Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals asking for reinstatement of its case against the federal government regarding the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, Jewel v. NSA. The case had been dismissed by the District Court. Here is the court’s twisted logic as to why the case was dismissed:

…so many Americans have had their communications and communications records illegally obtained by the government, no single person has legal “standing” to challenge the ongoing program of government surveillance.

Huh? It brings to my mind Joseph Stalin’s famous quote: “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” The Court really thinks that so many of us have had our rights violated that we just can’t have just one person seek retribution? Or as the EFF explains,

Unless corrected, the District Court’s ruling risks creating a perverse incentive for the government to violate the privacy rights of as many citizens as possible in order to avoid judicial review of its actions.

This is part of the EFF’s continuous efforts to “Stop the Spying” via “fighting these illegal activities on multiple fronts.”

• 8/2, Shahid Buttar, Huffington Post, COINTELPRO 2.0
• 8/2, Jesse J. Holland, CBS News, High Court Trimming Miranda Rights Bit by Bit
• 8/2, Ben Fox, Associated Press, US stalls on Sept. 11 trial for 5 at Gitmo
• 8/2, Associated Press, FBI’s push to clarify electronic authority raises privacy concerns
• 8/2, Maria Dinzeo, Courthouse News Service, Lawyers Want Wiretapping Data Destroyed
• 8/1, Roy Gutman, Miami Herald, Do Guantánamo media limits prevent open trials?
• 7/30, Julia Angwin, Wall Street Journal, The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets
• 7/29, Georgia Detention Watch , Letter to Secretary Napolitano Calling for an End to ICE/Local Police Collaboration and a Halt to Expansion of Immigration Detention System
• 7/29, New York Times, Breaking a Promise on Surveillance
• 7/29, Julian Sanchez, Newsweek, Why the Intelligence Community Needs GAO Oversight

www.bordc.org

• 7/8, Andy Worthington, Common Dreams, Bin Laden Cook Accepts Plea Deal at Guantanamo Trial
• 7/8, Jeremy Scahill, The Nation, Former Top CIA Spy on How US Intelligence Became Big Business
• 7/8, Lewis Page, The Register (UK), NSA setting up secret ‘Perfect Citizen’ spy system
• 7/8, Peter Griffiths, Reuters, Extradition of terrorism suspects
• 7/8, Democracy Now!, Military Psychologists Face Complaints With Licensing Boards Over Roles at Guantanamo
• 7/8, All Headline News, Khadr Fires American Lawyers As Gitmo Trial Nears
• 7/7, Charlie Savage, New York Times, Guantánamo Detainee Pleads Guilty in Terror Case
• 7/7, Randal C. Archibold, New York Times, Arizona Challenge Does Not Focus on Profiling

The US Social Forum kicked off yesterday in Detroit, and has already offered eye-opening experiences galore. Bringing together 15,000 people from across the country and coordinating roughly 1,000 separate workshops spanning a wide variety of compelling issues, the Social Forum promises something for everyone. For my part, I’ve found it positively scintillating.

In partnership with the Defending Dissent Foundation, Emma and I helped facilitate a workshop this morning on “Tools to Fight the Surveillance State.”  We shared analysis about how government spying has grown even worse than the sum of its various parts, including the PATRIOT Act, the NSA’s unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping scheme, the FBI’s infiltration of activist and religious networks under the 2008 Mukasey guidelines, and the integration of state and local police through SARs, fusion centers, and 287(g) local immigration enforcement programs.  In addition to learning a great deal about the struggles encountered by activists around the country, we also identified a number of potential coalition partners for our local campaigns seeking legislative limits on law enforcement authorities, as well as several potential collaborators on our FOIA campaign seeking transparency into fusion centers.

A second workshop hosted by the Rights Working Group offered an opportunity to discuss racial profiling issues, and the opportunities they offer to bring communities together across demographic and ideological divisions. One especially interesting notion to me was the tension between responses to Arizona emphasizing comprehensive immigration reform, on the one hand, while resigning solutions to stop profiling as it impacts various communities of color, on the other. Beyond simply talking about “black-brown tension,” we even had a live opportunity to talk some attendees through some of the concerns underlying that tension, which was a useful experience to share with other organizers.

