Category Archives: Civil Liberties
Ron Paul’s Podcast: IRS Scandal
ACLU: Following Texas’s Lead on Location Tracking; Texas to Warrants To Track Cell Phones
Yesterday, the Texas House of Representatives passed the first bill in the nation that would require law enforcement to obtain a probable cause warrant before tracking individuals’ location by collecting their cell phone location data. As Rebecca Robertson, legal and policy director for the ACLU of Texas put it, “By approving this amendment, our legislators would take a significant step to preserve the Fourth Amendment rights of Texas citizens, protecting them from potential unreasonable searches and seizures that could take place entirely outside judicial review.” They would also set a precedent that the rest of the country should be quick to follow.
We’ve been talking about location tracking for a long time now, because where you go says a lot about who you are—are you going to gay bars, a mosque, a fundamentalist church, a gun store, an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting, a political protest, etc.? In August 2011, 35 ACLU affiliates filed over 380 public records requests with state and local law enforcement agencies to ask about their policies, procedures and practices for tracking cell phones, and in April 2012, an additional affiliate filed 27 requests. What we learned is alarming: the laws and policies guiding cell phone location tracking across the country are in a state of chaos, with agencies in different towns following different rules — or in some cases, having no rules at all.
We believe that law enforcement agents should be obtaining location information in investigations only with safeguards—the probable cause standard and review by a judge—to ensure that while legitimate investigations can proceed, innocent Americans will be protected from unjustified invasions of their privacy. We’ve known that this standard is workable, because law enforcement agencies in every region of the country—from Denver, Colo. to Hawaii County to Wichita, Kan. to Lexington, Ky.—already obtain a probable cause warrant to track location and still do effective law enforcement. And, in the Jones Supreme Court case, a majority of the justices (in two concurrences) recognized that long term monitoring of an individual’s travels, no matter what technology is used, impinges on that individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy. Nonetheless, Texas could soon be the first state to actually legislate on this issue.
It’s been a long slog to get to this point. Despite having over 100 co-sponsors in Texas’s 150-member House, the original cell phone location tracking bill, HB 1608, was not brought up for a vote before Texas’ deadline for moving legislation through its first chamber. But, not to be deterred, the amazing bill sponsors, Rep. Hughes and Sen. Hinojosa, the ACLU of Texas, and the rock star Texas Electronic Privacy Coalition got the legislation added as a House amendment to a Senate bill, SB 1052, that requires a warrant for access to electronic communications content. (Congress, are you taking notes? Texas is about to show you how to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the outdated federal law that governs access to communications content and is, as of yet, silent on location tracking.) The Texas bill still has to go back to the Senate to approve the House amendments before making it to the governor’s desk.
If you’re from Texas, you can help your state make history by reaching out to your senator and ask him/her to support the House amendments to SB 1052. (You can find your senator’s contact info here.)
If you’re not in Texas, you can ask Congress to update ECPA, and if you happen to be from Maine, your legislature is poised to vote on this issue also, so please tell them to follow the Texas’ House’s lead and pass warrant protections for location tracking.
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Click below for the full article.
http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/following-texass-lead-location-tracking
Reason.com: ACLU Calls Bullshit on Obama’s Drone ‘Due Process’ Promises
As Ed Krayewski noted yesterday, not everybody was impressed by President Obama’s national security speech, in which he vowed to make himself be extra specially careful when raining death from the sky on suspected terrorists (and collaterally damaged civilians), including American citizens, with drones. Sen. Rand Paul may have been the pithiest, when he remarked, “I still have concerns over whether flash cards and PowerPoint presentations represent due process.” At greater length, the American Civil Liberties Union also expresses some doubts that “Presidential Policy Guidance,” whatever in hell that is, is the same as due process.
Says, in part, Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU:
To the extent the speech signals an end to signature strikes, recognizes the need for congressional oversight, and restricts the use of drones to threats against the American people, the developments on targeted killings are promising. Yet the president still claims broad authority to carry out targeted killings far from any battlefield, and there is still insufficient transparency. We continue to disagree fundamentally with the idea that due process requirements can be satisfied without any form of judicial oversight by regular federal courts.
