FBI keeps tabs on OWS

It turns out that all you crazy, post-hippy Occupy Wall Streeters were right: the government does not have your best interest at hearts. In fact, the FBI just released a heavily redacted memo that details some of the ways that it used its anti-terrorism surveillance power to keep last year's OWS campaign heavily guarded.

Released by the Partnership for Civil Justice after it pursued the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, the items included will just serve to (depending on your worldview) reinforce your paranoia American security bureaus having the carte blanche to become Big Brother, or terrify you into validating the belief that those kids with the drums and the dreadlocks were planning another 9/11.

-As early as August 19, 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting with the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests that wouldn’t start for another month. By September, prior to the start of the OWS, the FBI was notifying businesses that they might be the focus of an OWS protest.

Translation: You guys never had a chance. The FBI knew about the plans to occupy Zuccotti Square before most of you did.

-Documents released show coordination between the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and corporate America. They include a report by the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), described by the federal government as “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector,” discussing the OWS protests at the West Coast ports to “raise awareness concerning this type of criminal activity.” The DSAC report shows the nature of secret collaboration between American intelligence agencies and their corporate clients - the document contains a “handling notice” that the information is “meant for use primarily within the corporate security community. Such messages shall not be released in either written or oral form to the media, the general public or other personnel…” (The DSAC document was also obtained by the Northern California ACLU which has sought local FBI surveillance files.)

Translation: You want to know how Citibank had the drop on protesters last October? They were tipped off by the FBI/Department of Homeland Security and/or the Domestic Security Alliance Council.

-The Memphis FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force met to discuss “domestic terrorism” threats, including, “Aryan Nations, Occupy Wall Street, and Anonymous.”

Translation: One of these things is not like the other...

To read the entirety of the document, click here. But don't even bother clearing your browser history: the FBI already knows you're reading this article.

One of Dorff's more provocative close-ups.

Brake is both the title of a new thriller that will leave you breathless, and the one thing you’ll be yelling for to survive it. Directed at break-neck speed by Gabe Torres, it’s a movie so original and terrifying that to even attempt to tell you what it’s about would ruin the fun of discovering it for yourself. Suffice it to say, you will not be bored.

The star is Stephen Dorff, an unpredictable and always interesting actor who eschews the big bucks and easy fame of mainstream movies to devote his career to more challenging and transformative roles in quirky, low-budget independents—68 of them so far—ranging from good (Public Enemies) to bad (Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere) to downright unspeakable (Cecil B. Demented). He prefers risks to even bets, and he has proved himself fearless. (Don’t forget, he once played drag queen Candy Darling in I Shot Andy Warhol.) In Brake, he comes closest to leading-man status as he is likely to get, and the crackerjack results are well worth the 90-minute investment.

Waking in the darkness of a claustrophobic box, he seems to have been buried alive. His name is Jeremy, but he doesn’t know where he is or how he got there. You automatically think Ryan Reynolds in Buried, but this movie has a long way to go and the goose bumps are just beginning. Suddenly, from a walkie-talkie in the pitch blackness, he hears the voice of another man pleading, “Get me outta here,” trapped in the same situation, fearing for the safety of his wife and children, who are apparently being held hostage by a gang of terrorists. Then the sound of an engine starting, and his body starts knocking from side to side. Yes, of course. He’s locked in the trunk of a moving car! The other voice that becomes his only companion belongs to a member of the State Department, and apparently the driver of the car thinks Mr. Dorff is a secret agent too. “We know who you are, Agent Reins. Tell us what we want to know.  Where is the location of Roulette?” When his mood switches from bewilderment to rage, the driver releases into the darkness a hive of bees, knowing he’s allergic to the stings! The psychological and physical torture is just beginning.

In the course of 90 minutes, with the help of the voice on the other phone line, the pieces of the mystery are gradually revealed. Roulette is the name of a secret underground bunker built to house the president, vice president and national security advisers in the event of a national disaster. “We know who you are! We know who you work for!” chimes the chilling voice of the terrorist behind the steering wheel. Indeed Jeremy does turn out to be a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service who refuses to divulge the location even when his own wife is taken hostage while he’s warning her on a cell phone. And obviously the world outside the vehicle is in the middle of some kind of hostile attack. According to his government superiors, his friends and the special 911 operator who is trying to rescue him, Washington is in the midst of explosions and car bombings detonating at key locations like CIA headquarters, Reagan International Airport and Andrews Air Base. There are political undertones to sharpen the guesswork, but they’re unimportant compared with the exciting way the plot mechanics are worked out, bit by bit, without computer-generated effects. The script by Timothy Mannion switches gears so often it keeps you tossing like a sailboat in a typhoon.

