Trouble brews for S.F. Starbucks

Police say as many as 17 Starbucks stores in San Francisco were vandalized — windows clouded with glue, “For Lease” signs pasted on their facades and some of their locks jammed.

The pranksters also posted a notice on faux Starbucks letterhead regretfully announcing the closure of “thousands of retail locations worldwide.”

The “message from the Starbucks Corporation,” which company officials dismissed as fraudulent, turned Starbucks’ highly touted social responsibility program on its head, saying its lofty goals “to promote a sustainable social, ecological, and economic model for the production and trade of coffee” had failed.

“The global economy requires a relentless substitution of quantity over quality and shareholder value over human values,” read the statement, which was signed with the name of the company’s actual senior vice president of corporate social responsibility.

“At our current market level, Starbucks cannot in good conscience guarantee all of our beans meet both our rigorous quality standards as well as our commitment to social responsibility. We are moving over and making room for local coffee bars.”

There was no serious damage to the stores, which cleaned up and opened for business as usual Tuesday morning.

In a city where a mayoral candidate once sent out mailers featuring a crumpled Starbucks cup, there were some supportive reactions.

A main complaint is Starbucks’ tactic of offering above-market rents to storefront owners, driving up other commercial rents and often forcing locally owned stores out, according to Marsha Garland, executive director of the North Beach chamber.

But, she said, “The primary thing that we hate is the homogenization of America.” (Los Angeles Times)

US backs Florida’s new counter-terrorism database

Police in Florida are creating a counter-terrorism database designed to give law enforcement agencies around the country a powerful new tool to analyze billions of records about both criminals and ordinary Americans.

Organizers said the system, dubbed Matrix, enables investigators to find patterns and links among people and events faster than ever before, combining police records with commercially available collections of personal information about most American adults.

The state-level program, aided by federal funding, is poised to expand across the nation at a time when Congress has been sharply critical of similar data-driven systems on the federal level, such as a Pentagon plan for global surveillance and an air-passenger-screening system.

Some civil liberties groups fear Matrix will dramatically lower the threshold for government snooping because other systems don’t allow searches of criminal and commercial records with such ease or speed.

“It’s going to make fishing expeditions so much more convenient,” said Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that monitors privacy issues. “There’s going to be a push to use it for many different kinds of purposes.”

Matrix is short for Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange. The name was chosen somewhat whimsically by a Florida law enforcement officer, an agency official said. (Washington Post)

Florida protesters sue over free-speech zone arrests

Three protesters arrested at a 2002 rally attended by President Bush sued the U.S. Secret Service and others yesterday, arguing that their First Amendment rights were violated when they were arrested for refusing to picket inside specified zones. Joe Redner, 63, Adam Elend, 26, and Jeff Marks, 31, filed suit in US District Court in Tampa. They were arrested by Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies in November at a Gov. Jeb Bush campaign rally because they would not move into designated the Secret Service’s designated “free-speech zones.

Elend said the Secret Service and deputies discriminated at the Tampa rally, mostly allowing those with pro-Bush and neutral signs to stay nearby, but sending anti-Bush protesters to the zone. “They applied it totally based on the signs,” he said.

The three men said they’ve been protesting both Democrats and Republicans for years, calling their act “a freedom thing.” Redner said President Clinton’s Secret Service also employed protest zones. Elend encountered his first zones at the 2000 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles.

“There were these giant fences around this parking lot with a line of LAPD in riot gear on every side of the zone,” he said. “It was very much a prison.”

The men were not the first to be arrested for violating the zones.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and 10 other members of Congress have written US Attorney General John Ashcroft asking that charges be dropped against a South Carolina activist arrested last October for entering a restricted space around the president. Brett Bursey has argued he was arrested because of his sign’s message — “No more war for oil.”

Frank said yesterday that putting protesters is specified zones is wrong and that the Secret Service sometimes “forgets that this is a democracy.”

“We have a free-speech zone already,” Frank said. “It’s called the United States of America.” (AP)

Postal service researches ‘smarter’ mail

A presidential commission charged with studying ways to make the US Postal Service more efficient has recommended that the agency work with the Department of Homeland Security to develop sender identification technology for all US mail.

In a final report released last week, the President’s Commission on the US Postal Service says sender identification technologies such as “personalized stamps” that embed digital identification information would not only improve mail tracking and delivery operations but would also enhance the security of the entire mail system.

But civil-liberties groups and some private-sector technologists fear that requiring intelligent mail for all users of the Postal Service is overreacting to the threat of terrorism.

