Police NOT Obligated to Protect Citizens

How many of you believe that the main purpose of your local police department is to protect and serve the people? I don’t recall what TV program it was, but some years back there was a program about policeman and in the introduction it always had the words, ‘to protect and serve.’

We were taught from the time were small children that if we are threatened by anyone we were to call 911 and asked them to dispatch the police. But is that the real function of the police department?

According to the US Supreme Court decision in Warren v. District of Columbia in 1981, the police do not have the duty to provide protection and services to individuals except under specific assignments.

In 1975 two men kicked in the back door of a rooming house in Washington DC. The men entered the second floor room the woman and her four-year-old daughter were. The men raped and sodomized the mother. Two women living on the third floor above heard the screams and call the police station. The dispatcher promised them that help would be on the way, and sent out a Code 2 call to officers in the area.

The two women crawled out of the window onto the roof and watched as several police cars arrived. One car patrolled the alley and another car parked out front and the officer approached the front of the house and knocked on the door. When no one answered the second officer left the scene. All four police officers left the area five minutes after arriving.

The two women crawled back into their room they could still hear the screams coming from the floor below and again call the police department. The dispatcher logged the call as ‘investigate the trouble’ which was never dispatched to any officers in the field.

Hoping in believing that police officers had entered the home the two women called down to the woman on the third floor. The two rapists heard the calls and confronted the women at knife point and took all three women back to their apartment and continued to sexually abuse, rape, rob and beat them for the next fourteen hours.

One of the women that lived upstairs, Carolyn Warren, filed a lawsuit against the local police department for how they handled the situation. In her lawsuit, Warren contended that the police dispatcher failed to forward the first call with the proper degree of urgency — Code 1 — which would have alerted officers of the danger occurring within the home. The second contention in the lawsuit was that when the officers did respond, they fail to follow proper police procedures by not checking the rear entrance or windows of the home. The third contention filed in the lawsuit stated that the dispatcher failed to notify officers in the field of the second call.

The case went all the way to the Supreme Court where in 1981 a 4 – 3 decision was rendered stating that since Warren did not have a special relationship with the police department that the police were not obligated to go beyond the measures they took to protect her and the other women. Basically the Supreme Court ruled that police are not obligated to or have any duty to the victims of criminal acts. The main function of the police department is to arrest criminals and investigate crimes.

That only leaves one legal source of defense for every individual and homeowner. That defense is guaranteed by the Second Amendment in the right to bear and keep arms. That’s why the town of Kennesaw, Georgia passed an ordinance in 1982 requiring all homeowners to own a firearm to be used for protection. The only exceptions were for religious beliefs, convicted felons or those who had a strong conscientious opposition to guns. Consequently Kennesaw, a suburb of Atlanta, has one of the lowest crime rates in the nation.

So if you want to protect yourself and your family, I wouldn’t count on the police but rather I would urge you to go out and purchase a firearm and learn how to use it. Then if anyone breaks into your house, you’ll have your protection right there in your hands and you won’t have to wait for police who may or may not show up to help.

Consumer Group: The Rich May Pay Less For Car Insurance Even If They’re Not Safe Drivers

By Mary Beth Quirk

Driving safely and avoiding accidents isn’t just common sense — injuries hurt, car wrecks are bad — but also a way to make sure drivers keep their auto insurance premiums down. But according to figures released by a consumer group recently, insurance companies are in the habit of charging higher premium to safe, low- or moderate-income drivers than to richer people who were at fault for an accident.

The review by the Consumer Federation of America (via Bloomberg News) says that out of 60 cases it studied, the good drivers were hit with higher prices two-thirds of the time, because of factors like education and occupation. But shouldn’t how well you drive be a pretty important factor?

Yes, according to the CFA, which studied prices in 12 cities from State Farm, Allstate, Geico, Farmers and Progressive. How far one drives and how safe you are doing it should be how the bar is set, or at least a major part of it.

Using two hypothetical characters the group compared premiums offered to two 30-year-old women. Both had driven for 10 years, lived on the same street in a middle-income Zip code and both wanted the minimum insurance required by whichever state the group was researching.

