Slashdot Mirror

Email that dumbass before personal electronics are ruined forever. It seems only industry reps are invited, wtf? Does the EFF plan to do anything? How about the ACLU?

1. The Nazis want to take away other people's most basic natural rights. Just how is protecting natural rights wrong?

Freedom to contemplate ("wanting") something -- even something evil -- is a natural right. In the US, the force of law is supposed to be used only against an actual act or conspiracy, not an ideology or a religion.

In general, you cannot protect one natural right by withholding another, which is something that even our own ACLU doesn't quite understand.

2. Scientology is most definetly not banned in Germany, Scientologists are not persecuted. Yes, Scientology is criticized. What's wrong with that? Freedom of speech is a natural right.

It most certainly is regulated by the government. Tell me what role the government of Germany should be playing in this affair. This (German) reporter does a great job of illustrating how he doesn't "get" our constitutional separation of church and state, when he claims that CoS activities are only permitted in the States because of the protection of one of our political parties!

Yes, you ARE a troll and you ARE ignorant.

No, our disagreement stems from the fact that I am referring to concepts like "natural rights" that you're apparently thinking about for the first time in your life. :)

The supreme court and the ACLU disagree with you. For example, This page, the ACLU cannot teach every high school kid, everybody in the nation, what their rights are..

http://www.eff.org/

Error
FW-1 at mxwzeb01f: Access denied.

My company's proxy blocks access to the EFF web site. They also block access to the ACLU's site. I'm sure this says something. (Most likely that our IT department never bothered to change the default filter list from the vendor.)

Says Brad Templeton, a 41-year-old Internet entrepreneur and the EFF's chairman: "I sit in fear of the next attack not only because of who it might hurt but because of where it will take this debate."

The attacks themselves had limited effects on the economy and infrastructure of the U.S., but they empowered several monsters to wreak havoc. The consumer confidence boogey man came and went. And after the smoke cleared, Americans felt safer from physical danger because they thought they knew the score.

"If I don't get on an airplane or work in a skyscraper, I'll be OK," they tell themselves. "If I don't open suspicious envelopes and if I don't question the Patriot act, I'll be OK."

But the opportunists still run amok.

opportunist
An opportunist is one who tailors his or her beliefs or actions to circumstances in order to advance his or her interests, without regard to principle. ( The Washington Post Deskbook on Style )

It is unfortunate that there are opportunists in Congress who present a greater "threat to freedom" than Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden presented them with the opportunity to seize power, and they grabbed it.

The ACLU and EFF are the police and FBI that protect us from opportunists. Please familiarize yourself with their activities and support them.

Facial recognition software doesn't work, anyway.

"Didn't we pass a bill to make English the official language of the United States?"

No, but states (scroll a bit) appear to have.

• Privacy Digest: Wednesday, August 25, 1999.

  "CNN" - FCC to appeal court ruling vacating privacy regulations - August 25, 1999.

  A court ruling overturning federal protection of telephone customer records puts the interests of phone companies over the rights of consumers, a top federal regulator says.

  The Federal Communications Commission("FCC") plans to appeal the decision by the three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which could enable phone companies to use information about customers for marketing purposes without obtaining their consent.

  "FCC" Chairman Bill Kennard said the court's decision to reject the commission's rules remove important protections to consumer privacy.

• Privacy Digest: Saturday, August 28, 1999.

  Political News from "Wired News" - Phone Records Up for Grabs?.

  A court ruling ( 98-9518 -- U.S. West Inc. v. Federal Communications Comm. -- 08/18/1999 ) with implications for the use and sale of private telephone records sets a disturbing precedent for how the courts regard privacy, watchdog groups say.

  But the Federal Communications Commission("FCC") will appeal last week's 10th Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which pleased those privacy groups.

  The ruling effectively canceled a vague "FCC" regulation that had forced phone companies to obtain customer permission before using or selling call records for marketing purposes.

• Privacy Digest: Monday, November 1, 1999.

  ACLU Press Release: 10-25-99 - Consumer and Privacy Organizations, Legal Scholars Urge Appeals Court to Protect Consumers' Telephone Privacy.

  In a friend-of-the-court brief filed today, 15 consumer and privacy organizations and 22 legal scholars urged a federal appeals court to reconsider a decision that would allow telephone companies to use private telephone records for marketing purposes.

  The groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the case is of great importance to consumers across the United States.

  The brief, filed in support of a petition from the Federal Communications Commission, asks the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold a privacy provision that was enacted by Congress in 1996 and implemented by the FCC.

• Privacy Digest: Monday, June 12, 2000.

  Political News from "Wired News" - Court Sides With Telcos on Info.

  The Supreme Court let stand Monday a ruling that overturned a federal regulation requiring telephone companies to obtain customer approval before using or disclosing information about their account for marketing purposes.

  The justices declined to review a ruling by a Denver-based U.S. appeals court that the FCC violated constitutional free-speech rights under the First Amendment when it adopted the regulation in 1998.

While I agree that it is vitial that people contact their representatives with their concerns and support organizations like the ACLU and the EFF, another thing you can do to defy mass survailance efforts like Carnivore is to use encryption whenever possible online. I'm sure there are other /.ers out there who know a lot more about the subject (please speak up!), but I wanted to add what information I can for those who might not already know. Here are a few suggestions of ways I know to use encryption:

• Email

• You can encrypt your email communications with others who are also willing to get the right tools. Probably the easies tool is PGP (there's also an international page), or for the free software crowd GPG. PGP makes this pretty easy to use under windows with almost any program with its encrypt clipboard contents feature, but there are also plugins for verious email programs.

• Terminal Sessions/Telent

• Most people probably know about it, but there's ssh, openssh, and if you're using Windows check out Tera Term and its ssh extension.

• Instant Messaging

• My appologies to the *nix crowd, but I don't yet know much about instant messaging on those platforms (soon); however, if you use windows I have seen several instant messaging clients that support encrypted chatting. I suggest Trillian, which is awsome anyway, free, and has encryption features. As far as *nix goes, I'd check out the big ones (e.g. Jabber) and if it isn't in there by default, look for plugins.

This certainly doesn't solve all the problems. The biggest is web browsing. You can use anonymous web browsing tools such as Anonymizer, but that is admittedly kind of a pain. I don't have any good suggestions there. I'd be interested in any other ways others have found to incorperate encryption into their online communications.

And the moderation on the parent is proof that moderators are using their privileges to advance their agenda and silence dissenters.

Make your voice get heard by those who supposedly represent you! Follow this ACLU link and email the Bureau of Prisons today! (and mention this slashdot article too, perhaps they'll actually read about what they fail to represent).

There's a homily about how, when everyone is a lawbreaker, government has total control over everyone -- there will always be a pretext for detaining any person.

As another poster mentioned, it is quite likely that none of us would like to have all of our keystrokes made public -- some of our innermost thoughts go right through our keyboards, and Magic Lantern wouls apparently make no distinction between keystrokes that you intend to publish on the web, and those intended to stay private (financial info, personal letters, diaries, medical correspondence). If you think this sort of tapping would only occur under warrant, you aren't following the latest news.

Since 9/11, we already see our government detaining people for more extended periods of time even when the detaineee has not been accused of a crime, refusing to share the evidence against those detained, and the Dept of Justice is even, per AG Ashcroft, allowed to monitor conversations between people in custody and their lawyers. That last one applies to everyone, and is not limited to suspected illegal immigrants.

This is the top of a very slippery slope. If we give away rights to privacy in our homes and with our legal counsel, we will never get these rights back.

"A man who gives up some of his liberty for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

"Whether or not legislation is truly moral is often a question of who has the power to define morality." -- Jerome Skolnick

One of the most popular uses of the Social Security Number is stalking your ex-spouse. Larry's database should make this... easier?

Then there's the ACLU's stance: There must be no national ID system -- either in law or in practice.

But all of this means nothing, and preaching to the /. choir is pointless. There's only one number the politicians will look at. And it's this one.

If you want to do something proactive, try to do something about that.

I mean if everybody gets the rights of the Constitution afforded to them why then do we have citizenship?

To vote. To pay taxes. To sit on juries. To hold political office. The Rights granted by the Constitution are granted to Persons, not 'Citizens.' I'll head off any complaints about semantics by making reference to the provisions for eligibility to be a Congressman:

No person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty five years, and been seven years a citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state in which he shall be chosen. [Emphasis mine]

If personhood = citizenship, then why did the framers make the distinction between the two when determining eligibility? For further edification on your rights, and mine, and those of visitors from distant lands, I suggest the ACLU (Join Today!).

The ACLU has a nifty-neato page where you can simply enter your ZIP code and generate an email, fax, or postal letter to you Congress critter for free to express your views on post Sept. 11 civil liberties and the USA Patriot Act and urge Congressional inquiry.

Would a centralized database for such a database (i.e., the US Id. Card) provide security advantages? Isn't there a reason that Oregon was the first state?

Here's what the ACLU thinks: "Why Does the ACLU Oppose a National I.D. Card System?"

Copyright © 2001 Michael D. Crawford. Permission is granted to reproduce this document provided it is copied verbatim, in its entirety and that this copyright statement is preserved.

I just feel the need to write right now. Something has gone terribly wrong with the country I was raised to love. The good things that America stands for are being trampled into the dirt by those charged with the burden of protecting them.

I was raised to be a patriotic American. I grew up a military brat - my father was a proud officer of the United States Navy, who served in the Vietnam War. When I was young, I was always told that my father was fighting to preserve the freedoms that were guaranteed us by the United States Constitution.

In the first grade, I attended a school run by the U.S. Navy in Gaeta, Italy, where my father was stationed aboard the U.S.S. Springfield. Each day when we started school we sang patriotic songs and said the Pledge of Allegiance. We were told that America stood for freedom and democracy and justice.

I loved America for what it stood for.

I was told that things like political persecution, detainment without trial, and beating of prisoners were things that happened in other countries, that they would never happen in America. I was told that we fought the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution specifically to ensure such things would never again happen in America.

But today I see the ugly face of repression rising in America. And it is brought to you by the United States Government.

I am not proud to be an American today. I understand well why people in many other countries hate America. I love America, but I despise what it is rapidly becoming.

Something must be done about this.

There are many things that move me to write this, but what moved to me write this right now is that a member of a registered political party was singled out for harassment, first by American Airlines and then by the United States National Guard because of the opinions she holds.

Nancy Oden, one of the U.S. Green Party's top officials, was traveling to a Green Party national meeting from her hometown airport in Bangor, Maine. She had published a statement that calls for Universal Health Care, limitations on free trade, and a stop to the bombing of Afghanistan.

When she got to the American Airlines ticket counter she was told that there was a record in AA's computer indicating that she should be searched anytime she tried to fly.

During the search, she tried to help the security agent with a stuck zipper. The agent grabbed her arm and she pulled it away. The National Guard instructed the airline not to let her fly. The airline told all the other airlines not to let her fly. She was unable to attend the Green Party meeting.

So an official of a registered political party in the supposedly democratic United States was prevented from participating in the political process because her name had been recorded in a computer as someone who should be treated with suspicion.

I fear what America has become.

Also upsetting to me is the recent decision of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to allow eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations as well as opening of their mail. Read the ACLU press release opposing this.

From the Washington Post article U.S. Will Monitor Calls to Lawyers:

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft approved the eavesdropping rule on an emergency basis last week, without the usual waiting period for public comment. It went into effect immediately, permitting the government to monitor conversations and intercept mail between people in custody and their attorneys for up to a year at a time.

The right to a vigorous legal defense is one of the cornerstones of our democracy. It is one of the bulwarks that comes between official repression and those who are repressed, underprivileged, despised, outcast, or working for legitimate political change. You can read about the guarantee of legal representation in our Constitution:

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

I don't have a URL to link you to ( mail me one), but I read that among the hundreds of "suspects" and "material witnesses" rounded up in the days after September 11, many were held without charge and some were beaten by their jailers. Also some were held without being given access to attorneys or their families. I thought that could not happen here...

The recently signed USA PATRIOT act is an assault on our civil liberties the likes of which have not been seen in decades.

Read the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Analysis of USA PATRIOT Act, which largely discusses the law's impact on online activities - did you know that the government can now spy on the key words you search for at search engines like Google and AltaVista? Because computer cracking is now considered terrorism, searching for exploitz can result in your lengthy imprisonment.

The truth is the first victim of war.

Shortly after the September 11th attacks, President Bush said something to the effect that the reason the U.S. was attacked was because the terrorists hated our freedom, and that we must fight the terrorists in order to preserve it.

But Osama bin Laden does not care either way about our freedom. He has made it very clear why he hates the U.S., and none of this has been acknowledged by any official statements that I have heard. What bin Laden objects to are the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the land of the holy city of Mecca, U.S. support for Israel's repression of the Palestinians, and the continued U.S. bombing of Iraq. More than anything, he feels that the presence of U.S. troops in the Islamic Holy Land is a sacrilege.

Whatever your position is on bin Laden's objections to the U.S., you must agree that it is wrong for our President to lie to us. Get informed, and work to understand the complexities behind the enmity between the Islamic and Western world. It's not as simple as our government would have us believe.

You might be interested to know what the Pentagon is doing to improve the United States' image in the Islamic world. Well, I'll tell you. It has taken out a $400,000 contract with Madison Avenue public relations firm The Rendon Group in an effort to help it "orient to the challenge of communication to a wide range of groups around the world". In addition, former advertising executive Charlotte Beers has been apointed to the post of Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, a position she qualifies for because of her previous work promoting such products as Head & Shoulders shampoo.

Read about it in Propaganda Wars.

Well, its comforting to know that we'll be winning friends in Central Asia by showing professionally produced TV commercials depicting friendly Americans in between the news reports of mutilated and starving Afghani children.

If you, like myself, feel that something is wrong with America these days, or with whatever country you find yourself in, speak out about it.

In this troubled times, speaking openly to inform others of injustice or to protest may result in a backlash against you from government officials or others. Please read this speech on the importance of speaking your mind. Have courage - it is only by having the courage to speak and to work against injustice that we can prevent it from getting a lot worse.

