Federal Judge Gags On Idaho ‘Ag-Gag’ Law — This Is No Gag

Gosztola

Kevin Gosztola at Shadowproof reports a federal court decision that deems an Idaho law forbidding certain kinds of ‘whistleblower’ speech... specifically in this case, the documenting and revealing of animal abuse in an agricultural processing plant... to be unconstitutional. The law runs afoul of the First Amendment to the US Constitution: the whistleblower has the freedom to speak or publish information supportive of his/her assertion that abuse of the animal(s) does take place and may be criminal in nature; otherwise, there would be no point in whistleblowing in that context.

Something similar was attempted in Texas in 1996: some cattlemen sued Oprah Winfrey and a guest on her show for libel under the False Disparagement of Perishable Food Products Act of 1995 when Oprah and the guest discussed mad cow disease in beef cattle. (Wikipedia has a decent short summary.) The jury found Winfrey did not libel the cattlemen and did not owe them the obscenely high monetary damages they sought, but after the trial, Oprah got cold feet, refused to provide copies of the video of the original broadcast to interested reporters, repeatedly refused to speak in public about the incident, etc. Living in Texas, I can understand quite well why she might exercise such restraint.

But IMHO, those cattlemen were effing paranoid, and they certainly never had any legitimate basis for attempting to suppress speech about cows. The Constitution establishes for us all the right to defame all the cows we feel like, Texan or Idahoan, now or two decades ago, mad or merely a bit quirky. Of course it speaks more about the cowboys than the cow-critics, but the notion that any commercial product, agricultural, automotive or simply asswiping, is above public criticism is, um, fucking crazy. Let it be, pardners [sic].

Ferguson, MO Cops: Fascist Guns In The (Mid)West

Boomers: remember the days of our youth, when cops were often called "fascist pigs"? Well... they're baaaack! Ferguson, MO police seem to have declared as their enemies not just Blacks... not just Whites... but journalists in general. Two journalists covering the whole sorry business in that ugly little town (Ryan J. Reilly of Huffington Post; Wesley Lowery of Washington Post) were told to leave a McDonald's where they were working and sipping coffee, and when they didn't clear out fast enough (or through the right door), the cops arrested them.  They were not charged... hey, who needs charges if you're arresting "bad" people? Read the reporters' tweets during the incident at the link above.

It's really hard to justify this kind of crap, but from at least the Occupy movement forward, it's been happening more often. Maybe having the Pentagon donate (or sell cheap) its crowd control equipment to a remarkable percentage of the small-town police forces in America is deleterious to free speech, public protest and similar activities we once held to be America's protection against loss of civil liberties. Or maybe these cops in particular are just fascist pigs...

The ACLU has launched an investigation of militarization of America's police forces; goodness knows there's no shortage of material to investigate. Here is the summary, and here is the report (.pdf), titled "War Comes Home." IMNSHO, if military equipment is available to city police forces, inevitably, police operations will more and more come to resemble military operations... and history shows the path after that.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) reminds us in a tweet, "This is America, not a war zone. The people of #Ferguson just want answers. We all want answers." Indeed we do, and we'd better get some good answers soon. Meanwhile, if you love your democracy (what's left of it), don't give your police force MRAVs MRAPs and drones. And don't... ever... encourage police to arrest journalists.

---

Clarification: only the second photo above, of a crowd of protesters keeping their hands in plain sight, is from Ferguson. The police photos are representative of the transformation of police operations into military operations.

The Vanishing Fourth Amendment In The Post‑Constitutional Age

The Nation offers a survey article on the many ways the Fourth Amendment, the source of Americans' privacy rights, has been eviscerated in the post‑9/11 era, to the point at which practically none of the privacy rights we had in our youth are, in actual practice, protected today.

How does all this surveillance/dragnet/poking into private records work? Well, we don't know, because the mofos who do it won't tell us. Put simply, your secrets acquired by your government are available to them, but they're, ah... secret... from you. Got that?


