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State Secrets, No-Fly List Showdown Looms
schwit1 writes "The Obama Administration and a federal judge in San Francisco appear to be headed for a showdown over the controversial state secrets privilege in a case about the U.S. government's 'no-fly' list for air travel. U.S. District Judge William Alsup is also bucking the federal government's longstanding assertion that only the executive branch can authorize access to classified information. From the article: 'The disputes arose in a lawsuit Malaysian citizen and former Stanford student Rahinah Ibrahim filed seven years ago after she was denied travel and briefly detained at the San Francisco airport in 2005, apparently due to being on the no-fly list. In an order issued earlier this month and made public Friday, Alsup instructed lawyers for the government to "show cause" why at least nine documents it labeled as classified should not be turned over to Ibrahim's lawyers. Alsup said he'd examined the documents and concluded that portions of some of them and the entirety of others could be shown to Ibrahim's attorneys without implicating national security.'"
I want this judge on the Supreme Court.
Just the things being investigated and when can tip off associates, or, in the case of mistaken identities due to similar names, the real target.
While I am all for increased legislative oversight of all spy and terrorist-related investigations, good luck with this. The real Constitutional crime is not just warrantless stuff, but warrantless without cursory review by elected legislators or judges.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The Executive branch claims it and it alone can authorize access to classified information. If this is deemed as stupid as it sounds, especially in a supposedly free society and by a President that campaigned on unprecedented transparency, then this may be the start of something wonderful.
It doesn't matter which party they are in they want to control you.
No good deed goes unpunished.
The real question is why there should even be a no-fly list. No U.S. citizen or legal resident should be denied their right to travel without due process.
APK is a parasitic creature, nestled between mountainous testes, sucking the life out of them. AKA, a queer sumbitch.
Fix this exploit, Slashdot! No one likes to scroll for three minutes to get past the spam!
It's a sad day when you can tag someone anti-American who is pro-Constitution.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The constitution is alive and well; the First 7 articles are alive and very well. It's the bill of rights that was add as a compromise in 1792 so that a few state representatives would feel confortable with the document and sign that is "under fire".
However if you consider your rights to be self evident, you don't need a document defining those rights for you.
Understanding is not a requisite of cooperation or fulfillment of citizen related beneficiary obligations: obey the law, pay taxes and submit to jury duty. If you have a problem with the way government is conducting business, you should take more action about those issues than rant about stuff on /. or making suggestions that some hackers take actions that would threaten the dignity of our public servants or the policies they choose to implement. That type of action will only justify a reaction that will result in new policies that are more similar to the proverbial "shaved, sterilized and destroyed" processing of our remaining freedoms.
The single best way to make changes is to get people in your community organized in a way that can productively send a clear and constructive message to our leaders.
Luckily for all of us (except you, perhaps) that OP made no such claim, and didn't even hint that that might be a solution.
What was actually suggested was that PICTURES accompany NAMES on the No-Fly List, since there are frequently multiple people with the same name in the USA (note that I have an unusual surname, and yet I've managed to run into several people who knew someone with my FULL NAME)...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
First, I realize this, I'm in IT. But it's a good monologue. Pocket device != large database.
Second: he wasn't saying give everyone an iPod. He was using it as an example, a token of "look what an innovative company can do... maybe hire THEM instead of some guy"
Even in 2001 (or whatever) the idea of a distributed system wasn't unheard of. Heck at our college we had access to large-infrastructure database systems shared among campuses across the country. Said databases had searchable articles with bilbiographic meta-data, images of the pages, and a whole bunch of features. I can't speak for whether it was encrypted but I do know you needed a login.
The systems are obviously already networked to be able to get to the (I imagine) encrypted database. I can't imagine a scenario where a 2001-era PC would have a hard time also getting extra meta-data besides just a names-list (age, gender, etc). Heck we were even doing pictures.
And as Alan Shore said in the monologue: this is a country with some innovative tech companies are there. Apple, Microsoft (yeh they count), Google, loads of small companies. All advanced. All innovative. All doing incredible things at the time.
And you're saying the best that they could do, after throwing billions of dollars at the problem, was come up with a simple encrypted names list? No meta-data? No pictures? Nothing?
Fine, maybe slightly more expensive but wouldn't it be better to have a BETTER system than a names list that count stops a 10-year-old from getting on a plane?
We've come a long way in 12 years. But even back then things were advanced enough to do a better job on the system they picked.
Good thing he's gone and it's all better. It's well past time to hold the "new" regime responsible for its own abuse.
