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JULY 2008
U.S. - 5% WORLD'S POPULATION, 25% OF ITS PRISONERS
Adam Liptak, NT Times The United States
has less than 5 percent of the world¹s population. But it
has almost a quarter of the world¹s prisoners. Indeed, the
United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection
of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American
approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for
crimes - from writing bad checks to using drugs - that would
rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular
they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other
nations. Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized
nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and
length of American prison sentences.
The United States has, for instance,
2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation,
according to data maintained by the International Center for
Prison Studies at King¹s College London. China, which is
four times more populous than the United States, is a distant
second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes
hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention,
most of them in China¹s extrajudicial system of re-education
through labor, which often singles out political activists who
have not committed crimes.)
San Marino, with a population of about
30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled
by the center. It has a single prisoner.
The United States comes in first, too,
on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the
one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people
in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count
only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.) The only other
major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia,
with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have
much lower rates. England¹s rate is 151; Germany¹s
is 88; and Japan¹s is 63.
WASHINGTON POST
More than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or
prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly
$50 billion a year and the federal government $5 billion more,
according to a report .
With more than 2.3 million people behind
bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and
percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous
China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan
Pew Center on the States.
The growth in prison population is largely
because of tougher state and federal sentencing imposed since
the mid-1980s. Minorities have been particularly affected: One
in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women
ages 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in
355 for white women in the same age group.
CUSTOMS OFFICIALS ROUTINELY SEIZING
5-10% OF LAPTOPS
APPEALS COURT BLOWS WHISTLE ON
GITMO CASE
WHY VIRTUAL STRIP SEARCHING AIRLINE
PASSENGERS IS WRONG
BUSH PLANS DATA BASE ON AMERICAN
CITIZENS
MILITARY RATTLES DENVER WITH MOCK
EXERCISE
DENVER BUYING WEAPONS TO SUPPRESS
DISSENT
GREAT MOMENTS IN HOMELAND SECURITY
Colorado Springs Gazette - A bus service
that shuttles gamblers from Colorado Springs to nearby mountain-town
casinos has been awarded $382,000 in Homeland Security anti-terrorism
grants, according to a May report by the Colorado Springs Gazette.
Federal officials said the grants were part of the Infrastructure
Protection Activities program, with the money used for "vehicle
security," GPS systems, and training drivers, which means,
according to a bus company official, teaching them "to be
aware of their surroundings, of what's unusual and the people
on board."
JUNE 2008
HOW OUR SEXUALITY IS BEING RESTRICTED ONE
BAD LAW AT A TIME
COMCAST HIRING SPIES TO KEEP TRACK
OF CUSTOMERS
ONE
IN NINE YOUNG BLACK MEN BEHIND BARS
MAY 2008
A BRITISH COMMUNITY COURT AT WORK
EVENING GAZETTE, UK Something odd happens
as three magistrates are getting stuck into their caseload at
the East Middlesbrough Community Justice Court. They step down,
abandon their bench, walk over and join a defendant at the back
of the courtroom. They sit and an informal chat begins, taking
on a constructive, sympathetic tone.
"How’s it going?" asks bench
chair Sonia Brogden. "Come on, talk to us," she says
encouragingly. The defendant is asked about his emotional well-being,
home life, drinking, education and a report on his good progress.
A second case touches on sensitive issues
of domestic violence and mental health with a female offender.
Ms Brogden tells her: "It’s a punishment, you’ve
got to do it, but it’s also there to help you. Everybody
wants you to get through this and get on with your life."
The two people have already been sentenced.
These new community order "reviews" help keep an eye
on them, but it seems the main aim is to move them forward..
. .
Ms Brogden, who sits in the court on a
20-strong panel, says defendants need to know that judges care,
listen and give sentences for a reason. "The idea is to
see how people are doing, if they’re getting the guidance
and assistance that they need," she explains. "It’s
basically to keep everyone on the right track.
The defendants can feel that the bench,
the sentencers, are interested in what happens to them after
court."
She stresses: "We’re still the
bench, it’s still a courtroom. It’s that balance. The
court has to command respect."
In its other business, there are further
subtle differences. The magistrates more often speak to defendants
directly rather than through solicitors. Ms Brogden describes
an emphasis on civic responsibility: "It’s mainly in
the sentencing stage to try to say, why have you done it? You’re
part of this community. But you’ve spoilt yourself in some
way. How can we get you back into it? How can we stop you offending
in the community?". . .
She tells how unpaid work sentences in
the community court make offenders put something back into the
area they have wronged, with "Pay Back" restorative
justice projects. "We have an up-to-date list of jobs that
need doing for the community in East Middlesbrough, minor repair
works, tidying up, cleaning up."
[Neighborhood safety officer Rob Brown
says] "When someone get arrested, gets to court and gets
sentenced, they’re trying to tailor it to a specific community."
Rob points particularly to community reparation
work, like work at the Norfolk shops in Berwick Hills.
"There was graffiti and it was just
looking a bit run-down. We ask community payback teams to go
in on a reparation order and spruce up the area, clean up, paint
and take graffiti off the walls. The people who are causing the
trouble in an area should be the people on the reparation order."
UPDATED DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
JUDGE REJECTS BUSH’S VIEW
ON WIRETAPS
RESTORING EX-FELONS VOTING RIGHTS
STUDENT DIES AFTER POLICE ALLEGEDLY
ABUSE HIM
COMMUNITY COURTS GROWING
PASSENGERS ON LOS ANGELES TRANSIT
SUBJECTED TO RANDOM SEARCHES
WILL
PUBLIC DEFEND INTERNET AGAINST GOVERNMENT ATTACK?
THE SUPREME COURT DOES SOMETHING
RIGHT
JUDGE BACKS CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR
AGAINST ARMY
POLICE PSYCHOLOGISTS SAYS COPS
HAVE BEEN 'BRAINWASHED' ABOUT TASERS
WHY UC BERKELEY SHOULD FIRE ITS
TORTURE PROFESSOR
UNLOCKING AMERICA: THE DAMAGE
OUR PRISON POLICIES DO
RICK MOORE
A major report entitled "Unlocking America," coauthored
by nine leading criminology and penal experts--including the
University of Minnesota's Joshua Page--explores the causes of
the exploding prison population and offers suggestions for reversing
the numbers. Among the report's recommendations are eliminating
prison as a sanction for technical parole and probation violations,
reducing the length of some prison sentences, and reducing the
number of people incarcerated for "victimless" crimes,
including many drug offenses.
"We need to reduce the number of people
that are going to prison and be methodical about reserving prison
beds and allocating resources for the most serious and violent
offenders, and figure out alternative sanctions for other offenders,"
Page says.
According to Page, the number of people
incarcerated grew for various reasons. More people have been
given prison sentences instead of alternative sanctions such
as probation, particularly for drug offenses. In addition, sentences
have become longer, with mandatory minimum sentences and the
implementation of "truth-in-sentencing"--which reduces
the amount of time that can be deducted from a sentence for good
behavior (making it more "true" to the original sentence).
Last year, roughly 32 percent of new admissions
to Minnesota prisons were for people who violated the terms of
their probation or parole, known as "technical violators,"
[Joshua Page, assistant professor of sociology at the University
of Minnesota] says. (This could be for reasons like failing a
drug test or not finding work.) "And then if you add the
21.6 percent that are for drug offenses, more than half of Minnesota's
prison population are for [technical] violators and drugs."
Page and the other authors [of a new report] recommend de-criminalizing
victimless crimes, meaning people would not receive any criminal
punishment for drug use, prostitution, and the like. They also
suggest that states use alternative sanctions for some offenders
who currently serve prison sentences--for instance, selective
property offenders. Options might include paying restitution
or performing community service, whether it's picking up trash
on the side of the road or serving food at a homeless shelter.
UNLOCKING AMERICA
President Bush was right. A prison
sentence for Lewis "Scooter" Libby was excessive- so
too was the long three year probation term. But while he was
at it, President Bush should have commuted the sentences of hundreds
of thousands of Americans who each year have also received prison
sentences for crimes that pose little if any danger or harm to
our society. In the United States, every year since 1970, when
only 196,429 persons were in state and federal prisons, the prison
population has grown. Today there are over 1.5 million in state
and federal prisons. Another 750,000 are in the nation's jails.
