FBI, Police Detaining GOP Convention Protest Group Members

Glenn Greenwald is covering the FBI and Minnesota Police's raids of protesters houses ahead of the Republican convention. This is without any probable cause and mostly without warrants. Hopefully someone in the political establishment will object to this unlawful and un-American treatment of citizens, but who am I kidding? What's the chance of politicians sticking up for democratic freedoms? Slim.

FBI involvement:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/31/raids/index.html

Police raids:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/30/police_raids/index.html

At Least Some Good News this Week...

The woman with the baby dancing to Prince on YouTube is cleared of wrongdoing, the court ordering that fair use must be considered in the sending of a DMCA takedown notice.

People on the No-Fly list can sue to have their names be taken off the list, a court rules.

FBI Pushing for Warantless Investigations

Oh gawd, is this really happening? (Link to NY times version)

Nike tries to out anonymous Chinese blogger

This is quite an interesting interplay indeed going on between China an US Corporations. Some, such as Yahoo, are taking fire for outing formerly anonymous Internet commentators and do so only when they have to. Others, such as Nike, jump at the chance to subvert freedom of speech. Nike is trying to co-opt the Chinese government to out an anonymous blogger who said some not-so-nice things about their brand. It's sad to see American corporations to stoop to the level of an oppressive authoritarian state, but I guess I should have seen it coming. Something tells me China won't have much a problem complying with Nike's request, given all the other ways in which they mistreat their citizens.

"We want to act to protect our brand reputation in the same way as any corporation would want to if people were posting or writing false accusations," [the Nike spokesperson] said. "This isn't about a debate on freedom of speech. It's simply helping us to identify the person who posted it."

Sure this isn't about freedom of speech... if you're brain dead.

No such thing as 'Typical Terrorist'

Bruce Schneier says that the Guardian says:

MI5 has concluded that there is no easy way to identify those who become involved in terrorism in Britain, according to a classified internal research document on radicalisation seen by the Guardian.

Don't inform your local Republican... you might cause him significant embarrassment. As if we needed any more proof that profiling/data mining/whatever techniques would never yield any promising results. Turns out profiling is just another excuse to invade your privacy and infringe on your civil liberties... as if the 'war on terror' were anything else.

Update: The NRC says the same thing.

Anthrax and ABC and unsolved mysteries

Anyone who cares about how journalistic ethics have deteriorated and/or the disquieting cooperation of government and press in this country needs to read Glenn Greenwald's two articles on the unsolved 2001 anthrax case. The big questions are: 1) Who sent the anthrax and why? 2) Why did ABC news report it had sources that claim the anthrax was from Iraq and why are they trying to retreat from that now? 3) Who are those sources and why were they misleading the public?

Posts:
Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News
Journalists, their lying sources, and the anthrax investigation

Your laptop will be detained at the border, without reason, forever

The Washington Post does a nice job of translating DHS policy

The policies state that officers may "detain" laptops "for a reasonable period
of time" to "review and analyze information." This may take place "absent
individualized suspicion."

into plain English:

Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop or other electronic device to an
off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of
wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland
Security recently disclosed.
Also, officials may share copies of the laptop's
contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data
decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued
by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement.

Nevermind that any of this data can be transferred just as easily over the internet (which I highly advise for all travellers, btw), this is a scary and stupid policy. DHS is one-upping other sectors of government in the 'arbitrary and indefinite detention' genre by not even requiring suspicion to detain items. Michael Chertoff is the most dangerous man in America and needs to be stopped. Thank goodness there are a select few people in government (Sen. Russell Feingold, mentioned in the article) that still care about the Bill of Rights. See also Schneier's post.