Except for an occasional face glimpsed through broken windshields or the glass pipe that pumps unbearable horrors into the rear trunk, Mr. Dorff is the only actor on the screen for at least 80 minutes of the time. He is not the most important element in the film. He is the film. When the car plunges underwater and he is finally pulled from the wreckage only seconds before drowning, everyone he knows surrounds him. He’s safe at last. But the nightmare is far from over. Nobody is who they appear to be, and there’s a final chapter that will make you scream. It is amazing how much hair-raising action and fluid movement this film captures in the confined interior of a car trunk, or how many mood shifts Mr. Dorff conveys in a performance that can only be called multi-dimensional. From the red herrings around each turn in the road to the identities of the terrorists at the end, Brake is a film that never pauses to catch its breath. In retrospect, it’s preposterous. But while you’re gasping for air, it’s one hell of a thrill ride, like being stuck on a malfunctioning roller coaster for an hour and a half at top speed, and unable to get off.

rreed@observer.com

BRAKE

Running Time 92 minutes

Written by Timothy Mannion

Directed by Gabe Torres

Starring Stephen Dorff, Chyler Leigh and JR Bourne

3/4

That said, the zeal of the Transportation Security Administration’s front-line troops often is misguided and downright stupid. For example, TSA agents recently strip-searched three elderly women in Kennedy Airport. An 88-year-old woman reportedly was subjected to this screening because she wore a colostomy bag.

These are only the latest examples of TSA agents putting aside common sense and professional judgment in carrying out their vital mission. Senator Charles Schumer has come up with an idea that may spare others the indignity of an airport strip search. Mr. Schumer used his Sunday press conference this week to propose that airports be staffed with a “passenger advocate” who would be called in to mediate disputes over passenger searches.

This idea makes sense, and the Department of Homeland Security would be well-advised to give it serious consideration. The TSA has replaced the nation’s various departments of motor vehicles as the agency most-loathed by average citizens (next to the IRS, of course). Like the DMV, the TSA has to deal with millions of people standing in lines who’d much rather be someplace else.

The comparison is not precise, of course. The TSA’s assignment is much more serious, and one small error of judgment could lead to appalling consequences. It’s imperative that TSA agents take their jobs seriously.

That said, 88-year-old women shouldn’t be subjected to strip-searches. TSA agents might well feel that they have no recourse but to enforce agency rules by the letter, and in a way, that’s a good thing. All the more reason for the TSA to have on hand a passenger advocate who is empowered to apply common sense to rigid, by-the-book procedures designed, after all, for the safety of passengers and, indeed, the nation itself.

Senator Schumer’s idea is a good one. Homeland Security should take it seriously.

Peter King serves as the chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, and Lowey is the only New Yorker on the group's Appropriations Subcommittee. Neither King nor Lowey resides within the five boroughs, but both stressed the importance of homeland security and anti-terrorism programs in the New York City metropolitan area, which they called the "nation's most at-risk city."

"A continued federal, state and municipal collaboration in protecting the homeland is absolutely imperative," the letter stated. "We urge you to maintain substantial funding for the state homeland security grant program, urban area security initiative, and assistance to firefighter grant programs, which help bolster our law enforcement and public safety workforce and training."

The letter also urged the president to continue to invest in the Travel Security Administration for air travel safety, and to continue funding for the Coast Guard's Maritime Safety and Security Team, which Obama's budget request for FY 2011 proposed (unsuccessfully) to eliminate.

"It's clear that we have to bring federal spending under control," said King, "but we cannot afford to shortchange our homeland security needs, particularly those of New York City, which remains al Qaeda's top terror target."

President Obama's budget request is due on February 14th.

But this is no time to talk politics, when there are mahogany, limestone and oak floors at stake, not to mention 10-foot ceilings on the usually cramped Upper East Side. The three-bedroom condo was originally listed by Corcoran for $5.65 million, before there have been a couple of price cuts and the listing was eventually taken over by Sarah Parsons and Arline Tarte of Brown Harris Stevens. 

