The Obama administration has a terrible track record when it comes to pursuing whistleblowers and leakers, far worse than Bush ever had. But why are they going after the Associated Press so aggressively over the leak about the CIA operation in Yemen? No operational details were released and the AP even held off on the …
Category Archive: Civil Liberties
May 18 2013
Judge Endorses Heckler’s Veto
The Dearborn Arab International Festival has been the site of many clashes between the police and Christian evangelists who go there to preach to the mostly Muslim crowd. This has resulted in several arrests that ended in acquittals and lawsuits that vindicated the protesters and forced the city to apologize. But in one case from …
May 17 2013
Is the Seizure of AP Phone Records a Scandal?
There’s an interesting debate going on at the Volokh Conspiracy over whether the story about the DOJ seizing phone records of innumerable AP reporters and editors is a real story or not. Orin Kerr, who is a libertarian-leaning law professor and therefore generally likely to oppose unnecessary searches and seizures, declares it a non-story at …
May 17 2013
Royce Lamberth Just Became My Favorite Judge
Judge Royce Lamberth is one of those federal judges, like Richard Posner and Alex Kozinski, whose status in the legal profession exceeds their position, rivaling Supreme Court justices. And for good reason, too. He’s finally saying what few other jurists will say, that the judiciary is far too deferential to the executive branch on national …
May 17 2013
DOJ Gets Phone Records of AP Reporters
The Huffington Post reports that the Department of Justice obtained the phone records of numerous reporters for the Associated Press as well as records for the news organization’s generic phone lines and switchboards. AP sent a letter to the attorney general protesting the situation.
May 13 2013
Bad Forensic Evidence. Again.
A year ago, it was revealed that the Department of Justice had done a review of hundreds of cases involving hair and fiber analysis and found that hundreds of people may have been wrongfully convicted as a result of shoddy and overclaimed work at an FBI crime lab. They didn’t bother to report that to …
May 11 2013
Dearborn Settles With Christian Group
The city of Dearborn has reached a settlement with a group of Christian missionaries who were arrested during the Arab International Festival in 2010. The settlement requires the city to issue an official apology for the arrests and to pay the legal fees of the plaintiffs. The American Freedom Law Center, an offshoot of the …
May 11 2013
FBI Wants More Surveillance Power
As if the National Security State was not intrusive enough, the FBI is now demanding even more ability to listen in to our conversations. And it looks like they’re gonna get it, with the backing of both parties in Congress and — of course — President Obama as well.
May 08 2013
Atheist Literature Apparently Messed With
The passive distribution of atheist and secular pamphlets at a number of schools in Orange County, Florida took place last week but there was some apparent tampering. The table included an invitation to an event, as the Bibles that were distributed earlier, but those invitations were apparently taken out. The local Fox station had a …
May 08 2013
Yes, All Phone Calls are Recorded
Glenn Greenwald asks the question “Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?” He knows the answer already and the answer is yes. We’ve known this for years. He spotlights this admission of that by a former FBI counterterrorism agent on CNN:
May 07 2013
The Westboro Baptist Church is Right
Yeah, that’s a headline I never expected to write. But the ACLU has now filed suit on behalf of the Westboro Baptist Church against law enforcement officials in Iowa who have threatened to prosecute them under that state’s flag protection statute — a law that was already struck down by a federal court.
May 07 2013
The FISA Court: An Important Rubber Stamp
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was set up by FISA to handle requests for warrants that involve the gathering of intelligence on foreign operatives in the US, though it deals almost entirely with terrorism now. So how can it be both important and a rubber stamp? Because as Kevin Gosztola reports, while it rarely denies …
May 07 2013
NYPD Commish: Everything Wrong With Justice System
NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly gave an interview to a TV station that shows him to be pretty much everything that is wrong with our criminal (in)justice system. Believe it or not, he actually argues that the NYPD’s stop and frisk program, which targets blacks and Latinos a staggering 87% of the time, isn’t racist enough.
May 05 2013
Obama and Gitmo. Again.
President Obama announced at a press conference the other day, seemingly out of the blue, that he intends to try again to get the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed down. The chances of getting that through Congress are slim and none, but there are some things he can do on his own. Here’s part of …
May 03 2013
Fuck You, Mayor Bloomberg
Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York has rarely met an authoritarian policy he didn’t heartily endorse. Speaking against a bill that would appoint an inspector general to oversee the NYPD and give innocent victims of its stop and frisk program some legal recourse, he said:
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