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JANUARY 2010
"I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE
COMMERCE CLAUSE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND TO THE LAW
FIRMS IT EXPANDS"
FBI BROKE LAW MORE THAN 2,000
TIMES IN TELEPHONE SPYING
DOMESTIC POLITICAL TERRORISM MAKES
A MAJORITY OF AMERICANS AFRAID OF FREEDOM
THE TORTURE OF SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
DC GOVERNMENT THINKS WOMEN WITH
MORE THAN TWO CONDOMS ARE WHORES
FRENCH COURT RESCUES WORKER FIRED
FOR DOWNLOADING PORN
FEDERAL APPEALS COURT GIVES STATE'S
FELONS RIGHT TO VOTE
FEDERAL APPEALS COURT LIMITS USE
OF TASERS
OHIO SUPREME COURT: POLICE NEED
WARRANT TO SEARCH CELL PHONES
VERIZON GETS 'TENS OF THOUSANDS'
OF LAW ENFORCEMENT REQUESTS TO SPY ON CUSTOMERS
OBAMA ADMINISTRATION DECLARES
PETA TERRORIST THREAT
NEWSPAPER SAYS CARTOONS AREN'T
MEANT TO OFFEND
DECEMBER 2009
FBI COMES UP WITH BIGGEST CONSPIRACY
YET: 400,000 ON WATCH LIST
COPS STEALING FROM THE INNOCENT
NOVEMBER 2009
JUSTICE
DEPARTMENT HARASSES PROGRESSIVE WEB SITE
LOCAL POLICE CREATING AN AMERICAN
STASI
BRITISH POLICE PUT PEACEFUL PROTESTERS
ON SPY WATCH LIST
AMAZING CNN INTERVIEW WITH 10 YEAR OLD WHO
REFUSED TO SAY PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE BECAUSE OF LACK OF GAY RIGHTS
LAPD'S SICK AD TO GET PEOPLE TO
SPY ON EACH OTHER
JURORS USED BIBLE AS JUSTIFICATION
FOR DEATH PENALTY
OBAMA BACKS MAJOR RESTRICTIONS
ON FREE SPEECH
OCTOBER 2009
HATE CRIME BILL'S SUBTLE ATTACK
ON FIRST AMENDMENT
ACLU CHALLENGES REQUIRED DNA SAMPLES
FROM ARRESTEES
FEES FOR CITIZENSHIP UP TEN FOLD
MICHIGAN WOMAN THREATENED WITH JAIL FOR
BABYSITTING FOR FRIENDS
PITTSBURGH POLICE ABUSE AT G20
MEETING
SEX OFFENDER LAWS ARE HURTING
OUR CHILDREN
EUROPE FUNDS ORWELLIAN SPY PROGRAM
THAT WOULD MONITOR 'ABNORMAL BEHAVIOR' ON WEB
SEPTEMBER 2009
MEDINA, WASHINGTON MONITORS EVERY
VEHICLE THAT ENTERS TOWN
THE TECHNOLOGICAL TOOLS OF DICTATORSHIP
AUGUST 2009
GAYS ARE TOO LATE TO DESTROY TRADITIONAL
MARRIAGE
OBAMA TO CONTINUE ILLEGAL BORDER
COMPUTER SEARCHES
BRITAIN: IT TAKES A THOUSAND SPYCAMS
TO SOLVE ONE CRIME
LONDON POLICE TO TRY NEW TACTIC
FOR PROTESTS: PUT WOMEN OFFICERS IN CHARGE
OBAMA ADMIN CLAIMED RIGHT TO SPY
ON CAR DEALERS' COMPUTERS
WHY ISN'T OBAMA GETTING RID OF
BUSH-APPOINTED U.S. ATTORNEYS?
DNA EVIDENCE CAN BE FABRICATED
SAY SCIENTISTS
SCALIA DOESN'T THINK INNOCENCE
IS GROUNDS TO OVERTURN CONVICTION
PHILADELPHIA BANS MULTITASKING
SKATEBOARDERS
WHEN LAWYERS TAKE OVER BURNING
MAN, YOU KNOW WE'RE IN TROUBLE
OVER FOUR THOUSAND PEOPLE A YEAR
WHO WON'T GET INVITED TO THE WHITE HOUSE TO HAVE BEER WITH THEIR
ARRESTING OFFICER
PRISONERS STEALING POEMS TO WIN
PRIZES
AMERICA'S OVER THE TOP SEX OFFENDER
LAWS
A NEW APPROACH TO PRISONS
MADD GONE MAD
COURT ORDERS CALIFORNIA TO CUT
NUMBER OF INMATES BY A QUARTER
TIP TO HENRY LOUIS GATES
CIA MAINTAINS UNCLASSIFIED DATA IS STILL
CLASSIFIED
FLORIDA POLICE CAUGHT ON VIDEOTAPE
IN CRASH COVERUP
WHITE LAWYER GETS THE GATES TREATMENT
WHERE BAD COPS COME FROM
JULY 2009
WHY DISORDERLY CONDUCT LAWS ARE
OUT OF ORDER
PROTECTING YOUR PRIVACY ON FACEBOOK
MCDONALD'S WORKER ARRESTED FOR
OVER-SALTING HAMBURGER
CALIFORNIA TOWN WANTS TO SPY ON
EVERY CAR ENTERING ITS BORDERS
THE FRAUD OF MANDATORY ARBITRATION
OBAMA'S CZARS SHORT CIRCUIT THE
CONSTITUTION
SWAT TEAMS OUT OF CONTROL
OBAMA JUNGEN: NOW THE MARINES
WANT IN
FEDERAL ABORTION LAW DISCRIMINATES
AGAINST POORER WOMEN
COURT TELLS DC POLICE THEY CAN'T
HAVE NEIGHBORHOOD CHECKPOINTS
COURT UPHOLDS YANKEE SPECTATORS'
RIGHT TO PEE
BEING VISITED IN PRISON
PLAN TO SPY ON EVERY CAR ON AMERICAN
ROADS
INMATE TELLS ABOUT AMERICA'S SECRET
PRISONS
FIREFIGHTERS ARE NOT LAW CLERKS
JUNE 2009
WHY MADISON WOULD BE HAVING NIGHTMARES
VIRGINIA CITIZENS BEING FINED
FOR SEEKING TO UNSEAT SUPERVISORS
PENTAGON DEFINED LEGAL PROTEST
AS TERRORISM
JURY AWARDS OUTRAGEOUS FINE IN
MUSIC DOWNLOADING CASE
NSA
ANALYSTS SPIED ON OWN WIVES AND GIRLFRIENDS
STUDY PUNCTURES MUSIC INDUSTRY
FILE SHARING MYTHS
NEW MONTANA GUN LAW PART OF MOVE
TO REVIVE TENTH AMENDMENT
FEDS FAIL TO REGULATE HEDGE FUND
GAMBLING BUT ZAPS ONLINE POKER PLAYERS
MOVIE CORPORADOS GET EVEN GREEDIER
JUDGE UPHOLDS UNCONSTITIONAL PHONE
SPYING
OPPOSITION GROWS TO TSA PHOTO STRIP SEARCHES
FEDERAL JUDGE RULES POLICE CAN
TAKE DNA SAMPLES WITHOUT A WARRANT
GENERAL TO BE PUT IN CHARGE OF
DOMESTIC SECURITY
BRITAIN EXPANDS SYSTEM OF SPY
CAMS
ANOTHER RED LIGHT CAM SCAM EXPOSED
MAY 2009
FCC CLAIMS RIGHT TO SEARCH YOUR
HOUSE WITHOUT WARRANT
BRITJUNGEN SPY ON NEIGHBORS
MINNESOTA REJECTS REAL ID CARD
TSA SHOWING PUBLIC DUMBED DOWN
VERSION OF VIRTUAL SEARCH MACHINE
BORN IN MOZAMBIQUE, WHITE MEDICAL
STUDENT HARASSED FOR CALLING HIMSELF AFRICAN-AMERICAN
HEY, IT WORKED FOR HITLER
DIDN'T IT?
EXPLORER
SCOUTS BEING TAUGHT HOW TO KILL
MORE PHOTOS
DRIVERS CHARGE POLICE PIRACY IN
TEXAS
MASSACHUSETTS POLICE TAPPING INTO
PRIVATE DATA OF CELEBRITIES
FEDERAL JUDGE PUNISHES TEACHER
FOR CALLING CREATIONISM 'NONSENSE'
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT HAS DIFFERENT
RULES FOR BACKERS OF ISRAEL AND PALESTINE
NEW BOOK ON DC MADAM CASE
FEINGOLD GIVES OBAMA A "D"
FOR HANDLING OF SECRETS ISSUES
GROWING OLD BEHIND BARS
APRIL 2009
ADMINISTRATION PLANS TO FORCE
COMPUTERIZED STRIP SEARCHES ON ALL AIR PASSENGERS
FBI ABUSING DNA INFORMATION
HOMELAND POLICE SAY SUPPORT OF
SECOND OR TENTH AMENDMENT COULD BE SIGN OF POLITICAL EXTREMISM
JUSTICE THOMAS THINKS AMERICANS
HAVE TOO MANY RIGHTS
THE FLIP SIDE OF ZERO TOLERANCE
CONSERVATIVE BAPTIST PREACHER
SAYS
HE WAS ABUSED BY BORDER PATROL
ANOTHER GOVERNMENT FUNDED FUSION
CENTER BAD MOUTHING DEMOCRACY
ZERO TOLERANCE CLAIMS A VICTIM
BILL WOULD ALLOW PRESIDENT TO
SHUT DOWN INTERNET
CITIZENS FIGHTING BACK AGAINST
SPY CAMS
CONGRESS BANNED RESELLING CHILDREN'S
BOOKS PRINTED BEFORE 1985
MARCH 2009
RIGHT TO COUNSEL SLIPPING AWAY
SOUTH LEADS NATION IN LOCK UPS
- ESPECIALLY BLACKS
15 REASONS WHY THE DRINKING AGE
SHOULD BE 18
STUDENT LOSES FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS BY
DISCUSSING SECOND AMENDMENT
A CENSUS OF GITMO PRISONERS
LOCAL HEROES: MISSISSIPPI HOUSE
VOTES TO BAN TICKET CAMERAS
LOCAL HEROES: JURIES NULLIFY LAWS
THEY DON'T LIKE
NEW YORK CITY CUTS CRIME &
LOWERS NUMBER IN PRISON
FEBRUARY 2009
OBAMA TO KEEP USING RENDITIONS
NY POLICE SHOW BLATANT BIAS IN
STOP & FRISK
DC LETS YOU HAVE YOUR SECOND AMENDMENT
RIGHTS AS LONG AS YOU TAKE FIVE HOURS OF TRAINING, PASS A TEST,
GET A BACKGROUND CHECK AND THIRTEEN PAGES OF OTHER STUFF
ACTIVIST UNMASKS HIMSELF AS FBI
INFORMANT IN G.O.P. CONVENTION CASE
LOCAL HEROES: SOUTH DAKOTA COURT
RULES CURSING AT COP PROTECTED SPEECH
FLIGHT ATTENDANTS ABUSING TERROR
LAWS
JANUARY 2009
CALIFORNIA USING MARINES FOR CIVILIAN
POLICE WORK
FBI WANTS TO SPY ON INTERNET
JESSE VENTURA ON THE CIA'S INTEREST
IN MINNESOTA
FBI USING CELLPHONES AS HIDDEN
MIKES
MPAA PROPOSES VICIOUS INTERNET
SPYING, BLACKLISTING
RECORDING INDUSTRY TERRORIZE TRANSPLANT
PATIENT OVER DOWNLOADS
CLOSING GITMO IS FINE, BUT WHAT
IS OBAMA GOING TO DO ABOUT HIS OTHER 27,000 ILLEGAL PRISONERS?
