This guest blog post was written by Imad Khan.
On June 14, Texas Governor Rick Perry signed HB 912 into law, putting restrictions on the use of drones by law enforcement officials. This is a historic moment, especially in the wake of leaks from the NSA’s wiretapping schemes, confirming that Texas will not allow dragnet surveillance abuses by law enforcement agencies within the state’s jurisdiction.

It’s quite impressive that this bill came into law considering how powerfully its opposition challenged the measure’s sponsors and supporters. It took the cooperation of multiple parties to push this through, and Texas should be seen as a model for the rest of the country in regards to drones.

With the onset of the PATRIOT Act, it became apparent that technology could be used to violate civil liberties in the name of security. Many have scrutinized the PATRIOT Act, and later measures, for giving the executive branch overarching power without any congressional oversight. Legislatures across the country are trying to address the growing sources of civil liberties abuses by presenting bills that ensure some semblance of protection from arbitrary surveillance. Texas Representative Lance Gooden has done just that.

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This past week, CNN featured an article written by Mieke Eoyang (director of the National Security Program at Third Way) and Christopher Preble (vice president for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute), considering President Obama’s recent speech on counter-terrorism issues at the National Defense University.

Among other things, President Obama’s speech examined whether the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) should be left intact, or whether instead our national security would benefit from scaling it back.  Obama argued that the US must tailor its method of fighting terrorism to better fit “the nature of today’s threats.”

He continued by saying, “Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror,’ but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.”  Obama did not specifically mention a clean repeal of the AUMF, but that is the strategy that Eoyang & Preble advocate as being the most effective. Repealing the AUMF would help to scale back the very broad executive power that has characterized the office of the presidency since 2001.

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This guest blog post was written by Joshua Wilson.

It’s a good thing that the president, Congress, and our broader society have disregarded the legacy of the Anti-Federalists and created a system that perfectly abides the interests of tyrants.

Ed Snowden’s exposure of the PRISM program has started a series of questions that has already challenged the current legacy of government lies and complicity in them. Yet, rather than do their jobs, American media outlets seem content to join the Fourth Amendment’s death throws by calling into question the character of NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden, while avoiding the real issue of NSA crimes such as the PRISM program and further dragnet surveillance under the PATRIOT and FISA Acts.

I know Ed Snowden personally. We met at my Kung Fu school, which presents all who join us as members of an extended family. Ed was my Si Hing, or older brother. He was responsible to help me learn martial arts, but he truly lived up to his role as an older brother.

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In a court ruling on May 20, in San Francisco, CA, Google was ordered to comply with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) requests for private user information through the use of National Security Letters, a counter-terrorism measure implemented after the passing of the USA PATRIOT Act.

Judge Susan Illston, who ultimately decided against Google’s contention that the FBI’s probing was unconstitutional, ruled against the letters in a case filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in March–citing the letters as unconstitutional.

The new ruling comes at the heels of Google executives, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, releasing a manifesto titled The New Digital Age. Schmidt & Cohen touch on the importance technology has, and will have, on future developments in trading and politics, suggesting that the deterioration of privacy will help “open” democratic governments understand their constituents while arguing that “companies responsible for storing this data have a responsibility to ensure its security, and that will not change.”

They also reflect their views on the “importance of a guiding hand in the new digital age.” Cohen and Schmidt go on to say:

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On June 3rd, the Supreme Court released its decision in Maryland v. King, in which a 5-4 majority held that:

taking and analyzing a cheek swab of [an] arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerpringting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.

Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan joined Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent, focusing on the huge privacy invasion concerns represented by DNA swabbing prior to conviction.

This decision is clearly cause for concern. What’s more, it should  be viewed as part and parcel of a growing surveillance state, in which everyone’s bodies are cataloged, their movements tracked, and their beliefs recorded. The old idea of the Fourth Amendment, which was created specifically in order to protect us from government tyranny, is nearly dead.

Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, acknowledged that swabbing for DNA qualifies as a  search under the Fourth Amendment. However, he argues, it is a minimal intrusion and requires only a balancing of privacy concerns and legitimate government interests. He focuses on the comparison between taking DNA and fingerprinting, which is done mainly for the purposes of identifying arrestees.

The thrust of questioning and argument during oral argument belies this focus. While the government fell back on the arrestee identification argument, it initially argued that taking DNA samples would help solve unsolved crimes. Questions from several Justices in the majority made it clear that they appreciate the crime-solving aspect of DNA, beyond the identification aspect. Justice Scalia’s dissent explains why this matters.

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Last night, I appeared alongside renowned investigator James Bamford, whistleblower advocate Jesselyn Radack, and privacy and open government expert Ginger McCall on Thom Hartmann’s television program The Big Picture. Video from our interview (my first comments start at 7:05) is below, and here’s audio from my appearance on WBAI’s Five O’Clock Shadow with Robert Knight just a few hours earlier.

Several issues remain muted in much of the discussion about the NSA, its offensive and unAmerican spying programs, and the escalating crisis in the Washington establishment favoring imperial executive power over the constitutional legacy of the Republic created by our founders.

I address issues relating to executive secrecy, and one relating to corruption, below.

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Prisoners may face solitary confinement (i.e. imprisonment in a small cell for up to 23 hours a day without contact with other people) throughout the US criminal detention system. A new report published by Physicians for Human Rights focuses on the use (and abuse) of solitary confinement in immigration and national security settings, and provides specific recommendations to ensure that it does not contravene domestic and international laws against torture.

The PHR report explains that this subject has received relatively little attention because it involves “vulnerable populations from foreign countries, perceived as ‘other,’ assumed to be guilty of illegal activity, and having no political voice in the United States.”

