In the name of national security, we must touch you there

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Nov 222010
 
If anyone else got to touch you like this when unwanted, it would count as molestation. This? This is for your safety.

If anyone else got to touch you like this when unwanted, it would count as molestation. This? This is for your safety.

Starting in the beginning of November of this year, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) began carrying out a new policy for screening travelers at airports nationwide.  These have included two potentially privacy-breaching screening methods: backskatter x-ray machines that can see through your clothing and provide some rather interesting, if blurred, naked pictures of you and your family, and – should you choose to skip the mostly-nude photography – “enhanced patdowns”.

The colors of the government don’t really matter much, their twisting of language is what really is awe-inspiring over time.  There was never any torture, it was enhanced interrogations.  There is no assault, sexual abuse, or other infringements on citizens’ privacy, there are enhanced patdowns.  While the former took place in dark rooms well out of the view of the American people, the latter is happening right now, very publicly, out in the open for everyone to see.  Security theater is on display.  It’s an interactive experience, and it’s going to touch you.

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Waterboaring-lite: It’s still torture

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May 222009
 

While noted conservative talking head Sean Hannity has failed to take up a challenge from noted liberal talking head Keith Olbermann to be waterboarded for charity, another conservative talking head – Erich “Mancow” Muller – stepped up to the plate and found out just what waterboarding feels like, admitting that it is – in fact – torture.

Funny thing about this, though, is that compared to how it is “really” done – Mancow went through what you could only really describe as Waterboarding-lite. Current.tv has a video of Waterboarding that is much closer to how it’s actually done (skip ahead to about 3:00 for the actual act):

Somehow, I fear, the right wing echo chamber will continue shouting on despite all of this – even if it’s done to each and every last one of them.

Why the wool, slowly over our eyes? Part II

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Apr 212009
 
Room 641a at AT&T's San Francisco switching center, perhaps the epicenter for domestic spying

Room 641a at AT&T's San Francisco switching center, perhaps the epicenter for domestic spying

Following up on yesterday’s post, which went over my misgivings with the Obama administration on things such as letting people who tortured in our name walk away with no punishment, there still is something else that wasn’t addressed – something deeper, something uglier, and something that – for the moment – looks like it won’t be changing at all, and that would be the warrentless wiretapping of the Bush era.

Unfortunately Friday News Dumps are not the practice of only one party, and to that end on Friday April 3rd, a doozy was dropped on the legal system – the Obama Administration was moving to protect the illegal spying operation carried out by the National Security Agency against the citizens of the United States, inturperting the law in new & creative ways that would have impressed even the Bush Administration’s Department of Justice:

First, they (the Obama Administration) argued, exactly as the Bush Administration did on countless occasions, that the state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue out of hand. They argue that simply allowing the case to continue “would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security.” As in the past, this is a blatant ploy to dismiss the litigation without allowing the courts to consider the evidence.

…

Sad as that is, it’s the Department Of Justice’s second argument that is the most pernicious. The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying — that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes.

This is a radical assertion that is utterly unprecedented. No one — not the White House, not the Justice Department, not any member of Congress, and not the Bush Administration — has ever interpreted the law this way.

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Why the wool, slowly over our eyes?

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Apr 202009
 
CB Trinidad Americas Summit

"…those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice… will not be subject to prosecution".

A number of extraordinary things happened this past Thursday coming from the Obama Administration. First and foremost, the remainder of the Bush Administration’s infamous torture memos were released to the public. In those memos, in rather sickening detail and purpose, was laid out each and every possible way that the United States would torture someone they held captive, as well as enough legalese and mind paid to making it look like there was some attempt to think things through, as to provide a thin veil of “somehow, some way, this is all okay in the grand scheme of things”.

