Tag Archives: civil liberties

This Climate Scientist Just Won Another Victory in Court

by UteBelairmt Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Michael Mann, the perennially embattled climate scientist best known for his “hockey-stick” temperature graph, came out victorious yesterday in a court battle against a Virginia legislator and a conservative think tank that had sought to obtain thousands of Mann’s emails and research documents from his time as a University of Virginia professor.

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled that unpublished scientific research can be exempted from the state’s Freedom of Information Act requirements, because disclosing such information would cut into the university’s competitive advantage over other universities. As a result, some 12,000 of Mann’s emails and papers won’t be released to the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (formerly known as the American Tradition Institute) and Virginia Delegate Robert Marshall (R-Prince William), who had requested the documents in 2011.

In a statement on his Facebook page, Mann called the decision “a victory for science, public university faculty, and academic freedom.”

Back in 2012, a lower Virginia court ruled that the documents in question were considered “proprietary,” and thus shielded from FOIA requests. ATI appealed the decision, and the case landed with the state’s Supreme Court last October. The main question was whether research-related documents should get the same kind of protection as trade secrets and other information that could cause financial harm if released. ATI argued that Mann’s emails didn’t merit such protection, while Mann and U-Va. maintained that scientists should be able to hammer out their work behind closed doors before presenting a finished product to the public.

In a brief filed with the Supreme Court late last year, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press argued that in protecting Mann’s research, the lower court had actually set the scope too wide, leaving open the possibility that a university could claim virtually any document to be proprietary. But yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling revised the exemption criteria so that non-research-related documents—things like budgets and communications between administrators—could still be accessed with a FOIA, said Emily Grannis, the Reporters Committee staffer who authored the brief.

Of course, Grannis said, the ruling is only binding in the state of Virginia, but it could serve as a model for how other states set limits for what qualifies as proprietary if similar cases arise elsewhere.

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This Climate Scientist Just Won Another Victory in Court

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Infamous George Zimmerman Prosecutor Puts Disproportionate Number of Black Men on Death Row

by HFOSpencer Posted on March 11, 2014

Mother Jones

Florida is working hard these days to make itself a case study argument in favor of abolishing the death penalty. In a state that has seen more innocent people exonerated from death row than any other in the country, lawmakers last year passed legislation to try to speed up the pace of executions. Last month, Gov. Rick Scott (R) set a dubious record for presiding over more executions in his first term than any governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

Meanwhile, the state continues to ignore US Supreme Court rulings banning the execution of the mentally ill and intellectually disabled. Just last week, the state argued before the Supreme Court that it didn’t want to use accepted scientific principles to comply with the court’s ban on executing mentally disabled people because that would spare too many death row residents, a move that would be “inconsistent with Florida’s purposes.” And now comes the news the state’s most notorious prosecutor has not only sent a disproportionate number of felons to death row, but a disproportionate number of African-Americans, once again raising the troubling issue of racial disparities in the state’s capital punishment system.

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Infamous George Zimmerman Prosecutor Puts Disproportionate Number of Black Men on Death Row

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The Senate-CIA Blowup Threatens a Constitutional Crisis

by KristinaRosenba Posted on March 11, 2014

Mother Jones

This morning, on C-SPAN, the foundation of the national security state exploded.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, took to the Senate floor and accused the CIA of spying on committee investigators tasked with probing the agency’s past use of harsh interrogation techniques (a.k.a. torture) and detention. Feinstein was responding to recent media stories reporting that the CIA had accessed computers used by intelligence committee staffers working on the committee’s investigation. The computers were set up by the CIA in a locked room in a secure facility separate from its headquarters, and CIA documents relevant to the inquiry were placed on these computers for the Senate investigators. But, it turns out, the Senate sleuths had also uncovered an internal CIA memo reviewing the interrogation program that had not been turned over by the agency. This document was far more critical of the interrogation program than the CIA’s official rebuttal to a still-classified, 6,300-page Senate intelligence committee report that slams it, and the CIA wanted to find out how the Senate investigators had gotten their mitts on this damaging memo.

The CIA’s infiltration of the Senate’s torture probe was a possible constitutional violation and perhaps a criminal one, too. The agency’s inspector general and the Justice Department have begun inquiries. And as the story recently broke, CIA sources—no names, please—told reporters that the real issue was whether the Senate investigators had hacked the CIA to obtain the internal review. Readers of the few newspaper stories on all this did not have to peer too far between the lines to discern a classic Washington battle was under way between Langley and Capitol Hill.