The growth has been constant- in years of rising crime and falling
crime, in good economic times and bad, during wartime and while
we were at peace. A generation of growth has produced prison
populations that are now eight times what they were in 1970.
And there is no end to the growth under current policies.
The PEW Charitable Trust reports that under
current sentencing policies the state and federal prison populations
will grow by another 192,000 prisoners over the next five years.
The incarceration rate will increase from 491 to 562 per 100,000
population. And the nation will have to spend an additional $27.5
billion in operational and construction costs over this fi ve-year
period on top of the over $60 billion now being spent on corrections
each year.
This generation-long growth of imprisonment
has occurred not because of growing crime rates, but because
of changes in sentencing policy that resulted in dramatic increases
in the proportion of felony convictions resulting in prison sentences
and in the length-of-stay in prison that those sentences required.
. . .
Prisons are self-fueling systems. About
two-thirds of the 650,000 prison admissions are persons who have
failed probation or parole - approximately half of these people
have been sent to prison for technical violations. Having served
their sentences, roughly 650,000 people are released each year
having served an average of 2-3 years. About 40% will ultimately
be sent back to prison as "recidivists"- in many states,
for petty drug and property crimes or violations of parole requirements
that do not even constitute crimes. This high rate of recidivism
is, in part, a result of a range of policies that increase surveillance
over people released from prison, impose obstacles to their reentry
into society, and eliminate support systems that ease their transition
from prison to the streets.
Prison policy has exacerbated the festering
national problem of social and racial inequality. Incarceration
rates for blacks and Latinos are now more than six times higher
than for whites; 60% of America's prison population is either
African-American or Latino. A shocking eight percent of black
men of working age are now behind bars, and 21% of those between
the ages of 25 and 44 have served a sentence at some point in
their lives. At current rates, one-third of all black males,
one-sixth of Latino males, and one in 17 white males will go
to prison during their lives. Incarceration rates this high are
a national tragedy.2 Women now represent the fastest growing
group of incarcerated persons. In 2001, they were more than three
times as likely to end up in prison as in 1974, largely due to
their low-level involvement in drug-related activity and the
deeply punitive sentencing policies aimed at drugs. The massive
incarceration of young males from mostly poor- and working-class
neighborhoods- and the taking of women from their families and
jobs- has crippled their potential for forming healthy families
and achieving economic gains. The authors of this report have
spent their careers studying crime and punishment. We are convinced
that we need a different strategy. Our contemporary laws. . .
By far the major reason for the increase
in prison populations at least since 1990 has been longer lengths
of imprisonment. The adoption of truth in sentencing provisions
that require prisoners to serve most of their sentences in prison,
a wide variety of mandatory minimum sentencing provisions that
prevent judges from placing defendants on probation even when
their involvement in the conduct that led to the conviction was
minor, reductions in the amount of good time a prisoner can receive
while imprisoned, and more conservative parole boards have significantly
impacted the length of stay. For example, in a special study
by the U.S. Department of Justice on truth in sentencing, between
1990 and 1997, the numbers of prison admissions increased by
only 17% (from 460,739 to 540,748), while the prison population
increased by 60% (from 689,577 to 1,100,850). . . .
Proponents of prison expansion have heralded
this growth as a smashing success. But a large number of studies
contradict that claim. Most scientific evidence suggests that
there is little if any relationship between fluctuations in crime
rates and incarceration rates. In many cases, crime rates have
risen or declined independent of imprisonment rates. New York
City, for example, has produced one of the nation's largest declines
in crime in the nation while significantly reducing its jail
and prison populations.Connecticut, New Jersey, Ohio, and Massachusetts
have also reduced their prison populations during the same time
that crime rates were declining. A study of crime and incarceration
rates from 1980 to 1991 in all 50 states and the District of
Columbia shows that incarceration rates exploded during this
period. The states that increased incarceration rates the least
were just as likely to experience decreases in crime as those
that increased them the most. . . Other studies reach similar
conclusions, finding "no consistent relationship between
incarceration rates and crime rates" and "no support
for the ‘more prisoners, less crime' thesis."
. . .
Incarceration may not have had much impact
on crime, but it has had numerous unintended consequences, ranging
from racial injustice and damage to families and children to
worsening public health, civic disengagement, and even increases
in crime. Bruce Western demonstrates the extraordinarily disparate
impact of imprisonment on young black males compared to any other
subgroup of society. For example, he shows that nearly one-half
of all young black males who have not finished high school are
behind bars, an incarceration rate that is six times higher than
for white male dropouts. He then shows how incarceration damages
the lifetime earnings, labor market participation, and marriage
prospects for those who have been to prison and concludes that
the U.S. prison system exacerbates and sustains racial inequality.
British penologists Joseph Murray and David Farrington have analyzed
data sets about child development from three nations and found
that parental incarceration contributes to higher rates of delinquency,
mental illness, and drug abuse, and reduces levels of school
success and later employment among their children. . .
The failure of efforts to develop methods
of accurately identifying the small number of offenders who do
commit particularly horrendous crimes after serving their sentences
fueled demands for longer sentences across the board. The logic
of this argument was that if we can't single out the truly dangerous,
we will assume that anyone with two or three convictions for
a relatively wide range of offenses is a dangerous habitual criminal,
and keep them all in prison for an extremely long time. On the
basis of this reasoning, a number of states adopted mandatory
sentencing, truth in sentencing and in some states "three
strikes" laws, all of which extend prison sentences. These
laws have done little to reduce crime. Few convicted persons
have the requisite number of previous felony convictions to qualify
for the enhanced sentences. This is because rates of return to
serious crime on the part of those released from prison are not
high. Just 1.2% of those who served time for homicide and were
released in 1994 were rearrested for a new homicide within three
years of release, and just 2.5% of released rapists were arrested
for another rape. Sex offenders were less likely than non-sex-offenders
to be rearrested for any offense. . . .
The U.S. Department of Justice conducted
a major study of criminal involvement of prisoners who had been
released in 1994. It found that only 5% of the 3 million arrests
made in seven states between 1994 and 1997 were of recently released
prisoners.47 California's "three strikes" law has had
a number of evaluations; almost all found that it failed to reduce
crime. These studies make clear that, while many people who are
released from prison end up back behind bars, they are but a
fraction of the overall crime problem. Lengthening their sentences,
as a means of dealing with crime will at best have only marginal
impact. . .
At the turn of the 19th century reformers
realized that brutal prisons embitter prisoners rather than reform
them. Yet this persistent faith that prisoners can be discouraged
from returning to crime by subjecting them to harsh penalties,
or that the population at large can be deterred more effectively
with severe penalties than with milder ones, has never had empirical
support. Decades of research on capital punishment have failed
to produce compelling evidence that it prevents homicide more
effectively than long prison sentences. Community penalties,
it has been shown, are at least as effective in discouraging
return to crime as institutional penalties. Rigorous prison conditions
substantially increase recidivism. Evaluations show that boot
camps and "scared straight" programs either have no
effect on recidivism or increase it.
ACTIVISM: HOW TO GET A POLICE
CHIEF TO BACK OFF SNEAKY, ILLEGAL SEARCHES
DC's police chief Kathy Lanier
came up with a plan to get people to allow officers to search
their homes for any object by granting them immunity only from
the city' gun law. The local
ACLU, led by Johnny Barnes, got on the case with a door to
door information campaign that soon turned into a neighborhood
march. With this sort of protest, Chief Lanier soon backed off
of her sneaky search scheme.
APRIL 2008
SUPREME COURT RULES ILLEGAL ARREST DOESN'T
INVALIDATE SEARCH
17 YEAR OLD COLUMNIST FIRED FOR
TELLING THE TRUTH
NJ
COURT: INTERNET USERS HAVE PRIVACY RIGHTS TO THEIR DATA
GUN OWNERS ARE HAPPIER THAN OBAMA
SUPPORTERS
VIRGINIA STATE POLICE CONSPIRED
WITH FBI TO LIMIT STATE'S OPEN GOVERNMENT LAW
SUPREME
COURT RULES ILLEGAL ARREST DOESN'T INVALIDATE SEARCH
MONDOGLOBO CNN reports: The Supreme Court
offered unanimous support for police Wednesday by allowing drug
evidence gathered after an arrest that violated state law to
be used at trial, an important search-and-seizure case turning
on the constitutional limits of "probable cause."