Among the ways you can speak out

• Participate in online communities
• Send email to people you know
• Write web pages like this one and post the URL around
• Write letters to the editors of your local newspapers
• Staple leaflets to bulletin boards in your community
• Pass out leaflets in public places
• Call in to talk radio shows

Secondly, participate in what we have left of the democratic process. Our government has at least the appearance of having been elected, and the easiest way to make a change is to vote out the ones who have brought this upon us.

• Volunteer for political candidates you believe in
• Get a bunch of voter registration cards and stand in a public place to register voters
• Donate money to political candidates and parties who respect civil liberties
• Vote
• Write letters to your elected representatives. While you can send email, Congress gets so much spam that they pretty much ignore email these days. Instead, you can find your Congressperson's postal address at www.congress.org - write them a paper letter.

Use encryption to protect your privacy. Please read my page Why You Should Use Encryption as well as my letter Protect Your Rights with Encryption.

You can get encryption software for free - you can use either Pretty Good Privacy or The GNU Privacy Guard. Both offer excellent, military strength protection of your data, and the source code to each is freely available so that programmers are able to inspect it for security defects and back doors.

Teach the people you correspond with to use encryption.

Teach people who work for political change to use encryption. If you don't think political candidates and their staff need to use encryption, you're too young to remember Nixon's Plumbers getting caught breaking into the Watergate Hotel to wiretap the Democratic National Committe.

Join organizations that work to protect civil liberties. Among these are:

• The American Civil Liberties Union - Join Here
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation - Join Here - the EFF works to protect our civil liberties in the online world, including working to ensure that the work of computer programmers is protected as free speech under the First Amendment, thereby ensuring you access to software that guards your security and privacy.
• The Center for Democracy and Technology - Get Involved - working "to promote democratic values and constitutional liberties in the digital age"
• The Electronic Privacy Information Center - Donate Here - "established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values.

One might think, and one certainly hopes, that the ultimate safeguard against these threats to our civil liberties lies with the Supreme Court of the United States. But I am not so certain myself. The Supreme Court has ruled against the dictates of law and the Constitution during other troubled periods in our nation's history.

And we should remember that the current President received a minority of the popular vote and was only declared to have a majority of the Electoral Vote after an obviously politically motivated ruling by the Supreme Court, a decision that has few pretenses of being based on the rule of law. Even had all the ballots been counted, enough Black Florida citizens were prevented from going to the polls that the election would clearly have gone for Gore had they been allowed to exercise their right to vote.

As said in the dissenting opinion by Justices Stevens, Ginsberg and Breyer in Bush v. Gore (note - this is an Adobe Acrobat document):

What must underlie petitioners' (nb. - George W. Bush') entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

We must work together to restore the rule of law in our country - or we shall surely suffer for it. If you do not agree that Fascism can arise in the United States, take heed of the fact that Adolf Hitler was elected as the leader of his country too.

November 12, 2001

Copyright © 2001 Michael D. Crawford. Permission is granted to reproduce this document provided it is copied verbatim, in its entirety and that this copyright statement is preserved.

I just feel the need to write right now. Something has gone terribly wrong with the country I was raised to love. The good things that America stands for are being trampled into the dirt by those charged with the burden of protecting them.

I was raised to be a patriotic American. I grew up a military brat - my father was a proud officer of the United States Navy, who served in the Vietnam War. When I was young, I was always told that my father was fighting to preserve the freedoms that were guaranteed us by the United States Constitution.

In the first grade, I attended a school run by the U.S. Navy in Gaeta, Italy, where my father was stationed aboard the U.S.S. Springfield. Each day when we started school we sang patriotic songs and said the Pledge of Allegiance. We were told that America stood for freedom and democracy and justice.

I loved America for what it stood for.

I was told that things like political persecution, detainment without trial, and beating of prisoners were things that happened in other countries, that they would never happen in America. I was told that we fought the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution specifically to ensure such things would never again happen in America.

But today I see the ugly face of repression rising in America. And it is brought to you by the United States Government.

I am not proud to be an American today. I understand well why people in many other countries hate America. I love America, but I despise what it is rapidly becoming.

Something must be done about this.

There are many things that move me to write this, but what moved to me write this right now is that a member of a registered political party was singled out for harassment, first by American Airlines and then by the United States National Guard because of the opinions she holds.

Nancy Oden, one of the U.S. Green Party's top officials, was traveling to a Green Party national meeting from her hometown airport in Bangor, Maine. She had published a statement that calls for Universal Health Care, limitations on free trade, and a stop to the bombing of Afghanistan.

When she got to the American Airlines ticket counter she was told that there was a record in AA's computer indicating that she should be searched anytime she tried to fly.

During the search, she tried to help the security agent with a stuck zipper. The agent grabbed her arm and she pulled it away. The National Guard instructed the airline not to let her fly. The airline told all the other airlines not to let her fly. She was unable to attend the Green Party meeting.

So an official of a registered political party in the supposedly democratic United States was prevented from participating in the political process because her name had been recorded in a computer as someone who should be treated with suspicion.

I fear what America has become.

Also upsetting to me is the recent decision of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to allow eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations as well as opening of their mail. Read the ACLU press release opposing this.

From the Washington Post article U.S. Will Monitor Calls to Lawyers:

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft approved the eavesdropping rule on an emergency basis last week, without the usual waiting period for public comment. It went into effect immediately, permitting the government to monitor conversations and intercept mail between people in custody and their attorneys for up to a year at a time.

The right to a vigorous legal defense is one of the cornerstones of our democracy. It is one of the bulwarks that comes between official repression and those who are repressed, underprivileged, despised, outcast, or working for legitimate political change. You can read about the guarantee of legal representation in our Constitution:

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

I don't have a URL to link you to ( mail me one), but I read that among the hundreds of "suspects" and "material witnesses" rounded up in the days after September 11, many were held without charge and some were beaten by their jailers. Also some were held without being given access to attorneys or their families. I thought that could not happen here...

The recently signed USA PATRIOT act is an assault on our civil liberties the likes of which have not been seen in decades.

Read the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Analysis of USA PATRIOT Act, which largely discusses the law's impact on online activities - did you know that the government can now spy on the key words you search for at search engines like Google and AltaVista? Because computer cracking is now considered terrorism, searching for exploitz can result in your lengthy imprisonment.

The truth is the first victim of war.

Shortly after the September 11th attacks, President Bush said something to the effect that the reason the U.S. was attacked was because the terrorists hated our freedom, and that we must fight the terrorists in order to preserve it.

But Osama bin Laden does not care either way about our freedom. He has made it very clear why he hates the U.S., and none of this has been acknowledged by any official statements that I have heard. What bin Laden objects to are the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the land of the holy city of Mecca, U.S. support for Israel's repression of the Palestinians, and the continued U.S. bombing of Iraq. More than anything, he feels that the presence of U.S. troops in the Islamic Holy Land is a sacrilege.

Whatever your position is on bin Laden's objections to the U.S., you must agree that it is wrong for our President to lie to us. Get informed, and work to understand the complexities behind the enmity between the Islamic and Western world. It's not as simple as our government would have us believe.

You might be interested to know what the Pentagon is doing to improve the United States' image in the Islamic world. Well, I'll tell you. It has taken out a $400,000 contract with Madison Avenue public relations firm The Rendon Group in an effort to help it "orient to the challenge of communication to a wide range of groups around the world". In addition, former advertising executive Charlotte Beers has been apointed to the post of Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, a position she qualifies for because of her previous work promoting such products as Head & Shoulders shampoo.