--Mark Handler, the former top Macy's VP who saw the department store through some of its darkest days in the early `90s, has sold his apartment at 142 East 71st Street for $4.2 million. The apartment was originally two six-room apartments, combined into a sprawling nine-room pad, which will now be home to wealthy banker Dorone Farber. 

--Oh, to be the head of a small insurance empire and we, too, could have $7 million condos for every season. Douglas Libby, the president and CEO of the Seneca Insurance Company, and his wife, Marianne Johnson have sold their three-bedroom co-op at the Majestic on Central Park West. Dedicated real estate gazers will recall that the couple closed on the place just a little over 10 months ago. They did manage to turn a small $300K profit on the sale, but we doubt they needed it. The condo, which previously belonged to hedge fund mogul Bill Ackman, has been sold to an LLC, so its run of moderately famous and fabulously wealthy power buyers (at least that we know of) has come to an end. 

--The apartment that belonged to late Prudential Douglas Elliman broker Ruth Dubin and her husband Seth Dubin, a partner at Saterlee Stephens Burke & Burke, has sold for $5.5 million. The buyer is New Jersey plastic surgeon Richard Scharf. 

lkusisto@observer.com

Back in the bad old days of the cold war-when mutual nuclear annihilation was a policy option-a culture of secrecy arose in Washington. What wise observers understood even then was that while governments tried to keep secrets from each other, their chief concern was to keep secrets from their own people. Considering what had been done in the name of the United States, from Mafia assassination plots against foreign leaders to murder, corruption and coups d'état, that concern was quite sensible. And there was hell to pay when the hidden history began to emerge.

During the nine years since 9/11, the national security state has doubled or tripled in size, with huge annexes in the private sector-and the culture of secrecy has metastasized simultaneously. As The Washington Post reports in a landmark series titled "Top Secret America," by Dana Priest and William Arkin, the dimensions of the security colossus are stunning. It is nothing less than a fourth branch of government, so large, so powerful and so wealthy that no other branch can even grasp it, let alone control it.

How big? Nobody knows exactly, not even the Post investigative team, after two years of research that gathered many thousands of public records, including government contracts, intelligence reports and corporate documents, and included interviews with exceptionally knowledgeable sources.

But Ms. Priest and Mr. Arkin, whose work ought to be read by everyone, say that there are as many as 1,271 government entities and 1,931 private companies "working on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States," with an estimated 854,000 people-far more than live in the city of Washington, D.C.-holding top-secret security clearances." More than 30 building complexes for top-secret intelligence outfits are either under construction now or have been built since September 2001; altogether, these buildings occupy 17 million square feet of space.

Nobody in the White House, the Congress or any of the intelligence agencies, including the new Office of the Director of National Intelligence, seems to have the capacity to manage the complex tangle of agencies, companies and off-the-books entities that are supposed to protect us from violent extremism. After reviewing the way that the Defense Department oversees its most sensitive intelligence and operational programs last year, retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines told the Post reporters that he found the morass almost incomprehensible: "I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities. The complexity of this system defies description."

Calling this thing a "system" is a bit misleading. But does the leviathan offspring of government and corporation make us safer? That, too, is difficult to determine-in fact, it is impossible to determine, as the writers explain, because with "so many employees, units and organizations, the lines of responsibility began to blur." We have no way of knowing precisely what the national security complex does with the hundreds of billions of dollars in its shrouded budgets. What we do know is that billions of dollars are wasted through redundancy, corruption and sheer overgrowth. Too many agencies are performing the same tasks, such as shutting down terrorist money transfers and generating too many reports for anyone to read.

Most disturbing is that so many critical functions are outsourced to private corporations, primarily loyal to shareholders and management. The role of these corporations and their lobbyists, who controlled the creation of the Department of Homeland Security during the Bush administration, is a challenge to democracy of unprecedented proportions.

But despite presidential promises of transparency, the Obama administration is fostering more secrecy, not less-which is exactly the wrong way to cope with this problem. Our democracy and our security both depend on bringing this monstrous bureaucracy to heel-and that can only be done in the sunlight. 

jconason@observer.com