"When officers have probable cause
to believe that a person has committed a crime in their presence,
the Fourth Amendment permits them to make an arrest, and to search
the suspect in order to safeguard evidence and ensure their own
safety," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote. David Lee Moore was
stopped by Portsmouth, Virginia, officers five years ago for
driving his vehicle on a suspended license. Under state law in
such incidents, only a summons is to be issued and the motorist
is to be allowed to go. Instead, detectives detained Moore for
almost an hour, arrested him, then searched him and found cocaine.
At trial, Moore's lawyers tried to suppress
the evidence, but the state judge allowed it, even though the
court noted the arrest violated state law. A police detective,
asked why the man was arrested, replied, "Just our prerogative."
PENTAGON HEAVILY MANIPULATED TELEVISION MIKLITARY
COVERAGE
DAVID BARSTOW, NY TIMES To the public,
[military experts] are members of a familiar fraternity, presented
tens of thousands of times on television and radio as "military
analysts" whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative
and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the
post-Sept. 11 world. Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity,
though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those
analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of
the administration's wartime performance, an examination by The
New York Times has found.
The effort, which began with the buildup
to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit
ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial
dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors
vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.
Those business relationships are hardly
ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the
networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and
several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150
military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives,
board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights,
but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage
of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military
business generated by the administration's war on terror. It
is a furious competition, one in which inside information and
easy access to senior officials are highly prized. . . Records
and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its
control over access and information in an effort to transform
the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse - an instrument
intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV
and radio networks
Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged
only a limited understanding of their analysts' interactions
with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive
to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts
to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding
outside financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to
disclose conflicts, they said. And whatever the contributions
of military analysts, they also noted the many network journalists
who have covered the war for years in all its complexity.
Five years into the Iraq war, most details
of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon's campaign
have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the
Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages,
transcripts and records describing years of private briefings,
trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon
talking points operation. These records reveal a symbiotic relationship
where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism
have been obliterated. . .
CBS News declined to comment on what it
knew about its military analysts' business affiliations or what
steps it took to guard against potential conflicts.
NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures
for hiring and monitoring military analysts. The network issued
a short statement: "We have clear policies in place to assure
that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately
vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a
perception of a conflict of interest."
Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC,
said that while the network's military consultants were not held
to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists, they
were expected to keep the network informed about any outside
business entanglements. "We make it clear to them we expect
them to keep us closely apprised," he said.
A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives
"refused to participate" in this article.
WORLD AUDIT RANKING
A MOTTO FOR OUR TIMES
NEXT TARGET OF THE PRIVACY INVADERS:
YOUR MIND
PENTAGON STUDY SUGGESTS ILLEGAL
INTERFERENCE WITH BLOGS INCLUDING CO-OPTING BLOGGERS, CREATING
FAKE BLOGS, HACKING, CORRUPTING AND "TAKING DOWN" SITES
STUDENT QUESTIONED BY FBI FOR
LOOKING MIDDLE EASTERN
DC MAYOR WANTS TO SPY ON EVERYONE WITH 5,000 CAMERAS
GARY EMERLING, WASH TIMES - D.C. officials
are giving police access to more than 5,000 closed-circuit TV
cameras citywide that monitor traffic, schools and public housing
- a move that will give the District one of the largest surveillance
networks in the country. . . "We've been sort of sounding
the alarm on this stuff for a long time, saying these little
pieces - they grow," said Art Spitzer, legal director for
the American Civil Liberties Union of the National Capital Area.
"You put a camera here, it's not so bad, you put a camera
there, it's not so bad. But then it turns out all the sudden,
we find out there are 5,200 cameras. That's a big number."
Council member Phil Mendelson, chairman
of the Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary, said that
the proposed move was "breathtaking" and that the initiative
"has not been thought through."
"There is a huge civil liberty implication
because they're talking about a fully [interoperable] system,"
said Mr. Mendelson, at-large Democrat. "If it is as big
as they are suggesting, this is a major change."
The mayor said the Metropolitan Police
Department currently monitors 92 surveillance cameras in high-crime
neighborhoods. The number of cameras available for the department's
use in those neighborhoods will increase to 225 under the initiative,
although Mr. Fenty said police and other agencies also will have
access to 1,388 outside cameras and 3,874 cameras inside buildings
throughout the city.
Nearly 3,500 of the cameras are operated
by D.C. Public Schools. The city's transportation department
operates 131 of the devices, which are normally trained on streets
but can swivel. . .
Chicago, widely seen as the U.S. city that
has made the most aggressive use of surveillance technology,
has installed more than 2,000 cameras and began linking the devices
into a single network in 2004. The camera network in London,
referred to as the "Ring of Steel," is thought to be
the most extensive in the world, employing about 500,000 cameras.
MORE REASONS TO INVESTIGATE TASER
USE
ACLU CHARGES MILITARY USING FBI
TO SPY ON AMERICANS
PENTAGON STUDY SUGGESTS ILLEGAL INTERFERENCE
WITH BLOGS INCLUDING CO-OPTING BLOGGERS, CREATING FAKE BLOGS,
HACKING, CORRUPTING AND "TAKING DOWN" SITES
DANGER ROOM, WIRED Since the start of the
Iraq war, there's been a raucous debate in military circles over
how to handle blogs -- and the service members who want to keep
them. One faction sees blogs as security risks, and a collective
waste of troops' time. The other (which includes top officers,
like Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell) considers
blogs to be a valuable source of information, and a way for ordinary
troops to shape opinions, both at home and abroad.
[A] 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations
University, "Blogs and Military Information Strategy,"
offers a third approach -- co-opting bloggers, or even putting
them on the payroll. "Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally
attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be
worth considering," write the report's co-authors, James
Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning.
Lt. Commander Marc Boyd, a U.S. Special
Operations Command spokesman, says the report was merely an academic
exercise. "The comments are not 'actionable', merely thought
provoking," he tells Danger Room. "The views expressed
in the article publication are entirely those of the author and
do not necessarily reflect the views, policy or position of the
U.S. Government, Department of Defense, USSOCOM [Special Operations
Command], or the Joint Special Operations University.".
. .
The report introduces the military audience
to the "blogging phenomenon," and lays out a number
of ways in which the armed forces -- specifically, the military's
public affairs, information operations, and psychological operations
units -- might use the sites to their advantage"
|||| Information strategists can consider
clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other
persons of prominence... to pass the U.S. message. In this way,
the U.S. can overleap the entrenched inequalities and make use
of preexisting intellectual and social capital. Sometimes numbers
can be effective; hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack
a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth
considering. On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback
effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations
that the U.S. military had paid journalists to publish stories
in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like
to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility
and trust.
An alternative strategy is to "make"
a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position
of influence could take some time, however, and depending on
the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational
burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the
blog could be put online to any useful effect. Still, there are
people in the military today who like to blog. In some cases,
their talents might be redirected toward operating blogs as part
of an information campaign. If a military blog offers valuable
information that is not available from other sources, it could
rise in rank fairly rapidly. ||||
Denning, the report's author, has promoted
controversial opinions before. In the early 1990s, when she was
chair of the Georgetown University's computer science department,
Denning emerged as the leading advocate for the so-called "Clipper
Chip," a cryptographic device for protecting communications
-- until the government wanted to listen in. The project was
cancelled by 1996.
In her 2006 paper, Denning warns that blogs
can and will be used by America's enemies. These sites, she argues,
can also be used to serve U.S. government interests.
|||| There are certain to be cases where
some blog, outside the control of the U.S. government, promotes
a message that is antithetical to U.S. interests, or actively
supports the informational, recruiting and logistical activities
of our enemies. The initial reaction may be to take down the
site, but this is problematic in that doing so does not guarantee
that the site will remain down. As has been the case with many
such sites, the offending site will likely move to a different
host server, often in a third country. Moreover, such action
will likely produce even more interest in the site and its contents.
