Mike the Usurper wrote:

But House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisconsin, who shepherded the bill through the House, said sunset provisions were not necessary because there was no evidence the Patriot Act was being misused and lawmakers could provide sufficient oversight.

I think one thing that is overlooked in this is that Sensenbrenner is considered to be the right's answer to, well, I have a hard time thinking of anyone as far to the left as Jim is to the right, not even Ted. He's the one who held up the Intelligence Act because he wanted to attach immigration riders to it. He's the same one who, when presented by Amnesty International quoting FBI documents abouts abuses at Camp X-Ray, Abu Gharib and Bagram, simply didn't want to hear it, gaveled the meeting closed and walked off.

This is quite a lively discussion and I want to throw my hat into the ring. The thing that pisses me off about the Patriot Act is that both sides have turned it into such a political football that its almost impossible to have substantive discussion about it.

To Sensenbrenner I would say:

The discussion about whether or not these provisions are properly crafted hangs on the question of whether the checks and balances actually make sense for the long term and not on documented cases of abuse. This law is about the future and not about the past. Furthermore, even ardent defenders of the law conceed that various gag rules make it very difficult to document abuses. And no, I don't trust lawmakers to provide oversight. You, yourself have argued that the political discussion hasn't been substantive (more on that in a minute). To turn around and argue that its going to be effective at preventing abuse seems hypocritical.

To the left I would say:

Various overbroad calls for repealing the thing have contributed nothing at all to the debate. Sensenbrenner may have been a dick in that hearing, but he was right. POW abuse has absolutely nothing to do with the Patriot Act. Hearings about the Patriot Act ought to be about the Patriot Act. Talking about unrelated issues prevents the substantive debate that is needed about the specific provisions. Its almost as if you don't want that discussion to happen, because you don't actually want to reform this law. (Hrmmmmmmm.)

The most troubling provisions of this law are not the ones which have been opened to debate by the sunset clause. It is absolutely inevitable that the National Security Letters will be abused if the Supreme Court does not ultimately declare them unconstitutional.

A law that says that an FBI agent can write a letter demanding information with absolutely no oversight at all that cannot be challenged or even discussed is absolutely asking to be abused. As a temporary emergency measure it might have been acceptable. As a permanent part of our legal system it is not.

RE: Patriot Act Extended

adam wrote:
The article expresses the view that many in the Muslim community feel that anybody brought to trial wouldn't receive a fair trial. The question arises whether this is systematic of a failure of the British system to assimilate the community or perhaps in view of what happened to the Guildford 4 and the Birmingham 6, who were falsely convicted under not entirely dissimilar circumstances, a not unreasonable point of view. Or even perhaps both positions are in fact accurate.

I'm posting this back out to my MemeStream because I think its an incredibly good point that is easily forgotten.

There has been a lot of discussion in the past few years about due process for people suspected of terrorism. The point of view that some people seem to have is that nearly everyone accused of being a terrorist likely is a terrorist. You tend to give the police and the military the benefit of the doubt. They have no interest in sweeping up innocent people. The attitude is that due process helps the terrorists avoid punishment for their crimes.

The string of false convictions referenced above didn't occur in a third world country a long time ago. They occured in England in the 1970s. An innocent individual was gunned down in the street by police in England on Friday. The fact is that you are going to have innocent people get swept up in your anti-terror actions. It is unavoidable, because people whose job is prosecution tend to make presumptions of guilt that are not supported by the evidence, or perhaps even reasonable (like assuming that its unusual to see someone wearing a coat when its 62 degrees fahrenheit.) When your job is to see guilt you are going to see it even when its not there.

If you do not have a process for determining whether or not people ought to have been swept up, or if your process is seriously flawed as it was in England in the 70s, you will punish innocent people. If this is a systemic problem, you create a situation where no one trusts your judgement anymore, even if you improve your process. This tends to live with you for a long time.

Muslims who might have information which is useful to the authorities are unlikely to provide it if they are unsure of its meaning and they don't want to see innocent people get nailed by a system that cannot distinguish them.

To put it another way, people in the hood don't talk to the cops, and occaisonally they become so alienated that you get riots.

Alienating communities of people frustrates your ability to prosecute when you need it the most. One person cannot hide in a community unless the community wants to hide him. You want these people to trust you. If they don't trust you, they won't help you, and you won't get the intelligence you need.

RE: Telegraph | News | One in four Muslims sympathises with motives of terrorists

There is no simpler way of letting the emergency services know who to contact should you be involved in an accident than by using ICE.

ICE - In Case of Emergency

The mantle in gas lanterns, the small cloth pouch over the flame, is coated with a compound containing thorium-232. When bombarded with neutrons it produces uranium-233, which is fissionable. David bought thousands of lantern mantles from surplus stores and blowtorched them into a pile of ash.

To isolate the thorium from the ash, he purchased $1000 worth of lithium batteries and cut them in half with wire cutters. He placed the lithium and thorium ash together in a ball of aluminum foil and heated the ball with a Bunsen burner. This purified the thorium to at least 9000 times the level found in nature, and up to 170 times the level that requires NRC licensing.

Teenager builds fission reactor in Mom's shed out of household parts. Seriously.

