Erosion of civil liberties shifts into high gear

Sorry if this is old but I wasn't aware of the lovely li'l doodad Hentoff just wrote about:

Last year, buried in the 591-page Defense Appropriations Act—as civil- liberties watchdog John Whitehead and others have reported—the Republican-controlled 109th Congress, doubtless at the Bush/Cheney administration's behest, inserted a provision that (in Whitehead's words) allows the president "to declare martial law and use the military as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition' " that undermines public order. (Emphasis added.)

How much due process would these military-police roundups of suspected internal enemies give those prisoners? And how long will that military power be in effect domestically?

As our civil liberties disappear, where are the Democrats?

I just came across that too. Can anyone provide a source on it other than Hentoff quoting a civil liberties watchdog's version of the provision? I'd kind of like to see how it's actually worded in the bill.

Wouldn't it be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act? (just askin')

More like Posse Cominatus, amirite!

What's the point of being the Commander in Chief if you can't violate the law whenever you feel like it? Every president needs a hobby, you know. (I liked it better when Bush's hobby was choking on pretzels.)

No Child Left Behind specifies military can enter schools at any time. I secretly think that's a large reason Bush wanted it passed.

http://www.subcin.com/if.jpg

what military, they're all either out in the shit or recuperating in a hospital from being out in the shit. They gonna send in the judge advocates and the procurement officers?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

okay That is an A+++ point.

"standing army" (i.e. tombot otm)

It would be fun to have judge advocates chilling in high schools.

JAG: The Teener Years

Hentoff is back (at least this week), and there are going to be a lotta angry latte-drinkin' Hope-a-nauts:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-01-12/columns/george-w-obama

It is one thing, as the Bush regime did, to spy on us without going to court for a warrant, but to maintain that the executive branch can never even be charged with wholly disregarding our rule of law is, as a number of lawyers said, "breathtaking."

On the other hand, to his credit, Obama's very first executive orders in January included the ending of the CIA "renditions"—kidnapping terrorism suspects off the streets in Europe and elsewhere and sending them for interrogation to countries known to torture prisoners. However, in August, the administration admitted that the CIA would continue to send such manacled suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation.

Why send them to a foreign prison if they're not going to be tortured to extract information for the CIA? Oh, the U.S. would get "guarantees" from these nations that the prisoners would not be tortured. That's the same old cozening song that Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush used to sing robotically....

So what do you drink, then?

Latte drinking? They give me gas, dear boy.

Perhaps Dennis Perrin gargles creosote and hot wax.

someone already posted this: what are barack obama's flaws?

it was submitted without comment there though

coffee drinking survey was not complete at time of submission

the last several posts were brought to you by the ILX Bam 2012 Taskforce

all a big distraction from leno-conan.

what do you want "ilx" to say? it's horrible.

i'm known as a huge supporter of "bam" and consumer of latte it's true

i think morbius wants all of us hope-a-nauts to gather our pitchforks and march on washington

the last several posts were brought to you by the ILX Bam 2012 Taskforce

for the bazillionth time: not down with it, also not surprised

executive clingin to executive power shockah

if only i had voted for john mccain

if only we had listened to dr morbius

now, alas, he no longer offers comment

*towel thrown*

*gasps*

maybe hentoff is mad because obama is strongly pro-choice

*sips latte*

haha was waiting for that to come up

xp

*extends pinkie*

probably the only atheist pro-lifer i've ever heard of...

wait, is he anti-electric miles like stanley crouch, too?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8lJUX_TcFg

probably the only atheist pro-lifer i've ever heard of...

― chartres (goole), Wednesday, January 13, 2010 5:09 PM (49 seconds ago) Bookmark

iirc christopher hitchens is pro-life on the low.

there are loads of those around

John W. Whitehead: When Barack Obama was a U.S. Senator in 2005, he introduced a bill to limit the Patriot Act. Now that he is president, he has endorsed the Patriot Act as is. What do you think happened with Obama?

Nat Hentoff: I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had. An example is ObamaCare, which is now embattled in the Senate. If that goes through the way Obama wants, we will have something very much like the British system. If the American people have their health care paid for by the government, depending on their age and their condition, they will be subject to a health commission just like in England which will decide if their lives are worth living much longer.

yikes, that would be horrible!

iirc christopher hitchens is pro-life on the low.