Also, taking down a site that is known to pass enemy EEIs (essential
elements of information) and that gives us their key messages
denies us a valuable information source. This is not to say that
once the information passed becomes redundant or is superseded
by a better source that the site should be taken down. At that
point the enemy blog might be used covertly as a vehicle for
friendly information operations. Hacking the site and subtly
changing the messages and data-merely a few words or phrases-may
be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility
with the audience. Better yet, if the blogger happens to be passing
enemy communications and logistics data, the information content
could be corrupted. If the messages are subtly tweaked and the
data corrupted in the right way, the enemy may reason that the
blogger in question has betrayed them and either take down the
site (and the blogger) themselves, or by threatening such action,
give the U.S. an opportunity to offer the individual amnesty
in exchange for information. ||||
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/03/report-recruit.html
MARCH 2008
POLICE REMOVE 80 YEAR OLD CHURCH
DEACON FROM MALL FOR WEARING ANTI-WAR T SHIRT
SUPREME COURT RESTRICTS FBI SEARCHES
OF CAPITOL HILL
d FBI S prolly readN yr txt msgs
BANKS ENGAGED IN MASSIVE SPYING
ON CUSTOMERS
SCHOOL CENSORS STUDENT PAPER FOR
SURVEY THAT FINDS SCHOOL DOESN'T LISTEN TO STUDENTS
CLICKING ON THE WRONG WEB LINK
IS NOW A FEDERAL CRIME
HOMELAND POLICE BACK DOWN A BIT
ON REAL ID
REPORT: CRIME CAMERAS DON'T WORK
BOSTON COMMUNITIES PROTEST BACKDOOR
APPROACH TO POLICE SEARCH OF HOMES
WOULDN'T IT BE NICE IF ONE OF
THE DEMOCRATIC CONTENDERS UNDERSTOOD WHAT WAS WRONG WITH REAL
ID AS WELL AS THE GOVERNOR OF MONTANA?
MAINERS STAND UP AGAINST REAL
ID
HOUSE GOP CONS DEMOCRATS INTO
5TH SECRET SESSION SINCE 1812
FEBRURY 2008
HOW TO FOOL A SPY CAM
POLICE TERRORISM OF THE DAY
BRINGING THE COMMUNITY INTO LAW & ORDER
ATTORNEY GENERAL WANTS TO OVERRIDE
JUDGES ON CRACK-COCAINE SENTENCING
JANUARY 2008
WHY HATE CRIME LAWS ARE DANGEROUS
DECEMBER 2007
STUPID HOMELAND SECURITY TRICKS: YOU
CAN'T BE RESCUED WITHOUT A BACKGROUND CHECK
HOUSTON CHRONICLE - Texans seeking to escape
the next hurricane or state emergency by evacuation bus will
first be submitted to criminal background checks, the state's
emergency management director says. The idea, according to Jack
Colley, is to keep sex offenders and others who may be wanted
by police off the same buses used by the most vulnerable during
an evacuation: the elderly, disabled residents and children.
. .
Earlier this month, it was announced AT&T
Inc. has contracted with the Texas Governor's Division of Emergency
Management to provide electronic wristbands for those residents
wanting them, before they board an evacuation bus. The wristbands
would be scanned by emergency management officials and the person's
name would be added to a bus boarding log. That person's name
and their bus information would be sent wirelessly to the University
of Texas Center for Space Research data center.
When the evacuee arrives at a designated
shelter, the wristband would be scanned again to help state employees
respond to inquiries from the public about the safety and location
of evacuated family members.
The decision to wear a wristband is purely
voluntary. But anyone who boards an evacuation bus will have
to provide a name. There will be no requirement to show an identification
card, such as a driver's license, but officials may ask those
boarding for an ID. . .
"We're all entitled to privacy, but
we're not entitled to anonymity," Colley said.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5380868.html
HOMELAND POLICE USING FIRE DEPARTMENTS
TO SPY ILLEGALLY ON CITIZENS
COP TASERS DRIVER 5 MILES OVER
SPEED LIMIT
 AT
LEAST, POLICE DEPARTMENT APOLOGIZED THIS TIME
NEARLY
300 KILLED BY TASERS
NOVEMBER 2007
CITY ATTORNEY BULLIES PUBLIC TV STATION AFTER IT
DROPS HIM AS GUEST
SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE - San Diego City
Attorney Michael Aguirre has expanded his investigation into
the city's public-television station three months after the station
canceled a public-affairs program that sometimes featured him
as a guest.
Aguirre's latest demand for documents came
several weeks after he issued a report accusing the station of
"abrogat(ing) its duty to maintain objectivity and balance
in its local public affairs television programming" by canceling
"Full Focus," a public-issues program.
In recent months, Aguirre has suggested
the station might have committed civil or criminal violations
by canceling the show, on which Aguirre appeared as a guest 15
times from July 2003 until it left the air Aug. 1. . .
"Just about the last thing you want
in a free society is a government official going in and mucking
around in a newsroom and making programming decisions,"
said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of The Reporters Committee
for Freedom of the Press. . .
On Aug. 24, Aguirre asked the station to
turn over "any and all emails, documents and other public
records of KPBS' board members, officers or employees related
to the decision to cancel the KPBS program 'Full Focus.'"
Five days after that, he asked for documents showing how KPBS
selects guests for its radio program, "Editors Roundtable.".
. .
In an Aug. 29 letter to KPBS, Aguirre demanded
"any and all emails, documents and other public records
related to the selection of participants on the Editors Roundtable
program during 2006 and 2007."
CORPORATIONS HELPING BUSH REGIME
IN HUGE DOMESTIC SPYING PROGRAM
FEDS HAVE DONE BACKGROUND CHECKS
ON 25 MILLION AMERICANS THIS YEAR
LOS ANGELES POLICE PLAN TO STEREOTYPE
WHOLE MUSLIM COMMUNITIES
BOTCHED PARAMILITARY POLICE RAIDS:
AN EPIDEMIC OF "ISOLATED INCIDENTS"
CLICK ON VIEW
IMAGE FOR LARGER IMAGE
OCTOBER 2007
SUPREME COURT GIVES DE FACTO APPROVAL TO KEY ABUSES
OF DICTATORSHIPS: DISAPPEARING AND TORTURING PEOPLE
WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 - The Supreme Court
on Tuesday refused to hear an appeal filed on behalf of a German
citizen of Lebanese descent who claims he was abducted by United
States agents and then tortured by them while imprisoned in Afghanistan.
Without comment, the justices let stand an appeals court ruling
that the state secrets privilege, a judicially created doctrine
that the Bush administration has invoked to win dismissal of
lawsuits that touch on issues of national security, protected
the government's actions from court review. In refusing to take
up the case, the justices declined a chance to elaborate on the
privilege for the first time in more than 50 years.
MARK SHERMAN, AP
- [Khaled] El-Masri, 44, a German citizen of Lebanese descent,
says he was mistakenly identified as an associate of the Sept.
11 hijackers and was detained while attempting to enter Macedonia
on New Year's Eve 2003. He claims that CIA agents stripped, beat,
shackled, diapered, drugged and chained him to the floor of a
plane for a flight to Afghanistan. He says he was held for four
months in a CIA-run prison known as the "salt pit"
in the Afghan capital of Kabul. After the CIA determined it had
the wrong man, el-Masri says, he was dumped on a hilltop in Albania
and told to walk down a path without looking back.
"We are very disappointed," Manfred
Gnijdic, el-Masri's attorney in Germany, told The Associated
Press in a telephone interview from his office in Ulm. "It
will shatter all trust in the American justice system,"
Gnijdic said, charging that the United States expects every other
nation to act responsibly, but refuses to take responsibility
for its own actions. "That is a disaster," Gnijdic
said.
JUSTIN RAIMONDO, ANTIWAR -"This is
a sad day not only for Khaled el-Masri, but for all Americans
who care about the rule of law and our nation's reputation in
the world," said Ben Wizner, a staff attorney for the American
Civil Liberties Union, which brought the case on el-Masri's behalf.
"By denying justice to an innocent victim of this country's
anti-terror policies, the court has provided the government with
complete immunity for its shameful human rights and due process
violations," he added, noting that the administration of
President George W. Bush has asserted state secrecy to avoid
disclosing information regarding key aspects of its "global
war on terror," including the use of torture, in several
other cases as well.
