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

Nine secret, Bush-era documents that the Obama administration released this week demonstrate the hubris of a powerful government and the danger posed by it.

Some of these documents are among the dozens of memos that the ACLU has been suing the Department of Justice to release. To echo Glenn Greenwald from last year: “Yet again, the ACLU has performed the function which Congress and the media are intended to perform but do not.”

One of the legal opinions, written in October 2001 by John Yoo, a lawyer with the Office of Legal Counsel, one who needs a Conscience, argued that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to military activities inside the United States. That is, the federal government thought it could get away with illegal searches and seizures and spying on innocent U.S. citizens, all without a warrant, as long as it could make it look like part of a military operation.

Yoo also advised that “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war,” without saying specifically how that might play out, adding that the fight against “terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”  read more »

As you may know, The Conscience of Abe’s Turn was inspired not by George W. Bush, but by civil-rights abuses during Bill Clinton’s administration, some as portrayed in James Bovard’s book Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years. In a thoughtful article at the Future of Freedom Foundation website, James Bovard looks back at the last Democratic president’s record on Fourth-Amendment civil rights.

The Clinton administration consistently championed the right of government employees to stick their noses almost anywhere — into people’s email, car, house, or personal effects. Clintonites set off one false alarm after another to justify extending government’s right to intrude. The administration consistently sought to exploit technological development in order to maximize government’s control over the citizenry…

The prohibition against unreasonable searches is the key to the Fourth Amendment.

As law professor Jeffrey Standen observed in an article he wrote for Legal Times, each extension of government power makes further extensions “reasonable” — since “reasonable” is defined on a sliding scale by however much intrusion people will tolerate from the government. The Clinton administration often sounded as if the only searches that were unreasonable were the ones that government officials did not care to do.

(Click here to read the whole article.)

The article gets specific on many of the ways the Clinton administration fomented fear and fought to redefine the Fourth Amendment to give government enforcers more power over citizens. True, George W. Bush presided over some of the worst civil-rights abuses today’s citizens have ever seen. But we shouldn’t just assume that Bush’s Democratic successor will be a civil-rights proponent, because Obama—as Clinton before him, as any president, being in charge of the enforcement branch of the federal government—has a vested interest in promoting government power over systematic protections of our civil rights. Be aware.

Always watching!
-TimK

P.S. Thanks to libertarian policy analyst Doug Bandow for the pointer.

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 »

Here’s the story, as handed down by the family of Yolanda Madden:

The police in Odessa, Texas persuaded (or maybe forced) an informant to plant drugs on Yolanda Madden. This informant later testified in federal court that he had planted the false drug evidence. Other evidence (hair and urine) exonerated Yolanda. Even so, she is currently serving an multi-year prison sentence.

This is a story, of course, that many of us have heard many times before. The names and details change, but the story is largely the same. Because this is how drug prohibition works— Or rather, this is how drug prohibition fails us. If you’ve read the Abe’s Turn series, you have surely noticed it also infused with the spirit of these real-life stories.

The pattern of growing police power in order to combat fear, instead of actual crime, and Americans’ nonchalant acceptance of that power, is gradually eroding our security as free citizens. It is one of the most overlooked critical issues in American politics today.

But wait! There’s more to the story!  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

Buried in a Zogby poll about the right of secession—35% of those under age 30 would support their state if it decided to secede from the US!— Buried at the bottom is a separate question, “I believe the United States’ system is broken and cannot be fixed by traditional two-party politics and elections.” 44% of respondents agreed with that statement, that the US political system is broken.  read more »