Category Archives: Civil Liberties

If We Can’t Trust Our Elections…

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

A society that can’t run a fair election is not a democracy. We really should make it a priority to be a democracy.

This platitude is inspired by two sets of postings:

I should probably add in regard to the Eye on Miami series that while I think they have done extraordinary work documenting a huge problem, I think there is a fairly strong legal argument that any solution to the terrible local absentee ballot fraud issue will require something different from what they advocate. After Bush v. Gore, would not a solution — tighter rules on how ballots are cast and authenticated — have to be state-wide, not local, for equal protection reasons? And that runs into the problem of the same people who created the mess we’re in: the Republican legislature, some of whom are beneficiaries of the frauds if not actually paymasters and instigators of it.

Posted in Civil Liberties, Law: Constitutional Law, Miami | 5 Comments

You Can’t Hide

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Uncovering spoken phrases in *encrypted* VoIP conversations

We evaluate our techniques on a standard speech recognition corpus containing over 2,000 phonetically rich phrases spoken by 630 distinct speakers from across the continental United States. Our results indicate that we can identify phrases within encrypted calls with an average accuracy of 50%, and with accuracy greater than 90% for some phrases. Clearly, such an attack calls into question the efficacy of current VoIP encryption standards.

(via Dave Farber’s list).

Combine that fact with this alleged fact:

Several reports have emerged that China is cutting off phone calls mid-sentence when contentious words like ‘protest’ are used.

Posted in Civil Liberties, Cryptography | Comments Off on You Can’t Hide

Egypt Cuts Internet Access & SMS

Posted on January 27, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Reports are coming in that Egypt is now under an Internet and SMS blackout, just hours before a new series of major protests are planned against the regime of President Hosni Mubarak.

Sebone, a major Egyptian service provider based in Italy, is reporting that no Internet traffic is entering or exiting the country as of 12:30 AM Egyptian time.

via Internet Access & SMS Blocked in Egypt as Protests Escalate. See also C.Net’s Reports: Internet disruptions hit Egypt.

At present, the US government only wants the power to monitor all communications, and to require intermediaries to store them for a couple of years in case law enforcement wants them later, not the power to pull a kill switch.  That, fortunately, could never happen here.

Nor, of course, could torture.

UPDATE: On Twitter follow the #jan25 and #jan28 hash tags for user reports.

Tech reports at BGPMon, Internet in Egypt offline and Renesys, Egypt Leaves the Internet.

Posted in Civil Liberties, Internet, Politics: International | 5 Comments

Rule of Law

Posted on December 14, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

Suppose that after Bush v. Gore, someone had proposed as a testable hypothesis that an administration that took office thanks to a court ruling of dubious fidelity to stated norms of the rule of law would govern in defiance of those norms.

What would we say today about that hypothesis?

It’s “looking good“?

(Bonus legal contortion.)

[Original draft 12/19/2007: In preparation for my blog redesign, I found draft blog posts that somehow never made it to publication. This is one of them.]

2010: As we’ve just passed the 10th anniversary of Bush v. Gore, it seems like a time to post this, although people are starting not to care, which is itself a bad sign. The Obama administration’s decision not to prosecute anyone important from the Bush administration will surely come back to haunt us as it amounts to de facto legitimation — or at least acceptance which will in time be treated as legitimation — of their tactics. So even if the Obama appointees are more inclined to follow the rule of law than were their predecessors, they’ve still set it back in the end. It’s odd to have an administration that is both so Caeserist (or is that Bonapartist?) as regards state power and yet so often so inept at using political power. Unless of course they are in fact getting just what they wanted.

Posted in Civil Liberties | Comments Off on Rule of Law

This Should Be Obvious

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

These guys are right and these guys are wrong. Read about it at TPM since the ADL site is slashdotted.

Try to recall that “The mission of the Anti-Defamation League is to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike.”

Except sometimes, apparently.

Posted in Civil Liberties | 6 Comments

Nation Mag Claims ICE has Network of Secret Detention Faciilities — in the USA

Posted on December 25, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

In America's Secret ICE Castles, the Nation magazine claims that our immigration police has 186 secret detention facilities scattered around the country.

Among the more hair-raising allegations:

  • A year ago, a top ICE official boasted, “If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear.”
  • The 186 are mostly unmarked, and locals don't know about them.
  • People sent to these offices are kept off ICE's registry system so that people looking for them cannot find them.
  • Although ICE is not supposed to incarcerate US citizens, it has; they (like the immigrants ICE processes) are denied access to counsel.
  • At least one US citizen was deported as a result of this system.
  • One purpose of the system is to make it more difficult for lawyers to find prisoners before they are deported.

Much of the info concerns activities of the Bush admin; some of it clearly is still happening. The article is maddeningly unclear about how many.

Glenn Beck got a lot of ink a while back for claiming that Obama planned to build a network of secret detention centers in the US in order to lock up Republicans. Who knew that they already existed and were used to deny process of law to suspected undocumented foreigners? Add these to the secret camps in Afghanistan, Lithuania and elsewhere.

Posted in Civil Liberties | 9 Comments