Category Archives: CivilLiberties

“The List” Part 2: From Whole Cloth

Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.

“The Trial”, Kafka

Stumbled upon this troubling account from Denver’s ABC 7:

You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they’re reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it.

San Jose Costa Rica
Outskirts of San Jose, Costa Rica

“Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft … and they did nothing wrong,” said one federal air marshal.

Continue reading “The List” Part 2: From Whole Cloth

“The List”

From the Boston Globe

The federal government has inflated the “No Fly List” to 200,000 names. But the list has nabbed more members of Congress than it has terrorists. US Senator Edward M. Kennedy and US Representative John Lewis have been inconvenienced by it, and anyone named David Nelson is likely to face a major interrogation each time he flies. Federal officials make it very difficult to correct the list, thus tormenting citizens who are guilty of nothing more than having a name resembling a name suspected sometime by some government official.

That’s the “No Fly” list. The “reach into ones pants” or “feel up ones bra” list is much, much bigger – an expansive and encompassing list – mutable based on secret recipes that seem to vary by airline.

And it’s a bit more than an inconvenience if you are on the wrong side of a SSSS ticket designation and draw a TSA agent who fondles your genitalia.

Lawless Bush

Bush’s Presidency should go down as the worst in our Republic’s short history. In the rush to create a new American Imperialism, Emperor Bush’s profligate Constitutional trespasses – the calculated, unchallenged scope and breadth of abuse of his Executive powers – have set a new standard of political authoritarianism.

Continue reading Lawless Bush

Copyright Comic Book

Local IndyWeek reporter Fiona Morgan covers the story of a “copyright comic” in the tech-oriented magazine Wired.

Fair-use is an important tool for online activisim, as is copyright. Many online authors, for instance, use a Creative Commons content license to ensure widest dissemination of their message.

To make the issue a bit more digestable, three law professors (two from Duke) created the comic book: Bound by Law.

Practicing what they preach, the comic book is freely available under a Creative Commons license.

Fiona routinely covers tech-related issues for the IndyWeek, for example, this week’s important coverage of NC ‘net neutrality and media consolidation.

Just as consumers are becoming aware of things like net neutrality and media consolidation, Congress and the North Carolina legislature are acting like nobody’s paying any attention.

on June 13, the Finance Committee of the N.C. House passed the Video Service Competition Act without amending any of the no-brainer changes suggested by public interest groups that would have made it a little less of a travesty. A state version of the Internet TV provisions currently winding through U.S. Congress, this bill would abolish the current rules governing cable television service. Telephone companies such as Verizon and BellSouth have been pushing hard for this bill, because it would allow them to expand from broadband Internet to video service without having to negotiate with local governments. The bill will soon go to the full House for a vote; the Senate version, having passed one committee, makes one more committee stop before going to the floor.

Thanks go to ibiblio’s Paul Jones for the story tip.

One nation controlled by the medium…

Those who control the present control the past. Those who control the past control the future.

– Orwell, author 1984

Those who control our modern means of communication are free to manipulate the past, recast the present and shape the future. Powerful, greedy, immoral – the masters of our converging media/medium empires already trample heavily upon the newly emerging Town Commons.

Unfortunately, with today’s House vote destroying Internet neutrality, a vote generally along party lines, the monopolists now have untrammeled freedom to despoil the Commons.

What is Internet neutrality?

Continue reading One nation controlled by the medium…

Hedgehog & Fox: Mayor Foy Honors Robert Brown

Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy wrote a nice piece for the IndyWeek on friend and local civil rights activist Robert Brown.

I’m not sure whether Robert Brown was a hedgehog or a fox, but I know that he thought about it. He probably had an opinion, although I never asked him which he thought he was. Robert was a thinker, an informed thinker who read widely, and would off-handedly refer to something like Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog & The Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History…

Thanks Kevin for reminding me of Berlin’s essay and Brown’s works. Continue reading Hedgehog & Fox: Mayor Foy Honors Robert Brown

Fiber is Future Proof

[ UPDATE: ]

One of the best forums I’ve attended in the last 6 years!

