PLAN TO SPY ON EVERY CAR ON AMERICAN ROADS

Kansas City Star - The year is 2020 and the gasoline tax is history. In its place you get a monthly tax bill based on each mile you drove . . . tracked by a Global Positioning System device in your car and uploaded to a billing center. What once was science fiction is being field-tested by the University of Iowa to iron out the wrinkles should a by-the-mile road tax ever be enacted. . .

The idea of shifting to a by-the-mile tax has been discussed for years, but it now appears to be getting more serious attention. A federal commission, after a two-year study, concluded earlier this year that the road tax was the “best path forward” to keep revenues flowing to highway and transportation projects, and could be an important new tool to help manage traffic and relieve congestion.

VETERAN JOURNALIST ABUSED BY CUSTOM OFFICIAL

Jeff Stein, CQ - A veteran American journalist returning from Latin America on Saturday was closely questioned by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent about where he went and whom he talked to. John Dinges, a former NPR managing editor for news and currently professor at Columbia University's School of Journalism, landed at Miami International Airport June 27 after visiting Venezuela and Chile.

After examining his passport, he said, the CBP agent asked him, "What were you doing on this trip?"

Returning Americans are routinely asked such general questions.

"I told him I was a journalist," Dinges said, "conducting journalistic business in Chile and Venezuela.". . .

He said the agent demanded to know "exactly" where he went and whom he met with.

"I told him I was not comfortable answering those kinds of questions," said Dinges, who has written three books on Latin America.

But the agent was adamant. "He said, 'This is the United States, and I can ask you anything I want,'" Dinges recounted.

The agent said, "You have to answer, for me to assess your status."

When Dinges again objected, saying, "I feel protected under the Constitution," the officer told him, "If you don't want to talk, we can go to the back room, and you can discuss this with my supervisor."

Feeling threatened, and having to catch a connecting flight within the hour, Dinges relented, and "started to talk about meetings and where and who I'd talked to."

"I felt I had to keep talking and give him details until he was satisfied," said Dinges, who was also a foreign desk editor for the Washington Post, and reported frequently for the paper from Latin America. He joined the Columbia faculty in the 1990s. . .

As it turns out, Customs and Border Protection officers can indeed ask anyone, including journalists, anything, according to spokesman Michael Friel.

"There are no special procedures for dealing with a journalist," Friel said in an interview.

"The officer's role is to protect the borders" and "determine a person's admissibility to the United States."

BRITAIN DUMPS MANDATORY ID CARDS

Press Association, UK - British citizens will never be forced to carry ID cards, Home Secretary Alan Johnson said. today. In his first major policy announcement as Home Secretary, Mr Johnson ditched a trial scheme that would have required some airport staff and pilots to carry the controversial cards. . . He also ruled out ever requiring the public to own a card. Previously, ministers said ID cards could become compulsory once 80% of the population was covered. The cards will still be compulsory for foreign workers, Mr Johnson said.

FIRST INMATE TELLS ABOUT AMERICA'S SECRET PRISONS

AMY GOODMAN: The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Eric Holder and the Federal Bureau of Prisons challenging the legality of two secretive prison units in Indiana and Illinois. The prisons, known as Communication Management Units, are designed to severely restrict prisoner communication with family members, the media and the outside world.

The prisons were opened by the Bush administration with little public scrutiny. The first CMU was opened in 2006 in a special isolated wing of the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. A second CMU was opened last year in Marion, Illinois.

Most of the prisoners held in the CMUs have been Muslim men, but the units have also held several non-Muslim political activists, including environmental and animal rights activists.

The government has provided little information about the special prison units. A search on the Bureau of Prisons website yields just one document even mentioning the program. The ACLU lawsuit marks the first high-profile legal challenge to the prisons.

While President Obama has pledged to close Guantanamo and secret overseas prisons, he has said nothing about these secretive prison units known by some prisoners as "Little Guantanamo."

Today we speak to Andrew Stepanian, an animal rights activist who was held at the CMU in Marion, Illinois. He is believed to be the first prisoner released from a CMU. . .

AMY GOODMAN: Describe what it was like there.

ANDREW STEPANIAN: The Communications Management Unit is a prison within the actual prison. It's set up in the former hole of the United States Penitentiary, which was the first supermax prison in the federal penal system in the United States. . .

The unit doesn't have normal telephone communication to your family. The unit doesn't have normal visitation, like you would be able to communicate with your family or embrace them or hug them. These are restraints that are normally put on people that are considered to be the most violent and have the most egregious offenses. And yet, in this case, almost every person that was at the CMU was either a minimum-security case or, at most, a medium-security level, which gives you all the freedoms of being able to walk around a room normally with your family, spend about eight hours in a normal visiting day, say, walking around a patio or sharing snacks from a vending machine. These are the normal visits that a prisoner would be able to experience. These normal visits are denied.

Normal phone calls, usually 300 minutes a month for an average inmate, are denied. Instead, you have to make an appointment to make one phone call a week, and that needs to be done with the oversight of a translator, a live monitor and someone from Washington, DC. . .

Most of the men that are in these units are Muslim. I, myself, am not Muslim. From what I observed, about 70 percent of the men that were there were Muslim and had questionable cases that were labeled as either extremist or terrorist cases. But when I grew to meet them, I realized that the cases were, in fact, very different, and their personalities affected, you know, my judgment of them to think that they're better people than that.

LIBERALS PUSHING THOUGHT CRIME BILL

Prison Planet - HR 1966 has cleared the House and now faces the Senate as S.909, the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act. The bill is expected to sail through the Senate as it did in the House. It will provide federal assistance to the states, local jurisdictions, and Indian tribes to prosecute hate crimes, and for “other purposes.” . . .

S.909 is a direct violation of the First Amendment. It allows the federal government to prosecute people involved in “hate speech” transmitted over television, radio, and the internet. The House version of the bill states:

"Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce [radio, TV, internet] any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."

In other words, if a talk show host engages in “hostile” speech against a person or persons of the above mentioned federally protected group that talk show host will face federal prosecution and the prospect of a two year prison term.

Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch - The Matthew Shepard Act is a ham-handed attempt to right injustice by establishing different legal treatment for some classes of crime victims. The proposed statute classifies as "hate crimes" attacks based on a victim’s actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. America is well on its way to making it illegal to say anything nasty about gays, Jews, blacks and women. "Hate speech," far short of any direct incitement to violence, is on the edge of being criminalized, with the First Amendment gone the way of the dodo. . .

Suppose two fellows in a bar see a man come in and, later in the evening, beat him up. He turns out to be gay. Armed with the Hate Crimes Prevention Act if it becomes law, local prosecutors will have an incentive to pile hate crime charges on top of simple assault and thereby garner federal funding that will be available under the statute. The suspects then face an "enhancement" -several more years behind bars—for committing a hate crime. . . .

The problem with the Hate Crimes Prevention Act is that it creates a thought crime and also categories of crime victims for disparate treatment. Goodbye to equality under the law. How will a prosecutor prove that a lesbian was murdered because of her sexual orientation rather than because she refused to give the mugger her purse? . . .

Advocates for the hate crimes bill insist that it deals only with crimes of violence and has nothing to do with limiting free speech or thought. But as Paul Craig Roberts, has pointed out on this site. "All laws are expansively interpreted. For example: The Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act [passed in 1970] was directed at drug lords. Nothing in the law says anything about divorce; yet it soon was applied in divorce cases."

OBAMA REPORTED READY TO TRASH CONSTITUTION ON DETENTION WITHOUT TRIAL

Pro Publica - The Obama administration, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close Guantanamo, is drafting an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate suspected terrorists indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.

Such an order would embrace claims by former President George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that bypassing Congress could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said. . .

Instituting long-term detention through an executive order would leave Obama vulnerable to charges that he is willing to forsake the legislative branch of government, as his predecessor often did. Bush's detention policies suffered successive defeats in the courts in part because they lacked congressional approval and tried to exclude judicial oversight.

OBAMA'S CLASSROOM SPIES

David Price, Counterpunch - Four years ago I wrote a series of CounterPunch exposes on the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, then a pilot project funded under the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act. PRISP links undergraduate and graduate students with US security and intelligence agencies like the NSA or CIA, and unannounced to universities, professors or fellow-students, PRISP-students enter American university campuses, classrooms, laboratories and professor's offices without disclosing links to these agencies. PRISP was originally conceived by anthropologist Felix Moos, long a proponent of using anthropological knowledge in waging of counterinsurgency campaigns-an area of growing interest to the Obama administration as it prepares for prolonged soft power counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan. . .

While the National Intelligence Director's move to make PRISP a permanent budget item will damage the academic freedom and integrity of American universities, it will likely be met by the open arms of university administrators facing crashed university endowments and dwindling budgets. . .

This development is just the latest installment in on ongoing efforts to increase the militarization of American higher education. . .

Back in the early 1990s when the National Security Education Program was first introduced it was widely condemned by professional associations like the Middle East Studies Association and the African Studies Association, Latin American Studies Association for blurring the lines between independent scholarship raised by NSEP's its requirements that program participants later seek employment in governmental agencies. But with the depressed economy, plummeting endowment funds at universities and foundations, the difficult academic job market, and scarce academic funding sources, I fear that professional associations' reactions against these developments will be muted. . .

As this new generation of programs covertly brings undeclared and unidentifiable students into our universities they disrupt university identities and transforms the roles all who teach, research, study and work there in ways that they will not necessarily understand-as institutions of higher learning further lose their independence and become unwitting agents of state intelligence functions.

THE TOWN THAT LOVES BIG BROTHER

LA Times - Some 165 closed-circuit TV cameras soon will provide live, round-the-clock scrutiny of nearly every street, park and other public space used by the 55,000 residents and [Lancaster PA's] many tourists. That's more outdoor cameras than are used by many major cities, including San Francisco and Boston.

