One morning in late September 2005, Deb was riding the public bus to work. She was minding her own business, reading a book and planning for work, when a security guard got on this public bus and demanded that every passenger show their ID. Deb, having done nothing wrong, declined. The guard called in federal cops, and she was arrested and charged with federal criminal misdemeanors after refusing to show ID on demand.

There is a new case up on Papers Please. This is probably the most cut and dry of the three.

Papers Please : Deborah Davis

The rate at which individuals shed transactional data simply by living in a networked world seems to increase daily. The composite picture of individual activity that can emerge from such data is often of startling clarity, and will likely sharpen with in the future.  We don’t really have a coherent legal theory to address appropriately the growing privacy interests in this kind of data.
The full-scale judicial supervision accorded electronic surveillance and physical searches is probably overkill, and far too cumbersome for data for which basic investigative access is justified. On the other hand, the Miller view that the "consensual" delivery of this data to third parties strips it of any privacy interest looks untenable when one considers the effect of the information aggregated.

I'm disappointed that Rattle was the only one who rememed the Washington Post's recent coverage of National Security Letters, which is being hailed by people on both the left and the right as important journalism.

This commentary provides more of the debate. The main commentator seems to echo the modern conservative view that the legislature needs to be the final arbiter of civil liberties. Forgive me for being tactless, I think in the general case this view is stupid. The whole point of civil liberties is to limit the power of the democratic government with regard to the rights of individuals. Thats what the court system does. The legislature cannot be its own check and balance. The question here is whether this matter rises to the level of a civil rights issue. I think it does.

There is a healthy debate in the threads...

The Volokh Conspiracy - More on National Security Letters:

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond.

The WashPost has a very good feature on National Security Letters here.

The FBI's Secret Scrutiny

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class "to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights," she says. One student "had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb's-down sign with his own hand next to the President's picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster."

...

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service. On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.

The seemed fishy so I went looking for mainstream press coverage. Seems like the story checks out, but the "liberal" media is very short on details. One particular detail the "liberal" media is careful not to mention is the name of the film development house that called the police. The "liberal" media is very careful not to threaten advertising revenue from sponsors. Obviously part of their left wing agenda.

1. This isn't the first time I've heard of Walmart calling the police because they are suspicious of the contents of photos they've been asked to develop. I would not suprised if they aren't specifically trained to report suspicious information they are handling. Don't have anything developed or printed there.
2. This should not have actually resulted in Agents going to a school. At some point some amount of actual reason should have kicked in here. One moron at walmart is understandable. When the Agent and the US Attorney are also morons one begins to wonder.
3. The message here is clearly that freedom of speech barely exists. We will at least try to find a reason to prosecute.

AlterNet: Wal-Mart Coverage: Civics Student...or Enemy of America?

A federal judge promised a quick decision Wednesday on a motion to temporarily stop election officials from requiring photo identification at the polls.

This is interesting. Georgia now requires a photo ID to vote in person. As the ID costs $20, some people are calling it a poll tax. Supporters argue that if you don't want to pay the tax you can vote absentee. Detractors argue that voter fraud only occurs absentee and they don't know of any cases of in person voter fraud, so there is no point.

Georgia Poll Tax

'Our way of life is right. Yours isn't.'

An update on the Utah Rave. Bad news... The cops won in court.

Salon.com News | Stark raving mad

Judges are bound by the rulings of their superior courts.

Karlton said he was bound by precedent of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which in 2002 ruled in favor of Sacramento atheist Michael Newdow that the pledge is unconstitutional when recited in public schools.

Of course, the 9th circuit was simply upholding Supreme Court precedent, and Clarence Thomas (perhaps the most conservative guy on the court these days) agrees:

Justice Thomas voted to uphold the Pledge of Allegiance on the merits against an Establishment Clause challenge…Yet he specifically said that the Ninth Circuit's decision was "based on a persuasive reading of [the Court's] precedent."

So you can imagine how comments like this annoy the crap out of me:

This is an extraordinary and blatant display of judicial activism," Kay Daly, president of the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary

Conservatives accuse this Court of judicial activism for upholding the ruling of a superior Court? This sort of antilogic seeks to undermine the very rule of law in the minds of people who buy into it. This is not a responsible way to play politics.

On the meaning of Judicial Activism.

Basically the ridiculous Hamdi decision, in which the court invented an entirely new system of evaluating executive detentions out of thin air based on a vauge authorization for the use of force, is combined here with the obvious conclusion that once you are an enemy combatant, you are always an enemy combatant insofaras the conflict is ongoing.

The result is that the entire Constitution magically unravels before your eyes. The executive needs to be able to use the military without a declaration of War, so Congress authorizes the use of force. This use of force involves actual battles. The executive needs to be able to capture people on the battle field. The executive needs to be able to detain those people while the conflict is going on. This conflict will go on indefinately. If a combatant makes it from the battlefield back to America they are still a combatant and the executive still may need to detain them.

