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The ACLU is a leading force behind censoring religious speech.

The ACLU defends the rights of individual citizens to exercise their right to religious speech in their private lives. For instance, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Lafayette-Parish school board in Louisiana because it's dress code violated the religious beliefs of Rastafarian Children. The ACLU also worked to pass the Religious Freedom Bill of 2000 which helped protect an individual's right to worship.

The ACLU is opposed to government sponsored religion and government restrictions on religion. How more pro religion can you get?

The ACLU claims to defend the Constitution, but basically ignores the 2nd Amendment.

For more information, see the ACLU's position paper online.

The ACLU is strongly in favor of executing people without a trial.

There is a whole section on their website about this.

The ACLU in its "diversity" efforts supports the idea of denying people rights due to their skin color.

For more, please see the ACLU's section on Racial Equality.

In addition to being a card carrying member of the ACLU, I am also a member of the EFF. I wouldn't pick one over the other because they are both important to civil rights online and offline.

Start
here and
here.

Section 802 of the USA PATRIOT Act creates a federal crime of "domestic terrorism" that broadly extends to "acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws" if they "appear to be intended...to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion," and if they "occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States." How much more vague can you possibly get? This is going to end up being carte blanche.

Any political activist that chains himself to the doors of the local courthouse can be deemed a domestic terrorist. There goes Political Speech. This is the modern Alien and Sedition Acts.

Section 411 of the Act also poses an ideological test for entry into the United States that takes into consideration core political speech.

Section 213 of the Act authorizes federal agents to conduct "sneak and peek searches," or covert searches of a person's home or office that are conducted without notifying the person of the execution of the search warrant until after the search has been completed. Section 213 also authorizes the delay of notice of the execution of a warrant to conduct a seizure of items where the court finds a "reasonable necessity" for the seizure. Normal search warrants have to be conducted under the supervision of an appointee of the one being searched and anything seized must be inventoried and the inventory given.

Under Section 215, the Director of the FBI or a designee as low in rank as an Assistant Special Agent in Charge may apply for a court order requiring the production of "any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items)" upon his written statement that these items are being sought for an investigation "to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities." A judge presented with an application under Section 215 is required to enter an order if he "finds that the application meets the requirements of this section." Normally, an affidavit of probable cause by a 3rd party with first hand knowledge of the facts is required. No longer. As a result, Section 218 allows law enforcement agencies conducting a criminal investigation to circumvent the Fourth Amendment whenever they are able to claim that the gathering of foreign intelligence constitutes "a significant purpose." In doing so, Section 218 gives the FBI a green light to resume domestic spying on government "enemies"-a program that reached an ugly apex under J. Edgar Hoover's directorship.

Under Section 216 of the Act, courts are required to order the installation of a pen register and a trap and trace device31 to track both telephone and Internet "dialing, routing, addressing and signaling information" anywhere within the United States when a government attorney has certified that the information to be obtained is "relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation." No affidavit of probable cause is required. Once installed on an Internet Service Provider (ISP), Carnivore devours all of the communications flowing through the ISP's network-not just those of the target of surveillance but those of all users-and not just tracking information but content as well.

Section 203 of the USA PATRIOT Act authorizes the disclosure, without judicial supervision, of certain criminal and foreign intelligence information to officials of the FBI, CIA, and INS, as well as other federal agencies, where receipt of the information will "assist the official... in the performance of his official duties." So now, when the people cannot be spied upon by domestic agencies, they will acquire information from FORIEGN intelligence agencies that are spying on us. We reciprocate by sharing with them intelligence about their citizens, upon whom they are barred from spying.

Section 412 vastly inflates the Attorney General's power to detain immigrants who are suspected of falling into a class of persons engaged in terrorism. Upon no more than the Attorney General's unreviewed certification that he has "reasonable grounds to believe" that a non-citizen is engaged in terrorist activities or other activities that threaten the national security. The A.G. can effectively detain an immigrant forever.

Not expressly stated in the Act, but already in use by the federales is the labelling of a citizen as an "enemy combatant," scooping him up without a warrant, no affidavit of probable cause, no counsel, no charges, no bail, commit him to a FISA military tribunal, try him without counsel, refuse him an opportunity to introduce evidence that can impeach adverse witnesses, find him guilty, sentence him to death and execute him.

Those of us who remember the mistakes of history are doomed to be subjected to idiots who alow them to be repeated.

But with this sort of thing, and incidents like the Houston PD stormtrooperaid on kids at a K-Mart http://66.70.240.173/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1598 (discussed on my site, several news articles linked to there), I don't trust them...

Aw, fer Pete's sake. They really did that, didn't they? Aw jeez.

Okay, kids, let's all remember, now -- and repeat it often where others can here you -- "The Police Are Not On Your Side!"

Let's don't make 'em out to always be the enemy, but keep in mind that they have an awful job to do, they deal with the dregs of society, and you should *NOT* assume that they are on your side in a given situation. They're interests are not yours and we all need to keep that in mind during any encounter with the xxPD.

While we're at it, everybody go to the ACLU's website and download the Bust Card, print it and keep one in your wallet.

Hell, print two and give one to a friend.

aclu has a good list of things to do during an encounter with a police officer

You don't have to answer a police officer's questions, but you must show your driver's license and registration when stopped in a car. In other situations, you can't legally be arrested for refusing to identify yourself to a police officer.

but they also go on to say that you should obey an order, even if it is illegal--there is nothing you can do but bring a charge against the officer in court after the fact. but by then you're already screwed

Most of these rights were the main casualties in the War on Drugs. See US: This Is Your Bill of Rights, On Drugs for some other egregious examples of the police getting out of hand. You do not have to tell the police your name, address or let them photograph you. Since this is America the police have the right to ask you anything that they want; and you have the right to ignore them. These rights are laid out in the ACLU 's web site. I think that the best place to read about what the police can and cannot do when they approach you is a study by the New York Attorney General's Office entitled The New York City Police Department's "Stop & Frisk" Practices. This article goes on to site case law supporting things like "civilians are not required to answer or to provide proof of identity":

See De Bour, 40 N.Y.2d at 219, 386 N.Y.S.2d at 382 n.1; see also People v. Powell, 246 A.D.2d 366, 667 N.Y.S.2d 725 (1st Dep't 1998)

Some of this information is specific to the state of New York but much of it is applicable for people in every state. This report goes on to explain things like Federal law provides a floor for state standards. This means that states may enact tougher restrictions on their police departments but that they cannot give the police more lattitude to do things like question citizens.

The practice mentioned in the article will stand until someone sues to have it stopped. Here we are back with the ACLU again. They seem to be about the only organization that has deep enough pockets to pursue things like this. And the worst that is going to happen is they are told to stop. In reality the state and federal prosecutors are probably right when they say that the collecting of this information is legal. This is because the people that got into this file didn't walk away from the police in the manner that is outlined in the Supreme Court's decision in Terry v. Ohio and subsequent case law. For the police to detain you - meaning that you cannot just ignore them and walk away - they must first reasonably concluded that the suspect is engaged in criminal activity. The article in question says that the people were detained for loitering so the police have found what they say is a criminal activity. Make them prove it! Make them file a detailed report of the stop. File your complaints with the entities I listed above and make them justify their stop to their superiors. Make their superiors justify the stop to the local paper and the federal authorities. If everyone that was annoyed would push just a little then it would work more than one or two people pressing really hard.