Unlike anywhere else, cash-strapped Lancaster outsourced its surveillance to a private nonprofit group that hires civilians to tilt, pan and zoom the cameras -- and to call police if they spot suspicious activity. No government agency is directly involved.

Perhaps most surprising, the near-saturation surveillance of a community that saw four murders last year has sparked little public debate about whether the benefits for law enforcement outweigh the loss of privacy.

"Years ago, there's no way we could do this," said Keith Sadler, Lancaster's police chief. "It brings to mind Big Brother, George Orwell and '1984.' It's just funny how Americans have softened on these issues. . .

A few dozen people attended four community meetings held last spring to discuss what sponsors called "this exciting public safety initiative." But opposition has grown since big red bulbs, which shield the video cameras, began appearing on corner after corner.

Mary Pat Donnellon, head of Mission Research, a local software company, vowed to move if she finds one on her block. "I don't want to live like that," she said. "I'm not afraid. And I don't need to be under surveillance."

"No one has the right to know who goes in and out my front door," agreed David Mowrer, a laborer for a company that supplies quarry pits. "That's my business. That's not what America is about."

Hundreds of municipalities -- including Los Angeles and at least 36 other California cities -- have built or expanded camera networks since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In most cases, Department of Homeland Security grants helped cover the cost.

In the most ambitious project, New York City police announced plans several years ago to link 3,000 public and private security cameras across Lower Manhattan designed to help deter, track and detect terrorists. The network is not yet complete. . .

Only a few communities have said no. In February, the city council in Cambridge, Mass., voted not to use eight cameras already purchased with federal funds for fear police would improperly spy on residents. Officials in nearby Brookline are considering switching off a dozen cameras for the same reason.

UPDATE; BOZEMAN CUTS BACK ON EMPLOYEE SPYING PLANS

Fox News - A flood of criticism has prompted a Montana city to drop its request that government job applicants turn over their user names and passwords to Internet social networking and Web groups. The city of Bozeman abruptly suspended the practice Friday, saying it "appears to have exceeded that which is acceptable to our community.". . . "I liken it to them saying they want to look at your love letters and your family photos," said Amy Cannata of the Montana ACLU. . .

VIRGINIA CITIZENS BEING FINED FOR SEEKING TO UNSEAT FOR SUPERVISORS

WAVY, VA - Dozens of Gloucester County residents face a hefty fine after petitioning to unseat four of their supervisors. "It's, as far as I know, unprecedented for a court to punish somebody for exercising their right to petition the government for redress of grievances. We all have that. It's in the Bill of Rights," says Steven Emmert. Emmert is the attorney for the 40 Gloucester County residents who petitioned to have four of their supervisors removed including Teresa Altemus, Michelle Ressler, Bobby Crewe, and Gregory Woodard. "The citizens all felt it was appropriate to remove the representatives of their body, because they lost confidence in them."

Some of the 40 residents rallied outside the courthouse during a 2008 hearing, upset the four supervisors were indicted for allegedly conducting county business in private. However, the charges and petition against the supervisors were withdrawn and recently, the judge ruled the residents had to pay $2,000 a piece for misusing the judicial process for political gain.
"The effect of the trial courts ruling is that you can petition the government but you better be right or else you'll have to pay.". . .

CIA WANTS TO TURN COLLEGES INTO SPY FACTORIES

Washington Post - The Obama administration has proposed the creation of an intelligence officer training program in colleges and universities that would function much like the Reserve Officers' Training Corps run by the military services. The idea is to create a stream "of first- and second-generation Americans, who already have critical language and cultural knowledge, and prepare them for careers in the intelligence agencies," according to a description sent to Congress by Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair. . .

Under the proposal, part of the administration's 2010 intelligence authorization bill, colleges and universities would apply for grants that would be used to expand or introduce courses of study to "meet the emerging needs of the intelligence community." Those courses would include certain foreign languages, analysis and specific scientific and technical fields.

The students' participation in the program would probably be kept secret to prevent them from being identified by foreign intelligence services, according to an official familiar with the proposal.

PENTAGON DEFINED LEGAL PROTEST AS TERRORISM

ACLU - The Department of Defense considers protests an example of "low-level terrorism" according to an exam DOD employees were required to take this year. According to a whistleblower that came to the ACLU, a multiple choice question on the 2009 DOD Anti-terrorism Awareness training exam asked which of the following was an example of low-level terrorism:

- Attacking the Pentagon
- Improvised Explosive Devices
- Hate crimes against racial groups
- Protests

The ACLU fired off a letter to Gail McGinn, Acting Under-Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, demanding that the materials be corrected immediately. The DOD responded in an interview with Fox News, admitting the question was on the test that more than 1,500 department employees took.

"They should have made it clearer there's a clear difference between illegal violent demonstrations and peaceful, constitutionally protected protests," Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Les Melnyk said on Thursday.

The DOD agreed to remove the question from the test and to send an e-mail to each employee that took it "explaining the error and the distinction between lawful protests and unlawful violent protests."

FEDERAL JUDGE SAYS MILITARY CAN PRESSURE MINORS

San Francisco Chronicle - Without fanfare, a federal judge in Oakland on Thursday threw out voter-approved laws in two Northern California cities barring military recruiters from contacting minors.

U.S. District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong ruled that laws passed in the Humboldt County cities of Arcata and Eureka in November were unconstitutional and invalid.

The finding was not unexpected by proponents of the laws, which passed with 73 percent of the vote in Arcata and 57 percent in Eureka. The federal government quickly sued to overturn the laws, which have been stayed ever since.

But Dave Meserve, the former Arcata councilman behind the laws, said he was disappointed that the judge ruled without hearing arguments on the case. . . .

Opponents of recruiting have tried to keep recruiters off college campuses nationwide. Berkeley issued and then rescinded a letter calling Marine recruiters "unwelcome intruders."

And the San Francisco school board in 2006 killed the local Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps, which some members saw as a recruiting tool, launching a three-year battle that ended last month with JROTC back in place.

The Arcata and Eureka laws represented a new tactic that experts said appeared to have been the first of its kind in America: a counter-recruitment law passed not by a handful of elected activists, but by a plurality of voters.

Many voters in Arcata and Eureka who supported the measures saw the laws not as anti-military, but as an expression of a community's right to set its own rules - particularly relating to children. . .

The laws made it illegal to contact anyone under the age of 18 to recruit that person into the military or promote future enlistment. Minors could still initiate contact with recruiters if they chose.

"The judge said that the question of military recruitment is a subject which must be regulated by the federal government and may not be regulated by states and localities," said Stanford Law School Senior Lecturer Allen Weiner, who read the opinion but did not take part in the case.

CITY OF BOZEMAN STRIPS EMPLOYEES OF INTERNET PRIVAC

UPDATE: BOZEMAN CUTS BACK ON EMPLOYEE SPYING PLANS

Fox News - A flood of criticism has prompted a Montana city to drop its request that government job applicants turn over their user names and passwords to Internet social networking and Web groups. The city of Bozeman abruptly suspended the practice Friday, saying it "appears to have exceeded that which is acceptable to our community.". . . "I liken it to them saying they want to look at your love letters and your family photos," said Amy Cannata of the Montana ACLU. . .

ORIGINAL STORY

Montana News Station - Applying for a job with the City of Bozeman? You may be asked to provide more personal information than you expected.

That was the case for one person who applied for employment with the City. The anonymous viewer emailed the news station recently to express concern with a component of the city's background check policy, which states that to be considered for a job applicants must provide log-in information and passwords for social network sites in which they participate.

The requirement is included on a waiver statement applicants must sign, giving the City permission to conduct an investigation into the person's "background, references, character, past employment, education, credit history, criminal or police records."

"Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.," the City form states. There are then three lines where applicants can list the Web sites, their user names and log-in information and their passwords.

Article 2, Section 10 of the Montana Constitution reads "the right of individual privacy is essential to the well-being of a free society and shall not be infringed without the showing of a compelling state interest.". . .

Another concern the applicant raised was that by providing the City with a Facebook user name and password the City not only has access to the applicant's page but also to the pages belonging to all of the applicant's Facebook "friends."

AMERICANS SUPPORT LEGAL MARIJUANA

Don Hazen, AlterNet - Recent polling by Zogby in May demonstrated that a majority of Americans, say it "makes sense to tax and regulate" marijuana. The Zogby poll, commissioned by the conservative-oriented O'Leary Report, found 52 percent in favor of legalization, only 37 percent opposed. As Ryan Grim reports on the Huffington Post , a previous ABC News/Washington Post poll found 46 percent in support. In California, a Field Poll found 56 percent backing legalization and as a result California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called for an open debate on legalization, all which suggest that American society may be reaching a tipping point when it comes to legal pot. . .

An array of new circumstances -- Democrats in power, economic recession leaving states starving for revenue that could come from taxing cannabis sales, less funds for law enforcement and Mexican drug operatives moving into the US to grow huge amounts of untaxed pot, contributing to the horrible drug violence South of the Border -- support the growing public support for legalization of pot.

Anther element perhaps pushing changes to our pot laws is the gaggle of strange bed fellows who are outspoken on the issue. Former Secretary of State George Shultz and the late conservative economist Milton Friedman have been for legalization for years. But recently Fox News' latest conservative wild man Glenn Beck and CNN's much more reasonable Jack Cafferty have publicly questioned the billions spent each year fighting the endless war against drugs. They are joining the growing chorus that suggest it now makes more financial and social sense to tax and regulate marijuana

AUSTRALIA ADOPTS DICTATORIAL INTERNET CONTROLS

Sidney Morning Herald - The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks.

Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark's list of banned websites.

The move by the Australian Communications and Media Authority comes after it threatened the host of online broadband discussion forum Whirlpool last week with a $11,000-a-day fine over a link published in its forum to another page blacklisted by ACMA - an anti-abortion website.

