Civil Liberties

The Atlantic | Why is the national security community treating the "Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010," introduced by Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman on Thursday as a standard proposal, as a simple response to the administration's choices in the af...

Slate | It can be argued that when Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol accused nine lawyers in Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department of being the "al-Qaida Seven," working in the "Department of Jihad," they were simply exercising their First Amendment right to say anything that would get the...

Video | A video report posted by Federal Jack

Photography Is Not A Crime | Twice in 2007, Robert Ekas flipped off police in Oregon for no apparent reason than to express his First Amendment right to do so.  And twice he was pulled over.  Now he is suing the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office for violating his First and Fourth Amend...

Black Listed News | The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years, a requirement that law enforcement believes could help it in investigations of child pornography and other serious crimes.

Raw Story | United States military intelligence spied on Planned Parenthood and other domestic groups as part of US security preparations for the 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, according to a recently declassified military document obtained by a civil liberties group Thursday.

Philadelphia City Paper | In this week's A Million Stories, we explored the messy Webcam scandal that's going down at Lower Merion School District. The district insists that it only peered through students' Webcams in order to find lost or stolen laptops, and did so using a security softwar...

CNN | On January 19, a team of at least 15 people assassinated Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Dubai police released video footage of 11 of them. Although it was obviously a very professional operation, the 27 minutes of video is fascinating in its banality.

CNN | Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal government's become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Forty-four percent of those polled dis...

Boing Boing | According to his blog, Kevin visited the Bridges Shopping Centre in Sunderland with his son to spend the £10 his father gave the boy on a family visit. While there, he seated his son on a coin-operated train ride and snapped a photo of him with his cameraphone.

Guardian | Bob Patefield used his video camera to record the moment police stopped him from taking photographs of Accrington town centre. He shows how the police claims he was engaging in anti-social behaviour led to his arrest

Stryde Hax | This investigation into the remote spying allegedly being conducted against students at Lower Merion represents an attempt to find proof of spying and a look into the toolchain used to accomplish spying. Taking a look at the LMSD Staff List, Mike Perbix is listed as a Network Tech...

Video | Students of this school are being spied upon by teachers, including Assistant Principal Dan Ackerman. In another case Lower Merion School District spied on students even when they were at home.

Crooks and Liars | Bob Barr is booed and yelled at loudly by the crowd until the moderator, Jay Sekulow, calms them down, for daring to point out that waterboarding is torture.

Philly.com | The boy is developmentally delayed, one of the effects of being born 16 weeks prematurely. His ankles are malformed and his legs have low muscle tone. In March he was just starting to walk. Mid-morning on March 19, his parents wheeled his stroller to the TSA security point, a couple ...

Boing Boing | Schools are in an absolute panic about kids divulging too much online, worried about pedos and marketers and embarrassing photos that will haunt you when you run for office or apply for a job in 10 years.

Tremble the Devil | As our financial crisis deepens and the schisms between the haves and the have-nots continue to open, American drug laws and the prison system they’ve helped create are beginning to gather an increasingly harsh spotlight.

Green Is The New Red | Fifty years ago this month, four black students sat at a Woolworth’s whites-only lunch counter and refused to move. The following day 25 students did the same. A few days later, more than 300 showed up.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution | Carey’s only offense,  Kirschenbaum said, was that she “was more boisterous than they would have liked when she asked ‘why’…  It was just the police wanted these people to move. That [talking on the sidewalk] appears to be the only thing  these lad...

BBC | The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said it needed to be consulted over any use of the drones, that can fly up to 400ft and reach speeds of 30mph.  Merseyside Police said they had been unaware they needed a licence to fly the £40,000 remote control helicopter fitted with CCTV.

Cornell University Law School | A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.

Prison Planet | Illustrating once again that the prison planet being built around us far outstrips anything Aldous Huxley or George Orwell ever imagined, a Wired News report details how police forces worldwide are preparing to unveil drone aircraft that can not only conduct surveillance of pr...

Cnet | Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbers known as the "Scarecrow Bandits" that had robbed more than 20 Texas banks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves.

Alternet | Representatives from the CBS Corporation and Neutron Media Screen Marketing have rejected a paid advertisement from the NORML Foundation, the educational arm of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), that was intended to appear on the CBS Super Screen bill...

Spiegel | Interview with Spiegel and former President Cardoso of Brazil. 

Prison Planet | Claims on behalf of authorities that naked body scanner images are immediately destroyed after passengers pass through new x-ray backscatter devices have been proven fraudulent after it was revealed that naked images of Indian film star Shahrukh Khan were printed out and circu...

Cnet | The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years, a requirement that law enforcement believes could help it in investigations of child pornography and other serious crimes.

Video | CNN reports this story about yet another case of police abusing their power, over reacting and getting away with the pre-meditated murder and assault on civilians.  Abuse of the law by trusted enforcers of the law is a concern throughout the United States.

