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dksuddeth · 03-21-2006, 07:15 AM

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles...04toystore.htm

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ST. HELENS, Ore. - So far as she knows, Pufferbelly Toys owner Stephanie Cox hasn't been passing any state secrets to sinister foreign governments, or violating obscure clauses in the Patriot Act.

So she was taken aback by a mysterious phone call from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to her small store in this quiet Columbia River town just north of Portland.

"I was shaking in my shoes," Cox said of the September phone call. "My first thought was the government can shut your business down on a whim, in my opinion. If I'm closed even for a day that would cause undue stress."

When the two agents arrived at the store, the lead agent asked Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube, which he said was an illegal copy of the Rubik's Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time.

He told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied.

After the agents left, Cox called the manufacturer of the Magic Cube, the Toysmith Group, which is based in Auburn, Wash. A representative told her that Rubik's Cube patent had expired, and the Magic Cube did not infringe on the rival toy's trademark.

Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said agents went to Pufferbelly based on a trademark infringement complaint filed in the agency's intellectual property rights center in Washington, D.C.

"One of the things that our agency's responsible for doing is protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation's financial systems and obviously trademark infringement does have significant economic implications," she said.
Six weeks after her brush with Homeland Security, Cox told The Oregonian she is still bewildered by the experience.

"Aren't there any terrorists out there?" she said.

A rubiks cube knockoff is going to destroy national security?
Anti-terror laws increasingly used against common criminals

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In the two years since law enforcement agencies gained fresh powers to help them track down and punish terrorists, police and prosecutors have increasingly turned the force of the new laws not on al-Qaida cells but on people charged with common crimes.

The Justice Department said it has used authority given to it by the USA Patriot Act to crack down on currency smugglers and seize money hidden overseas by alleged bookies, con artists and drug dealers.

Federal prosecutors used the act in June to file a charge of "terrorism using a weapon of mass destruction" against a California man after a pipe bomb exploded in his lap, wounding him as he sat in his car.

A North Carolina county prosecutor charged a man accused of running a methamphetamine lab with breaking a new state law barring the manufacture of chemical weapons. If convicted, Martin Dwayne Miller could get 12 years to life in prison for a crime that usually brings about six months.

Prosecutor Jerry Wilson says he isn't abusing the law, which defines chemical weapons of mass destruction as "any substance that is designed or has the capability to cause death or serious injury" and contains toxic chemicals.

Civil liberties and legal defense groups are bothered by the string of cases, and say the government soon will be routinely using harsh anti-terrorism laws against run-of-the-mill lawbreakers.

"Within six months of passing the Patriot Act, the Justice Department was conducting seminars on how to stretch the new wiretapping provisions to extend them beyond terror cases," said Dan Dodson, a spokesman for the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. "They say they want the Patriot Act to fight terrorism, then, within six months, they are teaching their people how to use it on ordinary citizens."

Prosecutors aren't apologizing.

Attorney General John Ashcroft completed a 16-city tour this week defending the Patriot Act as key to preventing a second catastrophic terrorist attack. Federal prosecutors have brought more than 250 criminal charges under the law, with more than 130 convictions or guilty pleas.

The law, passed two months after the Sept. 11 attacks, erased many restrictions that had barred the government from spying on its citizens, granting agents new powers to use wiretaps, conduct electronic and computer eavesdropping and access private financial data.

Stefan Cassella, deputy chief for legal policy for the Justice Department's asset forfeiture and money laundering section, said that while the Patriot Act's primary focus was on terrorism, lawmakers were aware it contained provisions that had been on prosecutors' wish lists for years and would be used in a wide variety of cases.

In one case prosecuted this year, investigators used a provision of the Patriot Act to recover $4.5 million from a group of telemarketers accused of tricking elderly U.S. citizens into thinking they had won the Canadian lottery. Prosecutors said the defendants told victims they would receive their prize as soon as they paid thousands of dollars in income tax on their winnings.

Before the anti-terrorism act, U.S. officials would have had to use international treaties and appeal for help from foreign governments to retrieve the cash, deposited in banks in Jordan and Israel. Now, they simply seized it from assets held by those banks in the United States.

"These are appropriate uses of the statute," Cassella said. "If we can use the statute to get money back for victims, we are going to do it."

The complaint that anti-terrorism legislation is being used to go after people who aren't terrorists is just the latest in a string of criticisms.

More than 150 local governments have passed resolutions opposing the law as an overly broad threat to constitutional rights.

Critics also say the government has gone too far in charging three U.S. citizens as enemy combatants, a power presidents wield during wartime that is not part of the Patriot Act. The government can detain such individuals indefinitely without allowing them access to a lawyer.

And Muslim and civil liberties groups have criticized the government's decision to force thousands of mostly Middle Eastern men to risk deportation by registering with immigration authorities.

"The record is clear," said Ralph Neas, president of the liberal People for the American Way Foundation. "Ashcroft and the Justice Department have gone too far."

Some of the restrictions on government surveillance that were erased by the Patriot Act had been enacted after past abuses -- including efforts by the FBI to spy on civil rights leaders and anti-war demonstrators during the Cold War. Tim Lynch, director of the Project on Criminal Justice at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said it isn't far fetched to believe that the government might overstep its bounds again.