ACMA's blacklist does not have a significant impact on web browsing by Australians today but sites contained on it will be blocked for everyone if the Federal Government implements its mandatory internet filtering censorship scheme.

But even without the mandatory censorship scheme, as is evident in the Whirlpool case, ACMA can force sites hosted in Australia to remove "prohibited" pages and even links to prohibited pages.

Online civil liberties campaigners have seized on the move by ACMA as evidence of how casually the regulator adds to its list of blacklisted sites. It also confirmed fears that the scope of the Government's censorship plan could easily be expanded to encompass sites that are not illegal.

"The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship," Wikileaks said on its website in response to the ACMA ban.

The site has also published Thailand's internet censorship list and noted that, in both the Thai and Danish cases, the scope of the blacklist had been rapidly expanded from child porn to other material including political discussions. . .

Last week, Reporters Without Borders, in its regular report on enemies of internet freedom, placed Australia on its "watch list" of countries imposing anti-democratic internet restrictions that could open the way for abuses of power and control of information.

NEW MONTANA GUN LAW PART OF MOVE TO REVIVE TENTH AMENDMENT

Washington Times - A new Montana gun law puts the state at the forefront of a national bid to restore states' rights by attacking up to a century of federal court decisions on Washington's power.

Two other states - Alaska and Texas - have had favorable votes on laws similar to Montana's, declaring that guns that stay within the state are none of the feds' business. More than a dozen others are considering such laws, and more-general declarations of state sovereignty have been introduced this year in more than 30 legislatures.

The federal courts may not respond well to these laws in the short term, but backers who acknowledge this say that regardless, they intend for the laws to change the political landscape in the long term. They hope these state laws will undercut the legitimacy of contrary federal law - as has happened with medicinal marijuana - and even push federal courts to bend with the popular wind.

"What's going on is that people all over the country have decided, 'Enough is enough,' " said Kevin Gutzman, a professor at Western Connecticut State University and the author of "Who Killed the Constitution?" "This is supposed to be a federal system, but instead Congress seems to think it can legislate anything it wants.". . .

According to the act's supporters, if guns bearing a "Made in Montana" stamp remain in Montana, then federal rules such as background checks, registration and dealer licensing no longer apply. But court cases have interpreted the U.S. Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause as covering anything that might affect interstate commerce - which in practice means just about anything.. . .

"The Interstate Commerce Clause has grown and grown until the government asserts authority over everything under the sun," said Mr. Marbut, who wrote the original firearms legislation. "How much water you have in your toilet. Almost all environmental laws. Maybe one-third of all federal regulations are asserted under the Commerce Clause.". . .

The federal government, said Mr. Marbut, "is a creation of the states, and the states need to get their creation on a leash."

OBAMA MISLED ABOUT PRIVACY UNDER NEW DEFENSE CYBER PROGRAM

NY Times - A plan to create a new Pentagon cybercommand is raising significant privacy and diplomatic concerns, as the Obama administration moves ahead on efforts to protect the nation from cyberattack and to prepare for possible offensive operations against adversaries' computer networks.

President Obama has said that the new cyberdefense strategy he unveiled last month will provide protections for personal privacy and civil liberties. But senior Pentagon and military officials say that Mr. Obama's assurances may be challenging to guarantee in practice, particularly in trying to monitor the thousands of daily attacks on security systems in the United States that have set off a race to develop better cyberweapons. . .

There is simply no way, the officials say, to effectively conduct computer operations without entering networks inside the United States, where the military is prohibited from operating, or traveling electronic paths through countries that are not themselves American targets.

The cybersecurity effort, Mr. Obama said at the White House last month, "will not - I repeat, will not - include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic.". . .

Military officials say there may be a need to intercept and examine some e-mail messages sent from other countries to guard against computer viruses or potential terrorist action. Advocates say the process could ultimately be accepted as the digital equivalent of customs inspections, in which passengers arriving from overseas consent to have their luggage opened for security, tax and health reasons. . .

OBAMA DISSES GAYS AGAIN

ACLU, GLAD, Lamda Legal and others - We are very surprised and deeply disappointed in the manner in which the Obama administration has defended the so-called Defense of Marriage Act against Smelt v. United States, a lawsuit brought in federal court in California by a married same-sex couple asking the federal government to treat them equally with respect to federal protections and benefits. The administration is using many of the same flawed legal arguments that the Bush administration used. These arguments rightly have been rejected by several state supreme courts as legally unsound and obviously discriminatory.

We disagree with many of the administration's arguments, for example that DOMA is a valid exercise of Congress's power, is consistent with Equal Protection or Due Process principles, and does not impinge upon rights that are recognized as fundamental.

We are also extremely disturbed by a new and nonsensical argument the administration has advanced suggesting that the federal government needs to be "neutral" with regard to its treatment of married same-sex couples in order to ensure that federal tax money collected from across the country not be used to assist same-sex couples duly married by their home states. There is nothing "neutral" about the federal government's discriminatory denial of fair treatment to married same-sex couples: DOMA wrongly bars the federal government from providing any of the over one thousand federal protections to the many thousands of couples who marry in six states. This notion of "neutrality" ignores the fact that while married same-sex couples pay their full share of income and social security taxes, they are prevented by DOMA from receiving the corresponding same benefits that married heterosexual taxpayers receive. It is the married same-sex couples, not heterosexuals in other parts of the country, who are financially and personally damaged in significant ways by DOMA. For the Obama administration to suggest otherwise simply departs from both mathematical and legal reality.

When President Obama was courting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender voters, he said that he believed that DOMA should be repealed. We ask him to live up to his emphatic campaign promises, to stop making false and damaging legal arguments, and immediately to introduce a bill to repeal DOMA and ensure that every married couple in America has the same access to federal protections.

America Blog - Andrew Sullivan discovered that one of the three Obama Justice Department attorneys who wrote and filed the anti-gay DOMA brief is W. Scott Simpson, a Mormon Bush holdover who was awarded by Alberto Gonzales for his defense of the Partial Birth Abortion act. . . No wonder the brief was so filled with hate and bigoted religious right talking points, such as comparing gay marriage to incest and pederasty.

SUPREME COURT DENIES CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS TO GAYS AT REQUEST OF OBAMA

CNN - A former Army captain who was dismissed under a federal law dealing with gays and lesbians in the military lost his appeal at the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene in the challenge to the "don't ask/don't tell" law. . .

The Obama administration had asked the high court not to take the case, and White House officials had said they would not object to homosexuals being kicked out of the armed services.

During the presidential campaign last year, President Obama said he supported throwing out the federal law but has taken no specific action on the controversy.

POST CONSTITUTIONAL AMERICA

Buffalo News - It is legally permissible for police to zap a suspect with a Taser to obtain a DNA sample, as long as it’s not done “maliciously, or to an excessive extent, or with resulting injury,” a county judge has ruled in the first case of its kind in New York State, and possibly the nation.

Niagara County Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza decided that the DNA sample obtained Sept. 29 from Ryan S. Smith of Niagara Falls - which ties him to a shooting and a gas station robbery- is legally valid and can be used at his trial.

Smith was handcuffed and sitting on the floor of Niagara Falls Police Headquarters when he was zapped with the 50,000- volt electronic stun gun after he insisted he would not give a DNA sample.

He already had given a sample, a swab of the inside of his cheek, without protest the previous month. But police sent it to the wrong lab, where it was opened and spoiled. Prosecutors who had obtained a court order for the first sample went back to Sperrazza, who signed another order without consulting the defense.

Defense lawyer Patrick M. Balkin denounced the ruling in an interview with The Buffalo News.

“They have now given the Niagara Falls police discretion to Taser anybody anytime they think it’s reasonable,” he asserted. “Her decision says you can enforce a court order by force. If you extrapolate that, we no longer have to have child support hearings; you can just Taser the parent.”

JUDGE UPHOLDS UNCONSTITUTIONAL PHONE SPYING

Wired - A federal judge dismissed lawsuits targeting the nation's telecommunication companies for their participation in President George W. Bush's once-secret electronic eavesdropping program.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker upheld summer legislation protecting the companies from the lawsuits. The legislation, which then-Sen. Barack Obama voted for, also granted the government the authority to monitor American's telecommunications without warrants if the subject was communicating with somebody overseas suspected of terrorism.
AT&T was the first of many telcos sued for helping the NSA spy on Americans without warrants

AT&T was the first of many telcos sued for helping the NSA spy on Americans without warrants

Walker's decision, if it survives, ends more than three years of litigation accusing the nation's carriers of funneling American's electronic communications to the Bush administration without warrants in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. The ruling also means that the public may never know how the Bush White House coaxed the telecoms to participate in the program without court warrants, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation alleged in a lawsuit lodged in federal court here three years ago.

130 CLERGY PUBLICLY SUPPORT GAY MARRIAGE IN DC

This raises a point we have noted from time to time, namely that since almost all opposition to gay marriage is based on religious principles, any laws supporting that view are essentially engaged in the unconstitutional act of establishing religion - favoring one group over, say, the 130 clergy in this case

Washington Blade - More than 130 clergy representing dozens of churches and at least two synagogues in the District of Columbia released a joint statement expressing support for legalizing same-sex marriage in the city.

"We declare that our faith calls us to affirm marriage equality for loving same-sex couples," says the statement, which the signers call a "Declaration of Religious Support for Marriage Equality."

The declaration was released during a news conference at Covenant Baptist Church, a mostly black congregation in Ward 8, a section of the city that same-sex marriage opponents say would vote against a same-sex marriage law should it be placed on the ballot in a referendum.

Nearly 50 of the signatories to the declaration attended the news conference, standing at the pulpit behind the church's husband and wife pastors, Revs. Dennis and Christine Wiley.

"The black church and the black community have been characterized by some as being united in opposition to same-sex marriage," Christine Wiley said in reading a joint statement with her husband.

"This could not be further from the truth," she said. "Black people are not monolithic. We are diverse just like all other human beings."

