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On July 23, 2003, New York City Council candidate Othniel Boaz Askew was able to shoot and kill council member and rival James Davis with a gun in school headquarters at City Hall, even though entrance to the building required a trip through a magnetometer. How? Askew used his politicians’ privilege — a courtesy wave around from security guards at the magnetometer.

An isolated incident? Hardly. In 2002, undercover investigators from Congress’ auditing arm, the General Accounting Office, used fake law enforcement credentials to get the free pass around the magnetometers at various federal office buildings around the country.

What we see here is class warfare on the security battleground. The reaction to Sept. 11 has led to harassment, busywork, and inconvenience for us all – well, almost all. A select few who know the right people, hold the right office or own the right equipment don’t suffer the ordeals. They are waved around security checkpoints or given broad exceptions to security lockdowns.

If you want to know why America’s security is so heavy on busywork and inconvenience and light on practicality, consider this: The people who make the rules don’t have to live with them. Public officials, some law enforcement officers and those who can afford expensive hobbies are often able to pull rank.

Class warfare isn’t new. But in this form it is dangerous. By paying attention to the wrong things – grandma at the airport – we are ignoring the right things – identifying the most dangerous people. By training an army of low-paid workers to harass us all at airports by taking away our cologne, we aren’t doing the right things – hiring, training and rewarding an elite force of employees specially equipped to keep those who would hurt us off our airplanes and away from our bridges and tunnels.

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PRESS RELEASE TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS…

One popular definition of “terrorism” is the use of terror for political purposes. Does that make the GOP a terrorist organization?

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According to reports, a man was arrested when officers found 18 pounds of homegrown in his car, after he was pulled over for one of those “routine traffic stops”. The haul was worth between $63,000 and $140,000. Commentators suggest, however, that this estimate might be a little high for a couple of bags of buds.

Dean Brown, 37, of Racine, also had about his person a GPS navigation unit, in which he had cunningly stored the co-ordinates of various fields throughout the county.

You can guess what happened next.

Yes, the boys in blue (or possibly brown) went to investigate the fields, first checking the co-ordinates on Google Earth to work out the location. They found marijuana plants growing at four of the locations, and subsequently charged Brown with four counts of manufacturing marijuana, in addition to the charges of possession of marijuana with intent to deliver, and possession of drug paraphernalia.

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Hasan Elahi is a conceptual artist whose life is an ongoing work about surveillance. He starts by telling us a chilling story – his detention by the INS at Detroit Airport after returning from a trip from overseas. An immigration officer scanned his passport and blanched, then led Alahi through a maze under the airport to an INS detention facility. As a US citizen, this was pretty odd – he tried to talk with the guards to figure out what was going on. But it all became clearer when the man from the FBI in the dark suit came to talk with him.

The FBI asked him about his whereabouts on September 12, 2001 – he was able to answer the questions by taking out his Blackberry and showing off his meetings. Over the course of questioning, it became clear that the reason he was being questioned was that he had a storage locker in Tampa, where he’d been teaching. Scared by 9/11, the owners of the storage area reported that “an Arab man had fled on 9/12, leaving explosives in his locker.” There were, of course, no explosives, and he hadn’t fled – just the detritus of ordinary life.

Elahi’s life for the next few months involved dozens of interviews with the FBI, finally culminating in nine back to back polygraphs, which finally “cleared” him. He explains that the power dynamic of an FBI interview leads to a very human response – the desire for survival. Elahi says that he could have questioned the legality of the experience, hiring a lawyer… but he realized that there was the possibility that any act of resistance could have gotten him sent to Guantanamo.

For the next few months, every trip Elahi took, he’d call his FBI agent and give the routing, so he didn’t get detained along the way. He realized, after a point – why just tell the FBI – why not tell everyone?

So he hacked his cellphone into a tracking bracelet which he wears on his ankle, reporting his movements on a map – log onto his site and you can see that he’s in Camden. But he’s gone further, trying to document his life in a series of photos: the airports he passes through, the meals he eats, the bathrooms he uses. The result is a photographic record of his daily life which would be very hard to falsify. We all know photos can be digitally altered… but altering as many photos as Elahi puts online would require a whole team trying to build this alternative path through the world.