― free the charmless but occasionally brilliant Dom Passantino (history mayne), Wednesday, January 13, 2010 11:11 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

haha i read him somewhere saying "well, it is killing something, and that something is a human life of some kind" but i don't think he concluded, explicitly, that it was a bad thing to do...

first on death panel hitlist = nat hentoff

i wanna be on the health commission

That weight-challenged armed citizen will keep you safe in the event that armed thugs come in to rob that Wendy's and the both of you happen to be there. I know a few people who are into concealed carry and they certainly take it very seriously and have had gun safety classes as well as continually practice their marksmanship. Never lived in an open-carry state, though...

I can honestly see how it would creep people out but IMO the people who carry guns around on them are much less likely to have an accidental shooting than someone who keeps a gun in their unlocked drawer and assumes they will know how to use it if necessary.

To me, Carl there is as dangerous and unhinged as the kind of grown man that would wear a star-trek outfit or carry a replica lightsaber on their belt... And if he happens to be in the same place as you when some serious shit goes down he could likely be the person who saves your life.

Again though, I don't expect anyone who has not been exposed to it from very early in their life to understand american gun culture or not just think its fucked up in general.

yeah no

IME, the preponderance of gun owners are responsible, with many of them being ultra-serious about proper training and preparedness. The problem is, with many tens of millions of gun owners, even 1% of them being flaky shitheads with delusions of competance results in hundreds of thousands of these dangerous characters sloshing around the country.

most food is garbage but

Frosties + fries

ding ding we have a winner

so it was determined today on NPR that racial and religious profiling is "ok" for airports

lotta stupid ppl out there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH8vVKO0QkU&feature=sub

So glad I've subscribed to the Taiwan News youtube channel.

So glad I've subscribed to the Taiwan News youtube channel.

I started a thread about that here: Next Media of Taiwan animates the news

FUCK THIS SHIT.

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/parents-year-girl-pat-airport-procedures-changed/story?id=13363740

The family of the 6-year-old girl who received a pat down at airport security in New Orleans said today there needs to be a different screening process for children.

We struggle to teach our kids to protect themselves, to say 'no, it's not ok to touch me in this way in this area," the girl's mother, Selena Drexel, said. "Yet here we are saying it's ok for these people." If we don't find other ways we're making them more vulnerable, she said.

Drexel and her husband, Dr. Todd Drexel, of Bowling Green, Ky., appeared this morning in an exclusive interview with "Good Morning America."

A video of the couple's daughter going through the screening went viral on the Internet, getting thousands of views on sites like YouTube. It shows a TSA agent rubbing the young girl's inner thighs and running her fingers inside the top of the girl's blue jeans.

The Drexels said they stood powerless, watching as their daughter was patted down.

I did ask for alternatives, I asked for her to be rescanned," Selena Drexel said. "They just refused and said they were going to do what they were going to do."

Selena Drexel said she could only speculate as to why the 6-year-old was selected for the pat down. She said that the TSA supervisor made it clear "non-verbally" that there would be trouble if she caused a fuss.

The girl's father said that while his daughter was polite and respectful during the screening, she broke down into tears afterwards.

"Initially she was just confused," Todd Drexel said. "She really didn't understand what she had done wrong." He said he and his wife struggled with how to explain to their child what had happened after teaching her previously it was not ok to be touched in certain places. "Now she's been pat down in a public setting, in an airport."

The family was leaving New Orleans Armstrong International Airport when the incident happened on April 5. The Drexels have two other children, a 9-year-old and a 2-year-old.

The TSA said it has reviewed the tape and that the "officer followed proper current screening procedures." They added they "are exploring additional ways to focus its resources and move beyond a one-sized-fits-all system."

We struggle to teach our kids to protect themselves, to say 'no, it's not ok to touch me in this way in this area," the girl's mother, Selena Drexel, said. "Yet here we are saying it's ok for these people." If we don't find other ways we're making them more vulnerable, she said.

How do these people explain doctors to their children?

