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Court Nixes National Security Letter Gag Provision
2phar sends news that on Monday a federal appeals court ruled unconstitutional the gag provision of the Patriot Act's National Security Letters. Until the ruling, recipients of NSLs were legally forbidden from speaking out. "The appeals court invalidated parts of the statute that wrongly placed the burden on NSL recipients to initiate judicial review of gag orders, holding that the government has the burden to go to court and justify silencing NSL recipients. The appeals court also invalidated parts of the statute that narrowly limited judicial review of the gag orders — provisions that required the courts to treat the government's claims about the need for secrecy as conclusive and required the courts to defer entirely to the executive branch." Update: 12/16 22:26 GMT by KD : Julian Sanchez, Washington Editor for Ars Technica, sent this cautionary note: "Both the item on yesterday's National Security Letter ruling and the RawStory article to which it links are somewhat misleading. It remains the case that ISPs served with an NSL are forbidden from speaking out; the difference is that under the ruling it will be somewhat easier for the ISPs to challenge that gag order, and the government will have to do a little bit more to persuade a court to maintain the gag when it is challenged. But despite what the ACLU's press releases imply, this is really not a 'victory' for them, or at least only a very minor one. Relative to the decision the government was appealing, it would make at least as much sense to call it a victory for the government. The lower court had struck down the NSL provisions of the PATRIOT Act entirely. This ruling left both the NSL statute and the gag order in place, but made oversight slightly stricter. If you look back at the hearings from this summer, you'll see that most of the new ruling involves the court making all the minor adjustments that the government had urged them to make, and which the ACLU had urged them to reject as inadequate."
...this is one of the few steps that has been taken in a long time that makes me feel the whole "land of the free" thing.
Now, 250 million Americans should be writing to the Obama organization and asking why the fuck it was allowed in the first place and what is HE going to do about it... in the next 12 months, not how will he leave it to the next election.
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Well, congratulations America.
It is very nice to see a resurgence of freedom in your country.
The question/task for the future is to figure out how to prevent this sort of abuse from happening again.
It has been somewhat disturbing to see how easily your executive can disregard your highest laws with impunity only to have their actions repealed years later.
I mean, it is nice to have a constitution that declares things like a right to free speech and habeus corpus (or however that is spelled) but if the government can break that law for years without any legal sanction then is it anything but an empty statement of principles?
George Bush has proven that the American constitution has no teeth.
If an American president decides to break the law (any law) they cannot be stopped or punished in any way. The most that can happen is that they will be asked to stop... usually long after they have finished anyway.
Short of kidnapping white women is there anything your president cannot do? will your police forces EVER do anything to stop a president from breaking a law?
The answer seems to be no.
Yes, as a junior senator, voting is something you can do about not letting it get worse. He's president elect now and has the ear of everyone in the beltway and the world.... so.... what is he going to DO about it? He can't vote against it anymore in the Senate. Where will his veto votes be spent? It's a nice history, that, but what is his plan to fix the problems. So many promises are broken on the day after inauguration. What is Mr Obama's plan going forward?
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And the Congress Critters are elected from those same Americans.
Some of them are good. I'm in Washington state and all of my Congress Critters voted against the telcom immunity. And I voted for them again.
But the Constitution does not have any magical power to protect us. It is a statement that WE must support. Our forefathers died for those words.
Now, our Congress Critters won't even risk re-election to uphold them. Hell, they won't even risk the CHANCE that their opponents might say something mean about them.
Which is why Congress's approval rating is even lower than Bush's.
Get educated. Get organized. Then hold your Congress Critters accountable for their votes and their absences. That's the only way to get real change.
Ya, a handful of people of were unlawfully detained, and there were attempts to repress critical comments, but when the American people finally got sick of it they were allowed to change directions. The US Constitution doesn't stop us from electing idiots, crooks, or both. But it slows them down with the checks-and-balances scheme and allows the people to get a new government without violence.
The Bush administration got away with far less than they attempted, and we've got the Constitution to thank for it.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Obama's position on civil liberties is clear. He doesn't believe in them any more than Bush did.
His positions on liberties and freedoms are like those of most politicians. They all promote freedom to do "harmless" stuff, because it's not a threat to them or their power. But it's very rare to find one who promotes the "dangerous" ones. Being able to speak freely about and criticize the government (and call them on it when they screw up), habeas corpus, keeping and bearing arms, the right to privacy (both physical searches and observation)... those are ones that keep the government from exercising absolute control. There's a reason those things are the first things mentioned in the bill of rights, and in very clear terms; they knew the government would sooner or later try to restrict that.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
First let me say that my country, the ol' U.S. of A. is far from perfect. Second, let me say as an anonymous coward, you fail to let us know your own country. The UK and Canada, two countries I admire, currently have their own issues they are dealing with. You could be posting from some third world country that believes that anything the US stands for is something you refuse to stand for and therefore you are anti-constitution. I don't know. But don't throw stones at our huge glass houses. And don't shit pan the US constitution without a discussion of what failed and what didn't.
