The Agonist - Liberties

Russia enshrines ban on death penalty

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:47:31 -0800

Moscow | November 19

BBC - Russia's ban on the death penalty will remain when a current legal suspension expires on 1 January, the country's Constitutional Court has ruled.

It said the use of the death penalty was now impossible because Russia had signed international deals banning it.

Russian announced the moratorium in 1996 when it joined the Council of Europe, although it retains capital punishment in its criminal code.

Opinion polls suggest that a majority of Russians back the death penalty.

TSA is secretly watching you

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:11:58 -0800

Ken Kaye | Fort Lauderdale, FL | November 15

LAT - You might not see them. But they're watching you.

To identify dangerous people, the Transportation Security Administration stations behavior-detection officers at 161 U.S. airports, including ones in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Los Angeles. The officers can be anywhere, from the parking garage to the gate, looking for passengers who seem highly nervous or stressed.

They don't focus on nationality, race, ethnicity or gender, said TSA spokeswoman Sari Koshetz.

"We're not looking for a type of person, but at behaviors," she said.

Under the program, which started in Boston in 2003, a suspicious passenger might be given a secondary security screening or referred to police. Detection officers don't have the power to arrest someone.

'I will only wear pants'

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 05:56:07 -0800

Defiant 'trouser lady' continues to fight decency laws

Washington Post, By Stephanie McCrummen, November 14

KHARTOUM, SUDAN -- A few months after she was arrested for wearing pants, Lubna Hussein was lounging around her home in a shady, upper-class neighborhood in this capital along the Nile River. It was a hot afternoon, but the 34-year-old Sudanese journalist was wearing thick jeans adorned with sequins and embroidered flowers.

"Since all this happened, I will only wear pants," she said in the calmly defiant manner that led to her fleeting global celebrity as "the trouser lady," and a less-publicized backlash that has included anonymous death threats and newspaper columns calling her a prostitute. "If you have something to fight for, you can lose your life."

In July, Hussein attempted to shame Sudan's Islamist ruling party by inviting reporters to view her public flogging, a punishment under Islamic law that is sometimes applied here -- by leather whip or bamboo cane of the sort used on camels -- to women deemed to have violated decency laws.

As news spread, her court date drew crowds of women and men protesting in solidarity, and she received support from the likes of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Sudanese women started Web sites such as iamlubna.com, and some compared her to Rosa Parks, the American civil rights icon who challenged segregation laws.

Then, the campaign fizzled. Eager to dispense with the negative publicity, a judge sentenced Hussein to jail instead of flogging. She was released days later, and the attention surrounding her case settled into discussions among women about their experiences with Khartoum's vaguely worded decency laws, and the politics of keeping public order.

Previous Agonist Thread: Interesting Saudi op-ed narrative on the bozos in Riyadh trying to pick up girls

Watchdog slams ‘bogus’ Justice Dept. demand for news site’s visitor logs

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:21:56 -0800

Daniel Tencer | Nov 10

Raw Story - A Justice Department subpoena requesting all available information on all visitors to an independent news site is raising serious privacy concerns, and questions about how much information the US government is storing about its citizens' news reading habits.

Privacy watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation has released an extensive report on a "bogus" attempt by a US attorney in Indiana to get Indymedia.us, an independent left-leaning news site, to hand over all the data it had about all the users who visited the site on a particular day.

Further adding to civil libertarians' and privacy watchdogs' concerns is the fact that the Justice Department ordered Indymedia to keep silent about the request.

"This overbroad demand for internet records not only violated federal privacy law but also violated [Indymedia's] First Amendment rights, by ordering [it] not to disclose the existence of the subpoena without a US attorney’s permission," the EFF's Kevin Bankston wrote.

And while Indymedia is an unabashedly left-wing news site, advocating causes such as gay rights and anti-globalization, some of the site's defenders in the wake of the subpoena controversy are right-wing pundits who are drawing a parallel between the Indymedia case and the war of words between the White House and Fox News.

Fox News host Glenn Beck sent out a Twitter message on Tuesday drawing attention to the Indymedia story. Though the Tweet was non-committal -- "Interesting times we live in. Can't wait to see what this story is about." -- it did raise the unusual prospect of a prominent right-wing commentator championing the rights of a left-wing news site.

