Category: Rights, Justice, & Judgement

The trial, going on right now in federal court in San Francisco, involves claims by a former Stanford Ph.D. student that she was not allowed to fly in 2005 (except to go home to Malaysia) for reasons that the government won’t explain.

According to this NYT graphic (click for more detail), 99% of the names that are “nominated” end up on the master watch list. … In other words, the “Terrorist Screening Center” isn’t doing any “screening.”

one of the plaintiff’s witnesses—one of her daughters, who is an American citizen—had not been able to travel to the U.S. to testify because (wait for it) she had been put on the no-fly list

Source: Is the Government Tampering With Witnesses in No-Fly Trial? | Lowering the Bar

Sometimes a single story has a way of standing in for everything you need to know.  In the case of the up-arming, up-armoring, and militarization of police forces across the country, there is such a story.  Not the police, mind you, but the campus cops at Ohio State University now possess an MRAP; that is, a $500,000, 18-ton, mine-resistant, ambush-protected armored vehicle of a sort used in the Afghan War and, as Hunter Stuart of the Huffington Post reported, built to withstand “ballistic arms fire, mine fields, IEDs, and nuclear, biological, and chemical environments.”  Sounds like just the thing for bouts of binge drinking and post-football-game shenanigans.

Source: Tomgram: Chase Madar, The Criminalization of Everyday Life | TomDispatch

I realized I had to post because this opens all kinds of thorny philosophical issues which we’ve been talking about for years.

The lack of any semblance of due process when it comes to domain name takedowns.

Source: Whatever Happened to “Due Process” ?

The president’s partisan lawyers purport to vest him with the most extreme power a political leader can seize

when this memo refers to “a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaida”, what it actually means is this: someone whom the President – in total secrecy and with no due process – has accused of being that.

the memo isn’t justifying the due-process-free execution of senior al-Qaida leaders who pose an imminent threat to the US. It is justifying the due-process-free execution of people secretly accused by the president and his underlings, with no due process, of being that. The distinction between (a) government accusations and (b) proof of guilt is central to every free society, by definition, yet this memo – and those who defend Obama’s assassination power – willfully ignore it.

Source: Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens | Glenn Greenwald | Opinion | The Guardian

His dissent in a 1989 case stated that “today’s decision will reduce the privacy all citizens may enjoy.” And so it has.

You’d think that avowedly originalist conservatives would embrace this dissent and contest the wisdom of a secret court that has gone even farther than the wrongheaded precedent set by a 1989 majority opinion. Instead, conservatives by and large argue that the FISA court’s decisions properly render legal the sweeping, warrantless surveillance being conducted on American citizens, without any hint of individualized suspicion. In doing so, conservatives are signing onto the notion that there are special, judicially created exceptions to the Bill of Rights. So are many Obama Administration supporters.

Source: Thurgood Marshall’s Prescient Warning: Don’t Gut the 4th Amendment – The Atlantic

 

But ultimately, today’s decision will reduce the privacy all citizens may enjoy, for, as Justice Holmes understood, principles of law, once bent, do not snap back easily. I dissent.

— Justice Thurgood Marshall