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COURTESY DAVID COTNER!

“It’s with great excitement that Matt Luem, Greg Fiering and I near the last leg of our two-year adventure documenting the Power Team. As we make our final push to meet the Sundance deadline in mid-September, I am happy to give you a minor taste of what the film is all about. More content will be added in the next few weeks, but take a couple of minutes to enjoy the video and photo pages, as it conveys some of the more beautiful moments of the film, some violent, sanctified and often hilarious.

We expect to have a rough cut screening of the film at the end of August, and your attendance would be most welcome and appreciated.

Best and thanks,

James Reid
Producer, Born Again: The Power Team Story”

From the Baltimore Sun – Aug 6, 2006

NSA risking electrical overload

Officials say outage could leave Md.-based spy agency paralyzed

By Siobhan Gorman
Sun reporter

August 6, 2006

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency is running out of juice.

The demand for electricity to operate its expanding intelligence systems has left the high-tech eavesdropping agency on the verge of exceeding its power supply, the lifeblood of its sprawling 350-acre Fort Meade headquarters, according to current and former intelligence officials.

Agency officials anticipated the problem nearly a decade ago as they looked ahead at the technology needs of the agency, sources said, but it was never made a priority, and now the agency’s ability to keep its operations going is threatened. The NSA is already unable to install some costly and sophisticated new equipment, including two new supercomputers, for fear of blowing out the electrical infrastructure, they said.

At minimum, the problem could produce disruptions leading to outages and power surges at the Fort Meade headquarters, hampering the work of intelligence analysts and damaging equipment, they said. At worst, it could force a virtual shutdown of the agency, paralyzing the intelligence operation, erasing crucial intelligence data and causing irreparable damage to computer systems — all detrimental to the fight against terrorism.

Estimates on how long the agency has to stave off such an overload vary from just two months to less than two years. NSA officials “claim they will not be able to operate more than a month or two longer unless something is done,” said a former senior NSA official familiar with the problem, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Agency leaders, meanwhile, are scrambling for stopgap measures to buy time while they develop a sustainable plan. Limitations of the electrical infrastructure in the main NSA complex and the substation serving the agency, along with growing demand in the region, prevent an immediate fix, according to current and former government officials.

“If there’s a major power failure out there, any backup systems would be inadequate to power the whole facility,” said Michael Jacobs, who headed the NSA’s information assurance division until 2002.

“It’s obviously worrisome, particularly on days like today,” he said in an interview during last week’s barrage of triple-digit temperatures.

William Nolte, a former NSA executive who spent decades with the agency, said power disruptions would severely hamper the agency.

“You’ve got an awfully big computer plant and a lot of precision equipment, and I don’t think they would handle power surges and the like really well,” he said. “Even re-calibrating equipment would be really time consuming — with lost opportunities and lost up-time.”

Power surges can also wipe out analysts’ hard drives, said Matthew Aid, a former NSA analyst who is writing a multivolume history of the agency. The information on those hard drives is so valuable that many NSA employees remove them from their computers and lock them in a safe when they leave each day, he said.

A half-dozen current and former government officials knowledgeable about the energy problem discussed it with The Sun on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

NSA spokesman Don Weber declined to comment on specifics about the NSA’s power needs or what is being done to address them, saying that even private companies consider such information proprietary.

In a statement to The Sun, he said that “as new technologies become available, the demand for power increases and NSA must determine the best and most economical way to use our existing power and bring on additional capacity.”

The NSA is Baltimore Gas & Electric’s largest customer, using as much electricity as the city of Annapolis, according to James Bamford, an intelligence expert and author of two comprehensive books on the agency.

BGE spokeswoman Linda Foy acknowledged a power company project to deal with the rising energy demand at the NSA, but she referred questions about it to the NSA.

The agency got a taste of the potential for trouble Jan. 24, 2000, when an information overload, rather than a power shortage, caused the NSA’s first-ever network crash. It took the agency 3 1/2 days to resume operations, but with a power outage it could take considerably longer to get the NSA humming again.

The 2000 shutdown rendered the agency’s headquarters “brain-dead,” as then-NSA Director Gen. Michael V. Hayden told CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2002.