The focus on security stems from the 2001 anthrax attacks that took advantage of the anonymity provided by the U.S. mail system to kill or expose workers at the Sun tabloid in Boca Raton, Florida, at NBC News headquarters in New York, at the Capitol Hill offices of Senators Tom Daschle (D-SD) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and at various post offices.

“Intelligent mail could allow the Postal Service to permit mail-tracking and other in-demand services via a robust Web site that ultimately becomes the equivalent of an always-open, full-service post office,” the commission report states. “Intelligent mail also can significantly improve mail security through enhanced traceability, and could lead to substantial savings through sophisticated, real-time logistics management.”

Although the development of intelligent mail is a big issue for the USPS, the commission report is still under review, and it is premature to discuss future plans, says a Postal Service spokesperson.

Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, DC, says intelligent mail was created first as a commercial tool to boost efficiency. But to use it as a homeland-security tool raises questions about both effectiveness and privacy.

“The anonymity of the mail is something that the Postal Service has been proud of,” Schwartz says. “The history of the country is such that we want people to be able to speak anonymously, and taking away [anonymous mail] altogether does not seem to be a good idea.” (Computerworld)

$20 million fire draws outrage, support

A team of at least 80 investigators yesterday intensified the probe of last week’s $20 million arson fire in University City, and officials say they hope to know within days how the fire was set.

Arson specialists and dog teams began scouring the ruins of what was to be a five-story, 206-unit residential complex until flames destroyed it early Friday.

Twenty agencies are taking part, including the FBI, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the San Diego Metro Arson Strike Force, the FBI said.

The investigation is focusing on the militant group Earth Liberation Front, said Dan Dzwilewski, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the San Diego office. A banner reading “If you build it, we will burn it,” with the initials “E.L.F.,” was found at the site Friday. An e-mail sent from the group to The San Diego Union-Tribune later that day stated the banner “is a legitimate claim of responsibility by the Earth Liberation Front.”

ELF has claimed responsibility in the past for torching ski resorts in Colorado, luxury homes in New York and federal property in Oregon as protests against urban sprawl.

At the scene yesterday, reaction to the fire was mixed.

A small hand-printed sign taped to a nearby traffic barrier read: “Thank-You E.L.F. Burn Baby Burn.”

A woman who lives in the neighborhood tore down the ELF thank-you note, saying “We don’t need that.”

Jeff Carle, a spokesman for the Metro Arson Strike Team, said the project’s builder plans to resume construction. (San Diego Tribune)

Mass deportation flight of Palestinians

Coalition for the Human Rights of Immigrants (CHRI) has received information that the US Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (BICE), a division of the Department of Homeland Security, is preparing a mass deportation flight of as many as 100 Middle Eastern detainees, most likely including Palestinians.

Information about a similar deportation on May 14 was subsequently confirmed in a Reuters story published on July 28. In that deportation, at least 25 people were kept handcuffed on the flight to Amman; on May 16, six Palestinians among the group were taken overland—through Israeli checkpoints—to the occupied West Bank. Another group of Palestinians was deported to Gaza via Egypt, according to Reuters. (CHRI)

Report: Bush misuses science

The Bush administration has repeatedly mischaracterized scientific facts to bolster its political agenda in areas ranging from abstinence education and condom use to missile defense, according to a detailed report released yesterday by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA). The White House quickly dismissed the report as partisan sniping. The 40-page document, “Politics and Science in the Bush Administration,” was compiled by the minority staff of the House Government Reform Committee’s special investigations division, and has been posted at www.politicsandscience.org.

White House spokesman Adam Levine said it would take time for the administration to address the specifics of the report. However, he said, “I’m hard-pressed to believe anyone would consider Congressman Waxman an objective arbiter of scientific fact.”

Several prestigious scientific journals have editorialized about the Bush administration’s dealings in science in recent months, including Science, Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine. (The Washington Post)

US judges scrutinized over lenient sentencing

The United States Attorney General, John Ashcroft, has ordered prosecuting officials across America to collate and gather information on federal judges who impose sentences that are lighter than guidelines recommend.

In what has been interpreted as an attack on judicial independence, Ashcroft has told US attorneys to be aggressive in gathering such information. “The purpose of this is to make sure that all our US attorneys understand that we intend to apply US law evenly across all jurisdictions,” said Mark Carallo, a department spokesman.

Senator Edward Kennedy said prosecutors were being forced to “participate in the establishment of a blacklist of judges”. The retired judge John Martin told The Washington Post: “For a judge to be deprived of the ability to consider all the factors ... is completely at odds with the sentencing philosophy.” (Independent Digital (UK))