Civil Liberties

CNN | You reap what you sow! She obviously sounds like she has a guilty conscience.

NORML | Who are these people, President Obama?  They’re not the people out here who keep making marijuana legalization the number one topic of these online forums.  They’re not the millions whose lives are impacted by a marijuana arrest; the tokers and their families who lose jobs, houses, kids, freedom, assets, respect, security, and peace of mind because of marijuana prohibition.

Bloomberg | The U.S. Supreme Court for the first time limited police power to track people using GPS devices, ruling in a case that will shape the privacy rights Americans should expect from a new generation of wireless electronics.

CBS Detroit | A grass-roots committee working toward ending marijuana prohibition in Michigan is campaigning to amend state law and legalize marijuana use for adults 21 and older. The amendment would not apply to or change workplace or driving issues regarding marijuana.

 Torrent Freak | A few days ago the news broke that the pending Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was put on hold until consensus was reached.  Although the announcement was rather vague, some news sites and blogs declared SOPA dead, or “shelved,” or erased from history.

Courthouse News Service | Fred Robinson, 69, is accused of stealing more than $250,000 of public money from the Paideia Academy charter school to start a day-care business, and of taking as much as $175,000 from his job in Treasurer Larry Williams' office, where he was allegedly a no-show.

Chicago Tribune | Mayor Rahm Emanuel proposed the changes to the city's parade ordinance in his December request to the City Council for expanded powers to deal with the NATO and G-8 summits, set to overlap between May 19-21. The mayor said his request for new spending authority and additional restrictions on public gatherings "is temporary and it's just for the conference and it's appropriate."

Huffington Post | Half a year after the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), the Obama administration is set to release a series of reforms to the current gun law, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said on Thursday.

ACLU | President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law today. The statute contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision.  While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had “serious reservations” about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use the authorities granted by the NDAA, and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations

New York Times | One evening in August of 2006, I was celebrating my 18th birthday with my cousin and a friend. We were staying at my sister’s house on 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan and decided to walk to a nearby place and get some burgers. It was closed so we sat on benches in the median strip that runs down the middle of Broadway. We were talking, watching the night go by, enjoying the evening when suddenly, and out of nowhere, squad cars surrounded us. A policeman yelled from the window, “Get on the ground!”

The Independent | The demonstrator, who is part of the group occupying the empty UBS building dubbed the "Bank of Ideas", said he was told he would not be allowed on the Ryanair flight to Malaga because the pilot feared he might distribute leaflets and "upset other passengers".

OpEd News | Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) on Senate floor explaining it was Obama who requested the provision for indefinite military detention of American citizens without charge or trial.   Levin is a primary co-sponsor of the bill along with Sen. John McCain, and Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.    Senator Diane Feinstein recently confirmed that she was unable to excise Section 1031 in an email:

New York TImes | Israel’s Defense Ministry apologized on Monday for forcing a pregnant New York Times photographer to remove her clothes and submit to a physical search after she had already passed through an X-ray machine three times at a checkpoint in Gaza last month.

Sydney Morning Herald | BANGKOK: Thailand has warned users of Facebook that they could face prosecution under harsh lese-majeste laws if they press ''share'' or ''like'' on images or articles considered unflattering to the Thai monarchy.

Telegraph | A British company called Gamma International marketed hacking software to governments that exploited the vulnerability via a bogus update to iTunes, Apple's media player, which is installed on more than 250 million machines worldwide.

KURZWEIL | CarrierIQ is seeking to block information on its surveillance software, secretly installed on millions of of Android, BlackBerry and Nokia phones, but Android developer Trevor Eckhart refuses to remove the company’s training manuals from his website, Wired Threat Level reports.

Torrent Freak | Google has expanded its search blacklist to include many of the top file-sharing sites on the Internet, including The Pirate Bay. The changes were quietly processed and appear to be broader than previous additions. Google’s blacklist prevents the names of sites appearing in their Instant and Autocomplete search services, while the pages themselves remain indexed.

ACLU | The first we heard of this technology was in a March 2002 piece in The Boston Globe with the headline “Parking Enforcement on a Roll.” At that time, the technology was being deployed to scan parking lots for licenses associated with unpaid parking tickets and other fines.