Read about it in Propaganda Wars.

Well, its comforting to know that we'll be winning friends in Central Asia by showing professionally produced TV commercials depicting friendly Americans in between the news reports of mutilated and starving Afghani children.

If you, like myself, feel that something is wrong with America these days, or with whatever country you find yourself in, speak out about it.

In this troubled times, speaking openly to inform others of injustice or to protest may result in a backlash against you from government officials or others. Please read this speech on the importance of speaking your mind. Have courage - it is only by having the courage to speak and to work against injustice that we can prevent it from getting a lot worse.

Among the ways you can speak out

• Participate in online communities
• Send email to people you know
• Write web pages like this one and post the URL around
• Write letters to the editors of your local newspapers
• Staple leaflets to bulletin boards in your community
• Pass out leaflets in public places
• Call in to talk radio shows

Secondly, participate in what we have left of the democratic process. Our government has at least the appearance of having been elected, and the easiest way to make a change is to vote out the ones who have brought this upon us.

• Volunteer for political candidates you believe in
• Get a bunch of voter registration cards and stand in a public place to register voters
• Donate money to political candidates and parties who respect civil liberties
• Vote
• Write letters to your elected representatives. While you can send email, Congress gets so much spam that they pretty much ignore email these days. Instead, you can find your Congressperson's postal address at www.congress.org - write them a paper letter.

Use encryption to protect your privacy. Please read my page Why You Should Use Encryption as well as my letter Protect Your Rights with Encryption.

You can get encryption software for free - you can use either Pretty Good Privacy or The GNU Privacy Guard. Both offer excellent, military strength protection of your data, and the source code to each is freely available so that programmers are able to inspect it for security defects and back doors.

Teach the people you correspond with to use encryption.

Teach people who work for political change to use encryption. If you don't think political candidates and their staff need to use encryption, you're too young to remember Nixon's Plumbers getting caught breaking into the Watergate Hotel to wiretap the Democratic National Committe.

Join organizations that work to protect civil liberties. Among these are:

• The American Civil Liberties Union - Join Here
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation - Join Here - the EFF works to protect our civil liberties in the online world, including working to ensure that the work of computer programmers is protected as free speech under the First Amendment, thereby ensuring you access to software that guards your security and privacy.
• The Center for Democracy and Technology - Get Involved - working "to promote democratic values and constitutional liberties in the digital age"
• The Electronic Privacy Information Center - Donate Here - "established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values.

One might think, and one certainly hopes, that the ultimate safeguard against these threats to our civil liberties lies with the Supreme Court of the United States. But I am not so certain myself. The Supreme Court has ruled against the dictates of law and the Constitution during other troubled periods in our nation's history.

And we should remember that the current President received a minority of the popular vote and was only declared to have a majority of the Electoral Vote after an obviously politically motivated ruling by the Supreme Court, a decision that has few pretenses of being based on the rule of law. Even had all the ballots been counted, enough Black Florida citizens were prevented from going to the polls that the election would clearly have gone for Gore had they been allowed to exercise their right to vote.

As said in the dissenting opinion by Justices Stevens, Ginsberg and Breyer in Bush v. Gore (note - this is an Adobe Acrobat document):

What must underlie petitioners' (nb. - George W. Bush') entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

We must work together to restore the rule of law in our country - or we shall surely suffer for it. If you do not agree that Fascism can arise in the United States, take heed of the fact that Adolf Hitler was elected as the leader of his country too.

November 12, 2001

Copyright © 2001 Michael D. Crawford. Permission is granted to reproduce this document provided it is copied verbatim, in its entirety and that this copyright statement is preserved.

I just feel the need to write right now. Something has gone terribly wrong with the country I was raised to love. The good things that America stands for are being trampled into the dirt by those charged with the burden of protecting them.

I was raised to be a patriotic American. I grew up a military brat - my father was a proud officer of the United States Navy, who served in the Vietnam War. When I was young, I was always told that my father was fighting to preserve the freedoms that were guaranteed us by the United States Constitution.

In the first grade, I attended a school run by the U.S. Navy in Gaeta, Italy, where my father was stationed aboard the U.S.S. Springfield. Each day when we started school we sang patriotic songs and said the Pledge of Allegiance. We were told that America stood for freedom and democracy and justice.

I loved America for what it stood for.

I was told that things like political persecution, detainment without trial, and beating of prisoners were things that happened in other countries, that they would never happen in America. I was told that we fought the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution specifically to ensure such things would never again happen in America.

But today I see the ugly face of repression rising in America. And it is brought to you by the United States Government.

I am not proud to be an American today. I understand well why people in many other countries hate America. I love America, but I despise what it is rapidly becoming.

Something must be done about this.

There are many things that move me to write this, but what moved to me write this right now is that a member of a registered political party was singled out for harassment, first by American Airlines and then by the United States National Guard because of the opinions she holds.

Nancy Oden, one of the U.S. Green Party's top officials, was traveling to a Green Party national meeting from her hometown airport in Bangor, Maine. She had published a statement that calls for Universal Health Care, limitations on free trade, and a stop to the bombing of Afghanistan.

When she got to the American Airlines ticket counter she was told that there was a record in AA's computer indicating that she should be searched anytime she tried to fly.

During the search, she tried to help the security agent with a stuck zipper. The agent grabbed her arm and she pulled it away. The National Guard instructed the airline not to let her fly. The airline told all the other airlines not to let her fly. She was unable to attend the Green Party meeting.

So an official of a registered political party in the supposedly democratic United States was prevented from participating in the political process because her name had been recorded in a computer as someone who should be treated with suspicion.

I fear what America has become.

Also upsetting to me is the recent decision of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to allow eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations as well as opening of their mail. Read the ACLU press release opposing this.

From the Washington Post article U.S. Will Monitor Calls to Lawyers:

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft approved the eavesdropping rule on an emergency basis last week, without the usual waiting period for public comment. It went into effect immediately, permitting the government to monitor conversations and intercept mail between people in custody and their attorneys for up to a year at a time.

The right to a vigorous legal defense is one of the cornerstones of our democracy. It is one of the bulwarks that comes between official repression and those who are repressed, underprivileged, despised, outcast, or working for legitimate political change. You can read about the guarantee of legal representation in our Constitution:

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

I don't have a URL to link you to ( mail me one), but I read that among the hundreds of "suspects" and "material witnesses" rounded up in the days after September 11, many were held without charge and some were beaten by their jailers. Also some were held without being given access to attorneys or their families. I thought that could not happen here...

The recently signed USA PATRIOT act is an assault on our civil liberties the likes of which have not been seen in decades.

Read the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Analysis of USA PATRIOT Act, which largely discusses the law's impact on online activities - did you know that the government can now spy on the key words you search for at search engines like Google and AltaVista? Because computer cracking is now considered terrorism, searching for exploitz can result in your lengthy imprisonment.

The truth is the first victim of war.

Shortly after the September 11th attacks, President Bush said something to the effect that the reason the U.S. was attacked was because the terrorists hated our freedom, and that we must fight the terrorists in order to preserve it.

