan's Fukishima radiation:

It's the story of how a group of hackers and internet folks are working with Japanese volunteers to harness DIY technology to record and share data about radiation hotspots.

Women come forward with their on the job sexual harassment stories.

Wells Fargo involved with our 'illegal immigration' concentration camps.

Landmines.

Man paraglides with his hawk: Edit: his YouTube has been removed. Anyway. Man paragliding around with treats in his gloved hand and hawk flies in and lands on his arm.

No better than Argentina

America's Disappeared. Our very own concentration camps. Right here in the US. Someone somewhere is making a lot of money.

May this strike fear into the Bush administration

War crimes are always prosecutable.

MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) – John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old former Nazi camp guard, is due to stand trial on Monday on charges of helping to force 27,900 Jews into gas chambers in 1943.

Who takes care of the jailed immigrants' children?

Born in America, they are Americans. They are often separated from nursing mothers, left wandering the streets, stuck at daycare, abandoned to strangers, lost in the Child Services system.

WATERLOO, Iowa — In temporary courtrooms at a fairgrounds here, 270 illegal immigrants were sentenced this week to five months in prison for working at a meatpacking plant with false documents.

The prosecutions, which ended Friday, signal a sharp escalation in the Bush administration’s crackdown on illegal workers, with prosecutors bringing tough federal criminal charges against most of the immigrants arrested in a May 12 raid. Until now, unauthorized workers have generally been detained by immigration officials for civil violations and rapidly deported.

The convicted immigrants were among 389 workers detained at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in nearby Postville in a raid that federal officials called the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.

Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for northern Iowa, who oversaw the prosecutions, called the operation an “astonishing success.”

Oh, good for you, Mr. Dummermuth. The article continues: (my bold)

The unusually swift proceedings, in which 297 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced in four days, were criticized by criminal defense lawyers, who warned of violations of due process. Twenty-seven immigrants received probation. The American Immigration Lawyers Association protested that the workers had been denied meetings with immigration lawyers and that their claims under immigration law had been swept aside in unusual and speedy plea agreements.

The illegal immigrants, most from Guatemala, filed into the courtrooms in groups of 10, their hands and feet shackled. One by one, they entered guilty pleas through a Spanish interpreter, admitting they had taken jobs using fraudulent Social Security cards or immigration documents. Moments later, they moved to another courtroom for sentencing.

The pleas were part of a deal worked out with prosecutors to avoid even more serious charges. Most immigrants agreed to immediate deportation after they serve five months in prison.

Why is there such frantic haste? Why are they pushing these raids just before a presidential election? ... oh.

Remember what has happened to other immigrants who were swept up into the private prison system



(which is doing a very nice business at the moment), do we know what is happening to them? Do they have access to their families?

The article points out the evilness of these aliens:

All but a handful of the workers here had no criminal record, court documents showed.

And clearly, the businesses who hired these evil illegal aliens have been jailed or at least fined, right? The article continues:

No charges have been brought against managers or owners at Agriprocessors, but there were indications that prosecutors were also preparing a case against the company. In pleading guilty, immigrants had to agree to cooperate with any investigation.

Chaim Abrahams, a representative of Agriprocessors, said in a statement that he could not comment about specific accusations but that the company was cooperating with the government.

Ah. The corporations actually are pissed because lack of exploitable workers raises prices. They've even tried treating workers from India as they do the Mexicans, but it didn't go very well.

Note this amazingly unacknowledged fact:

"In 2001, the Social Security Administration concluded that undocumented immigrants "account for a major portion of the billions of dollars paid into social security that don’t match SSA records," which payees, many of whom are undocumented immigrants, can never draw upon. As of July 2003, these payments totaled $421 billion."

How about we spend the money intended for the border wall to start businesses in Mexico and Guatemala so these desperate families stay home?



Making these undocumented workers the scapegoat for our economic ills has been a traditional ploy in our political theater. It also brings out the truly ugly part of our society.

Is this the America we want to be?

crossposted at SteveAudio

So when did the illegal alien influx slow down?

That we have workers from India treated like this?:

More than 100 Indians who moved to the US for jobs have marched hundreds of miles to Washington DC in protest at being forced to work "like slaves".

