Civil Liberties

These recordings are from 2005, but comic Eugene Mirman received calls from a nonprofit that was recommending United American Technologies as a long distance provider because AT&T, MCI, and Sprint promote gay marriage. United American Technologies, by contrast, was billed as a “Christian-based telephone company,” with a “Faith, Family, and Freedom” campaign. Apparently the nonprofit was using prerecorded calls, which asked you to press one if you oppose gay marriage. Mirman really gets them going–they accuse MCI of running a child pornography website, and say that they aim to destroy the ACLU, for example. These calls were all illegal under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, even though they were initiated by a nonprofit, since these calls were clearly intended to advertise UAT. Prerecorded calls to a residence are illegal. United American Technologies is based in Oklahoma. The calls came from “Faith, Family, and Freedom,” a 527 organization created by Oklahoma Rep. Lance Cargill, who is now Oklahoma’s Speaker of the House. There are more details about these calls in Wikipedia’s entry on United American Technologies. (Hat tip: The Two Percent Company.) ...

Dahlia Lithwick gives a rundown.

Maher Arar, a Canadian (born in Syria) who was arrested by the U.S. and sent to Syria where he was tortured as a result of the RCMP’s erroneous labeling of him as someone associated with al Qaeda, was unable to receive a human rights award in Washington, D.C. because his name is still on the TSA no-fly list. Arar currently has a lawsuit pending in Canada against the RCMP. (Also see the Wikipedia entry on Arar.) This is further evidence of the TSA’s failure to competently maintain the no-fly list. UPDATE (October 20, 2006): Ed Brayton has discussed this story today. UPDATE (January 23, 2007): The U.S. Attorney General and head of Homeland Security are both insisting that Arar remain on the no-fly list for reasons which they have disclosed only to officials in Canada. The Canadians don’t think those reasons make any sense. My guess is that they think somebody they sent off to be tortured might have a beef with the people who did it to him.

An archivist at the Arizona Historical Foundation, Linda Whitaker, found a 25-min 16mm film canister last fall while preparing an exhibition on World War II Japanese internment camps. The film can was labeled “Poston Color Dupe.” The film turned out to be footage of Arizona’s Poston internment camp, which was located in La Paz county, 12 miles south of Parker. The film had a magnetic strip for sound, but it had deteriorated, so what is left is a color silent film. It has been converted to DVD format and is for sale for $40 from the Arizona Historical Foundation. Poston was one of two sets of Japanese internment camps in Arizona, and was also known as the Colorado River Relocation Center. It was composed of three camps, called Poston I, II, and III, on reservation land of the Colorado Indians. It operated from April 1942 to March 1946, and at its peak housed 18,000 people. The other was the Gila River Relocation Center about 50 miles southeast of Phoenix, which housed 13,000 people at its peak, and operated from May 1942 to February 1946. It was composed of two camps, Butte Camp and Canal Camp, which were built over the objections of the Gila River Indian tribe, on whose land they were built. The Japanese-Americans who were taken from their homes in California and Arizona and forced to live in these prison camps were mostly U.S. citizens (about 2/3). The Poston and Gila River camps were, at the time, the third and fourth largest “cities” in Arizona, after Phoenix and Tucson. The Poston camp was built by Del Webb, best known as a homebuilder of planned communities in the southwest (such as Sun City and Anthem). The discovery of this film serves to remind us how a country can get so caught up in wartime fear that it disregards its own Constitution and tramples the rights of individuals. ...

Former Arizona State University student president Yaser Alamoodi, still a student at ASU, was arrested at 6 a.m. on September 6 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. They took him to Eloy (about halfway between Phoenix and Tucson), where he sits in a detention center. The 29-year-old Tempe resident came to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia in 1996 under a student visa. He describes himself as “extremely secular. I was the president of my university. I have a commitment to everything America stands for, women’s rights to civil rights.” But because he married a U.S. citizen and they agreed to divorce in August, the divorce process invalidated his pending green card application. And because his passport and citizenship are from Yemen, the country where his father was born but which he’s never been in, that’s where he will be deported to. His attorney says he can stay in detention in Eloy and fight the deportation for six months to “years,” he can allow himself to be deported to Yemen and try to get a student visa to return to finish his degree, or if his wife stops the divorce process he would be allowed to stay.

