August 30, 2008
Cheeky of people, thinking they have rights....
November 30, 2007
Bring us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses, afraid of being tortured in the United States: The United States is not a safe country for refugees, the Federal Court said Thursday as it ruled that Canada will no longer...
August 07, 2007
Re: FISA etc, Atrios wants someone who can to ask: Have the phone and email conversations of any American journalists, US federal officeholders, or federal campaign workers ever been intercepted without a warrant?...
June 15, 2007
...or maybe not: An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than...
April 08, 2007
And he's a retired Marine too: "On 1 March 07, I was scheduled to fly on American Airlines to Newark, NJ, to attend an academic conference at Princeton University, designed to focus on my latest scholarly book, Constitutional Democracy, published...
April 04, 2007
...they really are out to get you (emphasis mine): A secret FBI intelligence unit helped detain a group of war protesters in a downtown Washington parking garage in April 2002 and interrogated some of them on videotape about their political...
March 15, 2007
Via TPM, the National Journal is reporting that Gonzalez asked Bush to end an internal Justice Department probe that was focusing on his own actions: Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut...
March 09, 2007
Via the Associated Press: WASHINGTON (AP) -- The FBI underreported how often it used the USA Patriot Act to force businesses to turn over customer information in suspected terrorism cases, according to a Justice Department audit. (snip) Justice Department Inspector...
February 08, 2007
A report of air marshalls bring required to submit a quota of suspects whether they suspect them or not: The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they're required to submit at least one report a month....
January 16, 2007
Armand mentioned the Lam case a couple of days ago, but I just saw via Balloon Juice that the number is possibly up to seven fired prosecutors. As Tim F. says, TPM is doing the work: Okay, so we already...
January 04, 2007
Found via Atrios, this from the NYDN: President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the Daily News has learned. The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform...
December 17, 2006
Those are what we need to take to the Department of Homeland Security. Is it really possible that a bureaucracy this young can already stink this much? the Department of Homeland Security, which has opted to bar access to detainees...
December 16, 2006
Right now, where are the legal immigrants that were rounded up in Homeland Security operations this week? Where are they? What's next? Maybe we should start a letter writing campaign, since trying to engage habeus corpus isn't necessarily going to...
November 18, 2006
He was speaking at the Air Force Academy about the August ruling against domestic spying: Gonzales, in remarks prepared for delivery at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said that some see the program as on the...
September 28, 2006
No? So then why is the left fringe, but not right, mentioned specifically in the NIE? The recently declassified NIE report on terrorism contains an interesting paragraph:"Anti-U.S. and anti-globalization sentiment is on the rise and fueling other radical ideologies. This...
September 13, 2006
...Congress is busy working to protect our rights. While refusing to give the president a blank check to prosecute the war on terrorism, Republicans in the Senate Judiciary Committee kept to the White House's condition that a bill giving legal...
July 27, 2006
Rooting out teh gay: A decorated sergeant and Arabic language specialist was dismissed from the U.S. Army under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, though he says he never told his superiors he was gay and his accuser was never...
July 20, 2006
First it was Quakers, now, college students: A federal Department of Homeland Security agent passed along information about student protests against military recruiters at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, landing the demonstrations on a database tracking foreign terrorism, according...
July 18, 2006
CNN (emphasis mine): President Bush personally blocked a Justice Department investigation of the anti-terror eavesdropping program that intercepts Americans' international calls and e-mails, administration officials said Tuesday. Bush refused to grant security clearances for department investigators who were looking into...
July 04, 2006
Ready and waiting for any excuse?. Emphasis mine. The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court...
May 15, 2006
Posted without comment, but what's your opinion? The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company, formed in 1997, called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts. ......
ABC News: A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources. "It's time for you to get some...
May 13, 2006
Are we really surprised that the big phone companies (but not Qwest) meekly rolled over for the NSA database? Not even condsidering cynical thoughts like quid pro quo over ending Net Neutrality, can you imagine any major corporation that wouldn't...
April 17, 2006
While googling some of our recent visitors, up popped a website called Concealed Position. One thing I have found while keeping track of "interesting" visits is that other people do too. Anyway, from this find, more finds. Guess what? Corporate...
April 15, 2006
...Majikthise reminds us that there is still skulking going on: If you thought CIFA was scary, wait until you here what's up next. MSNBC reports that the Pentagon is trying to merge merge CIFA and the DSS to create a...
March 19, 2006
No, not that way. According to the Bush administration, sexual orientation may be used to deny security clearances. The administration rewrote a 1997 regulation that had said sexual orientation “may not be used as a basis” for denying clearances or...
March 15, 2006
...they can hire me and pay me for my professional services by appointment and contract, not show up unannounced at my office hours, pump me for incriminating information and harass my students. Sheriff Lee Baca said Friday that his deputies...
March 09, 2006
I realize I've had my head down recently (dissertation), but I surfaced just long enough to see this NYT story. Last I checked, the Administration was spying on Americans without even a FISA warrant. This violates both FISA and some...