But Osama bin Laden does not care either way about our freedom. He has made it very clear why he hates the U.S., and none of this has been acknowledged by any official statements that I have heard. What bin Laden objects to are the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the land of the holy city of Mecca, U.S. support for Israel's repression of the Palestinians, and the continued U.S. bombing of Iraq. More than anything, he feels that the presence of U.S. troops in the Islamic Holy Land is a sacrilege.

Whatever your position is on bin Laden's objections to the U.S., you must agree that it is wrong for our President to lie to us. Get informed, and work to understand the complexities behind the enmity between the Islamic and Western world. It's not as simple as our government would have us believe.

You might be interested to know what the Pentagon is doing to improve the United States' image in the Islamic world. Well, I'll tell you. It has taken out a $400,000 contract with Madison Avenue public relations firm The Rendon Group in an effort to help it "orient to the challenge of communication to a wide range of groups around the world". In addition, former advertising executive Charlotte Beers has been apointed to the post of Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, a position she qualifies for because of her previous work promoting such products as Head & Shoulders shampoo.

Read about it in Propaganda Wars.

Well, its comforting to know that we'll be winning friends in Central Asia by showing professionally produced TV commercials depicting friendly Americans in between the news reports of mutilated and starving Afghani children.

If you, like myself, feel that something is wrong with America these days, or with whatever country you find yourself in, speak out about it.

In this troubled times, speaking openly to inform others of injustice or to protest may result in a backlash against you from government officials or others. Please read this speech on the importance of speaking your mind. Have courage - it is only by having the courage to speak and to work against injustice that we can prevent it from getting a lot worse.

Among the ways you can speak out

• Participate in online communities
• Send email to people you know
• Write web pages like this one and post the URL around
• Write letters to the editors of your local newspapers
• Staple leaflets to bulletin boards in your community
• Pass out leaflets in public places
• Call in to talk radio shows

Secondly, participate in what we have left of the democratic process. Our government has at least the appearance of having been elected, and the easiest way to make a change is to vote out the ones who have brought this upon us.

• Volunteer for political candidates you believe in
• Get a bunch of voter registration cards and stand in a public place to register voters
• Donate money to political candidates and parties who respect civil liberties
• Vote
• Write letters to your elected representatives. While you can send email, Congress gets so much spam that they pretty much ignore email these days. Instead, you can find your Congressperson's postal address at www.congress.org - write them a paper letter.

Use encryption to protect your privacy. Please read my page Why You Should Use Encryption as well as my letter Protect Your Rights with Encryption.

You can get encryption software for free - you can use either Pretty Good Privacy or The GNU Privacy Guard. Both offer excellent, military strength protection of your data, and the source code to each is freely available so that programmers are able to inspect it for security defects and back doors.

Teach the people you correspond with to use encryption.

Teach people who work for political change to use encryption. If you don't think political candidates and their staff need to use encryption, you're too young to remember Nixon's Plumbers getting caught breaking into the Watergate Hotel to wiretap the Democratic National Committe.

Join organizations that work to protect civil liberties. Among these are:

• The American Civil Liberties Union - Join Here
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation - Join Here - the EFF works to protect our civil liberties in the online world, including working to ensure that the work of computer programmers is protected as free speech under the First Amendment, thereby ensuring you access to software that guards your security and privacy.
• The Center for Democracy and Technology - Get Involved - working "to promote democratic values and constitutional liberties in the digital age"
• The Electronic Privacy Information Center - Donate Here - "established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values.

One might think, and one certainly hopes, that the ultimate safeguard against these threats to our civil liberties lies with the Supreme Court of the United States. But I am not so certain myself. The Supreme Court has ruled against the dictates of law and the Constitution during other troubled periods in our nation's history.

And we should remember that the current President received a minority of the popular vote and was only declared to have a majority of the Electoral Vote after an obviously politically motivated ruling by the Supreme Court, a decision that has few pretenses of being based on the rule of law. Even had all the ballots been counted, enough Black Florida citizens were prevented from going to the polls that the election would clearly have gone for Gore had they been allowed to exercise their right to vote.

As said in the dissenting opinion by Justices Stevens, Ginsberg and Breyer in Bush v. Gore (note - this is an Adobe Acrobat document):

What must underlie petitioners' (nb. - George W. Bush') entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

We must work together to restore the rule of law in our country - or we shall surely suffer for it. If you do not agree that Fascism can arise in the United States, take heed of the fact that Adolf Hitler was elected as the leader of his country too.

November 12, 2001

Political News from Wired News - Cybercrime Treaty Finally Ready. After four years of haggling over the language, several countries including the United States will sign a cybercrime treaty.

WildernessCoast.org - Cybercrime Treaty Bibliography -- By Date. A wide collection of links that talk about the Cybercrime Treaty Same info sorted by title.

Council of Europe - Convention on Cybercrime.

The Convention on Cybercrime has been adopted by the Committee of Ministers during its 109th Session, on 8 November 2001 and will be opened for signature, in Budapest, on 23 November 2001.

The Convention will be the first international treaty on crimes committed via the Internet and other computer networks, dealing particularly with infringements of copyright, computer-related fraud, child pornography and violations of network security. It also contains a series of powers and procedures such as the search of computer networks and interception.

Its main objective, set out in the preamble, is to pursue a common criminal policy aimed at the protection of society against cybercrime, especially by adopting appropriate legislation and fostering international co-operation.

The Convention is the product of four years of work by Council of Europe experts, but also by the United States, Canada, Japan and other countries which are not members of the organisation.

It will be supplemented by an additional protocol making any publication of racist and xenophobic propaganda via computer networks a criminal offence.

[ ... ]

But Fred Eisner, a consultant for the Dutch government and private companies, said the draft made unfair demands on Internet service providers by asking them to track Web users' online movements.

"This draft convention lacks balance," Eisner told the assembly. "The convention explicitly gives much more power to law enforcement agencies and it has no system of checks and balances."

Bruce McConnell, president of McConnell International, a Washington-based consulting firm, said the treaty should be more forceful in protecting the privacy of Web users who are already worried about being spied on.

"There is concern that the powers of surveillance ... are not balanced by comparable protections for individuals' privacy," he said.

Maybe you trust the law-enforcement chiefs in D.C. to do the right thing. But here's the catch. The same new powers given to the United States will also handed over to Bulgaria, Romania, Azerbaijan, and other Council of Europe nations that-although officially democratic now-don't have a strong traditions of checks and balances on police power.

Do you want investigators rummaging around your clients' computer systems on warrants issued by former Soviet bloc nations?

That's the prospect that has pushed AT&T Corporation and other high-technology companies into feverishly trying to stop or at least soften the treaty. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Information Technology Association of America also oppose it.

Stewart Baker is one of the chief lobbyists for the treaty opponents. As a former general counsel of the National Security Agency and recipient of the Department of Defense Medal for Meritorious Civilian Service, he's got street cred on these issues in corporate America.

What worries Baker and his colleagues? Consider the following hypothetical: A Los Angeles screenwriter corresponds by e-mail with a neo-Nazi in Germany while researching a script. Shortly after, he finds federal agents examining the files on his home computer. The agents also visit America Online Inc. to retrieve records of the screenwriter's AOL usage.