(H/T Enfant, in comments.)

How The Global War On Terrorism Has Supplanted The American Bill Of Rights

Via l'Enfant de la Haute Mer in comments here, we have two versions of an excellent article by Peter van Buren, "RIP, The Bill of Rights" (at TomDispatch) and "How the ‘War on Terror’ Became a War on the Constitution" (at The Nation). Van Buren's thesis is that America has lived through two eras and into a third era of governance:

• a monarchy when America was England's colony, 
• a constitutional era after the American Revolution and for approximately two centuries, and 
• a post-constitutional era beginning (as I perceive it) not later than the presidency of Ronald Reagan and coming to fruition in the presidencies of Dick Cheney, er, I mean, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. 

We may call the last era the era of the imperial presidency, or the era of the unitary executive. The first and third eras bear a striking and painful resemblance to each other: unitary rule is always arbitrary rule, no matter what you call the chief executive. The difference is how he (in America it's always been a "he"; see many European examples of a "she" as chief executive) is chosen: a kingship is an hereditary position with the initial king allegedly chosen by God; a presidency is not hereditary but rather, um, er, not really elected by the people either, unless you consider monetary units as ballot-weighting units. Once an American president or a constitutional monarch takes office, the differences are few.

Van Buren has done such a fine job of exploring the particulars of America's government and its relationship (if any) to democracy that I hardly need repeat his work... you may productively give both his versions a good read.

‘Inadvertence’

The federal government's song-and-dance to avoid any public scrutiny of the charges in a terrorism case in Chicago has danced right outside the pale... and the appeals court is having none of it. Kevin Gosztola of FDL:

A federal appeals court in Chicago ordered a redo of an oral argument in a case where the government filed an appeal against a defendant’s access to secret surveillance records.

Adel Daoud, a young Muslim who was arrested outside a Chicago bar in an undercover FBI sting operation, is charged with “attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction” and “attempting to destroy a building by means of an explosive.” A district court judge granted his defense team access to “foreign surveillance materials” under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was unprecedented.

On June 4, the 7th Circuit US Court of Appeals held argument on the government’s case for why the district court’s ruling should be reversed. The “public argument” part of the hearing was not recorded.

“By inadvertence, the device that makes a sound recording or the oral arguments of our cases was not turned on for the public argument in this case on Wednesday,” according to a court order issued on June 6. The court scheduled a new argument for June 9.

A do-over was ordered to dispel any perception of corruption.

...

"By inadvertence"? Awwww, gimme a break! If this was not a deliberate attempt to disrupt "a speedy and public trial, I'll eat my Uncle Sam red-white-'n'-blue hat. Clearly there is a policy... a secret policy... that no terrorism trial that comes before the FISA court or any appeal of such a trial will ever allow even the possibility of acquittal, even if that means running a drumhead trial in which the defendant's rights are not merely denied but just plain not even considered.

To repeat myself: this is not the United States of America I grew up in. After W.W.II, even the worst Nazis were subjected to fair trials in international courts. Now, the US will not even protect a terrorism defendant's constitutionally explicitly enumerated due process rights. The entire Obama administration should be ashamed of itself! Ashamed!

Tuesday Cat Porting; Chris Hedges Interviews Lynne Stewart

We are headed out in this awful weather to take our kitty Esther to... get this... an ophthalmologist. The problem with going to a high-priced veterinarian is that they feel free to refer to high-priced specialists located far from home. But it's Stella's kitty and Stella's decision. I'm along for the ride to comfort the cat, and of course Stella.