Dennis Wiley added, "And because Covenant Baptist Church is a beloved community with a long history of celebrating the richness of our diversity, we have gathered here today to reaffirm, in the immortal words of the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., that 'injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'"

FEDERAL JUDGE RULES POLICE CAN TAKE DNA SAMPLES WITHOUT A WARRANT

CNET - In the first case of its type, a federal judge in California has ruled that police can forcibly take DNA samples, including drawing blood with a needle, from Americans who have been arrested but not convicted of a crime.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Gregory Hollows ruled that a federal law allowing DNA samples upon arrest for a felony was constitutional and did not violate the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of "unreasonable searches and seizures."

Hollows, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, said the procedure was no more invasive or worrisome than fingerprinting or a photograph. "The court agrees that DNA sampling is analogous to taking fingerprints as part of the routine booking process upon arrest," he wrote, calling it "a law enforcement tool that is a technological progression from photographs and fingerprints."

OBAMA SEEKS POWER TO HIDE WAR CRIMES

Glen Greenwald, Salon - It was one thing when President Obama reversed himself last month by announcing that he would appeal the Second Circuit's ruling that the Freedom of Information Act compelled disclosure of various photographs of detainee abuse sought by the ACLU. Agree or disagree with Obama's decision, at least the basic legal framework of transparency was being respected, since Obama's actions amounted to nothing more than a request that the Supreme Court review whether the mandates of FOIA actually required disclosure in this case. But now -- obviously anticipating that the Government is likely to lose in court again -- Obama wants Congress to change FOIA by retroactively narrowing its disclosure requirements, prevent a legal ruling by the courts, and vest himself with brand new secrecy powers under the law which, just as a factual matter, not even George Bush sought for himself.

The White House is actively supporting a new bill jointly sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman -- called The Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009 -- that literally has no purpose other than to allow the government to suppress any "photograph taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States." As long as the Defense Secretary certifies -- with no review possible -- that disclosure would "endanger" American citizens or our troops, then the photographs can be suppressed even if FOIA requires disclosure. The certification lasts 3 years and can be renewed indefinitely. The Senate passed the bill as an amendment last week.

Just imagine if any other country did this. Imagine if a foreign government were accused of systematically torturing and otherwise brutally abusing detainees in its custody for years, and there was ample photographic evidence proving the extent and brutality of the abuse. Further imagine that the country's judiciary -- applying decades-old transparency laws -- ruled that the government was legally required to make that evidence public. But in response, that country's President demanded that those transparency laws be retroactively changed for no reason other than to explicitly empower him to keep the photographic evidence suppressed, and a compliant Congress then immediately passed a new law empowering the President to suppress that evidence. What kind of a country passes a law that has no purpose other than to empower its leader to suppress evidence of the torture it inflicted on people? Read the language of the bill; it doesn't even hide the fact that its only objective is to empower the President to conceal evidence of war crimes.

SOTOMAYER ON THIS AND THAT

David L. Hudson Jr, First Amendment Ctr - One of the more high-profile First Amendment decisions authored by Judge Sotomayor was her decision in U.S. v. Quattrone in which she invalidated a gag order issued by a trial judge that prevented the press from divulging the name of any prospective or selected juror in the second trial of Frank Quattrone, a former executive of Credit Suisse First Boston. . . She noted that the names of the jurors were read in open court, which limited the efficacy of a prior restraint in the first place. She concluded that "the district court's order barring publication of jurors' names not only subjected appellants to a prior restraint on speech, but also infringed their freedom to publish information in open court.". . .

Sotomayor authored an opinion for the 2nd Circuit rejecting various constitutional challenges to the so-called "global gag rule," which prohibits overseas organizations that receive U.S. funds from providing abortion services or engaging in speech intended to ease restrictions on abortion. . .

Sotomayor authored a unanimous 2nd Circuit panel decision which involved First and Fourth Amendment claims advanced by members of the Onondaga Nation, who were protesting a decision between Onondaga Nation chiefs and the state of New York that would permit the state to tax tobacco products sold to non-Native Americans on Onondaga land.

The protesters alleged that they were beaten by law enforcement officials after some of the demonstrators moved their protest activities to a public highway. Sotomayor refused to grant qualified immunity to law enforcement, noting that it was clearly established law that demonstrators had a constitutional right to protest free from interference as long as the protesters did not present a clear and present danger to public safety. . .

She sat on a three-judge panel that unanimously reinstated part of a former public school teacher's claim that he was retaliated against by his principal and other school officials for critical comments in a New York Post article. The article discussed the problem of attendance fraud. The panel determined that there was sufficient evidence that one principal did retaliate against the teacher shortly after the negative newspaper article. . .

In 1993, Sotomayor ruled in Flamer v. City of White Plains that a rabbi had a First Amendment right to display a menorah in a city park. The city of White Plains, New York, prohibited "fixed outdoor displays of religious or political symbols." The rabbi asserted that the regulation violated his free-exercise-of-religion and free-speech rights. She wrote that the city may not "preclude a private speaker from erecting a fixed display of a religious symbol, free-standing or otherwise, in a City park on the basis of such display's religious message."

Sotomayor rejected the First Amendment claims of two Muslims who alleged a First Amendment violation because a post office displayed Christian and Jewish symbols during the Christmas and Chanukah celebrations. . . She accepted the post office's argument that it promoted its business by including certain symbols that would best attract business and that it did not have to include seasonal displays requested by the public. . .

As a district court judge, she authored an opinion in Campos v. Coughlin in which she granted a preliminary injunction to two inmates of the Santeria religion who were denied the opportunity to wear religious beads, while other inmates were allowed to wear rosary beads. . .

She ruled in favor of prison officials in a First Amendment claim brought by an inmate who was placed on "mail watch" after prison officials mistakenly thought a book on economics titled Blood in the Streets: Investment Profits in a World Gone Mad was inflammatory. She focused on the fact that the inmate had a poor disciplinary record and the prison officials had valid security concerns. ". . .

Judge Sotomayor sat on three-judge panels in at least two high-profile student speech cases - one ruling against the student and one ruling in favor of the student. In Doninger v. Niehoff, the panel ruled against a student and her parent for the student's online speech critical of the school principal. The appeals court ruled that school officials could reasonably forecast that the student's critical online speech could cause a substantial disruption in the school environment.

In Guiles v. Marineau the three-judge panel that included Sotomayor ruled in favor of a Vermont student punished for wearing a T-shirt with a picture of then-President George W. Bush. The T-shirt in question referred to Bush as "Chicken-Hawk-in-Chief" and featured small print calling the president a crook and implying he was a cocaine-user. The panel, in an opinion written by Judge Richard Cardamone, determined that the shirt was not "plainly offensive" . . .

Sotomayor has written opinions in several Freedom of Information Act cases. In Wood v. FBI, she wrote for the 2nd Circuit that a prosecution memo and the names of investigating agents of the FBI and Department of Justice who were investigating Connecticut Federal Bureau of Investigation agents could be withheld because of FOIA exemptions for work product and privacy.

In Tigue v. U.S. Department of Justice, she for a three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit that a memorandum prepared by a U.S. attorney describing how the Internal Revenue Service should pursue criminal tax investigations was protected by an exemption covering an agency's "deliberative processes."

As a district court judge in Dow Jones v. U.S. Department of Justice, Sotomayor issued three different opinions related to the attempt by Dow Jones to receive a copy of a suicide note penned by former White House counsel Vince Foster. . . . Sotomayor ruled that FBI and Park Police Reports were exempt from disclosure. However, she also ruled that a photocopy of the Foster suicide note should be disclosed. . .

Sotomayor sat on the three-judge panel that rejected a First Amendment challenge by the New York Restaurant Association to a New York City Health Code policy requiring businesses to disclose calorie content of their food. The panel, in an opinion by Judge Rosemary Pooler, concluded in New York State Restaurant Association v. New York City Board of Health that "although the restaurants are protected by the Constitution when they engage in commercial speech, the First Amendment is not violated, whereas here, the law in question mandates a simple factual disclosure of caloric information and is reasonably related to New York City's goals of combating obesity."

Politico - The clarity of her support for limits on campaign fundraising and her background as a pioneering campaign regulator is raising eyebrows among election law experts who say her record is more substantial and explicit than that of any Supreme Court nominee since the dawn of the modern, post-Watergate campaign finance regime. . .

In a rare and little-noticed law review article, she forcefully defended the policy motivations behind restrictions, questioning the line between campaign contributions and "bribes," calling on Congress to overhaul campaign finance laws – including suggesting public financing of its own elections – and blasting the Federal Election Commission for not enforcing existing laws.

"The continued failure to do this has greatly damaged public trust in officials and exacerbated the public's sense that no higher morality is in place by which public officials measure their conduct," she wrote in a law review article based on a speech she gave to Suffolk University Law School in 1996, when she was a federal district court judge.

On the only occasion when she was confronted with the issue as a jurist, Sotomayor joined a decision that effectively gave a pass to a Vermont law that severely limited campaign contributions and capped campaign spending – a law that the Supreme Court later overturned as a First Amendment violation.

Richard Prince - [A Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press] report notes that, "As a District Court judge, Sotomayor wrote the opinion in Tasini v. New York Times, a case that was eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. "In 1993, a group of six freelance authors sued the New York Times Company, Newsday, Inc., and Time, Inc., claiming that the print publishers had infringed upon the writers' copyrights when the publishers licensed rights to copy and sell articles to computerized databases such as Lexis/Nexis. The media companies argued that they were authorized to reproduce the articles as a 'collective work' under the federal Copyright Act.
Sotomayor sided with the media companies in holding that the writers did not have a copyright interest in the articles. Instead, Sotomayor held that electronic versions are 'revisions' of the original articles which are covered by the publishers' copyright interest in the collective work of the periodicals.". . . The case was appealed to the Second Circuit, which overturned the decision, and held that the reproduced articles were new works, and not revisions included in a collective work. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Second Circuit 7–2, ruling that the authors had copyright interests in the electronic editions of their works."

