The ACLU stanning for the NRA

I heard about this more than a week ago, but wanted to offer something up anyway.

First, some apologists may say this is like defending the Nazis in Skokie 50 years ago.

No it's not.

The NRA may not be as flush as it tries to make out being, but it's much more flush than the National Socialist Party of America was or is. Or, as Students for Justice in Palestine is today. In short, it doesn't need the ACLU's help.

And help it is.

This is NOT an amicus brief. ACLU is serving as counsel for the NRA.

And, per the link, I don't see this as an attempt to silence the NRA, whether it needs civil-liberties organization help or not. Therefore, this is NOT "a controversial First Amendment issue." It's a semi-controversial NON-First Amendment issue, per the Second Circuit's ruling.

And, it's not like it needs to goose its membership. Trump's election, and its aftermath, did that, unless it had humongous churn. So why?

The "both sides" angle like too much of mainstream media still does too often? Churn, after all? An expectation of a Trump re-election?

And, let's not forget then-and-now Executive Director Anthony Romero, hand-in-glove with then board prez Nadine Strossen, working to gag other board members like Wendy Kaminer 15-plus years ago, when they protested about ACLU staff teaching people how to COMPLY with the Patriot Act.

Let's also not forget that, just a few years later, Romero wanted to pardon torturers.

Finally, per Wiki's page on it? Don't forget that while the ACLU "courageously" defended Nazis in the 1970s, it "cowardly" refused to defend alleged Communists in the 1950s. AND, it supported anti-First Amendment legislation, too.

The ACLU may have apologized for being lax in defending Communists. I don't know that it's ever apologized for the Patriot Act shit.

And, yes, it does a lot of good. But, it does its share of not so good, and needs to be kicked every few years.

Ding, dong, the wicked NSA witch is ...

Nowhere near dead, but scrambling and resetting a bit after some of its phone metadata snooping powers were not renewed by midnight Sunday night.

The New York Times reports the Senate will start at it again later today. It notes both the effort of Rand Paul and the miscalculation of Mitch The Turtle McConnell as major factors.

As noted, this isn't that big of a hit. The Justice Department will likely get current investigations grandfathered, and find other workarounds. How much limitations a new bill put on the NSA will be of interest, as will how much McConnell tries to get the House bill largely neutered.

Meanwhile, Dear Leader's team, under "oxymoron," has engaged in mass grandstanding to decry grandstanding on this issue.

We'll probably wind up with something halfway between the current Patriot Act and what the House wanted to cut out, along with NSA cheating.

===

And, in a sidebar note, Huckleberry J. Butchmeup, D-SC, is going to make official his presidential bid. Perry, as I knew he would, has more.

A forced patriotic mandate ... only the GOP

It is a funded mandate, but Constitution Day is a forced mandate, Kent Greenfield notes. Shock me that the GOPers in Congress got that done, and use the once-to-have-been-abolished Department of Education to do so:

Since 2005, by Congressional mandate, all educational institutions receiving federal funds — from preschools to universities, whether public or private — are required to provide relevant educational programming to observe the occasion.

 So, does that make it unconstitutional? Greenfield says that's at least arguable.

Ironically, Constitution Day is probably unconstitutional. One liberty the Constitution protects is the right of individuals and institutions not to applaud it. The laudable message that Congress wanted to send — our Constitution should be celebrated — is muddled by its method of mandatory commemoration. The mandate violates the academic freedom of the targeted institutions.

As for the option of turning down federal funds, Greenfield notes most schools can't afford to do that.

Beyond that, there's all the other issues. Riffing on the Pledge of Allegiance, Greenfield says:

(M)andatory patriotism is corrosive even if accomplished bit by bit. ... Rote patriotism is made even worse when citizens of other countries are also socialized to believe in the exceptionalism of their own nations.

Well put, well put. That said, conservatives have never met a version of coercive patriotism they don't like. Red Scare? Check? War on Terror? Check. Using a cheesed-up acronym to call a spy bill the Patriot Act? Check.