“I don’t want to trivialize this. This was really bad,” Hayden said. “We were dark. Our ability to process information was gone.”

As an immediate fallback measure, the NSA sent its incoming data to its counterpart in Great Britain, which stepped up efforts to process the NSA’s information along with its own, said Bamford.

The agency came under intense criticism from members of Congress after the crash, and the incident rapidly accelerated efforts to modernize the agency.

One former NSA official familiar with the electricity problem noted a sense of deja vu six years later.

“To think that this was not a priority probably tells you more about the extent to which NSA has actually transformed,” the former official said. “In the end, if you don’t have power, you can’t do [anything].”

Already some equipment is not being sufficiently cooled, and agency leaders have forgone plugging in some new machinery, current and former government officials said. The power shortage will also delay the installation of two new, multimillion-dollar supercomputers, they said.

To begin to alleviate pressure on the electrical grid, the NSA is considering buying additional generators and shutting down so-called “legacy” computer systems that are decades old and not considered crucial to the agency’s operations, said three current and former government officials familiar with the situation.

“It’s a temporary fix,” one former senior NSA official said.

On Wednesday, the same day that The Sun inquired about the power issue with the NSA’s public affairs office, the agency sent word to Capitol Hill about its energy conservation efforts.

“They have told us they have been shutting down all non-essential uses of power to help out BG&E,” said one congressional aide, adding that the NSA is also raising the temperature in its buildings two degrees to conserve.

The information was presented in the context that the NSA was making these changes “to be a good corporate citizen,” the aide said.

Contractors on at least one high-priority, power-intensive NSA project that is located off the headquarters campus, have upgraded their electrical infrastructure to ensure power for their project, according to two former agency officials. That lone upgrade, a fraction of the agency’s total demand, took four months.

Longer-term solutions being considered would move some operations to off-campus facilities with more electrical capacity, current and former officials said.

Adding more capacity to the substation feeding NSA is an obvious answer, but constraints on that particular facility make an expansion difficult, they said. BGE’s Foy declined to discuss specifics about the substation. She said it takes 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 years to design, procure equipment, obtain permits, and build a new one.

Post-9/11 needs
Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the NSA has ramped up its operations, and the electricity needed to sustain major projects — such as the warrantless surveillance program and technology modernization programs — has increased sharply.

The computer systems supporting these programs demand far more wattage per square foot than their predecessors and still more energy to cool them.

Area development like the Arundel Mills Mall has contributed to the problem by putting additional strain on the local electrical grid, according to two sources familiar with the issue. Joe Bunch, BGE’s director of strategic customer engineering, said, however, that the mall’s demand “was fairly easily accommodated.”

Demand in the Baltimore-Washington region has been growing, and the regional operator for Maryland and 12 other states has been studying the installation of up to $10 billion in new power lines to deliver more and cheaper electricity to this region.

“We’ve seen a lot of growth in Anne Arundel County as a whole but particularly in the north and northwest area of the county,” said Bunch, who agreed to talk about trends in the area but not the NSA’s specific demand. Much of that growth is because of the surge of high-tech jobs in the area from the NSA and government contractors, he said.

He said BGE is working to meet the demand by building new substations in the area. One was built about a year ago, and another is scheduled to be built in two to three years, he said.

“We have adequate capacity” now, he said, but upgrades like the new substation are being planned to stave off future strains on the electrical grid.

The NSA’s problem was identified in the late 1990s and could have been fixed by now — and for much less money — had keeping the lights on been a priority, current and former officials said.

“It fits into a long, long pattern of crisis-of-the-day management as opposed to investing in the future,” said one former government official familiar with the NSA’s electricity shortfall.

Electrical infrastructure maintenance and upgrades have been a casualty of the fight against terrorism, according to unclassified budget documents.

Upgrades delayed
Even as the NSA’s budget has ballooned after 9/11, the agency has put off basic utility upgrades such as a $4 million computer system to manage the allocation of power at the NSA — a sliver of the NSA’s estimated $8 billion budget.

“Due to budget constraint [sic] and other development [sic] in the fight against terrorism,” a 2007 budget document reads, the system was never fully implemented.

Without this system, the document stated, the NSA “may experience difficulties in meeting its power requirement to support critical war fighting missions.”