What the constitution is:
1) A document of precise, but not perfect, rules by which to found and run a government with very specific checks and balances so that no one branch of government is more powerful than others, so that not only there would be cooperation in order to pass important laws, but there would also be some competition.
2) A document with an addendum to preserve specific human rights the founders thought were important so that no state could pass laws to take away those rights.
3) A document that is changeable over time, albeit with a little difficulty, so that the change isn't whimsical.
What the constitution is not:
1) A suicide pact
2) A written in stone monolithic set of commandments
3) Psychic paper which compels the reader to always obey it's rules
4) A document that can pick up a gun and enforce itself
What happened to the constitution was that it was ignored. It was ignored because over a very long time, the public was pushed in a specific direction believing that the direction we were going was the proper one. This involved countless economic and social reasons. And it just got worse. Most people didn't see it that way, because it didn't impact them personally, and the average wage was not keeping up with inflation, the rich were getting richer and poor getting poorer, more people being impacted by NSL letters, more soldiers were dying in Iraq for what we knew to be a lie, a terribly managed natural disaster, and then finally an economic collapse followed by the most inept management seen in living memory. Eventually the public would demand a shift to a different direction.
What happened on first Tuesday of November in 2006 was the first step in what shows us the first thing that is good about the constitution. As things get worse, as more and more people are fed up with bad decisions, people begin to exercise the single most important constitutional power they have... a vote. The 2006 election was the first inkling that the US was fed up with it's president. So we voted another party into power. This didn't fix the problem, this didn't even stop the bleeding, but it did apply a tourniquet. Since then, the political will was slowly shifting away from Bush. This allowed all these things to properly come to light. Then in 2008 we used that constitutional power again, and we soundly rejected anything and everything that man stood for.
And while we flexed the constitutional rights there, other groups were going out and using the constitution for what it was for, defending these rights that Bush and cronies tried to take away. Such processes take time, and they are bearing fruit now. You may want these things to happen immediately, and am right there with you, but they don't. If we did things like this whimsically, then everything we'd do would be on a whim, and we'd be in worse shape as more bad decisions snuck into a system that didn't properly vett them, as the US system is designed to try to do.
One of the reasons why it took so long to fix this is because the will of the people, partially driven by stupidity, partially driven by fear, partially driven by group think, and partially driven by a very corrupt and very bad set of politicians, was against changing the status quo. But when it got really bad, the constitution succeeded by giving us an opportunity to return from the edge, and I think we have. A court decision like this is proof of
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Well, people aren't willing to give up their partisan attitude, so, the most viable option is probably to implement a preferential voting system so that people can vote for who they really want, while not screwing over their "safe" choice (of course, the scary possibility that people actually think these assholes are the best for the job exists, but I'm hoping that's not the case). The preferred option is for people to actually look at more than just two candidates and call it a day. Now, surely many third-party candidates are every bit as flawed as the major candidates, but surely at least one out of the pack must have some worth, which is more than we can say for McCain or Obama (yeah, moderation abusers, I criticized him, mod me down again).
Really, though, at this point the most important thing is to get some fresh blood into the system somehow. What we have now is a bunch of people who refuse to vote for someone who isn't in the big parties, and two big parties who are so corrupt that it makes it nigh-impossible for anyone who actually wants to change things to get power. I don't care if we accomplish it by reforming the major parties, or making third parties viable, but someone has to get in there and get some actual change done, not the "change" that candidates have promised us for as long as I can remember (which, of course, is always a completely empty promise).
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Just to offer an alternative viewpoint, not all agree with the viewpoint that Margaret Sanger was a racist. Furthermore, some would argue that she adopted the language of eugenics because that's what was popular at the time -- the United States had a eugenics program which was studied by Nazi Germany, and actually was praised by at least one high-ranking Nazi official during a visit to the United States. (Clearly, this was well before World War II started.)
Time Magazine gives a brief biography of Sanger, and here's another article which gives an even shorter, but I believe equally balanced, portrayal. The Wikipedia article about Margaret Sanger seems to need a lot of work -- it seems particularly biased toward the view that Sanger was a racist and eugenicist, and most sections are marked as probably misiterpreting or misrepresenting the cited source material. That's pretty bad scholarship, IMHO.
Personally, I don't see a big problem with eugenics in general. The problem is, the term has been villified because of what some groups (e.g., the Nazis) did in the name of eugenics, especially atrocities such as forced sterilizations and abortions. This is why I think any kind of state-sponsored eugenics is a bad idea -- such a program can too easily be abused. Instead, I think a more Libertarian approach is warranted, so that couples should be allowed to go to genetic counseling (a form of eugenics) when they plan to have a baby. When genetic engineering (a tool of reprogenetics, a form of eugenics) becomes available to weed out disease traits and select for desirable traits (e.g., high intelligence), parents should be allowed to avail themselves of such techniques.
But you were really trying to sling mud at Planned Parenthood by associating it with things that everybody "knows" are bad. In the end, Planned Parenthood is more about distributing condoms and birth control pills than it is about performing abortions, because the goal has always been to stop unwanted pregnancies in the first place.