The potential for abuse here is absolutely unlimited. The executive need merely assert that an individual was on the battlefield and they may be detained with absolutely no oversite, with the exception of a quick military tribunal where guilt is presumed. The detainee would presumably have to prove that he or she was not on the battlefield, without any access to any means of doing so.

The fact is that this line of reasoning cannot be acceptable, because the Constitution does, in fact, impose limits on the power of the executive, and this perspective does not.

I see three options:
1. Constitutional Crisis.
2. Congress acts NOW to clarify that they did not authorize this kind of detention, and creates an actual, workable framework for dealing with domestic terrorists, thereby saving the issue.
3. The Supreme Court finds some reason to disagree with this analysis.

I'm predicting the later. I think the court will decide that location IS relevent for military detentions. Someone detained on a battlefield was clearly on a battlefield. Someone who wasn't detained on a battlefield may not have been on a battlefield, and the risk of doing military detentions in that context is too great. The military should be forced to demonstrate to a court that the individual was on a battlefield beyond a reasonable doubt before they can be turned over to the military system.

Of course, the objection here is the possibility that if given a lawyer the suspect might use that lawyer to communicate messages while in prison. I think there are better ways to control this scenario then doing away with Constitutional rights. Its one of those vauge risks that people asking for law enforcement power always raise without ever being required to specifically articulate and defend.

If I was captured by the military and I wanted to communicate a message to compatriots I could do this through my captors in nearly the same way I would do it through a lawyer ... By convincing my captors to investigate particular things based on information I give them. If my operatives haven't seen me for a while and patsy one gets arrested, do X. If my operatives haven't seen me and patsy two gets arrested, do Y. Any procedures interrogators might employ to reasonably prevent themselves from being used in such a matter can also be employed by attorneys dealing with this kind of suspect.

The Volokh Conspiracy - The Military Detention Case:

A federal appeals court ruled today that the president can indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil in the absence of criminal charges, holding that such authority is vital to protect the nation from terrorist attacks.

Sweet! Kiss your checks and balances goodbye!

Court Rules U.S. Can Indefinitely Detain Citizens

The default reaction to the Rave bust in Utah from a number of people has been of the form "blah, blah, Republicans, blah, blah, Bush, blah, blah, Police State." This is more then a little annoying. Raves have been targetted federally by a bipartisan coallition led by Democrats. Yes, Virginia, Democrats have jack boots too.

In 2002 Democratic senators Biden, Leahy, and Durbin along with Republicans Grassley and Hatch proposed the Rave Act of 2002. Biden was the primary sponsor.

This law included a findings section, essentially a list of justifications, which is basically a collection of paranoid rantings that have little or no connection to reality. For example:

Many rave promoters go to great lengths to try to portray their events as alcohol-free parties that are safe places for young adults to go to dance with friends, and some even go so far as to hire off-duty, uniformed police officers to patrol outside of the venue to give parents the impression that the event is safe.

There is no way they might actually have a legitimate interest in hiring security guards!

Because rave promoters know that Ecstasy causes the body temperature in a user to rise and as a result causes the user to become very thirsty, many rave promoters facilitate and profit from flagrant drug use at rave parties or events by selling over-priced bottles of water and charging entrance fees to 'chill-rooms' where users can cool down.

You'd think maybe people who were dancing at an all night party would, you know, not want to drink a lot of alcohol, need bottles of water, and want to chill out, irrespective of whether or not they were on drugs, wouldn't you? Furthermore, I've been to a LOT of raves and I have never ever seen a separate fee charged for access to a chill room!

Apparently Leahy and Durbin dropped their cosponsorship, possibly when they started getting angry faxes. But Biden pushed on. He was joined by Presidential hopeful Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) and everyone's favorite Democratic Senator, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). The thing was rolled up into s.151, an omnibus protect the children law that, among many other things, calls for 2-4 year prison terms for anyone who puts sexually explicit material on a "misleading" internet domain name. It is now law.

Now, yeah, people do drugs at Raves. Some aspects of the rave culture are drug related. However, the same thing can be said of any pop culture in the past 50-80 years including Rock, Jazz, HipHop, etc... These laws don't target drugs specifically. They target Raves. They specifically target culture.

When I left Atlanta in the late 90s there was a vibrant rave culture in the city with a real community that corrdinated online and threw parties. Its completely gone. There is nothing left but a few high priced clubs that play similar music. This website stub is all thats left of a once vibrant mailing list of people who threw parties on a regular basis that I participated in for years. The police wiped it out. They wiped out a culture. They did it with strong support from the Democrats.

FOXNews.com - Views - Straight Talk - Raving Lunacy