Lynne Stewart

While I'm gone (most of the day), please read Chris Hedges's article/interview of famous civil liberties/rights activist lawyer Lynne Stewart, who is just recently out of jail after four years of a ten-year prison sentence, released because she has terminal breast cancer. Bluntly speaking, she was imprisoned for doing her job, defending her client in the face of impossible odds and in the face of the PATRIOT Act. She failed to win her case in 1995, but after the infamous 9/11/2001 that was not good enough for John Ashcroft, George W. Bush and their unsavory crew when they came into office: Stewart's client was "Omar Abdel Rahman, an Egyptian Muslim known as 'the Blind Sheikh,' who was convicted in October of that year for alleged involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center."

Stewart's crime, in short, was mounting a vigorous defense of Abdel Rahman when the government was determined to put him away for life... which they did. Stewart was sentenced to 28 months. When Barack Obama was elected president, "a federal appeals court under the Barack Obama administration demanded that the district judge reconsider her sentence. She was handed a new sentence by Koeltl—10 years." Message received: the right to trial by jury no longer extends to everyone, and if our government dislikes the accused, they have no problem taking revenge on his attorney. In this case, the government even used taped conversations between Stewart and Rahman as evidence against Stewart, a practice now legal but previously considered a blatant violation of attorney-client privilege.

This is a story to make you despair for the legitimacy of the judicial system in America. And when the courts become a tool of the executive, there is no more separation of powers... and we have no nation as our founders conceived it.

Marcy Wheeler Offers More Analysis Of The PCLOB Report

Here. emptywheel's assessment begins thus:

PCLOB tells us that the FISA Court approved a new automated query system (versions appear to have been in development for years, and it replaced the automated alert system from 2009) in late 2012 that permitted all the 3-degree contact chains off all RAS-approved identifiers to be dumped into the corporate store at once where they can be combined with data collected under other authorities (presumably including both EO 12333 and FAA) for further analysis.

[extended quote from the PCLOB report; please read at emptywheel's site at the link above]

...

On December 27, 2012, Jeff Merkley gave a speech in support of his amendment to the FISA Amendments Act that would push to make FISC decisions public. It referenced both the backdoor loophole (which John Bates extended to NSA and CIA in 2011, was implemented in 2012, and affirmed by the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2012) and the language underlying the phone dragnet. Merkley suggested the government might use these secret interpretations to conduct wide open spying on Americans.

[another extended quote from Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR).]

...

The point, in brief, is that we are being forced to live under a secret law, and that secret law may be in direct conflict with our constitutional rights in the powers it secretly grants to the intelligence agencies. Please note how Sen. Merkley is compelled to tiptoe around the whole issue by stating things as conditionals because he is probably prohibited from stating them outright in a public forum.

Sen. Jeff Merkley

This is not the America I grew up in. That America at least once rejected firmly the secret spying on American citizens undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI for purposes that were never freely debated by Congress and authorized by the President, purposes whose constitutionality was highly questionable at best. Nearly five decades later, here we are again: different intelligence agency; vastly advanced technology... but the same old bullshit subverting the same rights and liberties of the American people. What is it going to take to put a stop to the American surveillance state? Will I... will any of us... live to see the day it is shut down for good?

---

AFTERTHOUGHT: To the best of my knowledge, I am no relation to Judge John Deacon Bates, or indeed to any other George W. Bush appointee.

Top Secret Strategy Document: NSA Wants More Legal Surveillance Power

James Risen at NYT:

Officials at the National Security Agency, intent on maintaining its dominance in intelligence collection, pledged last year to push to expand its surveillance powers, according to a top-secret strategy document.

In a February 2012 paper laying out the four-year strategy for the N.S.A.’s signals intelligence operations, which include the agency’s eavesdropping and communications data collection around the world, agency officials set an objective to “aggressively pursue legal authorities and a policy framework mapped more fully to the information age.”

... “The interpretation and guidelines for applying our authorities, and in some cases the authorities themselves, have not kept pace with the complexity of the technology and target environments, or the operational expectations levied on N.S.A.’s mission,” the document concluded.

