The freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state.
Homeland Security's laptop seizures: Interview with Rep. Sanchez - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
For those who regularly write and read about civil liberties abuses, it’s sometimes easy to lose perspective of just how extreme and outrageous certain erosions are. One becomes inured to them, and even severe incursions start to seem ordinary. Such was the case, at least for me, with Homeland Security’s practice of detaining American citizens upon their re-entry into the country, and as part of that detention, literally seizing their electronic products — laptops, cellphones, Blackberries and the like — copying and storing the data, and keeping that property for months on end, sometimes never returning it. Worse, all of this is done not only without a warrant, probable cause or any oversight, but even without reasonable suspicion that the person is involved in any crime. It’s completely standard-less, arbitrary, and unconstrained. There’s no law authorizing this power nor any judicial or Congressional body overseeing or regulating what DHS is doing. And the citizens to whom this is done have no recourse — not even to have their property returned to them.
When you really think about it, it’s simply inconceivable that the U.S. Government gets away with doing this.
How can Obama say he’s a progressive when he condones this police state nonsense?
Let Me See Your Papers, Please
The NY Times rightly suggests that the Border Patrol is getting a bit aggressive in their work away from the border:
Editorial - On the Lake Shore Limited - NYTimes.com
We are well aware of the federal crackdown on illegal immigration, sparked by the clamor for fencing and troops at the border. But we do not recall any discussion of imposing internal immigration checks on public transportation, with agents with dogs and guns randomly hauling people off trains.
The Border Patrol’s mission includes interrogating people as they enter and leave the country, and it is authorized to operate within 100 miles of the border. But as its budget and manpower have soared since 9/11, it is looking like an agency distorted by mission creep, especially on the relatively quiet northern border. In the Rochester area, in western New York, border agents removed 2,788 passengers from trains from October 2005 to September 2009.
[…]
There is probably a reason the Border Patrol is waging its little-noted campaign on Amtrak and buses way out in rural and western New York and not, say, on the D subway to Coney Island, which happens to be near Kennedy International Airport. Border checks on New York City trains would prompt a much louder clamor about misplaced priorities and racial profiling, and harsher questions about whether the crackdown has anything to do with making the country safer.
Administration officials, including the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have recently said their top priority is catching convicted criminals, gang members and other dangerous immigrants. We welcome the call for restraint and discretion in using limited resources. Someone should tell the Border Patrol.
But we are headed for an increasingly policed state, where we will be forced to prove our identity, the purpose of our travel, and to be subjected to search whenever the ‘authorities’ — any clown with a badge — brace us; especially at 2am on a darkened train in the middle of nowhere.
It will take only one ‘terrorist’ incident on a train or a bus, and we’ll be passing through metal detectors before getting into the subway. You wait and see.
An Assault On Privacy
It seems likely that new sorts of surveillance that police and prosecutors want to use are running close to the edge of privacy guarantees in the constitution:
Charlie Savage, Judges Divided Over Growing GPS Surveillance - NYTimes.com
“Often what we have to do with the march of technology is realize that the difference in quantity and speed can actually amount to significantly more invasive practices, “ said Paul Ohm, a University of Colorado law professor and former federal computer-crimes prosecutor. “It’s like you keep turning the volume knob and it becomes something different, not the same thing just a little louder.”
Last week, such calls seemed to be answered by an ideologically diverse panel on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. It overturned a drug trafficking conviction because the evidence against the defendant included tracking data from a GPS receiver that the police hid under his sport utility vehicle without a warrant. The device essentially recorded his whereabouts 24 hours a day for four weeks.
Traditionally, courts have held that the Fourth Amendment does not cover the trailing of a suspect because people have no expectation of privacy for actions exposed to public view.
But the appeals court argued that people expect their overall movements to be private because different strangers see only isolated moments and a police department’s surveillance resources are limited. GPS technology, by allowing police departments to inexpensively track someone’s comings and goings, changes that equation, it said.
“Prolonged surveillance reveals types of information not revealed by short-term surveillance, such as what a person does repeatedly, what he does not do, and what he does ensemble,” wrote Judge Douglas Ginsburg.
