The Conscience of Abe’s Turn freedom of speech, defense, and life

Radley Balko posted a quick link to this Boston Herald article, which reports:

[Massachusetts state] trooper “Kathleen T. Carney was stripped of her service weapon and cruiser last week after a Dec. 1 duty status hearing stemming from allegations of brutality in the drunken-driving arrest of a 35-year-old Quincy woman, Patricia J. Dooling, on the night of Aug. 28…

There are several points in this article that ring a bell.  read more »

I have the Cato Institute’s official blog, Cato @ Liberty, listed in the “Conscience of America” links on this site. Most of the blog posts are quick, easy reading, accessible to the average American (or perhaps slightly above average) on the go. I’ve long been a fan of the Cato Institute, however, even in the many years before they had a blog. As a libertarian think-tank, Cato has long provided me with masses of valuable research on both civil rights and economic rights issues.

So for the more in-depth advocate, who wants to be deeply informed about the issues, here are just a few of the informative articles and papers I’ve read recently on civil rights, courtesy of the Cato Institute:  read more »

Jim Harper at Cato@Liberty (the Cato Institute blog) writes, “Recent reporting on the weakness of behavioral profiling in airports has overlooked a key dimension of the problem with it.”

People stopped and searched by government agents at airports based on behavioral profiling have been arrested in only 0.7% of cases; thus in general, these were unreasonable searches. Furthermore, people are arrested only on technicalities, never for actually doing something illegal that poses a risk to aviation, which is why the suspects are supposedly searched.

Behavioral profiling has a 0% success rate in finding threats to aviation. Behavioral profiling does not have a proximate relationship to securing against harm coming to commercial aviation.

The Fourth Amendment requires searches and seizures to be reasonable. Courts give law enforcement considerable leeway and often use the stamp “experienced officer” to grant the police broad authority to follow hunches. What we have here, though, is a basis for suspicion that has a 100% failure rate. It never finds what it is looking for…

If national security authorities developed a theory that vans with dented doors are likely to carry nuclear materials, this reasoning would allow the search of any van with dented doors. The consequence of a nuclear blast, of course, is thousands of times higher than an attack on aviation. But a wrong theory is still a wrong theory. The fact that searching vans for nuclear weapons turns up stolen goods 0.7% of the time would not save it. Arguing for the leeway to use a false basis for suspicion because of the size of the potential danger is simply a cleverly cloaked argument for a general warrant, which the Fourth Amendment prohibits.

(Click here to read the entire post.)

Behavioral profiling has some of the same problems as data mining, which is what the government does with the masses of data it collects on ordinary citizens. Digital-privacy advocates are correct in their fear of a government with the power to intrude into private transactions between citizens and to act on the information it’s collected. I can also recommend Jeff Jonas’s and Jim Harper’s Cato Policy Analysis, “Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining,” which like most Cato Institute reports is full of information and should give pause to innocent citizens who think a police state is no threat to them.

-TimK

Brian Wilson on his radio show at WSPD yesterday talked with Jim Bovard about a recent Washington Post article about sending U.S. troops to the U.S. “The U.S. military,” according to the Post, “expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe.”

Domestic emergency deployment may be “just the first example of a series of expansions in presidential and military authority,” or even an increase in domestic surveillance, said Anna Christensen of the ACLU’s National Security Project. And Cato Vice President Gene Healy warned of “a creeping militarization” of homeland security.  read more »

At first, I didn’t know what to do with this blog post. It’s about the Sea-Smurfs. That is, about CCMRF teams (pronounced “C Smurf”), which stands for “CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force.” And as everyone knows, CBRNE clearly and obviously refers to “Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear or high-yield Explosive.” And as you can probably figure out by now, this has something to do with the military.

Benjamin Friedman posted on the Cato Institute’s blog an article asking “Should We Fear Sea-Smurfs?” That’s kind of hard to answer if you don’t know what they are. I’ve read the article, and I’m still not sure I know what they are. Maybe no one knows. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Briefly, a CCMRF is a team of soldiers trained to perform police duties. Just what we need to make our police forces more civil, huh? But will they be unleashed on the unsuspecting American public?

Sea-smurfs can then do tasks short of law enforcement, including cleaning up after attacks. If terrorist attacks qualify as an insurrection, troops could perform law enforcement tasks in their aftermath. That might explain why the Sea-Smurfs received law enforcement training, but the Army denies that the training was related to domestic duties. It is good that the ACLU is trying to figure what exactly is intended.

Even if this mission is legal, however, it does not make it wise. Homeland defense activities like storms and terrorist attacks are the job of local and state authorities, and in extreme cases, the National Guard. Historically, these forces have been sufficient.

-TimK