DECEMBER 2008
PRISONS IN NORWAY
CONSTITUTIONAL DEAD LETTERS: HOW
OUR RIGHTS DISAPPEARED
PUBLIC DEFENDERS IN SEVEN STATES
REFUSING NEW CASES OR SUING TO PREVENT THEM
FEDERAL JUDGE OKAYS APARTHEID
STYLE NEIGHBORHOOD BLOCKADES
ACLU DETAILS STEPS NEW PRESIDENT
SHOULD TAKE TO RESTORE LIBERTIES
ACLU PRESSES BUSH REGIME ON DOMESTIC
MILITARY USE
MOST AMERICANS NOW OPPOSE MANDATORY
MINIMUM SENTENCES
OCTOBER 2008
MARYLAND CLASSIFIED 53 NONVIOLENT
ACTIVISTS AS TERRORISTS
HOMELAND POLICE PROCEEDING WITH NEW PLAN
TO SPY ON YOU
YOU CAN'T EVEN GO TO THE HOMELAND
SECURITY WEBSITE
WITHOUT THEM SPYING ON YOU
HOMELAND POLICE FIND NEW WAY TO
INSULT CONSTITUTION
AUTOMATED SPYING ON EVERYONE &
EVERYTHING
BUSH REGIME THUMBS NOSE AT WHISTLEBLOWER
ACT
MASSIVE TAKEDOWN OF ANTI-SCIENTOLOGY
VIDEOS ON YOUTUBE
TEXAS SCHOOLS PUT ANKLE BRACELETS
ON TRUANTS
DENVER POLICE CONTINUE TO IGNORE
CITY'S WILL ON POT ENFORCEMENT
FREE MARKET CAPITALISM ENDS ON
THE SIDEWALK
BUSH'S PLAN TO EXPAND SPYING ON
INNOCENT AMERICANS
AMERICAN ARTIST ARRESTED AT U.S.
BORDER
FOR DRAWNG THIS PICTURE
NYC HAS TO PAY $2 MILLION FOR
5O FALSE PROTEST ARRESTS
RECOVERED HISTORY: WHERE AMERICA'S
DRINKING LAW CAME FROM
LOUISIANA GOVERNOR MAKES IT'S
OK TO DISCRIMINATE AGAINST GAYS
COLLEGE PRESIDENTS SAY IT'S TIME
TO RETHINK DRINKING AGE
HOMELAND POLICE ABUSE PASSENGERS
AT JFK AIRPORT
SEPTEMBER 2008
DENVER COPS SELLING T-SHIRTS CELEBRATING
THEIR BRUTALITY AT DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
AUGUST 2008
BUSH REGIME PLANS TO EXPAND SPYING
ON AMERICAN CITIZENS, GROUPS
OHIO COURT SAYS COPS CAN'T IGNORE
WARRANT REQUIREMENT
ARKANSAS MAYOR TRIES FASCISM TO
CURB VIOLENCE
MOVIE MAKERS WANT TO SEIZE CONTROL
OF YOUR TV
FBI TRIED TO HIDE QUESTIONS ABOUT
DNA ACCURACY
MARYLAND STATE POLICE SPIED ON,
INFILTRATED ACTIVIST ORGANIZATIONS
COPS SEIZE CARS WITHOUT CONVICTIONS;
TAKE THEM FOR PRIVATE USE
HOMELAND POLICE ABUSE PASSENGERS
AT JFK AIRPORT
Emily Feder, AlterNet
- I arrived at JFK Airport two weeks ago after a short vacation
to Syria and presented my American passport for re-entry to the
United States. After 28 hours of traveling, I had settled into
a hazy awareness that this was the last, most familiar leg of
a long journey. I exchanged friendly words with the Homeland
Security official who was recording my name in his computer.
He scrolled through my passport, and when his thumb rested on
my Syrian visa, he paused. Jerking toward the door of his glass-enclosed
booth, he slid my passport into a dingy green plastic folder
and walked down the hallway, motioning for me to follow with
a flick of his wrist. Where was he taking me, I asked him. "You'll
find out," he said. . .
No one who had been detained
knew precisely why they were there. A few people were led into
private rooms; others were questioned out in the open at desks
a few feet from the crowd and then allowed to pass through customs.
Some were sent to another section of the holding area with large
computer screens and cameras, and then brought back. . .
There was one British
tourist in the group. Paul (also not his real name) was traveling
with three friends who had passed through customs soon after
their plane landed and were waiting for him on the other side
of the metal barrier; he suspected he had been detained because
of his dark skin. When he asked if he could go to the bathroom,
one of the guards said, "I wouldn't." "What if
someone has to?" I asked. "They will just have to hold
it," the guard responded with a smile. Paul began to cry.
I watched as he, over the course of four hours, went from feeling
exuberant about his trip to New York to despising the entire
country. "I speak the Queen's English," he said to
me. "I'm third-generation British. I came to America because
I've always wanted to come here, and now they've got me so scared
that all I want to do is go home. We're paying for your stupid
war anyway.". . .
Within a few hours of
my arrival, I saw at least 10 people denied the right to use
the bathroom or buy food and water. . .
After four hours, I finally
demanded to speak to the guards' supervisor, and he was called
down. I asked if the detainees could file a formal complaint.
He said there were complaint forms (which, in English and Spanish,
direct one to the Department of Homeland Security's Web site,
where one must enter extensive personal information in order
to file a "Trip Summary") but initially refused to
hand them out or to give me his telephone number. "The Department
of Homeland Security is understaffed, underfunded, and I have
men here who are doing 14-hour days." He tried to intimidate
me when I wrote down his name -- "So, you're writing down
our names. Well, we have more on you" -- and asked me questions
about my address and my profession in front of the rest of the
people detained. I pointed out a few of the families who had
missed their flights and had been waiting seven hours. His voice
barely controlled, his lip curled into a smirk. . .
WHAT OUR PRISON POLICIES HAVE
COST US
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
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 election of the U.S. Attorney General - and than granting
the AG some role in the naming of U.S. Attorneys. Strange as
this may seem, the election of a reform-minded local district
attorney has been one of the most effective approaches in dealing
with urban corruption and might well have the same effect on
the national level. Instead of having one highly ambitious politician
in the White House you would have two such politicians in Washington,
with one always worried about what the other would find looking
through the files
ELECTING AN ATTORNEY GENERAL
http://prorev.com/electag.htm
WHY EXCESSIVE INCARCERATION DOESN'T
WORK
EZEKIEL EDWARDS, DMI BLOG -
The number of inmates incarcerated for drug possession between
1980 and 2005 grew by more than 1000% and now cost $8.3 billion
dollars every year. As a result, between 1985 and 2004, states
increased spending on corrections by 202%, while spending on
public assistance decreased by more than 60%, and spending on
higher education, Medicaid, and secondary/elementary education
grew by just 3%, 47 %, and 55% respectively.
With an eye towards our prison epidemic,
the Vera Institute of Justice released a report recently on imprisonment
in America titled "Reconsidering Incarceration: New Directions
for Reducing Crime". Here is a summary of its findings:
- Research shows that while the U.S. experienced
a dramatic drop in crime between 1992 and 1997, imprisonment
was responsible for just 25% of that reduction.
- The remaining 75% was caused by other
factors, including lower unemployment, higher wages, more education,
more high school graduates, fewer young persons in the population,
increase in the number of police officers (provided that the
number of police did not necessarily translate into more arrests),
and decreases in crack cocaine markets.
- The impact of incarceration on crime
is inconsistent from one study to the next (research suggests
that a 10% increase in incarceration could lead to no difference
in the crime rate, or a 22% decrease, or a decrease only in property
crime). The most consistent figure is that a 10% increase in
imprisonment results in a 2% to 4% drop in crime rates.
- Researchers focusing on specific neighborhoods
found that more incarceration can actually increase crime rates,
arguing that "high rates of imprisonment break down the
social and family bonds that guide individuals away from crime,
remove adults who would otherwise nurture children, deprive communities
of income, reduce future income potential, and engender a deep
resentment toward the legal system. As a result, as communities
become less capable of maintaining social order through families
or social groups, crime rates go up."
-Increases in prison populations in states
which already have large prison populations have less impact
on crime (and eventually begin to increase crime rates) than
in states with smaller prison populations.