“A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individual or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”
Supreme Court review of the decision seems likely. It contradicted decisions in three similar GPS-related cases by appellate panels in Chicago, St. Louis and San Francisco.
In 2007, for example, Judge Richard Posner argued that “following a car on a public street” is “unequivocally not a search within the meaning” of the Fourth Amendment. While acknowledging that “technological progress poses a threat to privacy by enabling an extent of surveillance that in earlier times would have been prohibitively expensive,” he concluded that using a GPS device to investigate a suspect crossed no constitutional line.
The Fourth Amendment “cannot sensibly be read to mean that police shall be no more efficient in the 21st century than they were in the 18th,” he wrote. “There is a tradeoff between security and privacy, and often it favors security.”
But the tradeoffs that could favor security — like being able to barge into people’s homes unannounced — are specifically blocked by the constitution. Therefore we will have to reestablish limits to hold back an increasing lack of privacy and sovereignty over personal information, like geolocation.
More RIM Problems: India Wants Access
India Warns It May Block BlackBerry Traffic
The Indian government said Thursday that it would block encrypted BlackBerry corporate e-mail and messenger services if wireless companies did not enable law enforcement authorities to monitor those messages by the end of the month.
The ultimatum suggested that Indian officials had reached an impasse after weeks of negotiations with Research In Motion, the Canadian company that makes and provides services for the popular hand-held devices. India would become the second country in recent weeks to restrict BlackBerry services. The United Arab Emirates announced last week that it would begin blocking services in October.
“If a technical solution is not provided by 31st August, 2010, the government will review the position and take steps to block these two services from the network,” the Home Ministry, the Indian equivalent of the United States Department of Justice, said in a statement.
Losing access to the wireless market in India would be far more significant for R.I.M. than losing the ability to provide service in the United Arab Emirates. India is one of the world’s fastest-growing wireless markets, and it already has an estimated one million BlackBerry users. Some use R.I.M.’s consumer e-mail service, which the government said it had no problem with because it can already monitor those messages.
Every repressive government in the world, and now some semi-repressive ones, are lining up and demanding that RIM give them full access to encrypted communications.
Source: The New York Times
Man Faces Up To 16 Years In Prison For Videotaping The Police
The ACLU of Maryland is defending Anthony Graber, who potentially faces sixteen years in prison if found guilty of violating state wiretap laws because he recorded video of an officer drawing a gun during a traffic stop. In a trend that we’ve seen across the country, police have become increasingly hostile to bystanders recording their actions. You can read some examples here, here and here.
However, the scale of the Maryland State Police reaction to Anthony Graber’s video is unprecedented. Once they learned of the video on YouTube, Graber’s parents house was raided, searched, and four of his computers were confiscated. Graber was arrested, booked and jailed. Their actions are a calculated method of intimidation. Another person has since been similarly charged under the same statute.
The wiretap law being used to charge Anthony Graber is intended to protect private communication between two parties. According to David Rocah, the ACLU attorney handling Mr. Graber’s case, “To charge Graber with violating the law, you would have to conclude that a police officer on a public road, wearing a badge and a uniform, performing his official duty, pulling someone over, somehow has a right to privacy when it comes to the conversation he has with the motorist.” (via digby)
Source: azspot
Crime and punishment in America: Rough justice | The Economist
“America is different from the rest of the world in lots of ways, many of them good. One of the bad ones is its willingness to lock up its citizens (see our briefing). One American adult in 100 festers behind bars (with the rate rising to one in nine for young black men). Its imprisoned population, at 2.3m, exceeds that of 15 of its states. No other rich country is nearly as punitive as the Land of the Free. The rate of incarceration is a fifth of America’s level in Britain, a ninth in Germany and a twelfth in Japan.”
We can only hope that the economic realities of the economy will lead to a sharp decrease, once states determine they have no money to incarcerate.