Unfortunately the police are rarely required to justify their actions much less defend them in an official inquiry. Police enjoy something called qualified indemnity that protects them from the consequences of their actions in all but the most severe of circumstances. And even then they get off with a slap on the wrist instead of the punishment that they deserve. Case in point:

I used to live Colorado where they have a law similiar to that in many other states called capital murder. It states that if someone dies while in the commission of a felony that all people committing that felony can be charged with first degree murder. Perjury is a felony; that is what swearing out a false affidavit is. So when an officer lies while asking a judge for a search warrant they have committed a felony. When an innocent person dies in the execution of that search warrant it should be capital murder. If the person that lies is a police officer then it works out differently. They can even get their job back and the opportunity to lie again. This was not his first mistake. The FBI has even been critized for that very same offense.

We MUST stand up for our rights or we will loose them.
Regards, Tres.

My home page is set to the AP Wire. I can't find anything on this story and it was supposedly released within the last few hours? Also, the article says The American Civil Liberties Union is "Up in arms." Why then isn't there any mention of it on their homepage or in their news section?

My home page is set to the AP Wire. I can't find anything on this story and it was supposedly released within the last few hours? Also, the article says The American Civil Liberties Union is "Up in arms." Why then isn't there any mention of it on their homepage or in their news section?

Can you justify that?.
How can you argue that it is acceptable to leave confidential document in an unlocked, unguarded office for anyone to take. Do you live in the real world where confidential documents are securely stored, or in la la land where everyone is trusted to follow the rules?

In this case, the government has not fulfilled their mandate to guard the security of the U.S. and it's citizens. A Citizen of the U.S. discovered this, and went to the press. Citizens of the U.S. have that right.

The Government also has the right to find some way to punishing these citizens for exposing Government incompetence. A cynic would say that was to expected. A more rational person would hope his or her government would spend some time trying to solve the problem instead of engaging in a cover-up. This is especially true as we are suppose to protect whistle blowers to ferret out corruption, although I realize the Bush administration is intent on hiding behind homeland security.

I certainly am not saying that what these people did was strictly legal, but I would hope the U.S. government would take security a bit more seriously. I understand it is a learning curve.

I have a problem with laws against the private use of relatively harmless substances such as marijuana, especially when enforcement of such laws reduces civil liberties and privacy for all citizens. (No, I don't use pot myself.) And I hope you can agree that the DMCA and Disney Copyright Extension Act are blatant abuses of government power.

as for your 80% stat--do you have any way of backing that up?

A quick google search came up with this and this.

IIRC, they gave Hillary Rosen (of RIAA fame) an award for protecting free speech rights.

You're right, they did... in 1997. Perhaps you aren't deliberately being trollish, but the water shouldn't be muddied to fool people into thinking the ACLU agrees with Rosen's more recent behavior.

..their own publication: The Year in Civil Liberties. The 2000 one is not organized as effectively, so you should check out one of the older ones first, like 1999.

Perhaps the most striking thng one notices about the ACLU, uppon browsing these documents, is the large number of cases involving schools and children. I don't know about you, but I remember a very strong undercurrent of civil rights violations from high school. Not necissarily anything as bad as the cases that ACLU takes, but educators and legislators have demonstrated time and again an almost total disrespect for the constitutional rights of minors.

The bottom line about the ACLU is that if the government (including when a person/corperation is using government power) is significantly infringing on your rights, there is a very good chance the ACLU will support your possition. They might not want to send a lawyer, but you can oftin get freidn of the court breifs and simillar things."

• Although the DMCA provides a limited exception for accessing lists of blocked Web sites, Beeson said that it is meaningless because another provision blocks users from writing the software tools necessary to access the lists.
  

  "The copyright law says you can look under the hood under certain circumstances but you can't build a tool needed to open the hood," Beeson said. "This irrational rule is chilling important scientific research in violation of the First Amendment."
  

i'm glad the ACLU is stepping up to the plate on this one. good that they're on Bruce Perens' side too. renew your membership today!

If you're going to use 'free speech' as a legal defense, why not turn it into performance art?

(Of course, if you can get {insert favorite attractive celebrity} to perform it, it would be an added bonus.)

How about EFF? 2600? ACLU? No shortage of organizations: most of us agree with them, do you donate to them?

Simply untrue. There was no requirement to show a photo ID to board a flight. The "Patriot Act" was not signed into law by Clinton. Clinton did not approve "roving wiretaps." Clinton did not push for a national ID, but Bush is doing that right now in his "Operation TIPS" proposal.

I suggest that you read this ACLU summary of the changes the Bush administration has made since September 11:

INSATIABLE APPETITE: The Government's Demand for New and Unnecessary Powers After September 11

You will find that the voices speaking out in opposition to the curtailment of citizens' rights were Democrats while Republicans, Ashcroft, and Bush railroaded this legislation through.

ill-informed opinion on basic rights shown by the vocal majority of this blog! It is truly scary. Everyone here needs to go to the ACLU web site now to download, read, and remember your basic rights here in the U.S.A. Start with the Know Your Rights phamphlet.

ill-informed opinion on basic rights shown by the vocal majority of this blog! It is truly scary. Everyone here needs to go to the ACLU web site now to download, read, and remember your basic rights here in the U.S.A. Start with the Know Your Rights phamphlet.

NOTHING.

This isn't a matter of wait and see, the bill stinks so badly that even the sponsors claim to oppose it.

The Webcaster exemption is meaningless unless legislation is passed that overrides the Library of Congress CARP decision that makes Webcasting financially impossible for any US-based operation. Don't expect the bill to have this provision added, it was not written for our benefit either as consumers or as content distributors

Unfortunately, this is a draft, so there is no bill number we can add to this to so we can tell our Congresscritters which bill we want dumped into the bitbucket. Yet.

What can we do?

When the bill we don't want becomes available, we need to contact our Congressmen and Senators and tell them that WE DO NOT WANT IT. We need to tell our Congressman and Senators to VOTE YES on Rick Boucher's Music Online Competition Act .

The best way to do this is with a fax gateway set up specifically to enable us and anyone else who's interested to easily contact our elected representatives. When it becomes available, we then need to point, click, and make our points known.

Letters are obsolete in this context. Due to worry about anthrax, they are going through extensive decontamination and a letter might take months to get there if it shows up at all. Phone calls are good, but this works best because it's easy for someone to casually participate. What we need are hundreds of thousands of contacts between us and our elected representatives, and it's been proven that this works.

The ACLU uses this approach and it frequently works, despite the unpopularity of the ACLU itself and civil liberties in general.

Who lives in Washington,DC who is willing to dedicate a telephone line to this and is willing to maintain a fax server limited to local calls within the DC area?

The software required to run a Web-to-fax gateway already exists, check http://www.tpc.int for more information. The site seems to be down right now. If it doesn't come back up, there are other possibilities. Or start an Open Source project at Sourceforge and write one.

Given the basic gateway software, a front end is needed that does what we need to do.

The main requirement is that it allow users to submit their zip codes and automatically return a response that will direct their faxes with our canned message and anything users want to add to the fax number corresponding to their Congresscritter.