- Analysts are nearly unanimous in their
conclusion that continued growth in incarceration will prevent
considerably fewer, if any, crimes, and at substantially greater
costs to taxpayers.
- The more employment, the less crime.
Imprisonment reduces employment, and hence can foster more crime.
"Incarceration creates problems of low earnings and irregular
employment for individuals after release from prison by dissuading
employers from hiring them, disqualifying them from certain professions,
eroding job skills, limiting acquisition from work experience,
creating behaviors inconsistent with work routines outside prison,
and undermining social connections to good job opportunities."
Moreover, employers may shun neighborhoods with high incarceration
rates, and prison can generate connections to illegal rather
than legal employment. . .
- Research showed that a 10% increase in
real wages produced significant decreases in both real property
and violent crime.
- An increase in citizens' education levels
were associated with lower crime rates . . . Researchers argued
that a 1% increase in male high school graduation rates would
save the country $1.4 billion through crime reduction. Moreover,
prison-based education programs were found to dramatically reduce
recidivism rates. . .
FERUARY 2007
Track your spouse, employees or children
24/7
JUDGE CRACKS DOWN ON NYPD VIDEOTAPING
OF CITIZENS
JIM DWYER, NY TIMES - In a rebuke of a
surveillance practice greatly expanded by the New York Police
Department after the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal judge ruled
that the police must stop the routine videotaping of people at
public gatherings unless there is an indication that unlawful
activity may occur. Four years ago, at the request of the city,
the same judge, Charles S. Haight Jr., gave the police greater
authority to investigate political, social and religious groups.
In yesterday's ruling, Judge Haight, of
United States District Court in Manhattan, found that by videotaping
people who were exercising their right to free speech and breaking
no laws, the Police Department had ignored the milder limits
he had imposed on it in 2003.
Citing two events in 2005 - a march in
Harlem and a demonstration by homeless people in front of the
home of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg - the judge said the city
had offered scant justification for videotaping the people involved.
. . While he called the police conduct "egregious,"
Judge Haight also offered an unusual judicial mea culpa, taking
responsibility for his own words in a 2003 order that he conceded
had not been "a model of clarity."
The restrictions on videotaping do not
apply to bridges, tunnels, airports, subways or street traffic,
Judge Haight noted, but are meant to control police surveillance
at events where people gather to exercise their rights under
the First Amendment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/nyregion/16police.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
OVER A QUARTER MILLION NYC BLACKS STOPPED
AND FRISKED BY CITY COPS LAST YEAR
ALISON GENDAR, NY DAILY NEWS
- The NYPD conducted more than 500,000 stop-and-frisks last year,
with blacks five times more likely to be searched than whites.
. . Blacks accounted for 52% of the 508,540 individuals stopped
and checked last year, according to data released by the City
Council's Public Safety Committee. That percentage has changed
little in nearly a decade - it was 50% in 2000 and 52% in 1998.
But the total number of frisks soared from the 97,296 conducted
in 2002. Among the top reasons cops gave for stopping an individual
were that the suspect was in a high crime area or had made "furtive
movements," according to the statistics. Hispanics accounted
for 29% of the searches last year and whites 10%, the data showed.
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/494375p-416457c.html
JANUARY 2007
SUPERMAX BRUTALITY DRIVING PRISONERS
CRAZY
JEFFERY KLUGER, TIME - There's
no such thing as a good day for a prisoner at the highest level
of security within the Ohio State Penitentiary, a 504-bed supermax
prison in Youngstown, Ohio. Every inmate lives alone in a 7-ft.
by 14-ft. cell that resembles nothing so much as a large, concrete
closet, equipped with a sink, a toilet, a desk and a molded stool
and sleep platform covered by a thin mattress. The solid metal
door is outfitted with strips around the sides and bottom, muffling
conversation with inmates in adjacent cells. Three times a day,
a tray of food is delivered and is eaten alone. The prisoner
may spend 23 hours a day in lockdown, emerging to exercise once
a day. The lights in the cell never go off, although they may
be dimmed a bit at night.
If there's not much to like about
the conditions in Youngstown, there's not much to like about
the people confined there either. These are the men corrections
folks like to call "the worst of the worst," the kind
of felons who dealt drugs or led gangs or killed on the outside
and continued to do so in prison. For them, maximum security
would not be enough--only supermax would do. And say what you
will about the draconian environment, it keeps them under control.
But that level of control may
be counterproductive. It's possible that the very steps we're
taking to keep society safe and such prisoners in check are achieving
just the opposite. The U.S. holds about 2 million people under
lock and key, and 20,000 of them are confined in the 31 supermaxes
operated by the states and the Federal Government. That may represent
only 1% of the inmate population, but it's a volatile 1%. Push
any punishment too far and mental breakdown--or at least a claim
of mental breakdown--is sure to follow. When that happens, a
constitutional challenge can't be far behind.
In December, officials in Texas
and California conceded that the suicide rates in their prisons
are on the rise, with the majority occurring among inmates in
solitary. This prompted an outcry against both systems. . .
But is it constitutionally permissible?
And even if it is, is this the kind of open-ended mental-health
experiment the government should be running? "We have to
ask ourselves why we're doing this," says psychiatrist Stuart
Grassian, a former faculty member at the Harvard Medical School
and a consultant in criminal cases. "These aren't a bunch
of cold, controlled James Cagneys. We're taking criminals who
are already unstable and driving them crazy."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1582304,00.html
THE HIGH COSTS OF BEING RELEASED FROM
PRISON
EZEKIEL EDWARDS, DMI BLOG - As
a result of our country's love affair with incarceration, our
prison population has expanded mightily, as have, consequently,
the number of people leaving prison each day. With more than
600,000 releases a year from prison (and another whopping 10
million people released from jail who were either serving sentences
of less than one year or who had been awaiting trial), the urgency
with which America must direct attention to the reentry of prisoners
into society cannot be overstated.
The importance of developing
extensive, multi-tiered reentry programs for ex-prisoners was
brought sharply into focus earlier this month when the New England
Journal of Medicine published an article called "Release
from Prison - A High Risk of Death for Former Inmates",
documenting the findings of a study comparing the mortality rate
of over 30,000 ex-prisoners (62% white, 87% male) in Washington
State upon their reentry into society to other state residents.
Specifically, the study found
that the risk of death among former inmates during the first
two weeks after their release was 12.7 times that of other state
residents. . . The disparity between mortality rates of ex-prisoners
and other state residents was noticeably higher among females,
for inmates between the ages of 25-44, and for drug addicts.
The leading causes of death for people upon leaving prison were
drug overdose, cardiovascular disease, homicide, and suicide.
The statistic which, by itself,
demonstrates the critical importance of immediate intervention
for recently released inmates is that in the first two weeks,
as mentioned above, the mortality rate is 2,589 per 100,000,
but by weeks 3-4, it drops to 614 (which is still almost 3 times
the average rate, but vastly lower than the figure in weeks 1-2).
This suggests that while long-term intervention is important,
the most crucial juncture for transitional care is when ex-prisoners
first set foot outside the gates.
http://www.dmiblog.net/archives/2007/01/leaving_prison_walking_the_pla.html
THE ABUSE OF ROADBLOCKS
RADLEY BALKO, REASON - Police
in Escondido recently set up a DUI roadblock from 6pm to 12am.
The tally:
1,600 cars stopped,
931 drivers screened,
82 drivers pulled aside for extra
scrutiny,
32 vehicles impounded,
52 tickets issued to drivers
other than those whose vehicles were impounded,
and, drum-roll please....
...one DUI arrest.
Given that the Supreme Court
has only ruled on the legitimacy of roadblock checkpoints for
DUI policing (it has declared them illegal for the purposes of
drug policing, for example), you have to wonder at what point
what these roadblocks are achieving in practice begins to make
them constitutionally dubious, despite the fact that their stated
purpose may be.
http://www.reason.com/staff/hitandrun/143.html
COPS USE TASERS ON TOP OF,
RATHER THAN INSTEAD OF, GUNS
AP
- The Houston Chronicle reported that Houston police officers
have used Tasers more than 1,000 times in the past two years.
But in 95 percent of those cases, they were not used to defuse
situations in which suspects wielded weapons and deadly force
clearly would have been justified. Instead, the newspaper reported,
more than half the Taser incidents escalated from relatively
common police calls, such as traffic stops, disturbance and nuisance
complaints, and reports of suspicious people.
In more than 350 of the first
900 Taser incidents, no person was charged - the case was dropped
by prosecutors or dismissed by judges and juries. Of those people
who were Tasered and charged with crimes, most were accused of
misdemeanors or nonviolent felonies, the newspaper said
NOVEMBER 2006
POLICE MURDER OF 88-YEAR OLD
WOMAN IN RAID IS NO EXCEPTION
RADLEY BALKO, ATLANTA JOURNAL
CONSTITUTION - The botched Atlanta raid that ended in the shooting
death of 88-year-old Kathryn Johnston was sad and tragic, but
unfortunately, it was neither uncommon nor unpredictable. . .
Johnston is just one of at least 40 innocent people killed in
botched raids over the last 20 years in America. Worse, there
are dozens more cases of low-level offenders, bystanders - and
police officers killed or injured. . .
In 2005, for example, Baltimore's
Cheryl Lynn Noel, a mother and churchgoing woman, was shot to
death when she mistook raiding police officers for intruders.
She was holding a legal handgun when they kicked open her bedroom
door. That raid was conducted after police investigators found
marijuana seeds in the family trash.
Last January, Fairfax, Va., optometrist
Sal Culosi was accidentally shot and killed when a SWAT team
apprehended him. He was under investigation for wagering on football
games with a group of friends.
The Johnston raid isn't even
the first such tragedy in Georgia. In 2000, Riverdale's Lynette
Gayle Jackson called the police after her home had been invaded
by burglars. While investigating the break-in, police found a
small amount of cocaine that belonged to Jackson's boyfriend.
A few weeks later, police raided
Jackson's home, looking for her boyfriend. Jackson, understandably
afraid after having been robbed less than a month earlier, was
holding a gun when police entered her bedroom. The raiding officers
opened fire and shot her to death.
