Human rights advocates described the president’s proposal “as a plan to move Guantánamo to another ZIP code.”
Source: Obama’s Plan to Close Guantánamo Would Establish Indefinite Detention on U.S. Soil
Tag: ACLU
DOJ Has Blocked Everyone In The Executive Branch From Reading The Senate’s Torture Report | Techdirt
the new head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, demanded that all the federal government agencies that received the report should return it to him so he can destroy it and make sure that no one ever sees what’s in the report.
Source: DOJ Has Blocked Everyone In The Executive Branch From Reading The Senate’s Torture Report | Techdirt
FBI probed SciFi author Ray Bradbury for plot to glum-down America • The Register
Ten-year investigation into whether commies used SciFi to put nation into bad mood
Source: FBI probed SciFi author Ray Bradbury for plot to glum-down America • The Register
Death and Neglect at Rikers Island Women’s Jail
AFTER JUDY JEAN Caquias died in Rikers Island custody last year, her youngest sister received a box from her old apartment with all of her personal belongings. Her whole life distilled into a pile of odds and ends: pictures of family, old papers from school, an iron-on patch of a woman with a rainbow flag flying. Yankees memorabilia, an Obama sticker, a political flier: “Demand housing for the homeless.” A program for a community play she’d been cast in, and on the cover, a picture of her as a sad clown holding an American flag. And photos of herself: a grainy selfie she took in her bedroom wearing a gray tank top and gold chain, with close cut gray hair and reading glasses. Another where she’s a little thinner, in a white baseball cap and gray hoodie, eyebrows raised and mouth slightly open as if she’s about to say something.
On May 6 of last year, Caquias — who everyone knew as Jackie — was incarcerated at Rikers on a years-old warrant for having missed drug court dates. She was a tough lady at 61, according to the defense lawyer in her criminal case. But she had a history of liver disease, including a bout of Hep C, and in her 20s and 30s she had been addicted to heroin, which can also cause liver damage. Jackie had done time before on drug-related charges — but that was long ago. “She was very frightened of spending time in jail after all that time out,” her former lawyer Ilissa Brownstein says.
On Jackie’s second day at the Rose M. Singer Center, the island’s only women’s facility, the medical clinic ran lab tests that showed Jackie’s liver was severely stressed. Blood work two weeks later showed the same. Yet the doctors at Rikers didn’t send Jackie to a gastroenterologist for a liver exam. Instead, they prescribed her Tylenol 3 and iron, both dangerous for people with liver problems. The Tylenol 3 was discontinued after a week, but even after medical staff ordered the iron be stopped, the pharmacy continued dispensing it. Less than a month after Jackie arrived at Rose M. Singer, her system began to fail. She grew disoriented and delusional, and began vomiting so severely that blood and bodily tissue came up — all signs of acute liver failure. On June 25, 2014, after spending weeks in Elmhurst Hospital comatose and hooked up to machines, Jackie died. This according to a proposed amended notice of claim for a lawsuit to be filed this summer by her sister Daria Widing, and an analysis of health records by the medical expert hired for the case. The lawsuit, which will seek $20 million in damages, will charge that negligence by the City of New York contributed to Jackie’s death.
New York City’s chief medical examiner listed Jackie’s cause of death as “complications of upper gastrointestinal hemorrhage complicating hepatic cirrhosis due to Hepatitis C due to chronic substance abuse,” according to the medical expert. The New York State Commission of Correction, which conducts inmate mortality reviews, determined that Jackie’s cause of death was natural, and the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), in charge of overseeing Rikers medical care, reviewed Jackie’s case and closed it shortly after her death.
Both DOHMH and Corizon, the private company that runs medical services at Rikers, say that privacy law prohibits them from commenting on the medical care of individuals. Corizon says it is “deeply saddened by any death.”
I asked several former Rose M. Singer inmates if they had known Jackie. When I asked Namala Conteh, there was silence on the line. Then the memory filtered back: “Oh my god, the one that passed away? Oh my — you just reopened my wound again. The crazy thing is — I — I — mmmmmm, fuck. It’s crazy. That — Oh my god.”
Conteh was there at the clinic when Jackie was finally taken in. “They were so neglectful,” she says of the staff. “They had that blood all over their hands.”