The imaginary woman who wasn’t married, rented a home, didn’t have coverage for 45 days but has never been in an accident or ticketed with a moving violation was compared to a married executive with a master’s degree who owns her home and has always had continuous insurance coverage. But she’d been in an accident (again, hypothetically) that was her fault and caused $800 in damage within the last three years.

The results were somewhat surprising, although there were differences across the five insurers. Farmers, GEICO and Progressive always gave a higher quote to the safer driver than the woman who’d caused an accident. Across all 12 cities in the study, State Farm offered the lowest or second lowest premiums.

“State insurance regulators should require auto insurers to explain why they believe factors such as education and income are better predictors of losses than are at-fault accidents,” said J. Robert Hunter, CFA’s director of insurance and former Texas insurance commissioner.

“Policymakers should ask why auto insurers are permitted to discriminate on the basis of nondriving-related factors such as occupation or education,” he added.

We’re of the same mind. Rewarding good drivers with higher premiums seems like a backwards way to do it. If they’re going to get charged more anyway, where’s the motivation to be a safe driver, beyond insuring your own personal safety?

Kroger Gun Stunt Sparks 2nd Amendment Debate

Charlottesville police say the man who showed up at a Kroger grocery store with a loaded gun wanted to make a point. On Sunday, an unidentified 22-year-old man carried a loaded AR-15 into the Kroger store on Emmet Street and Hydraulic Road, sparking not only a scare for customers and employees but also a 2nd Amendment debate.

Charlottesville police drew their guns on the man after witnesses reported he brought a gun into the store. They restrained the man to ask him questions, but released him after they confirmed he is not a convicted felon, owned the gun legally and it was not concealed.

Police say he was cooperative and did nothing illegal. Officers did find a note in his pocket spelling out his intent to express his 2nd Amendment rights. Police say they could not release man's name because he was not arrested.

National Rifle Association (NRA) instructor Bill Davis says the gun incident was inappropriate and could have turned violent.

"I think it reflects on all gun owners in a bad way," Davis said. "I've talked to six NRA instructors this morning about it. Why did he have that note in his pocket? I think - this is my personal opinion - I think he expected to be shot, so they would have found the note and said he wasn't doing nothing."

NRA instructors and police agree that he did nothing illegal, but he did cause a lot of concern.

"He did not do anything wrong other than to disrupt a lot of activity, concern a lot of people within there and of course so close to the heels of a tragedy that happened in Connecticut," said Charlottesville Police Lieutenant Ronnie Roberts.

The disruption sparked the Kroger store to ban him from the property. Private property owners and businesses can post signs to keep guns out.

"The private property owners or businesses have a right to keep individuals that have either shotguns or rifles from coming into their business," Roberts said. "They can post that at the entrance to the door so that it is clearly visible, that no firearms of such are allowed inside the business."

Police point out that some localities in Virginia have restricted the use of carrying a rifle or a shotgun, but Charlottesville is not one of them. Click here for a closer look at Virginia laws pertaining to firearms. Davis says some of the legislation should be reformed.

"I think the law should be changed a little bit to say yes, you could carry open with a handgun, but you know you don't want to carry an assault weapon or any kind of shotgun in a public place of business," he said.

Charlottesville police say calls like these will require them to use valuable time and personnel.

"It does drain resources, as you could well see yesterday - the number of officers that were there and the heightened awareness on the officers' part," said Roberts. "I think the overall aspect of it is, it will increase the call volume requiring a number of officers to respond and it is a very delicate situation that you're dealing with."

A situation Davis says could have been prevented with some common sense. "If you go and carry concealed, carry concealed and don't let nobody know it. If you go and carry open, respect the rights of others," he said.

The Kroger on Hydraulic Road has no signs in front to prohibit guns from the store. Witnesses say the man did approach the store at first, and looked like he was checking for those signs before bringing in the gun.

Kroger Mid-Atlantic has released the following statement in regards to Sunday night's incident:

"Our policy in regards to guns in our stores is to comply with the state and local laws. The safety of our customers and our associates is always first and foremost as we run our business.

We treat each situation individually, based on the circumstance. In this case it was alarming and frightening to our customers and associates due to recent events.

Several of our customers dialed 9-1-1 and our store team's reaction was reasonable and understood."