"When the government hides behind
the state secrets doctrine to evade accountability for abuses,
and the courts accept that justification despite clear evidence
of wrongdoing, it undermines the whole idea of enforcement of
human rights," agreed Elisa Massimino, the Washington director
of Human Rights First. "Congress has let the CIA program
of rendition and secret detention go on long enough. It is time
to bring this practice under control," she added.
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=11733
U.S. CUSTOMS OFFICIALS ABUSE TOP FINNISH
BAND
JEAN HOPFENSPERGER, STAR TRIBUNE - When
three of Finland's most popular musicians, including one described
as that country's Bruce Springsteen, arrived for a recent tour
in Minnesota, they expected a quick trip through airport customs.
Instead, immigration agents at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International
Airport subjected them to more than two hours of interrogation
that the musicians considered so harsh and demeaning that they
filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki.
"It was almost three hours of screaming, door-slamming and
accusations, according to the report I received," said Marianne
Wargelin, honorary Finnish consul for the Dakotas and most of
Minnesota, which has the second largest Finnish-American population
in the nation.
Erkki Maattanen, a filmmaker for Finnish
Public Television who accompanied the musicians on the September
trip, said his questioners seemed to think the entourage was
smuggling drugs or intending to work without a permit. "I
kept trying to tell them why we were here, but they'd just yell,
'Shut up!"' he said. . .
"They threatened us with severe punishments
if we talk to each other," according to the complaint signed
by musicians Ninni Poijärvi and Mika Kuokkanen, "Through
the walls, I can hear officers yelling, screaming. They ask about
the purpose of our trip -- except we are only allowed to give
yes-or-no answers. I try to talk about our plans to meet with
Finnish-American folk musicians. Nobody listens. They interrupt
me constantly and they yell, 'You are a liar!"'. . .
The four were eventually released with
no explanation and no apology, the complaint said.
http://www.startribune.com/462/story/1513926.html
BUSH REGIME USES ARTIFICIAL INSECTS TO SPY
ON DEMONSTRATORS
FROM AMNESTY INTNL AD
SEPTEMBER 2007
HOMELAND POLICE STORING WHAT AIR PASSENGERS
READ IN THEIR FILES
RYAN SINGEL, WIRED - International travelers
concerned about being labeled a terrorist or drug runner by secret
Homeland Security algorithms may want to be careful what books
they read on the plane. Newly revealed records show the government
is storing such information for years.
Privacy advocates obtained database records
showing that the government routinely records the race of people
pulled aside for extra screening as they enter the country, along
with cursory answers given to U.S. border inspectors about their
purpose in traveling. In one case, the records note Electronic
Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore's choice of reading
material, and worry over the number of small flashlights he'd
packed for the trip.
The breadth of the information obtained
by the Gilmore-funded Identity Project (using a Privacy Act request)
shows the government's screening program at the border is actually
a "surveillance dragnet," according to the group's
spokesman Bill Scannell.
"There is so much sensitive information
in the documents that it is clear that Homeland Security is not
playing straight with the American people," Scannell said.
. .
One report about Gilmore notes: "PAX
(passenger) has many small flashlights with pot leaves on them.
He had a book entitled 'Drugs and Your Rights.'" Gilmore
is an advocate for marijuana legalization.
Another inspection entry noted that Gilmore
had "attended computer conference in Berlin and then traveled
around Europe and Asia to visit friends. 100% baggage exam negative.
Resides 554 Clay Street , San Francisco, CA. PAX is self employed
'Entrepreneur' in computer software business."
"They are noting people's race and
they are writing down what people read," Scannell said.
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/09/flight_tracking
SAVE STAR SIMPSON
CRITICS
- NOT COPS - GET TO DECIDE WHICH ART IS A BOMB
FEDS PLOTTING BACKDOOR CRACKDOWN ON
SEX FILMS
PUGBUS - The Department of Justice wants
to come up with an official list of every porn star in America
- and slap stiff penalties on producers who don't cooperate.
The new rules, proposed under the Adam Walsh Child Safety and
Protection Act, would require blue-movie makers to keep photos,
stage names, professional names, maiden names, aliases, nicknames
and ages on file for the inspection of the department's Child
Exploitation and Obscenity Section.
"The identity of every performer is
critical to determining and ensuring that no performer is a minor,"
according to the new proposal.
The adult film industry plans to challenge
the new rule as a violation of the First Amendment, said Paul
Cambria, a lawyer for Hustler and other adult film companies.
He sees it as a way to harass legitimate stag-film producers.
"If they can't get you for obscenity,
they'll get you for violating record-keeping," he said.
Such a violation would carry a five-year penalty.
The proposed rule would require porn producers
to give the title of the video or magazine, or the Web address
where the actor appears.
http://www.pugbus.net/artman/publish/08197002_11_rudypedia.shtml
DEMOCRATS HELP BUSH TRASH THE CONSTITUTION
JAMES RISEN, NY TIMES -
President Bush signed into law legislation that broadly expanded
the government's authority to eavesdrop on the international
telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without
warrants.
Congressional aides and others familiar
with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond
the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed
to gather information about foreign terrorists. They said seemingly
subtle changes in legislative language would sharply alter the
legal limits on the government's ability to monitor millions
of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United
States.
They also said that the new law for the
first time provided a legal framework for much of the surveillance
without warrants that was being conducted in secret by the National
Security Agency and outside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act, the 1978 law that is supposed to regulate the way the government
can listen to the private communications of American citizens.
"This more or less legalizes the N.S.A.
program," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National
Security Studies in Washington, who has studied the new legislation.
. .
CHARLIE SAVAGE, BOSTON GLOBE -
Privacy rights groups said the new law goes too far by allowing
the NSA to evade warrant requirements for calls and e-mails involving
Americans. They accused Democratic leaders of "spinelessness"
in the face of Republican threats to blame them for any coming
terrorist attack if they did not give the president the new power
before leaving for their annual August recess.
"We are deeply disappointed that the
president's tactics of fear-mongering have once again forced
Congress into submission," said Anthony Romero, executive
director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
In two respects, the law grants the executive
branch even broader warrantless wiretapping powers than the ones
Bush said he had a right to exercise under his original program.
First, the law requires telecommunications
companies to make their facilities available for government wiretaps,
and it grants them immunity from lawsuits for complying. Under
the old program, such companies participated only voluntarily
-- and some were sued for allegedly violating their customers'
privacy.
Second, Bush has said his original surveillance
program was restricted to calls and e-mails involving a suspected
terrorist, but the new law has no such limit.
Instead, it allows executive-branch agencies
to conduct oversight-free surveillance of all international calls
and e-mails, including those with Americans on the line, with
the sole requirement that the intelligence-gathering is "directed
at a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United
States." There is no requirement that either caller be a
suspected terrorist, spy, or criminal.
AUGUST 2007
IF YOU'RE AFRAID OR DISGUSTED AT THE
AIRPORT, HOMELAND SECURITY WANTS TO QUESTION YOU
KAITLIN DIRRIG, MCCLATCHY - Next time you
go to the airport, there may be more eyes on you than you notice.
Specially trained security personnel are watching body language
and facial cues of passengers for signs of bad intentions. The
watcher could be the attendant who hands you the tray for your
laptop or the one standing behind the ticket-checker. Or the
one next to the curbside baggage attendant.
They're called behavior detection officers,
and they're part of several recent security upgrades, Transportation
Security Administrator Kip Hawley told an aviation industry group
in Washington last month. He described them as "a wonderful
tool to be able to identify and do risk management prior to somebody
coming into the airport or approaching the crowded checkpoint."
The officers are working in more than a
dozen airports already, according to Paul Ekman, a former professor
at the University of California at San Francisco who has advised
Hawley's agency on the program. . . .
At the heart of the new screening system
is a theory that when people try to conceal their emotions, they
reveal their feelings in flashes that Ekman, a pioneer in the
field, calls "micro-expressions." Fear and disgust
are the key ones, he said, because they're associated with deception.
Behavior detection officers work in pairs.
Typically, one officer sizes up passengers openly while the other
seems to be performing a routine security duty. A passenger who
arouses suspicion, whether by micro-expressions, social interaction
or body language gets subtle but more serious scrutiny.