Deal in Senate on Protecting News Sources

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:47:08 -0800

New York Times, By Charlie Savage. October 30

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, leading Senate Democrats and a coalition of news organizations have reached tentative agreement on legislation providing greater protections against the fining or imprisonment of reporters who refuse to identify confidential sources.

Under the deal, made public Friday, federal judges could quash subpoenas demanding testimony or information from reporters if the judges determined that the public interest in news gathering outweighed the need to uncover the source of a leak, including, in some circumstances, unauthorized disclosure of classified government information.

Protection under the so-called shield law would also be extended to unpaid bloggers engaged in gathering and disseminating news.

A version of shield legislation was approved by the House in March. But a similar bill has stalled in the Senate, and its prospects appeared to dim significantly in September when the administration, responding to apprehension expressed by intelligence agencies and prosecutors, took a harder line with regard to cases in which the government could claim national security concerns.

With the new agreement, however, the White House has now moderated that position.

“We expect this proposal to move forward with bipartisan support, and the president looks forward to signing it into law,” said Ben LaBolt, a White House spokesman, who noted that the Obama administration was “the first administration in history to support media shield legislation.”

h/t On The Media: Shields Up, November 6
h/t Nieman Journalism Lab: Did newspapers and bloggers frame the shield law debate differently?, By CW Anderson, November 2

Maine’s vote on gay marriage draws national attention

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 08:43:33 -0800

Brad Knickerbocker | Augusta, ME | October 31

CSM - “As Maine goes, so goes the nation” is a political cliché long since out of use.

But with Tuesday’s election there, both sides in the fierce debate over same-sex marriage are hoping the outcome not only favors them but sends a clear message to the rest of the United States.

In May, the Maine Legislature passed a law legalizing gay marriage, and after initially opposing it Gov. John Baldacci signed the measure. If approved, “Question 1” on Tuesday’s ballot would overturn the new law.

If the measure wins at the polls, it would continue a string of about 30 states where voters have rejected gay marriage. If it fails, Maine would join the handful of states (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, and Iowa) where legislatures and courts — not voters — have made same-sex marriage legal.

“This is significant on the national level because this is the first time voters are weighing in on a law where marriage has already been defined for them,” Jenny Tyree, a marriage analyst with the conservative lobbying group Focus on the Family Action, told the Bangor Daily News.

Bangor Daily News: Maine marriage law has nation engaged

Obama signs first major federal gay-rights law

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 06:35:15 -0700

Margaret Talev | Washington | October 29

McClatchy - President Barack Obama on Wednesday signed the first major piece of federal gay rights legislation, a milestone that activists compared to the passage of 1960s civil-rights legislation empowering blacks.

The new law adds acts of violence against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people to the list of federal hate crimes. Gay-rights activists voiced hope that the Obama administration would advance more issues, including legislation to bar workplace discrimination, allow military service and recognize same-sex marriages.

Congress passed the hate crimes protections as an unlikely amendment to this year's Defense Authorization Act. Obama, speaking at an emotional evening reception with supporters of the legislation, said that more than 12,000 hate crimes had been reported the past decade based on sexual orientation.

He spoke of President Lyndon Johnson signing protections for blacks in the 1960s and said this was an extension of that work. "We must stand against crimes that are meant not only to break bones but to break spirits," Obama said. "No one in America should ever be afraid to walk down the street holding the hands of the person they love."

Also, CSM: Obama signs bill expanding hate crimes to sexual orientation

Loosening of F.B.I. Rules Stirs Privacy Concerns

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:01:14 -0700

Charlie Savage | Washington | October 28

NYT - After a Somali-American teenager from Minneapolis committed a suicide bombing in Africa in October 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating whether a Somali Islamist group had recruited him on United States soil.

Instead of collecting information only on people about whom they had a tip or links to the teenager, agents fanned out to scrutinize Somali communities, including in Seattle and Columbus, Ohio. The operation unfolded as the Bush administration was relaxing some domestic intelligence-gathering rules.