But now, during a time of two overseas wars, Americans’ opinions on torture seem to have fractured, and largely on generational lines. A new study by the American Red Cross obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast found that a surprising majority—almost 60 percent—of American teenagers thought things like water-boarding or sleep deprivation are sometimes acceptable. More than half also approved of killing captured enemies in cases where the enemy had killed Americans. When asked about the reverse, 41 percent thought it was permissible for American troops to be tortured overseas. In all cases, young people showed themselves to be significantly more in favor of torture than older adults.

Torture has been around as long as there have been wars, but media coverage of enhanced interrogation techniques has risen the visibility of torture since the attacks of September 11. Could the generation who came of age since the towers fell have a different notion of what’s acceptable in a time of war? “Over the past 10 years, they’ve been exposed to many new conflicts,” says Isabelle Daoust, who heads ARC’s humanitarian law unit. “But they haven’t been exposed to the rules.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-04-12/red-cross-study-finds-60-percent-of-young-people-support-torture/

Christine, you tell them that it's okay for doctors to touch you there sometimes to make sure you're not sick. "these people" = any parent with a lick of sense.

Doctors don't put their hands down your pants in public, this is really not that difficult. The whole atmosphere of going to the doctor's is totally different than traveling and being held up in a public space by people who aren't trained to deal w kids in any way, are brusque, confusing, trying to visibly intimidate your parents...kids can tell this stuff, c'mon.

I am now imagining a doctor's office that's just a big waiting room full of embarrassed ppl in various states of undress while a surly, disinterested MD wanders around and methodically pokes and prods them.

dunno what to think of that. TSA hysteria and 'think of the children!!!' are my absolute least favorite parts of the public's uneasiness with the nat'l security state. but i guess we should take whatever we can get on that front.

uh xps

That passage just struck me as being a bit "They touched my kid on her bad areas even though their job required it! Now she'll let anyone touch her there! Gulp!"

(And no, I'm not on the TSAs side at all in this.)

lol group-rate doctoring, might be a good cost cutting measure

(And someday I'll heed that "You=Too Slow" warning.)

(Oh, and add a :-) to my original post, as I should have.)

I honestly don't remember ever being told that people shouldn't touch me in my "private places", somehow it never came up? My parents probably didn't think it was worth introducing to our little worlds because it didn't seem likely to ever happen. So there was no hysteria.

But I remember having to show my bum to the doctor because of a skin problem in childhood and I was mortified that my doctor had to see it, so much so that I would have just gone home and lived with the illness if my mom hadn't insisted. It's not like kids don't have their own sense of modesty and/or embarrassment, even thought I think adult frequently assume that they don't, or just disregard it.

Also, until you grow up and have the pleasure of regular OBGYN appointments or whatever is it that men do for their own health, I have no idea, doctors do not even touch your crotch or go down your pants or whatever, all through childhood, do they? I have no recollection of having to take my clothes off at all for any doctor's appointment.

hi dere junior high/high school hernia checks in sports physicals

Or say, a problem urinating or something.

I honestly don't remember ever being told that people shouldn't touch me in my "private places", somehow it never came up? My parents probably didn't think it was worth introducing to our little worlds because it didn't seem likely to ever happen. So there was no hysteria.

All I ever learned was from what I saw on TV: Stay away from bicycle shops.

dunno what to think of that. TSA hysteria and 'think of the children!!!' are my absolute least favorite parts of the public's uneasiness with the nat'l security state. but i guess we should take whatever we can get on that front.

― goole, Wednesday, April 13, 2011 12:50 PM (1 hour ago)

dude what

'the public' does not have an uneasiness with the national security state, also, as far as i can tell

well yeah, that's what i meant. the only readily evident part of it is not liking front line employees of the dept of homeland security touching your kids' 'swimsuit areas'

'the public' also is not nearly engaged enough to give a shit about things like this until it's their junk getting touched - this is america, dude. that's the fault of a lot of things: a shitty media, genuinely bad policy, and yeah a general detachment among the average person wrt issues that don't affect them directly. i'm not one to concentrate his ire so much on the latter, though, because i think those grievances are legitimate and should be addressed too, even if they're only getting addressed because everyone in this country is a selfish asshole

no one has yet touched my private places
i need to fly more often

I am now imagining a doctor's office that's just a big waiting room full of embarrassed ppl in various states of undress while a surly, disinterested MD wanders around and methodically pokes and prods them.

