Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) introduced a bill to Congress recently that would completely remove the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

Paul’s bill in the House is accompanied by two more; Senator Diane Feinstein’s (D-Calif) Due Process Guarantee Act and Rep. Jeff Landry’s (R-LA) measure to “amend the detainee provisions”.

Paul’s bill is the most effective of the three in protecting civil and human rights by completely removing the section 1021 of the NDAA.

Landry’s bill would amend the NDAA to “specifically state that United States citizens may not be detained against their will without all the rights of due process afforded to citizens in a court ordained or established by or under Article III of the Constitution of the United States.”

However Landry’s draws a troublesome distinction between the rights of citizens and non-citizens. His bill, along Feinstein’s, would still allow the NDAA provisions to be used against people that are non-citizens of the United States.

Yet the Constitution grants the rights of due process to all people. To keep in accordance with the Bill of Rights, habeas corpus should not be denied to any person by the United States government. A fair trial, judge, and lawyer are guaranteed to all people by both US and international law.

Feinstein’s Due Process Guarantee Act, is the weakest of the three, and seems to have the largest Democrat backing with 20 co-sponsors.

The act would only prohibit the indefinite detention section to be used domestically. If any person, US citizen or otherwise, is in another country then the US government can arrest and detain them without any due process.

This is not an acceptable alternative; stepping across the border from Minnesota into Canada shouldn’t put a person into an unsafe situation with fewer rights. The rules need to apply universally and with affirmation of the Bill of Rights.

The Feinstein and Landry bills are trying to fix a major problem with a minor treatment, and their solutions may cause even more problems as they make it acceptable to violate the rights of non-citizens and people abroad.

Representative Paul’s bill is the best solution because it removes the problem entirely. The rights of due process need to be restored and protected fully, not only partly. Paul’s bill will reinstate the rights of due process and preserve the United States Constitution by completely removing section 1021 of the NDAA.

• 1/26, Editorial, Rutgers Daily Targum, Safety measures compromise liberty
• 1/26, Andrew Rosenthal, New York Times, Get the Whistleblowers
• 1/26, Rebecca MacKinnon, CNN, We’re losing control of our digital privacy
• 1/26, United Press International, Law’s detainee language unites left, right
• 1/25, The Talking Dog, Moderate Voice, Interview with Col. Morris Davis
• 1/25, Mark Zaretsky, New Haven (CT) Register, Civil Rights Coalition presses for stronger profiling prohibition laws
• 1/25, Editorial, Modesto (CA) Bee, Standing up for digital privacy

Conservatives are historically the champions of small government, fiscal responsibility, and traditionalism, holding America to our country’s Constitution and founding principles. As such, many conservatives take issue with one of largest government initiatives endangering liberty today: surveillance.

Conservative opinion writer George Will recently authored a column criticizing the violations of civil liberties occurring through domestic surveillance programs.

When the Los Angeles Police Department developed a Suspicious Activity Report program, the federal government encouraged local law enforcement agencies to adopt its guidelines for gathering information “that could indicate activity or intentions related to” terrorism. From the fact that terrorists might take pictures of potential infrastructure targets (“pre-operational surveillance”), it is a short slide down a slippery slope to the judgment that photography is a potential indicator of terrorism and hence photographers are suspect when taking pictures “with no apparent aesthetic value” (words from the suspicious-activity guidelines).

One reason law enforcement is such a demanding, and admirable, profession is that it requires constant exercises of good judgment in the application of general rules to ambiguous situations. Such judgment is not evenly distributed among America’s 800,000 law enforcement officials.

Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute also recently wrote critically of the government’s surveillance programs, examining their downsides from an economic and small government perspective.

“Conservatives, especially in the years since the 9/11 attacks, have been reluctant to apply their own insights to the subject” of federal surveillance spending, he says.

Conservative jeremiads against federal pork seldom focus on examples like — to pick one boondoggle that became public — the NSA’s Trailblazer. The Science Applications International Corporation, one of the 800-pound gorillas of intelligence contracting, signed a $280 million contract to set up this classified data-mining system in 2002, as reporter Tim Shorrock recounts in his 2008 book, Spies for Hire. NSA veteran William Black, who’d been hired on as a vice president at SAIC “for the sole purpose of soliciting NSA business,” returned to his old agency to run the project. More than three years later, having run up a tab of at least $1.2 billion, the system was scrapped. The contract to build the successor system went, of course, to SAIC.

“Why should we believe,” he asks, “that throwing more money at a problem through government will produce better results when subject to less outside scrutiny?”

Sanchez blames this trend largely on conservatives sacrificing their ideals for political capital and to continue the motto, “Leftists attack our troops and intelligence officials, while conservatives support them.”

Though the two don’t speak for all, both Will and Sanchez make a strong case why federal surveillance should be critical issue for both liberals and conservatives—for all Americans, wherever we stand on the political spectrum.

• 1/25, Rachel Gordon, San Francisco Chronicle, SFPD’s work with FBI unit may get more scrutiny
• 1/25, Karl Bode, BroadbandReports.com, Lamar Smith’s Other Really Awful Law: Expanding Domestic Surveillance Under Guise of Child Protection
• 1/24, Raven Clabough, New American, Montana Launches Recall Efforts Against NDAA Supporters
• 1/24, Joe Coscarelli, New York Magazine, NYPD Training Included a Scary Anti-Muslim Propaganda Film

Mahmoud M. Hegab was a well-regarded budget analyst at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) until 2010 when his Top Secret/SCI security clearance was abruptly revoked in a story covered by Steven Aftergood, editor  at Secrecy News, last October.