That all said, I'm surprised Grover Norquist hasn't pushed for this "stick" to be used to make Ronald Reagan Day a national holiday. Or that Rudy Giulani wasn't trotted out to do the same for "9/11 Day."

A partial win for civil liberties vs Preznit Kumbaya

Alleged National Security Agency leaker Thomas Drake will plead guilty to one misdemeanor count as part of a lenient deal with our "constitutional law scholar" President, George Barack Obama.

The Post notes that all other charges will be dropped in the deal and Drake will serve no jail time. He also will pay no fines, and can get assessed no more than one year of probation.

“It’s an unambiguous victory for Drake,” said Jesselyn Radack, director of national security at the Government Accountability Project, who supported Drake on whistleblower issues. “The prosecution’s case imploded.”

As another commenter in the story notes, George Barack didn't have many tools.
“As a tool for prosecuting leakers, the Espionage Act is a broad sword where a scalpel would be far preferable,” said Stephen Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at American University. “It criminalizes to the same degree the wrongful retention of information that probably should never have been classified in the first place and the willful sale of state secrets to foreign intelligence agencies.”
Prediction? A bipartisan coalition of "serious adults" crafts a new law, or an addendum to the Patriot Act, that targets leakers in exactly that way. They will still be potentially criminalized as felons, but at a lower felony level.

Showing how weak the case was, Drake rejected two earlier plea offers from the constitutional law administration. The big deal was that the plea agreement removed references to classified information.

Prediction No. 2? The administration will NOT address cost overruns and other issues mentioned by Drake in the first place.

Patriot Act sneakiness

Congressional leaders of both halves of the two-party duopoly, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House John Boehner, are working to get passed a four-year extension of the Patriot Act with as little publicity as possible.

The legislation would extend three expiring provisions until June 1, 2015, officials said.

The provisions at issue allow the government to use roving wiretaps on multiple electronic devices and across multiple carriers and get court-approved access to business records relevant to terrorist investigations. The third, a "lone wolf" provision that was part of a 2004 law, permits secret intelligence surveillance of non-U.S. individuals without having to show a connection between the target and a specific terrorist group.

And, of course, Herr President Obama, he of the "changiness," will immediately sign it into law.

Proof?
"Now more than ever, we need access to the crucial authorities in the Patriot Act," Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
This coming from the AG who has done a boss's butt-kissing volte face on civilian trials for people in Guantanamo and who is now siccing his Justice Department on marijuana operations in states that have legalized medical marijuana.

Is it implausible that the War on Drugs sees the use of the word "terrorist" in the near future?

The Dark Side of the Internet - Part 2 - political activism

Yesterday, I took a long look at whether the Internet lived up to the hype of cyberutopians Clay Shirky and Michael Shermer, and if not, how far short it fell.

Well, now, I'd like to take a bit more of a look at one particular issue within this, and that's whether or not the Net really empowers people politically, whether it primarily promotes slacktivism.

The entree to that?

Via a Facebook discussion, here's a dystopian take on Internet skeptic Evgeny Morozov as being over-dystopian.

Morozov thinks that the “ridiculously easy group-forming” that his leading nemesis Clay Shirky described in his recent book Cognitive Surplus is, in reality, leading largely to cognitive crap, at least as it pertains to civic action and political activism. Indeed, at one point in Chapter 7 (the creatively-titled, “Why Kierkegaard Hates Slacktivism”), Morozov speaks of the development of what we might think of as a “tragedy of the civic commons” (my term, not his). ...

But this ignores many legitimate forms of social organization / protesting that have been facilitated by the Net and digital technologies. Despite what Morozov suggests, we haven’t all become lethargic, asocial, apolitical cave-dwelling Baywatch­ rerun-watching junkies. If all Netizens are just hooked on a cyber-sedative that saps their civic virtue, what are we to make of the millions of progressives who so successfully used the Net and digital technologies to organize and elect President Obama? (Believe me, I wish they wouldn’t have been so civic-minded and rushed to the polls in record numbers to elect that guy!)

The main takeaway I get from this review of Morozov is that the reviewer thinks he's being too dismissive of the possibility of the Internet transforming democratic action.

