Wiretapping on Folsom Street? Moo.

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003914.php

Tags: 1984, idiocy

Bush signs bill to quiz terror suspects

Now in syndication on Fox: the wacky quiz show, What's My Crime?

Hosted by Chuck Woolery and set in the exotic locale of Guantánamo Bay, enemy contestants are asked a series of increasingly more difficult questions under tense conditions, vying for the opportunity to participate in "extreme sports" activities like waterboarding and genital electrocution.

Now entering its sixth season, the producers have made the game even more exciting and challenging by removing the "File-a-Habeas Corpus-Petition Lifeline" available to contestants in previous seasons.

Make sure to tune in--you never know when their "final answer" is really going to be their final answer!

Tags: 1984, awful, bush, idiocy, media, politics, wordplay

I missed the State of the Union address last night, but heard a little bit of the after-commentary on NPR. Robert Siegel of All Things Considered was talking to a Republican senator, who was defending the domestic spying terrorism surveillance program.

"I don't know what planet [your commentators] are living on," said the Republican senator. "The surveys indicate that once Americans understand that A, the President strongly believes he's on sound ground legally and B, the terrorism surveillance program is designed at intercepting conversations between people in the United States and suspected al Qaeda members overseas, they overwhelmingly support the program."

Siegel said, "I want to ask you a hypothetical question. I'm a journalist. A group that my government regards as terrorists in law has just been elected the majority party in the Palestinian territories. If I interview them, if I talk to them, does that open me up to surveillance? Should we assume that I'm talking to a terrorist?"

Pause, dead air. Siegel went on: "Does the President have the inherent authority to surveil my conversations?"

The senator responded, stammering a bit, "Well, the President believes he has the inherent authority to listen in to people who are in conversations with al Qaeda overseas."

Siegel: "So you're saying it's narrowly, only about al Qaeda, not about other terrorist groups."

Senator: "That's my understanding of the program, yes."

So, by some magic, the law somehow allows the President to perform this kind of surveillance without a warrant on al Qaeda contacts, but nobody else. I guess we don't have to worry about it, then.

(My position: Of course we should be spying on people talking to al Qaeda. That's what warrants are for. If you're listening in on so many people that you can't get warrants for them, you're probably listening to too many people.)

Tags: 1984, idiocy

Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends

Tags: 1984, idiocy

An article describing the history of Cheney and Rumsfeld's manipulations and schemes going all the way back to the Nixon era. Apparently they've used the trick of setting up a look-for-evidence-we-like intelligence agency outside the CIA not just once, but twice before.

You know you're in trouble when your vice-president and defense secretary are to the right of Kissinger.

Tags: 1984, idiocy, politics

Looks like the Senate backpedaled slightly on denying Guantanamo detainees access to federal courts, although it's apparently still short of full habeas corpus.

Tags: 1984, politics

Detainees Deserve Court Trials

Adel is innocent. I don't mean he claims to be. I mean the military says so. It held a secret tribunal and ruled that he is not al Qaeda, not Taliban, not a terrorist. The whole thing was a mistake: The Pentagon paid $5,000 to a bounty hunter, and it got taken.

The military people reached this conclusion, and they wrote it down on a memo, and then they classified the memo and Adel went from the hearing room back to his prison cell. He is a prisoner today, eight months later. And these facts would still be a secret but for one thing: habeas corpus.

Tags: 1984, politics

I think I misinterpreted what changed. If you actually created a given photo that could be considered sexually explicit, you were already liable for gathering the subject's personal info even before this change. So, assuming that the government isn't generally going after random photos of nudity on personal websites, this doesn't change anything for that.

What it changes is if you post a photo that was created by someone else (e.g. goatse), or (perhaps more importantly) you run a website or blog hosting service on which people can post photos. The change potentially makes the hoster (e.g. blogger, livejournal, flickr) liable. That's the real chilling effect.

Tags: 1984

Do you have boobs or penises on your website anywhere? Maybe an artsy photo you took of a model, or a snapshot you took at Burning Man that happened to have some happy nekkid hippies in the background? Did you bother to get your subject's Social Security number and a copy of his or her driver's license? No?

Congratulations. As of midnight tonight, you're a child pornographer.

Tags: 1984

Albion pointed out this lovely development:

FBI urges police to watch for people carrying almanacs

The FBI is warning police nationwide to be alert for people carrying almanacs, cautioning that the popular reference books covering everything from abbreviations to weather trends could be used for terrorist planning.

In a bulletin sent Christmas Eve to about 18,000 police organizations, the FBI said terrorists may use almanacs "to assist with target selection and pre-operational planning."

It urged officers to watch during searches, traffic stops and other investigations for anyone carrying almanacs, especially if the books are annotated in suspicious ways.

[...] The FBI noted that use of almanacs or maps may be innocent, "the product of legitimate recreational or commercial activities." But it warned that when combined with suspicious behavior -- such as apparent surveillance -- a person with an almanac "may point to possible terrorist planning."

Yeah, but what about all those swarthy people using atlases? I saw one of them the other day, driving a little too slowly, scanning the area in great detail as he referred to his map. He said he was just trying to find his way to the local Krispy Kreme...but it's much more likely that he was a communist! terrorist!

Tags: 1984