GOV/MIL ACLU Study Highlights U.S. Surveillance Society

[FarmerJohn]

By David Kravets June 29, 2010
Welcome to the surveillance society.

That’s what the American Civil Liberties Union concluded Tuesday with a report chronicling government spying and the detention of groups and individuals “for doing little more than peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights.”

The report, Policing Free Speech: Police Surveillance and Obstruction of First Amendment-Protected Activity (.pdf), surveys news accounts and studies of questionable snooping and arrests in 33 states and the District of Columbia over the past decade.

The survey provides an outline of, and links to, dozens of examples of Cold War-era snooping in the modern age.

“Our review of these practices has found that Americans have been put under surveillance or harassed by the police just for deciding to organize, march, protest, espouse unusual viewpoints and engage in normal, innocuous behaviors such as writing notes or taking photographs in public,” Michael German, an ACLU attorney and former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, said in a statement.

Here are a few examples:

At a California State University, Fresno lecture on veganism, six of the 60 in attendance were undercover officers from the local and campus police. The Oakland Police Department in California had infiltrated a police-brutality demonstration, and its undercover officers selected “the route of the march.”

A vegetarian activist in Georgia was arrested for jotting down the license plate of a Department of Homeland Security agent who was snapping photos of a protest outside a Honey Baked Ham store. A Joint Terrorism Task Force in Illinois went on a three-day manhunt in Chicago searching for a Muslim man for his suspicious activity of using a hand counter on a bus. As it turned out, the man was counting his daily prayers.

A Kentucky minister was detained at Canadian border trying to enter the United States because he had purchased copies of the Koran on the internet following the 2001 terror attacks. A New York, Muslim-American student journalist was detained for taking pictures of Old Glory outside a Veterans Affairs building as part of a class project. The authorities deleted the pictures before releasing her an hour later.





http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/aclu-surveillance/

Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/aclu-surveillance/#ixzz0sNe98WLL

 

[Publius]

They fear We the people more than they do islamic terrorist.

 

[gdpetti]

Is the U.S. a Fascist Police-State?

Gonzalo Lira
Gonzalo Lira's Blog
Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:05 EDT

© Woodcock
I lived in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship - I can spot a fascist police-state when I see one.

The United States is a fascist police-state.

Harsh words - incendiary, even. And none too clever of me, to use such language: Time was, the crazies and reactionaries wearing tin-foil hats who flung around such a characterization of the United States were disqualified by sensible people as being hysterical nutters - rightfully so.

But with yesterday's Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project decision (No. 08-1498, also 09-89) of the Supreme Court, coupled with last week's Arar v. Ashcroft denial of certiorari (No. 09-923), the case for claiming that the U.S. is a fascist police-state just got a whole lot stronger.

First of all, what is a "fascist police-state"?

A police-state uses the law as a mechanism to control any challenges to its power by the citizenry, rather than as a mechanism to insure a civil society among the individuals. The state decides the laws, is the sole arbiter of the law, and can selectively (and capriciously) decide to enforce the law to the benefit or detriment of one individual or group or another.

In a police-state, the citizens are "free" only so long as their actions remain within the confines of the law as dictated by the state. If the individual's claims of rights or freedoms conflict with the state, or if the individual acts in ways deemed detrimental to the state, then the state will repress the citizenry, by force if necessary. (And in the end, it's always necessary.)

What's key to the definition of a police-state is the lack of redress: If there is no justice system which can compel the state to cede to the citizenry, then there is a police-state. If there exists a pro forma justice system, but which in practice is unavailable to the ordinary citizen because of systemic obstacles (for instance, cost or bureaucratic hindrance), or which against all logic or reason consistently finds in favor of the state - even in the most egregious and obviously contradictory cases - then that pro forma judiciary system is nothing but a sham: A tool of the state's repression against its citizens. Consider the Soviet court system the classic example.

