Tag Archives | Civil Rights

Arkansas Town Enacts Martial Law, ID Checks Of Everyone In Public

By on December 21, 2012 in News 22

The mayor explains that normal constitutional protections don’t apply, because, due to the high rate of property crime, anyone walking outdoors in his city is a criminal suspect. Via Russia Today:

In order to curb the rising crime rate in this town of barely 25,000, Mayor Mike Gaskill and Police Chief Todd Stovall endorsed a plan to send cops dressed in full-fledged SWAT gear and equipped with AR-15s into downtown Paragould starting in 2013. What’s more, Stovall says, is he intends to have the cops collecting identification from everyone and anyone.

“If you’re out walking, we’re going to stop you, ask why you’re out walking, check for your ID,” the Daily Press reports him saying during last week’s meeting. “We will be asking for picture identification. We will be ascertaining where the subject lives and what they are doing in the area. We will be keeping a record of those we contact.”

“To ask you for your ID, I have to have a reason,” he said.

… Read the rest

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Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have Nothing to Hide

By on December 19, 2012 in News 7

Via the Chronicle of Higher Education, law professor Daniel J. Solove reveals all:

The nothing-to-hide argument is everywhere. In Britain, for example, the government has installed millions of public-surveillance cameras in cities and towns, which are watched by officials via closed-circuit television. In a campaign slogan for the program, the government declares: “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.”

But the problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is the underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things. By accepting this assumption, we concede far too much ground and invite an unproductive discussion about information that people would very likely want to hide. As the computer-security specialist Schneier aptly notes, the nothing-to-hide argument stems from a faulty “premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong.” Surveillance, for example, can inhibit such lawful activities as free speech, free association, and other First Amendment rights essential for democracy.

One such harm, for example, which I call aggregation, emerges from the fusion of small bits of seemingly innocuous data.

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US Citizens Still Don’t Need To Worry About The NDAA Just Yet

By on October 5, 2012 in News 3

Picture: Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Michael Billings (PD)

As Disinfo reported September 18th, the permanent injunction against §1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), has been stayed pending appeal.

Naturally the lawyers for the case are treating this as a major setback in whatever media is paying attention to them, which unfortunately is pretty thin: basically, it’s just their client. The most likely explanation for that dearth of coverage is that most major media sources have legal advisors on staff who are looking at the law suit the way the Justice Department is: this is either a standing or a separation of powers issue that should have died the miserable death all paranoid nuisance cases die at trial, and will get shut down at the appellate level and denied cert by SCOTUS. Which is not to say that view is correct, just that it’s the rather obvious and lazy conventional wisdom that cases like this attract among legal cognoscenti.… Read the rest

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U.S. Administration Officials Charged with Politically Motivated Killings of American Citizens

By on July 20, 2012 in News 4

If only tree-hugging ACLU types like Saul Alinsky wannabe Obama and their radical constitutional originalist opposition like Mitt Romney would stop stoking this issue for political gain!  From Charlie Savage at the New York Times:

Relatives of three American citizens killed in drone strikes in Yemen last year filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against four senior national security officials on Wednesday. The suit, in the Federal District Court here, opened a new chapter in the legal wrangling over the Obama administration’s use of drones in pursuit of terrorism suspects away from traditional “hot” battlefields like Afghanistan.

The first strike, on Sept. 30, killed a group of people including Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico, and Samir Khan, a naturalized American citizen who lived at times in Queens, Long Island and North Carolina. The second, on Oct. 14, killed a group of people including Mr.

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Ron Paul And The Liberty Of Bullies

By on January 25, 2012 in News 162

Ron PaulPaul Rosenberg writes in Al Jazeera:

On January 12, a great blow was struck against freedom, if you subscribe to the philosophy of Ron Paul. The Ohio Civil Rights Commission voted 4-0 to uphold its earlier finding that a Cincinnati landlord, Jamie Hein, had discriminated against a ten-year-old biracial girl by posting a “White Only” sign in June 2011, aimed at keeping her out of a swimming pool. According to Paul’s worldview, this was a grave and terrible blow to the white landlord’s liberty. The girl’s white father, however, sees things a bit differently.

“My initial reaction to seeing the sign was of shock, disgust and outrage,” the girl’s father, Michael Gunn, said in brief comments the day the final decision was announced. The family quickly moved away, in order to protect their daughter from exposure to such humiliating bigotry – but they also filed the lawsuit.

According to Ron Paul’s view of “liberty”, they were right to move, but wrong to sue.

… Read the rest

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The Wind that Shakes the Parley: Police Voice Concerns about Being Used to Stifle Legitimate Protest

By on December 1, 2011 in News 33

Ray LewisThis past week has tacked on more examples of politicians using law enforcement to stifle dissent among unsatisfied constituents.  NY’s Mayor Bloomberg, for instance, was quoted referring to the NYPD as his “own army”.  “But other facets of this story have been developing behind the scenes.  Could Operation SHIELD and Ray Lewis raise the “wind that shakes the parley”?  Chris Faraone writes in the Boston Phoenix:

As Occupy camps from coast to coast face evictions — and in many cases have already been pushed out of parks and plazas like so much human trash — it’s clear that the institutional response to the movement is escalating dangerously. Likewise, relations between police and activists seem to be deteriorating, as non-violent protesters continue to be arrested almost daily.

But as tensions build between Occupiers and Big Brother, what’s also true is that individual officers are increasingly concerned about their role in combating Occupy. Even in cities where the overall police response has been barbaric, there’s a growing sense that cops who’ve been charged with breaking camps are unnerved by such orders.

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Calling Out The Police For Hiding Their Nameplates

By on November 4, 2011 in News 49

The California Penal Code states that uniformed police officers must wear “a badge, nameplate, or other device which bears clearly…the identification number or name of the officer”. Feel free to remind the police of this when they forget:

Officer Hargraves of the Oakland Police Department is called out by a citizen journalist for covering his name tag with a strip of black electrical tape. Police lieutenant Hu removes the tape while the camera rolls.

The issue of “anonymous police” remains a serious problem. This is especially true for “riot police” who wear dark anonymous uniforms while firing rubber bullets, tear gas canisters and flash-bang grenades into the crowd.

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Happy Bloomsday, America!

By on June 16, 2011 in News 10
Hand drawing of Bloom by Joyce

Hand drawing of Bloom by Joyce

June 16th is the annual celebration of Leopold Bloom’s doomed wanderings through Dublin in 1904, as chronicled in James Joyce’s classic novel “Ulysses”.  And in the 21st century, reality finally catches up with and overtakes fiction.

In 1921 a U.S. court banned Ulysses on the grounds that some of its graphic depictions of nudity and sexuality constituted pornography under the Postal Code. And while that decision was reversed in 1933 by a judge who could only have failed today’s more rigorous selection processes for illiteracy and cretinism, the private sector came to the rescue of public morals when Apple banned an online illustrated version from its iStore last year.

However, that victory had an even shorter half-life. A couple months later, presumably realizing that it would lose it’s investment completely if it maintained the ban, and that nobody would likely access anything remotely smacking of literary merit anyway, Apple decided to give it a go after all.… Read the rest

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