The F.B.I.’s interpretation of those rules was recently made public when it released, in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit, its “Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide.” The disclosure of the manual has opened the widest window yet onto how agents have been given greater power in the post-Sept. 11 era.

In seeking the revised rules, the bureau said it needed greater flexibility to hunt for would-be terrorists inside the United States. But the manual’s details have alarmed privacy advocates.

One section lays out a low threshold to start investigating a person or group as a potential security threat. Another allows agents to use ethnicity or religion as a factor — as long as it is not the only one — when selecting subjects for scrutiny.

“It raises fundamental questions about whether a domestic intelligence agency can protect civil liberties if they feel they have a right to collect broad personal information about people they don’t even suspect of wrongdoing,” said Mike German, a former F.B.I. agent who now works for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Damn Brits

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:35:30 -0700

always trying to one up us...

White House Weighs In On Justice Who Won't Marry Interracial Couples

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:39:28 -0700

White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton responded today to a question about a justice of the peace in Louisiana who refused to sign the marriage license for an interracial couple out of concern "for the children."

"I've seen the story and I've looked into this a little bit. And I found that, actually, the children of biracial couples can do pretty good," said Burton, who is biracial himself.

"So in terms of anything else, I just think it's something that they're dealing with locally."

For those unfamiliar...

Anger at US mixed marriage 'ban'

BBC, October 16

A white US justice of the peace has been criticised for refusing to issue marriage licences to mixed-race couples.

Keith Bardwell, of Tangipahoa Parish in Louisiana, denied racism but said mixed-race children were not readily accepted by their parents' communities.

A couple he refused to marry are considering filing a complaint about him to the US Justice Department.

Mr Bardwell said he had often conducted the weddings of his black friends.

'No integration'

Mr Bardwell, who has worked in the role for 34 years, said that in his experience most interracial marriages did not last very long and estimated that he had refused applications to four couples in the past two-and-a-half years.

He said he had "piles and piles of black friends" but just did not believe in "mixing the races".

"They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else," he said.

He said he had discussed the issue with both black and white people before making his decision.

"There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage," he said "I think those children suffer and I won't help put them through it."

Homeland Security Reports on Revamped Immigration Enforcement

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:42:54 -0700

Spencer S. Hsu | Washington | October 16

WaPo - A controversial federal program that deputizes state and local law enforcement agents to catch illegal immigrants is expanding under the Obama administration, despite changes announced this summer intended to curb alleged racial profiling and other police abuses.

The Department of Homeland Security reported Friday that only four of 66 participating agencies have dropped out because of the new federal requirements. And those losses are offset by the addition of five police, sheriff's and corrections departments, while six more are nearing approval, according to the department.

In the Washington area, sheriff's offices in Frederick, Loudoun and Prince William counties continue to participate.

Nationwide, the program identified about 60,000 illegal immigrants for deportation over the past year, the highest number since the program was expanded nationwide in 2006. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano in July said agencies that receive federal grants and training under the program would have 90 days to agree to new terms aimed at ending controversial police practices identified by congressional auditors and civil rights groups. Critics cited cases in which police conducted roadside stops and neighborhood sweeps aimed at Latinos and other ethnic groups, often arresting minorities for traffic and other minor offenses in pursuit of illegal immigrants.

Instead of scaling back the program, as its critics wanted, DHS has reshaped it. The agency has reined in local police units that target illegal immigrants at large, directing the units instead to focus on those who commit major drug offenses or violent crimes, especially those already incarcerated. Most prominently, the agency cut back authority it had given to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. His operations in the Phoenix metropolitan area had led to charges of racial profiling and three federal investigations.

[...]

Arpaio, whose, 4,000-employee department has caught more illegal immigrants under the program than any other agency -- more than 20 percent of the nationwide total -- vowed to defy the new rules and continue arrests in the community. He said deputies will conduct another "crime suppression" raid Friday and turn over illegal immigrants found violating traffic laws or other civil offenses to federal authorities. If ICE refuses to take them, Arpaio said, he will take them to the next closest federal agency, probably the U.S. Border Patrol at the Mexican border.