JACKIE’S DEATH APPEARS to fit a pattern; a series of health care-related deaths alongside the never-ending reports of brutality in the Rikers men’s jails have dominated headlines in recent months. Last year, the AP reported that poor medical care at Rikers had helped precipitate at least 15 inmate deaths over the past five years. After medical staff failed to treat a 59-year-old inmate for constipation, he died of complications from an infected bowel. Another man went into a diabetic coma and died within two days of being incarcerated. According to a complaint filed by his family, a 19-year-old boy who complained of chest pain for seven months was never given an X-ray and died in 2013 from a tear in his aorta. The New York Times recently detailed another death, that of Bradley Ballard, an inmate with schizophrenia and diabetes who died after being locked in his cell for six days without medication or running water.
NSA domestic dragnet NOT authorised by Patriot Act, rules US Appeals Court
The NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone call records may be illegal, a US federal appeals court has ruled.
The US Second Circuit Court of Appeal unanimously ruled that the NSA’s bulk telephone metadata1program was not authorised by section 215 of the Patriot Act, voiding an earlier ruling by a lower court. The US District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed a legal challenge to the NSA dragnet surveillance program. Judge Vernon S Broderick ruled that section 215 of the Patriot Act was a statutory scheme that precludes judicial review.
The decision by three judges on appeal overturns that decision and re-opens the case against the NSA that it acted contrary to either the Fourth or First Amendments to the US Constitution. Lawyers are still to argue on these points properly. Attorneys for the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) have however succeeded in re-instating the case and in deprecating the Patriot Act as a trump card in justifying surveillance, as the ruling by the judges explains.
Government May Now Tell You Why You’re On “No Fly” List, But Not Always
Since the “no fly” list was formalized in 2001, the only way to know if the U.S. government would allow you to get on a plane was to show up at the airport and try to board a flight. The government would generally neither confirm nor deny that you were on the list, let alone tell you why.
On April 14, the government announced a new procedure for blacklisted travelers to try to clear themselves. Passengers who are denied boarding can lodge a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security, which will provide confirmation of their “No Fly List status,” and an unclassified summary of the reason why — unless providing that information would go against “national security and law enforcement interests.” The passengers can then appeal their status.
The notice of the new procedures came in court filings in several cases where plaintiffs have challenged their inclusion on the list.
Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, called the new procedures “grossly inadequate” and said her organization is already challenging them in court. The ACLU is representing 13 U.S. citizens who sued over the no fly list in 2010.
Last year a federal judge found that the government’s old redress process — which never confirmed or denied anyone’s status — was unconstitutional. The government’s response was the new procedures, which Shamsi says still doesn’t go far enough.
“One of our clients was provided a single cryptic sentence saying he had traveled to a particular country in a particular year. There are incomplete reasons, no evidence provided, and no hearing at which our clients can present their own evidence and cross-examine the government’s witnesses,” she said.
“The inadequate process the government provided to our clients is what it’s now formalizing for everyone else,” she added.
Gadeir Abbas, an attorney for Gulet Mohamed, a U.S. citizen who in 2011 was barred from flying home to Virginia from Kuwait, called the new redress process “entirely one-sided.”
Why Don’t Surveillance State Defenders Seem To Care That The Programs They Love Don’t Work?
There is a strong argument for ending these programs on the basis of their high cost and lack of effectiveness alone. But they actually do damage to our society. TSA agents participating in the behavioral detection program have claimed the program promotes racial profiling, and at least one inspector general report confirmed it. Victims unfairly caught up in the broader suspicious activity reporting programs have sued over the violations of their privacy. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concluded the telephone metadata program violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and raised serious constitutional concerns.
The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act passed by Senate Intelligence Committee last week is yet another example of this phenomenon. Experts agree that the bill would do little, if anything, to reduce the large data breaches we’ve seen in recent years, which have been caused by bad cyber security practices rather than a lack of information about threats. If passed by the full Congress, it would further weaken electronic privacy laws and ultimately put our data at greater risk. The bill would add another layer of government surveillance on a U.S. tech industry that is already facing financial losses estimated at $180 billion as a result of the exposure of NSA’s aggressive collection programs.
Turns Out Feds Actually Tracked Most International Calls For Nearly A Decade Before 9/11 — Didn’t Stop The Attack
One of the big arguments trotted out repeatedly by surveillance state defenders concerning the NSA’s Section 215 program to collect records on all phone calls is that such a thing “would have prevented 9/11” if it had been in place at the time. Here’s former FBI boss Robert Mueller making just that argument right after the initial Snowden leaks. Here’s Dianne Feinstein making the argument that if we had that phone tracking program before September 11th, we could have stopped the attacks. And here’s former NSA top lawyer and still top NSA supporter Stewart Baker arguing that the program is necessary because the lack of such a program failed to stop 9/11.
