World Without Walls. People have long worried that technology is destroying privacy. Today, the lament focuses on Facebook; but as far back as 1890 William Brandeis, a future Supreme Court justice, and his associate Samuel Warren were decrying the unprecedented assault against privacy by the new media of their day: tabloid newspapers and cheap photography. The two Boston lawyers were defending what they called a “principle as old as the common law”; their article, “The Right to Privacy,” was probably the most influential law-review article ever written. 1 But Brandeis and Warren had it backward.
When they laid the foundations of modern privacy law, they were inventing something strikingly new: a generalized right “to be let alone” that was unmentioned in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. In the 18th century, publicity was such an exception to the norm that privacy didn’t need to be named, much less legally protected. This legal model is inadequate for an age of networked information.
To sort... Sealing Loose Lips: Charting Obama’s Crackdown on Leaks. Bradley Manning’s conviction under the Espionage Act is the latest development in the Obama administration’s push to prosecute leaks. We’ve updated our timeline with the most recent events. Despite promises to strengthen protections for whistleblowers, the Obama administration has launched an aggressive crackdown on government employees who have leaked national security information to the press.
With charges filed against NSA leaker Edward Snowden this June, the administration has brought a total of seven cases under the Espionage Act, which dates from World War I and criminalizes disclosing information “relating to the national defense.” Prior to the current administration, there had been only three known casesresulting in indictments in which the Espionage Act was used to prosecute government officials for leaks. The administration has also targeted journalists. A spokesman for the Department of Justice told us the government “does not target whistleblowers.” Daniel Ellsberg Stephen Kim.
Reference Points. Gitmo in the Heartland | Rights & Liberties. On the evening of May 13, 2008, Jenny Synan waited for a phone call from her husband, Daniel McGowan. An inmate at Sandstone, a federal prison in Minnesota, McGowan was serving a seven-year sentence for participating in two ecologically motivated arsons. It was their second wedding anniversary, their first with him behind bars. So far his incarceration hadn’t stopped him from calling her daily or surprising her with gifts for her birthday, Valentine’s Day and Christmas. But Jenny never got a call from Daniel that night—or the next day, or the next.
It was only days later that Jenny heard from a friend that Daniel was in transit, his destination Marion, Illinois. By May 16 the inmate locator on the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) website showed Daniel in a variety of places, including a federal correctional facility in Terre Haute, Indiana. Finally on June 12, one month after their missed call, Daniel telephoned Jenny. But Jenny couldn’t find much. The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle. Many comedians consider stand-up the purest form of comedy; Doug Stanhope considers it the freest. “Once you do stand-up, it spoils you for everything else,” he says. “You’re the director, performer, and producer.” Unlike most of his peers, however, Stanhope has designed his career around exploring that freedom, which means choosing a life on the road.
Perhaps this is why, although he is extremely ambitious, prolific, and one of the best stand-ups performing, so many Americans haven’t heard of him. Because of the present comedy boom, civilians are starting to hear about Doug Stanhope from other comedians like Ricky Gervais, Sarah Silverman, and Louis CK. US detention policy: Exposing the dark side.
Days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration started making decisions that led to the official authorisation of torture tactics, indefinite incommunicado detention and the denial of habeas corpus for people who would be detained at Guantánamo, Bagram, or "black sites" (secret prisons) run by the CIA, kidnappings, forced disappearances and extraordinary rendition to foreign countries to exploit their torturing services. While some of those practices were canceled when Barack Obama took office in January 2009, others continue to characterise US detention policy in the "war on terror". Even the canceled policies continue to stain the record because there has been a total failure to hold the intellectual authors of these illegal practices accountable or to provide justice for the victims of American torture and extraordinary rendition.
