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

Via AntiPolygraph.org News: Just before the dawn of President-elect Obama’s reign, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven G. Bradbury has issued a late legal opinion contradicting an anti-polygraph memorandum from President Lyndon B. Johnson. Yes, you read that right: LBJ.  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

You may not have realized it, but buried in Sections 401 and 402 of Division C in H.R. 1424 (the bailout bill) are provisions giving the IRS the power to:

• set up undercover operations to entrap unsuspecting taxpayers, and
• release confidential tax returns to law enforcement and intelligence agencies

DownsizeDC has been running a campaign to reduce the chance that crap like this will happen in the future.

-TimK

Stories like this are the reason why we have reason for optimism in this country. This story is also one of the reasons why the ACLU is listed under “The Conscience of America,” because they inform of us police-state-like actions in the U.S. and use the tools at their disposal to stop them.

In 2005, it was reported that Bush had told the NSA it could warrantless surveillance of Americans. The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get government documents about this spying-on-Americans program.

The government ignored them. Tactic 1: If the people ask you for internal documentation that would make you look bad, pretend you didn’t hear them.

So the ACLU sued.  read more »

WEBWIRE – Monday, October 06, 2008

Washington, DC – New FBI guidelines governing investigations were released today after being signed by Attorney General Michael Mukasey. The American Civil Liberties Union quickly blasted the Department of Justice and FBI for ignoring calls for more stringent protections of Americans’ rights. The guidelines replace existing bureau guidelines for five types of investigations: general criminal, national security, foreign intelligence, civil disorders and demonstrations. The ACLU has been vocal in its disapproval of the overly broad guidelines, citing both the FBI’s and DOJ’s documented records of internal abuse.  read more »