The ACLU has this kind of setup that should be easy to duplicate. To see the user interface, click here and enter your zip code. Go through with the rest of the process if you agree with what they want public support for, but the important part is to see how such a thing works.

The hardest part is gathering the list of several hundred fax numbers. While there is such a list, it's a couple of years old and needs updating before it is used. Fixing this just takes being willing to put in a few hours comparing the list against the current list of Congresscritters and going to individual web pages for new additions to the list.

Based on the previous performance of the geek community, The Register says essentially that we as a community are too stupid to mobilize to cover our own asses,preferring the practice of pure Libertarian cult dogma to any approach that can work in the real world. Maybe they're right. I'm writing this in case they aren't.

Is our freedom worth a spare server, the price of a phone line, a bit of code writing, and being willing to point and click a few times as these bills hit various points in the legislative process?

It's up to you now. If The Register is right, and we can't mobilize to protect ourselves, we don't deserve to be free and we don't deserve to be able to use our computers and the Net we will instead of as appliances whose posssiblities are limited to what Hollywood, the Feds, and Microsoft give us permission for.

So you don't think that local authorities would ever approve of something so blatantly offensive to a section of humanity? Catholics Want "Antichrist" Billboard Removed Brian

Cites/sites? Sure. Enjoy.

American Civil Liberties Union:
http://www.aclu.org/congress/patriot_chart.html

Electronic Frontier Foundation:
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/Terrorism_ militias/20011031_eff_usa_patriot_analysis.html

Center for Democracy and Technology:
http://www.cdt.org/security/010911response.shtml

http://www.cdt.org/wiretap/020530guidelines.shtml

Molly Ivans (political columnist):
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid =12250

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid =12489


Robert Scheer (political columnist):
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid =12246

Need more? I've got 'em.

I understand your point. A good one, but also a very naïve one...
You must recall that governments usually are closely tied to it's land's industry and in my mind, this has become the true purpose of Echelon in the post-cold war aera: Industrial Espionage.
May I quote: "France, deeply suspicious of Britain's uniquely close intelligence links with the US, seized on reports that Echelon cost Airbus Industrie an 8bn contract with Saudi Arabia in 1994, after the US intercepted communications between Riyadh and the Toulouse headquarters of Airbus"

Some more links:
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shuttle/5604/data. html
http://www.aclu.org/echelonwatch/highlights.html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,34932,00 . tml

And, yes, don't believe in a conspiracy unless it has been denied... ;-)

Congress tried to get the NSA to disclose more, but failed.

The following is from the EchelonWatch web site. I think the text was written in 2000.

Over the past few months, the United States House of Representatives has been investigating ECHELON and related activities. As part of these investigations, the House Select Committee on Intelligence requested documents from the National Security Agency (NSA) regarding its operating standards for intelligence systems like ECHELON that may intercept communications of Americans. In a surprising move, NSA officials refused to disclose these documents by invoking the attorney-client privilege.

The ACLU voted this book best C++ book of 2001.

Wow. I didn't think the ACLU knew anything about computer programming...

Here's why I think it would be the right thing to do. Look at what Arthur Anderson got away with because they weren't forced out of existance: multiple judgements, spanning many years, some of the largest in history (seeking $600 million in fines for AZ Baptist Foundation anyone?), finally resulting in Enron, where public opinion finally got them turned into a shell of their former corporation.

> If you are convicted of a felony, the minimu[m]
> sentence is death by lethal injection?
Repeat after me:

Companies are not natural persons.

And even if they were natural persons, they deserve to suffer the same fate as 68% of the people on Death Row. How many corporations have been executed in the last 100 years? Go ahead, I'm waiting. I can read you off a huge list of natural persons who've had their lives snuffed out by the state. Are you implying that corporations are more moral than the people they make up??? Or something even more ludicrous?

Capital punishment is not even on the same level as revoking a company's charter. And it's definitely not the same as barring them from selling to government agencies in a county (or even a country for that matter). Which is what's being recommended. The two are not even remotely close.

If a government group/agency/regional authority stops buying your products, you still have the whole rest of the world, and all of the private world to sell to. And if your products are strong enough, why do you need to be on government dole anyways?

Now it'd be interesting if in companies convicted of criminal activities, the CEO and board of directors were subjected to lethal injection. That would clean up a lot of shoddy business practices and fraud in a hurry.

That's a solution that's got a lot to recommend it, actually....

If you disband a company, and sell off it's assets, and pay off the stockholders, who actually got hurt?

Yes, some people are out of business, but if the need remains for those services, those people A) will form a new company, or B) get hired by the former companies competitors. If there are no competitors, you've just cleared the field for anyone (hopefully two or three) new companies to come in and provide services.

-- Ender, Duke_of_URL

You'll notice I never mentioned parties here, just the Bush regime. Of course you're right - I've been very depressed at the attitude of the Democratic Party of late. I'm aware Hollings is a Democrat. I'm also aware that both parties are a little too keen on taking rights away from individuals. Your assumption that my argument is based on partisan politics is wrong.

The Dems and Republicans both are pretty eager to invade privacy right now; they're just both motivated by different goals. That's why the ACLU fights attacks on free speech no matter where they come from - all the laws you mention that have been struck down were struck down largely due to the work of ACLU lawyers.

Echelon Is already watching your comms.

How about the current situation, see how far your rights stretch when your "patriotic" neighbour informs on you and you are detained as an "enemy combatant" and passed over to "military interrogation".
Fun fun fun.

sex with the lights on

all positions except missionary

oral, anal, and any other kind of intercourse except vaginal

any sex outside of a legal marraige

This, obviously, means that all homosexual relations are illegal in the state of VA. In fact,
several years ago, a lesbian woman had her son taken away from her - because she was committing a crime (having sex with her partner), in the home the child was in. Apparently that sort of thing has changed a bit, and obviously these laws are rarely enforced, but they're still on the books.

For more stupid laws see: http://www.dumblaws.com/

How about some historical examples to bolster Michael's claim.

What many of the hard-core groups such as the ACLU and the EFF fear is a return to the days of COINTELPRO when the FBI (with the cooperation of the CIA) used it's vast powers to spy on Americans. And to discredit any political group outside of the mainstream. One noteable target was Dr. Martin Luther King. To quote from the Church Commission's report:

"The FBI collected information about Dr. King's plans and activities through an extensive surveillance program, employing nearly every intelligence-gathering technique at the Bureau's disposal. Wiretaps, which were initially approved by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, were maintained on Dr. King's home telephone from October 1963 until mid-1965; the SCLC headquarter's telephones were covered by wiretaps for an even longer period. Phones in the homes and offices of some of Dr. King's close advisers were also wiretapped. The FBI has acknowledged 16 occasions on which microphones were hidden in Dr. King's hotel and motel rooms in an "attempt" to obtain information about the "private activities of King and his advisers" for use to "completely discredit" them. " [My Emphasis]

The FBI sought to influence universities to withhold honorary degrees from Dr. King. Attempts were made to prevent the publication of articles favorable to Dr. King and to find "friendly" news sources that would print unfavorable articles. The FBI offered to play for reporters tape recordings allegedly made from microphone surveillance of Dr. King's hotel rooms.

