] "If this is the case, it is not only a violation of both
] domestic and international law but it reveals the
] willingness of U.S. officials to trample on the most
] fundamental principles of due process and human rights in
] their scorched-earth approach to counterterrorism," Watt
] said.

Even Fox News is roasting USG on this one.

FOXNews.com - Top Stories - Detained Deportee Tells of Torture in Syria

Thought this one was particularly apropo for this group.

WorkingForChange-This Modern World: Something Truly Terrifying

CDT's fact for fact response to the DOJ's pro-PATRIOT Act website.

Setting the Record Straight: An Analysis of the Justice Department's PATRIOT Act Website October 27, 2003

] Security is always a trade-off: How much security am I
] getting, and what am I giving up to get it? These
] "data-mining" programs are not very effective.
] Identifiable future terrorists are rare, and innocents
] are common. No matter what patterns you're looking for,
] far more innocents will match the patterns than
] terrorists because innocents vastly outnumber terrorists.
] So many that you might as well not bother. And that
] assumes that you even can predict terrorist patterns.

Schneier takes an admittedly unacademic swipe at TIA/CAPPS programs. Basically the idea is that profiling doesn't work regardless of how much data you are looking at. Proving this, unfortunately, requires a TIA project.

Newsday.com - Terror Profiles By Computers Are Ineffective

] The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ
] leveled to every understanding and too plain to need
] explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with
] which they might build up an artificial system which might,
] from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give
] employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power,
] and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips
] of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but
] thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms
] engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense
] can never be explained." -Thomas Jefferson

A very interesting and angry discussion on Slashdot about the Pledge case. Thought I'd bring it over here and see what people have to say. CNN's take is rather propagandist. In general, I find this subject to be messy. I think its obvious why the words "under god" have been added to the pledge, and I think its obvious that it was illegal to do it. However, three generations have now been raised bleating those words out every morning in a practice that I objected to as a child simply because it is the most obvious sort of brainwashing. Those people are no more likely to be able to look critically and rationally upon the words of their pledge then a Frenchman is to discard his native tongue. Could we not start by having schools which do not include these words in the pledge, or better yet, to not pledge at all? Does it make sense to confront America with its most ingrained irrational convictions directly? Is this going to be productive?

Slashdot | Supreme Court Will Hear Pledge of Allegiance Case

] The First Ten Amendments to the constitution of the
] United States printed on sturdy, pocket-sized, pieces of
] metal.
]
] The next time you travel by air, take the Security
] Edition of the Bill of Rights along with you. When asked
] to empty your pockets, proudly toss the Bill of Rights in
] the plastic bin.

Wow...

Bill of Rights - Security Edition

] In his 2 1/2 years in office, Attorney General John
] Ashcroft has earned himself a remarkable distinction as
] the Torquemada of American law. Tomas de Torquemada was
] the 15th century Dominican friar who became the grand
] inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. He was largely
] responsible for its methods, including torture and the
] burning of heretics - Muslims in particular.

DenverPost.com - Walter Cronkite on the DOJ

] I've seen a number of things like this over the years.
] While sometimes laws like that are designed to keep US
] companies from boycotting Israel or South Africa or Burma
] or black people, and sometimes even enforced, that's usually
] not the real purpose (unlike laws _requiring_ US companies to
] boycott Cuba or Iraq or France), just as the Foreign Corrupt
] Practices Act laws that forbid US companies from bribing
] foreign officials usually aren't intended to hunt down corrupt
] US companies.

Anti-boycott compliance has been mentioned on MemeStreams before, but not discussed. I want to know what you think about this. I find the idea uncomfortable, but I also find the specifics thorny.

Is boycotting someone an act of speech or of association, which should have first amendment protection? (Do I have a right to do business with other people of my choosing?)

Should it be legal for the government to prevent you from engaging in a boycott? (I.E. compel you to agree to trade with someone?)

Should it be legal for the government to compel you to engage in a boycott (i.e. economic sanctions against Cuba or North Korea)? If so, they why can't the government prevent a boycott as well?

Should it be legal for the government to prevent a company from refusing to do business with black people? If so, how is this different from anti-boycott enforcement?

Should it be legal for the government to prevent a company from doing business with North Korean people?

Re: Boycotting the Unwilling

] A study in January by the General Accounting Office, the
] investigative arm of Congress, concluded that while the
] number of terrorism investigations at the Justice
] Department soared after the Sept. 11 attacks, 75 percent
] of the convictions that the department classified as
] "international terrorism" were wrongly labeled. Many
] dealt with more common crimes like document forgery.

U.S. Uses Terror Law to Pursue Crimes From Drugs to Swindling

] Not only was BlackBoxVoting.org pulled down, but ALL of
] the documents, databases and programming for approximately
] 500 pages of material, most of which did not relate to Diebold at
] all, was confiscated. Dozens of web pages were pulled down which
] had nothing whatever to do with the disputed information. AIT Inc.
] has indicated that it believes it has the right to pull down the entire
] web site including unrelated pages. AIT Inc. is now prohibiting Bev
] Harris or Black Box Voting from accessing any of her own files, even
] for the purpose of removing them.

If these allegations are correct, there could be another interesting DMCA court case in here...

[IP] yet another misuse of dmca? Black Box Voting files confiscated