I disagree. I think, at least in the democratic U.S., governments have found new stasis or equilibrium, a la this"hype cycle" graphic.

Above the level of a small-town city council, do governments even take notice of e-mail action alert e-mails any more? Do you think they do? Do you, like me, assume they don't, and so participate in fewer such campaigns?

My guess is that staffers at congressional offices and such look at those e-mails, then go to environmental, civil liberties and other activist organization websites, and look at the "standard language" suggested by the agency, then discount all e-mails based on that.

I'm guessing that federal bureaus and agencies act similarly.

I'm also guessing that, in larger states, state elected officials' offices and state agencies are doing that more and more.

Ditto on Twitter feeds, if they see thousands of Tweets linking to the same bit.ly or tinyurl.com webpage.

In other words, government is screening you out.

That said, an old-fashioned phone call reaches either a real person, or a real-person's human-voiced voice mail. And, other than the higher tech of cellphones vs. landlines making it a bit easier to do the call, though no easier to speak, there's no tech advance here.

Or, are you a bit more skeptical of human psychology than that, even? Do you believe the ease of an e-mail alert is a salve for the conscience, an easy "indulgence" similar to buying carbon credits rather than taking real action against global warming? (See here for my thoughts on carbon credit indulgences.)

I do.

In other words, does the Internet have a tendency to foster "slacktivism"? Possibly, even quite possibly. Is that better than nothing at all? Yes. How much better will decide whether you lean toward Morozov or Shirky.

Now, I don't claim to have the answers for something more than that, but, I do think that's another fact that Net utopians don't address. In short, Shirky's utopianism about the Net is matched, possibly, by a utopianism about human nature.

But, not all governments are semi-transparent to transparent. What about authoritarian or totalitarian ones?

Again, from the review:

Morozov says modern China, Putin’s Russia and Hugo Chavez are embracing new digital technologies in an attempt to better control them or learn how to use them to better spy on their citizens, and he implies that this is just another way they will dupe the citizenry and seduce them into a slumber so they will avert their eyes and ears to the truth of the repression that surrounds them. Sorry, but once again, I’m not buying it.

Here, Adam Thierer seems ignorant of 19th-century European history.

I don't know about France, but, places further east, after the rise of daily newspapers in larger cities, provide an instructional parallel.

Rather than ban newspapers outright, or even censor them to near the point of being unintelligible, governments such as the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary let leading newspapers of the left stay on racks at coffeehouses and other high-traffic public places precisely so they could keep tabs on who appeared subversive, what information was getting the most reading, etc.

And, presumably, in exchange for letting such places stay in business, occasionally leaning on their owners to rat out a few patrons to stay in business.

Now, Morozov may be overstating the case with the idea that Chavez is, or can be, "duping" people. There, I would agree with Thierer. Somewhat. But, not nearly totally.

As I noted in my original post, a leaked e-mail from HBGary, one of the companies that wanted to spy on “Anonymous” and online supporters of it and Julian Assange, showed it has plans to ramp up corporate online sockpuppetry to a whole new level.

Now, Venezuela or Iran may not have consultancy companies with this level of expertise, or folks inside its government, to pull off something similar. But, you can bet Hu Jintao's China and Vladimir Putin's Russia do.

Speaking of, it now (3/20/11) seems China is blocking Gmail. Another nail in the coffin of Net utopians, as well as that of transationalists.

Again, Thierer should read some history of 100-plus years ago.

The Okhrana, the Czarist predecessor to the KGB, was notorious for its use of human agents provacateur. They included the man who assassinated Prime Minister Pytor Stolypin in 1911.

The use of fake Tweeters, fake Facebookers, etc. to do similar by electronic means should be seriously considered by the U.S. foreign policy establishment when monitoring unrest, or apparent unrest, in these countries, in fact.

But, at the same time, we don't need to go abroad, or leave the land of democracy, to talk about governments abusing the Internet

I mentioned HB Gary above. We don't even need to do that.

Under the Bush Administration (and perhaps still ongoing with Team Obama), the FBI spied on, harassed, and even arrested on flimsy charges individuals involved in peace/antiwar groups. How much of that was enabled by electronic snooping, or even electronic sockpuppetry?