The above quotes are from the final report of the Church Committee (see also Here), a congressional committee set up to investigate the FBI's abuses of power. Out of this investigation arose many of the restrictions that Bush, Ashcroft, and Co. are overturning. These changes and the arguments for them have received opposition from longtime FBI members:

"I feel that certain facts, including the following, have, up to now, been omitted, downplayed, glossed over and/or mis-characterized in an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment on the part of the FBI and/or perhaps even for improper political reasons..."

"Several prominent FBI alumni also blasted Ashcroft's cast-a-wide-net approach to the terrorism investigation, which led to the detention of some 1,200 people, only a dozen of them suspected of having any links with Al Qaeda. The mass arrests were part of a fundamental shift in the bureau's strategy. In the past, the FBI would identify suspected terrorists, move to forestall any immediate threat of violence, then watch the suspects in hopes of cracking an entire cell. Ashcroft's approach, the critics noted, might jeopardize the kinds of investigations that had prevented previous attacks. "We used good investigative techniques and lawful techniques," warned Reagan-era FBI director William Webster, "and we did it without all the suggestion that we are going to jump all over people's private lives."..."

This is what people (quite rightly) fear and what we should be striving against. This is what Prompted Emmanuel Goldstein (editor of 2600) to devote his editorial in the most recent issue to a call to arms against such governance. This is a serious issue and the note that Michael Struck was just right. The FBI stated that carnivore will never collect the wrong information Yet we have admissions of the opposite (see here). In the light of all of this, can you really say that he is wrong?

As always you can contact the ACLU for more.

For some fun side-reading see:

• Amnesty International's 2002 report on the U.S.A.
• NYC Indymedia
• The San Francisco Chronicle
• And, The Register

• Envy and Righteousness. Starting sometime in the early 20th century, the unsuccessful started believing that they were owed something by the successful. The turning point was FDR's New Deal, which was the birth of Big Government in the United States.
  
  And you do it too. Every time you say, "I wish the federal government would just regulate <foo>" or "I can't believe those ball players/lawyers/neurosurgeons make so much money," you're demonstrating envy and righteousness. Realize that if you think someone you don't know owes you something just because of your circumstances or his, someone else thinks the same about you. Realize that if you have the power to take away another's liberties, he has the power to take away yours. The only way to combat this is to deny government the power to forcibly take away any of our liberties.
  
  
• Inaction. Citizens who are concerned about the ever-expanding powers of our Big Government complain and complain and complain, but then continue to vote for the GOP (or, I suppose for the Democrats, though I definitely can't figure that one out) are just another part of the problem. Read my lips: The GOP is NOT a small-government party anymore! They have become addicted to your money just as the Democrats have, and now see the benefit to themselves of increasing the reach of the federal government.
  
  If you're not voting Libertarian, donating to the EFF, the ACLU or the Institute for Justice, and the NRA, your complaints about big government taking away all your freedoms one-by-one is pointless blather.
  

"The ACLU has often been at the center of controversy for defending the free speech rights of groups that spew hate, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis. But if only popular ideas were protected, we wouldn't need a First Amendment. History teaches that the first target of government repression is never the last. If we do not come to the defense of the free speech rights of the most unpopular among us, even if their views are antithetical to the very freedom the First Amendment stands for, then no one's liberty will be secure. In that sense, all First Amendment rights are 'indivisible.' "
http://www.aclu.org/library/pbp10.html

Those were the days.

Now CDs cost $19 or $20. The dot-com boom is, well, you know. Napster's gone. And the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has survived a legal challenge, which has only encouraged our fine Congress to pile on more onerous legislation.

Granted, none of this is as alarming as the apparent suspension of habeas corpus in the extended detention of more than 1,000 unnamed people in the U.S. since 9/11, but it's pretty darned ominous just the same.

Added to this heady mixture in recent weeks is a new generation of digital copy protection that's been showing up on music CDs distributed by Sony in Europe. Fast becoming known as the case of "Celine Dion Killed My iMac," initial reports indicate that these discs are not only unreadable by computers, but may actually crash them and prevent them from rebooting, necessitating a service call.

Aside from the immediate hardware questions--"Where the !@#$% is the iMac's manual CD eject hole and how the !@#$% do I get to it?!?"--several major questions about this situation have gripped the Mac universe. Here, without further ado, are the Curmudgeon's curmudgeonly answers to the top five. Some are techical, some are legal, some are political, some are a mix of all three.

Dayplanner note: if you already know exactly how CDs and copy protection work and you're pressed for time, feel free to skip right on down to Question #3. That's where things get, as they say in New England, wicked controversial.

QUESTION #1: Why do Macs and other computers choke on copy protected CDs?

When you look at the business side of a normal audio CD, you see one continuous semi-glossy surface that contains the audio information, or the "program". Bracketing the program are the lead-in and lead-out sections, which are the high-gloss rings at the inside and outside edges of the disc, respectively. The CD's audio tracks are not arranged in a particularly orderly fashion on the disc. As Robert Starret explains in an old but still definitive Emedia Professional article:

Red Book [i.e Audio CD] tracks are not files, per se. They are made up of a bunch of data that is meant to stream, and within the stream there is more than music. ... Data on an audio disc is organized into frames in order to ensure a constant read rate. Each frame consists of 24 bytes of user data, plus synchronization, error correction, and control and display bits. One of the first things that it is crucial to understand about CDs is that [their] data is not arranged in distinct physical units. Instead, the data in one frame is interleaved with the data in many other frames so that a scratch or defect in the disc will not destroy a single frame beyond correction.

Audio discs were designed to be read sequentially, in real time, with the digital data converted to an analog signal that would be played through a stereo's speakers. There was no need to have data on the disc to pinpoint the exact location of the beginning of a song. It is good enough just to get close. That extra data containing an exact starting address for each song takes up space that could otherwise be used for musical data.

So what a computer sees when it looks at an audio CD is not a foreign language, as when a Mac sees a DOS-formatted disc. Rather, it sees no language at all. There's no map, no file cabinet. Everything's just strewn out on the floor. This is why you can't just double-click an audio CD's icon in the Finder and drag one of the files to your hard drive. (If you do, the copied file will be zero k and contain no data.) Instead, you have to "rip" the file with a special digital audio extraction program or utility that manually searches out and extracts the tracks on the disc. That, by the way, is most likely why the term "ripping" came about. The kind of translation necessary for digital audio extraction no doubt struck many folks as analogous to the process of printing postscript-encoded fonts and images on a printer. Converting postscript to bitmap (so a printer can shoot ink droplets or laser-heated toner dots onto the paper) requires a Raster Image Processer, or RIP; hence "ripping."

Now, the key thing to understand here is that since audio CDs have no filesystem, and therefore no real data files, audio CD players do not need to be able to read data. Any data on an audio CD is ignored.

Computers, of course, come at CDs from the opposite perspective: data is their first order of business. So computers look for--and, if they find one, read--a data track on a CD before they look for, or read, an audio track. Data first, audio second, with each being treated separately.

You will be able to see this separate treatment in action if you have an "Enhanced CD" that contains bonus data material in addition to the audio program. Sara McLaughlin's 1999 release Mirrorball is one of the best-known Enhanced CDs. Stick it in your Mac and you'll see two separate CD icons, or volumes, show up on your desktop, one for the audio CD tracks and one for the data.