... the paper also outlined some of the agency’s other ambitions. They included defeating the cybersecurity practices of adversaries in order to acquire the data the agency needs from “anyone, anytime, anywhere.” The agency also said it would try to decrypt or bypass codes that keep communications secret by influencing “the global commercial encryption market through commercial relationships,” ...

... provided by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden ...

... Several inquiries are underway in Washington; Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the N.S.A.’s longest-serving director, has announced plans to retire; and the White House has offered proposals to disclose more information about the agency’s domestic surveillance activities.

...

That old Fourth-Amendment hater; I'd let him retire all right... retire to a prison cell.

(The article also contains a link to the strategy document itself.)

Chris Hedges On 'The Criminalization Of Journalism'

Jaisal Noor, producer for The Real Network News, interviews the always plain-spoken Chris Hedges. I started to say "the indefatigable Chris Hedges," but honestly, Hedges looks as tired as I feel these days. It must be a terrible burden that he carries, largely on our behalf and for our education. Be that as it may, Hedges addresses the detention... face it, the criminal arrest... of David Miranda by British officials at London's Heathrow Airport, charging him with "espionage" and "terrorism" — i.e., journalism embarrassing to officialdom on both sides of the Atlantic. The interview is published both as a video and in print; it is worth viewing both forms. A couple of quotations:

...

NOOR: So, Chris, let's start off by getting your response to the British government accusing David Miranda, the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, who often collaborates with Greenwald, of, quote, espionage and terrorism and saying those were some of the reasons why they held him for hours on end at Heathrow without letting him speak to his lawyer or anyone else.

HEDGES: Well, they didn't just told him. They seized all of his electronic equipment--his computer, his phone--because they were looking for some of the files that [Miranda's partner Glenn] Greenwald has been using to publish his stories that were leaked by Edward Snowden. And this is just part of the criminalization of journalism which has taken place not only within the United States but within countries like Great Britain as well.

NOOR: Britain doesn't have the same safeguards for journalists as places like the U.S. do. ...

HEDGES: Well, there aren't any safeguards left within the United States as well. ... the security and surveillance state has the phone--all of the electronic communications of every journalist in this country. They've used the Espionage Act aggressively seven times, the last time being against Snowden, to make sure nobody does talk to the press to expose the inner workings of power.

So we once had, at least legally, more protection as journalists than were provided to journalists in Great Britain. But all of it's gone up in smoke, both here and there. ...

NOOR: Now, the NSA and its defenders, they cite 54 terrorist plots they have been able to supposedly thwart due to this massive spying. But a recent report by ProPublica found that the NSA was only able to provide evidence in four of those cases. Why do you think the NSA is not providing additional evidence for those remaining 50 cases?

HEDGES: Well, because they're lying. ...

What's interesting is that a lot of times when they lie, they get caught because of courageous whistleblowers like Snowden who expose their [lies]. ...

...

Please read and/or watch the rest. The interview is short and to the point.

A mere few years ago I began to wonder whether the United States could survive the beating it has taken at the hands of Americans who truly do not care for its founding principles as long as they control the nation's power... Dick Cheney, the PNAC gang, Karl Rove, etc. I don't wonder anymore: in the words of Leonard Cohen, "The war is over. The good guys lost." The Bill of Rights... especially the First Amendment's freedom of speech and press... is nothing but pen-scratchings on parchment; there is no substance to those freedoms in the era of presidents George W. Bush Dick Cheney and Barack Obama. To parody the title of another Hedges book, war is a farce that gives the U.S. beatings.

It was great while it lasted. I feel I owe an apology to Thomas Jefferson and to my father, both of whom did their damnedest to create and then preserve a nation where things were done right — thank goodness neither of them survived to see what my generation has done to it.

---

AFTERTHOUGHT: A couple of days ago I began reading Jeremy Scahill's new book, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. I have not read Scahill's other book, but I am reminded by his first chapter of Jane Mayer's The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, a book which I went out and bought (used, of course) *after* I finished reading the library copy. One difference: the Scahill book is immense; you could use it to exercise your arms, pumping pulp instead of pumping iron. But the content is just as depressing as Mayer's excellent work. I may not be able to finish it...