In 2000, an article about “The Secret FISA Court: Rubber Stamping Our Rights” created outrage and prompted comments like this: This is beyond frightening. Thank you for this find. This does not bode well for continued freedom. Franz Kafka would have judged this too wild to fictionalize. But for us - it’s real. and this: Any chance of Bush rolling some of this back? It sounds amazing on its face.But today, when there’s warrantless NSA surveillance that makes the FISA Court look like significant judicial oversight, the comments are like this: Privacy is a false argument and has been for some time. Your insurance company and the credit bureaus have more on you than the feds do and you can do nothing about it. I would rather be secure knowing that the feds were looking over my shoulder and keeping me safe. I have nothing to hide, and in times of war, these steps are necessary.So when Clinton engages in eavesdropping (rubber stamped by the FISA Court), it’s a threat to the republic, but when Bush does it (without any judicial oversight), it’s no problem. Hat tip to Gene Healy at Cato, by way of The Agitator. ...

AT&T has filed a lawsuit against 25 unnamed data brokers for using “pretexting” to obtain customer call data records. These data brokers would pose as the legitimate customers in order to obtain billing records for third parties for a fee. Data brokers selling this data over the Internet got some negative public attention last summer and in January of this year, but Congress has not made pretexting illegal for phone records the way it is for financial records. It came out in June of this year that law enforcement and federal agencies were active customers of these data brokers, using them to obtain data without having to go through the process of getting warrants. The Electronic Privacy Information Center already filed an FTC complaint against one data broker, Bestpeoplesearch.com. ...

The U.S. Court of Appeals, 8th Circuit, ruled last week that if you are driving around with large amounts of cash, the government may presume that you are guilty of drug trafficking and seize that cash. The case in question was United States of America v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency (forfeiture cases name the seized items as the defendant). Emiliano Gomez Gonzolez was pulled over for speeding in Nebraska in 2003 while driving a rented Ford Taurus. In the car was a cooler with $124,700 in cash, which was seized on suspicion of a drug crime. A drug-sniffing dog barked at the car and the cooler, which was taken as evidence. Friends of Gonzolez testified that they had pooled their life savings to purchase a refrigerated truck in order to start a produce business. Gonzalez was sent on a one-way ticket to Chicago to buy the truck, but it had already sold. He had no credit card, so had a third party rent a car for him. He says he hid the money in a cooler to prevent it from being stolen. The District Court had found for Gonzolez, saying that there was no evidence of drug activity. The Appeals court disagreed, with a strong dissent by Judge Donald Lay. Forfeiture laws have long been heavily abused in the name of the war on drugs. In 1991, the Pittsburgh Press ran a six-part series on forfeiture abuse called Presumed Guilty: The Law’s Victims in the War on Drugs which can be found in various places online. UPDATE: Ed Brayton has also commented on this story at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. ...

Mike Ferner was arrested for “protesting” (he was wearing a Veterans for Peace t-shirt) while sitting, having a cup of coffee in the Jesse Brown V.A. medical facility in Chicago. Ferner, a Vietnam veteran, was told to leave or be arrested, and he chose the latter. He intends to contest the $275 fine in court. (Via The Agitator.)

Ed Brayton calls out both the NY Times and those accusing the Times of treason for reporting that the U.S. government is data mining in financial data from SWIFT. He points out that the Times is criticizing the U.S. government for doing what the Times itself editorialized in favor of the government doing, and also points out that it hasn’t really revealed anything of significance that the Bush administration hadn’t already publicly said it was doing. Further, the only actually new thing reported–that the government is accessing large amounts of data with broad subpoenas, rather than specific transactions–was also reported by the Wall Street Journal, but without it being hit with the same criticisms as the Times. This is a significant outbreak of inconsistency.