So the emergency room, then?

Every emergency room I've been in has had a waiting room completely separated from the treatment area, and the treatment area itself has been divided up into private rooms and curtained areas; I've never seen an emergency room that looks like a cafeteria.

Welcome to San Francisco, show your papers please

Greetings, dance clubbers and event goers—welcome to San Francisco. Feel free to patronize the club or festive event of your choice; just remember that the following regulations apply for all events and entertainment establishments with capacity for over 100 people.

* You must pass through a metal detector to enter the premises.
* You will be ID scanned, and your ID will be maintained in a database for at least 15 days, ready to be made available to the police on request.
* "High visibility" cameras watch you from the entrance and exit points of the premises. They will keep a recorded database for at least 15 days, one that's also available to the police on request.

These rules don't exist—yet. But the City's Entertainment Commission held a hearing last night to consider them, and a consortium of civil liberties groups have already expressed considerable alarm.

"We are deeply disappointed in the San Francisco Entertainment Commission for considering such troubling, authoritarian, and poorly thought-out rules," warns the Electronic Frontier Foundation, PrivacyActivism, and eight other groups in a letter sent to the Commission. It continues:

Scanning the IDs of all attendees at an anti-war rally, a gay night club, or a fundraiser for a civil liberties organization would result in a deeply chilling effect on speech, since participants could not attend without their attendance being noted, stored, and made available on request to government authorities. This would transform the politically and culturally tolerant environment for which San Francisco is famous into a police state.

A direct pipeline of personal information to the police also invites systemic abuses. The proposed rule would allow police to make a wholesale request for information every fifteen days, creating their own internal database of which individuals visit which particular venues and how often. The last time [San Francisco Police Department] created an intelligence unit, a court disbanded it to stop multiple documented abuses. The San Francisco Entertainment Commission should not invite history to repeat itself.

We put a call into the Commission to find out why or if its members think this proposal is necessary, but we just got a response repeating the notice about the meeting. The SFPD requested these provisions last year, the Entertainment Commission's Executive Director Jocelyn Kane told the SF Weekly on Monday. Some of the discussions about beefing up event security follow a fatal shooting last July at Jellys, an area night club which subsequently closed.

"This is a request. This is nothing other than, 'Let's talk about this'," Kane assured the Weekly. But she admitted "the assumption that you need these things to operate isn't something that everyone agrees to."

The notice, however, suggests that the Commissioners could adopt rules that "depart from the terms of the proposals below but address the same general subjects as the proposals." They could also expand or contract the 100 person threshold to "apply to a different or broader range of venues."

didn't realize ppl had to go through security to *leave* airports these days, wtf?

world is shitty & awful now iirc

reading about stuff like this kind of makes me despair because it seems rare that you'll see anyone, whatever their other political beliefs, actually DEFEND this sort of thing -- i mean, conservatives will blame it on liberals and vice-versa -- and yet it keeps getting worse and worse.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/28/travel/tsa-officer-faces-dismissal/index.html?iref=obnetwork

well

this is why ILXors don't fly with their comic books.

funny but yeah, dude should be fired

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/us/cell-carriers-see-uptick-in-requests-to-aid-surveillance.html

In the first public accounting of its kind, cellphone carriers reported that they responded to a startling 1.3 million demands for subscriber information last year from law enforcement agencies seeking text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations...

AT&T alone now responds to an average of more than 700 requests a day, with about 230 of them regarded as emergencies that do not require the normal court orders and subpoena.

wau, there sure are a lotta suspected terrorists.

Federal law allows the companies to be reimbursed for “reasonable” costs for providing a number of surveillance operations. Still, several companies maintained that they lost money on the operations, and Cricket, a small wireless carrier that received 42,500 law enforcement requests last year, or an average of 116 a day, complained that it “is frequently not paid on the invoices it submits.”

srsly tho, if you're going to buy off telecommunications companies to cooperate w/ your bullshit, the least you can do is pay the invoices. is there no honor among thieves?

With the demands so voluminous and systematic, some carriers have resorted to outsourcing the job. Cricket said it turned over its compliance duties to a third party in April. The outside provider, Neustar, said it handled law enforcement compliance for about 400 phone and Internet companies.

jobs!

""Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker and the recipient of a 2012 MacArthur Fellowship, estimates that she has been detained more than 40 times upon returning to the United States. She has been questioned for hours about her meetings abroad, her credit cards and notes have been copied, and after one trip her laptop, camera and cellphone were seized for 41 days.

"I'm taking more and more extreme measures, to the point where I'm actually editing outside the country'..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/business/court-cases-challenge-border-searches-of-laptops-and-phones.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/04/us-constitution-and-civil-liberties

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/new-york-nypd-stop-frisk-lawsuit-trial-charts

http://www.motherjones.com/files/stop-frisk-outcomes-race-01.png

WaPost thinks Bam may not be credible as "a champion of civil liberties"!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/15/obama-civil-liberties-sea-change

For years, the Obama administration has been engaged in pervasive spying on American Muslim communities and dissident groups. It demanded a reform-free renewal of the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, both of which codify immense powers of warrantless eavesdropping, including ones that can be used against journalists. It has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined, threatened to criminalize WikiLeaks, and abused Bradley Manning to the point that a formal UN investigation denounced his treatment as "cruel and inhuman".

But, with a few noble exceptions, most major media outlets said little about any of this, except in those cases when they supported it. It took a direct and blatant attack on them for them to really get worked up, denounce these assaults, and acknowledge this administration's true character.

It's all Bush's fault.

also, that was a nice snipe against Josh Marshall

The little things that make you moderates happy

I think being a simpleton has something to do with it

Trump, Clinton promise to expand the National Surveillance State in the wake of Orlando

Civil liberties advocates told ThinkProgress they found these proposals “disturbing” and “dangerous,” arguing that the mass surveillance the government has carried over the last decade has failed to prevent acts of terrorism.

“We have seen again and again, with Dylann Roof, with Tsarnaevs, that none of our dragnet surveillance programs keep us safe,” said Kade Crockford with the ACLU of Massachusetts, referring to the perpetrators of recent mass shootings and bombings in Charleston and Boston. “From the local level all the way up to the FBI and NSA, the government is hoovering up data on entire communities, the vast majority of whom have not and will not commit any crime. These policies violate the Constitution and are complete failures.”

Crockford noted that some U.S. intelligence officials have openly complained that excessive surveillance actually makes their jobs harder, by amassing so much useless information that it becomes difficult to single out dangerous individuals. “Adding to the haystack does not make it easier to find the needle,” she said.
Crockford also took issue with the candidates’ complaint that there is not enough information sharing between the federal government and local law enforcement, pointing to a vast network of “fusion centers” the Department of Homeland Security set up across the country for that exact purpose. An investigation by the ACLU found that these centers have in some instances spied on anti-war activists, not suspects of terrorism. And a bipartisan Senate investigation in 2012 found that spending $1.4 billion on fusion centers did not make the nation any safer, and in some cases violated the Constitution by illegally spying on U.S. citizens who were never accused of a crime.

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2016/06/13/3787858/hillary-trump-surveillance/

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/newt-gingrich-proposes-creating-new-house-unamerican-activities-committee

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich proposed the creation of a new version of the controversial House Un-American Activities Committee to root out American citizens who plan to commit terrorist attacks in the U.S.

“We originally created the House Un-American Activities Committee to go after Nazis. We passed several laws in 1938 and 1939 to go after Nazis and we made it illegal to help the Nazis. We're going to presently have to go take the similar steps here,” Gingrich said in a Monday appearance on “Fox and Friends.”

Originally founded in 1938, the committee investigated suspected threats of Nazi subversion and anti-government propaganda. During the Cold War, its activities sprawled, leading to the blacklist of Hollywood stars and left-wing activists, writers, and academics accused of having Communist ties.

In 1959, former President Harry Truman infamously called the committee “the most un-American thing in the country today.”

Gingrich also suggested that the U.S. will inevitably “declare a war on Islamic supremacists” living here due to the number of terrorist attacks that have been committed by American citizens, such as those in San Bernardino, California and at the Fort Hood military base.

“We're going to say, if you pledge allegiance to ISIS, you are a traitor and you have lost your citizenship,” Gingrich said.

Under current law, the U.S. cannot revoke the citizenship of natural-born U.S. citizens against their will.