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Government Asks Court to Keep ID Arguments Secret
RobXiii writes " CNN has a story on privacy advocate John Gilmore (Co-founder of the EFF) taking the federal government to court, to stop the requirement of ID for in country flights. In an ironic twist, the U.S. Department of Justice is asking the court to keep its argument for the secret law secret. How are we supposed to follow a law when the law itself can't be disclosed?"
This reminds me of an editorial in the Chicago Tribune (written by Molly Ivins) last Thursday:
"The Department of Justice has asked the Government Printing Office "to instruct depository libraries to destroy five publications the department has deemed 'not appropriate for external use.' Of the five publications, two are texts of federal laws. They are to be removed from libraries and destroyed, making their content available only to a law office or law library," according to the American Library Association. All the documents concern either federal civil or criminal forfeiture procedure, including how to reclaim items that have been confiscated by the government during an investigation."
What possible reason could there be to destroy federal legal publications? Thank you, Adolf, ahem, I mean John Ashcroft.
-Mark
I remember when we used to be make fun of secret laws in The Soviet Union back in the eighties. The commies also tortured political dissidents. Now it has all turned around. The USA is where you have secret laws, have to carry papers around, and can be detained and tortured idefinetly without a court order.
And all this changed after the Bush coup in 2000. Think about it..
How many people can read and understand the legal codes that govern their lives?
Not only read them, but then inturpet what they really mean.
I got stuck in a situation in the early 90's in South Carolina.
I had smoked headlight covers on my car. In SC, the law for headlight requirements is very specific. The headlight must be seen by a person from 300ft away. The headlight must be able to illuminate an object from 100ft away. With my headlight covers on, I easily met both of those requirements. Everything should be good to go. There is a third law that states a person can not alter the position or aiming of the headlights or physically alter the headlight assembly itself. That law sites specific examples of not moving the headlights to high, to low, or aiming them inapropriately, all related to blinding on coming drivers. Again, should be good to go. But wait, somewhere there was a forth law that only the police knew about... This one was a memo from the State Police headquarters stating headlight covers users shall be ticketed because it violated the states motor vehicle laws for headlight requirements. Yes, I got a ticket and fought it. I showed the judge my information and he showed me the letter from the the State Police. He dropped the charges because he could not tell me what part of the existing laws the headlight covers violated. The point being, even after researching the available laws and reading the examples of what the law is for, it came down to another persons interpetation completely different from mine as to what was legal and what was not.
On a side note, at the scene, I actually recieved two tickets, one for my headlight covers and one for the fog light covers. The State Police had the same exact car as mine (91 Mustang) but they did not even have fog lights. But since I had fog lights and they were then covered, I got two tickets.
Before any wise cracks about how headlight covers look stupid, they dim the lights to much etc.. I only used them in the day time (when i got my ticket) and they pulled right off in about 5 seconds for night driving.
Hahaha, I think we have the imprisoning people on terrorism suspicion (they don't even have to be charged) including US citizens.
Also, you can lose your citizenship for supporting "terrorist groups." Lets say that the Israeli government labels some Palestinian groups terrorist and an US citizen with family in Palestine gives their relatives money. In this instance, if the relatives contribute to that organization, the US citizen can be stripped of his citizenship because Israel is our ally. Of course, the citizen contributing directly would have the same if not more severe effects.
If the PATRIOT Act was in place in the late 80's, American members of anti-apartheid groups could lose their American citizenship because they could and probably were labeled terrorist....(make your own conjecture here)
Considering one of the flights was for a job interview this really sucks. The funny/sad thing is at a previous job about seven years ago I had a DOE Class Q clearance. Now I can't even get on a plane and no one [claims] they can fix it.
Real people are getting hurt and hurt badly because of this law. I hope Gilmore prevails.
I want the news to challenge my assumptions. I want investigative reporting uncovering causes and correlations that I didn't know existed before. I want open-minded reporting that doesn't bash reasonable perspectives on both sides of the political spectrum. I don't really see why the politics of the owner have to be so flagrantly reflected in the reporting - CNN was owned by Ted Turner for many years, who has many radical positions I don't agree with, but while not perfect, I've certainly never seen that kind of flagrant bias on CNN (about an equal number of people seem to accuse CNN of overly liberal and overly conservative bias as far as I can tell).
That's why I like the ancient Icelandic tradition. Once a year the Law Speaker would have to recite the law. All of it, from start to finish, from memory, without a break. If he missed bits, they were no longer considered part of the law. This kept a really good control over how unwieldy and impossible to understand the law could be.
Hell, imagine if our President had to recite the law once a year. There wouldn't be any space in that cranium for crap like the PATRIOT act.
I'm not sure that exactly the same system is workable for a modern society, but I am sure that I would seriously favor a system where one person had to recite the entire tax law from memory each year to determine how much we all paid. I see no reason why the tax system needs to be even a hundredth as complicated as it is now.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak