During the
presidential campaign season, Obama's campaign promised that he would vote to
filibuster any bill that gave amnesty to telecom companies that had cooperated
with Bush's illegal NSA warrantless wiretapping program. But then Obama voted
to legalize the program, to give immunity to the government and its connected
telecoms. He voted for cloture -- against filibuster. And now this issue is not
even being debated. We have a Bushian surveillance state approved by both
political parties. It is a bipartisan feature of leviathan, much like Social
Security or the war on drugs.
2. Torture, Kidnapping and Detention -- In the years since 9/11, our
government has illegally kidnapped, detained and tortured numerous prisoners.
The government continues to claim that it has the power to designate anyone,
including Americans as "enemy combatants" without charge. Since 2002,
some "enemy combatants," have been held at Guantanamo Bay
and elsewhere, in some cases without access by the Red Cross. Investigations
into other military detention centers have revealed severe human rights abuses
and violations of international law, such as the Geneva Conventions. The
government has also engaged in the practice of rendition: secretly kidnapping
people and moving them to foreign countries where they are tortured and abused.
It has been reported the CIA maintains secret prison camps in Eastern
Europe to conduct operations that may also violate international
standards. Congress made matters worse by enacting the Military Commissions
Act, which strips detainees of their habeas rights, guts the enforceability of
the Geneva Conventions' protections against abuse, and even allows persons to
be prosecuted based on evidence beaten out of a witness.
3. The Growing Surveillance Society -- In perhaps the greatest assault
on the privacy of ordinary Americans, the country is undergoing a rapid
expansion of data collection, storage, tracking, and mining.
Today the
government is spying on Americans in ways the founders of our country never
could have imagined. The FBI, federal intelligence agencies, the military,
state and local police, private companies, and even firemen and emergency
medical technicians are gathering incredible amounts of personal information
about ordinary Americans that can be used to construct vast dossiers that can
be widely shared with a simple mouse-click through new institutions like Joint
Terrorism Task Forces, fusion centers, and public-private partnerships. The
fear of terrorism has led to a new era of overzealous police intelligence
activity directed, as in the past, against political activists, racial and
religious minorities, and immigrants.
This
surveillance activity is not directed solely at suspected terrorists and
criminals. It's directed at all of us. Increasingly, the government is engaged
in suspicionless surveillance that vacuums up and tracks sensitive information
about innocent people. Even more disturbingly, as the government's surveillance
powers have grown more intrusive and more powerful, the restrictions on many of
those powers have been weakened or eliminated. And this surveillance often
takes place in secret, with little or no oversight by the courts, by
legislatures, or by the public.
4. Abuse of the Patriot Act -- In 2001, just 45 days after 9/11,
Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act severely limiting the constitutional rights
of immigrants and US citizens. The Act permitted non-citizens to be jailed
based on mere suspicion without charges and detained indefinitely. It broadened
the definition of activities considered "deportable offenses," including
defining soliciting funds for an organization that the government labels as
terrorist as "engaging in terrorist activity". The PATRIOT Act also subjected
lawful advocacy groups to surveillance, wiretapping, harassment, and criminal
action for legal political advocacy, expanded the ability of law enforcement to
conduct secret searches and engage in phone and internet surveillance, and gave
law enforcement access to personal medical and financial records. Related
executive orders barred press and the public from immigration hearings of those
detained after September 11th, allowed the government to monitor communications
between federal detainees and their lawyers, and ordered military commissions
to be set up to try suspected terrorists who are not citizens.
On May 26,
2011, Congress, rejecting demands for additional safeguards of civil liberties,
approved a four-year extension to key provisions of the Bush era Patriot Act
that will allow federal investigators to continue to use aggressive surveillance
tactics in connection with suspected terrorists. One of the sections of the
Patriot Act extended by Congress (Section 206) is the "roving
wiretap" power, which allows federal authorities to listen in on
conversations of foreign suspects even when they change phones or locations.
Another provision, Section 215 of the Patriot Act, gives the government access
to the personal records of terrorism suspects; it's often called the
"library provision" because of the wide range of personal material
that can be investigated. The third provision extended for four year is Section
6001 of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act. In 2004, Congress
amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to authorize intelligence
gathering on individuals not affiliated with any known terrorist organization,
with a sunset date to correspond with the Patriot Act provisions.
5. Government Secrecy -- The Bush administration has been
one of the most secretive and nontransparent in our history. The Freedom of
Information Act has been weakened , the administration has led a campaign of
reclassification and increased secrecy by federal agencies (including the
expansion of a catch-all category of "sensitive but unclassified"),
and has made sweeping claims of "state secrets" to stymie judicial
review of many of its policies that infringe on civil liberties.
The July
2011 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, "Drastic Measures Required,"
illustrates the vast and systemic use of secrecy, including secret agencies, secret
committees in Congress, a secret court and even secret laws, to keep government
activities away from public scrutiny. "Our government has reached unparalleled
levels of secrecy," said Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU Washington
Legislative Office. "Though this administration's attempts to be transparent
are laudable, the reality has been that it is just as secretive as its
predecessor. Congress has the tools to curb this excessive secrecy but it must
be more aggressive in using them. It's time to drastically overhaul the way our
government classifies information.
6. Real ID -- The 2005 Real ID Act, rammed
through Congress by being attached to a unrelated, "must pass" bill,
lays the foundation for a national ID card and makes it more difficult for persecuted
people to seek asylum. Under the law, states are required to standardize their
driver's licenses (according to a still undetermined standard) and link to
databases to be shared with every federal, state and local government official
in every other state Real ID requires people to verify legal residence in the
US in order to get a driver's license, permits secret deportation hearings and
trials, reduces judicial review of deportation orders and makes non-citizens
(including long-time permanent residents) deportable for past lawful speech or
associations.
7. No Fly and Selectee Lists -- The No-Fly list was established
to keep track of people the government prohibits from traveling because they
have been labeled as security risks. Since 9/11 the number of similar watch
lists has mushroomed to about 720,000 names, all with mysterious or ill-defined
criteria for how names are placed on the lists, and with little recourse for
innocent travelers seeking to be taken off them. The lists are so erroneous several
members of Congress, including Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), have been flagged.
8. Political Spying -- Government agencies -- including
the FBI and the Department of Defense -- have conducted their own spying on
innocent and law-abiding Americans. Through the Freedom of Information Act, the
ACLU learned the FBI had been consistently monitoring peaceful groups such
Quakers, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Greenpeace, the Arab
American Anti-Defamation Committee and, indeed, the ACLU itself.
9. Abuse of Material Witness Statute -- In the days and weeks after 9/11,
the government gathered and detained many people -- mostly Muslims in the US --
through the abuse of a narrow federal technicality that permits the arrest and
brief detention of "material witnesses," or those who have important
information about a crime. Most of those detained as material witnesses were
never treated as witnesses to the crimes of 9/11, and though they were detained
so that their testimony could be secured, in many cases, no effort was made to
secure their testimony.
The government has found alternative ways to hold people indefinitely without charge, sometimes simply because they believe the person might do something in the future. They have used immigration detention to target certain groups based on racial or religious profiling, abused federal grand jury conspiracy charges, and held activists on the vague charge of "material support." [The Center for Constitutional Rights]
10. Attacks on Academic Freedom -- The Bush administration has used
a provision in the Patriot Act to engage in a policy of "censorship at the
border" to keep scholars with perceived political views the administration
does not like out of the United States. The government has moved to over
classify information and has engaged in outright censorship and prescreening of
scientific articles before publication.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
