Civil Liberties

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted in favor of House Joint Resolution 10 to amend the U.S. Constitution to limit the scope of the First Amendment by banning the desecration of the flag. The resolution passed, 286-130, with 18 not voting. The voting went more-or-less along party lines, with Republicans going 209-12-10, Democrats 77-117-8, and Independents 0-1-0. The Senate has yet to vote on it. To their credit, three of Arizona’s Republican Representatives showed a willingness to buck the party line, accounting for a quarter of the Republicans who opposed the measure. Their votes went as follows: In favor: Franks (R), Hayworth (R), Renzi (R) Opposed: Flake (R), Grijalva (D), Kolbe (R), Pastor (D), Shadegg (R). In a recent post at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton quoted from and commented on an essay from Jonathan Alter: I inherited my one litmus test from my father, Jim Alter, who flew 33 harrowing missions over Nazi Germany during World War II. My father is not just a veteran who by all odds should not have survived. He is a true patriot. His litmus test is the proposal to amend the Constitution to ban flag burning, which will come up for a vote next week in the U.S. Senate. For dad–and me–any member of Congress who supports amending the Bill of Rights for the first time in the history of this country for a nonproblem like flag burning is showing serious disrespect for our Constitution and for the values for which brave Americans gave their lives. Such disrespect is a much more serious threat than the random idiots who once every decade or so try (often unsuccessfully) to burn a flag. I’ll go even further than that. Hell, I’ll go a lot further than that. If you’re the kind of person who supports a ban on flag burning, that fact alone is enough to brand you, in my view, as either a demagogue or someone weak-minded enough to be led by demagogues who play on your most shallow and childish emotional responses. Like the flag itself, the flag burning amendment is purely symbolic. And anyone who would throw away free speech rights for symbolic achievement has no business being in any political office in this country. ...

The Interacademy Panel on International Issues has issued a statement in support of the scientific evidence for evolution (PDF), urging the teaching of the facts and evidence. The statement is endorsed by 67 national academies of science and the executive board of the International Council for Science. The statement says that: We agree that the following evidence-based facts about the origins and evolution of the Earth and of life on this planet have been established by numerous observations and independently derived experimental results from a multitude of scientific disciplines. Even if there are still many open questions about the precise details of evolutionary change, scientific evidence has never contradicted these results: 1. In a universe that has evolved towards its present configuration for some 11 to 15 billion years, our Earth formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago. 2. Since its formation, the Earth - its geology and its environments - has changed under the effect of numerous physical and chemical forces and continues to do so. 3. Life appeared on Earth at least 2.5 billion years ago. The evolution, soon after, of photosynthetic organisms enabled, from at least 2 billion years ago, the slow transformation of the atmosphere to one containing substantial quantities of oxygen. In addition to the release of the oxygen we breathe, the process of photosynthesis is the ultimate source of fixed energy and food upon which human life on the planet depends. 4. Since its first appearance on Earth, life has taken many forms, all of which continue to evolve, in ways which paleontology and the modern biological and biochemical sciences are describing and independently confirming with increasing precision. Commonalities in the structure of the genetic code of all organisms living today, including humans, clearly indicate their common primordial origin.It goes on to give a statement about the nature of science. For those who would like to see some of the supporting evidence for each of these four statements, I highly recommend the TalkOrigins website. For the fourth statement in particular, I recommend Douglas Theobald’s article at the TalkOrigins site, “29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent." (Hat tip to Pharyngula)

Back on January 8, I wrote a posting titled “Cell phone call records available online." In that post, I wrote about sites on the Internet where you can pay a fee and get the calling records for cell phones and long distance call records for land lines. The companies providing these services are typically private investigators who use “pretexting”–pretending to be the legitimate owner of the phone–in order to con phone companies into turning over the data. Some also used social engineering or exploited server security flaws to gain access to phone provider online web portals. Subsequent to the publicity around that story, there was a brief attempt to pass a law making “pretexting” illegal for telephone records as it already is for financial records. Frankly, I think unauthorized use of someone’s phone provider web portal account should already be illegal under most state computer crime statutes, and obtaining phone records through misrepresentation should constitute theft by deception or violation of identity theft statutes, but I am not a lawyer. Now, we are learning who some of the major users of these services are: various offices of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, including the FBI; police departments in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, and Utah, and most likely hundreds of other police departments. These agencies are bypassing legal processes to obtain private phone records without warrants from private companies engaged in highly unethical if not illegal activity. Hat tip: Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