A behavior specialist may decide to move
in to help the suspicious passenger recover belongings that have
passed through the baggage X-ray. Or he may ask where the traveler's
going. If more alarms go off, officers will "refer"
the person to law enforcement officials for further questioning.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/18923.html
MORE GREAT MOMENTS IN THE GENERAL LAWS
OF MASSACHUSETTS
[Yesterday we ran a Massachusetts law banning
blasphemy and other theocratic offenses. Doug Henwood of the
Left Business Observer adds a few more goodies:
Chapter 272: Section 34. Crime against
nature Section 34. Whoever commits the abominable and detestable
crime against nature, either with mankind or with a beast, shall
be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more
than twenty years.
Chapter 272: Section 14. Adultery Section
14. A married person who has sexual intercourse with a person
not his spouse or an unmarried person who has sexual intercourse
with a married person shall be guilty of adultery and shall be
punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than
three years or in jail for not more than two years or by a fine
of not more than five hundred dollars.
Chapter 272: Section 18. Fornication Section
18. Whoever commits fornication shall be punished by imprisonment
for not more than three months or by a fine of not more than
thirty dollars.
http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/
REGAL CINEMAS HAS 19 YEAR OLD GIRL ARRESTED
FOR 20 SECOND FILM CLIP
TORRENT FREAK - Jhannet Sejas, a 19 year
old girl was immediately arrested by the police after she recorded
a 20 second clip from the movie "Transformers" that
she wanted to show to her little brother. She now faces up to
a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. Sejas was celebrating her 19th
Birthday with her boyfriend in a local theater in Arlington [VA].
A few minutes after she taped the short clip the police came
rushing in and took her into custody on the charges of "being
a pirate".
Sejas and her boyfriend were promptly escorted
out of the movie theater, still confused about what just happened.
"I was crying, I've never been in trouble before.",
she later said in a response to the trip to the police station.
Of course Sejas had no intention to sell
the 600 millisecond clip, she wasn't even planning to put it
on YouTube. The only thing she wanted to do was show it to her
13 year old brother, who was dying to see the movie himself.
Unluckily theater owners just introduced their new zero-tolerance
policy since everyone can be a pirate.
Kendrick Macdowell, a representative National
Association of Theater Owners said in a response: "We cannot
educate theater managers to be judges and juries in what is acceptable.
Theater managers cannot distinguish between good and bad stealing.".
. .
Sejas will go to trial later this month
for recording a motion picture without permission, and is facing
up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. Seriously unbelievable.
http://torrentfreak.com/teen-arrested-for-recording-20-second-movie-clip/
DANIELA DEANE WASHINGTON POST - Arlington police spokesman John Lisle said it
was the decision of Regal Cinemas Ballston Common 12 to prosecute
the case, a first for Arlington police. . . Jason Schultz, senior
staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said he is
aware of only one case prosecuted under the federal statute.
In September 2005, a Missouri theater employee pleaded guilty
to two counts of using a camcorder to copy two movies.
FIND THE REGAL CINEMAS IN YOUR AREA TO
AVOID
http://www.regalcinemas.com/movies/locations.jsp
ACLU SUES TSA, JET BLUE OVER ARABIC T-SHIRT
BAN
WHAT IT SAID
JULY 2007
THE MYTH OF BREATH TESTS
RADLEY BALKO, HIT & RUN - A local CBS
television reporter went drinking to test various personal blood-alcohol
devices. She found a wide disparity in readings among the different
brands, showing I guess that you really shouldn't trust the things.
What she fails to do, though, is ask why courts are then so reliant
on them. She brought some patrol officers with her, and measured
her results against the device she describes as "court-approved."
But she never really questions whether or not that one is accurate.
She then says that the police officers who helped her with the
story told her that "how a drinker scores in a field sobriety
test is the real measure of inebriation." In fact, this
simply isn't true. The standard field sobriety test was adopted
by NHTSA after one poorly administered test on 238 subjects in
1977. It's never been peer reviewed. One forensic expert in Georgia
gave the test to 21 of his students, none of whom had a drop
to drink. He then showed video of the tests to a group of police
officers. They said they'd arrest nearly half of them.
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/121187.html
LAWRENCE TAYLOR, DUI BLOG - Unique among
criminal offenses, a citizen accused of drunk driving faces trial
by machine. . . Prosecutors continue to assure jurors that these
state-of-the-art breathalyzers are highly accurate scientific
instruments - so accurate and reliable that they can feel comfortable
finding the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt based
solely upon the machine. . . Just how accurate and reliable are
these "state-of-the-art" breath machines?
Not very, according to internal documents
from the State of Virginia's Department of Forensic Science.
Attorney Robert F. Keefer of Harrisonburg,
Virginia, filed a demand under the Freedom of Information Act
for records concerning the machine used in that state, the Intoxilyzer
5000 (the most commonly used machine in the country over the
past 15 years. . . The following are direct quotes from those
documents:
"Funding of this request will allow
the agency to replace instruments (Intoxilyer 5000 instruments)
that are 9-10 years old and for which replacements are not available.
These instruments are outdated and the manufacturer is no longer
maintaining parts and not capable of fully supporting them since
current instruments demonstrate two further generations of technological
advancement."
In response to the request form's question,
"What are the expected results to be achieved if this request
is funded?", the following response was given:
"To replace outdated, unstable and
unreliable breath alcohol instrumentation used by police officers
throughout the Commonwealth to certify whether a driver is or
is not impaired."
Unstable and unreliable. But do you think
this is what prosecutors in Virginia tell juries? Of course not
http://www.duiblog.com/2007/06/13/report-breathalyzers-outdated-unstable-unreliable/
MORE
JUNE 2007
RECOVERED HISTORY: FRANK ZAPPA TAKES ON
RIGHTWING JOUNALISTS ON CNN 'CROSSFIRE'
FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED
ARCHIVES
In 1975 we published
this comparison between a DC Jail cell and a Volkswagon, drawn
by Washington architect Rich Ridley
MAY 2007
WHY HATE CRIME LAWS AREN'T A GOOD IDEA
GLOBE & MAIL, CANADA
- The Vatican's official newspaper accused an Italian comedian
on Wednesday of "terrorism" for criticizing the Pope
and warned his rhetoric could fuel a return to 1970s-style political
violence. In an unusually strongly worded editorial, L'Osservatore
Romano said a presenter of a televised May Day rock concert,
which is sponsored by Italy's labour unions, had launched "vile
attacks" on Pope Benedict in front of an "excitable
crowd". "This, too, is terrorism. It's terrorism to
launch attacks on the Church," it said. "It's terrorism
to stoke blind and irrational rage against someone who always
speaks in the name of love, love for life and love for man."
At the concert, held every year in front
of the Saint John in Lateran basilica - Rome's cathedral where
Pope Benedict sits as bishop - one of the presenters, Andrea
Rivera, spoke out against the Pontiff's stand on a number of
issues. "The Pope says he doesn't believe in evolution.
I agree, in fact the Church has never evolved," he said.
He also criticized the Church for refusing to give a Catholic
funeral to Piergiorgio Welby, a man who campaigned for euthanasia
as he lay paralyzed with muscular dystrophy. He died in December
after a doctor agreed to unplug his respirator.
"I can't stand the fact that the Vatican
refused a funeral for Welby but that wasn't the case for (Chilean
dictator Augusto) Pinochet or (Spanish dictator Francisco) Franco,"
he said between musical acts at the open-air concert.
JOSH GERSTEIN, NY SUN - A Jewish group
is calling for the firing of an outspoken CNN anchor, Lou Dobbs,
after he accused advocates for illegal immigrants of using propaganda
techniques employed by Nazi Germany. "Comparisons to Nazis
- especially in this day and age - are abhorrent," the president
and CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Gideon Aronoff,
said in a statement yesterday. " Mr. Dobbs has crossed the
line between responsible television commentary and hate-speech
propaganda of his own. Keeping him on the air is essentially
sanctioning by CNN - which is why we're asking CNN to remove
Dobbs from his very public platform." In a broadcast last
week, Mr. Dobbs denounced immigrant-rights groups for portraying
a crackdown on illegal immigration as a threat to foreigners
who live in America legally.
http://www.nysun.com/article/53574?access=962392
THE LIBERAL WAR ON FREE SPEECH
Sam Smith
IT'S hard enough defending the First Amendment
against the right. But these days one is almost as often likely
to find the foe a liberal who believes that free speech only
belongs to the righteous, the appropriate and the responsible
as defined by people like themselves.