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The Senate-CIA Blowup Threatens a Constitutional Crisis

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Did American Taxpayers Help Push Through Uganda’s Anti-Gay Law?

by LauraFore Posted on February 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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This week, when Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni approved a harsh new bill making “aggravated homosexuality” a crime punishable by life in prison, he cited a recent report from the Ugandan Ministry of Health’s Committee on Homosexuality, which concluded that same-sex attraction is mostly a learned impulse. “Since nurture is the main cause of homosexuality, then society can do something about it to discourage the trends,” Museveni said. “That is why I have agreed to sign the bill.”

This pronouncement creates a quandary for the United States. American officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, have vehemently condemned Museveni’s decision. Yet millions of US taxpayer dollars are flowing to the agency that the Ugandan leader used to justify the legislation, according to records from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Gay rights activist argue that the Committee on Homosexuality report was engineered to ensure the bill’s passage, and at least one committee member—a physician named Eugene Kinyanda—refused to sign his name to it because the process had “taken a very political” direction. “I will not be used to justify the passing of a bill which as a doctor I do not fully understand,” he wrote in an email to a fellow committee member, which was reprinted on the blog Patheos.

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Did American Taxpayers Help Push Through Uganda’s Anti-Gay Law?

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Is This the Beginning of the End for Solitary Confinement?

by abram Posted on February 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Minors, pregnant women, and the developmentally disabled can no longer be placed in solitary confinement in New York State prisons (barring exceptional circumstances) thanks to an agreement between the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and the New York State Department of Community Corrections (DOCCS) on February 19. The agreement will require the state to develop sentencing guidelines and maximum isolation sentences for the first time, and will make it the largest US prison system to ban the use of disciplinary solitary confinement for minors.


Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America’s Prisons.


Interactive: Inside a Solitary Cell


What Extreme Isolation Does to Your Mind


Documents: 7 Surprising Items That Get Prisoners Thrown Into Solitary


Maps: Solitary Confinement, State by State


VIDEO: Shane Bauer Goes Back Behind Bars at Pelican Bay

See more MoJo coverage of solitary confinement.

The agreement came just days before Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called for the end of the use of solitary for certain vulnerable individuals at a high-profile congressional hearing on Tuesday. The hearing featured testimony from activists, corrections officials, and former inmates, including Orange is the New Black author Piper Kerman, who stated: “Solitary confinement impedes access to important pre-natal and women’s health care services. In fact, pregnant women in solitary confinement often receive no medical care. And yet, pregnant prisoners in America are still sent to the SHU Special Housing Unit.”

New York is not the only state taking steps toward solitary confinement reform. Last week, Colorado Department of Corrections executive director Rick Raemisch, who has committed to lowering Colorado’s solitary confinement rate to less than 3 percent of the state’s prison population, penned a New York Times Op-Ed about his own experience in willing isolation for a night. At an early February meeting of corrections professionals, Mike Dempsey, who runs the Indiana Department of Corrections’ Division of Youth Services, discussed his state’s reduction of juveniles in solitary confinement from 48 beds—with some minors serving 24-month sentences—to 5-10 with a maximum sentence of 24 hours. Earlier this month, California, home to last year’s massive prisoner hunger strike, held a hearing on the use of solitary confinement—though ultimately prison advocates were unsatisfied with the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s proposed regulations.

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Is This the Beginning of the End for Solitary Confinement?

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Big Brother Turns Out to Be a Little Less Big Than We Thought

by s02xc3x Posted on February 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest on the NSA’s phone record collection program:

The National Security Agency is collecting less than 30 percent of all Americans’ call records because of an inability to keep pace with the explosion in cellphone use, according to current and former U.S. officials.

….In 2006, the officials said, the NSA was collecting nearly all records about Americans’ phone calls from a number of U.S. companies under a then-classified program, but as of last summer that share had plummeted to less than 30 percent.

….The bulk collection began largely as a land-line program, focusing on carriers such as AT&T and Verizon Business Network Services. At least two large wireless companies are not covered — Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile U.S., which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Wait a second. If you’re a terrorist planning, say, the destruction of electric power west of the Rockies, all you have to do is make sure everyone on your team has a Verizon cell phone? Huh.