The men plan to take their protest to the Indian ambassador.

The men say recruiters tricked them into paying up to $20,000 each for a new life in the US, where they then had to work in exploitative conditions.

The Mississippi firm that employed them, Signal International, has denied they were mistreated.

It says the men were paid wages above the local average and given good accommodation.

It accuses the recruitment firm of deceiving the Indians and has now ended its contract.

It is also demanding the recruiters return the fees the men paid them.

Apparently businesses are missing their yearly dose of cheap exploitable labor...

We have undocumented workers, recent 'illegal aliens' and those who have lived in this country for decades in 'detention centers' being run by private companies where the people in these prisons have no legal recourse, no voice, no ability to see their American-born children. What is happening there?

Why am I getting continual hits on my 'Slavery is good' posts?

WTF?

So... what would you do if you were caught up in a sweep

By ICE and not allowed to provide proof you were an American citizen?

It's happening now. Here. In the United States.

Officials with ICE, the federal agency that oversees deportations, maintain that such cases are isolated because agents are required to obtain sufficient evidence that someone is an illegal immigrant before making an arrest. However, they don't track the number of U.S. citizens who are detained or deported.

"We don't want to detain or deport U.S. citizens," said Ernestine Fobbs, an ICE spokeswoman. "It's just not something we do."

While immigration advocates agree that the agents generally release detainees before deportation in clear-cut cases, they said that ICE sometimes ignores valid assertions of citizenship in the rush to ship out more illegal immigrants.

Proving citizenship is especially difficult for the poor, mentally ill, disabled or anyone who has trouble getting a copy of his or her birth certificate while behind bars.

[snip]

The number of U.S. citizens who are swept up in the immigration system is a small fraction of the number of illegal immigrants who are deported, but in the last several years immigration lawyers report seeing more detainees who turn out to be U.S. citizens.

The attorneys said the chances of mistakes are growing as immigration agents step up sweeps in the country and state and local prisons with less experience in immigration matters screen more criminals on behalf of ICE.

ICE's Fobbs said agents move as quickly as possible to check stories of people who claim they're American citizens. But she said that many of the cases involve complex legal arguments, such as whether U.S. citizenship is derived from parents, which an immigration judge has to sort out.

And just where are these people being held as the immigration agents slowly plod through the bureaucracy? Where are these people's small children when both parents are swept up? What are they doing to these people when there is no oversight and no legal remedy?



WTF.

Update 1/26: Distributorcap in comments noted this sounds like the Nuremberg 1935 law. Googling Wikipedia gave me this:

The Nuremberg Laws (German: Nürnberger Gesetze) of 1935 were denaturalization laws passed in Nazi Germany. They used a pseudoscientific basis for racial discrimination against Jews. People with 4 German grandparents (white circles on the chart) were of "German blood", while people were classified as Jews if they descended from three or four Jewish grandparents (black circles in top row right). A person with one or two Jewish grandparents was a Mischling, a crossbreed, of "mixed blood".

Exactly.

Six years of Gitmo

Hasn't made us safer. Hasn't made us stronger. Hasn't made us more respected. Hasn't made us more feared. More hated, yes. More alone, yes. More disgraced, yes.

Six years of a homegrown concentration camp. Six years:

Six long years ago today, “the first orange-clad, shackled and blindfolded prisoners arrived at Guantanamo’s Camp X-Ray.” Since that “dark day in recent American history, more than 700 people have been detained without due process and not a single trial has been completed,” notes the ACLU.

As the world-wide protests go on, here is what an US appeals court decided:

A U.S. appeals court ruled today that “four former Guantanamo prisoners, all British citizens, have no right to sue top Pentagon officials and military officers for torture, abuse and violations of their religious rights.” The judge ruled that the defendants — including Donald Rumsfeld — “enjoyed qualified immunity for acts taken within the scope of their government jobs.”

Excuse me, your honor, judge, sir. Torture is against the Geneva Conventions. This administration eagerly urged our soldiers and the CIA to torture prisoners. Actions which sent Japanese and Germans to prison after WWII. Torture is illegal. There should be no 'qualified immunity for acts' that were ILLEGAL and MORALLY WRONG.