Source: sunsmudge
David Brooks Has Something Up His Sleeve
David Brooks has the ability to see the craziness that the G.O.P. has saddled the country with, but he is forever seeking to balance it with the Left’s progressive bent. For example, he read the Priest and Arkin series in the Washington Post on the terrifying post-9/11 growth of the security apparatus in the US. Brooks writes:
David Brooks, The Technocracy Boom
During the first part of this period, the Republicans were in control. They expanded a vast national security bureaucracy. In their series in The Washington Post, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin detail the size of this apparatus. More than 1,200 government agencies and 1,900 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence programs at around 10,000 sites across the country. An estimated 854,000 people have top-secret security clearance. These analysts produce 50,000 reports a year — a flow of paper so great that many are completely ignored.
In the second part of the period, Democrats were in control. They augmented the national security bureaucracy but spent the bulk of their energies expanding bureaucracies in domestic spheres.
Brooks then proceeds to detail the implementation of health care and financial reforms, enumerating the committees, departments and liaison offices that are being created to restructure the health insurance and financial industries.
But he never returns to the slight-of-hand offered at the start: the nearly 900K people with top secret clearance, the exponentially increased security efforts, the 50,000 reports per year. He never suggests the obvious: that it should be cut back drastically, at least to a point of comprehensibility. He never explicitly says that the Bush administration was wrong to spend so much and to build so grandiose a security world.
He merely holds it up and by implicit rhetorical magic implies that Obama and company are doing something similar with financial and health care reform. However, that isn’t the case. Trying to corral the costs of health care — which are eating into the countries future like rats in the corn crib — is nothing like spying on Yemeni citizens or money lenders in Islamic countries. Attempting to counter risks from unfettered financial markets — remember the bank disaster in 2008, David? — is really not like analyzing cell phone calling patterns.
Suggesting that the American people will rise up in a class war because a few years from now they are incensed about these reforms, and chop off the heads of the Technocrats that put them in place is really over the top. It looks like Brooks is going Tea Party on us.
The American people — if it is even possible to refer to that wildly diverse populace as a coherent entity — ought to be marching in the streets, demanding that the 75 billion dollars being pissed away every year, on top secret spook projects, surveillance, and who knows what, should be invested in the future: in a new energy system, new transportation infrastructure, and re-architecting our economy for a new world. We should demand that Obama dismantle the incipient police state infrastructure that Bush and Cheney built to control us.
If the people decide to revolt about something it won’t be because insurance companies can no longer drop people from health care policieswhen they get sick, or because fat cat bankers are being forced to trade fancy derivatives transparently.
- Post-9/11 Intelligence Apparatus Enormous, Wasteful, Intractable [Investigations] (gawker.com)
- Washington Post Investigates the Intelligence World Responsible for America’s Safety (eon.businesswire.com)
Source: The New York Times
7 Years For Stealing A Package Of Cheese?
We howl at the moon when a woman in Saudi Arabia is caned for being alone with a man not her relative, but we put petty offenders behind bars for decades or life because of the Three Strikes rule. And this in a state on the verge of insolvency?
Cheese Thief Jailed for 7 Years in California
On Monday, more than a year after a man was arrested outside a market in California with a $3.99 bag of Tillamook shredded cheese in his pants he had not paid for, a judge decided to go relatively easy on him, sentencing him to seven years and eight months in jail.
Prosecutors in Yolo County, Calif., outside Sacramento, had originally asked for a life sentence under the state’s “three strikes” law, arguing that the man, Robert Preston Ferguson, was a menace to society because of prior burglary convictions. As The Sacramento Bee reported last month, the district attorney’s office asked for 11 years instead, after “a new psychological evaluation convinced prosecutors that Robert Preston Ferguson’s most recent convictions for petty theft did not warrant a life sentence.”
At Monday’s sentencing hearing, the Sacramento newspaper noted, a deputy district attorney “said Ferguson was a career criminal who wouldn’t change.” The prosecutor added that Mr. Ferguson, who is in his 50s, had 13 previous convictions and had been in jail for 22 of the past 27 years but still took the cheese. Ten days before the cheese theft, Mr. Ferguson had also stolen a woman’s wallet from a 7-Eleven as she tended to her sick child, who had just thrown up on the floor.