In 2005, Stockbridge's Roy and
Belinda Baker were startled from their sleep by a raiding police
team that destroyed the couple's front door with a battering
ram. The Bakers were handcuffed and made to stand on their porch
at gunpoint. Police had mistaken the Bakers' home for the house
next door. . .
Forced-entry raids breach the
centuries-old idea that a man's home is his castle, and that
the government can only violate that sanctity under the most
extreme of circumstances. Yet over the last 25 years, we've seen
a staggering 1,300 percent increase in paramilitary style forced-entry
raids in the United States - there are about 50,000 per year
now. The majority of these raids are for proactive drug policing,
such as executing search warrants.
What's more, the very nature
of drug policing requires investigative tools that frequently
produce bad information. One example is the use of informants,
notoriously shady characters often involved in the drug trade
themselves. Police maintain that they rarely use a single informant's
tip as the basis for a drug raid, but dozens of botched raids
and a stack of innocent bodies over the years suggest otherwise.
Combine this propensity for bad
information with violent, highly confrontational forced-entry
raids, and the lack of oversight and real accountability that
pervades the entire process and you've created a system ripe
for tragic outcomes such as the one we saw Nov. 21 in Atlanta.
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2006/12/04/1204edbalko.html#
HATRED OF MUSLIMS RUNS HIGH
REUTERS - When radio host Jerry
Klein suggested that all Muslims in the United States should
be identified with a crescent-shape tattoo or a distinctive arm
band, the phone lines jammed instantly. The first caller to the
station in Washington said that Klein must be "off his rocker."
The second congratulated him and added: "Not only do you
tattoo them in the middle of their forehead but you ship them
out of this country ... they are here to kill us."
Another said that tattoos, armbands
and other identifying markers such as crescent marks on driver's
licenses, passports and birth certificates did not go far enough.
"What good is identifying them?" he asked. "You
have to set up encampments like during World War Two with the
Japanese and Germans."
At the end of the one-hour show,
rich with arguments on why visual identification of "the
threat in our midst" would alleviate the public's fears,
Klein revealed that he had staged a hoax. . . "I can't believe
any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with
anything I said," he told his audience on the AM station
630 WMAL, which covers Washington, Northern Virginia and Maryland
"For me to suggest to tattoo
marks on people's bodies, have them wear armbands, put a crescent
moon on their driver's license on their passport or birth certificate
is disgusting. It's beyond disgusting. Because basically what
you just did was show me how the German people allowed what happened
to the Jews to happen ... We need to separate them, we need to
tattoo their arms, we need to make them wear the yellow Star
of David, we need to put them in concentration camps, we basically
just need to kill them all because they are dangerous.".
. .
A Gallup poll this summer of
more than 1,000 Americans showed that 39 percent were in favor
of requiring Muslims in the United States, including American
citizens, to carry special identification. Roughly a quarter
of those polled said they would not want to live next door to
a Muslim and a third thought that Muslims in the United States
sympathized with al Qaeda, the extremist group behind the September
11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061201/lf_nm/usa_muslims_fear_dc_1&printer=1
THE HUMAN COST OF NO KNOCK RAIDS
DAVID BORDEN, DRUG WAR CHRONICLE
- One of the regularly repeating outrages in the drug war is
that of innocent people terrorized, physically harmed or killed
in drug raids gone bad. Retired Boston minister Accelyne Williams,
felled by a heart attack after a SWAT-style squadron battered
his door down and tackled him to the floor; 23-year old Anthony
Diotaiuto, shot ten times by a SWAT team in Sunrise, Florida;
Harlem's Alberta Spruill, dead from a heart attack after police
detonated a flash grenade in her home; many others, from many
places, their lives and deaths touching many others far and wide.
No-knock drug raids are demonstrably
dangerous, carrying a predictable risk of injury or death to
innocent or otherwise undeserving victims. Nevertheless, police
forces around the country continue with their immorally reckless
ways despite the continuing carnage. This week's Supreme Court
ruling, then, paving the way for even more such behavior, is
especially unfortunate. Though there is still technically a distinction
between regular and "no-knock" warrants, a majority
on the court has decided there should be no penalty -- no exclusion
of evidence -- when police forces without authorization to do
a no-knock raid go ahead and do one. Without such a penalty,
and with no criminal penalties attaching to levels of recklessness
by police officers that would land any ordinary citizen behind
bars or in civil court facing liability of millions, the problem
is bound to increase.
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/440/realworld.shtml
POLICE USE TORTURE GUN ON STUDENT WHO
FAILS TO SHOW ID IN LIBRARY
SARA TAYLOR DAILY BRUIN - An
incident in which a UCLA student was stunned at least four times
with a Taser has left the UCLA community questioning whether
the university police officers' use of force was an appropriate
response to the situation. Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a UCLA student,
was repeatedly stunned with a Taser and then taken into custody
when he did not exit the CLICC Lab in Powell Library in a timely
manner. Community Service Officers had asked Tabatabainejad to
leave after he failed to produce his BruinCard during a random
check at around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday. UCPD Assistant Chief of Police
Jeff Young said the checks are a standard procedure in the library
after 11 p.m. . .
Young said the CSOs on duty in
the library at the time went to get UCPD officers when Tabatabainejad
did not immediately leave, and UCPD officers resorted to use
of the Taser when Tabatabainejad did not do as he was told.
A six-minute video showed Tabatabainejad
audibly screaming in pain as he was stunned several times with
a Taser, each time for three to five seconds. He was told repeatedly
to stand up and stop fighting, and was told that if he did not
do so he would "get Tased again.". . .
The officers used the "drive
stun" setting in the Taser, which delivers a shock to a
specific part of the body with the front of the Taser, Young
said. . .
According to a study published
in the Lancet Medical Journal in 2001, a charge of three to five
seconds can result in immobilization for five to 15 minutes,
which would mean that Tabatabainejad could have been physically
unable to stand when the officers demanded that he do so.
"It is a real mistake to
treat a Taser as some benign thing that painlessly brings people
under control," said Peter Eliasberg, managing attorney
at the ACLU of Southern California. "The Taser can be incredibly
violent and result in death," Eliasberg said.
According to an ACLU report,
148 people in the United States and Canada have died as a result
of the use of Tasers since 1999.
http://dailybruin.com/news/articles.asp?id=38960
VIDEO OF INCIDENT
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g7zlJx9u2E&eurl=
STUART SILVERSTEIN, LA TIMES
- The UCLA student stunned with a Taser by a campus police officer
has hired a high-profile civil rights lawyer who plans to file
a brutality lawsuit. . . Attorney Stephen Yagman said he plans
to file a federal civil rights lawsuit accusing the UCLA police
of "brutal excessive force," as well as false arrest.
The lawyer also provided the first public account of the Tuesday
night incident at UCLA's Powell Library from the student, Mostafa
Tabatabainejad, a 23-year-old senior.
He said that Tabatabainejad,
when asked for his ID after 11 p.m. Tuesday, declined because
he thought he was being singled out because of his Middle Eastern
appearance. Yagman said Tabatabainejad is of Iranian descent
but is a U.S.-born resident of Los Angeles.
The lawyer said Tabatabainejad
eventually decided to leave the library but when an officer refused
the student's request to take his hand off him, the student fell
limp to the floor, again to avoid participating in what he considered
a case of racial profiling. After police started firing the Taser,
Tabatabainejad tried to "get the beating, the use of brutal
force, to stop by shouting and causing people to watch. Generally,
police don't want to do their dirties in front of a lot of witnesses."
He said Tabatabainejad was hit
by the Taser five times and suffered "moderate to severe
contusions" on his right side.
UCLA officials declined to respond
directly to Yagman's statements, saying they still were conducting
their internal investigation of the incident. . .
UCLA also said that Tabatabainejad
refused repeated requests by a community service officer and
regular campus police to provide identification or to leave.
UCLA said the police decided to use the Taser to incapacitate
Tabatabainejad only after the student urged other library patrons
to join his resistance. Some witnesses disputed that account,
saying that when campus police arrived, Tabatabainejad had begun
to walk toward the door.
BRIAN DOHERTY, REASON, 2005 -
Tasers, "nonlethal" dart guns with a range of about
15 feet that deliver 50,000-volt electric shocks for five seconds
at a time, are under fire for their roles in several civilian
deaths and police injuries. About 6,000 law enforcement agencies,
including officers at nine public schools in Tempe, Arizona,
have Tasers in their arsenals. A November report from Amnesty
International on Taser use in the U.S. found that the weapons
"are used on unarmed suspects in 80 percent of the cases,
for verbal non-compliance in 36 percent, and for cases involving
'deadly assault' only 3 percent of the time."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/36579.html
NYC POLICE CHIEF DECLARES WAR ON DEMONSTRATORS
RUSSELL BERMAN, NY SUN - The
New York City Bar Association is coming out against a Police
Department proposal to regulate protests by groups of 10 or more
pedestrians or bicyclists. The proposals, which the department
revised after criticism over the summer, would require parade
permits from groups of 10 or more pedestrians or bicyclists who
plan to travel more than two city blocks without obeying traffic
laws. The police also want to mandate permits for any organized
procession of 30 or more vehicles, including bicycles, regardless
of whether they follow traffic laws.
In testimony to be submitted
at a public hearing today, the bar association said the department's
new definition of a "parade" that requires a permit
is "a serious and unwarranted infringement on associational
freedom." Urging that the proposals be withdrawn, the association
said the City Council - and not the police - should regulate
parade permits. . . The plans have been seen as an attempt to
crack down on the frequent "Critical Mass" bike rides
that take over city streets. The New York Civil Liberties Union
also is opposing the new rules. "There is no justification
for them, and they impose an onerous burden on protest,"
the executive director of the NYCLU, Donna Lieberman, said yesterday.
http://www.nysun.com/article/44118|
UK COPS TO HAVE CAMERAS IN HEADGEAR
REGISTER, UK - Police officers
in London have begun to use a camera mounted on their headgear.