Matt Kelley, Change - Corey Rayburn Yung posted some informative statistics at the blog Sex Crimes this week. While the average federal judge ruled for the defendant in 6.28% of the time in 2008, Sotomayor ruled for the defendant in 7.41% of cases. A small difference, but it's something. Yung also ranks federal appeals judges on an activism scale and found her less activist in general than the average judge but slightly more activist on criminal cases. . .

In the case of U.S. v. Anthony Santa, the court ruled that crack cocaine found in Santa's possession was valid evidence despite the fact that the warrant against Santa had expired 17 months earlier. In a bookkeeping error, the warrant was never removed from the database and the police were acting in good faith. A true activist judge might have tossed that out, but not one aiming for a possible SCOTUS nomination. She was just following precedent.

She did go out on a limb, however, for felon voting rights. When her colleagues on the bench ruled to maintain the disenfranchisement of felons, she dissented strongly.

CNS - Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor ruled in January 2009 that states do not have to obey the Second Amendment's commandment that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. In Maloney v. Cuomo, Sotomayor signed an opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that said the Second Amendment does not protect individuals from having their right to keep and bear arms restricted by state governments. The opinion said that the Second Amendment only restricted the federal government from infringing on an individual's right to keep and bear arms. As justification for this position, the opinion cited the 1886 Supreme Court case of Presser v. Illinois. "It is settled law, however, that the Second Amendment applies only to limitations the federal government seeks to impose on this right," said the opinion. Quoting Presser, the court said, "it is a limitation only upon the power of Congress and the national government, and not upon that of the state."

LOCAL HEROES: STUDENTS WALK OUT OF CLASSROOMS TO PROTEST SPY CAMS

Guardian, UK - Pupils walked out of classrooms in protest against Big Brother-styled CCTV cameras recording their lessons. They were so angry with the installation of the equipment at Davenant Foundation School in Chester Road, Loughton, they refused to return until they received assurances it had been turned off.

It meant they missed three weeks of studies and led to the drafting of a petition signed by about 150 of their peers. And when they did return to the classroom they all wore masks to continue their protest.

The school, an accredited teacher training centre, said the equipment has been installed in two classrooms to capture footage showing examples of best practice in the profession, and would not be used without pupils' knowledge. . .

A father, whose son took part in the walk-out, said the school was wrong not to consult parents about the use of technology which "threatened our children's civil liberties".

OBAMA ASSUMES THE RIGHTS OF A DICTATOR

Sam Smith, Progressive Review - With his comments on preventive detention, President Obama has assumed the privileges of a dictator. There are no constitutional grounds for what he intends to do and nothing therefore to prevent him from expanding the language to include, for example, preventive detention for journalists who oppose the first three country conflict America has been in since World War II.

The claim by both Bush and Obama that they can exercise unconstitutional powers because we are in a war is supported neither by the document itself nor by reality, inasmuch as Congress has yet to declare war on anyone we are currently fighting. Further, all the unconstitutional measures used or proposed - from torture to preventive detention - have gained prominence without a single significant effort on the part of the United States to lessen the chances that someone in the countries concerned might wish to harm us. We have not only jettisoned the Constitution but common sense as well.

Andy Worthington, Counterpunch - Frankly, to even entertain the prospect that a third category of justice (beyond guilt and innocence) can be conjured out of thin air without fatally undermining the principles on which the United States was founded is to enter perilous territory indeed. Fundamentally, Guantánamo is a prison that was founded on the presumption that the Bush administration's "new paradigm" justified "preventive detention" for life, and although Obama stepped up his assurances at this point in his speech -- talking about "clear, defensible and lawful standards," "fair procedures," and "a thorough process of periodic review" -- it is simply unacceptable that "preventive detention" (which he referred to, euphemistically, as "prolonged detention") should be considered as an option, however much he tried to legitimize it by stating, "If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight."

Look at the sentence, "Hold[ing] individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war," replace "an act of war" with "a crime, any crime," and you will, I hope, realize why the proposed policy is so terrifying and so thoroughly unacceptable. If a President came to power promising to "hold individuals to keep them from committing a crime, any crime," I'd be very worried indeed. . .

I'm almost speechless with despair about [the proposal], and would urge anyone who believes in the fundamental right of human beings, in countries that purport to wear the cloak of civilization with pride, to live as free men and women unless arrested, charged, tried and convicted of a crime, to resist the notion that a form of "preventive detention" is anything other than the most fundamental betrayal of our core values.

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the author of 'The Guantanamo Files

Clip of Obama Speech: That's why my administration has begun to reshape the standards that apply to ensure that they are in line with the rule of law. We must have clear, defensible, and lawful standards for those who fall into this category. . . We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified. . . . our goal is to construct a legitimate legal framework for the remaining Guantanamo detainees that cannot be transferred. Our goal is not to avoid a legitimate legal framework. In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so, going forward, my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.

Rachel Maddow: You'll construct a legal regime to make indefinite detention legal. . . Develop an appropriate legal regime so you can construct a whole new system outside the courts even outside the military commissions so you can indefinitely imprison people without charges. And you will build that system from scratch. What's that somebody said about ad hoc legal strategies?

Just for context here in the United Kingdom where there isn't even a bill of rights, there has been a major debate about whether people can be held in preventive detention. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair wanted three months to be the outer limit for how long anyone could be held. There was a big political fight about it. Parliament ended up limiting that power to 28 days. 28 days is still the longest period of preventive detention that's allowed under law in any comparable democracy anywhere in the world

How long would President Obama's proposed indefinite detention last? He's not saying yet, but here is how he's defining the threat he says makes indefinite detention necessary.

Clip of Obama's speech: Right now, in distant training camps and in crowded cities, there are people plotting to take American lives. That will be the case a year from now, five years from now, and -- in all probability -- 10 years from now.

Maddow: Ten years from now? So you could get arrested today and locked up without a trial without being convicted without being sentenced for say ten years until the threat of your future criminal behavior passes? Prolonged detention he's calling it.

This was a beautiful speech from President Obama today with patriotic even moving language about the rule of law and the constitution and one of the most radical proposals for defying the constitution we have ever heard made to the American people.

FCC CLAIMS RIGHT TO SEARCH YOUR HOUSE WITHOUT WARRANT

Wired - If you have a wireless router, a cordless phone, remote car-door opener, baby monitor or cellphone in your house, the FCC claims the right to enter your home without a warrant at any time of the day or night in order to inspect it.

That's the upshot of the rules the agency has followed for years to monitor licensed television and radio stations, and to crack down on pirate radio broadcasters. And the commission maintains the same policy applies to any licensed or unlicensed radio-frequency device.

"Anything using RF energy - we have the right to inspect it to make sure it is not causing interference," says FCC spokesman David Fiske. That includes devices like Wi-Fi routers that use unlicensed spectrum, Fiske says.

The FCC claims it derives its warrantless search power from the Communications Act of 1934, though the constitutionality of the claim has gone untested in the courts. That's largely because the FCC had little to do with average citizens for most of the last 75 years, when home transmitters were largely reserved to ham-radio operators and CB-radio aficionados. But in 2009, nearly every household in the United States has multiple devices that use radio waves and fall under the FCC's purview, making the commission's claimed authority ripe for a court challenge.

"It is a major stretch beyond case law to assert that authority with respect to a private home, which is at the heart of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure," says Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Lee Tien. "When it is a private home and when you are talking about an over-powered Wi-Fi antenna - the idea they could just go in is honestly quite bizarre."

George Washington University professor Orin Kerr, a constitutional law expert, also questions the legality of the policy.

"The Supreme Court has said that the government can't make warrantless entries into homes for administrative inspections," Kerr said via e-mail, refering to a 1967 Supreme Court ruling that housing inspectors needed warrants to force their way into private residences. The FCC's online FAQ doesn't explain how the agency gets around that ruling, Kerr adds.

The rules came to attention this month when an FCC agent investigating a pirate radio station in Boulder, Colorado, left a copy of a 2005 FCC inspection policy on the door of a residence hosting the unlicensed 100-watt transmitter. "Whether you operate an amateur station or any other radio device, your authorization from the Commission comes with the obligation to allow inspection," the statement says.

The notice spooked those running "Boulder Free Radio," who thought it was just tough talk intended to scare them into shutting down, according to one of the station's leaders, who spoke to Wired.com on condition of anonymity. "This is an intimidation thing," he said. "Most people aren't that dedicated to the cause. I'm not going to let them into my house."

But refusing the FCC admittance can carry a harsh financial penalty. In a 2007 case, a Corpus Christi, Texas, man got a visit from the FCC's direction-finders after rebroadcasting an AM radio station through a CB radio in his home. An FCC agent tracked the signal to his house and asked to see the equipment; Donald Winton refused to let him in, but did turn off the radio. Winton was later fined $7,000 for refusing entry to the officer. The fine was reduced to $225 after he proved he had little income.

Administrative search powers are not rare, at least as directed against businesses - fire-safety, food and workplace-safety regulators generally don't need warrants to enter a business. And despite the broad power, the FCC agents aren't cops, says Fiske. "The only right they have is to inspect the equipment," Fiske says. "If they want to seize, they have to work with the U.S. Attorney's office."

But if inspectors should notice evidence of unrelated criminal behavior - say, a marijuana plant or stolen property - a Supreme Court decision suggests the search can be used against the resident. In the 1987 case New York v. Burger, two police officers performed a warrantless, administrative search of one Joseph Burger's automobile junkyard. When he couldn't produce the proper paperwork, the officers searched the grounds and found stolen vehicles, which they used to prosecute him. The Supreme Court held the search to be legal.

MINNESOTA REJECTS REAL ID CARD

ACLU - Minnesota Governor Timothy Pawlenty signed legislation that prohibits his administration from turning the state driver's license into a national identity card and from imposing new burdens on taxpayers, citizens, immigrants and state government.