And, let's not forget the Patriot Act itself and the Internet spying it allows.

For Shirky to write his utopian BS without even discussing that? Unconscionable. If the mainstream media did something like that, he'd be vomiting all over the Internet.

The Dark Side of the Internet — and social media

Now, I'm not a Luddite, either neo or paleo.

But, I'm also not a Kurzweilian, either, expecting technology to get us all living to 300 with Viagra-free perfect sexual activity. (And, that’s happening in just 30 years, says Kurzweil, with Time magazine dumb enough to give him its cover on that subject.)

So, while I appreciate making online friends, applying for jobs online, learning new things online, shopping online and more ...

I won't ignore that there IS a dark side to the Internet, even if not all of it is Orwellian. (Note: This may become a series — part 2 is here.)

Or, there's flip sides to coins, at least. And, the dark sides may be less harmful and more pedestrian than anything else. And, are in part "dark sides" only in comparison to a relentless, nearly fact-free boosterism of Internet utopians like Clay Shirky.

Take online shopping.

The flip side? Online ads becoming ever more pervasive. Online violations of private information growing and becoming more aggressive. And, in light of that, let me repeat my assertion that "Brave New World" is equally seminal as "1984,"if not more so.

And, I’m not alone in that.

“Is the Internet Changing the Way We Think?”, edited by John Brockman, the founder of the online science-and-technology site Edge.org, discusses a lot of these issues, as this Wall Street Journal review notes.

Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher, argues that the Internet isn't changing the way we think; it is exacerbating the deceptively simple challenge of "attention management." "Attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life," he argues. The way we use the Internet today represents "not only an organized attack on the space of consciousness per se but also a mild form of depersonalization. . . . I call it public dreaming."

These are not the laments of technophobes. MIT professor Rodney Brooks, an expert on robotics, worries that the Internet "is stealing our attention. It competes for it with everything else we do." Neuroscientist Brian Knutson imagines a near future in which "the Internet may impose a 'survival of the focused,' in which individuals gifted with some natural ability to stay on target, or who are hopped up on enough stimulants, forge ahead while the rest of us flail helpless in a Web-based attentional vortex." …
The substitution of the virtual for the real is another common theme. Paleontologist Scott Sampson worries about "the loss of intimate experience with the natural world." And computer scientist Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, says that the Internet has "become gripped by reality-denying ideology." Several of the book's contributors, particularly artists and architects, make solid arguments for the importance of unmediated experiences to the creative process. …

(Update: At the same time, Lanier is himself some sort of tech-neolib, who is dumb enough, naive enough, or on the take enough to assume that Big Data will give you or I micropayments for using its services.)

Beyond worrying about the Internet, at least one person in the book tells us not to overrate it:

The neuroscientist Joshua Greene suggests, in a blunt but apt metaphor, that the Internet, for all its revolutionary pretense, is "nothing more, and nothing less, than a very useful, and very dumb, butler.

Clay Shirky, below, can't fit "butler" or "robot" in his cyber-utopianism. I'll get to that later.

Meanwhile, there's the dark side of Twitter.

Lee Siegel immediately notes one issue:

Just a few years ago, all anyone could talk about was how to make the Internet more free. Now all anyone can talk about is how to control it.

it's a good start to his review of Evgeny Morozov's “The Net Delusion.”

He shows how American naivete and chauvinism have mixed to worship at the altar of Twitter:

He quotes the political blogger Andrew Sullivan, who proclaimed after protesters took to the streets in Tehran that “the revolution will be Twittered.” The revolution never happened, and the futilely tweeting protesters were broken with an iron hand. But Sullivan was hardly the only one to ignore the Iranian context. Clay Shirky, the media’s favorite quotable expert on all things Internet-related, effused: “This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.”

Frank Rich knows the truth.

The talking-head invocations of Twitter and Facebook instead take the form of implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism. How fabulous that two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses. That is indeed impressive if no one points out that, even in the case of the young and relatively wired populace of Egypt, only some 20 percent of those masses have Internet access.