. . Officers in the 19 safer neighborhood teams in the Haringey
area have been issued with eight cameras, each the size of an
AA battery, that record video images to a special utility belt.
They are activated by a switch on the belt. The equipment, which
costs around L1,800 per pack. . . can store up to 12 hours of
video. An extra battery pack can extend this to up to 400 hours,
although this makes the equipment much heavier.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/21/met_police_heargear_cameras/
HOUSTON POLICE ABUSE DEMONSTRATORS SUPPORTING
JANITORS' UNION
ANNA DENISE SOLIS, HOUSTON -
We sat down in the intersection and the horses came immediately.
It was really violent. They arrested us, and when we got to jail,
we were pretty beat up. Not all of us got the medical attention
we needed. The worst was a protester named Julia, who is severely
diabetic. We kept telling the guards about her condition but
they only gave her a piece of candy. During roll call, she started
to complain about light-headedness. Finally she just collapsed
unconscious on the floor. It was like she just dropped dead.
The guard saw it but just kept going through the roll. Susan
ran over there and took her pulse while the other inmates were
yelling for help, saying we need to call somebody. The medical
team strolled over, taking their own sweet time. She was unconscious
for like 4 or 5 minutes.
They really tried to break us
down. The first night they put the temperature so high that a
woman - one of the other inmates - had a seizure. The second
night they made it freezing and took away many of our blankets.
We didn't have access to the cots so we had to sleep on a concrete
floor. When we would finally fall asleep the guards would come
and yell 'Are you Anna Denise Solas? Are you so and so?' One
of the protesters had a fractured wrist from the horses. She
had a cast on and when she would fall asleep the guard would
kick the cast to wake her up. She was in a lot of pain.
The guards would tell us: 'This
is what you get for protesting.' One of them said, 'Who gives
a shit about janitors making 5 dollars an hour? Lots of people
make that much.' The other inmates - there were a lot of prostitutes
in there - said that they had never seen the jail this bad. The
guards told them: 'We're trying to teach the protesters a lesson.'
Nobody was getting out of jail because the processing was so
slow. They would tell the prostitutes that everything is the
protesters' fault. They were trying to turn everybody against
each other.
I felt like I was in some Third
World jail, not in America. One of the guards called us 'whores'
and if we talked back, we didn't get any lunch. We didn't even
have the basic necessities. It felt like a police state, like
marshal law, nobody had rights. Some of us had been arrested
in other cities, and it was never this bad before.
http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2006/11/update_on_antiunion_brutality.php
AVERAGE BRIT FILMED MORE THAN 300 TIMES
A DAY; RECORDING CONVERSATIONS NEXT
TIMES, UK - The microphones can
detect conversations 100 yards away and record aggressive exchanges
before they become violent. The devices are used at 300 sites
in Holland and police, councils and transport officials in London
have shown an interest in installing them before the 2012 Olympics.
The interest in the equipment comes amid growing concern that
Britain is becoming a "surveillance society". It was
recently highlighted that there are more than 4.2m CCTV cameras,
with the average person being filmed more than 300 times a day.
The addition of microphones would take surveillance into uncharted
territory. . .
The equipment can pick up aggressive
tones on the basis of 12 factors, including decibel level, pitch
and the speed at which words are spoken. Background noise is
filtered out, enabling the camera to focus on specific conversations
in public places.
If the aggressive behavior continues,
police can intervene before an incident escalates. Privacy laws
in Holland limit the recording of sound to short bursts. Derek
van der Vorst, director of Sound Intelligence, the company that
created the technology, said: "It is technically capable
of being live 24 hours a day and recording 24 hours a day. It
really depends on the privacy laws in a particular country."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2471987,00.html
SEPTEMBER 2006
ID PROGRAM WILL COST STATES $11 BILLION
DARRYL FEARS WASHINGTON - The cost to consumers for helping
to secure America became clearer yesterday as a coalition of
state groups tallied the bill for implementing the Real ID Act
and federal officials divulged the price that some of its workers
must pay for new smart cards. In a report released by the National
Governors Association, the National Conference of State Legislatures
and the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators,
state motor vehicle officials estimated it would cost more than
$11 billion over five years to implement the technology required
by the Real ID Act. . .
Under the law, states must start
to re-enroll about 250 million holders of U.S. driver's licenses
after May 2008. The states must train workers to verify copies
of original birth certificates, Social Security cards, marriage
certificates and various identification documents.
"The days of going to the
DMV and getting your license on the same day are probably over,"
said David Quam, director of federal relations for the National
Governors Association. "You'll have to take all your documents
as if you were applying for the first time. What this comes down
to is that more people will be in DMV offices spending more time
to get an ID."
DAVID LYKKEN AND THE POLYGRAPH MYTH
SECRECY NEWS - David T. Lykken,
a psychologist who did pioneering research and public education
on the limits and abuses of polygraph testing, died last week
at age 78. With exceptional clarity he demonstrated that the
polygraph is not a "lie detector" but simply a recorder
of physiological responses to verbal stimuli. And, he explained,
there is no set of physiological responses that corresponds uniquely
to deception.
That does not mean the polygraph
is worthless. There is empirical evidence to support its use
in the investigation of specific incidents, where "guilty
knowledge" of particular details may be usefully revealed
by the polygraph.
"The use of the [polygraph]
by the police as an investigative tool, while subject to abuse
like any other tool, is not inherently objectionable," Lykken
wrote.
(Not only that, "It seems
reasonable to conclude that whether O.J. Simpson did or did not
kill his wife could have been determined with high confidence
using a Guilty Knowledge Test administered within hours after
he was first in police custody.")
On the other hand, he said, the
use of the polygraph for security screening of personnel, as
is commonly done by U.S. intelligence agencies, cannot reliably
achieve its purported goal of identifying spies or traitors and
in many cases becomes counterproductive. . .
It is a sign of our times that
the scientific critique of polygraph testing has gained almost
no traction on government policy. To the contrary, the use of
the polygraph to perform the sort of screening that Lykken termed
a "menace in American life" is actually on the rise.
"From FY 2002 through 2005,
the FBI, DEA, and ATF conducted approximately 28,000 pre-employment
polygraph examinations" as well as tens of thousands more
for other purposes, according to a major new report from the
Justice Department Inspector General.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/polygraph/dojpoly.pdf
COMMUNITY BASED JUSTICE COMES TO THE
BRONX
AUBREY FOX, BRONX COMMUNITY SOLUTIONS
- After decades of cynicism about rehabilitative approaches in
the criminal justice system, in the last fifteen years there's
been a remarkable resurgence of creative court experiments to
address problems like drug addiction, mental illness, juvenile
delinquency and quality-of-life crime, as well as a new focus
on improving court-community relationships. . .
Problem-solving courts have been
around since 1989 (when the first drug court was created in Dade
County, Florida), and they've reached a particularly interesting
crossroads: the approach is starting to attract the attention
of the traditional court system.
That's where Bronx Community
Solutions comes in - it's an attempt to take the best of problem-solving
experiments and see if they can work in a traditional court setting,
as opposed to a stand-alone problem-solving court. . .
So what have we learned after
18 months of implementing Bronx Community Solutions?
I think the good news for other
jurisdictions interested in adopting problem-solving approaches
in a traditional court setting (as opposed to creating stand-alone
specialty courts) is how much bang for your buck you can get
from relatively modest changes.
Most jurisdictions use community
service as a sentencing alternative: what we've done is add social
service to the mix. Most jurisdictions need to get through their
arraignment calendar quickly: our method for screening cases
doesn't effect the speed at which the court gets its work done.
We also don't ask court players to abandon the adversarial model,
which means that the legal rights or defendants aren't being
sacrificed in the name of rehabilitation.
The two areas where we've dramatically
changed (or are trying to change) practice in the Bronx is by
creating an in-house social service clinic, staffed by a team
of social workers making connections to community-based agencies
in the Bronx, and attempting to forge new links between the courts
and the community though a Community Advisory Board. These are
areas that require an up-front investment of time and money to
get right.
One final note: it's important
to note that problem-solving court projects like Bronx Community
Solutions are not only about helping low-level offenders. They
are also about punishing them appropriately and ensuring some
accountability for communities hit hardest by quality-of-life
crime.
The ability to appeal to both
sides of the ideological spectrum is another advantage of problem-solving
courts, but it also means we cut against the grain of popular
depictions of the criminal justice system as too punitive. When
you work in a large urban criminal court like the Bronx, it's
easy to be shocked by how little low-level crime gets punished,
not the opposite.
We think it's appropriate to
expect that low-level offenders, particularly those who are getting
arrested again and again, can change their behavior (with a little
help from us) or at least "pay back" the community
through a court obligation like community service.
http://changingthecourt.blogspot.com/2006/06/introduction-to-bronx-community.html
HOW IT WORKS
- All judges in the Bronx will
have a broad set of sentencing options at their disposal, including
drug treatment, job training, family services and mental health
counseling.
- Offenders will be assigned
to community service work in neighborhoods throughout the Bronx.
Project staff will work with residents and community groups to
create community service options that respond to local problems
(for example, trash in a local park or walls marred by graffiti).
-By quickly assigning offenders
to social service and community service sentences, and rigorously
monitoring their compliance, Bronx Community Solutions will send
the message that community-based sanctions are taken seriously.
- Bronx Community Solutions invites
community groups and local residents to play a number of concrete
roles in ongoing operations, including identifying hot spots
and eye sores for community service projects, and participating
in a neighborhood advisory board.
Since the project began pilot
operations in January 2005, nearly 4,000 individuals have been
assigned to perform community restitution and receive social
services through Bronx Community Solutions. It is expected that
the program will handle upwards of 10,000 cases annually when
fully operational.
BENJAMIN SMITH, BRONX COMMUNITY
SOLUTIONS - The Bronx Community Solutions community service crew
was about to embark on its toughest challenge yet: helping the
Mount Hope Housing Corporation haul a dumpster's worth of garbage
out of an heavily overgrown, formerly abandoned lot. . . While
Mount Hope was excited to get our help, we were equally excited
to have the opportunity to experiment with a different model
of community service. For the first time in the Bronx, we were
partnering with a local non-profit to assist in visible and tangible
efforts to improve safety and neighborhood quality of life. .