The state legislature overwhelmingly endorsed the bill with a unanimous House vote and a 64-1 vote in the Senate. Minnesota becomes the 23rd state to reject the Real ID Act of 2005. . .

"23 states have now sent a clear message to Washington that they will not submit to wrongheaded federal mandates that waste state tax dollars and put privacy at risk," said Christopher Calabrese, Counsel of the ACLU Technology & Liberty Program. "Congress should take notice and repeal the Real ID Act so that effective driver's license security policy can be developed."

As part of creating a national identification card, the Real ID Act of 2005 also mandates that states hold Americans' private information in a single database that is accessible to federal and state officials - the cost and security of which is unknown. Consequently, the National Governors Association and the National Conference of State Legislatures have expressed strong opposition to the Real ID Act.

During her January confirmation hearing, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano called for a review of Real ID, saying the states were not consulted enough in its creation and that the initiative is a fiscal burden on the states.

Before heading up DHS, Napolitano was Governor of Arizona, where she enacted legislation prohibiting her state from complying with the requirements of Real ID.

TSA SHOWING PUBLIC DUMBED DOWN VERSION OF VIRTUAL SEARCH MACHINE

CNN - Privacy advocates plan to call on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to suspend use of "whole-body imaging," the airport security technology that critics say performs "a virtual strip search" and produces "naked" pictures of passengers, CNN has learned. . .

The national campaign, which will gather signatures from organizations and relevant professionals, is set to launch this week with the hope that it will go "viral," said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which plans to lead the charge.

"People need to know what's happening, with no sugar-coating and no spinning," said Coney, who is also coordinator of the Privacy Coalition, a conglomerate of 42 member organizations. She expects other groups to sign on in the push for the technology's suspension until privacy safeguards are in place. . .

TSA officials say privacy concerns are addressed in a number of ways.

The system uses a pair of security officers. The one working the machine never sees the image, which appears on a computer screen behind closed doors elsewhere; and the remotely located officer who sees the image never sees the passenger.

As further protection, a passenger's face is blurred and the image as a whole "resembles a fuzzy negative," said TSA's Lee. The officers monitoring images aren't allowed to bring cameras, cell phones or any recording device into the room, and the computers have been programmed so they have "zero storage capability" and images are "automatically deleted," she added.

But this is of little comfort to Coney, the privacy advocate with EPIC, a public interest research group in Washington. She said she's seen whole-body images captured by similar technology dating back to 2004 that were much clearer than what's represented by the airport machines.

"What they're showing you now is a dumbed-down version of what this technology is capable of doing," she said. "Having blurry images shouldn't blur the issue."

Lee of TSA emphasized that the images Coney refers to do not represent millimeter wave technology but rather "backscatter" technology, which she said TSA is not using at this time.

Coney said she and other privacy advocates want more oversight, full disclosure for air travelers, and legal language to protect passengers and keep TSA from changing policy down the road.

For example, she wants to know what's to stop TSA from using clearer images or different technology later. The computers can't store images now, but what if that changes?. . .

Coney knows only about what's out there now, and she worries that as the equipment gets cheaper, it will become more pervasive and harder to regulate. Already it is used in a handful of U.S. courthouses and in airports in the United Kingdom, Spain, Japan, Australia, Mexico, Thailand and the Netherlands. She wonders whether the machines will someday show up in malls.

The option of walking through a whole-body scanner or taking a pat-down shouldn't be the final answer, said Chris Calabrese, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.

"A choice between being groped and being stripped, I don't think we should pretend those are the only choices," he said. "People shouldn't be humiliated by their government" in the name of security, nor should they trust that the images will always be kept private.

"Screeners at LAX [Los Angeles International Airport]," he speculated, "could make a fortune off naked virtual images of celebrities."

HEY, IT WORKED FOR HITLER DIDN'T IT? EXPLORER SCOUTS BEING TAUGHT HOW TO KILL

MORE PHOTOS

NY Times, Imperial CA - Ten minutes into arrant mayhem in this town near the Mexican border, and the gunman, a disgruntled Iraq war veteran, has already taken out two people, one slumped in his desk, the other covered in blood on the floor.

The responding officers - eight teenage boys and girls, the youngest 14 - face tripwire, a thin cloud of poisonous gas and loud shots - BAM! BAM! - fired from behind a flimsy wall. They move quickly, pellet guns drawn and masks affixed.

"United States Border Patrol! Put your hands up!" screams one in a voice cracking with adolescent determination as the suspect is subdued.

It is all quite a step up from the square knot.

The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence - an intense ratcheting up of one of the group's longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters.

"This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl," said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff's deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run. "It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boy Scouts."

The training, which leaders say is not intended to be applied outside the simulated Explorer setting, can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out "active shooters," like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses. In a simulation here of a raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout.

"Put him on his face and put a knee in his back," a Border Patrol agent explained. "I guarantee that he'll shut up."

One participant, Felix Arce, 16, said he liked "the discipline of the program," which was something he said his life was lacking. "I want to be a lawyer, and this teaches you about how crimes are committed," he said.

Cathy Noriego, also 16, said she was attracted by the guns. The group uses compressed-air guns - known as airsoft guns, which fire tiny plastic pellets - in the training exercises, and sometimes they shoot real guns on a closed range.

"I like shooting them," Cathy said. "I like the sound they make. It gets me excited.". . .

Many law enforcement officials, particularly those who work for the rapidly growing Border Patrol, part of the Homeland Security Department, have helped shape the program's focus and see it as preparing the Explorers as potential employees. The Explorer posts are attached to various agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local police and fire departments, that sponsor them much the way churches sponsor Boy Scout troops.

"Our end goal is to create more agents," said April McKee, a senior Border Patrol agent and mentor at the session here.

US AIRWAYS HAS BLIND MAN ARRESTED FOR ASKING WHY PLANE WAS DELAYED TWO HOURS

Philadelphia Daily News - A blind international interpreter who says he was dragged off a Belgium-bound flight, arrested and held in custody in Philadelphia for hours without food or water faces an arraignment Thursday. His crime: He questioned why his U.S. Airways flight was delayed nearly two hours. Nicola Cantisani, 61, of Brussels, Belgium, a professional translator who has been blind since birth, was charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, police said. "This is taking airplane security to a new and ridiculous level," said his attorney, A. Charles Peruto Jr. "It's pretty crazy.". . .

Cantisani said he stood up to request a glass of water and to speak with the crew or captain about the delay, but was told to sit down. . .

Cantisani said he spoke with the captain, who told him the plane was having mechanical problems. He then returned to his seat.

Shortly afterward, another passenger made a remark about the crew, prompting three Philadelphia Police officers to escort that man off the plane, Cantisani said.

Then, police tried to remove Cantisani as well, he said.

Lt. Frank Vanore, a police spokesman, said the police were called to Gate A-19 because of a disorderly passenger.

POLL: 52% SAY LEGALIZE MARIJUANA

Huffington Post - A majority of Americans, in a poll, say it "makes sense to tax and regulate" marijuana. The Zogby poll, commissioned by the conservative-leaning O'Leary Report, . . . found only 37 percent opposed.

A previous ABC News/Washington Post poll found 46 percent in support. In California, a Field Poll found 56 percent backing legalization.

MASSACHUSETTS POLICE TAPPING INTO PRIVATE DATA OF CELEBRITIES

Boston Globe - Police from communities across the state have repeatedly tapped into the state's criminal records system to improperly access information on celebrities and "high-profile citizens," according to a scathing audit released yesterday that also branded the system as obsolete and flawed.

Law enforcement personnel looked up personal information on Patriots star Tom Brady 968 times - seeking anything from his driver's license photo and home address, to whether he had purchased a gun - and auditors discovered "repeated searches and queries" on dozens of other celebrities such as Matt Damon, James Taylor, Celtics star Paul Pierce, and Red Sox owner John Henry, said two state officials familiar with the audit.

The Criminal Offender Record Information system, with its massive databases of criminal records, driving histories, car ownership, and Social Security numbers, is intended to provide police and prosecutors with complete portraits of individuals who have been arrested or brought into the court system. Reports are available to other users such as landlords and some employers conducting background checks on prospective tenants and job seekers. Access is supposed to be restricted to authorized law enforcement users, who are specially trained.

But the yearlong review by state Auditor A. Joseph DeNucci depicts a system repeatedly accessed by users "without any apparent work-related justification."

Such unauthorized use could be considered fraud under federal law, and "disciplinary action, up to and including dismissal and/or criminal prosecution" could follow misuse of the system, DeNucci's audit said. . .

Thomas Nee, president of the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association, said he was stunned by the misuse of the system. "Anyone caught socially surfing that important law enforcement asset should be stripped of their right to use it," he said. "It's outrageous."

16 YEAR OLD HELD WITHOUT TRIAL, OTHER RIGHTS, UNDER ILLEGAL PATRIOT ACT

WRAL, NC - Sixteen-year-old Ashton Lundeby's bedroom in his mother's Granville County home is nothing, if not patriotic. Images of American flags are everywhere – on the bed, on the floor, on the wall.

But according to the United States government, the tenth-grade home-schooler is being held on a criminal complaint that he made a bomb threat from his home on the night of Feb. 15.

The family was at a church function that night, his mother, Annette Lundeby, said.

"Undoubtedly, they were given false information, or they would not have had 12 agents in my house with a widow and two children and three cats," Lundeby said.

Around 10 p.m. on March 5, Lundeby said, armed FBI agents along with three local law enforcement officers stormed her home looking for her son. They handcuffed him and presented her with a search warrant.

"I was terrified," Lundeby's mother said. "There were guns, and I don't allow guns around my children. I don't believe in guns."

Lundeby told the officers that someone had hacked into her son's IP address and was using it to make crank calls connected through the Internet, making it look like the calls had originated from her home when they did not.