I know you never said it wasn't Obama's fault, but when you continue to blame Bush for what Obama is doing, it helps create a cover for him.
The fact that Obama commits the same sins does not excuse Bush43 from committing them in the first place.
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
There are two main reasons I think this sort of thing about keeping unnecessary secrets is happening.
First, is a power play by the executive branch (it happens in the other branches too, don't get me wrong). Ie, when asked to do anything the knee-jerk response at all levels is to say "no", and when being forcefully asked or ordered again, the response is "NO" even louder. Like a petulant child being asked to go to sleep. It's pervasive because it's not a directive that comes down from upper management but just a natural response that most people have.
The second big reason is to protect loss of face and avoid embarrassment. Ie, these aren't national security secrets, but embarrassing secrets. Not even embarrassing in the sense of explosing malfeasance, but embarrassing because it makes someone looks stupid, or it makes a policy look stupid, or it makes someone who said "no" earlier look stupid if it's discovered there was no reason to say "no".
> If every politician is a crook, then only crooks become politicians.
That's how the system is designed (ie Money = power). It's not mindless cynicism, it's demonstrable cause and effect.
It's not mindless cynicism. It is a recognition that US politics operates on a purely tribal basis.
You have Democrats who really honestly believe Obama is a peacenik who has reduced the number of troops in Afghanistan every single year of his presidency. I'm not joking -- I saw this exact comment in my local paper's comment section by a die-hard Obamabot.
You have Republicans who believe that forcing people to pay premiums to private for profit insurance companies is Marxism (as opposed to crony capitalism or corporatism, the softer brother of fascism). I see this in my local paper's comment section all the time from the mainstream-GOP-subverted Tea Baggers.
Combined, the purely tribal Democrats and Republicans probably account for about 60% of the population. The remainder will be largely filled by people who vote for a "lesser evil" and a few single digit percentage pointers who support "fringe" third parties. I'm in that last group, have been actively engaged with the fringe, stood out in the sleet and rain holding signs for that fringe, will not vote for any candidate affiliated with either the DNC or the GOP under any circumstances -- I am the fringe -- and I know there is no hope short of a scandal so egregious that one of the parties basically has to reinvent itself. Seriously, Obama's presidency should be all the demonstration one needs that to most people, policies are irrelevant, only party affiliation matters.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
However if you consider your rights to be self evident, you don't need a document defining those rights for you.
The purpose wasn't to define them for you, it was to enumerate them as being specifically beyond the ability of the government to take away. Unfortunately, the interpretation of the Constitution has gone from the original "The government is empowered to act only where specifically granted authority" to "The government is empowered to act whenever not specifically denied authority, and if government lawyers can come up with some pretzel-like, taken-out-of-context, and misinterpreted reading of a specific prohibition that makes it not say what the plain text says, then the government can act there, too."
I'd like to believe that but as I said, Obama's presidency is proof against your assertion. Take for example Marty Lederman. He used to excoriate the GWB administration for using secret memo to support due process free detention (Gitmo). When he became part of the Obama administration, he began _writing_ Obama's secret memos "authorizing" (*) due process free execution.
Exactly what besides "my tribe uber alles" can account for that 180 degree switch in position on the core question of whether a person is entitled to trial before punishment is exacted?
Or try to have a conversation with an Obama apologist, and try to get a straight answer to the question: why was it wrong for GWB to put people in jail without trial, but not wrong for Obama to kill people without trial? Eventually, after all the deflections, slogans, and GWB-blaming, you'll get down to the core: I trust Obama and I did not trust Bush. I did this once with a frequent poster on my local paper's website and that is exactly what he said. His avatar is a picture of Bush with "worst ever" written over it. That is tribal politics, nothing else, and I think it accounts for much more of what we see than it is given credit for.
The ways in which Obama has extended the GWB era policies are legion. I started to list those before burning out on the project -- I've not updated this in a year, but you can sort of get an idea: http://nothingchanged.org/ Despite the plain facts, people still support him, and nothing can explain that besides the fact that he's a member of their tribe. The silence we hear from "progressives" is proof positive that policy doesn't matter because if it did, the same people that burned GWB in effigy, would be doing that to Obama. He's that bad from a policy perspective. And of course, all those GOPers should be praising him as much as Dick Cheney has praised him. But they don't. They call him a Marxist for coming up with a health care plan to the right of that proposed by Nixon. It really is tribal, at least for the most part.
(*) legal memos written by your own lawyers are not laws, they are opinions, so to suggest there is some authority there is ridiculous.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good