You Knew This Would Happen Eventually: DoJ To Use Data From Warrantless Surveillance In Criminal Case

Warrantless searches aren't just for alleged terrorists anymore. Jeralyn of TalkLeft has the details from a New York Times article:

... the government intends to offer into evidence or otherwise use or disclose in proceedings in the above-captioned matter information obtained or derived from acquisition of foreign intelligence information conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, as amended, 50 U.S.C. 1881a.

It's a sad day for anyone who ever depended on the Fourth Amendment to keep the government's nose out of their ordinary noncriminal business.

UPDATE: via the NYT article, it is, after all, a terrorism case: the charge is "providing material support to the Islamic Jihad Union, a designated terrorist organization based in Uzbekistan." It is still significant because the DoJ has only just begun a new policy of informing defendants if a link in the chain of evidence against them was obtained by surveillance without a warrant, in this case, wiretapping the defendant's phone calls. Damned nice of them to tell them, isn't it?

Victory For Privacy: Federal Appeals Court Rules Police May Not Conduct GPS Searches Without Warrant

Kevin Gosztola at FDL:

A federal appeals court has ruled that police must obtain a warrant in a case involving a “slap-on” GPS tracking device, where defendants had argued they were victims of searches that violated their privacy rights.

The court found the attachment of a GPS tracking device to a defendant’s van was not excused by the argument that law enforcement were acting in “good faith.” All evidence obtained from the search was ordered to be suppressed in the case.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reacted to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision. “Today’s decision is a victory for all Americans because it ensures that the police cannot use powerful tracking technology without court supervision and a good reason to believe it will turn up evidence of wrongdoing,” ACLU staff attorney Catherine Crump said.

...

It's about time. Warrantless searches, under Bush Junior and then under Obama, have become almost the rule rather than the exception, to the point at which the Fourth Amendment almost doesn't exist anymore. Perhaps this will breathe new life into it, and discourage at least some cops from doing whatever they damned well please irrespective of the Bill of Rights.

Extraordinary Rendition: It's Not Just A Bush-Cheney Thing

Kevin Gosztola of FDL, yesterday:

Rendition of Libyan Terror Suspect: What If Abu Anas al-Liby Had Nothing to Do With the Embassy Bombings?

By: Kevin Gosztola Monday October 14, 2013 8:11 pm

A Libyan terror suspect kidnapped from Libya in a raid by US special forces on October 5 was transferred from the naval ship, where he was being detained and interrogated, into “law enforcement custody” over the weekend.

The Justice Department indicated in a press release that he was “brought directly to the Southern District of New York, where he has been under indictment for more than a decade.” He was expected to be brought before a judge on October 15.

Al-Liby is suspected of being involved in the bombings of US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Last week, a chief federal public defender, David E. Patton, according to the Los Angeles Times, had pressed a federal judge to order that he be “brought to court immediately,” as he was aboard a ship being interrogated by the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, which is a special task force of personnel from the Pentagon, FBI, CIA and other agencies. He had not been read Miranda rights, which he and other terror suspects have a right to be read if they are being prosecuted under US law. But a federal judge would not issue such an order and would not appoint a defense lawyer to represent him either.

A more critical issue is that al-Liby, whose real name is Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, may not be the dangerous al Qaeda terrorist the United States government believes he happens to be.

...

Please read the rest of Gosztola's post. It is a case study in our government's unconstitutional (indeed un-American) actions in extraordinary rendition cases.

I have read the Bill of Rights many times. I skimmed it one more time before writing this post. And with the possible exception of the 10^th Amendment (and it's hard to tell on that one), none of the enumerated rights apply only to US citizens. In particular, in this case, foreigners retain judicial due process rights as surely as citizens.