Her argument was ignored, she said. Agents seized a computer, a cell phone, gaming console, routers, bank statements and school records, according to federal search warrants.

"There were no bomb-making materials, not even a blasting cap, not even a wire," Lundeby said.

Ashton now sits in a juvenile facility in South Bend, Ind. His mother has had little access to him since his arrest. She has gone to her state representatives as well as attorneys, seeking assistance, but, she said, there is nothing she can do.

Lundeby said the USA Patriot Act stripped her son of his due process rights.

"We have no rights under the Patriot Act to even defend them, because the Patriot Act basically supersedes the Constitution," she said. . .

"They're saying that 'We feel this individual is a terrorist or an enemy combatant against the United States, and we're going to suspend all of those due process rights because this person is an enemy of the United States," said Dan Boyce, a defense attorney and former U.S. attorney not connected to the Lundeby case.

Critics of the statute say it threatens the most basic of liberties.

"There's nothing a matter of public record," Boyce said "All those normal rights are just suspended in the air."

In a bi-partisan effort, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., last month introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives a bill that would narrow subpoena power in a provision of the Patriot Act, called the National Security Letters, to curb what some consider to be abuse of power by federal law enforcement officers. . .

Because a federal judge issued a gag order in the case, the U.S. attorney in Indiana cannot comment on the case, nor can the FBI. . .

"Never in my worst nightmare did I ever think that it would be my own government that I would have to protect my children from," Lundeby said. "This is the United States, and I feel like I live in a third world country now."

HSA EXTREMIST DICTIONARY WITHDRAWN

Washington Times - The same Homeland Security Department office that categorized veterans as potential terrorists issued an earlier report that defined dozens of "extremists" ranging from black power activists to abortion foes. The report was nixed within hours and recalled from state and local law enforcement officials.

Whites and blacks, Christians and Jews, Cubans and Mexicans, along with tax-hating Americans were among several political leanings listed in the "Domestic Extremism Lexicon" that came out of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis in late March. . .

Black separatism was defined as a movement that they said advocates the establishment of a separate nation within the U.S., and its members "advocate or engage in criminal activity and plot acts of violence directed toward local law enforcement" to advance their goals. Black power is a "term used by black separatists to describe their pride in, and the perceived superiority of the black race," the report said.

FEDERAL JUDGE PUNISHES TEACHER FOR CALLING CREATIONISM 'NONSENSE'

Orange County Register, CA - A Mission Viejo high school history teacher violated the First Amendment by disparaging Christians during a classroom lecture, a federal judge ruled today. James Corbett, a 20-year teacher at Capistrano Valley High School, was found guilty of referring to Creationism as "religious, superstitious nonsense" during a 2007 classroom lecture, denigrating his former Advanced Placement European history student, Chad Farnan.

The decision is the culmination of a 16-month legal battle between Corbett and Farnan – a conflict the judge said should remind teachers of their legal "boundaries" as public school employees.

"Corbett states an unequivocal belief that Creationism is 'superstitious nonsense,'" U.S. District Court Judge James Selna said in a 37-page ruling released from his Santa Ana courtroom. "The court cannot discern a legitimate secular purpose in this statement, even when considered in context."

In a December 2007 lawsuit, Farnan, then a sophomore, accused Corbett of repeatedly promoting hostility toward Christians in class and advocating "irreligion over religion" in violation of the First Amendment's establishment clause.

The establishment clause prohibits the government from making any law "respecting an establishment of religion" and has been interpreted by U.S. courts to also prohibit government employees from displaying religious hostility.

"We are thrilled with the judge's ruling and feel it sets great precedent," said Farnan's attorney, Jennifer Monk, who works for the Christian legal group Advocates for Faith & Freedom in Murrieta. "Hopefully, teachers in the future, including Dr. Corbett, will think about what they're saying and attempt to ensure they're not violating the establishment clause as Dr. Corbett has done."

Chad Farnan and his parents did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment, but released a prepared statement through their attorney: "We are proud of Chad's courageous stand and thrilled with the judge's ruling. It is a vindication of his constitutional rights."

Farnan's original lawsuit asked for damages and attorney's fees. These issues – plus a possible court injunction prohibiting Corbett from making hostile remarks about religion – will be considered in court at a future, undetermined date, Monk said. . .

JUSTICE SCALIA: WHAT I SAY DOESN'T APPLY TO ME

Martha Neil, ABA Journal - Last year, when law professor Joel Reidenberg wanted to show his Fordham University class how readily private information is available on the Internet, he assigned a group project. It was collecting personal information from the Web about himself.

This year, after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made public comments that seemingly may have questioned the need for more protection of private information, Reidenberg assigned the same project. Except this time Scalia was the subject, the prof explains to the ABA Journal in a telephone interview.

His class turned in a 15-page dossier that included not only Scalia's home address, home phone number and home value, but his food and movie preferences, his wife's personal e-mail address and photos of his grandchildren, reports Above the Law.

And, as Scalia himself made clear in a statement to Above the Law, he isn't happy about the invasion of his privacy:

"Professor Reidenberg's exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any," the justice says, among other comments.

WHAT PORTUGAL CAN TEACH US ABOUT DEALING WITH DRUGS

Glenn Greenwald, Cato - On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal framework, all drugs were "decriminalized," not "legalized." Thus, drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed to be exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm. Drug trafficking continues to be prosecuted as a criminal offense.

While other states in the European Union have developed various forms of de facto decriminalization - whereby substances perceived to be less serious (such as cannabis) rarely lead to criminal prosecution - Portugal remains the only EU member state with a law explicitly declaring drugs to be "decriminalized." Because more than seven years have now elapsed since enactment of Portugal's decriminalization system, there are ample data enabling its effects to be assessed.

Notably, decriminalization has become increasingly popular in Portugal since 2001. Except for some far-right politicians, very few domestic political factions are agitating for a repeal of the 2001 law. And while there is a widespread perception that bureaucratic changes need to be made to Portugal's decriminalization framework to make it more efficient and effective, there is no real debate about whether drugs should once again be criminalized. More significantly, none of the nightmare scenarios touted by preenactment decriminalization opponents - from rampant increases in drug usage among the young to the transformation of Lisbon into a haven for "drug tourists" - has occurred.

The political consensus in favor of decriminalization is unsurprising in light of the relevant empirical data. Those data indicate that decriminalization has had no adverse effect on drug usage rates in Portugal, which, in numerous categories, are now among the lowest in the EU, particularly when compared with states with stringent criminalization regimes. Although post-decriminalization usage rates have remained roughly the same or even decreased slightly when compared with other EU states, drug-related pathologies - such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage - have decreased dramatically. Drug policy experts attribute those positive trends to the enhanced ability of the Portuguese government to offer treatment programs to its citizens - enhancements made possible, for numerous reasons, by decriminalization.

MUCH MORE

MINNESOTA CENSORS INTERNET USE

CNET - The state of Minnesota has handed Internet providers a 7-page blacklist of gambling Web sites that they're supposed to prevent customers from accessing, a move that raises First Amendment and technical concerns.

"We are putting site operators and Minnesota online gamblers on notice and in advance," said John Willems, a Minnesota Department of Public Safety official, in a statement. Companies that received the list of off-limits Web sites -- which was made public on Thursday -- include AT&T, Comcast, Qwest, and Sprint/Nextel.

The Department of Public Safety's letters to the Internet providers say that "gambling is illegal within Minnesota" and claim that a federal law "requires upon notice by a law enforcement agency that you do not allow your systems to be used for the transmission of gambling information."

Federal law says that a "common carrier" must "discontinue or refuse, the leasing, furnishing, or maintaining" of any service if it's being used to transmit gambling-related information. (The U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal Communications Commission, however, have suggested that neither cable providers nor DSL providers are "common carriers.")

Joe Brennan of the Interactive Media Entertainment and Gaming Association in Washington, D.C. said on Thursday evening that his group just found out about the blacklist and is consulting with First Amendment attorneys to evaluate its options.

Minnesota's move echoes what happened in Pennsylvania about six years ago. The Keystone State enacted a law permitting the state attorney general to deliver orders to Internet providers telling them to block possibly illegal Web sites.

But a federal judge in Philadelphia struck down the law in 2004 on First Amendment grounds, saying: "There is little evidence that the act has reduced the production of child pornography or the child sexual abuse associated with its creation. On the other hand, there is an abundance of evidence that implementation of the Act has resulted in massive suppression of speech protected by the First Amendment."

WORD

We have 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the people in prison. Either we're the most evil people on earth, or we're doing something wrong. . . I saw more drug use at Georgetown University Law Center when I was a student there than I've seen anywhere else in my life. And some of those people are judges. - Senator James Webb

OBAMA WOULD END EXTRA COCAINE PENALTY FOR CRACK

Washington Post - Justice Department officials yesterday endorsed for the first time a plan that would eliminate vast sentencing disparities between possession of powdered cocaine and rock cocaine, an inequity that civil rights groups say has affected poor and minority defendants disproportionately. Lanny A. Breuer, the new chief of the criminal division, told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that the Obama administration would support bills to equalize punishment for offenders convicted of possessing the drug in either form, fulfilling one of the president's campaign pledges. Breuer explicitly called on Congress to act this term to "completely eliminate" the sentencing disparity.

SUPREME COURT HURTS SMALL STATIONS WITH 'FLEETING EXPLETIVE' RULING

Don't Tase Me Bro' - Apparently, one of the big arguments against banning "fleeting expletives" has been that it's expensive for small stations (in particular) to do this on a real-time basis; Scalia argues that it's now cheap enough not to be an issue.

Justice Breyer, who wrote the main dissenting opinion, disagreed. Although he confessed ignorance "about the prevalence of vulgarity in small towns," Breyer did point to one station manager's testimony to the FCC as evidence that a ban on fleeting expletives could decimate small time, live coverage of news and events.

