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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.
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!
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.
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.' " ]