They’re Listening

You know how the Bush administration claimed that they were only listening to terrorists with the phone taps? Well,
Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept [...]

Marriage and Craziness

The discussion (over at Pandagon) of this:
Last month, Rachel Bird exchanged vows with Gideon Codding in a church wedding in front of family and friends. As far as Bird is concerned, she is a bride.
To the state of California, however, she is either “Party A” or “Party B.”
Those are the terms that have replaced “bride” and [...]

Take My Laptop, Please

Via Majikthise, it seems the border patrol takes laptops to search with no suspicion of any illegal acitivity:
Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security [...]

FISA Passes

The Senate rejected amendments to the FISA bill (including one stripping the bill of telecom immunity) and passed it 69-28 (also see here). As he said he would, Senator Obama voted to get rid of immunity, but then voted to pass the bill. Thanks Obama.
Senator Clinton was a bit better (she voted against the final [...]

More FISA and Habeas Corpus

I have concentrated on the retoactive immunity given to telecoms in the FISA bill passed by the House, but there are other reasons to dislike it. Kevin Drum has a good post about it and David Kris looks at some of the technical bits.
Via Majikthise, it seems that one of the people that was illegally [...]

Telecom Immunity-Dems Cave

So it seems that Democrats have caved on Telecom immunity. At first glance it seems to be a compromise:
The proposal would give retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that can show the court that they received assurances from government officials that the program was legal and that they have “substantial evidence” in the form of classified [...]

Guantanamo and the Rule of Law

One of the bright spots in the Guantanamo trials has been the military lawyers. They recognized that the system as set up by the administration is not fair:
The lawyers, trained in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, were selected to defend detainees in a judicial system established especially for terrorism suspects. But many of them [...]

‘Fair’ Trials

In a move that I’m sure surprises no one, promises of a fair and open trial for the Guantanamo prisoners won’t be completely fair and open:
Though the top legal adviser for the commissions process, Air Force Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, has said the trials will be “fair, just, and transparent” and that detainees would have [...]

Guantanamo and Military Courts

I feel much better about the military tribunals, now that AG Mukasey has defended them:
Attorney General Michael Mukasey, defending military commissions to prosecute suspected terrorists, told federal judges yesterday that the upcoming trials will be “in the best traditions of the American legal system.”
…
“The military commission trials . . . will look and feel a [...]

I’m Evil

Lindsay B. has a link to this article about the FBI looking to infiltrate the evil vegans:
What they were looking for, Carroll says, was an informant—someone to show up at “vegan potlucks” throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protestors, schmoozing his way into their inner circles, then reporting back to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism [...]

American Hospitality

Here’s another fun American immigration/foreign visitor story:
But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in [...]

Guantanamo

This article in the Boston Globe looks at the case of an ex-detainee who drove a car bomb into an Iraqi police station and the announcments by the Defense Department:
“There is an implied future risk to US and allied interests with every detainee who is released or transferred from Guantanamo,” said Navy Commander Jeff Gordon, [...]

Loyalty Oaths in China and the US

I wrote an article where I looked at one of the reasons Tibetans rebelled: they are forced to sign loyalty oaths and participate in forced denunciations of the Dalai Lama. I would like to think that such things wouldn’t happen in a free society such as the US anymore, but I would be wrong (via Pam at [...]

More Bush Admin Craziness

Now that more of the documents are coming out, it’s becoming more obvious how little the Bush administration cares about the Constitution:
For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil didn’t apply to its efforts [...]

Watch Lists

The usual response to complaints about the loss of civil liberties is ‘if you haven’t done anything wrong you don’t have to worry’ misses a lot, but this (via KD) shows that it’s not true:
More American consumers have gotten caught up in a special brand of watchlist purgatory because their names are similar to ones [...]

House Files Suit

The House Judiciary has filed suit to get Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten to give information to the House on the US Attorneys firing, part of the slow motion move towards a Constitutional confrontation about executive privilege:
“They continue to focus on partisan theater,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said of House Democrats. “The confidentiality that [...]

NSA, You Suck

Via TPM’s Paul Kiel, the Wall Street Journal reports:
According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called “transactional” data from other agencies or private companies, and [...]

Telecom Immunity

Hmm, it has always been obvious to me that the Bush administration’s reason for pushing for telecom immunity was not about the telecoms, but now this argument has reached the Washington Post:
But in the bitter Washington dispute over whether to give the companies legal immunity, there is one thing on which both sides agree: If [...]

Domestic Spying?

At the main site, TPM calls this a Kafkaesque decision, but I don’t go quite that far since the groups weren’t charged with anything (the Kafka story has a man charged with a crime, but he doesn’t know what he’s charged with and nobody will tell him). Still, it is a pretty ridiculous case:
The American [...]

Bush In Africa and FISA

The House did not pass the surveillance law with immunity for the telecoms as the Senate did (yay), so Bush is upset:
“The American citizens must understand — clearly understand — that there still is a threat on the homeland, there’s still an enemy, which would like to do us harm,” Mr. Bush said Friday in [...]