.
But to our clients, this was
a day of court-ordered community service. They weren't sure what
to expect, and mostly they were just hoping to get their mandate
done. A typical day of community service is light work: mostly
sweeping and picking up litter in public parks, sidewalks, and
streets. Today, we would be cleaning a formerly abandoned lot
piled high with trash. . .
After bagging a huge amount of
trash and hauling it off the site, it was obvious to everyone
that we had really accomplished something. Although they'd been
skeptical at first, our clients were saying things like, "I'm
going to come back a year from now and make sure they finish
this project." "This is my neighborhood. I can't believe
how much trash people dump here. It doesn't feel right."
Many of the clients who worked
the hardest also sought information about job training and job
placement programs like Urban Youth Alliance and FEGS and we
made sure to escort them to our clinic after the day was over.
We've learned that clients who show up and take their mandate
seriously are often good candidates for these programs.
Rejuvenating neglected and abandoned
public space in the Bronx has a special history. In the aftermath
of wholesale disinvestment, the Bronx has been rebuilt lot-by-lot
and block-by-block, often by small community-based organizations
and groups of neighbors. .
http://changingthecourt.blogspot.com/2006/06/making-difference.html
CENTER FOR COURT INNOVATION
http://www.courtinnovation.org/
GOOD COURTS
http://www.courtinnovation.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.ViewPage&PageID=610
YOUR PASSPORT WILL GET YOU IN TROUBLE
BEFORE A TERRORIST WILL
BRUCE SCHNEIER, WASHINGTON POST
- If you have a passport, now is the time to renew it - even
if it's not set to expire anytime soon. If you don't have a passport
and think you might need one, now is the time to get it. In many
countries, including the United States, passports will soon be
equipped with RFID chips. And you don't want one of these chips
in your passport.. . .
RFID chips don't have to be plugged in to a reader to operate.
Like the chips used for automatic toll collection on roads or
automatic fare collection on subways, these chips operate via
proximity. The risk to you is the possibility of surreptitious
access: Your passport information might be read without your
knowledge or consent by a government trying to track your movements,
a criminal trying to steal your identity or someone just curious
about your citizenship. At first the State Department belittled
those risks, but in response to criticism from experts it has
implemented some security features. Passports will come with
a shielded cover, making it much harder to read the chip when
the passport is closed. And there are now access-control and
encryption mechanisms, making it much harder for an unauthorized
reader to collect, understand and alter the data.
Although those measures help,
they don't go far enough. The shielding does no good when the
passport is open. Travel abroad and you'll notice how often you
have to show your passport: at hotels, banks, Internet cafes.
Anyone intent on harvesting passport data could set up a reader
at one of those places. And although the State Department insists
that the chip can be read only by a reader that is inches away,
the chips have been read from many feet away. . .
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/15/AR2006091500923_pf.html
PRISON LABOR: THE NEW SLAVERY
CHRIS LEVISTER, NEW AMERICA MEDIA
- As a child Ayana Cole dreamed of becoming a world class fashion
designer. Today she is among hundreds of inmates crowded in an
Oregon prison factory cranking out designer jeans. For her labor
she is paid 45 cents an hour. At a chic Beverly Hills boutique
some of the beaded creations carry a $350 price tag. In fact
the jeans labeled "Prison Blues" -- proved so popular
last year that prison factories couldn't keep up with demand.
At a San Diego private-run prison factory Donovan Thomas earns
21 cents an hour manufacturing office equipment used in some
of LA's plushest office towers. In Chino Gary's prison sewn T-
shirts are a fashion hit.
Hundreds of prison generated
products end up attached to trendy and nationally known labels
like No Fear, Lee Jeans, Trinidad Tees, and other well known
U.S. companies. After deductions, many prisoners like Cole and
Thomas earn about $60 for an entire month of nine-hour days.
In short, hiring out prisoners has become big business. And it's
booming. . .
For the tycoons who have invested
in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold.
They don't have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment,
health or worker's comp insurance, vacation or comp time. All
of their workers are full time, and never arrive late or are
absent because of family problems; moreover, if prisoners refuse
to work, they are moved to disciplinary housing and lose canteen
privileges. Most importantly, they lose "good time"
credit that reduces their sentence. . .
Critics argue that inmate labor
is both a potential human rights abuse and a threat to workers
outside prison walls claiming, inmates have no bargaining power,
are easily exploited and once released are frequently barred
from gainful employment because of a felony conviction.
In one California lawsuit, for
example, two prisoners have sued both their employer and the
prison, saying they were put in solitary confinement after refusing
to labor in unsafe working conditions. In a nutshell John Fleckner
of Operation Prison Reform labels the growing trend "capitalist
punishment -- slavery re-envisioned."
http://www.alternet.org/story/41481/
COPS HARASSING PHOTOGRAPHERS CITING
NON-EXISTENT RESTRICTIONS
NEAL MATTHEWS, POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY
- Both amateur and professional photographers all over the country
are being stopped and harassed with no legal basis. As digital
cameras proliferate wildly, so do attempts to restrict what you
can shoot and how you can use the picture. And not all attempts
to quash photography have to do with national security concerns.
Some invoke copyright and trademark protection, others the privacy
both of celebrities and ordinary people. . .
On escalating tension between
police and photographers, a New York City Police Department spokesperson
explains, "We live in a world where everyone is suspicious
of photography. Generally, anything in a public place can be
photographed. But there's a difference between taking a picture
and taking surveillance, and our officers have to determine where
that line is.". . . "This is one of the biggest myths
with the law of taking photographs," explains Bert Krages,
a Portland, OR-based copyright attorney who has written books
on photographers' rights and techniques. "There is no general
prohibition against photographing federal buildings. There are
statutes that prohibit photographing areas of military and nuclear
facilities. But there are no laws against photographing other
federal facilities, other than the right of all property owners
to restrict activities that take place on their property. A federal
office building manager cannot restrict photography when the
photographer is situated outside the federal property boundary."
In fall 2005, Pop Photo Senior
Editor Peter Kolonia was shooting small architectural details
near the Mall in Washington, D.C. Stopping by the stairs of the
Department of Agriculture to shoot the base of a column, with
a fairly mainstream camera-a Fujifilm FinePix S3 Pro with a normal
lens and no flash-he put one foot on the bottom step, and…
"Two people, a security
guard in a generic uniform and a SWAT-type guy, dressed all in
black with a big gun, came out the front and asked what I was
doing."
They looked at his pictures,
then took the memory card and his driver's license inside to
run a check on him. "They were clearly trying to scare me,"
he says. "They knew I was just a tourist. When they came
out the second time they got very lecturey with me: 'Haven't
you heard there's a war on? Do you know about the threat of terrorism?'"
They threatened to confiscate
his camera (which requires a court order), and he had to talk
them out of keeping his memory card.
How far does the zealotry extend?
All the way to the flags at the county courthouse. That's what
recently got Ben Hider, a 27-year-old British citizen working
(legally, with a green card) as a photographer, into trouble.
On March 17, he stopped on a public thoroughfare at the Westchester
County courthouse in White Plains, NY, to snap a few pictures
of the wind-whipped flags out front.
Three court police officers quickly
surrounded him and started firing questions, then told him he
was being detained for shooting pictures of an official government
building. He was taken inside, where he was frisked, interrogated,
photographed, lectured on terrorism, told he was going to be
picked up by the "terrorism task force," and threatened
with deportation. After being held for two hours, he was released.
"People should know that
police are using fear and intimidation," says Hider. "For
what? I don't know what they gain."
http://www.popphoto.com/popularphotographyfeatures/2668/the-war-on-photographers.html
AUGUST 2006
FBI SPIED ON COLLEGE STUDENT RECORDS
GREG TOPPO, USA TODAY - A little-known
federal program created days after Sept. 11, 2001, examined financial
aid records of college students targeted by the FBI in terrorism
investigations, but it's unclear whether it netted any terrorists,
according to U.S. Education Department documents. The program,
called Project Strike Back, was a joint project of the department
and the FBI and was created 10 days after the terrorist attacks,
according to the documents from the department's Office of the
Inspector General. The documents were released to USA TODAY through
Freedom of Information Act requests. They were also obtained
by a Medill School of Journalism reporter working with the Associated
Press. . .
Terry Hartle, senior vice president
of government and public affairs for the American Council on
Education, which represents colleges nationwide, likened the
project to the IRS turning tax returns over to the Department
of Homeland Security "for possible ties to terrorism."
"Ultimately, this is troubling
but not surprising," Hartle said. "It's hard to be
surprised when it has become obvious that the government is mining
every database that they have. In the war on terror there are
no safe harbors where federal data is concerned."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-08-31-financial-aid-terrorism_x.htm
CORPS OF ENGINEERS REPORTS PUBLIC WITNESS
TO FBI FOR SUGGESTING THAT DAM BE REMOVED
MSNBC - Jim Bensman thought his
suggestion during a public hearing was harmless enough: Instead
of building a channel so migratory fish could go around a dam
on the Mississippi River, just get rid of the dam. Instead, the
environmental activist found himself in hot water, drawing FBI
scrutiny to see whether he had any terrorist intentions. The
case "shows just how easy it is to be labeled a suspected
terrorist," he says.
It all started on July 25 in
Alton, Ill., when the Army Corps of Engineers invited public
discussion about options for improving fish movement at the nearby
Melvin Price Locks and Dam, considered a major impediment to
roughly three dozen species that migrate upstream.
During the 90-minute hearing
that included on the agenda whether to build a fish channel,
Bensman says, he reiterated he's no fan of dams, contending they're
environmentally destructive and amount to billions of dollars
in corporate welfare for boating interests.
He urged that the dam be torn
out. He said he never mentioned blowing the dam up, though the
corps' presentation of possible options included a picture of
a dam being dynamited.
The next day, however, a local
newspaper reported that Bensman "said he would like to see
the dam blown up and resents paying taxes to fix dam problems
when it is barge companies that profit from the dam."