Because of Mr. Ferguson’s prior convictions, he had been charged with felonies for both of those petty thefts.
According to the Sacramento newspaper, Mr. Ferguson’s defense lawyer, Monica Brushia, argued that his six other burglary convictions had taken place three decades ago and noted that his conviction for misdemeanor assault came when he was a teenager and had thrown a can of soda at one of his siblings. She also noted that the psychologist’s report had concluded that Mr. Ferguson was mentally ill. He has biploar syndrome and struggles to control his impulses to steal during manic phases, she said.
She concluded that his most recent thefts were petty. “We’re talking about a pack of cheese,” she said.
Leaving aside concerns about whether the long sentence was just, some observers in California asked if the cash-strapped state should really be spending between $50,000 and $100,000 a year to lock up a cheese thief.
And the answer is, hell no.
Of course, it all makes sense in a police state.
Source: The New York Times
Police State Fading Due To Econolypse?
If there is any good coming from the econolypse, it may be the movement away from overincarceration in the US police state:
The United States, which has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, has about one-quarter of its prisoners. But the relentless rise in the nation’s prison population has suddenly slowed as many states discover that it is simply too expensive to overincarcerate.
Between 1987 and 2007 the prison population nearly tripled, from 585,000 to almost 1.6 million. Much of that increase occurred in states — many with falling crime rates — that had adopted overly harsh punishment policies, such as the “three strikes and you’re out” rule and drug laws requiring that nonviolent drug offenders be locked away.
These policies have been hugely costly. According to the Pew Center on the States, state spending from general funds on corrections increased from $10.6 billion in 1987 to more than $44 billion in 2007, a 127 percent increase in inflation-adjusted dollars. In the same period, adjusted spending on higher education increased only 21 percent.
In 2008, the explosion of the prison population ground to a near halt, according to data released last month by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. About 739,000 inmates were admitted to federal and state facilities, only about 3,500 more than were released.
[…]
One factor seems to be tight budgets as states decide to release nonviolent offenders early. This can not only save money. If done correctly, it can also be very sound social policy. Many nonviolent offenders can be dealt with more effectively and more cheaply through treatment and jobs programs.
Michigan, which has been hard hit by the recession, has done a particularly good job of releasing people who do not need to be in prison. As the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project details in a new report, Michigan reduced its prison population by about 8 percent between March 2007 and November 2009 by taking smart steps, notably doing more to get nonviolent drug offenders out, while helping in their transition to a productive, and crime-free, life.
Still headed in the wrong direction. We can only hope that the states, one by one, begin to back down from the mania of the 80s, 90s, and 00s. Especially for non-violent drug offenders.
Source: The New York Times
Britain Is A Police State
Ever-Present Surveillance Rankles the British Public by Sarah Lyall]
”[…] under a law enacted in 2000 to regulate surveillance powers, it is legal for localities to follow residents secretly. Local governments regularly use these surveillance powers — which they “self-authorize,” without oversight from judges or law enforcement officers — to investigate malfeasance like illegally dumping industrial waste, loan-sharking and falsely claiming welfare benefits.
But they also use them to investigate reports of noise pollution and people who do not clean up their dogs’ waste. Local governments use them to catch people who fail to recycle, people who put their trash out too early, people who sell fireworks without licenses, people whose dogs bark too loudly and people who illegally operate taxicabs.
[…]
The law in question is known as the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, or RIPA, and it also gives 474 local governments and 318 agencies — including the Ambulance Service and the Charity Commission — powers once held by only a handful of law enforcement and security service organizations.
Under the law, the localities and agencies can film people with hidden cameras, trawl through communication traffic data like phone calls and Web site visits and enlist undercover “agents” to pose, for example, as teenagers who want to buy alcohol.”
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Do Britons want to live in a society where you can be spied on to stop taking out the garbage too early?
There have been numerous exposés of the employees manning the surveillance cameras using them to snoop into people’s automobile make out sessions.
