Category Archives: Civil Liberties

Prof. Bolling Explains the New US Constitution

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

In easy-to-understand pictures.

Posted in Civil Liberties, Law: Constitutional Law | Comments Off on Prof. Bolling Explains the New US Constitution

Elections Should Be About Important Things

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

If the 2012 election feels hollow, this might be why. Such a massive Constitutional redesign of our American order should be debated, and a Presidential race is the right forum in which to do so. But since that’s not happening, social conflict a few years down the road is probably the more likely path.

— Matt Stoller at naked capitalism

He’s writing about all the terrible things we’re learning about banks robosigning foreclosure documents…learning it conveniently days after the government has (robo?)signed off on a whitewash deal for the perpetrators. Worst fact: it’s still happening.

The thing about that quote is that it could just as easily have been about civil liberties, such as the Obama-Holder view that they can terminate any US citizen with extreme prejudice without bothering to have the slightest judicial process. Of course right now the other side probably is unhappy they haven’t killed more citizens…

Posted in 2012 Election, Civil Liberties, Econ & Money: Mortgage Mess | 1 Comment

MN Town’s Child Suicide Cluster Likely Has a Political Cause

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Rubin Erdely describes the human cost of political gay-bashing: nine student suicides in two years in Michelle Bachmann’s home district. The article attributes this to the local School Board’s embrace of a fervent anti-gay agenda. This in turn fed a climate of severe anti-gay bullying in the schools, making targeted students’ life hell — while administrators did nothing, maybe under the Board’s policies could do nothing, to protect them.

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Total Traffic Surveillance Systems

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

Canada is building a total traffic surveillance system based on Automatic Licence Plate Recognition (ALPR):

With ALPR, for $27,000, a police cruiser is mounted with two cameras and software that can read licence plates on both passing and stationary cars. According to the vendors, thousands of plates can be read hourly with 95-98 percent accuracy. These plate numbers are automatically compared for “hits” against ICBC and Canadian Police Information Centre “hot lists” of stolen vehicles; prohibited, unlicensed and uninsured drivers; and missing children. When such “hits” occur, plate photos are automatically stamped with time, date, and GPS coordinates, and stored. The officer will investigate details in the above-mentioned databases directly, and may pull over suspect vehicles.

At least, that’s how the popular story goes ….

… the Privacy Commissioner described the ALPR program to parliament as “general and ubiquitous surveillance, without adequate safeguards,” …

… the categories of people that generate alerts or “hits” in the ALPR system, alongside car thieves and child kidnappers, are much broader than has ever been disclosed publicly. And information on these people’s movements is being retained in a database for two or more years. For example, though you may not be stopped, your car is a “hit” and its movements are tracked and recorded if you’re on parole or probation or, in some cases, you’ve simply been accused of breaking a criminal law, federal or provincial statute, or municipal bylaw. You’re also a hit if you ever attended court to establish legal custody of your child, if you’ve ever had an incident due to a mental health problem which police attended, or if you’ve been linked to someone under investigation. The list of hit categories continues through three more pages, and a fourth page that the RCMP completely redacted.

Meanwhile, according to the Privacy Impact Assessment, the RCMP is also keeping records for three months on the whereabouts of everybody else’s cars, too—this is called “non-hit” data.

I predicted something like this over a decade ago in The Death of Privacy?, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

I wanted to write that undoubtedly we’ll be doing this here very soon. But in fact it seems we’re already using Automatic License Plate Reader/Recognitiontechnology in many parts of the US.

(Canadian article spotted via Slashdot.)

Posted in Civil Liberties, Law: Privacy | 3 Comments

Non-Violence May Be the Dominant Strategy

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

Naked Capitalism Blog — which I would currently rank as the most essential reading in blogdom — reports on a study arguing that resistance movements that adopt non-violent methods are substantially more likely to prevail against authoritarian regimes than those movements that turn to violence:

Erica Chenoweth has developed a dataset and analyzed the historical record. Below the fold are slides summarizing the results of her study of 323
 non-violent and violent campaigns 
from
 1900-2006. (There are twenty slides, so anybody with a slow connection may prefer to download a zipped file of the original PDF).

I do wonder if the movements that turned to violence may have known something about the regime, so that there might be some self-selection bias. But then who can know that much about a regime when starting a mass opposition movement?

Posted in Civil Liberties, Politics: International | 4 Comments

Arizona Legislature Votes for Agressive Ignorance

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

It’s not enough to be a modern Nativist in Arizona, you have to be vigilant against facts and viewpoints that challenge your orthodoxy. University Professor of Law at Seattle University Richard Delgado and Research Professor of Law at Seattle University Jean Stefancic explain:

Last week, the Tucson Unified School District eliminated a popular Mexican American Studies program in local high schools that, in a short period of time, had done a lot of good. Established a few years ago pursuant to a desegregation decree and taught by charismatic teachers, the program had increased the graduation rate of Mexican-origin kids to 93 percent; nationally the rate is around 50. Since the Tucson school district is heavily Latino, that’s a lot of kids. Egged on by anti-immigrant groups, the Anglo-dominated administration decided that the program was un-American and divisive because it taught the kids about the War with Mexico, struggles for school desegregation, and Jim Crow laws under which people with brown skins had to sit in the balcony of movie theaters, take a back seat in restaurants, swim in public pools on one day of the week only, and work according to a dual wage scale, one for Anglos, the other for Mexicans.

…

When an outside audit gave the program a positive review, the district ended it anyway and, for good measure, ordered that teachers discontinue using texts like Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, Rodolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima, Rodolfo Acuna’s Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, Elizabeth Martinez’s 500 Years of Chicano History, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and a book by the two of us, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, in classes where they had found an eager readership of brown teenagers.

To make sure that everyone got the point, the authorities directed the staff to collect and box seven of the most offensive books during class time so that the students would see them being packed up and carried to trucks bound for a distant book depository.

— Academe Blog, Book Banning in Arizona, via Kaimipono D. Wenger in Concurring Opinions.

Posted in Civil Liberties, Law: Everything Else | Comments Off on Arizona Legislature Votes for Agressive Ignorance