The Radioactive Boy Scout

It took less than two hours after the bombing attempts in London's transit system on Thursday for the New York City police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, to decide to begin random checks of passengers' bags in the city's mass transit system. But he said Friday that his decision had been nearly a year and a half in the making.

Mr. Kelly said he started to focus more closely on the vulnerabilities of the city's transit system in February 2004, after a deadly explosion in the Moscow underground... But Mr. Kelly, who has long thought that searches would be necessary in the transit system, said he realized that the measure might be seen as invasive. The time, he said, wasn't right until Thursday.

"The reality is, you need an event such as London for people to realize this is a procedure put in place for their safety," Mr. Kelly said during an hourlong interview in his office at 1 Police Plaza. "Searches are intrusive. The issue is what the public will accept. You still need an event to get public support."

This is an interesting datapoint. I'll save the cynical commentary.

Time Is Right for Searches, Police Official Tells New Yorkers - New York Times

YouGov sought to gauge the character of the Muslim community's response to the events of July 7.

As the figures in the chart show, 88 per cent of British Muslims clearly have no intention of trying to justify the bus and Tube murders. However, six per cent insist that the bombings were, on the contrary, fully justified.

Six per cent may seem a small proportion but in absolute numbers it amounts to about 100,000 individuals who, if not prepared to carry out terrorist acts, are ready to support those who do.

Moreover, the proportion of YouGov's respondents who, while not condoning the London attacks, have some sympathy with the feelings and motives of those who carried them out is considerably larger - 24 per cent.

A substantial majority, 56 per cent, say that, whether or not they sympathise with the bombers, they can at least understand why some people might want to behave in this way.

I really hope this study was flawed. There needs to be more. The actual POV of that community needs to be directly discussed. I would like to see surveys like this done in the US as well.

Telegraph | News | One in four Muslims sympathises with motives of terrorists

Police acknowledged on Saturday the man they shot dead on Friday was not connected to bomb attacks on the British capital the previous day, calling the shooting tragic and regrettable.

Awesome. Dude walks out of a block of flats where a lot of Islamic people live wearing a coat. Acts funny. They shoot him 5 times in the head. Apparently he was innocent.

Reuters AlertNet - Man shot dead by UK police not connected to bombs

Police officials... have also said that anyone found to be carrying illegal drugs or weapons will be subject to arrest, a provision that lawyers have found troubling.

One has to be sympathetic to the idea of performing some searches. However, one of the basic ideas behind the notion that random searches at airports are legal is the idea that they are specifically limited to AT and do not target other crimes. There is a bit of a legal grey area here about whether they have the right to prosecute for other crimes if they discover them in the course of one of these searches. That grey area needs to be resolved now. The NYPD have clearly expressed their opinion on the matter.

If we establish a policy that says we can do random searches where ever because of terrorism and we will prosecute any crime we discover in the process of performing these searches then essentially we're saying that we can perform random searches where ever. If the police think you're up to no good they can stop and search you and just put you down on their quota of "daily anti-terror searches." The connection with terrorism eventually becomes irrelevant other then as a loophole that popped the whole thing wide open.

This is really going to push the 4th amendment. If its ok to do it at airports, can we do it at the subway? If its ok to do it at the subway can we do it on the street? If its ok to do it on the street, then when is it not ok to do it? Is it ok to search random houses for bomb labs. You might discover some that way...

This is the slippery slope that concerns people with the rise of searches at airports, schools, and border crossings. We're slipping down that slope. The subway is so pervasive in NYC that this will have a significant effect on the culture of the city. If you live there you ride the subway. If you ride the subway you may be searched. So, if you live there you may be searched. NYC suddenly seems more prickley then Singapore.

The government there should have presented this as a temporary measure. They should have performed the searches with teams that are firewalled from the regular police and have no authority to prosecute anything except terrorism. Declaring it an "indefinite" fixture of the city, and doing it with regular police, was a mistake.

You want to have a free and open society, but that society requires cooperation. Mutual respect. When people begin to seriously abuse the society you have to respond. Its really hard to figure out how to do that without sacrificing openness, but this announcement doesn't reflect a genuine effort to try. This is the image of terrorism changing our way of life.

Look for the spin to be that anyone who raises questions about the way this is being handled is either opposed to the searches in totality or is simply helping the enemy.

Privacy Rights Are at Issue in New Policy on Searches - New York Times

What is not uncertain, however, is that our Current Account
Deficit has granted a degree of control and authority to another sovereign
nation over our own economy. The net results of that may be determined over the
coming decade.

Buffett (who I've come to dislike inspite of my respect for him) warned of this in 2003. Bill Gross specifically predicted this for 2005.

The Big Picture: Federal Reserve Responsibilities Outsourced to China

Could it be part of a greater geopolitical game? In other words, what President Bush is really worried about in Asia is North Korea. He does not really care about the RMB; he just pretends to care. This allows him, in negotiations with the Chinese, to say: "I will fold on the RMB, if you give North Korea up; in that way, you guys can give up your embarrassing ally without losing face".

North Korea IS China. Its possible that we might have just sold Manhatten for some beads.

The Big Picture: Playing With Fire?