5 Years After: Portugal's Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results

Street drug–related deaths from overdoses drop and the rate of HIV cases crashes

By Brian Vastag

In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.

Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank.

"Now instead of being put into prison, addicts are going to treatment centers and they're learning how to control their drug usage or getting off drugs entirely," report author Glenn Greenwald, a former New York State constitutional litigator, said during a press briefing at Cato last week.

Under the Portuguese plan, penalties for people caught dealing and trafficking drugs are unchanged; dealers are still jailed and subjected to fines depending on the crime. But people caught using or possessing small amounts—defined as the amount needed for 10 days of personal use—are brought before what's known as a "Dissuasion Commission," an administrative body created by the 2001 law.

Each three-person commission includes at least one lawyer or judge and one health care or social services worker. The panel has the option of recommending treatment, a small fine, or no sanction.

Peter Reuter, a criminologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, says he's skeptical decriminalization was the sole reason drug use slid in Portugal, noting that another factor, especially among teens, was a global decline in marijuana use. By the same token, he notes that critics were wrong in their warnings that decriminalizing drugs would make Lisbon a drug mecca.

"Drug decriminalization did reach its primary goal in Portugal," of reducing the health consequences of drug use, he says, "and did not lead to Lisbon becoming a drug tourist destination."

Walter Kemp, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, says decriminalization in Portugal "appears to be working." He adds that his office is putting more emphasis on improving health outcomes, such as reducing needle-borne infections, but that it does not explicitly support decriminalization, "because it smacks of legalization."

Drug legalization removes all criminal penalties for producing, selling and using drugs; no country has tried it. In contrast, decriminalization, as practiced in Portugal, eliminates jail time for drug users but maintains criminal penalties for dealers. Spain and Italy have also decriminalized personal use of drugs and Mexico's president has proposed doing the same. .

A spokesperson for the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy declined to comment, citing the pending Senate confirmation of the office's new director, former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs also declined to comment on the report.

Arizona Republicans Propose Bill That Would Not Allow Atheists To Graduate High School

By Hemant Mehta

A group of Arizona politicians — all Republicans, of course — have proposed a law (House Bill 2467) requiring public high school students to recite the following oath in order to graduate:

I, _______, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge these duties; So help me God.

To quote Comedy Central’s Ilya Gerner: “Nothing says ‘I take this obligation freely’ quite like a state law that withholds your diploma unless you swear an oath.”

Kevin Bondelli adds:

… graduating high school is not the same thing as voluntarily accepting the responsibility of a public office or admission to the legal bar. A high school diploma is, with extremely few exceptions, required to have a chance to live above the poverty level. It is the culmination of an education that up until that point was compulsory.

It’s bad enough the Republicans are demanding loyalty of the kind normally reserved for members of Congress and beyond — but there’s also no way I would say those last four words, and the current text of the legislation does not allow for any alternatives.

In other words, if this bill were to become a law, atheists would either not be allowed to graduate… or they would be forced to lie so they could graduate. Neither option is acceptable.

Mike Sunnucks of the Phoenix Business Journal points out another problem:

The Arizona bill could also face legal challenges if it is approved.

Jehovah’s witnesses, some Muslims and pacifist Quakers have in the past challenged loyalty oaths imposed by the federal government and other agencies, saying they conflict with their beliefs and religious professions. Similarly, some Arizona students could challenge the proposed high school oath as a violation of their religious liberties and freedom of expression.

This bill is the work of Representatives Bob Thorpe, Sonny Borrelli, Carl Seel, T.J. Shope, Jeff Dial, David Livingston, Chester Crandell, and Steve Smith.

Smith and Shope have also introduced legislation demanding that all students in grades 1-12 recite the Pledge of Allegiance (with “Under God”) every day. At least in that bill, students can get out of saying it with their parents’ permission.

No such exemption exists in the Loyalty Oath.

Keep in mind that in both cases, the bills do not help children get a better education. That’s the saddest thing about all this. The people who are in charge of fixing the education crisis are proposing solutions that would only waste more classroom time and exclude many students from graduating despite fulfilling their current requirements.