These sorts of powers will always be misused. It’s inevitable. So we should not allow these encroachments into privacy.
Source: The New York Times
Cross The Border, Lose Your Rights
Bush’s Search Policy For Travelers Is Kept - washingtonpost.com by Ellen Nakashima]
“The Obama administration will largely preserve Bush-era procedures allowing the government to search — without suspicion of wrongdoing — the contents of a traveler’s laptop computer, cellphone or other electronic device, although officials said new policies would expand oversight of such inspections.
The policy, disclosed Thursday in a pair of Department of Homeland Security directives, describes more fully than did the Bush administration the procedures by which travelers’ laptops, iPods, cameras and other digital devices can be searched and seized when they cross a U.S. border. And it sets time limits for completing searches.
But representatives of civil liberties and travelers groups say they see little substantive difference between the Bush-era policy, which prompted controversy, and this one.
“It’s a disappointing ratification of the suspicionless search policy put in place by the Bush administration,” said Catherine Crump, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. “It provides a lot of procedural safeguards, but it doesn’t deal with the fundamental problem, which is that under the policy, government officials are free to search people’s laptops and cellphones for any reason whatsoever.”
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano yesterday framed the new policy as an enhancement of oversight. “Keeping Americans safe in an increasingly digital world depends on our ability to lawfully screen materials entering the United States,” she said in a statement. “The new directives announced today strike the balance between respecting the civil liberties and privacy of all travelers while ensuring DHS can take the lawful actions necessary to secure our borders.”}”
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This is proof we are living in a police state. Why aren’t people marching on the White House? This is a Democrat administration, folks, but you wouldn’t know it.
Source: Washington Post
We Live In A Police State
Not in America?
[Editorial - Run Amok - NYTimes.com]
“Federal immigration squads with shotguns and automatic weapons forcing their way into citizens’ homes without warrants or lawful consent, shoving open doors and climbing through windows in predawn darkness, pulling innocent people from their beds, holding groggy occupants at gunpoint, taking people away without explanation — after invading the wrong house.
This is a true account of the depths to which the Bush administration sank in its twilight, when immigration enforcement was ramped up to a feverish extreme.
The details are in a report released Wednesday by the Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. It describes a campaign of illegal home invasions waged by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from 2006 to 2008 on Long Island and in New Jersey. The report, written by a panel led by Lawrence Mulvey, the police commissioner of Nassau County on Long Island, examined 700 arrest records obtained through Freedom of Information lawsuits, and found a shameful pattern of abuses.
The raids were supposed to be a hunt for gang members and other dangerous criminal fugitives, but two-thirds of those arrested were happenstance targets — Latinos with civil immigration violations. Although agents lacked judicial warrants, and thus could not legally enter private homes without a resident’s informed consent, they routinely did so anyway — in 86 percent of the Long Island cases studied and 24 percent of those in New Jersey. And while ICE was legally required to have reasonable suspicion before detaining and questioning anybody, in two-thirds of arrest reports studied, no explanation for the initial arrest was given.”
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The authorities behind this should be in jail. Where is the Justice Department?
Source: The New York Times
By Their Fruits Shall You Judge Them
[via Pew Study Shows Criminal Corrections Spending Outpaces All but Medicaid by Solomon Moore]
“One in every 31 adults, or 7.3 million Americans, is in prison, on parole or probation, at a cost to the states of $47 billion in 2008, according to a new study.
Criminal correction spending is outpacing budget growth in education, transportation and public assistance, based on state and federal data. Only Medicaid spending grew faster than state corrections spending, which quadrupled in the past two decades, according to the report Monday by the Pew Center on the States, the first breakdown of spending in confinement and supervision in the past seven years. The increases in the number of people in some form of correctional control occurred as crime rates declined by about 25 percent in the past two decades.”
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We are living in a police state, and it’s expensive. China is the second in the world after us in the incarceration rate of it’s citizens. Buy, hey: it’s a free country, right?
Erratic inquiries of Stowe Boyd, who means well, despite everything.