CBC | Police organizations across the country co-operated to spy on community organizations and activists in what the RCMP called one of the largest domestic intelligence operations in Canadian history, documents reveal.

The Atlantic | Within moments, and without Guerena firing a shot--or even switching his rifle off of "safety"--he lay dying, his body riddled with 60 bullets. A subsequent investigation revealed that the initial shot that prompted the S.W.A.T. team barrage came from a S.W.A.T. team gun, not Guerena's. Guerena, reports later revealed, had no criminal record, and no narcotics were found at his home.

The Wash | I hate these fucking full body scanners. Luckily, I have not had to be faced with going through one as of yet and I’d hate to be the TSA officer that would try and make me go through one. Most likely, depending on my day, that encounter will not be pretty.

CNN | "Political expression deserves the highest level of protection and it was unacceptable for the state to suddenly shut down protesters' speech and forcibly oust them from Legislative Plaza that has long been used as a place for peaceful expression," said Hedy Weinberg, executive director at the ACLU of Tennessee.

Gigaom | Many internet users in the United States have watched with horror as countries like France and Britain have proposed or instituted so-called “three strikes” laws, which cut off internet access to those accused of repeated acts of copyright infringement. Now the U.S. has its own version of this kind of law, and it is arguably much worse: the Stop Online Piracy Act, introduced in the House this week, would give governments and private corporations unprecedented powers to remove websites from the internet on the flimsiest of grounds, and would force internet service providers to play the role of copyright police.

PennLive The Patriot News | The 42-year-old Black man also claims authorities didn’t return all the money they took after an arbitration board appointed by Dauphin County Court rebuffed the forfeiture request in March. He contends that nearly $43,000 was seized and that he received only $28,980 back.

Think Progress | The Oakland Police Department’s heavy-handed use of force — which included using flash grenades, rubber bullets, and tear gas — shocked the world as the city moved to crack down on Occupy Oakland.  But the harsh crackdown was not without a historical precedent. In April 2003, the department violently cracked down on raucous Iraq war demonstrations, attacking protesters with concussion grenades, “sting balls,” and other similar weapons...

Huffington Post | "We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove," Google wrote in its Transparency Report. "Separately, we received requests from a different local law enforcement agency for removal of videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. We did not comply with those requests, which we have categorized in this Report as defamation requests."

Demand Progress | The rumors were true: The new Blacklist Bill could effectively destroy YouTube, Twitter, and other sites that rely on user-generated content by making the sites' owners legally responsible for content their users post.  It also includes provisions that would make it a felony to stream unlicensed content -- including cover band performances, karaoke videos, video game play-throughs, and more.

New York Times | The Intellistreets system comprises of a wireless digital infrastructure that allows street lights to be controlled remotely by means of a ubiquitous wi-fi link and a miniature computer housed inside each street light, allowing for “security, energy management, data harvesting and digital media,” according to the Illuminating Concepts website.

The Independent | Specialist detectives from the Metropolitan Police have discovered the existence of a secret mobile phone within News International's east London headquarters that was used in more than 1,000 incidents of illegal hacking.

The Weed Blog | Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos said this week that legalization of marijuana would allow the war on drugs to move forward by shifting focus to harder drugs and helping to stop the international violence associated with drug trafficking.

ARS Technica | For the last two years, Google has released comprehensive reports twice a year on the frequency of takedown requests and government data requests received in countries around the world. The latest data, released on Tuesday, focuses on the first half of 2011.

The Offices of US Senator Ron Wyden | Surrounded by technology that was considered cutting edge when major digital surveillance laws were written, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) welcomed U.S. Senator Mark Kirk (R- Ill.) as a cosponsor of the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act (GPS) which provides sorely needed legal clarity for the use of electronically-obtained location data that can be used to track and log the location and movements of individual Americans. The GPS Act was introduced in June by Wyden and Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).

Oregon Business Report | Two Congressmen have written a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking the FTC to investigate certain websites’ use of “supercookies” to track the activities of website visitors after they have left the website and without their knowledge. The letter, written by Congressmen Joe Barton (R-TX) and Ed Markey (D-MA), is based on an August Wall Street Journal article discussing their use.