A softer, gentler Blackwater

Still has San Diego county in the crosshairs:

So it has come to the border hamlet of Potrero, population 850. Eight miles from Mexico and 40 miles inland from San Diego, Potrero has found itself at the centre of a controversy.

But it is a dispute that goes beyond the rights and wrongs of a large company intent on developing farmland. Opponents fear that it will be the first step towards Blackwater moving in on the potentially lucrative and politically sensitive job of patrolling the US-Mexico border. While Congress has authorised increased recruitment for the Border Patrol, the federal agency that polices the border, many have asked how it is going to be paid for and who is going to do the training. Enter Blackwater West.

"We're here by happenstance," said Brian Bonfiglio, Blackwater West's vice-president. Bonfiglio, who was previously in charge of security for Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, was dispatched a year ago from the company's base in North Carolina to oversee the expansion west. "We're a training company. This site was not chosen because of its proximity to the border. The Border Patrol has not approached us and we're not chasing Border Patrol contracts. If the government said here's a contract we want you to bid on, I can't say what the company would do."

Bonfiglio may not be able to say, but the company's president did. In his book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, journalist Jeremy Scahill recounts company president Gary Jackson's May 2005 appearance before the House homeland security committee. "Just as the private sector has responded in moving mail and packages around the world more efficiently," Jackson told the committee, "so too can Blackwater respond to the customs' and Border Patrol's emerging and compelling training needs."

The first salvo against Blackwater's plans comes on December 11, when a recall election - called as a result of a petition by residents - will be held to replace the majority of the Potrero planning group. The group has been criticised for unanimously approving Blackwater's application to build a training facility on a dilapidated chicken farm. Set in 824 acres, the valley that would be Blackwater West is surrounded by low brush and hills. The land includes part of the Cleveland national forest, although Blackwater says it will not use any of the forest land on its property.

Approval was given last December before all but a handful of residents were aware of the plans. Once details emerged, some locals decided to act. "A lot of my neighbours were of the opinion that you couldn't do anything about it," said Parks. "But as time went by I found out that we had some supporters. Now there are more people who aren't afraid to come out and speak."

And has plans branching out into more areas:

Jeremy Scahill for The Nation:

Prince promises that Blackwater "is going to be more of a full spectrum" operation. Amid the cornucopia of scandals, Blackwater is bidding for a share of a five-year, $15 billion contract with the Pentagon to "fight terrorists with drug-trade ties." Perhaps the firm will join the mercenary giant DynCorp in Colombia or Bolivia or be sent into Mexico on a "training" mission. This "war on drugs" contract would put Blackwater in the arena with the godfathers of the war business, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon.

In addition to its robust business in law enforcement, military and homeland security training, Blackwater is branching out. Here are some of its current projects and initiatives:

§ Blackwater affiliate Greystone Ltd., registered offshore in Barbados, is an old-fashioned mercenary operation offering "personnel from the best militaries throughout the world" for hire by governments and private organizations. It also boasts of a "multi-national peacekeeping program," with forces "specializing in crowd control and less than lethal techniques and military personnel for the less stable areas of operation."

§ Prince's Total Intelligence Solutions, headed by three CIA veterans (among them Blackwater's number two, Cofer Black), puts CIA-type services on the open market for hire by corporations or governments.

§ Blackwater is launching an armored vehicle called the Grizzly, which the company characterizes as the most versatile in history. Blackwater intends to modify it to be legal for use on US highways.

§ Blackwater's aviation division has some forty aircraft, including turboprop planes that can be used for unorthodox landings. It has ordered a Super Tucano paramilitary plane from Brazil, which can be used in counterinsurgency operations. In August the aviation division won a $92 million contract with the Pentagon to operate flights in Central Asia.

§ It recently flight-tested the unmanned Polar 400 airship, which may be marketed to the Department of Homeland Security for use in monitoring the US-Mexico border and to "military, law enforcement, and non-government customers."

§ A fast-growing maritime division has a new, 184-foot vessel that has been fitted for potential paramilitary use.