Neglect of infrastructure at the NSA has been a chronic problem, often fraught with bureaucratic politics, former agency officials said.

Fort Meade is not the only NSA outpost facing limitations on its ability to upgrade electrical infrastructure. Listening posts around the world, such as Menwith Hill in Britain and Bad Aibling in Germany, are ailing.

The NSA’s largest listening station, Menwith Hill, has an “aging infrastructure that cannot support the people or equipment” there, according to a budget document for 2007.

It is faced with “concrete foundations that are crumbling,” an “electrical infrastructure that is not in compliance with current codes,” and a weakened infrastructure that poses a safety hazard, the document said.

Identical language appeared in the previous year’s budget documents.

With agency operations facing an imminent threat, facilities issues are front and center. “It’s a big deal,” said one former senior NSA official. “They’re all talking about it, anyway. That’s progress.”

COURTESY JOHN COULTHART!

(Click on the above images — FOLLOW THE QUIET QUIET FOREST SPECTRUM links)
No Tickets Shall Be Mailed, Tickets Available @ Door!
Non-Refundable.

$25.00
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‘Our store’s name is “Nahui Ohlin” which in nahuatl means: Four Movement. We decided to call it this because we felt we had to represent our ancestral wisdom and history. You see, four is a sacred number which in itself expresses movement. The four Directions, Four Elements, Four Major nations on this continent, The Inka, Maya, Mexikah, and Kahokia. There are also four seasons, and four stages of human life: Infant, adolescent, adult, and elder. All part of movement. And this store and idea, is the re-birth of an Indigenous movement. We try to cover the different perspectives of our culture. We have Northern Indigenous literature, and history. Also crafts from Mexikoh, which represent the day of the Dead. We have Alpaka hats from Ecuador, and our most popular item: T-shirts. Revolutionary, Indigenous, Traditional, Political, Payasadas, and just plain garras Firmes. We have underground Hip Hop, musica folclorica, Musica de protesta, and Speeches by Messengers of Justice. Books of Revolutionary movements in Centro America, and Mexikoh. Jewelry, incense, old Rustic images of Tonantzin, and hand made hand bags. We even have “Mexican Lucha Libre” masks.

We decided to open up a shop in Echo Park because of the lack of cultural representation in this part of the city. In fact, we felt like after the “Chavez Ravine” incident in the late 50’s la raza in this area has been kept silenced and passive. Hardly anyone knows that the team they support and defend out at the stadium, forcibly evicted Mexicanos out of their homes to make way for progress. The Dodger clan is now trying to heal those wounds by exhibiting Raza on their billboards as cheering fans. Reflecting us as passive supporters of “La Dodgerization”.

We defiantly reject the Gentrification that is also taking place here in Echo Park. La Raza, once again is being displaced and ejected out of Echo Park. History repeats itself. But, nosotros on the other hand are counterattacking it. We “Degentrificate” by moving in. We are here to represent la Raza and our grandiose Cultura. ‘

NBC News

Is U.S. ready to settle with Native Americans?

Dispute over land royalties and Indian Trust Fund may end this fall

By Joel Seidman
NBC News

Updated: 12:41 a.m. PT Aug 2, 2006

WASHINGTON – For Elouise Cobell, a Native American landowner who launched a class-action lawsuit in 1996 against the U.S. government, there may be reason to be optimistic.

The battle over the Indian Trust Fund has been going on unofficially for more than a century, encompassing Indian lands dating back to 1887. Wednesday, the chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee said a settlement is within reach.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had two high level visitors to his Capitol Hill office Tuesday morning. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne came to talk with McCain about trying to settle the long-term dispute.

The Interior Department manages Cobell’s property and that of about 500,000 other Native Americans, leasing the oil, timber, mining and grazing rights, and collecting the money in trusts and distributing it to the owners. Cobell contends the government owes Indians more than $50 billion.

Gonzales and Kempthorne spoke with McCain and Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., the ranking Democrat on the committee, a day before both were to offer a bill that would have suggested a settlement of close to $8 billion to compensate Indian land owners.

The bill never made it. McCain says he was willing to listen to what the government had to offer and hold off with legislation until the Senate comes back from its month-long summer recess in September. “I won’t agree to anything unless Cobell feels it’s OK,” McCain told NBC News.