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Click below to read the full article.
http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/24/aclu-calls-bullshit-on-obamas-drone-spee
CNN: Obama: U.S. will keep deploying drones — when they are only option
Drone strikes are a necessary evil, but one that must be used with more temperance as the United States’ security situation evolves, President Barack Obama said Thursday.
America prefers to capture, interrogate and prosecute terrorists, but there are times when this isn’t possible, Obama said in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington. Terrorists intentionally hide in hard-to-reach locales and putting boots on the ground is often out of the question, he said.
Thus, when the United States is faced with a threat from terrorists in a country where the government has only tenuous or no influence, drones strikes are the only option — and they’re legal because America “is at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban and their associated forces,” Obama said.
He added, however, “To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance. For the same progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power — or risk abusing it.”
Increased oversight is important, but not easy, Obama said. While he has considered a special court or independent oversight board, those options are problematic, so he plans to talk with Congress to determine how best to handle the deployment of drones, he said.
The nation’s image was a theme throughout the speech, as Obama emphasized some actions in recent years — drone strikes and Guantanamo Bay key among them — risk creating more threats. The nature of threats against the United States have changed since he took office — they’ve become more localized — and so, too, must efforts to combat them, he said.
“From our use of drones to the detention of terror suspects, the decisions that we are making now will define the type of nation and world that we leave to our children,” he said.
Today, al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan and Afghanistan worry more about protecting their own skin than attacking America, he said, but the threat is more diffuse, extending into places such as Yemen, Iraq, Somalia and North Africa. And al Qaeda’s ideology helped fuel attacks like the ones at the Boston Marathon and U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi.
Obama said the use of lethal force extends to U.S. citizens as well.
On Wednesday, his administration disclosed for the first time that four Americans had been killed in counterterrorist drone strikes overseas, including one person who was targeted by the United States.
“When a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America — and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens; and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot — his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a SWAT team,” Obama said.
To stop terrorists from gaining a foothold, drones will be deployed, Obama said, but only when there is an imminent threat; no hope of capturing the targeted terrorist; “near certainty” that civilians won’t be harmed; and “there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat.” Never will a strike be punitive, he said.
Those who die as collateral damage “will haunt us for as long as we live,” the president said, but he emphasized that the targeted individuals aim to exact indiscriminate violence, “and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes.”
It’s not always feasible to send in Special Forces, as in the Osama bin Laden raid, to stamp out terrorism, and even if it were, the introduction of troops could mean more deaths on both sides, Obama said.
“The result would be more U.S. deaths, more Blackhawks down, more confrontations with local populations and an inevitable mission creep in support of such raids that could easily escalate into new wars,” he said.
The American public is split on where and how drones should be used, according to a March poll by Gallup.
Although 65% of respondents said drones should be used against suspected terrorists abroad, only 41% said drones should be used against American citizens who are suspected terrorists in foreign countries.
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What do you think? Should American Citizens be targeted and killed on American or Foreign soil without due process of law? Click below for the full article.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/23/politics/obama-terror-speech/index.html?hpt=po_c1
USA Today: IRS replaces official involved in Tea Party controversy
Embroiled in scandal, the IRS has replaced the official who supervised agents involved in targeting Tea Party groups.
Lois Lerner, IRS director of exempt organizations, refused to answer questions by a House committee Wednesday, saying she did nothing wrong but was nevertheless invoking her Fifth Amendment right not to testify against herself.
“I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules and regulations, and I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee,” Lerner said.
She was replaced Thursday by Ken Corbin, a 27-year IRS veteran who had a deputy director in the wage and investment division.
In announcing the change in an e-mail to IRS employees, the agency’s new acting commissioner, Danny Werfel, did not mention Lerner. Administration and congressional sources told news organizations that she was placed on administrative leave.
The move came hours after Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John McCain, R-Ariz., who lead the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sent Werfel a letter urging him to suspend Lerner “immediately.”
Lerner was the IRS official responsible for the office in Cincinnati that created a “be on the lookout” list for tax-exempt applications from groups using the words “tea party,” “patriot” and “9/12 project” in their names. Those applications were held up for more than a year while applications from liberal groups requesting similar status were routinely approved, a USA TODAY review found.