Meanwhile, Blackwater is deep in the camp of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Cofer Black is Romney's senior adviser on counterterrorism. At the recent CNN/YouTube debate, when Romney refused to call waterboarding torture, he said, "I'm not going to specify the specific means of what is and what is not torture so that the people that we capture will know what things we're able to do and what things we're not able to do. And I get that advice from Cofer Black, who is a person who was responsible for counterterrorism in the CIA for some thirty-five years." That was an exaggeration of Black's career at the CIA (he was there twenty-eight years and head of counterterrorism for only three), but a Romney presidency could make Blackwater's business under Bush look like a church bake sale.

In short, Blackwater is moving ahead at full steam. Individual scandals clearly aren't enough to slow it down. The company's critics in the Democratic-controlled Congress must confront the root of the problem: the government is in the midst of its most radical privatization in history, and companies like Blackwater are becoming ever more deeply embedded in the war apparatus. Until this system is brought down, the world's the limit for Blackwater Worldwide--and as its rebranding campaign shows, Blackwater knows it.

Just what are the plans for Blackwater in the United States? Or, saying it another way, what plans does the Bush administration have for Blackwater? Containing war protesters? A holy crusade? Concentration camps? A coup? A fascist state?

Just exactly what is going on?

Will they have 'Arbeit macht frei' above the gates?

Bryan Finoki of Subtopia is keeping track of the huge complex being built in Guantanamo:

As it turns out the proposal to build warehousing structures for interdicted refugees in the event of a ‘hypothetical Caribbean boat crisis’ is already well under way. Even though Defense Secretary Robert Gates shot down a costly proposal for a $125m Military Commissions Courthouse earlier this year, the Miami Herald, who has been doing a good job of keeping watch on Guantanamo’s base development, says progress is being made on the migrant detention installation with some lucrative contracts in the works.
It appears the Bush administration has not only been preparing for what’s being referred to as a “theoretical humanitarian relief mission” by developing a sheltering scheme capable of accommodating 10,000 people – for those either “fleeing a political crisis” or “a natural disaster” – but there is another second wave proposal (no pun intended) that is looking to build out even larger facilities for an additional 35,000 potential migrants.

10,000 people? 35,000 people? Why are we building concentration camps in Cuba as well as 'detention centers' in the U.S.? What is our government getting ready to do?

Sorry about the food poisoning outbreak

But just what is this place? A privately run immigration detainee camp?:

TACOMA, Wash., Aug. 15 Public health officials in Tacoma, Wash., were investigating Wednesday to see if food poisoning caused 300 detainees in an immigration facility to become ill.

Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department officials were called Saturday night when about 180 detainees were treated for diarrhea, nausea and vomiting at the Northwest Detention Center's health clinic, The Seattle Times reported.

More cases followed, including several involving staff members who had also eaten at work that day, officials said.

Health department spokesman Joby Winans said officials were looking into how the food was prepared and surveying those who got sick about what they ate.

"The good news is that no one was seriously ill. They were uncomfortable, yes, but not seriously ill," Winans told the Times.

The privately contracted facility is run by The GEO Group, which serves three hot meals per day to about 1,000 people, the report said.

Northwest Detention Center? What does Google tell us....

Oh dear god:

On April 7, [2004] politicians and law enforcement officials gathered in Tacoma, Washington, to celebrate the opening of the Department of Homeland Security’s newest gem, a $115 million facility called the Northwest Detention Center.

The building, designed to hold up to 700 undocumented immigrants awaiting deportation, was nearly two years in the works, and supporters hoped it would provide a much-needed economic boon to the region.

Later that week, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division sent a report to Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich, documenting the results of an investigation into two of the state’s juvenile halls. In stomach-churning detail, investigators described how employees brutally beat youths at the facilities, and how basic living conditions didn’t meet even the lowest constitutional standards. In a subsequent statement, Assistant Attorney General R. Alexander Acosta said, “No juvenile should be exposed to such conditions.”