Except, it turns out, the feds did have just such a program prior to 9/11 — run by the DEA. As you may recall, back in January it was revealed that the DEA had its own database of phone call metadata of nearly all calls from inside the US to foreign countries. Brad Heath at USA Today came out with a report yesterday that goes into much more detail on the program, showing that it dates back to at least 1992 — meaning that the feds almost certainly had the calls that Feinstein and Mueller pretended the government didn’t have prior to 9/11.
Congressional Rep. John Carter Discovers Encryption; Worries It May One Day Be Used On Computers To Protect Your Data
Here’s a suggestion: if you’re a Congressional Representative whose job it is to regulate all sorts of important things, and you state in a hearing “I don’t know anything about this stuff” before spouting off on your crazy opinions about how something must be done… maybe, just maybe educate yourself before confirming to the world that you’re ignorant of the very thing you’re regulating. We famously saw this during the SOPA debate, where Representatives seemed proud of their own ignorance. As we noted at the time, it’s simply not okay for Congress to be proud of their own ignorance of technology, especially when they’re in charge of regulating it. But things have not changed all that much apparently.
We already wrote about FBI Director James Comey’s bizarre Congressional hearing earlier this week, in which he warned those in attendance about the horrible world that faced us when the FBI couldn’t spy on absolutely everything. But the folks holding the hearing were suckers for this, and none more so than Rep. John Carter. The ACLU’s Chris Soghoian alerts us to the following clip of Carter at that hearing, which he says “is going to be the new ‘The Internet is a Series of Tubes'” video. I would embed the video, but for reasons that are beyond me, C-SPAN doesn’t use HTTPS so an embed wouldn’t work here (randomly: Soghoian should offer CSPAN a bottle of whiskey to fix that…).
Here’s the basic transcript though:
Rep. John Carter: I’m chairman of Homeland Security Appropriations. I serve on Defense and Defense subcommittees. We have all the national defense issues with cyber. And now, sir, on this wonderful committee. So cyber is just pounding me from every direction. And every time I hear something, or something just pops in my head — because I don’t know anything about this stuff. If they can do that to a cell phone why can’t they do that to every computer in the country, and nobody can get into it? If that’s the case, then that’s the solution to the invaders from around the world who are trying to get in here. [Smug grin]
FBI Director Comey: [Chuckle and gives smug, knowing grin]
Carter: Then if that gets to be the wall, the stone wall, and even the law can’t penetrate it, then aren’t we creating an instrument [that] is the perfect tool for lawlessness. This is a very interesting conundrum that’s developing in the law. If they, at their own will at Microsoft can put something in a computer — or at Apple — can put something in thatcomputer [points on a smartphone], which it is, to where nobody but that owner can open it, then why can’t they put it in the big giant super computers, that nobody but that owner can open it. And everything gets locked away secretly. And that sounds like a solution to this great cyber attack problem, but in turn it allows those who would do us harm [chuckles] to have a tool to do a great deal of harm where law enforcement can’t reach them. This is a problem that’s gotta be solved.
Canadian bloke refuses to hand over phone password, gets cuffed
A 38-year-old Canadian citizen has been arrested for refusing to hand over his smartphone’s password to border agents.
Alain Philippon, of Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines in Quebec, arrived at Halifax international airport in Canada from the Dominican Republic on Wednesday – and was selected by the Canada Border Services Agency for further screening.
In the course of that search he was asked to provide the password for his phone but refused. He was charged with “hindering or preventing border officers from performing their role,” according to CBC.
If found guilty, Philippon could face a fine of anywhere between CAN$1,000 and CAN$25,000 (US$19,900, £13,000) as well as a possible one-year jail sentence.
Philippon was released on bail, and is reportedly willing to challenge the decision when he heads to court on May 12. That challenge would create an interesting legal case in an area of increasing importance: digital “goods” and the right to privacy.
While border officials are given much broader search powers than other authorities, the issue of whether a Canadian border agent is entitled to demand access to the contents of Canadian’s private phone or laptop has not been tested in court.
The agents rely on a interpretation of the word “goods” from legislation written long before smartphones started storing huge amount of personal data. While there is no argument that border agents are entitled to search within people’s luggage, the question of what “inspection” refers to remains uncertain.
An agent can inspect a phone or laptop from the outside, but should they be entitled to compel someone to provide access to its content and if so under what grounds?