***Update***: While the bill still includes the God language, Think Progress reports that it may be revised:

As written, the bill does not exempt atheist students or those of different faiths from the requirement, though Thorpe has pledged to amend the measure. “In that we had a tight deadline for dropping our bills, I was not able to update the language,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Arizona Republic. “Even though I want to encourage all of our students to understand and respect our Constitution and constitutional form of government, I do not want to create a requirement that students or parents may feel uncomfortable with.”

So it’s possible alternative language may solve the atheist problem, but *requiring* students to take the oath still poses a host of constitutional issues. Another option would be to make the oath optional, but that would make this bill completely irrelevant.

Which would be fine by me.

Internet connection crucial to everyday life, German federal court rules

Because an internet connection is an important commodity, the plaintiff should be compensated for the loss of it, the court ruled

By Loek Esser

Internet access is as crucial to everyday life as having a phone connection and the loss of connectivity is deserving of financial compensation, the German Federal Court of Justice has ruled.

Because having an internet connection is so significant for a large part of the German population, a customer whose service provider failed to provide connectivity between December 2008 and February 2009 is entitled to compensation, the court ruled today.

"It is the first time the court ruled that an Internet connection is as important a commodity as having a phone," said court spokeswoman Dietlind Weinland.

The plaintiff was erroneously disconnected and demanded that the unnamed telecommunications company pay for costs that incurred in switching to a new provider. The plaintiff also demanded compensation of €50 (£42) per day for the period his was unable to use his DSL, fax over IP and VoIP services, according to the court.

The Federal Court, however, awarded compensation only for loss of the internet connection. Compensation for the loss of a fax connection was denied because a fax only enables the user to send text and images faster than conventional mail and the technology is increasingly becoming irrelevant due to the rise of alternatives such as email, the court ruled.

While a phone connection is an important commodity, the plaintiff was also denied compensation for loss of his VoIP phone line since he owned a mobile phone, said Weinland.

But the plaintiff is entitled to compensation for the lost DSL line because the Internet has been a crucial part of people's economic living standards for a while now, the court ruled.

The internet is important because it offers access to information in the form of text, images, video and audio files. Almost all subjects are covered on the Internet, from light entertainment to highly scientific topics, the court said.

Because of its availability, the Internet increasingly replaces other media such as encyclopedias, magazines or TV, and it also enables a global exchange between its users via email, forums, blogs and social networks, the court said. In addition, the internet is increasingly used for the initiation and conclusion of contracts as well as for legal transactions and the fulfilment of public service obligations, it added.

Appeals court rules Indiana can't ban sex offenders from Facebook

Social media ban is too sweeping to pass muster under the First Amendment.

by Timothy B. Lee

Today, a federal appeals court struck down a 2008 Indiana law that banned registered sex offenders from using social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

The challenge was brought by an anonymous Hoosier who is on the state's sex offender registry as a result of a 2000 conviction for child exploitation. When the Indiana legislature passed a law banning him from using social media sites, he brought a legal challenge arguing the law violated his First Amendment rights. A lower court judge rejected his argument. But on Wednesday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit overruled his decision.

"Illicit communication comprises a minuscule subset of the universe of social network activity," wrote a unanimous three-judge panel. "As such, the Indiana law targets substantially more activity than the evil it seeks to redress."

That's a problem because under Supreme Court precedents, regulations that target speech must be "narrowly tailored" to achieve a significant government interest. While deterring sexual exploitation of minors is obviously a legitimate government interest, the court found a total ban on accessing social media sites was too broad to pass muster.

The Seventh Circuit's ruling could influence pending litigation in San Francisco over a California initiative that requires sex offenders to provide the government with a list of their social media identifiers. Earlier this month, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against the law. While decisions of the Seventh Circuit are not binding in California courts, Wednesday's ruling is likely to be cited in future litigation over the California measure.

Kindergartner Suspended Over Bubble Gun Threat

A 5-year-old girl was suspended from school earlier this week after she made what the school called a “terrorist threat.”

Her weapon of choice? A small, Hello Kitty automatic bubble blower.

The kindergartner, who attends Mount Carmel Area Elementary School in Pennsylvania, caught administrators’ attention after suggesting she and a classmate should shoot each other with bubbles.

