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Stop-and-Frisk Campaign: About the Issue The NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices raise serious concerns over racial profiling, illegal stops and privacy rights.
Earlier this week, we noted how the owners of the various hiphop blogs and Torrent-Finder, the torrent search engine, that were seized by Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) group still hadn't been provided the details on why their domains were seized. However, that's no longer the case.
The Senate's PROTECT IP Act and the House's Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are so noxious that even the Business Software Alliance has serious reservations , and SOPA's main backer had to take to the virtual pages of National Review today to quell a growing revolt among his conservative colleagues about "regulating the Internet." Whatever you think of the legislation, it unquestionably represents a sea change in the US approach to the Internet, one which explicitly contemplates widespread website blocking and search engine de-listing. The level of debate on an issue this important has been... suboptimal.
Imagine if the US government, with no notice or warning, raided a small but popular magazine's offices over a Thanksgiving weekend, seized the company's printing presses, and told the world that the magazine was a criminal enterprise with a giant banner on their building. Then imagine that it never arrested anyone, never let a trial happen, and filed everything about the case under seal, not even letting the magazine's lawyers talk to the judge presiding over the case. And it continued to deny any due process at all for over a year , before finally just handing everything back to the magazine and pretending nothing happened.
For many years we've explored how entertainment and software industry piracy statistics are very reliable -- at least in terms of being consistently and notoriously wrong on an annual basis.
When Troy Davis was executed in Georgia, despite the recantation of seven of the nine witnesses who had testified against him and despite the lack of other material evidence implicating him in the murder for which he was convicted, it seemed like things could not get much worse for due process. Two weeks later, the US skipped the messiness of court hearings altogether and executed its own citizen , Anwar Al-Awlaki, with a unpiloted drone. The government and the mainstream media tried to rationalize what had once been unthinkable: the summary execution of a citizen without due process.
from the dept
from the dept We've been covering Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall's attempts to get folks working in national intelligence to explain their interpretation of certain provisions of the PATRIOT Act.
June 09, 2010 The top official at the American Civil Liberties Union seems to be losing patience with President Barack Obama and his administration. Speaking at a conference of liberal activists Wednesday morning, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero didn't mince his words about the administration's handling of civil liberties issues.
The Obama administration’s unprecedented war on whistleblowers suffered two serious and well-deserved defeats. The first occurred in the prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, who was accused of multiple acts of espionage, only for the DOJ to drop virtually all of the charges right before the trial was to begin and enter into a plea agreement for one minor misdemeanor. Today, The Washington P ost – under the headline ”Judge blasts prosecution of alleged NSA leaker” — reports that the federal judge presiding over the case “harshly criticized U.S. prosecutors’ treatment of a former spy agency official accused of leaking classified material.”
Enlarge Photo Illustration: Big Brother’s online snooping by Linas Garsys for The Washington Times more >
Gen David Petraeus has previously said US online psychological operations are aimed at 'countering extremist ideology and propaganda'.