Category Archives: Civil Liberties
Electronic Frontier Foundation: Pelosi Faces Questions, Criticism about NSA Surveillance at Netroots Nation
At the Netroots Nation conference this weekend, Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was questioned publicly about her stance on NSA spying. While she was quick to defend the program as markedly different from the warrantless wiretapping program established under President Bush, she also noted that more needed to be done to improve transparency around the program.
Pelosi’s comments were met with skepticism and disapproval from at least some members of the audience. Marc Perkel, a small business owner and technology activist, interrupted Pelosi when she was talking about finding a balance between security and civil liberties. According to Politico, Marc Perkel yelled, “It’s not a balance. It’s not constitutional!…No secret laws!”
Perkel urged Pelosi to “Talk to your sys admin” – a comment he later clarified as a push for Pelosi to better understand the technology behind the NSA’s surveillance.
Perkel was escorted out of the luncheon amid cries from other conference goers to “Let him stay.”
Pelosi assured the audience she welcomed the debate and spoke warmly of several bills in Congress that are a response to the NSA surveillance programs. She also stated that she had reason to believe that President Obama would be making an announcement about the FISA court order in the next few days. Her comments on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden violating the law were met with boos from the crowd.
Below, find pictures from the event. You can see watch the entire speech here, discussion of NSA spying begins at 44:00.
EFF is urging individuals to speak out against NSA spying by signing the StopWatching.us petition and (most importantly) calling members of Congress.
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Click below for the full article on EFF’s website.
Reason.com: Andrew Napolitano Asks, Where’s Fidelity to the Constitution When We Need It?
When Snowden began his work for Booz Allen Hamilton, he took two oaths. The first oath was to keep secret the classified materials to which he would be exposed in his work as a spy; the second oath was to uphold the Constitution. Shortly after Snowden began his work with the NSA, he came to the realization that he could not comply with both oaths. He realized that by keeping secret what he learned, writes Andrew Napolitano, he was keeping the American public in the dark about what its government is doing outside the Constitution in order to control the public.
Politicians as diverse as Republican Speaker John Boehner and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein called Snowden a traitor. So did former Vice President Dick Cheney, and President Obama said that for once Cheney’s words were music to his ears. On the other hand, former Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Republican Sen. Rand Paul, my Fox News colleague Bill O’Reilly and I have all referred to Snowden as a hero.
What did Snowden do that has those in power screaming for his scalp and those — generally — who fear the loss of liberty, including millions of young people, grateful for his courage?
The NSA is America’s domestic spying apparatus. Its budget is secret. It will soon occupy the largest federal building on the planet. It often hires outside contractors to do much of its work. One of those contractors is Booz Allen Hamilton. Booz Allen’s co-chair is former Admiral John M. McConnell, who once headed the NSA. When Snowden began his work for Booz Allen, he took two oaths. The first oath was to keep secret the classified materials to which he would be exposed in his work as a spy; the second oath was to uphold the Constitution.
Shortly after Snowden began his work with the NSA, he came to the realization that he could not comply with both oaths. He realized that by keeping secret what he learned, he was keeping the American public in the dark about what its government is doing outside the Constitution in order to control the public.
What is it doing?
The government persuaded a federal judge with a perverse understanding of the values and history and language of the Constitution to sign a series of orders directing the largest telephone company in the U.S. and the largest Internet providers in the world to make available to the government’s prying eyes all sorts of information about nearly all of us, thus allowing the feds to monitor our use of land line and wireless phones, as well as our use of emails and texts. The numbers are staggering. Verizon has greater than 113,000,000 U.S. customers who generate or receive more than one billion phone calls every day. Americans text and email one another using the services of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others many billions of times every day.
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Click below for the full article.
http://reason.com/blog/2013/06/20/andrew-napolitano-asks-wheres-fidelity-t
Video: Police Beat a Father To Death While He Begs For Help – Then Arrest Witnesses and Confiscate Video
International Business Times: Web Pioneer Tim Berners-Lee Warns of Government Bid to Control Internet ‘On the Sly’
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has warned that the internet is facing a major threat from governments and companies who are seeking to “control it on the sly”.
Berners-Lee said the internet’s founding principles of openness and freedom of speech were at risk of being lost due to laws such as the US Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa), government surveillance and attempts by internet giants to profit from individuals’ private data.
“Unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society,” said Berners-Lee.
“I call on all web users to demand better legal protection and due process safeguards for the privacy of their online communications, including their right to be informed when someone requests or stores their data.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has warned that the internet is facing a major threat from governments and companies who are seeking to “control it on the sly”.
Berners-Lee said the internet’s founding principles of openness and freedom of speech were at risk of being lost due to laws such as the US Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa), government surveillance and attempts by internet giants to profit from individuals’ private data.
“Unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society,” said Berners-Lee.
“I call on all web users to demand better legal protection and due process safeguards for the privacy of their online communications, including their right to be informed when someone requests or stores their data.