An audit by the IRS inspector general found that Lerner tried to immediately correct that list when she learned about it in 2011 but replaced it with criteria that included groups “critical of how the country is being run.” Members of Congress from both parties want to know why she never informed Congress — even under direct questioning.
Levin and McCain wrote that they believe that Lerner “failed to disclose crucial information concerning the IRS’s inappropriate targeting of some conservative … organizations” during the committee’s investigation into how the IRS enforces the law for tax-exempt 501(c)(4) groups.
“Given the serious failure by Ms. Lerner to disclose to this Subcommittee key information on topics that the Subcommittee was investigating, we have lost confidence in her ability to fulfill her duties as Director of Exempt Organizations at the IRS,” the senators wrote. “Ms. Lerner’s continued tenure in the office she holds, where she is responsible for overseeing 1.6 million tax-exempt organizations, would erode public trust and confidence in the IRS and its professional integrity. We believe that the immediate removal of Ms. Lerner from office would be a vital step in helping to restore public trust in the agency.”
Last week, acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller resigned at the request of President Obama.
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Click below to view the article on USA TODAY’s website:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/05/23/irs-lois-lerner-leave/2356065/
Video: Judge Napolitano rips the DOJ for targeting reporters
Video: The I.R.S. Abusing Americans Is Nothing New
The Washington Post: Senate panel approves immigration changes requiring fingerprint system at 30 U.S. airports
Every immigrant leaving the United States through one of the 30 biggest airports would have to be fingerprinted by federal authorities under an immigration reform measure that won early committee approval in the Senate on Monday.
The plan approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee is a concession to Republicans and some Democrats who support establishing a nationwide biometric tracking system at all U.S. air, sea and land ports of entry, a key recommendation made by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to track potential terrorists entering or leaving the country.
The committee rejected a similar GOP proposal last week that would have forced the Department of Homeland Security to establish a biometric immigration tracking system at every U.S. air, sea and land port of entry. The committee’s Democrats and the four members of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” who wrote the immigration bill and sit on the panel said such a plan would be too expensive.
But bipartisan negotiators sought a compromise after Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) — a key GOP member of the “Gang of Eight” — said he supports the concept of a nationwide biometric system and would fight for the proposal once the immigration bill reaches the full Senate.
Under the new agreement sponsored by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), DHS would need to establish a fingerprint tracking system at the nation’s 10 largest international airports within two years of the bill’s approval. The program would expand to the next 20 largest international airports within six years.
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Click below for the full article.
San Francisco Chronicle: More Obama aides knew of IRS audit; Obama not told
White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and other senior advisers knew in late April that an impending report was likely to say the IRS had inappropriately targeted conservative groups, President Barack Obama‘s spokesman disclosed Monday, expanding the circle of top officials who knew of the audit beyond those named earlier.
But McDonough and the other advisers did not tell Obama, leaving him to learn about the politically perilous results of the internal investigation from news reports more than two weeks later, officials said.
The Treasury Department also told the White House twice in the weeks leading up to the IRS disclosure that the tax agency planned to make the targeting public, a Treasury official said.
The apparent decision to keep the president in the dark about the matter underscores the White House’s cautious legal approach to controversies and reflects a desire by top advisers to distance Obama from troubles threatening his administration.
Obama spokesman Jay Carney defended keeping the president out of the loop on the Internal Revenue Service audit, saying Obama was comfortable with the fact that “some matters are not appropriate to convey to him, and this is one of them.”
“It is absolutely a cardinal rule as we see it that we do not intervene in ongoing investigations,” Carney said.
Republicans, however, are accusing the president of being unaware of important happenings in the government he oversees.
“It seems to be the answer of the administration whenever they’re caught doing something they shouldn’t be doing is, ‘I didn’t know about it’,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told CBS News. “And it causes me to wonder whether they believe willful ignorance is a defense when it’s your job to know.”
Obama advisers argue that the outcry from Republicans would be far worse had McDonough or White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler told the president about the IRS audit before it became public, thereby raising questions about White House interference.
Still, the White House’s own shifting information about who knew what and when is keeping the focus of the IRS controversy on the West Wing.
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Click below for the full article.