In spite of this, we see extraordinary rendition inflicted not merely by the admittedly evil George W. Bush and Dick Cheney but also by the allegedly more moderate Barack Obama. Refusing to read Miranda rights as a protection of due process? moderate? refusing to appoint a defense attorney? moderate? Not hardly! Our nation's founders are surely spinning in their graves.

And remember, this is process for a man who appears (to some people at least) to be trying to cooperate with the government... to be sure, acting in his own best interest (that's his right), and possibly having been a terrorist (that's to be determined by trial, not merely assumed without trial), but apparently trying to cooperate.

If our courts begin abducting people who are trying to cooperate (perhaps to prevent their testimony?), if our courts begin denying due process rights (guaranteed by our Constitution not just to citizens, but to people in general when under US jurisdiction), what possible confidence can we have that they will not turn the same extreme measures against American citizens when they find it convenient? And... what a time to decide to do this, while most of us are distracted by the government shutdown!

Niemöller nailed it in 1946, though he was speaking about German Nazis... in one variant, "First they came for the Jews..." Well, now they're coming for the alleged terrorists, and I'm damned if I will remain silent. Even a terrorist deserves a fair trial. Even a terrorist deserves a defense attorney.

UPDATE: from an AP article:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Four years after his failed effort to bring the 9/11 mastermind to New York for trial, President Barack Obama has reinstated the federal courthouse as America's preferred venue for prosecuting suspected terrorists.

His administration has done so by quietly securing conviction after conviction in the civilian judicial system. Meanwhile at Guantanamo Bay, admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's case moves at a snail's pace.

...

Right. It's amazing how many convictions you can obtain if you refuse to appoint a defense attorney...

How Does Obama Really Feel About His Drone 'Kill List'? And Will It Pass To The Next President?

Kevin Gosztola of FDL's The Dissenter reveals that "an unnamed official with the Obama administration" told Scott Shane of the New York Times that in seeking to answer that question, the Obama administration contemplated the very real possibility that the levers of power might pass from Obama's to Rmoney's hands, and sought to codify and restrict the targeted assassination powers. From Shane's article:

...

... With a continuing debate about the proper limits of drone strikes, Mr. Obama did not want to leave an “amorphous” program to his successor, the official said. The effort, which would have been rushed to completion by January had Mr. Romney won, will now be finished at a more leisurely pace, the official said.

...

Gosztola's concerns are much like my own:

...

The revelation is remarkable in that it shows GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney—not the fact that the power to extrajudicially kill people suspected of committing or having ties to terrorism was being claimed—was why the administration began to have increased concerns over drone warfare.

...

Clearly there needs to be a formal policy in place regarding targeted assassinations using drones: they are sloppy weapons liable to kill far more people than the intended target, and in those few cases where the targeted person has been an American citizen, that citizen had no opportunity for a trial, a proof of his/her guilt before a court of law, and a formal sentence by such a court. In other words, if drone use were not bad enough on the grounds that America is murdering babies, it is still worse because it is used unapologetically to violate the Fourth Amendment. All of this needs to be thought out, debated and decided by a team of advisors not given to thinking in lock-step with the president.

That said, drone warfare is liable to continue and even increase into the indefinite future, including, yes, into a Republican presidency, if indeed that would be any worse. (I always said Obama is the lesser evil, not that he is not capable of evil.) If this haphazard, cowboy-shoot-first attitude continues, it will not be long before America has no friends among the nations and leaders of the world... and who can blame them. We need three things: real rules in place and implemented in the field, clear accountability for every drone strike, and... most of all... transparency. These acts are being committed in my name, and in yours if you're an American citizen: you deserve to know as specifically as possible who is being killed and why, what their nationality is, if they are noncombatants, whether their due process rights were preserved, and who dies as "collateral damage" from this most indiscriminate of weapons.