"As one local station manager told the FCC, 'to lessen the risk posed by the new legal framework. . . I have directed [the station's] news staff that [our station] may no longer provide live, direct-to-air coverage of 'live events where crowds are present. . . unless they affect matters of public safety or conven­ience. Thus, news coverage by [my station] of live events where crowds are present essentially will be limited to civil emergencies.'"

In Breyer's view, "the Federal Communications Commission failed adequately to explain why it changed its indecency policy from a policy permitting a single 'fleeting use' of an expletive, to a policy that made no such exception."

Breyer sees an obvious difference between the Carlin routine ("a monologue that deliberately and repeatedly uttered the expletives here at issue more than 100 times in one hour at a time of day when children were likely to hear the broadcast") and fleeting expletives, but Justices Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, Alito, and Kennedy disagreed. TV stations now drop the F-bomb only at their peril. "A safe haven for families" or a First Amendment killer?

Although the ruling against Fox was made under Republican Kevin Martin, acting FCC head Michael Copps (a Democrat) praised today's decision as "a big win for families.". . .

Andrew Jay Schwartzman, head of the Media Access Project, called the ruling "extremely disappointing. We remain hopeful that the FCC's restrictive policies will ultimately be declared unconstitutional, but there will be several more years of uncertainty, and impaired artistic expression, while the lower courts address the First Amendment issues which the Court chose not to confront today."

JIM CROW RETURNS TO THE SOUTH, WITH LATINOS AS THE NEW BLACKS

Joshua Holland, AlterNet - According to a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, low-income Latinos in the American South are living in what one participant described as a "war zone."

The report was based on interviews with hundreds of poor Latinos -- U.S. citizens and legal and illegal immigrants alike. It paints a bleak picture of the routine abuses faced by those among a marginalized underclass.

According to the authors, poor Latinos in the South "are routinely cheated out of their earnings and denied basic health and safety protections. They are regularly subjected to racial profiling and harassment by law enforcement. They are victimized by criminals who know they are reluctant to report attacks.". . .

According to the report:

This treatment - which many Latinos liken to the oppressive climate of racial subordination that blacks endured during the Jim Crow era - is encouraged by politicians and media figures who scapegoat immigrants and spread false propaganda. And as a result of relentless vilification in the media, Latinos are targeted for harassment by racist extremist groups, some of which are directly descended from the old guardians of white supremacy.

The authors add, "instead of acting to prohibit and eliminate systematic exploitation and discrimination against Latinos, state and local governments in much of the South have exacerbated the situation" through harsh local policies and over-the-top rhetoric about illegal immigration.

FBI ABUSING DNA INFORMATION

NY Times - Law enforcement officials are vastly expanding their collection of DNA to include millions more people who have been arrested or detained but not yet convicted. . . Until now, the federal government genetically tracked only convicts. But starting this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will join 15 states that collect DNA samples from those awaiting trial and will also collect DNA from detained immigrants - the vanguard of a growing class of genetic registrants. . .

But criminal justice experts cite Fourth Amendment privacy concerns and worry that the nation is becoming a genetic surveillance society.

"DNA databases were built initially to deal with violent sexual crimes and homicides - a very limited number of crimes," said Harry Levine, a professor of sociology at City University of New York who studies policing trends. "Over time more and more crimes of decreasing severity have been added to the database. Cops and prosecutors like it because it gives everybody more information and creates a new suspect pool."

Courts have generally upheld laws authorizing compulsory collection of DNA from convicts and ex-convicts under supervised release, on the grounds that criminal acts diminish privacy rights.

DNA extraction upon arrest potentially erodes that argument, a recent Congressional study found. "Courts have not fully considered legal implications of recent extensions of DNA-collection to people whom the government has arrested but not tried or convicted," the report said. . .

As more police agencies take DNA for a greater variety of lesser and suspected crimes, civil rights advocates say the government's power is becoming too broadly applied. "What we object to - and what the Constitution prohibits - is the indiscriminate taking of DNA for things like writing an insufficient funds check, shoplifting, drug convictions and other cases where police don't have a need to obtain DNA because it's not relevant to charges facing them," said Michael Risher, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

ADMINISTRATION PLANS COMPUTERIZED STRIP SEARCHES FOR ALL AIR PASSENGERS

NY Times - In a shift, the Transportation Security Administration plans to replace the walk-through metal detectors at airport checkpoints with whole-body imaging machines - the kind that provide an image of the naked body.

Initially, the machines were supposed to be used only on passengers who set off the metal detectors, to provide them with an option to the customary secondary physical pat-downs and inspections by electronic wand.

But Robin Kane, the agency's acting chief technology officer, said that the initial results from pilot tests at some checkpoints at 19 airports in the United States had been so good that the idea of using the machines as the standard checkpoint detectors made sense. Those results included, he said, positive feedback from passengers.

The plan now is that all passengers will "go through the whole-body imager instead of the walk-through metal detector," he said.

"We're just finishing some piloting in six airports in the primary screening position," he said. Assuming tests continue to be positive, the machines will eventually be used at most domestic airports. . .

Bruce Schneier, a security technology consultant, said the body-imaging machines are the equivalent of "a physically invasive strip-search.". . .

In interviews, agency officials stressed that the technology remained in a test phase. They said that they expected initial contracts to produce the machines to be awarded this summer and that passengers will start seeing the machines at some checkpoints soon afterward. They had no timetable for when the machines would be installed at most airports. . .

CONSERVATIVE BAPTIST PREACHER SAYS HE WAS ABUSED BY BORDER PATROL

Ray Stern, Phoenix New Times - A local Baptist pastor who was left bloodied and indignant after a stop at the Border Patrol's checkpoint on eastbound Interstate 8 wonders in a recent video, "Why is this happening in the United States of America?"

New Times readers who remember our February 2008 article on the infamous checkpoint know the answer: Because of a disputed -- but still potent -- U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

As the article states, the Border Patrol was granted an exception to normal Fourth Amendment procedures, allowing the agency to set up checkpoints with trained dogs on any road within 100 miles of the international border. Funding for drug-and-human-sniffing dogs increased after the 9/11 attacks, resulting in thousands of recreational pot users -- and few criminals or illegal immigrants -- getting busted at the Interstate 8 checkpoint.

Pastor Steven Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church, 2707 West Southern Avenue in Tempe, presumably doesn't use drugs or smuggle undocumented workers into the country. His offense was to demand a constitutional right that doesn't apply near the border.

In a YouTube video Anderson made and posted, the pastor narrates a tale that should send chills down the spine of any American.

While driving through the checkpoint, located about 70 miles east of Yuma, a Border Patrol dog "alerted" to the pastor's vehicle, and agents instructed him to pull his car over to an inspection area. Anderson refused, claiming the dog had seemed mellow and that the agents had no right to search him. Agents blocked his path for an hour until an officer from the Arizona Department of Public Safety showed up, Anderson says.

The lawmen broke his vehicle's windows with hammers, shot him with a Taser and threw him to the ground, he says.

"He's got his foot on my head," Anderson says of one officer. "I'm shot by more Tasers again. . . They're just torturing me with these Tasers again and again.". . .

His forehead bleeding from cuts, Anderson was arrested and driven to an urgent care facility in Yuma. A DPS trooper ignored his desperate pleas to be allowed to urinate until Anderson was in pain, he says.

The pastor received 11 stitches and spent the night in jail

VIDEO

NAPOLITANO SUPPORTS HOMELAND SECURITY INSULT TO VETERANS AND SUPPORTERS OF THE CONSTITUTION

Progressive Review - According to the Washington Times, "Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said she was briefed before the release of a controversial intelligence assessment and that she stands by the report sent to law enforcement." The report, widely circulated to police around the country implicitly defined as sources of extremist politics veterans and supporters of one fifth of the ten items in the Bill of Rights. While one may argue with the 2nd or 10th Amendment, it is the job of the police at every level to enforce the laws, of which there is none more important than the U.S. Constitution.

Washington Times - The top House Democrat with oversight of the Department of Homeland Security said in a letter to Ms. Napolitano that he was "dumbfounded" that such a report would be issued.

"This report appears to raise significant issues involving the privacy and civil liberties of many Americans - including war veterans," said Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, in his letter. . .

In her statement Wednesday, Ms. Napolitano defended the report, which says "rightwing extremism" may include groups opposed to abortion and immigration, as merely one among several threat assessments. But she agreed to meet with the head of the American Legion, who had expressed anger over the report, when she returns to Washington next week from a tour of the U.S.-Mexico border. . .

In his letter to Ms. Napolitano, Mr. Thompson demanded that Homeland Security officials explain how and why they wrote the report and whether it poses any threat to civil liberties.

"As I am certain you agree, freedom of association and freedom of speech are guaranteed to all Americans - whether a person's beliefs, whatever their political orientation, are 'extremist' or not," Mr. Thompson said.

Mr. Thompson said the report "blurred the line," and that he is "disappointed and surprised that the department would allow this report to be disseminated" to law enforcement officials nationwide. . .

"Rightwing extremism," the report said in a footnote on Page 2, goes beyond religious and racial hate groups and extends to "those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely."

"It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration," said the report, which also listed gun owners and veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as potential risks.

The assessment is not the first Homeland Security product to examine threats based on political extremism. In January, the department sent law enforcement officials an assessment of cyberterrorism threats from such left-leaning sources as environmental, animal rights and anarchist groups. .

OBAMA REFUSES TO PROSECUTE CIA TORTURE CRIMINALS

Politico - The Obama administration pledged not to prosecute CIA employees who carried out aggressive interrogation practices approved by top officials in the Bush administration. The pledge came as President Barack Obama authorized the release of four Bush administration legal memos detailing war on terror interrogation techniques that some have decried as torture. . .

"This is a time for reflection not retribution," Obama said. "We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."

Progressive Review - Obama didn't say whether this principle also applied to murderers, bank robbers and marijuana users.