At Occupy protest encampments across the country this week, the controversy that was all the rage had to do with the defense budget bill just passed by Congress. The paranoia was palpable, and for good reason, considering how the issue was covered by the mainstream, corporate news media — and the implications for protesters worried about being arrested and detained indefinitely without due process as they carry their protests into an election year in 2012.
While much of the debate over the policy on detaining suspected terrorists on domestic soil was probably lost on much of the country now in a shopping frenzy with only a week to go before Christmas, even at the Occupy Birmingham encampment downtown activists were not happy with President Barack Obama. One even suggested he was taking a look at voting for Mitt Romney, the Mormon from Massachusetts, “because at least he represents a minority.”
A federal appeals court reinstated a landmark lawsuit challenging the Bush Administration’s abuse of the privacy of innocent Americans with amendments it pushed in the name of security after 9/11 to the Foreign Surveillance Act, a statute that gave the executive branch virtually unchecked power to collect international e-mails and telephone calls.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of a broad coalition of attorneys and human rights organizations, labor groups, legal and media outlets whose work requires them to engage in sensitive and sometimes privileged telephone and e-mail communications with colleagues, clients, journalistic sources, witnesses, experts, foreign government officials and victims of human rights abuses located outside the United States.
In a statement today, ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer call the ruling a huge victory for privacy and the rule of law.
“The government’s surveillance practices should not be immune from judicial review, and this decision ensures that they won’t be,” Jaffer said. “The law we’ve challenged permits the government to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications, and it has none of the safeguards that the Constitution requires. Now that the appeals court has recognized that our clients have the right to challenge the law, we look forward to pressing that challenge in the trial court.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has uncovered widespread violations stemming from FBI intelligence investigations from 2001 to 2008, according to a report released Wednesday. It documents alarming trends in the Bureau’s intelligence investigation practices, suggesting that FBI intelligence investigations have compromised the civil liberties of American citizens far more frequently, and to a greater extent, than was previously assumed.
Using documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act litigation, the report finds:
• Evidence of delays of 2.5 years, on average, between the occurrence of a violation and its eventual reporting to the Intelligence Oversight Board;
• Reports of serious misconduct by FBI agents including lying in declarations to courts, using improper evidence to obtain grand jury subpoenas, and accessing password-protected files without a warrant;
• Indications that the FBI may have committed upwards of 40,000 possible intelligence violations in the 9 years since 9/11;
“The report underscores the need for greater transparency and oversight in the intelligence community,” Mark Rumold said. “As part of our ongoing effort to inform the public and elected officials about abusive intelligence investigations, we are distributing copies of the report to members of Congress.”
The show, which will be rebroadcast tonight on most PBS stations, reported on the National Security Agency’s surveillance of vast streams of data — phone conversations, emails, faxes — from ATnT’s regional switching center in San Francisco.
The National Security Agency (NSA) was first empowered to wiretap on American soil without a warrant just three weeks after the attacks of September 11, thanks to an executive order from then-President Bush. The Obama administration had sought to retain the NSA’s surveillance privileges; the judge rejected the Justice Department’s claim that pursuing the lawsuit would reveal state secrets.
What does this all mean? James Bamford, who wrote The Shadow Factory and wrote and produced The Spy Factory with producer/director C. Scott Willis, says, “What it means is that the judge says what was done there — by both the NSA and ATnT — was illegal because it violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), enacted in 1978, requires court authorization for domestic wiretaps. But, Bamford points out, that doesn’t mean the telecoms which cooperated with the NSA will be on the hook.
“ATnT and the other telecoms were later given immunity by Congress,” he reminds us, a boneheaded move if there ever was one on the part of Congress, including many Democrats, some from Alabama. You know who you are!
Sometimes a legal summation can capture a story better on video than any editorial column…
Notice we have the ability to deliver messages in this way on the Web Press.
I am sitting here attempting to watch Toyota defend itself before Congress for it’s dangerous cost-cutting in production that led to massive safety issues with the Japanese auto giant’s cars, and it reminds me of the final episode of Boston Legal. You may remember how the litigation division of Denny Crane’s law firm fought off a takeover by the Chinese. Couldn’t find that episode on YouTube, but this is one of the best closing argument speeches from the show.
As Congress begins to consider renewing sections of the USA PATRIOT Act set to expire at the end of the year, we have a unique opportunity to press for new civil liberties protections to shield ordinary Americans against government spying, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Last week, 10 US Senators introduced the perfect vehicle for reform of the surveillance powers in the PATRIOT Act, as well as the much broader and more dangerous FISA Amendments Act (FAA), the warrantless surveillance law that was passed by Congress last summer.
The new bill, called the JUSTICE Act, would add essential new checks and balances to a broad range of surveillance powers. In particular, it would reform the notorious National Security Letter power that allows the FBI, without court supervision, to secretly demand that companies hand over your private phone and Internet records.
Even more important, the JUSTICE Act would add strong new privacy protections to the FAA, which vastly expanded the government’s authority to sweep up Americans’ phone calls and emails without probable cause or meaningful court review.
The JUSTICE Act would also repeal the immunity for telecommunications companies that illegally assisted in the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. This would restore the rule of law and allow EFF’s suit against ATnT to continue so that the courts can do their job and rule on the legality of the surveillance.
“This is our first real shot at meaningful surveillance reform in a long time, but things are moving very quickly,” according to the release. “The Senate Judiciary Committee is planning to consider PATRIOT renewal this week. It’s crucial that the bill that the committee sends to the Senate floor contains as many of the JUSTICE Act’s reforms as possible. It’s time to fix PATRIOT once and for all, and now is our chance.”
The non-profit organization urges people to contact their senators today and ask them to co-sponsor and support the JUSTICE Act.
On the eve of the big show in Washington, the first Supreme Court nomination hearings of the Obama era, it is interesting to wonder why the New York Times chose to use this photo of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions without identifying him. That’s the back of Attorney General Eric Holder’s head on the left, along with an unknown aide and Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
On Fox News Sunday, Feinstein called it a “big problem.” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, on “This Week” on ABC, agreed that the secrecy “could be illegal” and demanded an inquiry.
I was practically laughed off the Finebaum show for raising this issue on the radio in Alabamaland a couple of years ago. Now it is finally on the front page of the New York Times, Washington Post, the AP A-wire and even on prime time cable TV news.
One of these days, someone will listen. The conservatives are all worried about their Second Amendment rights to bear arms, but said nothing when the Bush administration took their Fourth Amendment rights. We are calling on the Obama administration to cooperate in restoring those rights.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Elliot Mintzberg, chief counsel for oversight investigations of the House Judiciary Committee, answered direct questions from Glynn Wilson, Editor and Publisher of The Locust Fork News-Journal, last Friday at a press conference on corruption in the U.S. justice system. He refused to give a date for former Bush political aide Karl Rove’s interview, but he insisted it would be under oath, subject to perjury and transcribed for public release, and could possibly lead to public hearings — as we reported the other day in the news feature Political Justice Under the Spotlight in Washington.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