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Click below for the full article.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/476385/20130608/tim-berners-lee-internet-threat-privacy.htm
Reason.com: Obama: Spilling Secrets Is Bad When It Scares People, Good When It Reassures Them
In an interviewwith Charlie Rose that aired last night, President Obama said that despite his defense of the NSA’s recently revealed surveillance programs, he continues to believe “we don’t have to sacrifice our freedom in order to achieve security,” which he called “a false choice.” Still, he said, “that doesn’t mean that there are not tradeoffs involved in any given program or any given action that we take.” The first example he gave was telling:
All of us make a decision that we go through a whole bunch of security at airports….When we were growing up, that wasn’t the case, right? You ran up to the gate five minutes [before your flight]. It’s been a while since I went through commercial flying, but I gather the experience is not the same. That’s a tradeoff we make….
To say there’s a tradeoff doesn’t mean somehow that we’ve abandoned freedom. I don’t think anyone says we’re no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports.
I don’t know about you, but I never made a decision to “go through a whole bunch of security at airports.” I do not arrive early, wait in line, repeatedly display my government-issued ID, empty my pockets, take my computer out, cram my toiletries into a Ziploc bag, remove my shoes and belt, and stand with my arms held up in a gesture of surrender while a scanner looks under my clothing becase I like doing those things, or even because I see them as a reasonable price to pay for the extra protection these rituals of obeisance allegedly provide. I do these things because the government makes me do them. I would welcome the option of flying without all the security theater, despite the extra risk that supposedly would entail, and I suspect I am not alone. Maybe if Obama flew commercial once in a while he would understand that travelers do not necessarily comply with the TSA’s arbitrary edicts because they view them as sensible precautions well worth the inconvenience and humiliation.
While I would not say “we’re no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports,” we certainly are less free than we were before. Otherwise it would make no sense to describe this change as a “tradeoff.” The government took some of our freedom, and in return it gave us the illusion of security. Many of us doubt the value of this deal. Are we not allowed to complain about a loss of freedom as long as we have some left? Is that what Obama has in mind when he says “we don’t have to sacrifice our freedom in order to achieve security”?
Obama’s other example of a tradeoff between freedom and security is equally troubling:
We make a tradeoff about drunk driving. We say occasionally there are going to be checkpoints. They may be intrusive.
Again, you and I did not invent DUI checkpoints. Cops did, and the Supreme Court upheld these suspicionless seizures based on the premise that they aim mainly to protect public safety rather than catch criminals (even though they do result in arrests, frequently on charges that have nothing to do with drunk driving). Since I wish the Court had not carved out this exception to the Fourth Amendment and continue to find such roadblocks objectionable, Obama’s analogy does not reassure me.
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The Liberty Report Take: The George W. Obama administration continues……..
Click below for the full article.
http://reason.com/blog/2013/06/18/obama-spilling-secrets-is-bad-when-it-sc
Video: DHS Checkpoint: Obedience Training
Open Market: E-Verify National ID System Threatens Americans’ Privacy
“I’m not a criminal, so there’s really no reason for me to be in a criminal database.” That was James Shepherd, a Kentucky native and a roofer, after he was stopped by police under “suspicion of trespassing” at a Florida hotel. The officer on the scene asked to take his picture and ran it through Florida’s facial recognition database. Finding no matches, he uploaded Shepherd’s photo with the label “suspicious person.”
Florida is one of 26 states that use facial recognition software to verify identities of individuals who possess state ID photos or have their photos added by police, according a new report by The Washington Post. The Post report exposes how quickly systems created for one purpose can be coopted for other purposes. This should make those who support, in order to stop illegal immigration, the E-Verify national ID system contained in the Senate immigration bill consider what other applications authorities could find for the System.
E-Verify violates “a key principle of privacy”
The Senate immigration bill would create a centralized database with photos of every legal U.S. worker or potential worker. It does this by combining the Social Security database – names, addresses and Social Security Numbers – with passport and state ID photos (p. 1317). The bill incentivizes states to provide photos by offering hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for making them accessible to the federal government (p. 1377).
This much alone violates what Robert Ellis Smith, publisher of Privacy Newsletter, calls a “key principle of privacy.” As Smith explains, “The principle is that information gathered for one purpose ought not be used for an incompatible purpose without consent of the individual.” In this instance, Americans never conceived their Social Security accounts or driver license photos would be used for immigration enforcement, violating the premise under which they handed them over.
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Click below for the full article.
Politico: George W. Bush’s NSA director Michael Hayden praises Obama
Gen. Michael Hayden, former National Security Agency Director under George W. Bush, praised the Obama administration’s transparency regarding the NSA’s surveillance of phone records.
“The Obama administration was more transparent .. than we were in the Bush administration,” Hayden told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday. “They made this metadata collection activity available to all the members of Congress, not just all the members of the intelligence committees
Hayden’s comments come after current NSA Director Keith Alexander defended the NSA program in a Senate Appropriations Committee earlier in the day, saying that it has prevented “dozens of terrorist events.”
Hayden said the same was true during his time at the NSA.
“We did have a whole series of intelligence reports that came out of that program that would not otherwise have been available,” Hayden said of what is now called the Terrorist Surveillance Program, the equivalent policy during his tenure.
Hayden went on to criticize leaker Edward Snowden, saying that to be a true whistleblower, “you need to raise your hand within the institution.”
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The Liberty Report Take: A ringing endorsement from anything Bush Administration related on managing terrorism and giving up freedom for the sake of security might be worth exactly one Bernanke buck.