Warrantless mail searches may be allowed

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White House denies any change arising from postal legislation attachment

WASHINGTON - A signing statement attached to postal legislation by President Bush last month may have opened the way for the government to open mail without a warrant.

The White House denies any change in policy.

The law requires government agents to get warrants to open first-class letters.

But when he signed the postal reform act, Bush added a statement saying that his administration would construe that provision “in a manner consistent, to the maximum extent permissible, with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances. ...”

“The signing statement raises serious questions whether he is authorizing opening of mail contrary to the Constitution and to laws enacted by Congress,” said Ann Beeson, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. “What is the purpose of the signing statement if it isn’t that?”

She said the group is planning to file request for information on how this exception will be used and also asking whether it has already been used to open mail.

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said there was nothing new in the signing statement.

In his daily briefing Snow said: “All this is saying is that there are provisions at law for — in exigent circumstances — for such inspections. It has been thus. This is not a change in law, this is not new.”

Postal Vice President Tom Day added: “As has been the long-standing practice, first class mail is protected from unreasonable search and seizure when in postal custody. Nothing in the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act changes this protection. The president is not exerting any new authority.”

Schumer critical of action
However, Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., criticized Bush’s action.

“Every American wants foolproof protection against terrorism. But history has shown it can and should be done within the confines of the Constitution. This last-minute, irregular and unauthorized reinterpretation of a duly passed law is the exact type of maneuver that voters so resoundingly rejected in November,” Schumer said.

The ACLU’s Beeson noted that there has been an exception allowing postal inspectors to open items they believe might contain a bomb.

“His signing statement uses language that’s broader than that exception,” she said.

Bush uses the phrase exigent circumstances: “The question is what does that mean and why has he suddenly putting this in writing if this isn’t a change in policy,” Beeson said.

In addition to suspecting a bomb or getting a warrant, the law allows postal officials to open letters that can’t be delivered as addressed — but only to determine if they can find a correct address or a return address.

Bush has issued at least 750 signing statements during his presidency, more than all other presidents combined, according to the American Bar Association.

Reserving the right to make changes
Typically, presidents have used signing statements for such purposes as instructing executive agencies how to carry out new laws.

Bush’s statements often reserve the right to revise, interpret or disregard laws on national security and constitutional grounds.

“That non-veto hamstrings Congress because Congress cannot respond to a signing statement,” ABA president Michael Greco has said. The practice, he added, “is harming the separation of powers.”

The president’s action was first reported by the New York Daily News.

The full signing statement said:

“The executive branch shall construe subsection 404(c) of title 39, as enacted by subsection 1010(e) of the act, which provides for opening of an item of a class of mail otherwise sealed against inspection, in a manner consistent, to the maximum extent permissible, with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances, such as to protect human life and safety against hazardous materials, and the need for physical searches specifically authorized by law for foreign intelligence collection.”

Has the "Mark of the Beast" arrived?

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All in the name of "Homeland Security"

Port workers to pay for Homeland Security ID
Plan will charge $159 for high-tech card, but some say costs are too high

WASHINGTON - Truck drivers, longshoremen and mariners will have to pay up to $159 for a high-tech identity card that will grant them access to U.S. ports.

Groups representing truckers and longshoremen said the fee is too high and will force some workers — especially truck drivers — to quit their jobs.

Some workers will have to buy the cards as soon as March. But a time has not been specified for port operators and ship owners to buy the equipment that reads the cards, according to a rule announced Wednesday by the Homeland Security Department.

The agencies issuing the cards — the Coast Guard and Transportation Security Administration — still have to test the card readers and decide on specifications.

TSA chief Kip Hawley said the government’s main interest is port security. Until card readers are installed, Coast Guard patrols will conduct random checks of the cards with handheld devices at ports, he said.

Todd Spencer, executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association in Grain Valley, Mo., described the fees as “really high” for a program “that isn’t even functional.” The group represents 148,000 drivers in an industry where turnover averages 120 percent a year, Spencer said.

“It’s going to be another reason that drivers are simply going to say, ’Phooey, I’m not going to get any of it,”’ Spencer said.

The cards were first ordered by Congress in 2002 as a way to strengthen security at seaports, considered vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

The project stalled, however. Congress passed a port security bill in October that included a requirement that rules for the new card be written by Jan. 1.

750,000 get first credentials ...
The Transportation Workers Identity Credential will be issued initially to 750,000 port workers who pass government background checks.

The card will contain the holder’s photograph and name, an expiration date and a serial number. An integrated circuit chip will store the holder’s fingerprint template, a PIN chosen by the individual and unique identifying information.