“I think people know how harmless a bubble is. It doesn’t hurt,” said Robin Ficker, an attorney for the girl’s family. According to Ficker, the girl, whose identity has not been released, didn’t even have the bubble gun toy with her at school.

The kindergartner was ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation during her 10-day suspension, which was later reduced to two days. The evaluation deemed the girl normal and not a threat to others, Ficker said.

The girl’s family is considering a lawsuit against the school to get the blemish — all because of bubbles — off their daughter’s record.

“The mother has tried to get the girl in another school since this time, and they won’t take the little girl because of this mark on her record,” Ficker said.

The suspension comes one month after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, which has created a heightened sense of alert at schools across the country. The Mount Carmel Area School District told ABC News, “We are confident that much of the information supplied to the media may not be consistent with the facts… The Mount Carmel Area School District takes the well-being and safety of students and staff very seriously.

Pupil expelled from Montreal college after finding ‘sloppy coding’ that compromised security of 250,000 students personal data

Ethan Cox

Ahmed Al-Khabaz, a 20-year-old computer science student at Dawson College in Montreal, was expelled after discovering and reporting a security flaw in a computer program run by CEGEPs in Quebec.

A student has been expelled from Montreal’s Dawson College after he discovered a flaw in the computer system used by most Quebec CEGEPs (General and Vocational Colleges), one which compromised the security of over 250,000 students’ personal information.

Ahmed Al-Khabaz, a 20-year-old computer science student at Dawson and a member of the school’s software development club, was working on a mobile app to allow students easier access to their college account when he and a colleague discovered what he describes as “sloppy coding” in the widely used Omnivox software which would allow “anyone with a basic knowledge of computers to gain access to the personal information of any student in the system, including social insurance number, home address and phone number, class schedule, basically all the information the college has on a student.”

“I saw a flaw which left the personal information of thousands of students, including myself, vulnerable,” said Mr. Al-Khabaz. “I felt I had a moral duty to bring it to the attention of the college and help to fix it, which I did. I could have easily hidden my identity behind a proxy. I chose not to because I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.”

I felt I had a moral duty to bring it to the attention of the college

After an initial meeting with Director of Information Services and Technology François Paradis on Oct. 24, where Mr. Paradis congratulated Mr. Al-Khabaz and colleague Ovidiu Mija for their work and promised that he and Skytech, the makers of Omnivox, would fix the problem immediately, things started to go downhill.

Two days later, Mr. Al-Khabaz decided to run a software program called Acunetix, designed to test for vulnerabilities in websites, to ensure that the issues he and Mija had identified had been corrected. A few minutes later, the phone rang in the home he shares with his parents.

“It was Edouard Taza, the president of Skytech. He said that this was the second time they had seen me in their logs, and what I was doing was a cyber attack. I apologized, repeatedly, and explained that I was one of the people who discovered the vulnerability earlier that week and was just testing to make sure it was fixed. He told me that I could go to jail for six to twelve months for what I had just done and if I didn’t agree to meet with him and sign a non-disclosure agreement he was going to call the RCMP and have me arrested. So I signed the agreement.”

The agreement prevented Mr. Al-Kabaz from discussing confidential or proprietary information he found on Skytech servers, or any information relating to Skytech, their servers or how he accessed them. The agreement also prevented Mr. Al-Kabaz from discussing the existence of the non-disclosure pact itself, and specified that if his actions became public he would face legal consequences.

When reached for comment Mr. Taza acknowledged mentioning police and legal consequences, but denied having made any threats, and suggested that Mr. Al-Khabaz had misunderstood his comments.

“All software companies, even Google or Microsoft, have bugs in their software,” said Mr. Taza. “These two students discovered a very clever security flaw, which could be exploited. We acted immediately to fix the problem, and were able to do so before anyone could use it to access private information.”

Taza explained that he was quite pleased with the work the two students did identifying problems, but the testing software Mr. Al-Khabaz ran to verify the system was fixed crossed a line.

“This type of software should never be used without prior permission of the system administrator, because it can cause a system to crash. He [Al-Khabaz] should have known better than to use it without permission, but it is very clear to me that there was no malicious intent. He simply made a mistake.”