March 07, 2006
March 03, 2006
At least, that's what I expect next given the outcome of this case. A federal jury using an anti-terrorism law for the first time convicted six animal rights activists on Thursday for a campaign to drive a company out of...
February 21, 2006
And unlike the last one, we can blame this one on the Bush administration. Sometimes it’s the small abuses scurrying below radar that reveal how profoundly the Bush administration has changed America in the name of national security. Buried within...
NYT (emphasis mine): In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied...
January 26, 2006
And we're not talking Faberge eggs. The administration does not need Congress to extend the USA Patriot Act in order to keep using the law's investigative powers against terror suspects. That's from a Boston Globe story about domestic spying, and...
January 16, 2006
The Stealth Badger was there, and has created a most excellent write-up. Check it out....
Quote of the day: "Our freedom is too precious, and too much blood has been shed to preserve it, to entrust it to a single person, however sincere and however well intentioned." Armand sent me this link to an LA...
On Al Gore's speech today? I've never been a huge fan, and I didn't hear the speech, but Ive gone over the text. I like the "overreach and regret" theme. I understand linking to MLK and COINTELPRO today of all...
I'll make the assertion that Mohammed Yousry should not be in prison. Read the article yourself, and tell me what you think. I'll also assert that "juror 39" is a moral coward. I can't adequately express my feelings for people...
January 08, 2006
Hope not. “I had no idea (Homeland Security) would open personal letters,” Goodman told MSNBC.com in a phone interview. “That’s why I alerted the media. I thought it should be known publicly that this is going on,” he said. Goodman...
January 05, 2006
I happened to be in a different radio market this morning, and as is my wont, tuned into talk radio to see how their local hour was different from ours. The talk down here, of course, was focused on the...
January 04, 2006
And lo and behold, members of Congress complained when the NSA acted without the President's approval to expand its domestic spting operations (emphasis mine): The National Security Agency acted on its own authority, without a formal directive from President Bush,...
January 03, 2006
...because I haven't linked since December 19th. Read the whole post, you'll get my title by the first sentence of the second paragraph. A good roundup about how we're getting distracted by potentially irrelevant side issues and why data mining...
December 31, 2005
Interested in the whole cookie flap? The National Security Agency is a cream-of-the-crop spy operation; it has some of the best spooks that money and calls to patriotism (or coërcion) can buy; and it has a black-box budget. Anti-spyware and...
December 30, 2005
In the WaPo today, an op-ed from a Lt. Colonel who wonders what will be the repercussions from domestic spying. As Americans take stock of the news that the government has been involved in domestic warrantless eavesdropping as well as...
December 29, 2005
Charles posts a Delayed Reaction to NSA Wiretapping. A summary of the main points: Did it violate the Fourth Amendment? Probably not, since the surveillances involved international calls and e-mails, and there is a plausible argument that border search exceptions...
December 24, 2005
Vast: The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks...
December 22, 2005
Your assignment today is to go read the medium-length Washington Post story on the disaster that was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Short version: a bureaucratic mess. Discuss. (Seriously, a great read. Well worth your time.)...
December 21, 2005
Larry Johnson discusses a case where the FISA wiretaps were timely and effective, then speculates on why the Bush adminstration would want more: Now for the real story. Mosquera was grabbed thanks to a roving wiretap. I've heard the story...
December 20, 2005
I don't think they should be saying Bob Graham is the "misremembering" type of guy. Former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who chaired the Senate intelligence committee and is the only participant thus far to describe the meetings extensively and on...
Feeling a little distressed over this whole violation of civil liberties business, I went over to read what Tim F. at Balloon Juice had to say about it all. Well, confession, I went to see what John Cole had to...
Cheney says: Cheney said the program had "saved thousands of lives." Here's my question. How does the use of secret illegal wiretaps save thousands of lives more than the legal ones? That seems to be his implication here. Does this...
The hand-written message (PDF) from Rockefeller to Cheney gives some context to the inscrutable behavior. Note the mention of Poindexter. Also note the last paragraph, which shows his suspicion that his protest would be buried or denied. From the Democratic...
Apparently the Bush administration thinks so: One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a "Vegan Community Project." Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group's "semi-communistic ideology." Are you surprised that most...
December 18, 2005
Morris, in comments to a previous post, chided me for not taking the threat of terrorism seriously: That's essentially the argument you're making, saying that we shouldn't adapt to this threat until it's stronger than we are. And that is...
December 17, 2005
Although, I was considering titling this post "We're Fucked," since amongst the three of us who study war, revolution, authoritarianism, political leadership and the middle east, our book list is a lot more scary that some undergrad at UMass-Darmouth working...
December 16, 2005
Another day, another Constitutional atrocity by the Bush Administration. It's a good one this time: the National Security Agency has been spying on Americans, without a court-approved warrant. A few selected highlights from the long article: Months after the Sept....
November 27, 2005
And that you might be paying for it? From Jesus' General, the second report that he has been visited by CIFA (Counterintelligence Field Activity). And no, don't try to use the address he captured from his sitemeter. It doesn't work....