Kudos to Laurin for organizing the program, Casey, Lynda, Ray, Chad and Shannon! They all did fantastic presentations covering a broad range of muni-networking issues – NPO-model, governmental operational efficiencies, collaboration, school and community usage, etc.
[ Original Post: ]

The municipal networking forum has kicked off.

Casey Lide, of Baller Herbst , has started out with a broad overview of business models, technologies and reasons for municipal networking.

Casey brings up the “holy grail” of FTTH (fibre-to-the-home). It’s capital intensive, but as he says, “Fibre is future proof.”

Amen!

Plenty of room and plenty of time if you want to come down….

Utility Commission on the ball…

Kudos to the folks running our NC Utilities Commission!

When the USA Today story fingering Bellsouth’s complicity in the NSA scandal broke I called our North Carolina Utilities Commission to lodge a complaint. The receptionist told me a “consumer specialist” would call within the hour to get details about my case. “Sure,” I said, pretty much expecting I’d have to call back over several days to reach the right person – that’s what we’ve grown to expect from all levels of government, right?

Within the hour, I got that call. The gentleman was direct, knowledgeable and filed the complaint without hesitation. He also said he’d follow up with any developments.

Today he did.

The case has been forwarded to the FCC, which is acting as a clearinghouse for a number of states. In addition, my case will continue at the State level until resolved by the FCC investigation.

This level of competence and service by the Utility Commission folks gives me confidence that they’ll be able to handle any fastballs the communications monopolists throw Chapel Hill’s way as the community forges ahead on the municipal network project.

Bellsouth Back from the Abyss? Denies USA Today’s NSA Charges.

Bellsouth denies USA Today charge, claims no sharing of records.

According to CNN and other news sources, Bellsouth denies USA Today’s claim that it participated in the massive NSA privacy breach.

In several reports, Bellsouth spokesman Jeff Battcher claims

Battcher said BellSouth’s customer service department had received only 26 complaints about reports that private phone records may have been relayed to the government.

26 sounds quite low, especially since I know 5 folk, including myself, that called when the story broke.

Bellsouth’s Billion Dollar Mistake

[ UPDATE: ] Bellsouth denies USA Today charge, claims no sharing of records.

According to CNN and other news sources, Bellsouth denies USA Today’s claim that it participated in the massive NSA privacy breach.

In several reports, Bellsouth spokesman Jeff Battcher claims

Battcher said BellSouth’s customer service department had received only 26 complaints about reports that private phone records may have been relayed to the government.

26 sounds quite low, especially since I know 5 folk, including myself, that called when the story broke.

Verizon and ATT are still on the hook.
Continue reading Bellsouth’s Billion Dollar Mistake

Punish the Peeping Toms

If you’re concerned about the widespread domestic surveillance telephone companies, like Bellsouth, have performed on innocent Americans for the last five years, please contact the following folk:

These companies violated not only their published privacy policies and federal statutes but are complicit in one the largest violations of our Constitutional rights in our history.

[ UPDATE #2: ] Bellsouth denies USA Today charge, claims no sharing of records.

According to CNN and other news sources, Bellsouth denies USA Today’s claim that it participated in the massive NSA privacy breach.

In several reports, Bellsouth spokesman Jeff Battcher claims

Battcher said BellSouth’s customer service department had received only 26 complaints about reports that private phone records may have been relayed to the government.

26 sounds quite low, especially since I know 5 folk, including myself, that called when the story broke.

Verizon and ATT are still on the hook.[ UPDATE: ]

Call 404-249-2000, Bellsouth’s CEO Duane Ackerman’s office. Report Bellsouth’s violations of both their own corporate integrity, privacy and ethics policies AND their FCC regulatory and legal requirement to safeguard customer records.

Can you hear me now, NSA? Not if you’re the Justice Department.

From CNN and the AP via AudioActivism and Daily Wireless.

X-posted from Brian Russel’s AudioActivism

Domestic spying inquiry killed

AP is reporting that the US Department of Justice has stopped its investigation of the warrantless phone spying done by the NSA at the approval of George Bush.

“We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR [Office of Professional Responsibility] has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program,” OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey’s office shared the letter with The Associated Press.

We can’t depend on our Federal government’s law enforcers to corral Constitutional abuses.

Continue reading Can you hear me now, NSA? Not if you’re the Justice Department.