Civil Liberties

A federal judge has ordered the U.S. government to pay $101 million to four men who were wrongly imprisoned for more than thirty years on murder convictions when the FBI withheld exculpatory evidence. Two of the four men died in prison. The Department of Justice argued that the federal government had no obligation to share information with state prosecutors even though they knew that the testimony identifying the men as the killers was false. The judge declared that the DoJ’s position was “absurd” and “The FBI’s misconduct was clearly the sole cause of this conviction." The FBI gave bonuses and commendations to its agents who were responsible for these erroneous convictions for the murder of Edward “Teddy” Deegan. (Via The Agitator, who rightly asks why the FBI agents responsible for this travesty of justice are not themselves in jail.) UPDATE (July 31, 2007): The Agitator reports on FBI Assistant Director Wayne Murphy’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on the use and abuse of confidential drug informants, in which Murphy argues that the FBI should not be required to disclose evidence about wrongdoing by confidential informants to state prosecutors in order to prevent murders or to prevent people from being wrongly imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. Apparently the FBI considers the war on drugs so important that it is better to allow people to be murdered or people to be wrongly imprisoned than to jeopardize a drug investigation. ...

One of the serious problems I have with our democracy is that politicians are a package deal. When one gets elected we celebrate their good ideas, but we have to endure their idiotic ones. I think this could explain the popularity of the “lesser-of-evils” argument people often use to persuade others to vote for their pet candidate of the moment. Arguably, all politicians are idiots - to a greater or lesser degree. Case in point: Ron Paul. You can love him for his stance on the war in Iraq, but this sort of stuff really makes me wonder about the guy: The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders’ political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs. Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be aghast at the federal government’s hostility to religion.WTF??? Isn’t Ron Paul supposedly a constitutionalist? It’s not a big surprise to me to find that the source of the above patent absurdity is an article posted at lewrockwell.com - home of the kookiest of the kooks in the “libertarian” world. Thanks to the no god zone, which has more to say on this topic. UPDATE by Jim (October 18, 2007): Dispatches from the Culture Wars has more on Ron Paul’s views on religion and government, with lots of data in the comments. UPDATE by Jim (December 25, 2007): Ron Paul rejects evolution. ...

The fact that color printers print a pattern of yellow dots on all pages that indicate which printer was used, for the purposes of being able to track the identity of who has printed any page, has been known since the EFF decrypted the codes and publicized the information in 2005. Now, however, the MIT Media Lab has started a project called “Seeing Yellow” to encourage printer owners to contact the manufacturers and complain, after it has been found that those who do so get reported to the U.S. Secret Service as subversives. (There is one known case, in which someone called to ask a printer manufacturer if there was a way to turn off the “feature.”) (Via Don Lloyd at Distributed Republic.)

The Arizona legislature and the governor have passed legislation banning the sale of t-shirts that say “Bush Lied/They Died.” The Arizona legislature voted unanimously in favor of the ban, which allows for the punishment of a year in jail for using the names of deceased soldiers to sell goods, and gives the families of such soldiers the right to collect civil damages. This is an outrageous violation of the First Amendment to prohibit perfectly legitimate political speech using factual information in the public domain. Similar bans have also been passed in Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma, and are in the works in Florida. In Arizona, this law also violates the state constitution (Article 2, Sections 1, 2, and 6, in my non-lawyerly opinion). Several Democrats who voted for the bill have now agreed that they should not have, and made excuses for why they did: “I shouldn’t have voted the way I did,” House Minority Leader Phil Lopes said. The Tucson Democrat blamed his vote in favor of Senate Bill 1014 on a “senior moment." Rep. Tom Prezelski, D-Tucson, said he thought problems he originally had with the measure had been fixed. He acknowledged not reading the final version. And Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Phoenix, conceded that she wasn’t paying attention and was totally unaware of the contents of the bill on which she voted at least twice—once after a proponent of the measure gave a short floor speech explaining the essence of the bill and why he believed it was necessary. Our governor, also a Democrat, has given an equally lame response when asked why she signed such a clearly unconstitutional bill: …gubernatorial press aide Jeanine L’Ecuyer said a divided vote would not have resulted in a veto. “Her concern is for the families who lost someone,” L’Ecuyer said. Asked if Napolitano, a lawyer, believes the measure is unconstitutional, L’Ecuyer’s only response was, “The governor signed the bill."Napolitano cannot be re-elected, and after this, she clearly should not be. Any legislator who voted for this bill should be given the boot, which means cleaning out the entire Arizona legislature. Toss the bums out! The shirts are being sold by Dan Frazier of Flagstaff, who also offers some different messages on top of the list of names of the fallen soldiers. The Arizona Civil Liberties Union has already filed a lawsuit to overturn the law (PDF). If anyone in Phoenix is interested in purchasing some of these shirts as part of a group purchase (or as my resale at cost to you, so I can work some civil disobedience of an unconstitutional law into it), please let me know. UPDATE (August 24, 2007): Dan Frazier has gone to court to get an injunction against the law, but it looks like the legislators wrote the law not only in ignorance of the Constitution, but in ignorance of what Frazier is doing–the law doesn’t ban the sale of items using the names of fallen soldiers, it bans advertising using the names of fallen soldiers. The names are not legible on Frazier’s website, so he may not fall afoul of the law. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s a bad, unconstitutional law, however. ...