[snip]

Before the Department of Homeland Security was created in 2002, Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) handled detentions under the purview of the Justice Department. Dow’s book documents cases of abuse and unjust imprisonment in INS detention centers dating back to the ’80s and the influx of immigrants from countries like Haiti, Guatemala and El Salvador. Such an environment thrived, he says, because detainees were trapped in a legal netherworld and few outside the detention center walls noticed.

The potential for abuse worsened as the number of undocumented immigrant detainees exploded from 5,532 in 1994 to 20,000 in 2001. Faced with mounting costs, INS began contracting with private companies, states and counties. But the resulting patchwork of federal, private and local responsibility created even less accountability, says Dow, and in effect helped further shield INS from public scrutiny.

Following 9/11, the Justice Department added to the secrecy shrouding detainees by invoking a series of draconian measures designed to expand INS’s power. They include closing immigration hearings to the public and holding detainees without charge for 48 hours, or in emergency cases, indefinitely. INS officials denied mass roundups, but it was clear people were being detained with increased regularity. Although specifics are difficult to come by, Dow says between 1,200 and 5,000 people have been detained as a result of the Justice Department’s new policies.

And this: (my bold)

The Department of Homeland Security contracts with The GEO Group, a national detention-management company, to run the detention center.

The center opened in April 2004. It primarily houses immigrants from Washington, Oregon and Alaska facing deportation, although more recently it also has held people brought in from elsewhere.

And this, written in 2006

The end goal: to expel from the country every illegal immigrant without a legitimate claim to be here. Within a year, officials expect to have rattled many of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the country, creating a disincentive for others to attempt illegal crossings.

Homeland Security was on track to remove 180,000 people from the country during the fiscal year that ended Friday, up 7 percent from the previous year.

"We're detaining them with full expectation of removing them and, depending on where they came from, that process can be very quick," said Gary Mead, assistant director for detention and removal operations with the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C. Homeland Security wants to send a clear message, he said: "If you come to this country illegally, we'll apprehend you, detain you and remove you."

Under Operation Reservation Guaranteed, as it is being called, detainees are flown to wherever in the country a bed is available. As part of the operation, Homeland Security has relocated about 700 detainees a week across the country, Mead said.

What kind of oversight is going on in these places? What happens to the kids of these detainees, the ones who are born here and are Americans? What kind of fair process is guaranteed for these people? Who protects them from abuse?

It sounds like we have concentration camps in the United States and a ready supply of slave labor.

It reminds me of another era...

They didn't learn from the last few raids?

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. (AP) - Dozens of young children were stranded at schools and with baby sitters after their parents were rounded up by federal authorities who raided a leather goods maker suspected of hiring illegal immigrants, authorities said Wednesday.

Immigration officials said 327 of the 500 employees of Michael Bianco Inc., mostly women, were detained Tuesday by immigration officials for possible deportation as illegal aliens.

About 100 children were stuck with baby sitters, caretakers and others, said Corinn Williams, director of the Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern Massachusetts.

"We're continuing to get stories today about infants that were left behind," she said. "It's been a widespread humanitarian crisis here in New Bedford."

So... they'll all end up in our very own concentration camp?

OMG! I thought I was so far afield I was joking

When I asked what had happened to the illegals picked up in the DHS raids.

Lo and Behold! Talk Left blog:

What holds 400 illegal immigrants from 30 countries, 170 of them children? The T. Don Hutto Family Detention Center, for which the Corrections Corporation of America receives $2.8 million per month.

A jail by any other name is still a jail. A detention camp is still a detention camp. That the prisoners wear scrubs instead of orange jumpsuits or pink underwear doesn't change a thing.

The Government invited the media today. Surprise, for the first time there was pizza on the menu. How humane. They brought in plastic potted plants to warm up the place. The Government says its more like a community college than a jail.

What a farce. Can the "students" leave? Of course not. It's a jail.

More...

Outside the blocky buildings with thin slit windows, protesters from a local group called Texans United for Families held up signs saying, “Don’t Jail Children for Profit.”

“If they can put an ankle bracelet on Martha Stewart so she doesn’t run off to Jamaica,” said a protester, Jose Ortan, a computer technician, “they can find ways to do it for immigrant families.”