This five-part series traces the detention policy debacle as it has evolved over the last ten years. Cracks and challenges. The two-tiered justice system: an illustration - Glenn Greenwald. Of all the topics on which I’ve focused, I’ve likely written most about America’s two-tiered justice system — the way in which political and financial elites now enjoy virtually full-scale legal immunity for even the most egregious lawbreaking, while ordinary Americans, especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, are subjected to exactly the opposite treatment: the world’s largest prison state and most merciless justice system. That full-scale destruction of the rule of law is also the topic of my forthcoming book. But The New York Times this morning has a long article so perfectly illustrating what I mean by “two-tiered justice system” — and the way in which it obliterates the core covenant of the American Founding: equality before the law — that it’s impossible for me not to highlight it.
The article’s headline tells most of the story: “In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures.” And that, in turn, led to this, from The New York Times, June 3, 2009: The Decline and Fall of the American Republic - Bruce Ackerman. Bruce Ackerman shows how the institutional dynamics of the last half-century have transformed the American presidency into a potential platform for political extremism and lawlessness. Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the War on Terror are only symptoms of deeper pathologies. Ackerman points to a series of developments that have previously been treated independently of one another—from the rise of presidential primaries, to the role of pollsters and media gurus, to the centralization of power in White House czars, to the politicization of the military, to the manipulation of constitutional doctrine to justify presidential power-grabs. He shows how these different transformations can interact to generate profound constitutional crises in the twenty-first century—and then proposes a series of reforms that will minimize, if not eliminate, the risks going forward.
The book aims to begin a new constitutional debate.
The Tyranny of Defense Inc. - Magazine. In 1961, Dwight Eisenhower famously identified the military-industrial complex, warning that the growing fusion between corporations and the armed forces posed a threat to democracy. Judged 50 years later, Ike’s frightening prophecy actually understates the scope of our modern system—and the dangers of the perpetual march to war it has put us on. The Heads of State American politics is typically a grimy business of horses traded and pork delivered. Political speech, for its part, tends to be formulaic and eminently forgettable. Yet on occasion, a politician will transcend circumstance and bear witness to some lasting truth: George Washington in his Farewell Address, for example, or Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural. Fifty years ago, President Dwight D. Ike’s farewell address, nationally televised on the evening of January 17, 1961, offered one such occasion, although not the only one.
During Eisenhower’s presidency, few credited him with being a great orator. The President’s Power to Order the Extra-Judicial Execution of an American Citizen. When stories originally surfaced to the effect that President Obama had authorized the killing of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, my first reaction was to say that the criticism of some civil libertarians was overblown. A warrior fighting on the battlefield against U.S. forces in a conflict has no privilege against being killed because he is a U.S. citizen—that’s a well-settled norm of the laws of war, upheld by the Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin (1942).
Surely the Obama Administration would justify its action under these principles: there must be evidence linking al-Awlaki to an imminent, military threat involving al Qaeda and its associated forces, and evidence putting him in a command and control position. I waited to hear confirmation of that, and perhaps even to get a taste of the evidence. This whole affair did not have to figure on the public policy stage. I have no doubt that the Obama Administration will prevail in this litigation. No Comment — March 28, 2014, 12:32 pm. Lawfare and Targeted Killing: Developments in the Israeli and US Contexts. Over the last decade, the term lawfare, an amalgamation of “law” and “warfare,” has been adopted and popularized among people engaged in monitoring, judging and debating the legality of a state’s wartime behavior vis-à-vis enemies on and off the battlefield.
Today, the dominant theme in debates about lawfare turns on the contested legitimacy of litigation to challenge military and security policies and practices; and efforts to sue or prosecute state agents, government-funded contractors, and corporations who are alleged to have engaged in or abetted serious violations of law in the conduct of war. While some people (myself included) attach a positive connotation to the term and the activities to which it refers, those who oppose efforts to constrain military and executive discretion in accordance with international law standards disparage it. State Lawfare In September 2000, Palestinians began a second intifada with mass demonstrations to protest the ongoing occupation.