In today's liberal climate it would be
hard to get an ACLU off the ground because its potential organizers
would be too busy being morally superior to lesser mortals.
The only way out of this trap seems to
be to choose among the censors. Do you want liberals or conservatives
telling you when to shut up? Those of us who share Walt Kelly's
view that we must defend the basic right of all Americans to
make damn fools of themselves are in a minority in both camps.
A case in point is the despicable Ann Coulter,
who has called John Edwards a "faggot" and suggested
that Al Qaeda wants Obama to win the White House.
John Edwards reaction: "Her outrageous
comments are inexcusable and should not be tolerated in the public
dialogue."
Would attorney Edwards care to enlighten
us on what Coulter could have said that would have been tolerated?
Would it have been all right to call Edwards a "wimp"
or to claim that a President Obama might weaken our stand against
Al Qaeda? And how does one discover when the line of inexcusability
has been crossed?
The Democrats are also pressing for an
expansion of hate crime legislation even though it is clearly
constitutional to hate; it's just criminal to do anything about
it that hurts someone or their property - matters already well
covered by law.
There are other problems with such an approach.
It helps to drive hate further underground. It makes it harder
to deal with in its political and psychological manifestations
and, above all, it helps let off the hook all those related issues
such as cross-ethnic economic inequities. Far better, say, to
guide angry lower income white frustrations away from blaming
immigrants towards tackling the big white guys in charge than
implying - as liberals increasingly do - that if they're just
nice to people everything will be fine.
Unfortunately, liberals increasingly have
become indifferent to the economic issues that a populist progressive
would use to redirect misplaced anger. The liberal message has
become one of propriety over progress and in the end you get
neither.
Since Edwards presumably is trying to learn
as much about populism as he has about hedge funds, here's a
suggestion. Say that Coulter can utter any stupid and mean thing
she wants but if she does it on radio or TV, under an Edwards
presidency there will be a revival of the broadcast fairness
rule so that her victims can come right back at her on the same
outlet. And talk about Coulter's ties with the big businesses
that are ruining the lives and communities of so many Americans.
Broadcasting didn't used to be this nasty.
But the robber barons of the RBCB era* worked their evil magic
on the airwaves just as they did on everything else. They killed
the fairness doctrine and fostered the rise of the repulsive
right.
In the end, what we need is not less free
speech but more of it.
* RBCB is the Progressive Review's neologism
of the day, standing for the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era
JURY TRIALS ARE DISAPPEARING
ADAM LIPTAK, NEW YORK TIMES - Trials are
on the verge of extinction. They have been replaced by settlements
and plea deals, by mediations and arbitrations and by decisions
from judges based only on lawyers' written submissions. Federal
courts conducted about 3,600 trials in civil cases last year,
down from 5,800 in 1962. That is not an enormous drop - until
you consider that the number of cases has quintupled in the meantime.
In percentage terms, only 1.3 percent of federal civil cases
ended in trials last year, down from 11.5 percent in 1962.
The trends in criminal cases and in the
state courts are broadly similar, though not always quite as
striking. But it is beyond dispute that even as the number of
lawyers has grown twice as fast as the population and even as
the number of lawsuits has exploded, actual trials have become
quite rare.
Instead of hearing testimony, ruling on
objections and instructing jurors on the law, judges spend most
of their time supervising the exchange of information, deciding
pretrial motions and dealing with settlements and plea bargains.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with
settlements, at least when they are the product of reasoned and
sensible compromise between evenly matched adversaries. But trials
are not disappearing simply because more cases are being settled.
Instead, they are increasingly being replaced by summary judgments,
in which judges evaluate evidence submitted to them on paper.
"During the last years of the 20th
century, summary judgment in the federal courts moved from a
small fraction of dispositions by trial to a magnitude several
times greater than the number of trials," Marc Galanter,
who teaches law at the University of Wisconsin and the London
School of Economics and Political Science, wrote last year in
The Journal of Dispute Resolution.
Professor Galanter elaborated in an interview.
"Summary judgments are being asked for in about 17 percent
of cases and granted in about 9 percent," he said, citing
recent data from the Federal Judicial Center. That is a big jump
from 1960, when no more than 1.8 percent of federal civil cases
ended in summary judgment, according to data from the administrative
office of the federal courts analyzed in a 1961 law review article.
"We've moved in a way to a more European
way of decision-making, by looking at the court file rather than
through encounters with living witnesses whose testimony is tested
by cross-examination," Professor Galanter said.
In criminal cases, the vast majority of
prosecutions end in plea bargains. In an article called "Vanishing
Trials, Vanishing Juries, Vanishing Constitution" in the
Suffolk University Law Review last year, a federal judge questioned
the fairness of the choices confronting many criminal defendants.
Those who have the temerity to "request
the jury trial guaranteed them under the U.S. Constitution,"
wrote the judge, William G. Young of the Federal District Court
in Boston, face "savage sentences" that can be five
times as long as those meted out to defendants who plead guilty
and cooperate with the government.
The movement away from jury trials is not
just a societal reallocation of resources or a policy choice.
Rather, as Judge Young put it, it represents a disavowal of "the
most stunning and successful experiment in direct popular sovereignty
in all history."
Indeed, juries were central to the framers
of the Constitution, who guaranteed the right to a jury trial
in criminal cases, and to the drafters of the Bill of Rights,
who referred to juries in the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Amendments.
Jury trials may be expensive and time-consuming, but the jury,
local and populist, is a counterweight to central authority and
is as important an element in the constitutional balance as the
two houses of Congress, the three branches of government and
the federal system itself.
http://www.lexisone.com/news/nlibrary/n043007d.html
BALTIMORE, PHILADELPHIA MOVE TOWARDS
MARTIAL LAW
JOHN FRITZE, BALTIMORE SUN - Large swaths
of Baltimore could be declared emergency areas subject to heightened
police enforcement - including a lockdown of streets - under
a city councilman's proposal that aims to slow the city's climbing
homicide count. The legislation - which met with a lukewarm response
from Mayor Sheila Dixon's administration yesterday, and which
others likened to martial law - would allow police to close liquor
stores and bars, limit the number of people on city sidewalks
and halt traffic in areas declared "public safety act zones."
It comes as the number of homicides in Baltimore reached 108,
up from 98 at the same time last year. . .
In addition to closing businesses in the
zones, the bill would permit police to limit the number of people
who could gather on sidewalks, in streets or in other outdoor
areas. It would prohibit the sale and possession of weapons,
though Curran acknowledged that weapons used by criminals are
almost always already obtained illegally. Zones could be established
solely by the mayor, initially for a two weeks, with the option
to renew indefinitely.
Provisions of the bill are identical to
a law in Philadelphia that recently gained attention when a mayoral
candidate and former city councilman proposed relying more aggressively
on the code. That candidate, Michael Nutter, won the Democratic
nomination for mayor Tuesday. . .
Philadelphia's law allows the city to impose
a curfew in the emergency zones, but Curran said he removed that
provision from his bill because it seemed too strict.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/baltimore_city/bal
- te.md.ci.emergency17may17,1,5521348.story?ctrack=2&cset=true
PENTAGON TURNING LOCAL COPS INTO
INVADING ARMY
APRIL 2007
200TH WRONGFUL CONVICTION PROVEN BY
DNA
EZEKIEL EDWARDS, DMI BLOG
- How can you simultaneously be one of the unluckiest and luckiest
men in America? Ask Jerry Miller, who became the 200th person
exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing. 200 people arrested,
prosecuted, convicted, and sent to prison for years (14 of whom
had been sentenced to death), eventually to have their innocence
established by scientific proof. 200 people who served a total
of 2,475 years in prison, almost one million nights, for crimes
they did not commit.
When Jerry Miller was 22 years old, the
police picked him up after an officer said he resembled a composite
sketch of a Chicago rapist. He was tried and convicted on the
basis of the victim's subsequent misidentification, and served
24 years in prison before being released last year on parole.