Look on the underside of the CD and you'll see that a very shiny band interrupts the normally continuous semi-gloss surface. This band is the lead-out for the audio disc, which is normally at the edge of the disc. But on an Enhanced CD, there's a second patch of program material after the lead-out. This is the data portion. Now look at a picture provided by German Magazine Chip of the underside of a disc that uses the Key2Audio copy protection technology Sony has employed most famously on the European release of Celine Dion's most recent album (ignore the disembodied hand holding the felt-tip marker for now).

Note the shiny band about 1/4 of the way in from the outside edge of the disc, just like you'd see on the underside of Mirrorball. The material from that band out to the disc's edge is a data track. Unlike a normal Enhanced CD, however, the data track on this CD is corrupt. I don't know exactly how it works, but it is formatted in such a way that a computer will initially recognize it as a valid data track but will not in fact be able to read it successfully. This situation will result in: the computer endlessly trying to read the disc; the computer giving up and ejecting the disc (or asking you to eject it); or the computer giving up with the disc sitting in the drawer, unmounted on the desktop and invisible to the OS. The second possibility is annoying; the first and third possibilities are potentially disastrous.

So computers choke on Sony's copy protected discs because (1) computers read data tracks first, and (2) Key2Audio data tracks are corrupt. Audio CD players, on the other hand, aren't capable of reading data tracks--remember, audio CD tracks lack a filesystem and there are no directories or headers to read. So audio CD players simply ignore the data track, just as they do for normal Enhanced CDs.

QUESTION #2: What's with this magic marker trick to defeat copy protection? Does it really work?

You betcha. Computers read data tracks first, but the data track has to be located at the end of the CD. Sounds confusing, but it has to be that way. In computer parlance, an Enhanced CD is a form of multisession CD. The CD is written to more than once; in the case of Enhanced CDs and Mac-PC hybrid CDs, this happens because you want to write two different types of data to the same CD. Audio CD players can only read the first session on a CD--again, no need or ability to know what multiple sessions are since an audio CD is expecting to see only audio CD tracks. So the audio content has to be the first thing on the disc, located on the inside of the disc surface. The data track is on the outside.

So if you take a magic marker--or, more dangerously a piece of electrical tape or a Post-it note--and use it to cover over that shiny band that divides the audio program from the data track, your computer won't realize that there even is a data track as it scans from the beginning of the CD--the inner part where the audio stuff is--to the outside looking for data. What your computer will see is a final audio track that seems to go on and on until it reaches the edge of the disk. This will put a whole lot of silence at the end of the last track when you rip the CD (a problem you can rectify using the Quicktime Player as an audio editor), but otherwise you'll be good to go.

QUESTION #3: Is Apple liable for the damage caused to my iMac by these CDs?

The answer to this one as far as the Curmudgeon is concerned is a big fat hairy NO. Before I explain why, I must say that I find it disheartening that so many folks on Usenet and the Mac Web are complaining about Apple in regards to this issue. Yes, it sucks to have to take your iMac to a repair shop and pay something on the order of $250US just to get a stuck CD removed. Yes, it's annoying that modern Macs have manual-eject holes that are difficult to see and hidden behind decorative outer CD doors. But I think the root of folks' complaints is that some Apple machines seem to be damaged more seriously by these disks than most WinTel PCs (largely, from what I can tell, by the aforementioned difficulty in detecting and accessing Macs' manual eject holes). While I don't want to downplay the real expense and misery some folks have experienced, it seems to me that the knee-jerk blaming of Apple comes from a kind of Mac inferiority complex run amok: "Why do Apple machines have to react worse to this than WinTel machines?!? My PC friends are going to rake me over the coals on this one! I thought Macs were supposed to be easier to use and better-built, and yet my PC just let me eject the CD!" And so on.

These sentiments are understandable, but they don't form the basis for a proper understanding of whether or not Apple should pay to fix this problem. Putting aside the question of legal liability for the moment, it's just not right to expect Apple or any computer manufacturer--or any CD player manufacturer whose machines won't play these new CDs, for that matter--to anticipate technology that hadn't been invented when the machine was designed. Early CD players were confused by Enhanced CDs; many home and car CD players still can't play CD-RWs; many DVD players (which are always labeled "DVD/CD/VCD") can't handle CD-Rs. In fact, the different CD formats are covered by different technology standards: Red Book for normal audio CDs, Yellow Book for data CDs, Orange Book for CD-R and CD-RW, and Blue Book for Enhanced CDs. Incidentally, the fact that CD-R and CD-RW are grouped together under a single standard explains why manufacturers are hesitant to certify that their CD and DVD players will play home-brewed recordable CDs: unless a player can handle both CD-R and CD-RW discs, it's not Orange Book compliant.

Now the funny thing is that much of the debate over Apple's responsibility here has skipped over this simple, and to my mind obvious, fact. Instead, the debate has proceeded to another, related question:

QUESTION #4: Are these new Sony discs really CDs or not? Should Apple support them even if they're not CDs?

Here's where the Curmudgeon throws you a curve ball, because contrary to what you've read, it's entirely possible, even likely, that these copy protected discs are in fact CDs.

Of course, Apple's position, as stated in a now-infamous Knowledgebase article is that Key2Audio discs "are technically and legally not Compact Discs (CD format)" because they do not conform to the CD audio format, and so Apple is under no obligation to make Macs work with them.

Sony agrees, having removed the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" badge and logo from discs that use the Key2Audio system.

But I don't think that really settles the matter. Attentive readers of the Mac Web might recall that the first draft of Apple's knowledgebase article stated that inserting such a disc into a Mac constituted misapplication of the product (the Mac, not the disc) and therefore any resulting problems were not covered under warranty. Apple has since removed that portion of the article, no doubt on the advice of legal counsel.

I don't know why that paragraph got removed from the article, but I have a hunch it's because the question of whether or not a Key2Audio disc is a CD has not come close to being settled.

Consider this: while the Sony discs don't conform to the Red Book CD standard, they appear to conform to the Blue Book standard--the one that governs Enhanced CDs. It's not possible to look at the full specs for CD standards without paying Philips (co-creator of the CD format along with, ironically, Sony) quite a bit of money. But available summaries of the Blue Book standard indicate that the standard does not say what has to be on that data track. Philips presumes that data tracks on Enhanced CDs "will in general contain items like disc and track titles, lyrics, and background information on the music," (quoted from here), but the Blue Book spec doesn't actually prescribe specific uses for the data track. The only requirement, as far as I can see, is that the data track be formatted with a known filesystem, typically ISO-9660 (DOS), and/or HFS. Since the Key2Audio system works precisely by getting the computer to "take the bait" by first recognizing the data track, and then confuses it by messing up the actual structure or nature of the data, it's reasonable to assume that the Key2Audio system does in fact conform to the Blue Book standard. (In other words, if the data track was not formatted with a valid filesystem, the computer would ignore it or spit the disc out.) Aside from the obvious marketing nightmare ("Our Enhanced CDs are unique because they diminish the product!") The only difference between a Key2Audio disc and an Enhanced CD is that the Key2Audio CD's data track is used to implement copy protection rather than to provide song lyrics, videos and other more traditional Enhanced CD data content.