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Big Brother Turns Out to Be a Little Less Big Than We Thought

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How to Use Public-Private Partnerships to Screw the Poor

by Cosetta Shallenberger Posted on January 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is now behind an Iron Curtain-like paywall, which is too bad since apparently they ran a great story yesterday about Georgia’s practice of using private companies to collect fines and fees in the criminal justice system. I’ll farm out the job of summarizing the story to the Economist’s Jon Fasman:

It works like this: say you get a $200 speeding ticket, and you don’t have the money to pay it. You are placed on probation, and for a monthly supervisory fee you can pay the fine off in instalments over the course of your probation term. The devil, as ever, is in the details….Those supervisory fees vary markedly: in Cobb County, for instance, just north of Atlanta, the government charges a $22 monthly fee. Private companies charge $39, and often add extra costs on top of that to cover drug testing, electronic monitoring and even classes they decide offenders need.

….Even worse, people who fail to pay the fines imposed by these private companies can find warrants for their arrests sworn out and the period of their probation extended. I spoke with an attorney for a couple in Alabama who say they were threatened with Tasers and the removal of their children if they did not pay the company what they owed. In 2012 a court found that the fees levied by private-probation companies in Harpersville, Alabama, could turn a $200 fine and a year’s probation into $2,100 in fees and fines stretched over 41 months.

Isn’t that great? It’s the free market at work, all right. It reminds me of last year’s piece in the Washington Post about the privatization of the debt collection in Washington DC:

For decades, the District placed liens on properties when homeowners failed to pay their bills, then sold those liens at public auctions to mom-and-pop investors who drew a profit by charging owners interest on top of the tax debt until the money was repaid.

But under the watch of local leaders, the program has morphed into a predatory system of debt collection for well-financed, out-of-town companies that turned $500 delinquencies into $5,000 debts — then foreclosed on homes when families couldn’t pay, a Washington Post investigation found.

As the housing market soared, the investors scooped up liens in every corner of the city, then started charging homeowners thousands in legal fees and other costs that far exceeded their original tax bills, with rates for attorneys reaching $450 an hour.

You may remember this as the story of the 76-year-old man struggling with dementia who was thrown out on the street and had his house seized because of a mix-up over a $134 property tax bill. That in turn might remind you of all the stories you’ve heard about civil asset forfeiture, where local police agencies groundlessly extort property from people convicted of no crimes, and then use the money “for purchasing equipment and getting things you normally wouldn’t be able to get to fight crime.”

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?

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How to Use Public-Private Partnerships to Screw the Poor

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Obama’s NSA Reforms More Transparent Than Expected—But Expectations Were Really Low

by HermelindaWCAQ Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, President Obama released his plan to reform the NSA’s sweeping surveillance program. Obama offered much praise for the NSA, and he’s not ending the agency’s controversial bulk collection program, which scoops up information about Americans’ telephone calls. But he is making substantial changes to how the program currently runs, indicating that he may be more willing to risk the ire of the intelligence community for the sake of transparency reforms, than he’s been in the past. Many oversight questions, though, are still being left to the intelligence community, and the reforms Obama announced on Friday only address a sliver of the surveillance issues raised by the Snowden leaks. Most notably, the president did not address many of the internet-related revelations produced by the Snowden documents. But he tried to offer some real reform to civil libertarians (though hardly meeting the demands for widespread changes) while providing much support to the intelligence community, which will not likely cheer the reforms the president is implementing.

Bulk Phone Records Collection: Not Going Away, But More Hurdles for the NSA

The biggest change announced on Friday deals with the government’s practice of sweeping up Americans’ phone records in bulk—a practice that 60 percent of Americans oppose. Privacy advocates had hoped that Obama would take this opportunity to end the program. Instead, he announced that he’ll be making some big changes to how it operates. He ordered the attorney general and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to implement a system in which NSA analysts must get approval from the FISA court to search the records. There will also be a new limit on the number of people the NSA can investigate via these records (“two steps removed from a number associated with a terrorist organization instead of three.”) These are significant changes—ones that could ruffle feathers at the NSA, which has claimed that any changes to the program would undermine its ability to combat terrorism. However, the real test will be whether the judicial review process will be stringent enough to satisfy critics. In the past, the FISA court has been criticized as a “rubber stamp” court.

Bulk Phone Records Storage: Going Somewhere, No One Knows Where

Obama ordered the intelligence community and the attorney general to come up with a new way to store phone records collected under the program, without having the government hold on to this data. This certainly will create some hurdles for the NSA, but it doesn’t mean that the NSA is no longer permitted to collect telephone records. It’s just about how they’ll be stored. While the intelligence community has to come up with recommendations before March 28, it’s entirely unclear when this policy will be implemented, because no third-party outside of phone companies—which have indicated they don’t want this responsibility—really exists.

