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Justice Department Censors ACLU Web Site
phr1 writes "According to the Washington Post, the ACLU was forced to remove a paragraph from their online press release, that specified what kind of information FBI agents could request under the Patriot Act that the ACLU has been suing over. "
The dispute over the ACLU's April 28 news release centered on two paragraphs. The first laid out the court's schedule for receiving legal briefs and noted the name of the New York-based judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero.
The second paragraph read: "The provision under challenge allows an FBI agent to write a letter demanding the disclosure of the name, screen names, addresses, e-mail header information, and other sensitive information held by 'electronic communication service providers.' "
And three paragraphs up...
The second paragraph read: "The provision under challenge allows an FBI agent to write a letter demanding the disclosure of the name, screen names, addresses, e-mail header information, and other sensitive information held by 'electronic communication service providers.' "
Nice one, Washington Post!
Kerry voted for PATRIOT.
He's no savior.
Here's Google's cache of the offending press release. Judging from the story link, this looks like the censored text:
"The ACLU has led opposition to controversial portions of the Patriot Act, filing a challenge to Section 215, another provision that allows the FBI to gain access to sensitive records, and filing briefs before the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to oppose expanded wiretaps. With support from a broad right-left coalition, the ACLU has also encouraged passage of approximately 300 local resolutions against anti-civil liberties portions of the law, and has urged Congress to leave in place the "sunsets" for Patriot Act provisions set to expire in 2005."
"The parties have agreed to a briefing schedule in the case. The ACLU will file a summary judgment motion on May 17, 2004; the government will respond on June 7, 2004; all briefing will be completed in July 2004. The court is likely to schedule arguments in the case in late summer 2004. The case is assigned to Judge Victor Marrero."
But wait! I went to the ACLU's actual page and found the same text. Cruising through the most recent press releases turned up a new release that tells the story. Long story short, this story's already out of date (the info has been reinstated)! That doesn't mean that the government didn't fuck up, just that at least one judge hasn't lost his/her mind.
A provider of electronic communication service or remote computing service shall disclose to a governmental entity the -
(A)
name;
(B)
address;
(C)
local and long distance telephone connection records, or records of session times and durations;
(D)
length of service (including start date) and types of service utilized;
(E)
telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and
(F)
means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number),
of a subscriber to or customer of such service when the governmental entity uses an administrative subpoena authorized by a Federal or State statute or a Federal or State grand jury or trial subpoena or any means available under paragraph (1).
(3)
A governmental entity receiving records or information under this subsection is not required to provide notice to a subscriber or customer.
we have a law which allows secret investigations and arrests, and prohibits the accused from telling anyone about what's being done to them
I've wondered, when someone receives a "National Security Letter" -- since it's illegal to reveal you've gotten one -- how does the recipient go about getting a lawyer?
"Law Offices."
"Uh, hi, I think I need a lawyer."
"What sort of legal services do you need sir?"
"Uh, I can't say."
"You can't say?"
"No, that's illegal, but I need a lawyer, to help me with this thing I can't talk about. You know, a secret lawyer for secret charges."
This is not the United States of America I learned about in school.
But then neither is sending Canadian Maher Arar to Syria to be tortured, or exposing an undercover CIA agent for petty personal revenge, or setting up secret U.S. prison camps for 10,000, or Military Intelligence encouraging torture in those prisons, or lying about the reasons for going to war.
Wake up -- this is the same administration that ignored warnings of 9/11. Why do we keep rewarding this secretive, authoritarian, and incompetent administration?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
You can get a lawyer, but the PATRIOT act allows the feds to monitor all your conversations with your lawyer, and charge your lawyer as a conspirator. If they can spin a criminal investigation as a terrorist investigation, they play by a whole different set of rules: sealed charges, secret detentions, secret courts.
I've been voting Libertarian every election since Reagan, and it's not working.
More music, fewer hits
Huh? I am from Wisconsin. Feingold was the only one who voted against it. Thank God for him.
The record is here.
Wellstone voted Nay... don't you just love misinformation. Conspiracy theorists love that!
What's this? Bush has appointed Federal judges? I thought the Democrats had stone walled every judge he's nominated in the past four years. If Kerry comes in, you can be sure the Republicans will return the favor.
No, they blocked the 4 most objectionable nominees out of 100+. The rest were confirmed.
Get your facts straight.
It is goddamn scary that a U.S. citizen even has to consider posting information on foreign ground to achieve freedom of speech and press.
Sami Al-Hussayen is being tried under the Patriot Act right now for giving "aid and comfort" to "designated terrorist groups."
Al-Hussayen's "crime" was to set up a web site for groups the government claims support terrorism, and acting as few as sixteen times as a "moderator" in a discussion forum on that web site.
Ironically, Sami Al-Hussayen came to america to avoid arrest in Egypt for condemning Islamic violence.
Basically, Al-Hussayen's crime was to be associated with a web site that praised suicide bombing in Chechnia and Israel.
Now, I'm against terrorism in Israel (and also against the hard-line Likud land grabs, for that matter), but I'm not convinced the Chechens are not freedom fighters in their fight against the Russians as much as were the Afghans who fought the Soviet invasion in 1979.
Does that mean that if I set up a web site calling for support of Chechen independence, I'd go to prison? Apparently so. What happened to the right to hold an opinion and freely speak it?
Yes, today in the country that calls itself the "Land of the Free", where George Bush claims our enemies "hate us for our freedoms", you can go to Federal Prison for helping to set up a web site that the government later decides to outlaw.