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Orange County Republican leaders on Thursday called for the withdrawal of a GOP congressional candidate they believe sent a letter threatening Hispanic immigrant voters with arrest.

Tan D. Nguyen denied knowing anything about the letter in an interview Thursday with The Associated Press but said he fired a campaign staffer who may have been responsible for it.

County Republican Chairman Scott Baugh, however, said that after speaking with state investigators and the company that distributed the mailer, he believes Nguyen had direct knowledge of the “obnoxious and reprehensible�? letter. He told the AP that the party’s executive committee voted unanimously to Nguyen to drop out of the race against Democratic U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez.

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I was on the bleeding edge of digital photography when I bought my one megapixel camera back in ’96. Now some physicists at Rice University in Houston have the nerve to build a ONE PIXEL camera. The camera produces images by recording thousands of single-pixel images one after the other, rather than simultaneously recording millions of pixels.

“The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don’t ask for their love; only for their fear.”
– Heinrich Himmler

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The Republican Party will begin airing a hard-hitting ad this weekend that warns of more cataclysmic terror attacks against the U.S. homeland.

The ad portrays Osama bin Laden and quotes his threats against America dating to February 1998. “These are the stakes,” the ad concludes. “Vote November 7.”

Brian Jones, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said the ad would run on national cable beginning Sunday, but he declined to discuss specifics of the buy.

The commercial tracks with Republican Party strategy to make the war on terrorism a central theme of this election. It will air as recent polls show Republicans losing ground as the party best able to combat terrorism.

“Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
– Hermann Goering

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As TPMm readers know well, House Appropriations chairman Jerry Lewis (R-CA) is under federal investigation for possible improprieties in how he oversaw Congress’ spending of $900 billion annually. Yesterday, we reported that Lewis had dropped nearly $800,000 in legal fees to defend himself against the probe.

This evening, Congressional Quarterly reports (sub. req.) that in a round of calls Monday evening, Lewis fired 60 investigators who had worked for his committee rooting out fraud, waste and abuse, effective immediately.

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Moving quickly to implement the bill signed by President Bush this week that authorizes military trials of enemy combatants, the administration has formally notified the U.S. District Court here that it no longer has jurisdiction to consider hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed by inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

In a notice dated Wednesday, the Justice Department listed 196 pending habeas cases, some of which cover groups of detainees. The new Military Commissions Act (MCA), it said, provides that “no court, justice, or judge” can consider those petitions or other actions related to treatment or imprisonment filed by anyone designated as an enemy combatant, now or in the future.

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Sure, Apple Computer (AAPL) sold a lot of iPods in the September quarter. But unlike in past periods, when surging sales of the iconic digital-music player grabbed headlines, this time around, the Mac was the belle of the earnings ball.

In fact, Apple sold more of its Macintosh computers—1.61 million—than in any other quarter. Mac sales were clearly the high point of the quarter and the year, accounting for $2.2 billion, or 45%, of revenue. Apple had made a point to emphasize the Mac following the transition to using chips from Intel (INTC) from using chips made by IBM (IBM) and Freescale Semiconductor (FSL). Apple completed the switch when it released the MacPro earlier this month.

“They delivered in spades,” Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster says of Apple’s Mac sales. “It’s a sign that Apple has turned the corner from being a niche player to being a player that is starting to make a run at bigger players.”

Meanwhile, as if you needed another reason to ignore Gartner:

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Increasing component costs and pressure to cut its prices mean Apple’s best bet for long-term success is to quit the hardware business and license the Mac to Dell, analyst firm Gartner claimed on Tuesday.

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Listen up, “Battlestar Galactica” fans. A war is brewing, fiercer than anything involving Cylon robots. The battlefield: the Internet, where fans can get their “Battlestar” fix with three-minute mini-episodes created especially for the Sci Fi Channel’s Web site, SciFi.com. NBC Universal, the studio behind “Battlestar,” refused to pay residuals or credit the writers of these “Webisodes,” claiming they’re promotional materials. So “Battlestar” executive producer Ron Moore said he wouldn’t deliver any more of them, including the 10 that were already in the can.

Now here’s an interesting experiment; let somebody put the webisodes on YouTube or some other download site. Anybody want to bet NBC will send take-down notices, claiming such piracy hurts the artists?