It points out that solitary confinement in the immigration and national security settings is used excessively and arbitrarily, and in many cases constitutes torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment that violates domestic and international laws. Solitary confinement generally has been recognized within the US as a locus of torture, notably in the Resolution Proclaiming Chicago to be a Torture Free Zone.

Medical and prison experts agree that solitary confinement can cause severe harm to the detainee, outweighing any benefit in all but the most extreme cases. In fact, isolation can cause severe and long-lasting psychological effects such as hyperresponsivity to external stimuli, perceptual distortions, illusions, and hallucinations, panic attacks, difficulties with thinking, concentration, and memory, intrusive obsessional thoughts, and overt paranoia. What’s more, it can result in corresponding physiological effects such as sleep disturbances, dizziness and heart palpitations, severe digestive problems, and deterioration of eyesight.

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On May 20, 2013, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) and DBA Press released the results of an in-depth investigation into state surveillance of First Amendment dissent. Their report, “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street,” details how state and regional “fusion center” personnel monitored the Occupy Wall Street movement over the course of 2011 and 2012.

Based on thousands of pages of records obtained from law enforcement agencies, the report cites documents that offer concrete evidence that surveillance has become an embedded feature of everyday American life. CMD’s findings reinforce the concerns of many activists that the surveillance state has grown far beyond its purpose of protecting America from “terrorist threats,” detailing the ways in which it serves to benefit corporate interests. This is no secret. As the debate over the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protect Act earlier this year emphasized, public and private intelligence sharing is the wave of the future.

Such information sharing happens in multiple ways.

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Last week, the Obama administration anonymously leaked that James B. Comey would be its nominee to direct the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Comey formerly served as an Assistant United States Attorney, the Deputy Attorney General, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Lockheed Martin, and General Counsel of the largest hedge fund in the world.

Mr. Comey’s time as Deputy Attorney General has gained the most attention due to a dramatic 2004 incident where, as Acting Attorney General, he rushed to the bedside of a sedated John Ashcroft to refuse the renewal of the Bush Administration’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program.

When Bush began to go ahead with the program anyway, FBI Director Robert Mueller, Comey and Ashcroft all threatened to resign. However, after unknown changes were made in the spying program, the men withdrew their threats of resignation.

Put another way, Comey affirmatively approved warrantless wiretapping of Americans. At his confirmation hearing, Comey should explain exactly what changes were made to the program, and why he believed they were sufficient to allow warrantless spying on people in the United States.

Putting the issue into sharp focus, Comey’s nomination will come on the heels on recent the leak of a court order that provides a window into the dragnet surveillance of Americans’ telephone communications initiated by the FBI. As reported by the Guardian, The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order gives the National Security Agency (NSA) daily records of every phone call made by Verizon Business Customers. The revelation is just one piece of evidence pointing a much broader spying program conducted by the National Security Agency.

In recent years, the FBI has not only been conducting widespread wiretaps but also targeting, surveilling and entrapping innocent Americans. Such odious tactics are ripe for review during the confirmation of a new FBI director. The current operating guidelines for the FBI allow the FBI to investigate people without any indication of wrongdoing, including the use of informants and physical surveillance. Congress should seize this opportunity to demand that law enforcement respect constitutional protections for speech and privacy.

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The (UK) Guardian published a previously secret court order authorizing dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans without any pretense of justification, confirming concerns raised by civil libertarians (including me) for years.

Since first taking office in 2009, the Obama administration has repeatedly extended the USA PATRIOT Act, including the overbroad section 215 cited as the basis for the FBI surveillance approved by the secret order disclosed by the Guardian. In light of Congress’ recent decision to extend the law permitting even worse abuses by the NSA for another five years, and the Supreme Court’s outrageous decision in Clapper v. Amnesty Int’l turning a blind eye to dragnet domestic surveillance, the document is also a clarion call for both mass outrage and immediate congressional action for long overdue sunlight at the National Security Agency.

The document is disturbing because, in a single swoop, it authorizes not just the wiretapping of a single individual, or a single organization, but all of the customers of a single telecommunications company. The order reinforces its own secrecy, immune from public or congressional oversight, violating core tenets of both Due Process and the Fourth Amendment at once.

Surveillance run amok

The first thing to take away from this disclosure is this sheer scale and scope of FBI and NSA spying on Americans. Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rand Paul (R-KY), like the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and various allied organizations, have been raising alarm since even before the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”).

Along with Senator Mark Udall (D-CO), Sen.  Wyden has suggested in his capacity as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee that Americans would be outraged if we knew about secret government interpretations of the PATRIOT Act’s controversial Section 215 authority. The law is bad enough without being contorted to allow surveillance even beyond its meager limits, but that’s exactly what the document leaked to the Guardian demonstrates: a single wiretap order allowing the FBI to spy on millions of law-abiding Americans at once, without even a pretense of the individualized suspicion long required by the Constitution.

Wyden has also sought information about how many Americans have been impacted by NSA spying overseen by the same FISA court that approved the FBI surveillance revealed by the Guardian. The answers would be laughable if they weren’t so disturbing: the NSA claimed it couldn’t answer a quantitative question because it would somehow violate the privacy of individuals under surveillance, and also that figuring out the answer to Wyden’s inquiries would simply be impracticable.

The NSA’s spin moves before Sen. Wyden’s attempts at oversight insinuated what the Guardian’s disclosure confirms: that our government’s most secret agency is run amok, squandering billions of dollars while assaulting America from our own shores, using our own money.

While outrage is appropriately escalating at the scale of FBI and NSA abuses, three angles to this controversy have remained muted in most of today’s commentary.

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