Steve Stallone, spokesman for the San Francisco-based International Longshore and Warehouse Union, said the cards at first would work like the cheap photo IDs already in use at ports.

“We’re going to be paying $139 to $159 and we don’t know how they work?” Stallone said.

Hawley said the fee was reasonable for a card that is good for five years and includes high-tech identification verification and a security threat assessment. Drivers who have had background checks, either because they carry hazardous material or cross the border, will pay less, he said.

“It’s pretty hard to say, ‘I can’t afford $30 a year for a professional credential,”’ Hawley said.

Kevin Hayes, vice president for Long Beach Container Terminal Inc. at the Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach, said the program could make ports more efficient.

“As a uniform credential, it will speed things up because there will be a lot less thinking involved — eventually,” he said.
... 6 million will, eventually
Ultimately, as many as 6 million transportation workers in rail yards, airports and seaports will have to buy the card to gain access to secure areas.

Last April, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that seaport workers would be checked for links to terrorism and to ensure they are legal U.S. residents. Yet only port workers and longshoremen have been checked so far.

People familiar with trucks that ferry cargo in and out of ports contend many drivers are illegally in the United States.

Hawley said the TSA has conducted background checks of truck drivers who have applied for credentials to carry hazardous materials. Fewer than 1 percent failed to pass the checks, he said. “We don’t have any apology for requiring a legal residency,” he said.

Yet Leigh Strope, spokeswoman for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said the union does not think it possible for the government to make the program work as it should.

The Private Arm of the Law

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The Private Arm of the Law
Some Question the Granting of Police Power to Security Firms

By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 2, 2007; A04

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Kevin Watt crouched down to search the rusted Cadillac he had stopped for cruising the parking lot of a Raleigh apartment complex with a broken light. He pulled out two open Bud Light cans, an empty Corona bottle, rolling papers, a knife, a hammer, a stereo speaker, and a car radio with wires sprouting out.

"Who's this belong to, man?" Watt asked the six young Latino men he had frisked and lined up behind the car. Five were too young to drink. None had a driver's license. One had under his hooded sweat shirt the tattoo of a Hispanic gang across his back.

A gang initiation, Watt thought.

With the sleeve patch on his black shirt, the 9mm gun on his hip and the blue light on his patrol car, he looked like an ordinary police officer as he stopped the car on a Friday night last month. Watt works, though, for a business called Capitol Special Police. It is one of dozens of private security companies given police powers by the state of North Carolina -- and part of a pattern across the United States in which public safety is shifting into private hands.

Private firms with outright police powers have been proliferating in some places -- and trying to expand their terrain. The "company police agencies," as businesses such as Capitol Special Police are called here, are lobbying the state legislature to broaden their jurisdiction, currently limited to the private property of those who hire them, to adjacent streets. Elsewhere -- including wealthy gated communities in South Florida and the Tri-Rail commuter trains between Miami and West Palm Beach -- private security patrols without police authority carry weapons, sometimes dress like SWAT teams and make citizen's arrests.

Private security guards have outnumbered police officers since the 1980s, predating the heightened concern about security brought on by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. What is new is that police forces, including the Durham Police Department here in North Carolina's Research Triangle, are increasingly turning to private companies for help. Moreover, private-sector security is expanding into spheres -- complex criminal investigations and patrols of downtown districts and residential neighborhoods -- that used to be the province of law enforcement agencies alone.

The more than 1 million contract security officers, and an equal number of guards estimated to work directly for U.S. corporations, dwarf the nearly 700,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the United States. The enormous Wackenhut Corp. guards the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and screens visitors to the Statue of Liberty.

"You can see the public police becoming like the public health system," said Thomas M. Seamon, a former deputy police commissioner for Philadelphia who is president of Hallcrest Systems Inc., a leading security consultant. "It's basically, the government provides a certain base level. If you want more than that, you pay for it yourself."

The trend is triggering debate over whether the privatization of public safety is wise. Some police and many security officials say communities benefit from the extra eyes and ears. Yet civil libertarians, academics, tenants rights organizations and even a trade group that represents the nation's large security firms say some private security officers are not adequately trained or regulated. Ten states in the South and West do not regulate them at all.

Some warn, too, that the constitutional safeguards that cover police questioning and searches do not apply in the private sector. In Boston, tenants groups have complained that "special police," hired by property managers to keep low-income apartment complexes orderly, were overstepping their bounds, arresting young men who lived there for trespassing.

In 2005, three of the private officers were charged with assault after they approached a man talking on a cellphone outside his front door. They asked for identification and, when he refused, followed him inside and beat him in front of his wife and three children.