In a letter to McCain, Interior Secretary Kempthorne writes: “There is both an atmosphere and positive attitude in the Administration to find a settlement solution. I believe we have a historic opportunity to embrace constructive solutions to long-standing trust management concerns held by generations of Indians.”

Cobell feels this is a positive move, her spokesman Bill McAllister said, though she is disappointed the administration “does not seem ready to resolve this quickly.” Last week, when McCain was drafting his bill, she said, “It would be foolish to ignore political realities while our people continue to go without the basic staples of life. That is why I and the other representative plaintiffs are considering this settlement offer.” But Cobell reiterated, “I have been quoted as saying that an $8 billion dollar settlement amount for the historical accounting claims of 500,000 individual Indian trust beneficiaries is ‘equitable.’ That is not what I said. That is not what I believe.”

For the past 10 years the court battle has been a messy, protracted affair. Cobell has won a series of victories. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth held Interior Secretaries Bruce Babbitt and Gale Norton in contempt and ordered the Interior Department to disconnect its computers from the Internet to secure Indian trust data.

Indian trust documents were once scattered throughout all 50 states, some in federal facilities, others jammed into barns, attics and even storage sheds. Nobody was even sure what was out there. Lamberth ordered the Interior Department to collect boxes full of Indian records from across the country and have them trucked to Lenexa, Kansas. National Archives workers then file the documents in boxes. So far, there are more than 145,000 boxes there, 300 million documents with new shipments arriving weekly.

But those victories ended last month when the government won a major battle by removing Judge Lamberth from the case, who had repeatedly vowed to expose the Department of Interior, whose “spite,” he said, has led it to turn its “wrath” on trust beneficiaries and engage in “willful misconduct,” “iniquities,” “scandals,” “dirty tricks” and “outright villainy.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, siding with the government, removed Lamberth. The appeals court found that Lamberth had lost his objectivity. “We conclude, reluctantly, that this is one of those rare cases in which reassignment is necessary,” the judges wrote. The court ordered the case reassigned to another judge. The appeals court said, “Our ruling today presents an opportunity for a fresh start … We expect both parties to work with the new judge to resolve this case expeditiously and fairly.”

Repeated federal reports have exposed corruption and mismanagement in the Indian Trust system — no one has ever attempted a complete accounting. Cobell, a Blackfoot Indian from Montana, asked the court to find out what no one else could. She asked, “How much money has the government earned on tribal lands from leases for oil and mineral and timber and grazing?” By law, that money is meant for the Indian Trust Fund.

But the appeals court concluded that Lamberth went too far, “on several occasions the district court or its appointees exceeded the role of impartial arbiter.” The Court wrote that Lamberth believed that racism at Interior continued, quoting a Lamberth ruling in which he states the department is “a dinosaur — the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago, the last pathetic outpost of the indifference and anglo-centrism we thought we had left behind.”

Recognizing the harm done to Indian tribes by the mismanagement of the trust fund, the appeals court wrote: “This case serves as an appalling reminder of the evils that result when large numbers of the politically powerless are placed at the mercy of institutions engendered and controlled by a politically powerful few. It reminds us that even today our great democratic enterprise remains unfinished. And it reminds us, finally, that the terrible power of government, and the frailty of the restraints on the exercise of that power, are never fully revealed until government turns against the people.”

The appeals court also issued a stern warning to the government, that it has, “an obligation to rise above its deplorable record and help fashion an effective remedy.”

In their letter Tuesday to McCain, Interior Secretary Kempthorne writes: “If we can define a legislative settlement consistent with our collective goals, I believe, together, we can determine what financial consideration and level of funding for improved beneficiary services would be provided to Indian Country.”

McCain warned that establishing a monetary settlement won’t be easy. “The OMB will be involved,” he said. The Office of Management and Budget, McCain intimated, was not happy even with the $8 billion number he had suggested in his legislative draft.

The chief judge of the District Court, Thomas Hogan, has 30 days from the appeals court ruling to appoint a new judge to hear this case.

McCain said he didn’t think that Congress or the Indian land-owners could wait another 10 years mired in litigation to resolve the issue.