The administration of Dawson College clearly saw things differently, proceeding to expel Mr. Al-Khabaz for a “serious professional conduct issue.”

“I was called into a meeting with the co–ordinator of my program, Ken Fogel, and the dean, Dianne Gauvin,” says Mr. Al-Khabaz. “They asked a lot of questions, mostly about who knew about the problems and who I had told. I got the sense that their primary concern was covering up the problem.”

Following this meeting, the fifteen professors in the computer science department were asked to vote on whether to expel Mr. Al-Khabaz, and fourteen voted in favour. Mr. Al-Khabaz argues that the process was flawed because he was never given a chance to explain his side of the story to the faculty. He appealed his expulsion to the academic dean and even director-general Richard Filion. Both denied the appeal, leaving him in academic limbo.

“I was acing all of my classes, but now I have zeros across the board. I can’t get into any other college because of these grades, and my permanent record shows that I was expelled for unprofessional conduct. I really want this degree, and now I won’t be able to get it. My academic career is completely ruined. In the wrong hands, this breach could have caused a disaster. Students could have been stalked, had their identities stolen, their lockers opened and who knows what else. I found a serious problem, and tried to help fix it. For that I was expelled.”

Morgan Crockett, director of internal affairs and advocacy for the Dawson Student Union, agrees.

“Dawson has betrayed a brilliant student to protect Skytech management,” said Ms. Crockett. “It’s a travesty that Ahmad’s academic future has been compromised just so that Dawson and Skytech could save face. If they had any sense of decency, they would reinstate Ahmad into [the] computer science [program], refund the financial aid debt he has incurred as a result of his expulsion and offer him a full public apology “ Repeated calls to various members of the Dawson administration were not returned, with the college citing an inability to discuss an individual student’s case on legal and ethical grounds in a statement released by their communications department.

Congress Disgracefully Approves the FISA Warrantless Spying Bill for Five More Years, Rejects All Privacy Amendments

Today, after just one day of rushed debate, the Senate shamefully voted on a five-year extension to the FISA Amendments Act, an unconsitutional law that openly allows for warrantless surveillance of Americans' overseas communications.

Incredibly, the Senate rejected all the proposed amendments that would have brought a modicum of transparency and oversight to the government's activities, despite previous refusals by the Executive branch to even estimate how many Americans are surveilled by this program or reveal critical secret court rulings interpreting it.

The common-sense amendments the Senate hastily rejected were modest in scope and written with the utmost deference to national security concerns. The Senate had months to consider them, but waited until four days before the law was to expire to bring them to the floor, and then used the contrived time crunch to stifle any chances of them passing.

Sen. Ron Wyden's amendment would not have taken away any of the NSA's powers, it just would have forced intelligence agencies to send Congress a report every year detailing how their surveillance was affecting ordinary Americans. Yet Congress voted to be purposely kept in the dark about a general estimate of how many Americans have been spied on.

You can watch Sen. Ron Wyden's entire, riveting floor speech on the privacy dangers and lack of oversight in the FISA Amendments Act here.

Sen. Jeff Merkley's amendment would have encouraged (not even forced!) the Attorney General to declassify portions of secret FISA court opinions—or just release summaries of them if they were too sensitive. This is something the administration itself promised to do three years ago. We know—because the government has admitted—that at least one of those opinions concluded the government had violated the Constitution. Yet Congress also voted to keep this potentially critical interpretation of a public law a secret.

Tellingly, Sen. Rand Paul's "Fourth Amendment Protection Act," which would have affirmed Americans' emails are protected from unwarranted search and seizures (just like physical letters and phone calls), was voted down by the Senate in a landslide.

The final vote for re-authorizing five more years of the FISA Amendments Act and secretive domestic spying was 73-23. Our thanks goes out to the twenty-three brave Senators who stood up for Americans' constitutional rights yesterday. If only we had more like them.

Of course, the fight against illegal and unconsitutional warrantless wiretapping is far from over. Since neither the President, who once campaigned on a return to rule of law on surveillance of Americans, nor the Congress, which has proven to be the enabler-in-chief of the Executive's overreach, have been willing to protect the privacy of Americans in their digital papers, all eyes should now turn to the Courts.