"I can't understand why they are bullying this law enforcement agency for political reasons when we've been so successful," Arpaio said in an interview. "We're going to go out again [Friday] -- the same way we've been doing it."

FBI Putting Driver's Licenses in Virtual Lineup

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:56:11 -0700

Stephen J. Dubord | Raleigh, NC | October 13

The New American - The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now able to scan millions of driver’s licenses using facial recognition technology as they seek to track down fugitives.

The project, initiated in North Carolina, has led to at least one suspect being apprehended. Now the Bureau wants to expand the program nationwide, but privacy experts are warning that this puts innocent people into a virtual criminal lineup.

“Everybody’s participating, essentially, in a virtual lineup by getting a driver’s license,” stated American Civil Liberties Union attorney Christopher Calabrese. And there is no way to opt out of the lineup other than not having a driver’s license.

The FBI had their first success story with a double homicide suspect named Rodolfo Corrales. Using a 1991 booking photo of Corrales as the standard, the Bureau used computers to hunt through the 30 million photos in the North Carolina motor vehicle agency database. Within seconds, the search turned up a dozen drivers resembling Corrales.

“Running facial recognition is not very labor-intensive at all,” analyst Michael Garcia noted. “If I can probe a hundred fugitives and get one or two, that’s a home run.”

[...]

The FBI itself is not authorized to gather and retain photos. That is why the facial recognition process must take place at the Division of Motor Vehicles in an individual state. The authority to make the driver’s license information available to law-enforcement officials already exists under state and federal laws. “Unless the person’s a criminal, we would not have a need to have that information in the system,” pointed out Kim Del Greco, overseer of the FBI’s biometrics division. “I think that would be a privacy concern. We’re staying away from that.”

So sensitive, Mr./Ms. Del Greco! Nice to have you on the side of all that is good in the world.

AP Article

Report: Abortions decline worldwide

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:16:03 -0700

Linda Feldmann | Washington | October 13

CSM - The decline in abortions corresponded with increased contraceptive use, though access to contraception remains uneven in the developing world.

Contraceptive use is up worldwide, and with that has come a decline in abortions and unintended pregnancies, according to a report [“Abortion Worldwide: A Decade of Uneven Progress” - PDF] by the Guttmacher Institute released Tuesday.

Between 1995 and 2003, the number of abortions performed worldwide fell from 45.5 million to 41.6 million. The global rate of abortions fell as well: from 35 abortions for every 1,000 women of reproductive age (15-44) in 1995, to 29 per 1,000 women in 2003.

The decline corresponds with a growth in contraceptive use worldwide. The proportion of married women practicing contraception rose from 54 percent in 1990 to 63 percent in 2003, Guttmacher reports. Unmarried, sexually active women are also more likely to be using contraception.

What spurred the increase in contraceptive use?

"In the course of social and economic development, women and couples increasingly want smaller families, and so in a broad sense those are some of the contributors to uptake of contraception," says Gilda Sedgh, a senior research associate at the New York-based Guttmacher Institute and a coauthor of the study.

"That of course is not possible without access to contraception. So it's service provision and international investments in family planning programs that have made it possible."

Guttmacher Institute Press Release: ABORTION AND UNINTENDED PREGNANCY DECLINE WORLDWIDE AS CONTRACEPTIVE USE INCREASES

“The gains we’ve seen are modest in relation to what we can achieve. Investing in family planning is essential—far too many women lack access to contraception, putting them at risk,” notes Dr. Camp. “Legal restrictions do not stop abortion from happening, they just make the procedure dangerous. Too many women are maimed or killed each year because they lack legal abortion access.”

The report finds that while the incidence of abortion is closely related to that of unintended pregnancy, it does not correlate with abortion’s legal status. Indeed, abortion occurs at roughly equal rates in regions where it is broadly legal and in regions where it is highly restricted. The key difference is safety—illegal, clandestine abortions cause significant harm to women, especially in developing countries.

Unsafe abortion causes an estimated 70,000 deaths each year, and an additional five million women are treated annually for complications resulting from unsafe abortion. Approximately three million women who experience serious complications from unsafe procedures go untreated.