"I don't think that those are frivolous fears," Lynch said. "We've already heard stories of local police chiefs creating files on people who have protested the (Iraq) war ... The government is constantly trying to expand its jurisdictions, and it needs to be watched very, very closely."

It seems to me that I remember a whole lot of 'government officials' saying that this was ONLY going to be used to combat terrorism.
Using the patriot act to target patriots

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John Kerry voted for the anti-terrorist law, the USA Patriot Act, but now wants to change it and replace Attorney General John Ashcroft with someone “who actually upholds the Constitution of the United States.” However, the liberal critics never cite alleged “abuses” under the law involving the anthrax investigation, which has been driven by Kerry's Democratic colleagues, Senators Patrick Leahy and Thomas Daschle.

The Patriot Act has been used to obtain search warrants against doctors and scientists who had been warning about the threat of bioterrorism in the U.S. The most prominent such cases are Dr. Steven Hatfill and now Dr. Kenneth Berry. No evidence has been produced against either man, but the highly publicized raids on their homes—and the media feeding frenzy—give the fleeting impression that the Bureau is making progress.

Yet it appears that Hatfill and Berry have become FBI targets primarily because they warned America about terrorism that the FBI and the CIA didn't prevent.

The same FBI that falsely implicated security guard Richard Jewell in the Olympic Park bombing has made several mistakes in the anthrax case. The first mistake was assuming that Leahy and Daschle received anthrax letters because they were liberals. Leahy's influential chief of staff, who pushed this theory, was quoted in Marilyn Thompson's book on the case as saying the anthrax killer was a “right-wing zealot.” Daschle offered his opinion that the perpetrator probably had a U.S. military background. This fit an FBI profile of the alleged perpetrator. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a leading advocate of this view, met with the FBI and Leahy's staff and pointed them toward Hatfill, a former U.S. government scientist. Her views were echoed by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and other media.

Under media assault, Hatfill was labeled a “person of interest” by Ashcroft. After losing several jobs because of government and media scrutiny, he has filed suit against the Justice Department and Kristof and the Times.

The second key FBI mistake was thinking that the Ames strain of anthrax, used in U.S. labs and found in the letters, was not available to foreign terrorists.

These mistakes explain why the Justice Department, in a 29-page report on the Patriot Act, cited dozens of cases in which the law has been beneficial but had only one anthrax-related “success” story. It said that investigators “saved valuable time” by using the Patriot Act to apply for a search warrant for American Media, Inc. in Boca Raton, Florida, the employer of the first anthrax victim.

The reference to “saving valuable time” ignores the fact that it took the FBI nearly a year after the attacks to start a crime-scene investigation of the American Media building. The decontamination of the building only started this July.

Former CIA Director James Woolsey says it is time to change the FBI assumption that the anthrax attacks were perpetrated by “a crazed solitary American microbiologist operating out of a cave” in the U.S.

Such a theory, he pointed out at a June symposium at the American Enterprise Institute, means that the perpetrator was either “a very quick crazed solitary microbiologist” or “a very lucky crazed solitary microbiologist,” because he was ready to mail his anthrax letters shortly after al Qaeda hit the U.S. on 9/11.

According to the FBI theory, this crazed scientist even wrote like an Islamic radical, putting references to “Death to Israel” and praise for Allah on the letters, only as a diversion.

Woolsey noted the evidence that in the summer before 9/11, hijacker Muhammad Atta took an associate, who turned out to be one of the other hijackers, in for medical treatment in Florida, near the first anthrax attacks and near where they lived. He had a black lesion on his leg that a doctor and experts say was anthrax-related. Woolsey said, “That raises some interesting questions which again I would suggest we should pursue rather than bury.”

Ignoring the al-Qaeda connection to the anthrax attacks, the FBI's targeting of Berry continues the questionable behavior evident in the Hatfill case. As some of their agents wore protective suits to dramatically enter one of Berry's homes, the FBI was telling local officials there was no danger to public health. It looked like another big show and photo opportunity, similar to what occurred when the FBI raided Hatfill's home.

Journalists should be investigating how the Bureau obtained search warrants in the Berry case and what, if any, “evidence” is contained in them. There may be a story here about real abuses of the USA Patriot Act and why the FBI has been unable to solve this nearly three-year-old case.

Eavesdrop without a warrant? what about physical searches?

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In the dark days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a small group of lawyers from the White House and the Justice Department began meeting to debate a number of novel legal strategies to help prevent another attack. Soon after, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to begin conducting electronic eavesdropping on terrorism suspects in the United States, including American citizens, without court approval. Meeting in the FBI's state-of-the-art command center in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the lawyers talked with senior FBI officials about using the same legal authority to conduct physical searches of homes and businesses of terrorism suspects--also without court approval, one current and one former government official tell U.S. News. "There was a fair amount of discussion at Justice on the warrantless physical search issue," says a former senior FBI official. "Discussions about--if [the searches] happened--where would the information go, and would it taint cases."

Who is the real enemy here? When did america dissolve in to tyranny? Guess who's fault it is? 90% of americans, thats who.

Remember all the 'nut case' 'conspiracy theorists' and 'alarmists' finger pointing towards some people who tried to tell you you've lost your freedoms?
There it is, staring you right in the face.