After completing our workshops, I enjoyed a chance to catch up with former DC housemates, colleagues from the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, longtime mentors, and a small army of activists I’ve never had a chance to meet before. A fascinating conversation with arts professor Dan Wang from Chicago offered an inspiring finish to a wonderful day.

I’m looking very forward to tomorrow. The various events I’ve witnessed here have all been inspiring, as well as informative—and finding partners with whom to collaborate seems as difficult as shooting fish in a barrel. While I’m excited about the chance to address the National South Asian Bar Association’s conference in Boston this weekend, I must confess feeling a bit sad about needing to leave Detroit Friday morning.

Big Brother is watching. He watches everyone all the time from the telescreens in Orwell’ s dystopian novel, 1984. Big Brother is here in the US, too.

In a recent article featured in The Inquirer, “Informers Everywhere,” Stephan Salisbury reports that two North Jersey teenagers were arrested after terrorist propaganda was found on their computers. The two boys planned to travel to Somalia, but were stopped by US officials. How did the government know where the teens were going? As stated by Salisbury:

This Somalia trip, like the Iraq trip three years ago, was completely on spec, at least as described in the criminal complaint. The plotters had no contacts overseas. No specific plan on how to get from Egypt to Somalia. No weapons.

The government had informers. They had them everywhere:

This anxiety metastasized over the years as it became increasingly clear to residents that thousands of informers and covert police agents were keeping tabs on the doings of community centers, mosques, bookstores, coffeehouses, and whole neighborhoods.Informers have become so much a fact of daily life in Muslim areas that congregants joke that the FBI’s informers keep bumping into the NYPD’s informers leaving Friday prayer at al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn.

George Orwell wrote in 1984:

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

When will the world Orwell was so worried about, a totalitarian state, become a reality for the US? The warrantless wiretapping, the copious number of informants, and the growing number of dissonant journalists, military service members, and citizens investigated all demonstrate that the thought police have already started to arrive. What’s next? Will we all start to love big brother, as Orwell prophesizes, because he keeps us “secure”?

Washington Post reviewer Leonard Downie Jr. has a look at Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media and the Rule of Law, written by Gabriel Schoenfeld. The book takes on those journalists whom the author believes are a “menacing internal threat.”

In general, he means journalists “‘who would subvert democracy by placing themselves above the law’ when they publish classified information ‘leaked’ by government and other sources.”

Mr. Schoenfeld zeroes in on the New York Times in particular for exposing,

two secret Bush administration antiterrorism programs: warrantless surveillance of some Americans’ international telephone calls and e-mails, and the exploitation of a Belgian electronic banking clearinghouse to track individuals’ international financial transactions.

The Times‘ position? That it was,

justified revealing these covert programs by claiming that 1) there was debate about their legality within the government; 2) the programs could involve invasions of Americans’ privacy; and 3) the programs’ extraordinary nature made them “a matter of public interest.”

However, Mr. Schoenfeld believes,

Such reasoning…is outweighed by the Bush administration’s determination that these covert efforts were necessary in wartime and should have remained secret.

Mr. Downey allows that the author,

…raises significant and troubling questions about whether some decisions to publish classified information are influenced by journalists’ personal agendas…

But his weakness is,

Schoenfeld does not dwell on those instances in which the publication of classified information, sometimes over official objections, has held the government accountable for its conduct, such as The Washington Post’s revelations of secret CIA prisons in foreign countries, where “enhanced interrogation techniques” were used on terrorism suspects outside the U.S. legal system.