The agents are fulfilling a warrant issued by German authorities allowing them to search for Nazi propaganda. Such material is unlawful in Germany but not in the U.S. They framed their warrant in terms of "suspected terrorist activity."

LAW.com (requires cookies) - International Treaty on Cybercrime Poses Burden on High-Tech Companies.

Maybe you're a civil libertarian, and maybe you're not. Maybe you worry about how the United States exercises its vast investigative and prosecutorial powers, and maybe you don't.

But if you counsel U.S. corporations on computer-related issues, you should be concerned about a new proposed treaty known as the "Convention on Cybercrime." The Council of Europe, a 43-nation public body created to promote democracy and the rule of law, is nominally drafting the treaty. Curiously, however, the primary architect is the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation are using a foreign forum to create an international law-enforcement regime that favors the interests of the feds over those of ordinary citizens and businesses. Their goal is to make it easier to get evidence from abroad and to extradite and prosecute foreign nationals for certain kinds of crimes.

Maybe you trust the law-enforcement chiefs in D.C. to do the right thing. But here's the catch. The same new powers given to the United States will also be handed over to Bulgaria, Romania, Azerbaijan, and other Council of Europe nations that -- although officially democratic now -- don't have a strong tradition of checks and balances on police power.

[ ... ]

Stewart Baker, a partner at Washington, D.C.'s Steptoe & Johnson, is one of the chief lobbyists for the treaty's opponents. As a former general counsel of the National Security Agency and recipient of the U.S. Department of Defense Medal for Meritorious Civilian Service, he's got street credentials on these issues in corporate America.

Slashdot | Implications Of The International Cybercrime Treaty.

SiliconValley.com part of San Jose Mercury News - Pioneer cybercrime pact tightens privacy rules.

MS-NBC - Pioneer cybercrime pact tightens privacy rules. PARIS, May 25 -- Stiff criticism from the EU and pressure groups has prompted drafters of the world's first treaty against cybercrime to tighten provisions protecting privacy online, the final text showed Friday.

[ ... ]

Against EU objections, it also limits the right of a country to reject a request from abroad to store and hand over data in potential crime cases if the requesting country thinks it could be misused.

The text says states should make sure that systems operators or other people who know how to use a certain system can be ordered to cooperate in any such a cyberprobe.

PARIS (Reuters) - Stiff criticism from the EU and pressure groups has prompted drafters of the world's first treaty against cybercrime to tighten provisions protecting privacy online, the final text showed on Friday.

The Council of Europe, a 43-state human rights watchdog, has amended the text to ensure police respect privacy rights when they follow digital trails to fight online crimes such as hacking, spreading viruses, using stolen credit card numbers or defrauding banks.

''The guarantees in the treaty have been reinforced,'' Peter Csonka, deputy head of the economic crime division at the Council's headquarters in Strasbourg, told Reuters after the Council posted the final text -- version 27 -- on its Web site.

But the treaty, which has aroused heated debate in cyberspace since its draft text became public last year, ignored calls by Internet service providers (ISPs) for fewer costly requirements on preserving data that could be linked to a crime.

It still accorded police wide powers to chase suspected cybercriminals -- powers some critics say go beyond what is legal in some Council member states or in observer countries like the United States, Canada and Japan due to sign the treaty.

ZDNet - Internet founder worried over EU cybercrime plans.

BRUSSELS --Vint Cerf, a founding father of today's Internet, said on Thursday that European Union plans for new rules to fight crime on the Web risked clashing with existing EU privacy regulations.

Cerf, who helped develop the Internet in the early 70s shortly after graduating from Stanford University and now works for WorldCom, said more secure network systems were an immediate priority for the successful development of the ubiquitous Web.

He told Reuters in an interview that Internet traffic should be retained only for billing purposes and was too cumbersome to be stored for police investigations.

Changes to a controversial treaty on cybercrime have done nothing to improve it, say civil liberty campaigners.

Next week, the Council of Europe will vote on the treaty, which has been redrafted 26 times before reaching its final version late in May.

The most recent changes were made to take into account the fears of civil liberty and privacy campaigners. But cyber-rights groups say the latest changes are purely cosmetic and have not diluted what they describe as its most pernicious sections.

The groups say that, if adopted in its current form, the treaty could lead to changes in legislation that would stifle rights to privacy and do little to curb the activities of law enforcement agencies.

[ ... ]

In December 2000, 23 organisations, banding together under the banner of the Global Internet Liberty Campaign (GILC), signed a letter condemning the 25th draft of the treaty as "appalling", and warned that it handed law enforcement agencies sweeping powers to snoop and could seriously erode online privacy.

Now, three civil liberty groups, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Privacy International, have sent another letter to the Council of Europe outlining their "continuing concerns" over the wording of the treaty and saying that their fears have not been laid to rest.

The letter chastises the Council of Europe for refusing to open up the redrafting debates to non-governmental organisations and for, it says, ignoring the human rights and privacy concerns of organisations such as the GILC.

It goes on to say that the original criticisms still stand, and that the treaty does not pay enough attention to existing laws which safeguard human rights. It says the treaty's recommendations on protecting privacy are vague and do not go far enough.

IT industry gurus have branded the Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime 'foolish, unworkable and a legal con trick'.

The controversial treaty provides a blanket legislation to deal with all forms of internet crime from hacking to online pornography.

Caspar Bowden, director of internet think-tank FIPR, said: "The Convention is essentially a legal con trick, drafted in secret by a handful of nameless bureaucrats. It equates the internet - a network of private networks - with 'cyberspace', a metaphor from science fiction.

"By this sleight of hand, the internet is defined as a public space over which law enforcement should be granted unfettered powers of surveillance and extradition," he added.

International policy-makers this week ended a round of talks aimed at setting common rules affecting online trade and commerce, but they made little progress in bridging divisions that threaten to delay the pact.

In the works for nearly a decade, the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments is still almost unknown outside international policy circles. Nevertheless, it could have broad implications for consumers and businesses by setting new rules for online copyrights, free speech and e-commerce--if it is approved.

Opposition to the treaty heated up Wednesday, when a two-week drafting session wrapped up with few concessions to critics, primarily from the United States, who say the pact threatens free speech and could force Internet service providers to become global content police.

"In a nutshell, it will strangle the Internet with a suffocating blanket of overlapping jurisdictional claims, expose every Web page publisher to liabilities for libel, defamation and other speech offenses from virtually any country, (and) effectively strip Internet service providers of protections from litigation over the content they carry," Jamie Love, director of Ralph Nader's Consumer Project on Technology (CPT), wrote in a report after the meeting.

The treaty is one of several efforts by the global community to grapple with a complicated legal issues on a borderless Web.

Four years ago, nations including the United States signed onto a World Intellectual Property Organization pact to protect copyright in the digital age. And several countries, including the United States, are hammering out the world's first cybercrime treaty, which would provide a standard for fighting online crime.

The Hague treaty differs from those efforts because it would not outline specific laws participants must follow. It's much broader, requiring participants to agree to enforce each others' laws on a variety of topics. As it stands, the treaty would require courts to enforce the commercial laws of the convention's 52 member nations, even if they prohibit actions that are legal under local laws.

BRUSSELS - The blueprint for a global code on Cyber-crime was agreed on in Strasbourg, France, Friday, paving the way for international rules governing online copyright infringement, online fraud, child pornography and hacking.