The London Independent reported yesterday that more than 60 detainees at Guantanamo Bay were under 18 at their time of capture, including some boys as young as 14. One child prisoner, Mohamed el Gharani, was accused of involvement in a 1998 al Qaeda plot in London, even though he was 12 years old at the time and living with his parents in Saudi Arabia. British officials say the UK had been assured that juveniles would be held in a special facility called “Camp Iguana,” but only three juveniles were treated as children. A senior Pentagon spokesman says that no one being held now at Guantanamo Bay is a juvenile, though London lawyers say there are at least 10 still being held who were 14 or 15 when captured. (Those statements are not contradictory.)

The Baltimore Sun has reported on a shelved 1990s NSA program to collect and analyze phone records which had the following features: Used more sophisticated methods of sorting through massive phone and e-mail data to identify suspect communications. Identified U.S. phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy. * Employed an automated auditing system to monitor how analysts handled the information, in order to prevent misuse and improve efficiency. ...

Two New Jersey attorneys, Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer, have filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York City against Verizon regarding its sharing of call-detail records with the NSA without a subpoena. The lawsuit charges that Verizon has violated a number of federal laws, including the 1986 Stored Communications Act (28 USC 2701), which provides for $1,000 in statutory damages for each violation. Some reports have quoted a $50 billion figure based the potential of one violation regarding the information of each of 50 million people, but the suit as filed asks for $1,000 per violation, or $5 billion if certified as a class action. The Stored Communications Act is a confusingly-written piece of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that covers both content records (such as email) as well as non-content records (such as log information and subscriber information). One of the exceptions in the law for when a provider can supply non-content information to a governmental entity without a subpoena is if (quoting from a commentary by law professor Orin Kerr) “the provider reasonably believes that an emergency involving immediate danger of death or serious physical injury to any person justifies disclosure of the information.” This seems like a defense that Verizon will be likely to use to justify a program that’s supposed to be used to identify and stop terrorists. Verizon claims that it “does not, and will not, provide any government agency unfettered access to our customer records or provide information to the government under circumstances that would allow a fishing expedition." RCN, a telecom and Internet provider (its assets include the former Erols Internet) based in Herndon, VA, has issued a press release stating that it, like Qwest, has not disclosed customer information except when required by legal process.

Details of AT&T’s cooperation with the National Security Agency are beginning to emerge as a result of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against AT&T, as described by Wired: AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers’ phone calls, and shunted its customers’ internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against the company. ...

Back on March 4, the story broke from an American traveling in Canada that something had gone wrong at Citibank, causing it to shut off access from the ATM networks of Canada, Russia, and the UK. Bruce Schneier picked it up on March 6, and now it’s hit the mainstream media with more details, with some attributing the problem to OfficeMax. The symptoms from a bank customer’s perspective are debit cards being replaced by the banks (which Citibank, Bank of America, and Washington Mutual have been doing since at least last month) and an inability to make withdrawals with current cards from ATMs in Canada, Russia, or the UK. At least some of the banks have now admitted to ATM fraud occurring, with Citibank admitting to “several hundred transactions” in three countries, while some western Massachusetts institutions have seen fraud in Spain, Pakistan, and Romania. The attribution to OfficeMax comes from investigations in Massachusetts. Tech Web News’ report is the most detailed to date: The unfolding debit card scam that rocked Citibank this week is far from over, an analyst said Thursday as she called this first-time-ever mass theft of PINs “the worst consumer scam to date.” Wednesday, Citibank confirmed that an ongoing fraud had forced it to reissue debit cards and block PIN-based transactions for users in Canada, Russia, and the U.K. ...

