I fear that the United States has grown fearful of ideas.

Why I'm Banned in the USA - washingtonpost.com

Chief William J. Bratton of the Los Angeles Police Department said Thursday that the episode here in which police officers clashed with demonstrators and journalists on Tuesday at an immigration rally was the “worst incident of this type I have ever encountered in 37 years” in law enforcement. After a request by Mr. Bratton, the F.B.I. announced Thursday that it would open a civil rights inquiry into the incident,

Whatever went on in L.A. on Monday it sounds like it wasn't your standard police/protestor clash. (Of course, when the cops are beating down professional journalists they tend to be more willing to admit error than when they are beating down college students who can be accussed of lying or baiting.) (On the other hand, I really, deeply wish people on the left would tell the "black bloc" fucks that throwing rocks at the cops is not constructive. Its possible to have a peaceful protest on any issue that you want. You guys can't do it because you're not peaceful, and not because the police are involved in some sort of right wing conspiracy with the man.)

Action by Police at Rally Troubles Los Angeles Chief - New York Times

In May, London-based Hip Hop artist M.I.A. revealed that she was denied a visa to come work with American music producers on her next album. News reports indicate that the Sri Lankan-born artist was excluded because government officials concluded that some of her lyrics are overly sympathetic to the Tamil Tigers and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

American Civil Liberties Union : U.S. Government Increasingly Blocking Entry at the Border Because of Ideology, ACLU Says

Meanwhile, the U.S. Government is using the "ideological exclusion provision" of the Patriot act to bar perfectly peaceful people from the United States because they may express points of view that the administration dislikes. These are the actions of a totalitarian state.

The American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and PEN American Center, filed a lawsuit this year challenging a provision of the Patriot Act that is being used to deny visas to foreign scholars. They did this after Professor Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss intellectual, had his visa revoked under "the ideological exclusion provision" of the Patriot Act, preventing him from assuming a tenured teaching position at the University of Notre Dame. It’s a suit that attempts to prevent the practice of ideological exclusion more generally, a practice that led to the recent exclusions of Dora Maria Tellez, a Nicaraguan scholar who had been offered a position at Harvard University, as well as numerous scholars from Cuba.

In March 2005, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about the government’s use of the Patriot Act ideological exclusion provision. Cuban Grammy nominee Ibrahim Ferrer, 77, who came to fame in the 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club, was blocked by the U.S. government from attending the Grammy Awards, where he was nominated for the Best Latin album award in 2004. So were his fellow musicians Guillermo Rubalcaba, Amadito Valdes, Barbarito Torres and the group Septeto Nacional with Ignacio Pineiro. The list goes on.

The Two Malcontents » U.S. Border Patrol Bars Canadian Psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar

A respectable Vancouver psychotherapist who took a few rides on the Technicolor express back in the 1960s has been orbidden from entering the United States after a border guard googled him and turned up some trippy writing the therapist published in 2001. Andrew Feldmar, was accustomed to traveling to the U.S. five or six times a year to visit his children...
"Persons with AIDS, tuberculosis, infectious diseases are inadmissible," Milne said. "Anyone who is determined to be a drug abuser or user is inadmissible. A crime involving moral turpitude is inadmissible and one of those areas is a violation of controlled substances."

You can be barred entry to the United States because U.S. Customs thinks you are immoral based on your writings on the Internet.

U.S. Customs brings the culture war to the border.

April 26, 2007

High school senior Allen Lee sat down with his creative writing class on Monday and penned an essay that so disturbed his teacher, school administrators and police that he was charged with disorderly conduct.

"I understand what happened recently at Virginia Tech," said the teen's father, Albert Lee, referring to last week's massacre of 32 students by gunman Seung-Hui Cho. "I understand the situation."

But he added: "I don't see how somebody can get charged by writing in their homework. The teacher asked them to express themselves, and he followed instructions."

Allen Lee, an 18-year-old straight-A student at Cary-Grove High School, was arrested Tuesday near his home and charged with disorderly conduct for an essay police described as violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location.

Sounds like someone needs a refresher course on constitutional law, which should be coming by directly.

Student Writes Essay, Gets Arrested by Police

Wiccans will be allowed to have the symbol of their religion placed on grave markers in national cemeteries under a lawsuit settlement with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced Monday.

Wiccans will be allowed to place pentacles on graves, VA says

FBI Director Robert Mueller pleaded with senators Tuesday not to curtail
the Patriot Act that empowers the federal government to secretly obtain
personal records, although a Justice Department investigator discovered that
the bureau had failed to obey its requirements.

The problem wasn't the law, Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee;
it was the FBI.

"The statute did not cause the errors," Mueller said. "The FBI's
implementation of the statute did."