National Security Letters: Less Secret, Still No Judicial Oversight

Obama is making some modest changes to the process by which the government can use National Security Letters to compel businesses to secretly provide private records to federal investigators. Companies will now be able to disclose these requests—but at some yet-to-be determined point. The specifics are up to the attorney general. Privacy advocates will undoubtedly be disappointed by the fact that Obama is refusing to require judicial review before the government issues these secret orders.

The Top-Secret Spy Court: More Transparency, But Congress Should Figure It Out

Obama is asking the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to annually review which decisions made by the FISA court can be declassified. He is also asking Congress to put together a panel of advocates that will provide an independent voice in “significant cases before the court.” This is not quite as strong as having an in-house privacy advocate on every case, but it’s a serious change.

Everything else:

And…that’s pretty much it. Obama’s reforms don’t cover reports that the NSA has been working to undermine the internet’s encryption—such as by hacking into Google—and don’t entail a major overhaul of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which governs PRISM, the program that’s been accused of sweeping up internet communications. So it seems that any kind of online surveillance the government may be carrying out, will remain largely intact: “We’d hoped for, and the internet deserves, more,” says Alex Fowler, global privacy and policy leaderâ&#128;&#139; at Mozilla. “We’re concerned that the President didn’t address the most glaring reform needs.”

Obama maintains that there have been no alleged abuses of the telephone records collection program, which contradicts what the top-secret spy court has found. But his reforms indicate a greater willingness to reconsider aspects of the NSA’s surveillance programs, and they’ve somewhat exceeded expectations. He does say these reforms are only a start, which might be a small comfort to privacy advocates who are looking for much more.

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Obama’s NSA Reforms More Transparent Than Expected—But Expectations Were Really Low

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Nine Gifts the NSA Will Hate

by tf942pe Posted on December 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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In the wake of the Edward Snowden-enabled revelations about the reach of the surveillance state, your more privacy-sensitive loved ones may have spent the year discovering TOR, making the jump to mesh networks or encrypted email, or mumbling about converting their nest egg to Bitcoin.

But now that gift-giving season is well upon us, what’s left to get the security-obsessed person who already has it all? Tin foil hats have a timeless appeal, but here’s a short list of slightly more practical devices:

Camera-Detecting Armor

Surveillance Spaulder Demonstration

stml/Vimeo

London artist James Bridle has thought up a wearable device known as a “surveillance spaulder,” which—through infrared detection—would alert the wearer to surveillance cameras by triggering a small muscle reaction. While not “currently a functioning device,” he claims the device is more than possible given the correct components, power supply, and a little bit of tinkering.

Anti-Facial Recognition Hats

The Perfect Anti-Surveillance Hat?

CafePress

Concerned about having your face detected in photos or by security cameras? If Anonymous’ advice of wearing a mask or continuously tilting your head more than 15 degrees seems a little cumbersome, try the hactivists’ suggested DIY project of making an infrared LED-fitted hat to tuck under the Christmas tree.

Camera-Confusing Eyewear

Anti-Facial Recognition Glasses

Isao Echizen/National Institute of Informatics

Not the DIY type? Professor Isao Echizen at Japan’s National Institute of Informatics may have the answer: eyewear that transmits near-infrared rays to render the wearer’s face undetectable to cameras. Not only will this give someone on your list that cool cyberpunk look, but by keeping their image from being captured it will be harder to track their movements.


Face-Disgusing Makeover

CV Dazzle Make-Up

Adam Harvey/ahprojects.com

For the more fashion-conscious, consider a haircut and makeup using style advice derived from WWI and WWII camouflage techniques. The project, created by NY designer Adam Harvey and known as CV Dazzle, uses “cubist-inspired designs” to break up symmetry and tonal contours, creating an “anti-face” technique the designer claims will confuse the detection algorithms of most facial recognition software.

HMAS Yarris in Dazzle Camouflage, WWII

Wikimedia Commons

Drone-Proof Clothing

Adam Harvey’s Stealth Wear

Adam Harvey/ahprojects.com

The stylish options don’t stop at simple facial recognition. Harvey’s more recent Stealth Wear project puts together a series of heat-reflecting burqas, scarfs, and hoodies purported to limit potential drone surveillance. Simply put the clothing on, and you’re blacked out to most thermal imaging. According to the website’s rather garbled recounting of Islamic tradition, the clothing reflects “the rationale behind the traditional hijab and burqa,” acting as a veil to separate women from God—only in this case, “replacing God with drone.”