After months of wrangling, Congress has approved the renewal the 16 expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act by making 14 of them permanent and extending the other two by four years. The renewal also includes things like fighting methamphetamine abuse. This version of the bill is the last one passed by the House on December 14 of last year, so none of the delay accomplished anything to improve it. A few reforms were included–libraries can’t be subpoenaed without a court approval, recipients of subpoenas don’t have to provide the names of their attorneys, and individuals subject to gag orders can challenge the orders–after waiting a year. The Senate is considering passing an additional requirement that targets of “sneak-and-peek” searches be notified within seven days. The bill, HR 3199, the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act, was passed by an 89-10 vote in the Senate. Both of Arizona’s Senators, Kyl and McCain, voted in favor of it. The ten no votes were from Sens. Akaka (D-HI), Bingaman (D-NM), Byrd (D-WV), Feingold (D-WI), Harkin (D-IA), Jeffords (I-VT), Leahy (D-VT), Levin (D-MI), Murray (D-WA), and Wyden (D-WA). Sen. Inouye (D-HI) did not vote. The House passed the bill on December 14, 2005 with a 251-174 vote, the details of which are here. Arizona’s Representatives voted along party lines: For: Flake (R-6th), Franks (R-2nd), Hayworth (R-5th), Kolbe (R-8th), Renzi (R-1st), Shadegg (R-3rd), Against: Grijalva (D-7th), Pastor (D-4th).

The Phoenix New Times, one of the country’s oldest free “alternative” weekly newspapers which has won numerous awards for its investigative reporting, has published the Mohammed cartoons that have stirred up so many protests. The cartoons appear in conjunction with an article titled “The Chosen One,” about local feminist Muslim Deedra Abboud, the director of the Arizona chapter of the Muslim American Society’s Freedom Foundation, a civil rights group headquartered in D.C., and former director of the Arizona chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). She left CAIR after growing tired of responding to Ann Coulter, whom she feels doesn’t deserve the attention. (I agree.) Abboud is a recent Muslim convert, a former Southern Baptist business major at the University of Arkansas. She converted after a period of arguing against Muslims, then reading the Koran. Apparently she found Islam more sensible than Christianity, as she questioned the Trinity and how the notion of Jesus dying for the sins of mankind could possibly make any sense. It’s too bad she jumped out of the frying pan into the fire, dropping one bogus religion only to adopt another. Regarding the cartoon controversy, she is quoted saying “I don’t think Americans have been given the full context of those cartoons,” Abboud tells Uncle Nasty, her voice becoming louder as she tries to speak over the one on the other end of the phone. “I’m not defending the violence. But the editor of the Danish paper wasn’t trying to make a point; he was clearly trying to offend people."Actually, the editor of the Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten, solicited the cartoons because Danish author Kare Bluitgen had written a children’s book about Mohammed and was unable to find an illustrator. The editor wanted to see if there was really such a chilling effect against artists that they were afraid to illustrate the book, and solicited artists’ renditions of Mohammed, without specifying that they take any particular position. The instruction was to “draw the Prophet as they saw him." That children’s book, The Koran and the Life of Mohammed, is now a best-seller in Denmark, by the way–though its illustrator remains anonymous. The controversy arose four months after the Danish paper published the cartoons, and was heightened by Muslim imams who circulated the cartoons along with other, more offensive cartoons which were not published by the paper. Abboud claims she has been following the controversy since the original publication, and is aware of these other cartoons not being published by the Danish paper. Zuhdi Jasser, another prominent local Muslim (a politically conservative doctor who previously worked as a doctor at the U.S. Capitol and often writes op-ed pieces in the Arizona Republic) is described in the New Times piece as not trusting Abboud or the organizations she represents. Jasser organized a “Muslims Against Terrorism” rally at which CAIR representatives were not permitted to speak, because of what Jasser describes as their promotion of victimhood within the Muslim-American community.