The Nation | In a major speech on Internet freedom last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged American tech companies to "take a proactive role in challenging foreign governments' demands for censorship and surveillance."

IDS News | The project is designed to aid military operations, including anti-terrorism efforts, and to explain how knowledge is spread between peers in the modern military, according to the IU press release.

LA Times | D.A.R.E. America Chairman Skip Miller writes in his Jan. 28 Times Op-Ed article, "Don’t legalize marijuana," that his organization has been successful in its efforts to reduce illegal drug use in the U.S. by educating schoolchildren.

News Record | “The moments they sat in those chairs have had a lasting impact on our nation,” President Barack Obama said in an e-mail to the News & Record. “The lessons taught at that five-and-dime challenged us to consider who we are as a nation and what kind of future we want to build for...

Washington Post | Bush administration lawyers who paved the way for sleep deprivation and waterboarding of terrorism suspects exercised poor judgment but will not be referred to authorities for possible sanctions, according to a forthcoming ethics report, a legal source confirmed.

CNN | Essex County prosecutors said yesterday that they will confer with the states top federal prosecutor over the case of a Worcester man who was fatally injured in November at a police checkpoint in North Andover.

The Register | Gordon Brown told Parliament last week that body scanners would be installed at UK airports this week. A Department of Transport spokesman today told The Register he was unsure if they had been deployed yet, but noted the week isn't over.

Stop the Drug War | For those hoping that Barack Obama would wage the war on drugs less aggressively than his predecessor, this is not a good sign: Yesterday he announced that the new head of the Drug Enforcement Administration will be Michele Leonhart, a career DEA agent who has been the agency's ...

LA Times | Supporters of legalized marijuana announced today that they have gathered about 700,000 signatures for their initiative, virtually guaranteeing voters will see it on the November ballot.  They plan to turn in the petitions today to elections officials in some of the state's majo...

Wall Street Journal | All of your bank and ATM transactions are analyzed. All of your instant messaging and Web site usage at your job is stored and potentially analyzed for misuse and then reported to managers. Your home is photographed from the sky every day.

Contra Costa Times | Jack Cole, co-founder of the 8-year-old organization, is a retired New Jersey State Police lieutenant who served 12 of his 26 years on the job as an undercover narcotics cop. He describes the War on Drugs as "not only a dismal failure but a terribly destructive policy."

Free Keene | few days back on this blog we posted the news that longtime NH police officer Brad Jardis was no longer going to arrest medical cannabis users. Jardis has shown much courage – far more than the average cop – in first coming out verbally against the insane war on drugs, and now taking t...

Gig Is Up & New World Order Report | Gary was mandated by the court to represent his client in the courthouse but he refused to be scanned by a body scanner under constitutional grounds that since he was not leaving the city and traveling between jurisdictions and since he had not violated any l...

New York Daily News | A drug bust of two Bronx men wasn't all it was cracked up to be - and now they're looking for a sweet payday from the city.  Cops accused Cesar Rodriguez and Jose Pena of having crack cocaine in their work van, but it was only coconut candy, they said Friday.

CNN | "My son tried to run thinking his life was in jeopardy," Terez Miles said. "He made three steps before he slipped and fell." After that, she said, the police used a stun gun and beat him, pulling out a chunk of his hair.

Cracked | Hollywood has never been afraid to sacrifice realism for the sake of an entertaining story. And since pretty much every movie or TV show features the police in some way, we as an audience get fed a lot of total horse crap about how the law works and how cops operate in the USA.

New York Daily Post | In what has become a YouTube sensation, several San Diego officers are seen roughly handcuffing New York native Bill Carroll for allegedly being drunk and resisting police.  Carroll -- who had been shouting "J-E-T-S, Jets! Jets! Jets!" near the off-duty officer -- told The...

Washington Times | The New York-based human rights group Freedom House stated in its report made public Tuesday that basic freedoms were weakened in 2009 by violent repression by Iran's government against election protesters, lengthy prison terms handed out by China's communist government to pro-dem...

Free Keene | A letter from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition Member Brad Jardis, a 10+ year veteran of the NH police force (and probably the most courageous cop I’ve ever known).

Washington Post | E-mails obtained by The Washington Post detail how counterterrorism officials inside FBI headquarters did not follow their own procedures that were put in place to protect civil liberties. The stream of urgent requests for phone records also overwhelmed the FBI communications analy...

Raw Story | That's up from just 69% in 1997, the last time the two firms asked that question, and from 75% in 2003, according to Gallup.  The main divide among American voters today is how the medical community should be enabled to dole out the drug.

Public Opinion | When a Chambersburg man left the grocery store Sunday afternoon, he thought it was nervy that someone parked a pickup truck in the fire lane beside the entrance, so he asked the driver what gave him the privilege. The driver was an off-duty state police trooper, and by the end of th...