The 41 members of the Council of Europe (CoE), plus the U.S., Canada and Japan, signed on to a draft convention on cybercrime that is set to be rubber-stamped at ministerial level in September.

"Once adopted, the Convention will be the first international treaty on criminal offenses committed through the use of Internet and other computer networks," the Council of Europe said in a statement.

In September, the Council of Europe approved the Convention on cybercrime, a historic treatise that lays the foundation for legislation allowing for a greater sharing of information between countries to combat the rise of cybercrime.

The treatise isn't binding, but instead would have to be adopted into law by its 43 European member states and five outside countries including the United States, Canada and Japan.

The treaty is broad, covering crimes committed on the Internet such as fraud, child pornography and violations of computer network security. It also sets up global policing procedures for conducting computer searches, interception of e-mails, and extradition of criminal suspects.

More details on the CyberCrime Treaty can be found in the Privacy Digest archives dated September 26,2000, September 27,2000, October 09,2000, October 16,2000, October 18,2000, October 19,2000, October 25,2000, November 14,2000, November 20,2000, November 22,2000 and March 24,2001. This is not all the information at Privacy Digest and other sites so if you want to know more try a search

Chart of surveillance law changes

Sorry to inform you all about this, but the recently passed "Anti-Terroism bill" makes it easier for the FBI to ask england to get information on a suspected criminal, because now evidence from a "foriegn" nation is admissable in court no matter how it was retreived. so you no longer have protection against an illegal search, because our government just needs to ask someone else's government to do the breakin for them.

Also if you read the new Anti-Terroism bill you will find that the wire taping rights have been expanded, and this might not be illegal anymore.

for more information on the homeland security act check out aclu archives

Well, you know ... if they were Customs Officers, they could check your rectum for fingernail clippers if you looked at them the wrong way; and if you happened to have any outgoing international snailmail on you, they could read that too -- and these searches will be completely constitutional IF it becomes law.

I feel safer already.

In recent years we have seen a raft of laws that, under one guise or another, act to limit speech and dissemination of information. Your own experience with DeCSS is a prime example. Since September 11 there has been a renewed push in Governmental circles not only to restrict information by refusing to comply with FOIA requests but to demand information by increasing surveillance.

As someone who has dealt with this and won, how do you see it progressing? Do you think that this will pass and these laws will be overturned? Or do you see this as only the beginning?

In recent years we have seen a raft of laws that, under one guise or another, act to limit speech and dissemination of information. Your own experience with DeCSS is a prime example. Since September 11 there has been a renewed push in Governmental circles not only to restrict information by refusing to comply with FOIA requests but to demand information by increasing surveillance.

As someone who has dealt with this and won, how do you see it progressing? Do you think that this will pass and these laws will be overturned? Or do you see this as only the beginning?

I tried submitting this story myself, but guess they didn't like my version, or he got it in first.

Anyway, here's some commentary that I included with version I wrote:

American Civil Liberties Union
Center for Democracy and Technology
Yahoo! News

Do you know how easy this is? I recently had a boss confront me about 3 months worth of URL accesses. Fortunately, I have a tool available to me to keep them honest. Either party can extract their pound of flesh ;-)

The newest revisions included in the USA act awaiting passage this very moment blur the lines considerably, reducing all citizens to potential victims of secret FISA warrants, black bag jobs, and surveillance of their communications and financial transactions as detailed in this write-up of the bill at ACLU.ORG

More troubling by far are the sentiments echoed in this story at the Washington Post, which contain speculations by government officials about the need to apply torture to material witnesses and the justification for this torture due to the urgent nature of the investigation. Mind you, these are material witnesses, not indicted criminal suspects. The fact that they have not been indicted removes all Miranda rights protections from them, including right to counsel. The fact that they are not citizens removes any protections against unlimited detention. There are persistent but unconfirmed reports of the detainees in Manhattan being subjected to sleep and sensory deprivation, and reports that doctors are being called in to determine exactly the levels of "pressure" they can be subjected to, as well as recommending drugs to be used to assist in interrogation. These reports seem to indicate that the torture has already started, and is not merely being discussed. The participation of doctors in this kind of torture, even in a monitoring capacity, is directly against the Nuremberg Code, the UN Principles of Medical Ethics, and the UN Convention against Torture.

As a nation, we are perilously close to returning to the days of the Cold War and before when unwitting human experimentation in mind-control and behavior modification was conducted in secret, when U.S. soldiers were drugged and in some cases driven to suicide in order to try out the very "truth serums" being discussed in the Post article, and when conscientious objectors were used as guinea pigs for starvation and cold weather exposure experiments not so very different from those that Nazi doctors were hung for at the end of WWII.

Looking at things from a legal point of view, we are either at war with someone, or we are not. If we are at war, then aren't the people being held in Manhattan Prisoners of War, and subject to the protections of the Geneva Convention? If we are not at war, then this all devolves into a pure criminal proceeding where coerced testimony, "assisted interrogation" and the like are clearly unconstitutional and will poison any cases ever brought against these people.

The corrupting influence at work here is the mixing of Intelligence activities and criminal proceedings, which are anathema to each other. Intelligence is the world of innuendo, hunches, and threads of circumstance where decisions to attack aspirin factories with cruise missiles can be made on the slimmest of evidence, or none at all. Criminal prosecution depends on rigorously documented chains of evidence, sworn testimony and eye-witnesses. Phrases like "beyond a reasonable doubt" seemed to appear frequently the two times I was a juror, once in a murder trial. Due to this difference, the FBI is not institutionally equipped to operate in the Intelligence community, and the CIA is psychologically unable to grasp the difference between rumor and evidence. Mixing the two as the USA act does will forever damage the integrity of our nation's government and reduce the United States to a totalitarian state the likes of which the world has never seen before:

Every totalitarian distopia ever envisioned in literature (or occurring in real life, over time) has one attribute in common: the crushing lack of personal luxury for the masses. This has been at least a partial stimulus to any resistance against these regimes. The levels of affluence in most of the US, combined with the public's ability to have their attention monopolized by the most recent media craze, whether the Gary Condit affair, or the current Anthrax scare, makes us most susceptible to a gradual erosion of our rights. The frogs are being not so gently boiled right now and no one is complaining too much.

Write to your Congress-Critters today!

"I fear for the Republic"

Tom Porter

band together to resist these laws. there's power in numbers, join the ACLU

The boys at the NSA have been doing this and more for years with ECHELON. Check out the links Link 1, Link 2

For a bit of enlightment on the relationship between these two chuckleheads, Read This.

Patriot ACT, USA ACT, ATA:

I know everyone has read and knows something about these bills, but here is a break down of what they mean in terms of things like computer crime and vandalism...

(a) Our Constitution gaurantees "due process" to all PERSONS, not all CITIZENS, meaning that immigrants may also enjoy these rights. However, under these acts, immigrants can be held on suspiscion of potential crime (ridiculous!). The Senate Bill allows for indefinite jail time without due process...