And Mr. Obama... well, he needs to pull out the book from which he used to teach Review of Constitutional Law (or whatever it's called), and spend some time with his nose in it. Apparently he's forgotten some things. Apparently, many of the rest of us have forgotten those same things. It's time for a serious review of the rightful limits on presidential power.

Fusion... Not Nuclear, Not Musical, But DHS Centers

How far did DHS ultimately go in removing your civil liberties and your privacy, starting (more or less) on 9/11/2001? Gene Howington at Jonathan Turley's blog sketches the sordid picture for us. Few answers will surprise you, but if you grew up in an earlier, freer America, a lot of them will offend you. What can you still keep private from your government? In essence... not a damned thing. Not one. And it's all compiled in databases, crudely indexed and even more crudely cross-referenced, to make sure that what the DHS knows about you that is incorrect, the FBI, CIA, NSA, DoJ and often local law enforcement agencies also know about you... equally incorrectly. Like nuclear fusion, this kind of fusion can so easily get out of hand, become unstable and do more harm than good, that I can't help thinking the term was chosen premeditatedly.

Be sure to read the comments. Most of Turley's readers are attorneys, and many of them have some perspective on the process by which Homeland Security has become personal insecurity. Welcome to our brave new world.

One Nation, Under Surveillance: TrapWire

It's the latest thing in government-sponsored warrantless surveillance of American citizens, 24x7, every aspect of their lives... and it's here today. Here's a sample from FDL's TheCallUp:

...

So what is TrapWire, and why has its leak created such a commotion? According to reporting at RT, TrapWire is a detailed surveillance system that “can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw[s] patterns, and do[es] threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” Anything suspect gets input into the system to be “analyzed and compared with data entered from other areas within a network for the purpose of identifying patterns of behavior that are indicative of pre-attack planning.”

According to the article, this system has been secretly installed in most major cities and around landmarks across the United States, in Canada, and in the UK. Most local police forces are installing their own monitoring software that works in conjunction with TrapWire. Private properties, including casinos, are now signing up to TrapWire. Essentially, it sounds like Big Brother identifying you, watching you, assessing your every move for abnormalities, then indexing your behavior.

...

Please read the whole article. This is effectively the old Total Information Awareness program actually implemented, either in defiance of federal law and the Constitution, or else in compliance with some secret law we have no knowledge of.

Oh, by the way... as WikiLeaks and Anonymous began releasing documents pertaining to the program, they were subjected to the DDoS attack from Hell. It looks like the scariest obstacle to your freedom of speech and your right to know what your government is doing is now... your government.

ACLU Challenges Government Classification Of Every Word Detainees Speak In Gitmo Trials

What's classified in a Gitmo detainee's trial? No less than every word spoken by a detainee. Yep. Everything a defendant says is presumptively classified, notwithstanding the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of a "speedy and public trial." So much for the "public" part! Read what Pro Publica's Cora Currier documents for us. Here's Currier on the ACLU's action:

...

The ACLU filed a brief in May saying that the government’s order of presumptive classification and the forty-second delay [in the livecast of trials to American news agencies] violate the public’s right of access to the trial. The ACLU’s motion takes issue with the idea that the government has declared detainees’ “personal knowledge of their detention and treatment in U.S. custody” classified. Their exposure to classified information was forced upon them, the ACLU states, in CIA detention and interrogation programs that are now outlawed.

The ACLU argues that an executive order on classification signed by Obama in 2009 says in part that, in order to be properly classified, information must be “under the control of the United States Government.” The ACLU’s brief challenges whether that authority could be extended “categorically to human beings under the government’s control.” [emphasis in original]. The ACLU also argues that the detainees were not in any kind of contractual relationship which would make them liable for the classified information they were exposed to.

...

It's just another battle in the bipartisan war on rights and liberties.

Once again, we need to remind our leaders that the Bill of Rights is written to apply to all persons, not just citizens. That fact and five bucks will get you a frappuccino at Starbucks...