This is liberty?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
That seems to be the case for most Democrats. Voting against the "Patriot Act" would have been political suicide at the time.
Three points:
1) Russ Feingold voted against it. It'll be interesting to see if this comes back to bite him in the ass - he's up for re-election this fall. I hope he makes it; he's one of the few politicians in either party that I respect (even though I think the campaign finance reform bill is unconstitutional).
2) Most politicians didn't even read it before they voted on it, which is why there's a minor backlash against it now from both parties. Fortunately, at least some people paid attention. The Republican committee chairman responsible for vetting the bill before it hit the floor (I forget his name) actually read the original version that Ashcroft submitted, and deleted significant portions. Apparently the original allowed suspension of habeas corpus, and the chairman's response was something along the lines of "WTF?" (Of course, the administration seems to be getting away with that on its own; I hope the SCOTUS slaps them down.)
3) The bill was designed to fix some of the more obvious intelligence failures leading up to 9/11. Although there's a lot of nasty stuff in it, people recognized immediately that some changes would need to be made. So, they were in a hurry to pass the bill because it was obvious that they'd been caught with their pants down. Which, of course, meant that they voted without thinking.
He is also being charged with transferring large sums of money to a terrorist organization. I'm not saying it's right that he's being charged for moderating a web board, but you're presenting just one of the charges against him and implying that he was thrown in jail solely for that reason.
Give me a break. Castro hasn't stopped torturing and murdering his enemies. Yeah, what the US is doing to prisoners violates the Geneva Convention, but they're all walking out with their body parts intact and alive, which is still a lot better than a lot of people get in places like Cuba.
This is not entirely true. A number of the pictures show prisoners that have been severely beaten. One picture showed a prisoner that had been stuffed in a body bag packed with ice; the photo showed the man after he died.
Three prisoners in Afghanistan have been killed during interogation (the investigations are ongoing after 18 months), two at Army bases and a third at a CIA facility on the Pakistan border. There are also at least 25 cases of Iraqi prisoners dying in US custody, 13 of them under suspicious circumstances.
On Meet the Press, Republican senator Lindsey Graham pointed out, "This is not just about humiliation, Tim. The allegations in this report involve rape and murder. Please, don't leave this whole scenario thinking that this is just about a humiliating experience. This is about system failure. This is about felony offenses."
Granted, the abuses in the US run Iraqi prisons do not match those under Saddam. They are worse, however, than most Middle Eastern countries.
Here are the paragraphs that were removed, (per the Washington Post)
[The dispute over the ACLU's April 28 news release centered on two paragraphs. The first laid out the court's schedule for receiving legal briefs and noted the name of the New York-based judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero.
The second paragraph read: "The provision under challenge allows an FBI agent to write a letter demanding the disclosure of the name, screen names, addresses, e-mail header information, and other sensitive information held by 'electronic communication service providers.' " ]
That's really a narrow minded, uninformed perspective you have there, no doubt propagated by the media. It's as accurate a characterization of the ACLU as the myth that Al Gore Invented the Internet or the woman who sued McDonalds for spilling coffee was frivolous. If you do the research you find the media spins these things wildly out of control, or else finds the most atypical fringe examples and amplifies them as if they're locoust-sized plagues about to decend upon all mankind.
Here's a classic example of how left-wing the ACLU is:
It's funny how right-wing pundits will harp for hours about three hippies chaining themselves to a tree for hours, and conveniently ignore the arrest of several hundred people who gathered in a park in Washington D.C. to protest the war.
The ACLU has done much to help all different groups regardless of political ideology. Here's just a sample:
Reno v. ACLU
The Court struck down Congress' Communications Decency Act, which was an attempt to censor the Internet by banning "indecent" speech, ruling that "the interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship."
Board of Commissioners v. Umbehr
Government contractors cannot be subjected to reprisals, such as the loss of a contract, for expressing their political views.
McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission
A state prohibition against the anonymous distribution of political campaign literature violated the right to anonymous free speech.
Lebron v. Amtrak
An artist argued successfully that Amtrak had been wrong to reject his billboard display because of its political message. The Court extended the First Amendment to corporations created by, and under the control of, the government.
Ladue v. Gilleo
A Missouri town's ordinance that barred a homeowner from posting a sign in her bedroom window that said, "Say No to War in the Gulf - Call Congress Now!" was deemed to violate the First Amendment.
Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. Hialeah
A city's ban on the ritual slaughter of animals as practiced by the Santeria religion was overturned as a violation of religious liberty since the city did permit such secular activities as hunting and fishing.
Cruzan v. Director of the Missouri Department of Health
In the Court's first right-to-die case, the ACLU represented the family of a woman who had been in a persistent vegetative state for more than seven years. Although the Court did not go as far as the ACLU urged, it did recognize living wills as clear and convincing evidence of a patient's wishes.
Grutter v. Bollinger/Gratz v. Bollinger
Providing a strong endorsement of affirmative action in higher education, the Court held that public universities have a compelling interest in creating a diverse student body and that race may be treated as a "plus" factor in the admissions process.
Lawrence v. Texas
The Court struck down a Texas sodomy statute that criminalized private acts of sexual intimacy between same-sex couples, expanding the privacy rights of all Americans and promoting the right of lesbians and gay men to equal treatment under the law.
Chicago v. Morales
Struck down Chicago's anti-gang loitering law which disproportionately targeted African American and Latino youth who were not engaged in criminal activity, and resulted in the arrest of 45,000 innocent people