(b) These new laws broaden the definition of Terrorism to include things that include vandilism, computer crime, and (un)civil disobedience. There already exist laws that broadly define terrorism, and flying planes into buildings filled with thousands of innocent people meets those requirements. Marching in a demonstration is not terrorism, throwing a brick through a starbucks window is vandalism and property damage not terrorism, and hacking a website is not terrorism, (it is vandalism!). Also, under terrorism laws, people who harbor terrorists, or give terrorists advice can also be tried as terrorists! If you stay on my couch and then throw a brick at starbucks the next day, I am a terrorist. If I post a security weakness in Microsoft web servers on my website to warn people, and some kid uses the info to hack into someone's site, I am a terrorist!

(c) The laws give the FBI new powers to wiretap and read emails without a warrant. They can also read e-mails and URLS. If I want to read news about Bombs and Terrorists on google, and I type in "Bombs" and "Terrorists" into the field, that is all the FBI needs to suspect me of crime and set up a phone tap or a Carnivore search on me. The FBI is supposed to only be able to know where an email comes from and where it is going. They are supposed to only read the "To:" and "From:" fields of the e-mails, but how can you look at the header of an e-mail and not happen to glance at the "Subject:" line? Basically, that is what is happening in these laws and with Carnivore. ISP's have to install it on their servers. It is like a black box, no one can monitor what the FBI is doing or reading!

THESE LAWS ARE UNECESSARY FOR COMBATING TERRORISM! CURRENT LAWS ARE SUFFICIENT! WHY IS THE FBI, CIA, AND JUSTICE DEPARTMENT DOING THIS?

Resources:

• The entire Senate bill (the USA act) is here somewhere...
• The ACLU has an online chart that compares the three bills with current law.
• The EFF has great resources about these laws.
  
• EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) also has good info...

Actually, the goal of terrorism is to get draw attention to the cause that the terrorists support, not kill large numbers of people.

I'm one of those crazy /. readers that reads the pages linked to by the article. It's in the comparison by the ACLU that they say ATA, PARTIOT, and USA. I took the ACLU's statement to override what /. said since it isn't what I call the paragon of proper reporting.

The ACLU has consistently argued that religious activities on campus are the same as other activities on campus, and have to be allowed equal access under the same rules. (Conversely, they argue they don't get any special rights, either.) They also have said, over and over, that certain types of speech cannot be disallowed because people simply don't like, stretching all the way back to the infamous time they defended the rights of neo-Nazis to march though a predominately Jewish area., which oddly enough I cannot find a link about. They caught a lot of flak for that one.

Now, the ACLU don't do gun control issues, for whatever reasons. But it's not like they support it, either. Nothing stops people from giving to the NRA and the ACLU.

Here's one SCENARIO from the ACLU or why not just read the summary of the law.

Here's one SCENARIO from the ACLU or why not just read the summary of the law.

Happy New Year: It's 1984

With technical people, the argument should be towards the ineffectiveness of the USA bill

CRYPTO-GRAM special issue

And in general

EFF alerts

ACLU site

There is an chart at the ACLU that compares the differences between current law and the new laws that are trickling through the House and Senate.

I went to the San Francisco EFF event that discussed the scope of these bills. It was a great talk. I can't believe how broadly unconstitutional these new bills are!

There is an chart at the ACLU that compares the differences between current law and the new laws that are trickling through the House and Senate.

I went to the San Francisco EFF event that discussed the scope of these bills. It was a great talk. I can't believe how broadly unconstitutional these new bills are!

We can and should individually contact our legislators about issues we feel are important. However, if we don't organize and address problems with the strength of numbers, we're wasting our efforts. Whatever you feel is the issue that must be addressed, join! Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, or the Open Source Lobby.

The letter's already written (and you can change it), they will fax, email, or snail-mail it for you, no charge, and they automatically address it to YOUR Senators based on your ZIP code.

Senators and their staffers read faxes. And they get there almost as fast as email.

(I'm posting anonymously because this has been posted inside a thread on this story (hence I'm "redundant") but if someone will mod this up it has a better chance of being seen and causing a real effect. So, I'm posting anonymously because I don't want the kharma that the other poster should be getting.)

http://www.aclu.org/action/usa107.html

I have not seen ACLU participate in DMCA cases or against proposed legislation such as SSSCA. As a result, I assume the ACLU has no argument over such laws.

just because you haven't seen something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. in actuality, the ACLU filed a friend-of-court-brief int the 2600 decss case.

-BlueLines

But, given that ACLU has a mission, stating the obvious, to promote liberties, why has the ACLU long been absent on issues related to technology?

What are you talking about? The ACLU has a long history of defending tech rights, and were the first organization to challenge an Internet-related federal law and have it heard by the Supreme Court. Check out Reno v. ACLU if you haven't done so before. This case was heard way, way back in 1997. The ACLU has also worked in conjunction with the EFF and/or EPIC on numerous occasions.

More recently they have filed amicus briefs in cases regarding anonymous speech on the net, as well as in the DeCSS case.

To state that the ACLU has "no argument" with laws such as the DMCA or the SSSCA is to argue from simple ignorance. Both of those laws directly conflict with the values that the ACLU tries to advance and preserve.

But, given that ACLU has a mission, stating the obvious, to promote liberties, why has the ACLU long been absent on issues related to technology?

What are you talking about? The ACLU has a long history of defending tech rights, and were the first organization to challenge an Internet-related federal law and have it heard by the Supreme Court. Check out Reno v. ACLU if you haven't done so before. This case was heard way, way back in 1997. The ACLU has also worked in conjunction with the EFF and/or EPIC on numerous occasions.

More recently they have filed amicus briefs in cases regarding anonymous speech on the net, as well as in the DeCSS case.

To state that the ACLU has "no argument" with laws such as the DMCA or the SSSCA is to argue from simple ignorance. Both of those laws directly conflict with the values that the ACLU tries to advance and preserve.

But, given that ACLU has a mission, stating the obvious, to promote liberties, why has the ACLU long been absent on issues related to technology?

What are you talking about? The ACLU has a long history of defending tech rights, and were the first organization to challenge an Internet-related federal law and have it heard by the Supreme Court. Check out Reno v. ACLU if you haven't done so before. This case was heard way, way back in 1997. The ACLU has also worked in conjunction with the EFF and/or EPIC on numerous occasions.

More recently they have filed amicus briefs in cases regarding anonymous speech on the net, as well as in the DeCSS case.

To state that the ACLU has "no argument" with laws such as the DMCA or the SSSCA is to argue from simple ignorance. Both of those laws directly conflict with the values that the ACLU tries to advance and preserve.

USA act (Senate bill)
PATRIOT act (House bill)

I already did, but unfortunatly, my "representatives" (McCain, Kyl, and Jeff Flake from AZ) are all sponsors of these horrible bills.

"History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure."

- Justice Thurgood Marshall, 1989

USA act (Senate bill)
PATRIOT act (House bill)

I already did, but unfortunatly, my "representatives" (McCain, Kyl, and Jeff Flake from AZ) are all sponsors of these horrible bills.

"History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure."

- Justice Thurgood Marshall, 1989

As an alternative, if you simply must have currrently popular music, get it from secondspin.com or switchhouse.com or any other shop that sells used CDs. They sound just as good as the original, and more importantly, you are neither breaking any laws (yet) nor supporting the RIAA. Write your congress-critter anyways. It's the only way to keep your liberties.