Reflective Drone Survival Guide

Drone Survival Guide

A field guide to various Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and tactics for hiding from drones printed on an aluminum paper reflective enough to “interfere with the drone’s sensors.” While the price is cheap ($15 or €10), the information is also downloadable for free.

M-65 Jackets

Military Camouflage

SPC Gerald James/Wikimedia Commons

Does your giftee need a new coat? Some military-inspired jackets—already made with a camouflage pattern known as Disruptive Pattern Material—also have infrared reflective coatings that make them harder to spot in certain lights.

Bug Detectors and Noise Generators

All-in-One RF Bug Detector

brickhousesecurity.com

For the slightly more gadget-oriented, noise generators, surveillance bug detectors, and virtually invisible bluetooth earpieces could all make great stocking stuffers—especially for those particularly concerned with being followed or having their conversations tracked. The downside? They all come with hefty price tags.

Abandoned Missile Silo

Minuteman III Silo
Department of Defense/Wikimedia Commons

Of course, if all else fails, you could buy a “luxury survival condo” in a converted Atlas missile silo for the strangely reasonable cost of $750,000 to $1.5 million. The company’s press release promises “extended off-grid living” and walls “designed to withstand a nuclear blast.” At this point, going inside a bunker and unplugging might be the only way to completely remove yourself from the NSA’s all-seeing eye.

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Nine Gifts the NSA Will Hate

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When Having Condoms Gets You Arrested

by CarltonLenehan Posted on December 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last week, Mother Jones‘ Molly Redden wrote about a recent Human Rights Watch report, “In Harm’s Way,” which argues that aggressive policing in New Orleans is contributing to the city’s soaring HIV/AIDS rates. One tactic that Human Rights Watch found to be particularly problematic: the police harassment of suspected sex workers for possessing condoms.

At the heart of the matter is the vague definition of the crime of “loitering for prostitution,” which invites arbitrary arrests and discriminatory policing. According to the report, police in New Orleans use the possession of condoms as evidence of prostitution, even if they don’t witness the crime underway. The result? Of the report’s 169 interviewees, all of whom had exchanged sex for money, drugs, or life necessities, more than a third said that they had carried fewer condoms out of fear of police harassment. More than a quarter had had unprotected sex due to the fear of carrying condoms.

Testimonies in the report describe police harassing sex workers, threatening arrest based on condom possession, and, in some cases, confiscating the condoms altogether. Transgender women reported the police calling them a “thing,” a “whore,” and “a disgrace to America” while searching them for condoms. Cleo, a 36-year-old woman, said, “In the French Quarter in March of this year I was at a bar with a man and the cops asked only the trans women to go outside and they searched us. If we had condoms we got arrested for attempted solicitation.”

New Orleans isn’t the only place where Human Rights Watch has documented condom confiscation. Last year, the organization examined the police treatment of sex workers in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, and found that police in all four cities were using condoms as evidence of prostitution.

From last year’s report, “Sex Workers at Risk”:

Police use of condoms as evidence of prostitution has the same effect everywhere. Despite millions of dollars spent on promoting and distributing condoms as an effective method of HIV prevention, groups most at risk of infection—sex workers, transgender women, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth—are afraid to carry them and therefore engage in sex without protection as a result of police harassment. Outreach workers and businesses are unable to distribute condoms freely and without fear of harassment as well.

Over the past year, some places have made progress. In June, New York became the first state to pass a law prohibiting the use of condom possession as evidence of prostitution-related crimes. In Washington, DC, the Metropolitan Police started distributing “condom cards” and leaflets to sex workers and community health groups (Example text: “Individuals are allowed to carry as many condoms as they want. There is no ‘three condom rule'”). In February, the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS identified the usage of condoms as evidence of prostitution as one of several “HIV-specific criminal laws” that are “fueling the epidemic rather than reducing it.”

Whether or not the New Orleans Police Department will act on the report remains up in the air. Last week, dozens of people in New Orleans marched in front of City Hall holding signs saying “Prevention Not Punishment.” A New Orleans Police Department spokesperson has told local media that “to date, we have no record of the allegations made in this report.”

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When Having Condoms Gets You Arrested

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