No law
authorizes this power nor is there any judicial or congressional body
overseeing or regulating what DHS is doing.
And the citizens to whom this is done have no recourse -- not even to
have their property returned to them.
FBI agents encouraged to
search your trash, public databases just to
sniff around for crime
The Federal
Bureau of Investigation plans to issue new rules for its agents saying,
essentially, that they can and should dig through our trash and search
databases if people who aren't suspects but who are simply being assessed or
looked at. The new FBI trash-digging policy will be a part of the agency's
updated Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, a source tells the New
York Times. The changes apply not to criminal investigations but, apparently, to
agents' ability simply to sniff around "proactively," according to
the Times. The paper states that some agents wanted the trash-sifting powers so
they could use evidence found among refuse to pressure people to snitch on
others.
The F.B.I.
recently briefed several privacy advocates about the coming changes. Among
them, Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a lawyer for the
American Civil Liberties Union, argued that it was unwise to further ease
restrictions on agents' power to use potentially intrusive techniques,
especially if they lacked a firm reason to suspect someone of wrongdoing.
"Claiming additional authorities to investigate people only further raises the
potential for abuse," Mr. German said, pointing to complaints about the bureau's
surveillance of domestic political advocacy groups and mosques and to an
inspector general's findings in 2007 that the F.B.I. had frequently misused
"national security letters," which allow agents to obtain information like
phone records without a court order. [5]
Some of the
most notable changes apply to the lowest category of investigations, called an
"assessment." The category, created in December 2008, allows agents to look
into people and organizations "proactively" and without firm evidence for suspecting
criminal or terrorist activity. Under current rules, agents must open such an
inquiry before they can search for information about a person in a commercial
or law enforcement database. Under the new rules, agents will be allowed to
search such databases without making a record about their decision. Mr. German said the change would make it
harder to detect and deter inappropriate use of databases for personal
purposes. [6]
The new
rules will also relax a restriction on administering lie-detector tests and
searching people's trash. Under current rules, agents cannot use such
techniques until they open a "preliminary investigation," which -- unlike an
assessment -- requires a factual basis for suspecting someone of wrongdoing. But
soon agents will be allowed to use those techniques for one kind of assessment,
too: when they are evaluating a target as a potential informant. Agents have
asked for that power in part because they want the ability to use information
found in a subject's trash to put pressure on that person to assist the
government in the investigation of others. [7]
Freedom of Speech Curbs [8]
As Geoffrey R. Stone, a professor of law at the University of Chicago and the chairman of the board of the American Constitution Society, wrote in the New York Times on January 3, 2011:
The
so-called Shield bill, now introduced in both houses of Congress in response to
the WikiLeaks disclosures, would amend the Espionage Act of 1917 to make it a
crime for any person knowingly and willfully to disseminate, "in any manner
prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States," any classified
information "concerning the human intelligence activities of the United
States."
Although
this proposed law may be constitutional as applied to government employees who
unlawfully leak such material to people who are unauthorized to receive it, it
would plainly violate the First Amendment to punish anyone who might publish or
otherwise circulate the information after it has been leaked. At the very
least, the act should be expressly limited to situations in which the spread of
the classified information poses a clear and imminent danger of grave harm to
the nation.
And
finally, a central principle of the First Amendment is that the suppression of
free speech must be the government's last rather than its first resort in
addressing a problem. The most obvious way for the government to prevent the
danger posed by the circulation of classified material is by ensuring that
information that must be kept secret is not leaked in the first place.
Obama reverted to Bush
detention policy in virtually every way
After week
one in the White House, Obama reverted to Bush detention policy in virtually
every way. One of the first major disgraces concerned detainees at Bagram, the
prison camp in Afghanistan,
where Bush began shipping more detainees after Guantanamo was no longer his lawless
playground, and where Obama has increased funding and the prison population.
Four men sued for habeas relief. Justice John Bates, a federal judge appointed
by Bush found that habeas should apply, in limited capacity, to Bagram, given
that the Supreme Court ruled that it extended to Guantanamo. Obama's administration appealed
this ruling, using Bushian reasoning down the line. [9]
Bagram is
even worse than Guantanamo,
where at least the CRST process existed, and the military commissions have
freed hundreds of people. Bagram is simply a dungeon beyond the law, and Obama
has basked in it with only a little criticism from the left. As for Guantanamo, Obama had
promised to close it by January 2010. It is not closed and current plans
indicate it will be closed, perhaps around the end of Obama's first term. There
is talk of bringing Gitmo to the mid-west, which raises other concerns of setting
the precedent that you don't need to go to Cuba to find an American legal
black hole. A cry for justice in the spirit of "Yes We Can" has
morphed into a totalitarian-style five-year plan. And the abuses there have
only gotten worse. [10]
Raymond Azar,
Obama's first rendition victim, was not even an alleged terrorist or
belligerent. He was accused of a white-collar crime that shouldn't even be a
crime -- failing to come forward regarding very minor corruption in defense
contracting. But for an alleged white-collar non-crime, this Lebanese man
working at Sima International was arrested in Afghanistan and, according to his
testimony, taken to Bagram, deprived of sleep, stripped naked, subjected to
extreme temperatures and stress positions, deprived of food, confined in a
metal box and railroaded into a plea bargain lest he never see his family
again. [11]
References
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