Eupraxsophy

The History of American Assassinations

It’s a long read, but it’s well worth it, for it reveals that the seemingly recent growth of executive power — namely through the national security apparatus — has been decades in the making. It was especially (though not solely) intensified by none other than Ronald Reagan, widely regarded as a defend of American freedom and values.

In December 1981, Reagan signed the executive order 12333 undoing the previous decades’ reforms with the stroke of a pen. For cover, Reagan’s people planted fake scare stories through Jack Anderson about non-existent Libyan assassination squads infiltrating U.S. borders, waterskiing their way across the Great Plains to spring John Hinckley and wreak havoc on the American Way of Life.

And that is the back story to Reagan’s executive order 12333, the one that allegedly banned assassinations and allegedly made him so much more progressive than Bush or Obama.

Reagan not only gave the CIA carte blanche in the US to spy, but he also massively expanded the powers of the FBI and law enforcement to spy on Americans domestically with another executive order in 1983, paving the way for a repeat of all the awful abuses uncovered by Sen. Church, which only started coming to light at the end of Reagan’s presidency.

In other words, there is arguably a legal precedence for the drone attacks, warrantless wiretapping, legal opaqueness, and other questionable government practices. Indeed, the courts have been either willing to abide by these actions, or forced to begrudgingly accept their legality given the precedence. Excess and unaccountable state power is not only being further entrenched in our system, but it’s been intricately established within it for some time. Needless to say, that’s very troubling.

2 months ago -

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US Congress Says Netflix Can Share What You're Watching

Last Tuesday, the Senate quietly altered a key privacy law, making it much easier for video streaming services like Netflix to share your viewing habits. How quietly? The Senate didn’t even hold a recorded vote: The bill was approved by unanimous consent. (Joe Mullin of Ars Technica was among the first to note the vote.)

4 months ago -

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US Courts Divided Over Warrantless Cellphone Searches

Is this best left to the courts, or the legislature?

“The courts are all over the place,” said Hanni Fakhoury, a criminal lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group. “They can’t even agree if there’s a reasonable expectation of privacy in text messages that would trigger Fourth Amendment protection.”

The issue will attract attention on Thursday when a Senate committee considers limited changes to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a 1986 law that regulates how the government can monitor digital communications. Courts have used it to permit warrantless surveillance of certain kinds of cellphone data.

A proposed amendment would require the police to obtain a warrant to search e-mail, no matter how old it was, updating a provision that currently allows warrantless searches of e-mails more than 180 days old.

As technology races ahead of the law, courts and lawmakers are still trying to figure out how to think about the often intimate data that cellphones contain, said Peter P. Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University. Neither the 1986 statute nor the Constitution, he said, could have anticipated how much information cellphones may contain, including detailed records of people’s travels and diagrams of their friends.

“It didn’t take into account what the modern cellphone has — your location, the content of communications that are easily readable, including Facebook posts, chats, texts and all that stuff,” Mr. Swire said.

Courts have also issued divergent rulings on when and how cellphones can be inspected. An Ohio court ruled that the police needed a warrant to search a cellphone because, unlike a piece of paper that might be stuffed inside a suspect’s pocket and can be confiscated during an arrest, a cellphone may hold “large amounts of private data.”

But California’s highest court said the police could look through a cellphone without a warrant so long as the phone was with the suspect at the time of arrest.

Judges across the nation have written tomes about whether a cellphone is akin to a “container” — like a suitcase stuffed with marijuana that the police might find in the trunk of a car — or whether, as the judge in the Rhode Island murder case suggested, it is more comparable to a face-to-face conversation. That judge, Judith C. Savage, described text messages as “raw, unvarnished and immediate, revealing the most intimate of thoughts and emotions.” That is why, she said, citizens can reasonably expect them to be private.

5 months ago -

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Why Email is - and Must Remain - Private

From Al-Jazeera English:

On social media networks, we have come to expect that what is private one day may be public the next, and that what we erased years ago may suddenly reappear in an archive. But this expectation did not hold, until recently, for email. Most people assume that the audience of their email is the person with whom they are emailing, and that once you delete the email, it is gone.

Security experts decry this viewpoint as hopelessly naïve. “Don’t put anything in an email that you wouldn’t send to your mother,” says cyber security expert Jeff Ahlerich, in a manner yet again reminiscent of an elder scolding a child.