Rich also implies that American teevee, as opposed to the effectively banned-from-America Al Jazeera, relies on foreign Tweeters out of collective corporate laziness:

That we often don’t know as much about the people in these countries as we do about their Tweets is a testament to the cutbacks in foreign coverage at many news organizations — and perhaps also to our own desire to escape a war zone that has for so long sapped American energy, resources and patience.

Meanwhile, the Internet in America is not that ethical:

As Morozov points out, don’t expect corporations like Google to liberate anyone anytime soon. Google did business in China for four years before economic conditions and censorship demands — not human rights concerns — forced it out. And it is telling that both Twitter and Facebook have refused to join the Global Network Initiative, a pact that Morozov describes as “an industrywide pledge . . . to behave in accordance with the laws and standards covering the right to freedom of expression and privacy embedded in internationally recognized documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

So, let’s not expect the Internet to radically change the ethos of American business.

To some degree, I suspect early expectations of the Internet were in part a mix of American naivete, salvific technologism and American exceptionalism that all overlapped, and are now facing reality.

Yet more on the dark side of the Net from the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, reviewing Clay Shirky's new book, as well as Morozov's.

This is a great overview of a variety of books, some claiming this is the best of times for human psychology and more, some saying the brain in some ways just can't keep pace, and some saying its six of one, a half dozen of the other.

(A)mong the new books about the Internet (there are three types): call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers.

In the first category? A book by new media fluffer Clay Shirky and an essay Pop Ev Psycher (yes, you are) John Tooby, both make ignorant claims about the early egalitarianism and humanism of the printing press, among other things.

Shirky’s and Tooby’s version of Never-Betterism has its excitements, but the history it uses seems to have been taken from the back of a cereal box. The idea, for instance, that the printing press rapidly gave birth to a new order of information, democratic and bottom-up, is a cruel cartoon of the truth. If the printing press did propel the Reformation, one of the biggest ideas it propelled was Luther’s newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism. And what followed the Reformation wasn’t the Enlightenment, a new era of openness and freely disseminated knowledge. What followed the Reformation was, actually, the Counter-Reformation, which used the same means—i.e., printed books—to spread ideas about what jerks the reformers were, and unleashed a hundred years of religious warfare.

I'll pass on both. As for Shirky, if he can't get the founding instrument of media, and its early influence on society, right, how can we trust his pronunciamentos on media today? Of course, we can't.

Meanwhile, Shirky's naive wiki-touting gets demolished:

In a practical, immediate way, one sees the limits of the so-called “extended mind” clearly in the mob-made Wikipedia, the perfect product of that new vast, supersized cognition: when there’s easy agreement, it’s fine, and when there’s widespread disagreement on values or facts, as with, say, the origins of capitalism, it’s fine, too; you get both sides. The trouble comes when one side is right and the other side is wrong and doesn’t know it. The Shakespeare authorship page and the Shroud of Turin page are scenes of constant conflict and are packed with unreliable information. Creationists crowd cyberspace every bit as effectively as evolutionists, and extend their minds just as fully. Our trouble is not the over-all absence of smartness but the intractable power of pure stupidity, and no machine, or mind, seems extended enough to cure that.

Gopnik then tackels the "Better-Nevers" In brief:

The books by the Better-Nevers are more moving than those by the Never-Betters for the same reason that Thomas Gray was at his best in that graveyard: loss is always the great poetic subject.

He doesn't review Morozov, but his book would probably fall halfway here, halfway in the Better-Waser group, which says the Net isn't a utopia, but we've heard similar complaints about other technology.

Chris Lehmann has a similar review of Shirky, with some Morozov, at The Nation.

Lehmann labels Shirky as not only a hand-waving utopian optimist, but a vignette-as-authoritarian writer of the same ilk as Malcolm Gladwell. It’s also clear that Shirky has more than a touch of the economic libertarian in him, deriding, or seeming to, much of the liberal-developed social contract of the last century or so in the U.S and elsewhere in the western world.