Now, you might think the Curmudgeon is splitting hairs here. Who cares if you call it (A) an out-of-spec disc that's not a real CD, or (B) an Enhanced CD with a screwy data track?

It seems to me that there's a huge difference. It might seem like Sony is shooting itself in the foot by omitting the official "CD Digital Audio" badge from its copy protected discs. But to my eyes it's the opposite: Sony is weaseling out of the truth, which is that its discs are in fact Blue Book-compliant CDs that are not out-of-spec but rather are defective, and have intentionally been made defective, using the Blue Book format as a trojan horse to disable the user's hardware when that hardware is a computer.

Insofar as these discs damage or disable computers, they operate like computer viruses, except that instead of working on the software side, they attack via hardware and firmware. Their method of copyright protection is less like MacroVision and CSS (the copy protection mechanisms used on VHS and DVD), and more like the "zapping" techniques used by cable companies to disable cable boxes in homes where cable service or premium channels are being received illegally. In those cases, however, there's a way of distinguishing between legal and illegal activity. Legal cable setups don't get their boxes zapped. With Key2Audio, the technology behaves as though inserting a CD in your computer makes you a criminal.

Now, if a court were to agree with my argument that Key2Audio discs are in fact really CDs, then Sony (and Key2Audio) could be liable to lawsuits from computer users who lost time, money and perhaps data as a result of damage done to their computers by these discs. Conceivably, Sony could also be liable to suits brought by computer manufacturers for sabotaging their machines or interfering with their business practices. By saying these discs aren't CDs, Sony hopes to extricate itself from such liability. One can only hope that Sony gets its ass handed to it by the European Union courts--which are routinely more consumer-friendly than their U.S. cousins--before this situation gets out of hand.

This brings us to the second part of this question: Should Apple support these discs even if they're not really CDs? To which the Curmudgeon replies: Heck No! Key2Audio discs do not represent a new technology or a new CD spec. They are a malicious corruption of an existing spec. Without manual intervention by the user on a disc-by-disc basis, it's impossible to design drive firmware or CD driver software that can differentiate between an Enhanced CD and a Key2Audio CD.

That said, it would be nice if drives used in Macs had their firmware updated so that insertion of a Key2Audio disc would generate a normal "This disc is unreadable" message from the OS, allowing for a smooth and uneventful eject procedure.

Even better would be a user-selectable option to "ignore data volumes on multisession CDs" via a CD Preference Pane (OS X) or Control Panel (OS 9). You could select that option and use Key2Audio discs to your heart's content. If you needed to use an Enhanced CD, you could uncheck the option. It would be a bit of a kludge, but that's the best that can be done given the insidious nature of the Key2Audio technology.

QUESTION #5: What about Fair Use?

The much-ballyhooed concept of "fair use" is much more complicated than it seems, and much too complicated to cover fully here. Its value in helping us fight the good fight against Sony is significant but limited.

It is of course true that it's not a violation of fair use to rip a CD and load its songs onto your hard drive or mp3 player, or onto a mix CD-R. The essence of the famous, then obscure, now famous again "Betamax" case (in which Sony was the defendant, ironically, and which was decided by the Supreme Court exactly one week before the release of the first Macintosh) is that it is permissible for you to record or copy copyrighted material so long as it does not deprive the copyright holder of revenue it could obtain if your copy did not exist. So in that sense we all do have a legal "right" to rip CDs.

At the same time, fair use does not obligate Sony to make its music CDs technologically compatible with your Mac, particularly if Sony gets away with claiming that these things aren't really CDs. Technological compatibility is a matter for the market, not the courts: if enough people refuse to buy such discs, Sony will stop making them. If folks buy them, then they'll keep on making them.

The tragedy here is that the market doesn't work like a democracy. Consumers will never have the ability to choose between copy protected and non-copy protected versions of the same CD. You won't see Virgin Records marketing their non-copy protected version of the Celine Dion CD against Sony's copy protected version. It's that old problem of copyright.

So if we leave the fantasy world of economics textbooks and travel to the real world, in which demand is not merely met but created, shaped and channeled, we see that relatively few people--especially children and teens--want or "demand" a non-copy protected CD. What they desire is the music that happens to be on the CD (or the persona, or fame, or body, of the person who makes the music). So the kid hears Britney on the radio or sees her in a video on MTV, or sees her in that Pepsi commercial on broadcast TV, and then goes to the store to buy the music. Upon arrival, our young consumer is presented with a CD. The fact that it costs $18.99 even though it cost Sony about 99 cents to manufacture isn't really relevant. The fact that it's copy protected probably isn't relevant either. The $19 copy protected CD is the product, end of story. There's no other legal way to get the music. Thus, there's no way to gauge the consumer's preference for copy protection, because the consumer isn't choosing or rejecting a content-delivery medium; rather, the consumer is choosing (or rejecting) the music.

So fair use gets lost in the muddle of the market. But we can try to find it again if we take a gander at the reason Key2Audio exists in the first place: online music swapping.

The record industry says that CD ripping and music piracy go hand-in-hand; hence the need for digital copy protection. Yet a moment of reflection yields the following observations:

(A) Most noncommercial piracy these days (i.e. mp3 sharing) does indeed involve ripping CDs onto computers.

(B) At the same time, most ripping does not lead to piracy.

(C) Virtually no commercial, for-profit piracy involves ripping CDs onto someone's computer and distributing them via file sharing. Instead, it is likely that commercial, high-volume piracy involves mass copying of audio CDs via standalone CD duplicators that can copy any kind of copy protected disc as easily as they copy Playstation CDs (which use a similar copy protection mechanism). To stop this sort of pirating, the record companies will have to continue to rely on the same law enforcement agencies and tactics as clothing manufacturers and electronics manufacturers do in their efforts to shut down counterfeit designer jeans plants and "Sorny" or "Sonee" Walkman manufacturing operations.

(D) No more than one successful rip of a song from a CD is necessary in order for it to be disseminated all across the internet. In order to accomplish such a successful rip, a person can spend less than $300 for a standalone CD duplicator or less than $3 for a Sharpie felt-tip marker.

These observations all point to one undeniable conclusion: digital copy protection schemes like Key2Audio will not stop illegal music copying. So not only will Key2Audio infringe on fair use, but that's all it will do.

The "casual" illegal copyer, who rips a CD, makes a mix CD for his or her car, puts another copy on an mp3 player, and gives three CD-R copies of the original CD to three friends, may in fact be prevented by Key2Audio technology from using his original CD to engage in this mixture of legal and illegal uses. But as long as someone, somewhere, has managed to rip the CD, this person will still be able to download the album and make that mix CD, copy that file onto an mp3 player, and make those CD-R dubs for friends. The source material, being in mp3 format, will be of slightly inferior quality, but it will hardly be noticeable, let alone objectionable, to most people listening with most audio equipment.

With all this in mind, a new picture emerges. We no longer see a push-pull between fair use and copyright, or between consumer desire and intellectual property. Instead, we see piracy continuing more or less undisturbed, with fair use being seriously disrupted.

It would be paranoid and silly to think that Sony and other record companies would want to destroy fair use just for the heck of it. There has to be a method to their madness, yes?