Extra Torrent | Last week the UK’s High Court of Justice held the meeting between the country’s Internet service provider BT and pro-copyright outfit Motion Picture Association. The purpose of the meeting was to talk about the countermeasures supposed to be applied against the illegal Newzbin2 site. If you are still not aware, BT was demanded to block access to this online service.

Reason.com | The latest Gallup poll shows a record high of 50 percent of Americans in favor of legalizing marijuana use. This follows a consistent upward trend, picking up speed in 2006 when 36 percent of Americans favored marijuana legalization.

The Agitator | When last we visited the story, Good’s neighbors had held a rally for her. Then Rochester police showed up at that rally, and began writing tickets for those attendees who parked more than 12 inches from the curb. The cops even brought rulers.

Detroit Free Press | Motorists driving on expressways around Flint are getting surprised by a stunning tactic that the Genesee County sheriff has been using to fight the flow of illegal drugs -- one that legal experts said will not withstand a court challenge.

University of Pittsburgh School of Law | The Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris [official website, in French] on Friday ordered [judgment in PDF, in French] French Internet service providers to block access to Copwatch Nord Paris I-D-F, a website designed to allow civilians to post videos of alleged police misconduct.

Here is a list showing the 2012 Presendential Canidates Stance on marijuana.  Like All Presidential Administrations Before Him, The Obama Administration Officially Considers Marijuana To Be Just As Dangerous As Heroin

The Register | In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in federal court in the northern district of Mississippi, Brooke Rutledge of Lafayette County, Mississippi, also asserted claims for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, trespassing, and invasion of privacy.

Information Liberation | A Pennsylvania police officer threatened to falsely charge two Ron Paul supporters with wiretapping for videotaping him making an ass out of himself. After threatening to arrest the men for wiretapping because they dared to stand up to his "authority," the activists pointed out videotaping police is not wiretapping and it is not a crime. Well, that made the cop fly into a rage, he demanded they delete the video or he will have them arrested.

Boston Review | Back in the day, when bad guys used telephones, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies would listen in with wiretaps. As long as phone companies cooperated—and they had to, by law—it was a relatively straightforward process. The Internet, however, separated providers of communications services—Skype, Facebook, Gmail—from those running the underlying infrastructure.

WIRED | The Sunday veto means that when police arrest anybody in the Golden State, they may search that person’s mobile phone — which in the digital age likely means the contents of persons’ e-mail, call records, text messages, photos, banking activity, cloud-storage services, and even where the phone has traveled.

End the Lie | Since its inception in response to the September 11th attacks, the behemoth bureaucracy known as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has grown into an organization that is nothing short of nightmarish.

MSNBC | Marijuana dispensaries that have large operations or are close to areas with children will be the focus of a federal crackdown in California, U.S. prosecutors said Friday in explaining a campaign that some activists said goes far beyond the Bush administration's policies.

Reuters | There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

Daily Mail | A 14-year-old boy is being held in a harsh prison cell on the holiday island of Bali for drug possession - one of the youngest foreigners to be arrested in Indonesia.  The young Australian faces up to 12 years in jail after being arrested for allegedly being in possession of 6.9 grams of marijuana.

Huffington Post | Johnson is one of two better-known libertarian-leaning candidates in the GOP primary race, along with Texas Rep. Ron Paul. However, the former governor has found himself excluded from several debates and registers at only about one percent in national polls.

Addicting Info | The thousands of indefatigable Wall Street protestors, risking their eyes and recording equipment against Wall Street’s personal jack-booted thugs in the NYPD, recently garnered even more support– the US Marines. That’s the type of support that may make an NYPD cop think twice before he decides to go all Tiananmen Square on a group of teenage girls, armed with chalk and cardboard signs (maybe it’s because they are spelled properly?).

Boing Boing | Glenn Greenwald reports on the US assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen in Yemen, who had not been charged with (or convicted of) any crime. Al-Awlaki was "far from any battlefield," and no judge or jury considered any accusations that had been levelled against him, nor did he have the opportunity to face his accusers nor offer a defense. Whether or not al-Awlaki was a terrorist (something no court can determine now), this sets a new precedent: the US can assassinate its own citizens on presidential order without any due process or accountability.