Meanwhile, a leaked e-mail from HBGary, one of the companies that wanted to spy on “Anonymous” and online supporters of it and Julian Assange, shows it has plans to ramp up corporate online sockpuppetry to a whole new level. So much for Shirky's alleged Internet egalitarianism.

Via Jim Lippard, here's a dystopian take on Morozov as being over-dystopian.

The main takeaway I get from this review of Morozov is that the reviewer thinks he's being too dismissive of the possibility of the Internet transforming democratic action.

I disagree. I think, at least in the democratic U.S., governments have found new stasis or equilibrium, a la the "hype cycle" graphic Lippard mentioned.

Above the level of a small-town city council, do governments even take notice of e-mail action alert e-mails any more? Do you think they do? Do you, like me, assume they don't, and so participate in fewer such campaigns?

Or, are you a bit more skeptical of human psychology than that, even? Do you believe the ease of an e-mail alert is a salve for the conscience, an easy "indulgence" similar to buying carbon credits rather than taking real action against global warming? (See here for my thoughts on carbon credit indulgences.)

I do.

In other words, does the Internet have a tendency to foster "slacktivism"? Yes. Is that better than nothing at all? Yes. How much better will decide whether you lean toward Morozov or Shirky.

Now, I don't claim to have the answers for something more than that, but, I do think that's another fact that Net utopians don't address. In short, Shirky's utopianism about the Net is matched, possibly, by a utopianism about human nature.

But, at the same time, we don't need to go abroad, or leave the land of democracy, to talk about governments abusing the Internet

I mentioned HB Gary above. We don't even need to do that.

Under the Bush Administration (and perhaps still ongoing with Team Obama), the FBI spied on, harassed, and even arrested on flimsy charges individuals involved in peace/antiwar groups. How much of that was enabled by electronic snooping, or even electronic sockpuppetry?

And, let's not forget the Patriot Act itself and the Internet spying it allows.

For Shirky to write his utopian BS without even discussing that? Unconscionable. If the mainstream media did something like that, he'd be vomiting all over the Internet.

Anyway, the reality is that 20 years from now, much of the Net will be Russian, Chinese and Nigeria spammers talking to each other anyway.

So, the portion of the Net that’s not foreign money spammers 20 years from now will be Big Biz PR spammers. Or, speaking of Russia and China, more and more of it will be cyberwarfare.

Update: Add alleged skeptic, but real pseudoskeptic, Michael Shermer, to the list of cyberutopians. He's so bad he believes Ray Kurzweiil's prediction that the Singularity will arrive by 2030.

Senate Dems sell out civil liberties again

The Patriot Act got renewed by the Senate with NO civil liberties protections added.

Finally, another worrier about Google Chrome

Jonathan Zittrain points out a variety of issues, including not just Google getting hacked and your documents exposed to public view, but cloud computing making you subject to the Patriot Act. And those are not all the worries of Zittrain.

Background on Obama’s lack of cred on civil liberties

Some talking points from the WaPost story about his appearance in libertarian-state Montana. (That’s more accurate, in some ways, than Red state, IMO.)

If anything, Obama may be heading the other way … on some of the intrusive homeland security measures popular with the "security moms" who populate the East and Midwest swing suburbs. ... He recently embraced a compromise bill on warrantless wiretapping that would effectively offer legal immunity to telecommunications companies that helped spy on customers. In 2006, after expressing misgivings, he voted for the Patriot Act's reauthorization, saying it was a marked improvement over the original bill of 2001. Obama voted for an emergency spending bill that included creating the Real ID, even though he said he opposed the identification card as an unfunded mandate. Support for the Real ID is in line with law-and-order voters.

Doesn’t that Patriot Act comment sound JUST like his FISA comment? And, of course, the Patriot Act reauthorization was no such thing.

Yes, it was an improvement over the original, but in no sense a marked improvement.

As for Real ID, you’ll note that Obama didn’t oppose the idea itself, just the cost.

In other words, we shouldn’t be surprised by Obama on FISA. He has a history.

