Recently in Civil Liberties Category

Behind on my reading, I only now saw this outstanding post by Bruce Schneier about what should be done to improve airport security. His plan:

This would be my real answer: "Establish accountability and transparency for airport screening." And if I had another sentence: "Airports are one of the places where Americans, and visitors to America, are most likely to interact with a law enforcement officer - and yet no one knows what rights travelers have or how to exercise those rights."

Schneier wants transparency about the no-fly and watch lists. He argues that there should be clear and explicit rules about what passengers can expect from TSA at checkpoints. He calls for "airport security [to] be solely about terrorism, and not a general-purpose security checkpoint to catch everyone from pot smokers to deadbeat dads."

That's an outstanding plan. Sadly, it is hard to imagine much of it being implemented.

Reporting from China, James Fallows notes from his experience that only a small minority of Chinese residents know enough about what happened 20 years ago at Tiananmen Square to give June 4 any real significance.

As Harpers' Scott Norton explains, Senator Leahy endorses this necessary idea.

Andrew Sullivan asks a vital question of the main-stream media:

A simple question: now that the chief Gitmo prosecutor has said that Qahtani was tortured, will the New York Times, the AP, Newsweek and the Washington Post stop using words and euphemisms that are not true? Or do we have to endure more linguistic cowardice from the MSM?

Alas, I'm going to bet on cowardice.

Steve Benen highlights a Washington Post story explaining why many of us are worried about the government having the ability to order surveillance of people with little oversight. Abuse of the tactic is almost assured.

The Maryland State Police surveillance of advocacy groups was far more extensive than previously acknowledged, with records showing that troopers monitored -- and labeled as terrorists -- activists devoted to such wide-ranging causes as promoting human rights and establishing bike lanes.

Intelligence officers created a voluminous file on Norfolk-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling the group a "security threat" because of concerns that members would disrupt the circus. Angry consumers fighting a 72 percent electricity rate increase in 2006 were targeted. The DC Anti-War Network, which opposes the Iraq war, was designated a white supremacist group, without explanation.

One of the possible "crimes" in the file police opened on Amnesty International, a world-renowned human rights group: "civil rights."

This is an intolerable act. We should not accept it. The Founding Generation would be shocked to learn we are submitting to these actions with little complaint.

Somehow I just do not feel all that much safer after reading this story, highlighted today by Atrios.

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.

Ah, that's quite a public face we are showing to the rest of the world. Now Ms. Cooper, as the Times so properly puts it, is looking to move to Italy after what happened to her boyfriend.

These are just the stories we know. One wonders what we may find out under a new administration or a Congress that fully embraces its vital and Constitutionally necessary oversight role.

Harpers' Scott Norton reminds us that tomorrow, January 1, 2008, marks the bicentennial of the United States ban on the importation of slaves. He is right, this should be a more publicly acknowledged event.

Norton also urges us to read this excellent op-ed on the anniversary by historian Eric Foner.

This is not something about which people who claim to believe in the Constitution should be proud. As ThinkProgress reports:

In the recently released annual survey of worldwide privacy rights by Privacy International and EPIC, the United States has been downgraded from "Extensive Surveillance Society" to "Endemic Surveillance Society." As Glenn Greenwald notes, this is "the worst possible category there is for privacy protections, the category also occupied by countries such as China, Russia, Singapore and Malaysia."

That is good campany for this supposedly Constitutional Republic to be a part of, isn't it?

This "big brother" society we are creating should be a major issue in the on-going presidential campaign.

Here's why letting people speak is often the best course of action -- even better than radical right-wing talking points seeking to silence someone. Josh Marshall writes about Iranian President Ahmadinejad's appearance yesterday at Columbia University:

I think it's hard to come to any conclusion but that Ahmadinejad was diminished by yesterday's events, not elevated. And America seemed bigger for not having cowered before him, as so many wanted to.

It is the principles on which this nation was founded that led to the United States being respected and seen as an agent for good in this world. Open political speech is one of these bedrock principles.

Alas, it is another of our founding principles the radical right has rejected.

Talk Left discusses a Washington Post report that tells the story of a person who has received one of the Bush Adminstration's infamous national security letters.

The situation is one familiar with what Josef K. faced in The Trial. Not only is this possibly a case of the FBI misusing its power, but the person in question cannot even discuss his predicament.

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.

And he should resent it. Actually, all of us should resent it.