Let's return to the Betamax case. There was an equally important, but lesser known, second prong to that case. As detailed on this helpful web page, Sony was sued by two movie studios, not two television networks. One of the studios' major complaints was that Sony's Betamax allowed for the creation of a video rental market, which allowed video stores to buy one copy of a movie on tape and rent it out hundreds, even thousands, of times until the tape wore out, without ever paying an additional dime to the movie studios. The Supreme Court ruled that this kind of video rental business was covered under fair use by what's known as First Sale Doctrine, which in essense means that when you buy something you can do whatever you want with it (as long as it's the original, not a copy). That's right--it's legal for you to rent your music CDs to your friends for fun and profit, as long as you're not renting them CD-R copies or keeping a copy for yourself while you rent the original. First Sale Doctrine, it turns out, is what propelled the Betamax case to the Supreme Court: it was the part of the original District Court Decision that was overturned at the Appelate level, enabling Supreme Court review of the entire case. First Sale Doctrine, by the way, is also why you can "license" as much software as your bank account will allow, but you cannot actually buy any.

It is First Sale Doctrine, rather than the more well-known "personal copy" rule, that is ultimately under attack by the record industry. For what reason could there be to prevent you from ripping your own CDs, except to offer you the "opportunity" to purchase multiple versions of the same music so you can listen to that music in ways that currently are defined as fair use: a CD for your stereo; an mp3 for your hard drive, and a "secure digital" copy for your record-industry approved portable digital music player? With a CD priced at $19, an mp3 at $5 (which would include a royalty to counteract the inevitable hard drive-to-hard drive copying), and a secure digital version priced at $2.50, that'd be $26.50 for one music album. No doubt you'd be able to buy all three togeter in a package deal for "only" $25. Or maybe you could license all three formats for the low, low price of $9.95 a year, for the rest...of...your...life--remember DivX DVDs?

Key2Audio is the first step in a dreadful double perversion of Fair Use. The first perversion is the idea that by making a copy of music for yourself, you are depriving the copyright holder of the ability to obtain revenue from selling you additional copies of the same music. The second, linked, perversion is that by destroying your ability to exercise fair use, the record company extends its copyright power beyond the content (the music) to the delivery medium (the CD).

There's no doubt this will all be fought out in the courts. And a recent New York Times article indicates that tech companies might finally be waking up to the threat posed by Hollywood and the RIAA.

But more than that, this requires grassroots action by all of us. As I wrote at the beginning of this column, Key2Audio isn't the worst threat we face by a long shot. But it's ominous as one more little indication of the broad threat to notions of freedom and privacy that are crucial to the quality of life in our country as we know it.

For more information, or to get involved, try The Campaign for Digital Rights at http://uk.eurorights.org/, the Electronic Frontier Foundation at http://www.eff.org/, or the ACLU at http://www.aclu.org/.

We have nothing to lose but most of our rights.

don't the participating countries (US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK,) sound suspiciously like the prime Echelon members?

Though the EFF and the ACLU have *somewhat* one-sided perspectives on such legislation, they're still a great resource. The papers that the EFF produces are always highly detailed and informative in nature. Maybe just stating some choice stats or using the information as background could help you get your point across.

Voting record of Mr. Taylor on ACLU issues

ACLU's Voting Record

all those orgs counting the innocents being released have been desperatly trying to find an innocent person who had been executed for the last hundred years and they haven't been able to come up with a single case.

Might that be because they're too busy working on current death penalty cases, which have a "deadline", so to speak? Most death penalty opponents seem to focus on a particular case with the aim of saving that person, and once he's been executed, there is little urgency to continue. Keep in mind that in the American system, there is no such thing as 'proven innocent'. You can try to overturn a sentence after someone's dead, but courts are unlikely to hear your case, as they're also busy dealing with current cases. Examples such as the Sam Sheppard case(though not a death penalty case) show that even high-profile cases will not get reviewed by the courts if the defendant is dead. The closest you usually get are things such as these:

In 1990, Jesse Tafero was executed in Florida. He had been convicted in 1976 along with his wife, Sonia Jacobs, for murdering a state trooper. In 1981 Jacobs' death sentence was reduced on appeal to life imprisonment, and 11 years later her conviction was vacated by a federal court. The evidence on which Tafero and Jacobs had been convicted and sentenced was identical; it consisted mainly of the perjured testimony of an ex-convict who turned state's witness in order to avoid a death sentence. Had Tafero been alive in 1992, he no doubt would have been released along with Jacobs. Tafero's death is probably the clearest case in recent years of the execution of an innocent person. (from the ACLDU).

If you want more number than that, how about this:
A study published in 1982 in the Stanford Law Review documents 350 capital convictions in which it was later proven that the convict had not committed the crime. Of those, 23 convicts were executed; others spent decades of their lives in prison. In a 1996 update of this study it was revealed that in the past few years alone, four individuals were executed although there was strong evidence that they were not guilty of the crime for which they were condemned. (from the ACLU

Okay, simple question: how does killing these people make society safer, if they're already convicted and sitting in jail? It seems to me that taking a "life means life" approach, where a life sentence means you spend the rest of your life in jail unless your conviction is overturned, is the most reasonable approach to murder and violent crime.

all those orgs counting the innocents being released have been desperatly trying to find an innocent person who had been executed for the last hundred years and they haven't been able to come up with a single case.

Might that be because they're too busy working on current death penalty cases, which have a "deadline", so to speak? Most death penalty opponents seem to focus on a particular case with the aim of saving that person, and once he's been executed, there is little urgency to continue. Keep in mind that in the American system, there is no such thing as 'proven innocent'. You can try to overturn a sentence after someone's dead, but courts are unlikely to hear your case, as they're also busy dealing with current cases. Examples such as the Sam Sheppard case(though not a death penalty case) show that even high-profile cases will not get reviewed by the courts if the defendant is dead. The closest you usually get are things such as these:

In 1990, Jesse Tafero was executed in Florida. He had been convicted in 1976 along with his wife, Sonia Jacobs, for murdering a state trooper. In 1981 Jacobs' death sentence was reduced on appeal to life imprisonment, and 11 years later her conviction was vacated by a federal court. The evidence on which Tafero and Jacobs had been convicted and sentenced was identical; it consisted mainly of the perjured testimony of an ex-convict who turned state's witness in order to avoid a death sentence. Had Tafero been alive in 1992, he no doubt would have been released along with Jacobs. Tafero's death is probably the clearest case in recent years of the execution of an innocent person. (from the ACLDU).

If you want more number than that, how about this:
A study published in 1982 in the Stanford Law Review documents 350 capital convictions in which it was later proven that the convict had not committed the crime. Of those, 23 convicts were executed; others spent decades of their lives in prison. In a 1996 update of this study it was revealed that in the past few years alone, four individuals were executed although there was strong evidence that they were not guilty of the crime for which they were condemned. (from the ACLU

Okay, simple question: how does killing these people make society safer, if they're already convicted and sitting in jail? It seems to me that taking a "life means life" approach, where a life sentence means you spend the rest of your life in jail unless your conviction is overturned, is the most reasonable approach to murder and violent crime.