Patriot Act parts found unconstitutional

Early this year, some U.S. climatologists argued for seeding the atmosphere with particulant pollutants, i.e., soot, to reflect sunlight; now, British “Gaia” hypothesis deviser James Lovelock wants to create a It violates the Fourth Amendment:

U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended by the Patriot Act, “now permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment.”

No shit, and yet Democrats voted to do that just a month ago. Meanwhile, intelligence czar Mike McConnell wants to make that permanent.

Probably Congressional Democrats still won’t find a spine, and will hope SCOTUS bails them out.

Judge says no to part of revised Patriot Act

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero said telling an Internet service provider to turn over records without a judicial court order violates the separation of powers. The ACLU had challenged FBI-issued National Security Letters on precisely that grounds, in the lawsuit before Judge Marrero’s court.

This applies to the 2005-revised Patriot Act. Marrero had earlier struck down the NSL gag order provision in the original version of the Act as a free speech violation; the Second Circuit Court of Appeals directed him to hear the ACLU’s suit on the constitutionality of the act even as revised.

The law was written "reflects an attempt by Congress and the executive to infringe upon the judiciary's designated role under the Constitution," Marrero wrote.

A win’s a win.

Now, can we get Democratic presidential candidates to tell us what they are going to do to junk the Patriot Act — besides Kucinich, who’s already made that pledge?

Forty-four Democrats sink civil liberties

Forty-four House Democrats voted yes on renewing the Patriot Act July 21. And those 44 made the difference between it being renewed or being killed, barring some toned-down version.

As Yahoo reports:

The House reauthorized the act by 257-171. In the Republican-controlled chamber, 44 Democrats supported the bill while 14 Republicans opposed it.

If every Democrat voting had opposed the issue while the 14 Republicans in opposition had all held on, it would have failed by a 215-213 margin.

Those 44? That's more than 20 percent of House Democrats.

Yet another reason to vote Green.

And here’s another:

“Republicans also added a new provision to apply the federal death penalty for terrorist offenses that resulted in death and another establishing a new crime of narco-terrorism to punish people using drug profits to aid terrorism. These offenders will now face 20-year minimum prison sentences.”

Great. Democrats aid and abet the pseudo-war on drugs.

Oh, but we get this sop:

”House Republicans agreed last week that this clause -- perhaps the most contentious -- and another allowing so-called roving wiretaps, which permits the government to eavesdrop on suspects as they switch from phone to phone, would be renewed for only 10 years instead of being made permanent.”

Well, lucky us. Fortunately the Senate is only extending those provisions for four years in its version of the bill.

Democrats sell out on civil liberties again

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 11-4 vote to approve giving the FBI more subpoena-less search powersis the latest proof of that.

And listen to the lame justification for this:

Some senators who voted 11-4 to move the bill forward said they would push for limits on the new powers the measure would grant to law enforcement agencies.”This bill must be amended on the floor to protect national security while protecting Constitutional rights,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski D-Md. Ranking Democrat Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., supported the bill overall but said he would push for limits that would allow such administrative subpoenas “only if immediacy dictates.”

The ACLU notes these major concerns :

1. Makes permanent Patriot Act powers without safeguards.
2. Does not provide adequate safeguards to protect library and other private records.
3. Eliminates prior court review of FBI library and other private records demands for intelligence gathering purposes.
4. Strikes an existing First Amendment safeguard for records search powers.
5. Further expands time limits for FISA surveillance.
6. Exacerbates using FISA as “end-run” around stricter safeguards for criminal surveillance.
7, Creates new statutory authority for intelligence investigators to track mail of ordinary citizens.
8. Expands greatly the amount of information obtained without probable cause through Internet surveillance.

A Reuters article offers some hope:

the Senate Judiciary Committee, which also has oversight authority on the Patriot Act and related legislation, was expected to assume control of the measure as part of its own reauthorization proceedings.

Of course, it also shows how big business keeps its own ass covered:

Roberts and Rockefeller said the bill would provide more safeguards under a provision of the Patriot Act that allows federal authorities to subpoena business records.

Meanwhile, Democrats also appear to have no problem with Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts holding secret meetings left and right to grease the skids for approval of this disaster.