Lisa Thurau-Gray, director of the Juvenile Justice Center at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, said private police "are focusing on the priority of their employer, rather than the priority of public safety and individual rights." But Boston police Sgt. Raymond Mosher, who oversees licensing of special police, says such instances are rare.

Private police officers "do some tremendously good things," Mosher said, recalling one who chased down a teenager running with a loaded gun.

In Durham, after shootings on city buses, the transit authority hired Wackenhut Corp. police to work in the main terminal in tandem with city police officers stationed on buses.

"There is a limit to the amount of law enforcement you can expect taxpayers to support," said Ron Hodge, Durham's deputy police chief, who said some of his requests for additional officers have been turned down in recent years. Although, as in most cities, some Durham police work privately while they are off-duty, Hodge said the demand for off-duty police outstrips the supply.

In one of the country's most ambitious collaborations, the Minneapolis Police Department three years ago started a project called "SafeZone" with private security officers downtown, estimated to outnumber the police there 13 to 1. Target Corp. and other local companies paid for a wireless video camera system in downtown office buildings that is shared with the police. The police department created a shared radio frequency. So far, the department has trained 600 security officers on elements of an arrest, how to write incident reports and how to testify in court.

When a bank was robbed in the fall, a police dispatcher broadcast the suspect's description over the radio. Within five minutes, a security officer spotted the man, bag of cash in hand, and helped arrest him.

Private police officers work across the Washington area, although their numbers have not been growing sharply. According to the D.C. police department, any private security employee who is armed must be licensed as a "special police" officer with arrest powers; the city has more than 4,000 of them, including at universities and some hospitals. Maryland and Virginia, which have different criteria, each have several hundred private police, according to law enforcement and regulatory officials.

In Virginia, the Wintergreen Resort has a private police department with 11 sworn officers. They include an investigator who last year helped solve a string of break-ins along the Appalachian Trail, identifying the burglar with images from the department's video camera when he drove out of the resort with a stolen car.

The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services is also trying to foster closer ties between security companies without police powers and the police and sheriff's departments. The agency has begun training and certifying "Private Crime Prevention Practitioners" and soon plans to send security companies e-mails with unclassified homeland security threats and crime alerts.

Maryland has no similar collaboration, according to the Maryland State Police, which licenses security officers. The District is strengthening its supervision of security and private police, with new requirements for training and background checks having been adopted by the D.C. Council.

Some of the most sophisticated private security operations have expanded in part because of shrinking local and federal resources. The nation's largest bank, Bank of America, hired Chris Swecker as its corporate security executive last year when he retired as assistant director of the FBI. Even as identity theft and other fraud schemes have been booming, Swecker said, fewer federal investigators are devoted to solving such crimes, and many U.S. attorney's offices will not prosecute them unless their value reaches $100,000.

As a result, he said, federal officials now ask the bank's own investigators to do the work, including a three-year probe that helped police and the FBI piece together an identity-theft ring that defrauded 800 bank customers of $11 million.

In North Carolina, the state Department of Justice requires company police to go through the same basic training as public officers. They have full police powers on the property they are hired to protect.

Capitol Special Police's owner, Roy G. Taylor, was chief of three small nearby police departments and held state law enforcement jobs before starting the company in 2002. As Hispanic gangs were increasing, he said, "I saw a niche." The company has eight officers, some of whom are part time while working for area police departments.

They have used batons and pepper spray but have not fired a service weapon, Taylor said. Once, in an apartment complex where they worked in nearby Carrboro, Capt. Nicole Howard, Taylor's wife, dressed in plain clothes to attract a convicted rapist who had been peering in windows and stalking women. Then she arrested him for trespassing.

Today, charging $35 per hour, the firm has contracts with four apartment complexes, a bowling alley, two shopping centers and a pair of private nightclubs. A few weeks ago, two of the Taylors' employees, Capt. Kenny Mangum and Officer Matt Saylors, walked over to a car at the nightclub Black Tie to warn the men inside not to loiter in the parking lot. Catching a whiff of marijuana, they found seven rocks of crack cocaine in the ashtray and two handguns under the seat of the driver, who was a convicted felon. They called the Raleigh police to handle the arrest.

Because they are part of a private company, Taylor and his officers are mindful that customers are billed for the time they spend testifying in court.

"I try to make arrests only when absolutely necessary," said Watt, the officer who stopped the six men with the open beer cans. The company's marked patrol cars, he said, do not have radios to call for backup help or computers to check immediately for outstanding warrants or criminal records.

After satisfying himself that the six young men, lined up nervously and shivering in the cold night air, had no drugs, Watt let them go.