IRS considers giving data to other agencies
The Internal Revenue Service is exploring ways to share names, addresses, birth dates, employee records, and other taxpayer information with law-enforcement agencies, particularly the Immigration and Naturalization Service, according to legislative aides and senior tax attorneys.
In recent weeks IRS officials have approached the House Ways and Means committee for discussions on how certain confidentiality laws could be reinterpreted to expedite the sharing of taxpayer records with the Justice Department, the FBI, INS, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. In particular, they say, the IRS wants to pass on information compiled under its individual taxpayer identification number program, which requires foreigners with earned income in the United States and awaiting citizenship to comply with US tax laws. Foreign workers in the US use the identification numbers to obtain driver’s licenses and open bank accounts, a potentially lucrative trove of information for internal domestic spying agencies.
Currently, the IRS must obtain a court order before it can share information with another governmental agency. Some congressional aides said IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson, a former INS deputy commissioner and Justice Department official in the Reagan administration, believes post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism laws give him the authority to make the changes without having to rewrite laws.
Aides said any such move, though taken in the name of national security, could violate the spirit if not the letter of US nondisclosure laws. These privacy rules were first established in the mid-1970s as part of an overhaul of the tax code after the Nixon White House used IRS records to intimidate its enemies. (Globe)

Ashcroft limiting prosecutors’ use of plea bargains
Attorney General John Ashcroft made it tougher on Sept. 22 for federal prosecutors to strike plea bargains with criminal defendants, requiring attorneys to seek the most serious charges possible in almost all cases. The policy directive issued by Ashcroft is the latest in a series of steps the Justice Department has taken in recent months to combat what it sees as dangerously lenient practices by some federal prosecutors and judges. The move also effectively expands to the entire gamut of federal crimes the attorney general’s tough stance on the death penalty, which he has sought in numerous cases over the objections of federal prosecutors.
Critics in the defense bar and some federal prosecutors said the new policy would serve only to further centralize authority in the hands of Washington policymakers, discourage prosecutors from seeking plea bargains and ratchet up sentences in criminal cases that may not warrant them. “What is driving this,” said Gerald D. Lefcourt, past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, “is that a tough-on-crime attorney general is pandering to the public, and he knows that this will play well.”
The policy change is likely to escalate a debate that has become increasingly contentious over how prosecutors and judges mete out justice in the federal courts. With the backing of many Republicans in Congress, the Justice Department has sought to impose greater uniformity and “accountability” in federal cases. (New York Times)

Superbomb ignites science dispute
The Pentagon’s pursuit of a new kind of nonnuclear super-weapon has sparked a behind-the-scenes revolt among its elite scientific advisers, some of whom reject the scheme as pseudoscience.
The military’s goal is to develop a bomb that might be far more powerful than existing conventional weapons of the same size. Precisely targeted, such a weapon could take out targets without posing the severe political risks of using nuclear bombs.
The key to the concept is a little known element called hafnium. By figuring out how to unleash the abundant energy from a hafnium isotope, called hafnium-178, the military hopes to develop a new generation of weapons.
Late last year, the Pentagon created the 12-member Hafnium Isomer Production Panel (HIPP). Its purpose: to assess ways to mass-produce the isotope for military uses ranging from bombs to advanced forms of propulsion.
Yet some of the nation’s most distinguished scientists and military advisers have advised the Pentagon that claims by hafnium-178 enthusiasts defy sound physical theory and have not been reproduced in lab experiments by other researchers. For the first time, some of these skeptics are going public with their concerns.
Last month, in a memorandum to Pentagon and Energy Department officials, five of the 12 members of the military’s own advisory panel on mass producing hafnium-178 and other top experts warned against prematurely proceeding to develop weapons “applications that may not make physical sense.”
The Pentagon isn’t discouraged by skeptics’ doubts about the hafnium-178 isomer. In fact, it’s trying to figure out how to mass produce the stuff. According to one knowledgeable source who insisted on anonymity, a full-scale hafnium-178 facility, if approved, “would probably [cost] tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Chief gives credit to use-of-force panel
The number of officer-involved shootings in San Diego has plummeted to four this year from 19 last year, a remarkable turnaround for a department with more than 5,300 “high-risk” incidents annually, police Chief William Lansdowne told a City Council committee yesterday.
The chief attributed much of the decrease to the implementation of recommendations from a use-of-force committee, which includes about 70 members of the community and 60 Police Department employees
Of the 19 shootings last year, officers struck 15 people and killed six. In the 12 years from 1990 through 2001, San Diego police shot 151 people and killed 81.
Lansdowne extolled what he said was “the extraordinary” restraint he has witnessed during five recent incidents where people barricaded themselves in houses, apartments or trees.
Since July, all officers have been required to complete a form whenever they use force. (San Diego Union-Tribune)

Congress hides some of Pentagon’s spying project in other agencies
When Congress killed the Pentagon’s vast computerized terrorism-surveillance project, it secretly transferred some of the research and tools to other agencies but won’t spell out exactly which ones.
The 2004 defense appropriations bill Congress sent President George W. Bush on Thurs., Sept. 25 would close former admiral John Poindexter’s old office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and bar DARPA from proceeding with all but four small, uncontroversial parts of the admiral’s Terrorism Information Awareness research program.
But the US House of Representatives-Senate conference report on the bill and comments by Senate aides indicated the conferees moved some of the TIA software research and tools to other government agencies for use in gathering foreign intelligence.
A senior Senate aide, requesting anonymity, said the transferred TIA money and programs included collaborative tools, which means software designed to help analysts connect the dots between isolated intelligence tidbits now scattered among agencies like the CIA, FBI and US State Department.
The Senate aide said secrecy prevented disclosing precisely which TIA programs or how much money was shifted and to which agencies. CIA, State, Defense and a host of other agencies participate in the National Foreign Intelligence Program, which the conferees specifically authorized to use “processing, analysis and collaboration tools for counter-terrorism foreign intelligence purposes.” (AP)

Guards allegedly set up man’s prison rape
In a lawsuit set to go to trial on Sept. 24, an inmate claims prison guards punished him by setting up his rape by a convicted murderer who was so notorious for abuse that he was known as the “Booty Bandit.”
Scheduled witnesses at the federal trial include Wayne Robertson, who has acknowledged raping and torturing Eddie Webb Dillard and said the guards intentionally put Dillard in his cell.
Dillard claims three guards violated his civil rights by setting up the rapes over two days in March 1993 to punish him for kicking a guard at another prison. Dillard alleges the guards — Robert Decker, Joe Sanchez and Anthony Sylva — and now-retired prison medical assistant Kathy Horton-Plant then orchestrated a cover-up by refusing to take him to a hospital and by not filing internal medical reports.
The California Department of Corrections, which would be responsible for any compensatory damages awarded to Dillard, contends it is the guards and not the agency that were at fault, department spokesman Russ Heimerich said.
Witnesses include former guard Roscoe “Bonecrusher” Pondexter, who testified at the criminal trial under a grant of immunity. He has said his fellow officers knew they were endangering Dillard when they left him in a cell with 6-foot-3, 230-pound Robertson, who is serving a life sentence for murder and weighed nearly twice as much as Dillard did at the time. (AP)