A police-state is not necessarily a dictatorship. On the contrary, it can even take the form of a representative democracy. A police-state is not defined by its leadership structure, but rather, by its self-protection against the individual.

A definition of "fascism" is tougher to come by - it's almost as tough to come up with as a definition of "pornography".

The sloppy definition is simply totalitarianism of the Right, "communism" being the sloppy definition of totalitarianism of the Left. But that doesn't help much.

For our purposes, I think we should use the syndicalist-corporatist definition as practiced by Mussolini: Society as a collection of corporate and union interests, where the state is one more competing interest among many, albeit the most powerful of them all, and thus as a virtue of its size and power, taking precedence over all other factions. In other words, society is a "street-gang" model that I discussed before. The individual has power only as derived from his belonging to a particular faction or group - individuals do not have inherent worth, value or standing.

Now then! Having gotten that out of the way, where were we?

Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project: The Humanitarian Law Project was advising groups deemed "terrorists" on how to negotiate non-violently with various political agencies, including the UN. In this 6-3 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court ruled that that speech constituted "aiding and abetting" a terrorist organization, as the Court determined that speech was "material support". Therefore, the Executive and/or Congress had the right to prohibit anyone from speaking to any terrorist organization if that speech embodied "material support" to the terrorist organization.

The decision is being noted by the New York Times as a Freedom of Speech issue; other commentators seem to be viewing it in those terms as well.

My own take is, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project is not about limiting free speech - it's about the state expanding it power to repress. The decision limits free speech in passing, because what it is really doing is expanding the state's power to repress whomever it unilaterally determines is a terrorist.

In the decision, the Court explicitly ruled that "Congress and the Executive are uniquely positioned to make principled distinctions between activities that will further terrorist conduct and undermine United States foreign policy, and those that will not." In other words, the Court makes it clear that Congress and/or the Executive can solely and unilaterally determine who is a "terrorist threat", and who is not - without recourse to judicial review of this decision. And if the Executive and/or Congress determines that this group here or that group there is a "terrorist organization", then their free speech is curtailed - as is the free speech of anyone associating with them, no matter how demonstrably peaceful that speech or interaction is.

For example, if the Executive - in the form of the Secretary of State - decides that, say, WikiLeaks or Amnesty International is a terrorist organization, well then by golly, it is a terrorist organization. It no longer has any right to free speech - nor can anyone else speak to them or associate with them, for risk of being charged with providing "material support" to this heinous terrorist organization known as Amnesty International.

But furthermore, as per Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, anyone associating with WikiLeaks - including, presumably, those who read it, and most certainly those who give it information about government abuses - would be guilty of aiding and abetting terrorism. In other words, giving WikiLeaks "material support" by providing primary evidence of government abuse would render one a terrorist.

This form of repression does seem to fit the above definition of a police-state. The state determines - unilaterally - who is detrimental to its interests. The state then represses that person or group.

By a 6-3 majority, the Supreme Court has explicitly stated that Congress and/or the Executive is "uniquely positioned" to determine who is a terrorist and who is not - and therefore has the right to silence not just the terrorist organization, but anyone trying to speak to them, or hear them.

And let's just say that, after jumping through years of judicial hoops, one finally manages to prove that one wasn't then and isn't now a terrorist, the Arar denial of certiorari makes it irrelevant. Even if it turns out that a person is definitely and unequivocally not a terrorist, he cannot get legal redress for this mistake by the state.

So! To sum up: The U.S. government can decide unilaterally who is a terrorist organization and who is not. Anyone speaking to such a designated terrorist group is "providing material support" to the terrorists - and is therefore subject to prosecution at the discretion of the U.S. government. And if, in the end, it turns out that one definitely was not involved in terrorist activities, there is no way to receive redress by the state.

Sounds like a fascist police-state to me.

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fair use http://www.sott.net/articles/show/211215-Is-the-U-S-a-Fascist-Police-State-

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