This is quite interesting considering that also at the same time, the state of California is coming after Lego Mindstorms for not making the implementation of the kits more easier to use and accessible for less educated kids, specifically those from poorer areas. Lego could be forced to make a more scaled down version of mindstorms with new color coding of certain mechanical parts, and an available alternative "pre-built" kit. You can see the article at the ACLU website

Or see Reno v. ACLU. This was originally ACLU v. Reno, but when the ACLU won in a lower court, the Justice Department appealed. The name's where therefore swtiched.

This is how the case looks whenever a private party brings suit against the federal government over the constitutionality of a law.

And when was the last time you heard of any problems at Disneyland?

Apart from the numerous fatalities on the monorail and rides? Maybe the gangfights broken up by plainclothed security. Let's see... first gangfight in 1976, first recorded murder in 1981. Still, the Disneyland Security guys, backed up by hidden cameras play hardball , they're into handcuffing suspects to metal railings, lengthy interrogations etc. Don't try to enter if you have the wrong hair colour

What's amazing is that a place that caters for so many people has so few problems. But problems it has.

Until US citizens become more aware of privacy concerns, not only will businesses abuse information, but the US government itself. According to the ACLU, census data has been abused in the past, used by the government during WW2 to round up citizens of Japanese ancestry. Considering the local political climate of special interest, and the historical use of private information by the US government, it is clear to see how US policy will unfold.

The list: lawyers who work for the ACLU fighting for civil rights, lawyers who work for NRDC trying to protect the environment, lawywers who work for the EFF, or PFAW, or any other public interest organization. Or all the lawers who work for the state, federal, and local government who try to keep corporations for running amuck. My wife works for the Massachusetts Office of Child Care Services trying to keep kids safe, and help parents find child care they can count on.

And for the record, the attorneys in her office make a lot closer to $20/hour. Care to figure out how long it takes to repay $60,000 in law school student loans at that rate (after you take out rent and food)?

There are thousands of lawyers who choose to work for the public good instead of their own greed. There are tens of thousands who go for the greed, but don't let that make you ignore the ones who Do The Right Thing.

This is merely bizarre. For a truly surreal story, look at the case of Brandi Blackbear.

She was suspended from school for successfully practicing witchcraft. She allegedly cast a spell which made a teacher sick. The ACLU is taking it to court.

Yeah, it's offtopic, but it is interesting.

As several have mentioned, there are some precedent laws dealing with libel over the internet. Pretty disgruntling. I wonder why this escaped the mainstream radar? Surely the ACLU or Oprah would have something to say about it.

DISCLAIMER: I made no intentionally misleading or disparaging comments in this internet post about Oprah Winfrey, the ACLU, or the Texas Cattlemen's Association.

And neither did Slashdot.

Where are the telescreens?
FBI and CIA spyware in the forms of Magic Lantern, Carnivore and Echelon just for starters. Your computer may not be forced to be on all the time, but it sure is two-way and it sure is possible for it to be used to spy on you and probably is via carnivore every time you send or receive email.

The secret police everywhere? The most obvious example of the increased powers of the secret police is the mendaciously named "USA PATRIOT Act" which has been criticized from the right, the left and just about every other leaning as well.

The cameras that monitor my every move?
Tampa, Boston, Orlando, Washington DC are all places with cameras in public areas like sports arenas, streets and airports watching and recording everyone that passes in their field of view. Then there are the traffic cameras that have been installed all across the nation from DC to Hawaii. Plus, don't forget, big business's contribution to Big Brother's campaign - the survelliance camera which you can count on recording your every move inside (and out) of almost any corporate owned retail establishment. That one doesn't even need a link they are so ubiquitous.

So, you see see, even your vain attempt to set up a strawman does not do the problem justice. We are a nation of cowards who long ago sacrificied our liberties for a few ineffective promises of security - if anything the terrorist attack on 9/11 is proof of that. So what do we let our government do? Even more of the same ineffective, yet terribly stiffling, practices that hurt the common man and do so very little to prevent further attacks. Previously each sacrifice was just one small change, hardly anything to be concerned about, but since 9/11 in the degree of the slope has taken a huge curve downward.

P.S. If you think the class of politicians and lawyers are even close to being equal citizens of the state with the average Joe, you are the raving lunatic. Either that, or a member of the privilged elite yourself with a blind eye towards the real state of the nation. If you can't believe that, just take a look at the benefits of being a member of the ruling class in Washington - no mandatory social security - they have their own plan with better returns and more guarantees - they are exempt from the federal fair labor practices laws - they have (good!)health insurance for life as well as a huge pension for life, even after serving only one term. It's a nice gig if you can get it.

Take for instance, the famous case of the "The Tin Drum", winner of the 1979 Best Foreign Film Oscar. For simply suggesting, not even depicting, sexual behavior on the part of children, the film was banned as obscene in a number of areas. ACLU lawsuits followed, of course, which means you can read about the whole thing courtesy of their site.

Am I for protecting children against sexual predators? Yup. But am I worried when the government gets yet another chance to move the goalposts on what's art and what's indecent? You betcha.

Besides, while English may be the United States 'official language' in practice, there really is no such thing.

The ACLU has good information about language and the United States here.

The other end of the spectrum (wanting the country to go entirely English speaking and nothing else, is available here.

Seperation between church and state? Well, okay. But must there be a seperation between church and city or church and school? Why can't each school decide for themselves?

Becuase the school is run by the state. And incientally, state applys to any government in this country - federal, state, local. And government operated school has to abide by the constitution. Not to get ad hominem (sp?) here - but this is really basic American civics.

Secondly, isn't there already a seperation between "church" and state? I figured that with so many religions involved that there was no official "church".

It's not about an official church, its about any religion have any more or less influence on goernment than any other religion. So if we let Religion A have a certain right, we need to let every other religion (even the one's that A doesn't like, or thinks is occult, etc) have the same right. What is often forgotten is that the same applies in reverse - all religion's have protection and free from the government. So the government can't decide to, say, tax your local Baptist church out of existence, and let your local synagogue or mosque get a free ride. Incidentally, the famous "Wall of Separation" quote was in response to a Baptist group writing the president thanking him for supporting the Seperation of Church and State - as they were facing oppression at the hands of thier Congregationalist controled local government.

Also, where is the exact passage that contains "seperation between church and state"?

Well, it all stems from the "Congress shall make no law..." clause in the Constitution about relgions. The actualy phrase was coined in the aforementioned letter by (I am almost sure, but I am tired) Thomas Jefferson. More details about all this can be found at a place like the ACLU or AU.

If you want to get started in the way you describe, I suggest getting some basic exposure to lobbying efforts generally by contacting the Electronic Freedom Foundation or the ACLU's Cyber-Liberties group. They are much better suited to help you on your new carrer path than I.

read the pages to make sure they are what you want, I don't want to make a blanket statement that these are for everyone.

www.eff.org
Electronic Frontier Foundation. Fights for your rights to publish open source, crypto all kinds of /.-esque things.

www.aclu.org
American Civil Liberties Union. You get a little card for joining. These guys have LOTS and LOTS of lawyers. If you read any CNN/Reuters news article about this kind of stuff, you'll usually get a comment from the ACLU somewhere in there. I am a member. There are a few others. I'm not sure which, but hopefully someone will post those. These are our weapons.