The Obama Administration followed up the release of these terrible documents by saying the CIA agents who took part in these activities would not be held responsible for any of it, ever. Not in so many words but most assuredly in so many actions citing the age old, and nearly always wrong, defence of “they were just following orders”. Continue reading »

Maybe if you just stop being Muslim, you’ll get to fly unbothered again

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Jan 052009
 

A hat-tip to the Washington Post for this latest head-smacking example of the uglier side of our brave new world…

Officials ordered nine Muslim passengers, including three young children, off an AirTran flight headed to Orlando from Reagan National Airport yesterday afternoon after two other passengers overheard what they thought was a suspicious remark.

Happy New Year, it looks like we were just as paranoid in 2008 as we are starting out 2009. More wonderful details beyond the flip…
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Then they came for the activists and dissenters, and I said nothing as I was neither…

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Sep 022008
 

Between Hurricane Gustav’s slamming into Louisiana, John McCain’s rather inexplicable Vice President choice, and Obama’s thunderous speech last Thursday night, it’s understandable if other smaller stories fall through the cracks and don’t get the attention they deserve. I just always thought that “gross violation of freedom of speech & privacy” perpetrated by the police in seemingly random raids across the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area would rise above being a simple “smaller story”.

Apparently not.

At first glance, the report sounds sinister and dangerous-sounding enough:

Aided by informants planted in protest groups, authorities raided at least six buildings across St. Paul and Minneapolis to stop an “anarchist” plan to disrupt this week’s Republican National Convention.

From Friday night through Saturday afternoon, officers surrounded houses, broke down doors, handcuffed scores of people and confiscated suspected tools of civil disobedience.

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The Minimum Security Prison of America (aka “Fun Times at the Canadian Border!”)

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Aug 032008
 

For those just tuning in here, I live in the state of Michigan. As such, I am surrounded on two sides (north and east, a little south if you want to get trivia-esque) by Canada. While I haven’t gone recently (a few years) due to a lack of funds, earlier on this decade I would go to Canada when I had the chance – especially when I spent a couple of years in northern Michigan in the tiny city of Sault Sainte Marie, MI, which is a stone’s throw from its twin city of the same name in Canada. The border crossing process had usually been rather simple for me, with the most that I got asked is “Where’d you go? How long were you there? Bringing back lots of money? Alright have a good one.” I suppose it was a bit naive of me to think that things would go south in the couple of years since I’ve been to Canada, especially in lieu of revelations that Homeland Security can take your laptop at the border if they feel like it.

Like most things in life you stay naive of it, happily nested in a world of “it can’t/won’t happen to me” until – sure enough – it does.
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You can take our freedom, just make sure I get my fucking vacation!

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Aug 062007
 

The Dog Days of Summer have come to the nation’s capital. The politicians have fled town – and who could blame them? I know of a dozen better places to spend my time than in the middle of a former swamp during that time of year where you can take a knife to the air and cut yourself a drink of water. Then again, I’m not one of the 535 people charged with representing a sect of people in the United States. I don’t have a job to do in D.C.

It began Friday evening. It always begins on Friday evenings. Why do the worst things that happen in this country in a government-related sense begin, or are announced, on Friday evenings? Anyway, breaking news bulletins crossed the television, announcing that negotiations between the Senate and the White House on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Back when the act came into effect in 1978, though controversial it was intended to be a legal means to spy on foreign intelligence working in this country. It was one of the laws warped by 2001′s USA PATRIOT Act to include that wide blanket group of “terrorists” and their sympathizers, which depending on who’s running what, can include people from actual legitimate terrorist organizations, to someone on the street wearing a “Buck Fush” t-shirt.

The negotiations taking place between the Senate and the White House seemed to center around the usage of illegal wiretaps against American citizens – something which the NSA and AT&T have turned into an art form over the past decade in their efficiency and scope of recording powers. There was a glimmer of hope earlier on that Friday evening that perhaps tonight was the night we would see the Congress stand up for the vast majority of Americans who are sick and tired of this administration, and this administration abusing its authority with regularity. I was one of the people hoping.
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