Bans 'do not cut abortion rate'

BBC, October 13

Restricting the availability of legal abortion does not appear to reduce the number of women trying to end unwanted pregnancies, a major report suggests.

The Guttmacher Institute's survey found abortion occurs at roughly equal rates in regions where it is legal and regions where it is highly restricted.

It did note that improved access to contraception had cut the overall abortion rate over the last decade.

But unsafe abortions, primarily illegal, have remained almost static.

[...]

Western Europe is held up as an example of what access to contraceptive services can achieve, and the Netherlands - with just 10 abortions per 1,000 women compared to the world's 29 per 1,000 - is held up as the gold standard.

Here, young people report using two forms of contraception as standard.

Even the UK, which has a relatively high rate, fares well in comparison to the US, where the number of abortions is among the highest in the developed world. The institute says this rate is in part explained by inconsistencies in insurance coverage of contraceptive supplies.

Report: US considers phone companies ‘arm of government’

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 21:17:28 -0700

Daniel Tencer | Oct 10

Raw Story - The US government doesn't have to reveal information about phone companies that may have spied illegally on Americans because those phone companies are an "arm of the government," the US Justice Department argued in a recent court case.

In a lawsuit over the Bush administration's decision to give immunity to telecom companies over its warrantless wiretapping program, the Justice Department argued that it doesn't have to publicly reveal what it discussed with the phone companies because those discussions were "inter-agency communications," explains Ryan Singel at Wired.

He cites a passage from a court document in which the department argues that "the communications between the agencies and telecommunications companies regarding the immunity provisions of the proposed legislation have been regarded as intra-agency...."

Singel was reporting on privacy watchdog group Electronic Frontier Foundation's two-year-long legal battle with the DoJ over access to those communications. In 2008, the Bush administration passed a law granting reotroactive immunity to phone companies that had participated in the administration's warrantless wiretapping program.

After news reports in 2007 suggested that the phone companies had lobbied the government to have those protections put in place, the EFF launched a freedom-of-information request to have discussions between the Justice Department and the phone companies made public. When the government refused, the EFF took the matter to court.

On September 24, a US District Court judge sided with the EFF and ordered the government to "release more records about the lobbying campaign to provide immunity to the telecommunications giants that participated in the NSA's warrantless surveillance program," the EFF stated.

The judge gave the Justice Department until last Friday to hand over the documents. But, late on Thursday, the government appealed for a 30-day stay of the judge's order. That order was refused, but the judge has delayed any further decisions on the case for another week.

CONGRESS 'A MERE APPENDAGE' OF EXECUTIVE BRANCH?

Blogger Marcy Wheeler at FireDogLake says there are more interesting revelations about the government's attitude towards constitutional powers in the delay request it filed last week.

Justice Dept. to Review Bush Policy on DNA Test Waivers

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:17:13 -0700

Jerry Markon | Oct 11

WaPo - Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has ordered a review of a little-known Bush administration policy requiring some defendants to waive their right to DNA testing even though that right is guaranteed in a landmark federal law, officials said.

The practice of using DNA waivers began several years ago as a response to the Innocence Protection Act of 2004, which allowed federal inmates to seek post-conviction DNA tests to prove their innocence. More than 240 wrongly convicted people have been exonerated by such tests, including 17 on death row.

The waivers are filed only in guilty pleas and bar defendants from ever requesting DNA testing, even if new evidence emerges. Prosecutors who use them, including some of the nation's most prominent U.S. attorneys, say people who have admitted guilt should not be able to file frivolous petitions for testing. They say the wave of DNA exonerations has little impact in federal court because all those found to be innocent were state prisoners, and the waivers apply only to federal charges. DNA evidence is used far more frequently in state courts.

But DNA experts say that's about to change because more sophisticated testing will soon bring biological evidence into federal courtrooms for a wider variety of crimes. Defense lawyers who have worked on DNA appeals strongly oppose the waivers, saying that innocent people sometimes plead guilty -- mainly to get lighter sentences -- and that denying them the ability to prove their innocence violates a fundamental right. One quarter of the 243 people exonerated by DNA had falsely confessed to crimes they didn't commit, and 16 of them pleaded guilty.