AP:

“[CHERTOFF:] Illegal migrants really degrade the environment. I’ve seen pictures of human waste, garbage, discarded bottles and other human artifact in pristine areas. And believe me, that is the worst thing you can do to the environment.”

Really.

So live brown bodies jumping a fence are worse than dead brown bodies floating in the water after Katrina. Good to know.  Read more 

Coincidence? You be the judge. What’s clear is that, as is typical of Bush’s operations, the program was run without regard to the law. The Christian Science Monitor:

The $42 million cutting-edge [ADVISE] system, designed to process trillions of pieces of data, has been halted and could be canceled pending data-privacy reviews, according to a newly released report to Congress by the DHS’s own internal watchdog.

Data mining to help fight the war on terror has become an accepted, even mandated, method to provide timely security information. The DHS operates at least a dozen such programs; intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense employ many others.

But ADVISE (Analy­sis, Dissemina­tion, Visu­ali­zation, Insight and Semantic Enhance­ment) was special. An electronic omnivore conceived in 2003, it was designed to ingest information from scores of databases, blogs, e-mail traffic, intelligence reports, and other sources, government documents and researchers say.

How reassuring. (And it would certainly work for domestic politics, too, eh?)

So, what could go wrong?  Read more 

When they’re not telling us to fear everything, they’re telling us to fear nothing (except, of course, restrictions on GOP power).

Michael Chertoff neatly tells us life is good, keep on shoppin’, and keep on ignoring Bush’s escalating encroachments upon your freedom:

“We are safe, but we are safe because we continue to pay attention and we continue to add security measures.”

On what basis does he tell us that “we’re safe”? As Donald Rumsfeld once said, “Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”  Read more