Roundtable on Targeted Killing: The Secret Bureaucracy of Targeted Killing. [This is the fifth part of a six-part series associated with a Jadaliyya roundtable discussing targeted killings . Participants include Richard Falk, Nathan Freed Wessler, Pardiss Kabriaei, Leonard Small, and Lisa Hajjar. Click here for the introduction to the roundtable.] Three US citizens were killed in Yemen in 2011 by drone strikes carried out under the auspices of the government’s targeted killing program. They were neither charged with any crime nor brought before a judge. The killings were carried out by the executive branch acting alone, with no oversight from the courts and no public presentation of evidence. At least two more US citizens are reportedly on government “kill lists,” along with numerous alleged terrorism suspects of other nationalities. Obama’s Public Acknowledgment On 30 January 2012, President Obama took questions on a live internet video forum organized by Google+ and YouTube.
Public Killings, “Secret” Program The Need for Transparency. A Secret License to Kill by David Cole. On Friday, a front-page New York Times story reported that a rift has emerged within the Obama Administration over whether it has authority to kill “rank-and-file” Islamist militants in foreign countries in which there is not an internationally recognized “armed conflict.” The implications of this debate are not trivial: Imagine that Russia started killing individuals living in the United States with remote-controlled drone missiles, and argued that it was justified in doing so because it had determined, in secret, that they posed a threat to Russia’s security, and that the United States was unwilling to turn them over. Would we calmly pronounce such actions compliant with the rule of law? Not too likely. And yet that is precisely the argument that the Obama Administration is now using in regard to American’s own actions in places like Yemen and Somalia—and by extension anywhere else it deems militant anti-US groups may be taking refuge.
Torture, and impunity in US courts. New York, NY - An important question confronting courts in the United States is whether individuals subjected to torture and other abuse in the "war on terror" can obtain a judicial remedy for their mistreatment. A recent decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia, concludes that they may not. The decision, which throws out the civil suit of former enemy combatant Jose Padilla, is troubling, both in its result and potential sweep. It not only threatens core freedoms protected by the constitution, but also undermines the principle that government officials should be held accountable for their illegal conduct.
Padilla was the victim of one of the most extraordinary uses of military detention power after the 9/11 attacks. In May 2002, Padilla was arrested by the FBI at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport and detained as a material witness in connection with the government's investigation into the attacks. Seeking reparations. When mistaken identity leads to torture - 9/11 - Salon.com - Every day through Sept. 11, we’ll offer a new story from “Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice,” about men and women caught in the war on terror’s crossfire. On New Year’s Eve 2003, Khaled el-Masri, now 48, was seized at the border of Serbia and Macedonia by Macedonian police who mistakenly believed that he was traveling on a false German passport.
(Reportedly, he was mistaken for a suspected terrorist with the name al-Masri.) He was detained for over three weeks before being handed over to the CIA and rendered to Afghanistan. Shortly after Khaled’s release from Afghanistan, staff within both the CIA and the U.S. State Department reported the mistaken identity of their detainee to senior personnel, and German prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents allegedly involved in Khaled’s abduction. Currently incarcerated in Germany (on unrelated charges), Khaled has stopped speaking about his experiences.
After about seven days, another official turned up. The myth of freedom in the land of the free. New Haven, CT - In 1893, a massive financial panic sent demand for the Pullman Palace Car Company into a downward spiral. The luxury rail car company reacted by slashing workers' wages and increasing their work load. After negotiations with ownership broke down the following year, the American Railway Union, in solidarity with Pullman factory workers, launched a boycott that eventually shut down railroads across the US.
It was a full-scale insurrection, as the late historian Howard Zinn put it, that soon "met with the full force of the capitalist state". The US Attorney General won a court order to stop the strike, but the union and its leader, Eugene V Debs, refused to quit. I imagine a similar revelation for the tens of thousands of Americans who participated in last fall's Occupy Wall Street protests. Yet the harder they pushed, the harder they were pushed back - with violence. Income inequality isn't just about justice; it's about freedom, too. Prisons, Privatization, Patronage.
10 Years Later, 9/11 Commission Says President Is Failing to Protect Civil Liberties | emptywheel | Rights & Liberties | Scoop.it. What Happens in Yemen: The "End" of Citizenship and How We Got Here. Civil liberties?