But we are not children. We are adults who cannot possibly maintain the energy or fortitude to police our every online interaction. That doing so is viewed as common sense raises basic questions of how we want to live our lives. We should not be asking how to police our emails, but what it means that we expect our emails to be policed - and what this expectation does to our ability to interact, express ourselves and change.

5 months ago -

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Is Public Nudity a Form of Free Speech?

6 months ago -

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You’re not being “oppressed” when another group gains rights that you’ve always had. Did granting women the right to vote or blacks the right to equality end up oppressing men and whites respectively?

Furthermore, similar arguments were made then as now: slavery and patriarchy were also defended through the same appeal to “tradition” (slavery has been around for centuries, and women have always been property) and “religion” (for example, Biblical lines that teach the subjugation of women or the acceptance of slavery).

1 year ago -

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The US Government Tries to Violate Our Privacy...Again

Click the link to read more, if you can stomach it.

1 year ago -

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Anti-Privacy Forces Strike Back: What is CISPA?

Read it and weep. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole trying to stop these insidious bills.

1 year ago -

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The Trespass Bill

It seems that our increasingly unpopular Congress is becoming ever more emboldened to undertake constitutionally specious legislation. Perhaps their 11% approval rating gives them the perception that they have little to lose anyway? Or maybe this comes to show just how out of touch our political elites really are from the people they purportedly represent – and the founding document they claim to abide by as if it were sacred. RT reports:

The US House of Representatives voted 388-to-3 in favor of H.R. 347 late Monday, a bill which is being dubbed the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011. In the bill, Congress officially makes it illegal to trespass on the grounds of the White House, which, on the surface, seems not just harmless and necessary, but somewhat shocking that such a rule isn’t already on the books. The wording in the bill, however, extends to allow the government to go after much more than tourists that transverse the wrought iron White House fence.

Under the act, the government is also given the power to bring charges against Americans engaged in political protest anywhere in the country.

Under current law, White House trespassers are prosecuted under a local ordinance, a Washington, DC legislation that can bring misdemeanor charges for anyone trying to get close to the president without authorization. Under H.R. 347, a federal law will formally be applied to such instances, but will also allow the government to bring charges to protesters, demonstrators and activists at political events and other outings across America.

The new legislation allows prosecutors to charge anyone who enters a building without permission or with the intent to disrupt a government function with a federal offense if Secret Service is on the scene, but the law stretches to include not just the president’s palatial Pennsylvania Avenue home. Under the law, any building or grounds where the president is visiting — even temporarily — is covered, as is any building or grounds “restricted in conjunction with an event designated as a special event of national significance.”

I understand the need for safety, given the times we live in. But these provisions seem both vague and excessive, and there haven’t been any recent incidents to suggest that we need this sort of tight security against routine protests. The fact that this bill has emerged during the aftermath of a spate of OWS demonstrations makes me question its motivation. To make matters worse, it’s far more applicable than it may initially seem:

In the text of the act, the law is allowed to be used against anyone who knowingly enters or remains in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so, but those grounds are considered any area where someone — rather it’s President Obama, Senator Santorum or Governor Romney — will be temporarily visiting, whether or not the public is even made aware. Entering such a facility is thus outlawed, as is disrupting the orderly conduct of “official functions,” engaging in disorderly conduct “within such proximity to” the event or acting violent to anyone, anywhere near the premises. Under that verbiage, that means a peaceful protest outside a candidate’s concession speech would be a federal offense, but those occurrences covered as special event of national significance don’t just stop there, either. And neither does the list of covered persons that receive protection.

In matters of law, this kind of openness to interpretation can be very troubling. We’ve seen so many attempts to reign in on our civil liberties - SOPA, PIPA, the NDAA, to name the most recent examples – that’s becoming frighteningly routine. What’s worse is that few Congressman of either party took issue with this bill, and the fact that even the stridently pro-Constitution GOP was overwhelmingly behind it smacks of both cruel irony and hypocrisy (not that Democrats are any less guilty).

Even if this bill doesn’t make it into law, given the remaining procedural channels that remain, the fact that we keep seeing these attempts is reason enough to worry – and be vigilant, given the notable lack of media attention on this so far. Clearly, people need to be made more aware of these things on their own accord, and show our politicians that we’re paying attention.

1 year ago -

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