In a lawsuit  against the NGA, Hegab contended that among the issues precipitating his loss of clearance were the fact that his newlywed wife had graduated from an Islamic school, that she had participated in an anti-war protest, and that she had engaged in pro-Palestinian political activity while a student at George Mason University.

Hegab’s complaint presented an extensive account of Mr. Hegab’s experience along with a detailed rebuttal of the allegations against him and his wife.

Well at least Hegab’s right to pursue the matter proves he still has access to due process, right?

Apparently not.

Last week, as Aftergood reports, Judge James C. Cacheris of the Eastern District of Virginia dismissed Hegab’s complaint saying that even if the plaintiff’s allegations were true, no review of the decision was possible because the court lacked the authority to review the underlying bases of the dispute.

Effectively, according to Secrecy News, “a government agency’s decision to revoke an employee’s security clearance cannot be reviewed by a federal court even if the decision is based on ethnic discrimination or religious prejudice or other unconstitutional grounds.”

“A determination of whether Hegab’s security clearance was revoked due to legitimate national security concerns or, as Hegab alleges, constitutionally impermissible bases would necessarily require a review of the merits of NGA’s decision. Absent clear congressional directive, which Hegab fails to identify, such a review is flatly prohibited by Egan and Fourth Circuit precedent,” Judge Cacheris wrote.

“Egan” here refers to the 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Department of the Navy v. Egan, which has often been invoked in support of broad and unreviewable executive branch authority in national security policy.  A critique of Egan and its subsequent application was presented by constitutional scholar Louis Fisher, then of the Law Library of Congress, in “Judicial Interpretations of Egan,” November 13, 2009.

• 1/24, Glenn Greenwald, Salon, Rules of American justice: a tale of three cases
• 1/24, Uprising Radio, Supreme Court Rules Against Unauthorized Use of GPS Tracking Devices
• 1/24, Andy Worthington, Eurasia Review, Please Call For Guantánamo Closure By Signing White House Petition
• 1/23, Spencer Ackerman, Wired, Homeland Security Wants to Spy on 4 Square Miles at Once

A popular hip-hop blog, Dajaz1.com, finally got its domain back recently after having it seized by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in November 2010. The ordeal is detailed in an editorial by Mike Masnick at Techdirt. The lengthy legal battle was so secretive that even Dajaz1′s attorney, Andrew P. Bridges, was not informed about the proceedings:

[T]he deadline for the government to file for forfeiture came and went and nothing apparently happened. Absolutely nothing. Bridges contacted the government to ask what was going on, and was told that the government had received an extension from the court. Bridges, quite reasonably, asked how that was possible without him, as counsel for the site, being informed of it or given a chance to make the case for why such an extension was improper.

He also asked for a copy of the the court’s order allowing the extension. The government told him no and that the extension was filed under seal and could not be released, even in redacted form.

He asked for the motion papers asking for the extension. The government told him no and that the papers were filed under seal and could not be released, even in redacted form.

He again asked whether he would be notified about further filings for extensions. The government told him no.

He then asked the US attorney to inform the court that, if the government made another request for an extension, the domain owner opposed the extension and would like the opportunity to be heard. The government would not agree.

And file further extensions the government did. Repeatedly. Or, at least that’s what Bridges was told. He sent someone to investigate the docket at the court, but the docket itself was secret, meaning there was no record of any of this available.

Without the extensions, the government has only 90 days to begin the forfeiture process when a domain is seized. No complaint was filed against Dajaz1 for criminal copyright infringement or any other charges, yet the censorship continued for over a year, until December 2011.  Now the Dajaz1 blog is back, sharing some information about the incident on the site’s “Copyright Policy” page.

Today, a unanimous Supreme Court decided in US v. Jones that police must seek judicial authorization before placing a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s car.  On the one hand, the decision represents a resounding victory for Fourth Amendment and privacy principles eroded by the government’s presumptive use of advancing surveillance technologies. On the other hand, reading between the proverbial lines reveals a disturbing split on the Court about how the Fourth Amendment will apply in the future.

As noted by the Center for Democracy & Technology:

The Justice Department had argued that the GPS device, because it tracked the person’s movements only on the public streets, did not raise any concern under the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which generally requires a warrant for searches and seizures.  Not a single Justice agreed with the government on that issue.

Instead, all nine agreed that, under the facts of the case, the Constitution required a warrant issued by a judge.  Five Justices agreed that any use of GPS planted by the government was a search generally requiring a warrant, effectively settling that issue.

• 1/23, Tony Romm, Politico, Supreme Court: GPS location tracking qualifies as search
• 1/23, Glenn Greenwald, Salon, Western justice and transparency
• 1/23, Tim Mak, Politico, Rand Paul detained by TSA
• 1/23, Jay Price, Charlotte (NC) Observer, Report: N.C. transport company aids torture
• 1/23, Reuters, U.S. flouts law at Guantanamo, despite Obama vow: U.N.
• 1/23, New America Media, ACLU: Arizona Jail Does Not Meet “Basic Human Rights”
• 1/22, Shakeel Syed with Farid Zakaria, TruthOut, The FBI Spied on Me and Then Lied About It