Workers at the corps' St. Louis
office "took a dim view (of the article) and questioned
if it was a potential threat," and a security manager forwarded
the clipping to the FBI, said corps spokesman Alan Dooley.
Within days, the FBI had Bensman
on the phone, asking whether he was any threat.
"To think I'm a terrorist
is utterly ridiculous," Bensman, 46, said from his home
in Alton, just north of St. Louis. "How could any reasonable
person think a terrorist is going to come to a public meeting
held by the Army Corps, let them know who they are and announce
their terror plot? It just doesn't make sense to me."
Dooley isn't offering apologies,
casting the agency's deferral to the FBI as a judgment call.
"I don't want to dispute
anything with Jim at this point," Dooley said. "We're
not going to debate whether this is over-sensitivity or under-sensitivity."
Dooley noted that when it comes
to determining security threats "there's probably a lower
threshold after 9/11."
Marshall Stone, a supervisory
special agent with the FBI office in Springfield, Ill., acknowledged
that the corps had asked his agency to review Bensman's remarks.
He wouldn't discuss the status of the inquiry, to avoid casting
"a negative cloud" on Bensman if the review uncovers
nothing.
Bensman is affiliated with the
Sierra Club and the forest-protection group Heartwood, and his
environmental activism is well-known around much of the Midwest.
He has railed against logging and gone to bat for bats, woodpeckers
and, lately, migratory fish in the Mississippi.
"They all know me, and I'm
a thorn in their side," Bensman says of the Corps of Engineers.
"I'm one of their biggest critics, and I'm sure I drive
a lot of them crazy. But the First Amendment gives me a right
to publicly speak out."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14530980/from/RS.1/
BROOKLYN'S UNIQUE COMMUNITY COURT
[One of the architects of
this court is Greg Berman, director of the Center for Court Innovation
and former Progressive Review intern]
MICHAEL WILSON, NY TIMES - Now six years old, the court in Red
Hook is one of a kind, the nation's first multi-jurisdictional
community court. It combines elements of criminal, family and
housing courts not only under the same roof, but also before
the same judge, Alex M. Calabrese. It follows similar courts
started in Midtown Manhattan, in 1993, and later in Harlem, but
those projects did not combine all three courts.
Many of the cases Judge Calabrese
hears are of the sort common in any courthouse, involving drugs,
prostitution or vandalism. But he and the court have garnered
wide attention for what is considered a groundbreaking crossover
role: a court linking criminal sentences with social services,
like substance abuse counseling and youth programs, all in the
same building. The city is exploring a similar project in the
Bronx.
One morning a week, the courthouse
fills - the line for the metal detectors snaking out onto the
sidewalk - with people who have been issued summonses in Red
Hook and its surrounding neighborhoods, including Sunset Park
and Park Slope. . .
To sit through a few Tuesdays
in the court is not only to see and experience the million little
details and moments that make this courthouse unique in New York
City, but also to return to a simpler time, to an array of affronts
to a collective sensibility. Riding a bicycle on the sidewalk.
Playing music too loud. Drinking in public. Urinating in public.
Being in a park after-hours.
Some cases are pleaded down or
thrown out. Others bring a fine or a lecture in a "quality-of-life
class," which is just that, a class that seeks to instruct
on how to live a better life, a life without alcoholics in parks
and urinators in alleys.
"It's a small-town court
in a big city. Just like in a small town, the judge actually
knows who's doing what," said David Bookstaver, a spokesman
for the state's Office of Court Administration. "You have
to face that same judge every time you screw up."
The court, and its sole judge
to date, have heard almost 12,000 summonses - the type of violations
that include quality-of-life cases - since opening in 2000, far
more than any other kind of case, and more than five times the
number of criminal cases. . .
The court's crossover role continues
outside, as the judge, prosecutors and police officers regularly
visit community meetings. This month, Judge Calabrese and the
court were given the 2006 "Organizational Lawyer as Problem
Solver Award" by the American Bar Association at a meeting
in Hawaii. . .
The quality-of-life classes,
where many defendants are sent to clear their summonses, were
conceived as something of a community accounting, with offenders
facing a panel of three people who live or work in the neighborhood,
said Greg Berman, director of the Center for Court Innovation
and an architect of the Red Hook court. . .
BROOKLYN'S MENTAL HEALTH COURT
http://www.courtinnovation.org/
CENTER FOR COURT INNOVATION
http://www.courtinnovation.org/
JET BLUE, TSA PREVENT MAN FROM BOARDING
PLANE WITH T-SHIRT THAT SAYS 'WE WILL NOT BE SILENT' IN ENGLISH,
ARABIC
RAED JARRAR, RAED IN THE MIDDLE
- I went to JFK in the morning to catch my Jet Blue plane to
California. I reached Terminal 6 at around 7:15 am, issued a
boarding pass, and checked all my bags in, and then walked to
the security checkpoint. For the first time in my life, I was
taken to a secondary search. My shoes were searched, and I was
asked for my boarding pass and ID. After passing the security,
I walked to check where gate 16 was, then I went to get something
to eat. I got some cheese and grapes with some orange juice and
I went back to Gate 16 and sat down in the boarding area enjoying
my breakfast and some sunshine.
At around 8:30, two men approached
me while I was checking my phone. One of them asked me if I had
a minute and he showed me his badge, I said: "sure".
We walked some few steps and stood in front of the boarding counter
where I found out that they were accompanied by another person,
a woman from Jet Blue.
One of the two men who approached
me first, Inspector Harris, asked for my id card and boarding
pass. I gave him my boarding pass and driver's license. He said
"people are feeling offended because of your t-shirt".
I looked at my t-shirt: I was wearing my shirt which states in
both Arabic and English "we will not be silent". You
can take a look at it in this picture taken during our Jordan
meetings with Iraqi MPs. I said "I am very sorry if I offended
anyone, I didn't know that this t-shirt will be offensive".
He asked me if I had any other T-shirts to put on, and I told
him that I had checked in all of my bags and I asked him "why
do you want me to take off my t-shirt? Isn't it my constitutional
right to express myself in this way?" The second man in
a greenish suit interfered and said "people here in the
US don't understand these things about constitutional rights".
So I answered him "I live in the US, and I understand it
is my right to wear this t-shirt".
Then I once again asked the three
of them : "How come you are asking me to change my t-shirt?
Isn't this my constitutional right to wear it? I am ready to
change it if you tell me why I should. Do you have an order against
Arabic t-shirts? Is there such a law against Arabic script?"
So inspector Harris answered
"you can't wear a t-shirt with Arabic script and come to
an airport. It is like wearing a t-shirt that reads "I am
a robber" and going to a bank". I said "but the
message on my t-shirt is not offensive, it just says "we
will not be silent". I got this t-shirt from Washington
DC. There are more than a 1000 t-shirts printed with the same
slogan, you can google them or email them at wewillnotbesilent@gmail.com
. It is printed in many other languages: Arabic, Farsi, Spanish,
English, etc."
Inspector Harris said: "We
cant make sure that your t-shirt means we will not be silent,
we don't have a translator. Maybe it means something else".
I said: "But as you can see, the statement is in both Arabic
and English". He said "maybe it is not the same message".
So based on the fact that Jet Blue doesn't have a translator,
anything in Arabic is suspicious because maybe it'll mean something
bad!
Meanwhile, a third man walked
in our direction. He stood with us without introducing himself,
and he looked at inspector Harris's notes and asks him: "is
that his information?" Inspector Harris answered "yes."
The third man, Mr. Harmon, asks inspector Harris : "Can
I copy this information?", and inspector Harris says "yes,
sure".
Inspector Harris said: "You
don't have to take of your t-shirt, just put it on inside-out."
I refused to put on my shirt inside-out. So the woman interfered
and said "let's reach a compromise. I will buy you a new
t-shirt and you can put it on top of this one". I said "I
want to keep this t-shirt on". Both inspector Harris and
Mr. Harmon said "No, we can't let you get on that airplane
with your t-shirt." I said "I am ready to put on another
t-shirt if you tell me what is the law that requires such a thing.
I want to talk to your supervisor." Inspector Harris said
"You don't have to talk to anyone. Many people called and
complained about your t-shirt. Jet Blue customers were calling
before you reached the checkpoint, and customers called when
you were waiting here in the boarding area".
It was then that I realized that
my t-shirt was the reason why I had been taken to the secondary
checking.
I asked the four people again
to let me talk to any supervisor, and they refused.
The Jet Blue woman was asking
me again to end this problem by just putting on a new t-shirt,
and I felt threatened by Mr. Harmon's remarks as in "Let's
end this the nice way". Taking in consideration what happens
to other Arabs and Muslims in US airports, and realizing that
I will miss my flight unless I covered the Arabic script on my
t-shirt as I was told by the four agents, I asked the Jet Blue
woman to buy me a t-shirt and I said "I don't want to miss
my flight."
She asked, what kind of t-shirts
do you like. Should I get you an "I heart New York t-shirt?".
So Mr. Harmon said "No, we shouldn't ask him to go from
one extreme to another". I asked Mr. Harmon why does he
assume I hate New York if I had some Arabic script on my t-shirt,
but he didn't answer.
The woman went away for three
minutes, and she came back with a gray t-shirt reading "New
York". I put the t-shirt on and removed the price tag. I
told the four people who were involved in the conversation: "I
feel very sad that my personal freedom was taken away like this.
I grew up under authoritarian governments in the Middle East,
and one of the reasons I chose to move to the US was that I don't
want an officer to make me change my t-shirt. I will pursue this
incident today through a constitutional rights organization,
and I am sure we will meet soon". Everyone said okay and
left, and I went back to my seat.
At 8:50 I was called again by
a fourth young man, standing with the same Jet Blue woman. He
asked for my boarding pass, so I gave it to him, and stood in
front of the boarding counter. I asked the woman: "is everything
okay?", she responded: "Yes, sure. We just have to
change your seat". I said: "but I want this seat, that's
why I chose it online 4 weeks ago", the fourth man said
"There is a lady with a toddler sitting there. We need the
seat."