Department of Justice civil appellate attorney John S. Koppel has written a scathing editorial in The Denver Post: As a longtime attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, I can honestly say that I have never been as ashamed of the department and government that I serve as I am at this time. The public record now plainly demonstrates that both the DOJ and the government as a whole have been thoroughly politicized in a manner that is inappropriate, unethical and indeed unlawful. The unconscionable commutation of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s sentence, the misuse of warrantless investigative powers under the Patriot Act and the deplorable treatment of U.S. attorneys all point to an unmistakable pattern of abuse. ...

How long before Google adds output from an American Science & Engineering Z Backscatter Van to Google Maps? See the demonstration video here. (Hat tip to Dave Palmer on the SKEPTIC list.)

I just came across an old post of mine on the Internet Infidels’ Discussion Boards: February 22, 2004, 05:24 PMI keep seeing this TV commercial from the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The commercial shows a girl standing on a dock on a lake, with a life preserver sitting on it, and another drowning in the water as she looks on. The voiceover says something like “If you had a friend who was drowning, you’d help, wouldn’t you?" Every time I see it I think it’s going to be an argument for the nonexistence of God. The ad is online, though it doesn’t seem to be one of the ones the ONDCP put on YouTube, with subsequent ridicule. The ONDCP ad campaign has been studied by the GAO and found to be ineffective, but the government continues to spend over one hundred million dollars per year on it. ...

FCC Kevin Martin has responded to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision on “fleeting expletives," which not only went completely against the FCC but suggested that the grounds for the FCC’s authority to regulate indecency on the broadcast airwaves may no longer exist. Here’s part of what he had to say: I completely disagree with the Court’s ruling and am disappointed for American families. I find it hard to believe that the New York court would tell American families that “shit” and “fuck” are fine to say on broadcast television during the hours when children are most likely to be in the audience. The court even says the Commission is “divorced from reality.” It is the New York court, not the Commission, that is divorced from reality in concluding that the word “fuck” does not invoke a sexual connotation. ...

Salon.com has an interesting article about how the American Center for Voting Rights, which was front-and-center in convicted felon ex-Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH)’s congressional committee hearings on alleged voter fraud, has disappeared. The Republicans were attempting to crack down on alleged voter fraud in locations that had high Democratic voter turnout, despite the fact that no prosecutable cases of such fraud have turned up. The American Center for Voting Rights was an apparent think tank (which formed right before the hearings started) which offered sound bites and alleged research documenting the putative problem. Several of the fired U.S. Attorneys were individuals who had refused to go after weak voter fraud cases against Democratic candidates in locations where the Republicans and ACVR were also trying to make it more difficult to vote and reduce Democratic voter turnout. Check out the Salon.com article.

There’s now much discussion in the blogosphere about former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey’s testimony before Congress. Comey related that in 2004, the warrantless wiretapping program had come up for reauthorization–the previous authorization was due to expire the following day. Comey, filling in for Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was in the hospital for emergency gall bladder surgery, refused to sign Bush’s order for reauthorization. Bush secretly sent his White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card to Ashcroft’s hospital bedside to get his signature, but an aide to Ashcroft tipped off Comey. Comey rushed to the hospital, and obtained from FBI Director Robert Mueller a directive to Ashcroft’s security staff to not remove Comey even if Gonzales and Card insisted upon it. At the hospital, Ashcroft also refused to sign the reauthorization directive. Comey related that the entire senior staff of the Department of Justice, including himself and FBI Director Mueller, were prepared to resign over the issue. Had that happened–in an election year, no less–perhaps the outcome of that election would have been different. Bush consulted directly with Comey and Mueller, and gave them assurances that the program would be modified to comply with Department of Justice recommendations, and Comey signed the reauthorization several weeks later. It’s not clear whether it continued to operate without authorization for that period of weeks. A Talking Points Memo reader comments: ...