Devil's Tower at Daily Kos provides his thoughts and notes that the reporters weren't allowed to interview the detainees during the tour.

Update 2/26: Peterr at Firedoglake reports:

Last December, Pach highlighted the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on various Swift meat processing plants, sweeping up all manner of workers. Some were legal, others were not, but "working while brown" seemed to be the common denominator. One of the most problematic issues, to me, was the handling of children and families. Little thought seemed to have been given to how to deal with the children in school whose parents were swept up. Churches and other groups stepped up, but the lack of concern on the part of ICE for the children affected by this was appalling.

This past Thursday, the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) and the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children, two well-known and non-partisan NGOs, released a report entitled Locking Up Family Values (large pdf - 2 MB). It details the conditions at two model "family detention facilites" run by ICE, and the story is appalling.

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children felt it vital to examine the implications of this expanding penal approach to family detention in order to inform the development of policy and practice that serves the best interests of children and families. To that end we visited both the T. Don Hutto Residential Center and the Berks Family Shelter Care Facility and talked with detained families as well as former detainees. What we found was disturbing:

• Hutto is a former criminal facility that still looks and feels like a prison, complete with razor wire and prison cells.
• Some families with young children have been detained in these facilities for up to two years.
• The majority of children detained in these facilities appeared to be under the age of 12.
• At night, children as young as six were separated from their parents.
• Separation and threats of separation were used as disciplinary tools.
• People in detention displayed widespread and obvious psychological trauma. Every woman we spoke with in a private setting cried.
• At Hutto pregnant women received inadequate prenatal care.
• Children detained at Hutto received one hour of schooling per day.
• Families in Hutto received no more than twenty minutes to go through the cafeteria line and feed their children and themselves. Children were frequently sick from the food and losing weight.
• Families in Hutto received extremely limited indoor and outdoor recreation time and children did not have any soft toys.

And that's just from the summary.

But it made such a nice neat pile!

If we could call all crimes and stuff terrorism. Then send all the bad guys to the really cool camps Halliburton's Kellogg Brown and Root is building all over the US....

Sinfonian at Blast Off! explains:

Here's a shocker: the federal government has been identifying all manner of cases as terrorism-related since 2001, but many of those had nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.
[snip]
It's really quite consistent with this maladministration's totalitarian attitude, the old "my way or the highway" mentality. You get arrested on terror charges (trumped up though they may be) and you have no constitutional rights -- rot in Gitmo without counsel for all anyone cares. If martial law has to be declared, and the military has to take over civilian law enforcement, so be it. And if they can't scare you by throwing strawman terrorist arguments into every issue, well, they'll just make shit up. Oh, sorry, I mean "diminish or inflate" the statistics.

Just wondering.... You know those illegal alien sweeps that caused such a ruckus late last year?

Do we know where the illegal aliens have gone?

Update: Via C&L, Texas Kaos talks about the PBS report on the government spying on its own citizens:

The key findings in PBS's report:

- The government is intercepting most emails sent domestically.
- AT&T is collecting most emails and sharing them with the government, specifically the NSA (this is backed up by Klein's documents).
- The NSA spy room at AT&T's San Francisco facility is only accessible to the NSA and AT&T employees cleared by the NSA
- The NSA's interest seems to be in MAE WEST, *the* major hub of American and international internet traffic on the West Coast
- The device installed in San Francisco is capable of intercepting 10 GIGBYTES of data per second. In layman's terms, that means it could go through all the information in all the books in the Library of Congress in 15 minutes.

AT&T declined to be interviewed for this PBS report.

[snip]

Also included in the PBS report was the revelation (earlier reported in Salon) that more AT&T whistleblowers have come forward. They've provided evidence that AT&T's St. Louis facility also had a secret NSA room installed after 9-11. This room is only accessible to the NSA (or employees cleared by NSA, much like the SanFran room) and employs biometric security. Bottom line is that AT&T is looking more and more complicit in the degradation of our civil liberties post 9-11.

[snip]

You can watch the entire NOW program online - I'd strongly advise doing so. I'd embed it, but GooTube is going down the drain and I refuse to use their "service" anymore. So, click this link and go watch the program. You'll be glad you did.