Since his release, he has lived as a registered sex offender,
required to wear an electronic monitoring device at all times
and prohibited from being alone with children or leaving his
job for lunch. For more than a quarter of a century, he maintained
his innocence. Through representation by the Innocence Project,
Mr. Miller was able to secure a court order for testing DNA evidence
in his case. The results: none of the forensic evidence came
from Mr. Miller. . .
Just since 2000, there have been 135 DNA-based
exonerations. There have been 27 in Illinois alone. And this
is just the tip of the iceberg, considering that in many of the
older cases where there was DNA evidence, it has been lost, destroyed,
or consumed by original testing.
More disturbingly, the vast majority of
crimes do not involve forensic evidence. Take robbery cases,
for example: there are far more robbery cases than murder or
rape cases; they are highly susceptible to misidentification;
and they almost never involve forensic evidence, meaning that
there are thousands of prisoners who are precluded from ever
even having the chance to scientifically establish their innocence.
So, despite the 200 exonerations, these cases are only a sliver
of the nation's "innocence" cases, falling into a small
category of almost exclusively murder and rape cases in which
there was DNA evidence, and enough of it, and locatable, and
which a court deemed appropriate for testing. This would be troubling
in any criminal justice system, but none more so than In a country
with 2.3 million people behind bars. . .
MINNESOTA SUPREME COURT STRIKES
DOWN RED LIGHT CAMS
THE NEWSPAPER - The Minnesota Supreme
Court delivered the highest-level court rebuke to photo enforcement
to date with a unanimous decision against the Minneapolis red
light camera program. The high court upheld last September's
Court of Appeals decision that found the city's program had violated
state law.
The supreme court found that Minneapolis
had disregarded a state law imposing uniformity of traffic laws
across the state. The city's photo ticket program offered the
accused fewer due process protections than available to motorists
prosecuted for the same offense in the conventional way after
having been pulled over by a policeman. The court argued that
Minneapolis had, in effect, created a new type of crime: "owner
liability for red-light violations where the owner neither required
nor knowingly permitted the violation."
"We emphasized in Duffy that
a driver must be able to travel throughout the state without
the risk of violating an ordinance with which he is not familiar,"
the court wrote. . .
The court also struck down the "rebutable
presumption" doctrine that lies at the heart of every civil
photo enforcement ordinance across the country.
"The problem with the presumption
that the owner was the driver is that it eliminates the presumption
of innocence and shifts the burden of proof from that required
by the rules of criminal procedure," the court concluded.
"Therefore the ordinance provides less procedural protection
to a person charged with an ordinance violation than is provided
to a person charged with a violation of the Act. Accordingly,
the ordinance conflicts with the Act and is invalid."
RULING
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/16/1688.asp
NYC POLICE ENGAGED IN WIDESPREAD SPYING
ON POLITICAL GROUPS BEFORE GOP CONVENTION
JIM DWYER, NY TIMES
- For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention,
teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to
cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert
observations of people who planned to protest at the convention,
according to police records and interviews. From Albuquerque
to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police
officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers
or fellow activists, the records show. They made friends, shared
meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed daily reports with
the department's Intelligence Division. Other investigators mined
Internet sites and chat rooms. . .
Potential troublemakers were hardly the
only ones to end up in the files. In hundreds of reports stamped
"N.Y.P.D. Secret," the Intelligence Division chronicled
the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of
breaking the law, the records show. These included members of
street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations,
as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death
penalty, globalization and other government policies. Three New
York City elected officials were cited in the reports.
In at least some cases, intelligence on
what appeared to be lawful activity was shared with police departments
in other cities. A police report on an organization of artists
called Bands Against Bush noted that the group was planning concerts
on Oct. 11, 2003, in New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco
and Boston. Between musical sets, the report said, there would
be political speeches and videos.
"Activists are showing a well-organized
network made up of anti-Bush sentiment; the mixing of music and
political rhetoric indicates sophisticated organizing skills
with a specific agenda," said the report, dated Oct. 9,
2003. "Police departments in above listed areas have been
contacted regarding this event."
MARCH 2007
INDENTURED SERVITUDE IN FULL SWING IN
U.S. PRISONS
EZEKIEL EDWARDS, DRUM MAJOR INSTITUTE -
J. Tony Serra, a well-known California attorney, has brought
a suit in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of inmates
against a federal prison camp in Santa Barbara County challenging
its prison pay system which compensates inmates for their labor
at between 5 cents and $1.65 an hour. Serra knows what its like
to labor for so little: he just spent 10 months in the prison
for tax evasion and made 19 cents an hour.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle,
Serra described a "nationwide network of prison camps churning
out products made by low-paid inmates for contractors and federal
agencies that might ... otherwise buy the same goods from unionized
private plants.". . .
The federal government's prison industries
program, also known as UNICOR, by 2003 operated 100 factories
generating over $665 million in sales using 20,274 prisoners.
The prisoners are paid far below minimum wage and often work
in unsafe environments, since FPI is not bound by the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration.
In addition to taking advantage of cheap
labor, both government-run and private prisons also provide employment
for thousands of people outside the prisons, from wardens to
guards to construction workers to businessmen. Corrections Corporation
of America, the world's largest private prison corporation, operates
59 facilities in 20 states, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom and
Australia, despite being plagued by mismanagement and scandals,
including inadequate health care and mental, emotional, and physical
abuse of inmates within its prison walls (some of which resulted
in death). . .
As Grassroots Leadership has observed,
"the existence of an industry based on incarceration for
profit creates a commercial incentive in favor of government
policies that keep more people behind bars for longer periods
of time."
Any discussion about reducing our prison
population, pulling out of the war on drugs, or otherwise reforming
the criminal justice system, faces a huge obstacle: the prison
industry. From politicians who rely on prisons for their senate
seats to counties that rely on federal funds because of the inflated
size of its unemployed "residents", from correction
guards and their powerful unions to entire towns employed by
prisons, from the police narcotics units to narcotics prosecutors,
all have a keen financial interest in keeping the prison industry
alive and kicking, if not constantly growing, even if at the
expense of the liberty of fellow citizens.
It seems that, after money itself, prisons
have become this country's primary domestic drug of choice, a
drug which is destroying this nation from within and a habit
we need desperately to kick.
http://www.dmiblog.net/archives/2007/03/ten_cent_toil_also_known_as_pr.html
US ATTORNEYS: IT'S NOT THE POLITICS
BUT THE LACK OF LIMITS
Sam Smith
THE ASSUMPTION that the appointment and
character of US Attorneys are traditionally free of politics
- like, say, federal judges - is a nice one but can find little
encouragement in American history.
In fact, both US Attorney and federal judges
are patronage appointments. This patronage power is limited by
a number of factors such as, in the case of judges, a lifetime
appointment, the need for Senate confirmation and the ratings
of the American Bar Association.
For U.S. attorneys the control has traditionally
been confirmation by the Senate, a limited term (four years but
typically the life of an administration), and the need for approval
by any US Senator of the president's party in the state where
the US Attorney will be assigned.
Neither of these systems has worked as
well as the establishment would have us believe, sometimes for
reasons unrelated to national politics. For example, one study
found that the cities in which US Attorney enforced drugs laws
the least were Las Vegas and Nashville. Obviously, local politics
plays a role.
In the case of the Bush firings, the problem
was not that the decisions were political but that they were
made in the middle of a term after confirmation protection was
surreptitiously excised by the Patriot Act.
Part of the reason the US Attorney system
has worked as well as it has is because once power has been assigned,
the exercise of that power has been largely devolved to the US
Attorney's office with a few notable exceptions in both Republican
and Democratic administrations. As with other matters of patronage,
a partial cure - the best that can be hoped for - is not in grand
principles but in the checks that are applied. What the Bush
regime did was to dump these checks with predicable results.
Much as it offends purists, one partial
solution is to revive the power that US Senators once had over
the US Attorney appointments. Such patronage power at the very
least spreads the potential for evil around rather than, as Bush
would prefer, leaving it all up to him.
Another, more radical approach, would be
the suggestion that Ernie Fitzgerald and I made some time back:
the ele |