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• 5/3, Emptywheel, John Yoo: Stupid Political Hack AND Craven Addington Disciple
• 5/3, Jane Sutton, Reuters, U.S. chained wounded Canadian teen to door: medic
• 5/3, Press TV, Torture cases question UK democracy
• 5/3, Michelle Chen, TruthOut, Report: Immigration Laws Put Five Million Children at Risk of Family Separation
• 5/3, Spencer Ackerman, Washington Independent, NCIS Agent Says Omar Khadr Recounted Being Threatened With Torture
• 5/3, Kevin Charles Redmon, The Atlantic, The New Abu Ghraib
• 5/2, Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic, “A Court Stenographer For War Criminals”
• 5/2, Nicholas Riccardi, Los Angeles Times, Both sides in Arizona’s immigration debate use crime argument
• 5/1, Carol Rosenberg, Miami Herald, Changes to key Guantanamo evidence innocent, officer says
• 4/30, Ryan Singel, Wired, Police Wiretapping Jumps 26 Percent

The NSA is well known.  It’s well known that the NSA was strengthened after 9/11 to help bridge the gap between intelligence communities and prevent terrorism.  It’s well known that the PATRIOT Act undermined FISA and gave the NSA the gall to play fast and loose with the law, most notably with illegal wiretapping. It’s well known because sources and reporters made the effort to monitor the government and expose the truth.  The future of highlighting government abuse of power from within is the question du jour.

On April 15, the New York Times broke the story that Obama’s Department of Justice was indeed going ahead with an indictment of Thomas Drake.  Mr. Drake was a senior level NSA employee who allegedly provided reporters with evidence of the NSA illegal wiretapping program, which became a major sticking point tainting the Bush administration.

The New York Times article delves into the rarity of prosecution in the case of leaked information:

Only a small number of prosecutions have been brought against government officials in recent decades for improperly disclosing information. Such cases often provoke a public debate over the trade off between protecting government secrets and covering up government wrongdoing or incompetence…

Unlike the Bush administration, Obama’s DOJ hasn’t gone so far as to intimidate newspapers that reveal classified information, but Mr. Drake’s prosecution sends signals intimidating other would be whistle blowers.  Lucy Dalglish, the Executive director for Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has said, “The whole point of the prosecution is to have a chilling effect on reporters and sources, and it will.

This is not the first time that the government has attempted suppression through prosecution of a whistle blower and we can be sure this won’t be the last.  One of the most famous cases of whistle blowing was that of Daniel Ellsberg.  Ellsberg was responsible for releasing what are now known as the Pentagon Papers, revealing lies and cover ups by our government, before and during the Vietnam War.

Daniel Ellsberg (aka The Most Dangerous Man in America, the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary of the same name) reminds us that every citizen, at every level of government, has not only the right but duty to protect our country, from the outside as well as the inside:

Don’t do what I did.  Don’t wait until the bombs are falling in Iran.  Don’t wait until people are dying. Go to the press and reveal.

• 4/8, Norman Council, People’s Campaign for the Constitution Blog, Pssst
• 4/8, Yonat Shimron, News and Observer, Conference targets rendition flights
• 4/8, Jack Mann, ExecutiveGov, DHS Unveils its Open Government Plan
• 4/8, Janin R. Wedel, Huffington Post, Warrantless Wiretap Case & Obama: Abuse of Executive Power?
• 4/8, Adam Serwer, TAPPED: Blog of The American Prospect, Civil Liberties Coaltion: Don’t Bother Closing Gitmo If You’re Just Going To Bring It Here.
• 4/8, Sonya Dowsett, Reuters, Spain agrees to take four more Guantanamo inmates
• 4/8, Daphne Eviatar, Fire Dog Lake, Guantánamo Hearings: A Military Bureaucratic Conundrum
• 4/7, William Fisher, TruthOut, Corporate Social Responsibility: Wisdom or Window Dressing?
• 4/7, Austin Raynor, The Libertarian Solution, National ID and Personal Privacy

The USA PATRIOT Act—that scion of fear and loathing passed without debate in the weeks following the attacks of September 11, 2001—was extended for one year by Democratic President Barack Obama on February 27.

This is an interesting development from a President who has spoken extensively on openness and transparency in government. Instead, he signs a law that uses secret means, warrants issued by secret courts and gag rules that forbid people being told that they are being investigated.

Even more interesting is the surreptitious process used in enacting the measure. The extension was approved through amendments from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to “H.R. 3961. Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act of 2009,” which effectively gutted the House bill and replaced it with the reauthorization. Citizens cannot see how their senators voted on the question. The bill was passed by a voice vote, so that individual votes couldn’t be recorded. Then Obama signed the bill on a Saturday night, so it missed the major news cycle. The process depicted government at its clandestine best.

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