This perspective is infuriating. For the millionth time, the reason we want oversight of your agent's actions isn't because we have a problem with the abstract idea that they might collect information about terrorists, its because your agents are human, and will, intentionally or unintentionally, screw it up. The statute must change because the statute can change. There is no way to change whether or not your agents are human. Why do you people continue to insist that oversight is not necessary? Oversight is obviously necessary! The powers assumed in the past few years have been based on an assumption of perfection and benevolence on the part of police which is absolutely unheard of in the history of the world. The reality is that your are going to screw it up and you are going to hire crooked people and sometimes you are going to be enforcing crooked policies passed by corrupt politicians. That is the real world. If you don't think that police surveillance needs oversight you are living in a fantasyland, and that was the problem with these rules from the beginning.

FBI director blames agency, not Patriot Act, for abuses

Colleen Tunney-Ryan, a TransUnion spokeswoman who perhaps has memorized key sections of 'Thank You For Smoking,' says the people who order the credit reports agree not to take any action based on the reports. The idea that lenders order the reports only to ignore them makes a sort of exquisite sense that 27B cherishes.

The denied party list has never been enforced for normal domestic transactions. Some companies shipping export controlled commodities check it, but McDonalds, for example, does not face prosecution for failing to perform a DPL check before selling you a hamburger.

Much like employee drug screening this is an example of companies overzealously participating in law enforcement. The really scary part is, however, that the law is not totally clear on the fact that McDonalds isn't required to perform checks, and so as companies embrace this it could result in decisions by Commerce to start requiring it in some contexts.

The end result is that if for some reason you are a partial match, which happens all the time, you are going to find yourself facing real hassles, as the companies that are implementing this voluntarily probably aren't staffing to clear false positives efficiently. How many people named John Hernandez do you think there are in the United States. I'm guessing a lot.

This is where the anti terror efforts really start to screw up people's lives

DHS estimates that it will take only 44 minutes for a current driver's license holder to get a certified copy of their birth certificate, travel to the DMV and get a new license when it expires. No current driver's license holder will be allowed to renew a license by mail. They estimate the costs to states and individuals over 10 years will be $23 billion.

A couple years ago a friend of mine was arrested, taken to jail, because the name on his social security card did not exactly match the name on his driver's license. DHS had ordered that driver's license databases be correlated with Social Security and simply issued arrest warrants for anyone with a mismatch. Lots of married women got caught up in it. That was the start.

The annoying beaurocractic process mentioned above is the least of my worries in regard to REAL ID.

REAL ID will internationalize criminal records, all the way down to parking tickets. You get a speeding ticket in Holland and it goes against your licence in Georgia. Unpaid parking tickets in California will prevent you from driving in Hong Kong. You will not be able to escape the system...

Unless you want to forgo flying or entering federal buildings or collecting social security... Then if you live in one of the states that will issue drivers licences that are not connected with REAL ID you can get one and live off the grid. This puts conservatives in an interesting catch 22 situation. The reason these alternate drivers licenses exist is that if we're going to have illegal immigrants we'd prefer that they carry liability insurance. Many conservatives would prefer that we didn't have illegal immigrants. But other kinds of conservatives would prefer to have the option of living off the grid. You really have to make that choice right now. If you can live off the grid, so can others. If you need one of these things to drive, you won't be able to live off the grid and drive legally, buy beer or cigarettes, or carry insurance.

A National Healthcare plan might be the final nail the coffin here. It would be a federal program tied to these federal IDs. If you want to see a doctor under national healthcare, you won't be able to live off grid.

The use of these IDs will expand and expand. There really is little reason to have one federal ID and a separate passport, and there will be an interest, over time, in standardizing these on an international basis. The present plan does not require that the IDs be chipped. Thats fortunate, but probably temporary. They'll eventually get chipped.

20 or so years from now it will be possible to enforce things like age restrictions for social networking sites. In order to create an account you'll plug your national ID card into the slot on your laptop. You'll mostly do this because it will fill out all your biographical information for you. Its just more convenient that way. But it will also enable enforcement of restrictions and tracibility.

We don't really need all of this technology to engage in perfect law enforcement. There are other ways. The East Germans had perfect law enforcement. You don't have to have a 4th amendment and if you didn't you'd bust more criminals. At some point it would be nice if we stop and realize that the fact that technology makes something convenient doesn't make it a good idea. We're not going to.

The mainstream nanny state liberals and mainstream cultural conservatives control the government, because the government serves them. Other people don't want government. They do, and the government gives it to them, and it will keep giving it to them until this country is locked down tight as a drum. They'll stand on the other side of it and wonder why we're not particularly good at innovation anymore, but they'll never think that the root cause is the ID chip in their pockets.

REALID: Your Orwellian Nightmare has already begun