Then they re-issued me a small
boarding pass for seat 24a, instead of seat 3a. They said that
I can go to the airplane now. I was the first person who entered
the airplane, and I was really annoyed about being assigned this
seat in the back of the airplane too. It smelled like the bathrooms,
which is why I had originally chosen a seat which would be far
from that area.
It sucks to be an Arab/Muslim
living in the US these days. When you go to the Middle East,
you are a US taxpayer destroying people's houses with your money,
and when you come back to the US, you are a suspected terrorist
and plane hijacker.
If you want to call Jet Blue
and ask about their regulations against Arabic script, you can
use the following number: 1-800-JETBLUE (538-2583)
http://raedinthemiddle.blogspot.com/2006/08/back-from-mideast.html
STOPPING ALL THOSE TERRORIST VIOLISTS
MARK SAVAGE, BBC - Strict security
measures at UK airports are having a "devastating impact"
on musicians, says the Musicians' Union. It says its members
"are reporting significant lost earnings" because they
are unable to take their instruments on board aircraft as hand
luggage. Many instruments are too fragile to be placed in the
hold of an airliner, the union told the BBC News website.
But the Department for Transport
says the security regulations will "be in place for as long
as they need to be. . . A spokeswoman at the Department for Transport
said instruments would have to be checked into the hold until
the security situation was downgraded.
US violin duo Marc Ramirez and
Olivia Hajioff, who play together as Marcolivia, contacted the
BBC to tell how they had been affected by the restrictions. .
. "We are planning to return to the States on 27 August,
but have been informed by the airline and by the Department for
Transport that we will not be able to take our violins with us
into the cabin
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5273576.stm
FEDERAL COURT RULES POLICE
CAN SEIZE CASH FROM DRIVERS WITHOUT CAUSE
THE NEWSPAPER - A federal appeals
court ruled yesterday that if a motorist is carrying large sums
of money, it is automatically subject to confiscation. In the
case entitled, "United States of America v. $124,700 in
U.S. Currency," the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth
Circuit took that amount of cash away from Emiliano Gomez Gonzolez,
a man with a "lack of significant criminal history"
neither accused nor convicted of any crime.
On May 28, 2003, a Nebraska state
trooper signaled Gonzolez to pull over his rented Ford Taurus
on Interstate 80. The trooper intended to issue a speeding ticket,
but noticed the Gonzolez's name was not on the rental contract.
The trooper then proceeded to question Gonzolez -- who did not
speak English well -- and search the car. The trooper found a
cooler containing $124,700 in cash, which he confiscated. A trained
drug sniffing dog barked at the rental car and the cash. For
the police, this was all the evidence needed to establish a drug
crime that allows the force to keep the seized money.
Associates of Gonzolez testified
in court that they had pooled their life savings to purchase
a refrigerated truck to start a produce business. Gonzolez flew
on a one-way ticket to Chicago to buy a truck, but it had sold
by the time he had arrived. Without a credit card of his own,
he had a third-party rent one for him. Gonzolez hid the money
in a cooler to keep it from being noticed and stolen. He was
scared when the troopers began questioning him about it. There
was no evidence disputing Gonzolez's story.
Yesterday the Eighth Circuit
summarily dismissed Gonzolez's story. It overturned a lower court
ruling that had found no evidence of drug activity, stating,
"We respectfully disagree and reach a different conclusion...
Possession of a large sum of cash is 'strong evidence' of a connection
to drug activity."
Judge Donald Lay found the majority's
reasoning faulty and issued a strong dissent.
"Notwithstanding the fact
that claimants seemingly suspicious activities were reasoned
away with plausible, and thus presumptively trustworthy, explanations
which the government failed to contradict or rebut, I note that
no drugs, drug paraphernalia, or drug records were recovered
in connection with the seized money," Judge Lay wrote. "There
is no evidence claimants were ever convicted of any drug-related
crime, nor is there any indication the manner in which the currency
was bundled was indicative of drug use or distribution."
"Finally, the mere fact
that the canine alerted officers to the presence of drug residue
in a rental car, no doubt driven by dozens, perhaps scores, of
patrons during the course of a given year, coupled with the fact
that the alert came from the same location where the currency
was discovered, does little to connect the money to a controlled
substance offense," Judge Lay Concluded.
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/12/1296.asp
CORPORATION WITH CLOSE BUSH TIES TRYING
TO IMPLANT SPY CHIP UNDER SKIN OF ALL AMERICAN TROOPS
DC EXAMINER - A microchip company
with powerful political connections is lobbying the Pentagon
for the right to implant chips under the skins of the nearly
1.4 million U.S. military personnel. Verichip Corp., which is
based in Florida and planning to offer its stock to the public
soon, has been one of the most aggressive marketers of radio
frequency identification chips. Company officials have touted
the chips as versatile, able to be used in a variety of situations
such as helping track illegal immigrants or giving doctors immediate
access to patient's medical records.
Now the company is "in discussions"
with the Pentagon, spokeswoman Nicole Philbin said. She added
that Verichip wants to insert the chips under the skin of the
right arms of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen. The idea is to
be able to scan an arm and obtain that person's identity and
medical history. . .
The company has political muscle
in the form of Tommy Thompson. A former secretary of the Department
of Health and Human Services, Thompson is a partner at the lobbying
law firm of Akin Gump and is a director of Verichip.
Thompson said he's sure that
the chip is safe and that no one - not even military personnel,
who are required by law to follow orders - will be forced to
accept an implant against his or her will. He has also promised
to have a chip implanted in himself. . .
Liz McIntyre, author of a book
critical of the chips, said that VeriChip is "a huge threat"
to public privacy. "They're circling like vultures for any
opportunity to get into our flesh," McIntyre said. "They'll
start with people who can't say no, like the elderly, sex offenders,
immigrants and the military. Then they'll come knocking on our
doors."
http://www.examiner.com/a-232630~Company_trying_to_get_under_soldiers__skin.html
My country used to be
Sweet land of liberty
That once was true
Until the FCC
Chose what we hear and see
On radio and on TV
FCC FU!
When you deny our choice
You censor every voice
That's what you do
We'd say "go fly a kite"
But that's far too polite
For stealing First Amendment rights
FCC FU!
What makes your ass so tight?
Does the religious Right
Rule over you?
Those few fanatic fools
And your outrageous rules
Kick freedom in the family jewels
FCC FU!
Soon those misguided kooks
Will all be burning books
With help from you
Why be so meddlesome?
Must you assume we're dumb?
What is it you protect us from?
FCC FU!
Are we all so repressed
That one small glimpse of breast
Must be taboo?
One Janet Jackson boob
Botched up what's on the tube
Bend over, we're not using lube
FCC FU!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzaqXFcsH2U
JULY 2006
FEDERAL JUDGE RULES CENSORING DVDs IS
VIOLATION OF COPYRIGHT
VINCE HORIUCHI, SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
- It's the kind of ending Hollywood craves. After a bitter three-year
legal battle involving Utah companies that sanitize movies on
DVD and VHS tape, a federal judge in Denver ruled Thursday that
such editing violates U.S. copyright laws and must be stopped.
In a ruling in the case involving Clean Flicks vs. 16 of Hollywood's
hottest directors, U.S. District Judge Richard P. Matsch found
that making copies of movies to delete objectionable language,
sex and violence hurts studios and directors who own the movie
rights. "Their [studios and directors] objective . . . is
to stop the infringement because of its irreparable injury to
the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies,"
the judge wrote in a 16-page decision. . .
Clean Flicks is a distributor
that prod
uces copies of Hollywood blockbusters
on DVD by burning a scrubbed version onto a blank disc. Those
versions are then sold over the Internet and to video stores
around the country who offer them for rent. The judge ordered
Clean Flicks and other companies named in the suit, including
Play It Clean Video of Ogden and Clean Films of Provo, to stop
"producing, manufacturing, creating" as well as renting
edited movies. Those businesses also must hand over all inventory
to the movie studios within five days of the ruling. Lines said
there are 80 to 90 video stores in the U.S., half of them in
Utah, that buy edited movies from Clean Flicks and rent them
to customers. . . The controversy over cleansing movies began
in 1998 when the owners of Sunrise Family Video in American Fork
began deleting nude scenes of Kate Winslet from the blockbuster
"Titanic" for $5.
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_4026743
FBI WAS OBSESSED WITH ARTHUR MILLER
CANADIAN BROADCASTING - The FBI
files of great American playwright Arthur Miller show he was
under suspicion of being a Communist almost from the staging
of his first play in 1944. Arthur Miller was under surveillance
by the FBI for his left-of-centre political views. The files,
received by the Associated Press under Freedom of Information
legislation, include a 34-page FBI report, compiled in 1951,
that states Miller was "under Communist party discipline"
in the 1930s and was a member of the party in the 1940s. The
FBI was relying on information from informants. . .
In an essay published in 1999,
Miller recalled that "practically everyone I knew stood
within the conventions of the political left of centre; one or
two were Communist party members... and most had had a brush
with Marxist ideas or organizations.
"I have never been able
to believe in the reality of these people being actual or putative
traitors any more than I could be," he wrote. . .
In later essays, Miller dismissed
allegations he had been "under Communist discipline"
and said he was never a member of the party.
His FBI file, stretching from
1944 to 1956, showed he was under close surveillance through
press clippings and informants. The FBI studied his plays to
detect Communist sympathy and noted who in the cast had left-wing
connections. . .
In 1956, the House Un-American
Activities Committee asked him to give names of alleged communist
writers with whom he had attended meetings in the 1940s. Miller
refused and was convicted of contempt of Congress, a decision
eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
When he married screen idol Marilyn
Monroe in 1956, the FBI had an informant at the scene. The report
at the time says "an anonymous telephone call" disclosed
that the Jewish wedding was an obvious "cover-up" for
Miller, who "had been and still was a member of the CP (Communist
party), and was their cultural front man."
http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2006/06/20/miller-fbi.html
TSA
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ACLU SUES TSA, JET BLUE OVER ARABIC T-SHIRT
BAN
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