EFF was just in federal court in San Francisco two weeks ago, challenging the NSA's untargeted dragnet warrantless surveillance program. And the Supreme Court will soon rule whether the ACLU's constitutional challenge to the "targeted" portions of the FISA Amendments Act can go forward.

But make no mistake: this vote was nothing less than abdication by Congress of its role as watchdog over Executive power, and a failure of its independent obligation to protect the Bill of Rights. The FISA Amendments Act and the ongoing warrantless spying on Americans has been, and will continue to be, a blight on our nation and our Constitution.

Atoms Reach Record Temperature, Colder than Absolute Zero

Charles Choi

Absolute zero is often thought to be the coldest temperature possible. But now researchers show they can achieve even lower temperatures for a strange realm of "negative temperatures."

Oddly, another way to look at these negative temperatures is to consider them hotter than infinity, researchers added.

This unusual advance could lead to new engines that could technically be more than 100 percent efficient, and shed light on mysteries such as dark energy, the mysterious substance that is apparently pulling our universe apart.

An object's temperature is a measure of how much its atoms move — the colder an object is, the slower the atoms are. At the physically impossible-to-reach temperature of zero kelvin, or minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius), atoms would stop moving. As such, nothing can be colder than absolute zero on the Kelvin scale.

Bizarro negative temperatures

To comprehend the negative temperatures scientists have now devised, one might think of temperature as existing on a scale that is actually a loop, not linear. Positive temperatures make up one part of the loop, while negative temperatures make up the other part. When temperatures go either below zero or above infinity on the positive region of this scale, they end up in negative territory. [What's That? Your Basic Physics Questions Answered]

With positive temperatures, atoms more likely occupy low-energy states than high-energy states, a pattern known as Boltzmann distribution in physics. When an object is heated, its atoms can reach higher energy levels.

At absolute zero, atoms would occupy the lowest energy state. At an infinite temperature, atoms would occupy all energy states. Negative temperatures then are the opposite of positive temperatures — atoms more likely occupy high-energy states than low-energy states.

"The inverted Boltzmann distribution is the hallmark of negative absolute temperature, and this is what we have achieved," said researcher Ulrich Schneider, a physicist at the University of Munich in Germany. "Yet the gas is not colder than zero kelvin, but hotter. It is even hotter than at any positive temperature — the temperature scale simply does not end at infinity, but jumps to negative values instead."

As one might expect, objects with negative temperatures behave in very odd ways. For instance, energy typically flows from objects with a higher positive temperature to ones with a lower positive temperature — that is, hotter objects heat up cooler objects, and colder objects cool down hotter ones, until they reach a common temperature. However, energy will always flow from objects with negative temperature to ones with positive temperatures. In this sense, objects with negative temperatures are always hotter than ones with positive temperatures.

Another odd consequence of negative temperatures has to do with entropy, which is a measure of how disorderly a system is. When objects with positive temperature release energy, they increase the entropy of things around them, making them behave more chaotically. However, when objects with negative temperatures release energy, they can actually absorb entropy.

Negative temperatures would be thought impossible, since there is typically no upper bound for how much energy atoms can have, as far as theory currently suggests. (There is a limit to what speed they can travel — according to Einstein's theory of relativity, nothing can accelerate to speeds faster than light.)

Wacky physics experiment

To generate negative temperatures, scientists created a system where atoms do have a limit to how much energy they can possess. They first cooled about 100,000 atoms to a positive temperature of a few nanokelvin, or billionth of a kelvin. They cooled the atoms within a vacuum chamber, which isolated them from any environmental influence that could potentially heat them up accidentally. They also used a web of laser beams and magnetic fields to very precisely control how these atoms behaved, helping to push them into a new temperature realm. [Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings]

"The temperatures we achieved are negative nanokelvin," Schneider told LiveScience.

Temperature depends on how much atoms move — how much kinetic energy they have. The web of laser beams created a perfectly ordered array of millions of bright spots of light, and in this "optical lattice," atoms could still move, but their kinetic energy was limited.

Temperature also depends on how much potential energy atoms have, and how much energy lies in the interactions between the atoms. The researchers used the optical lattice to limit how much potential energy the atoms had, and they used magnetic fields to very finely control the interactions between atoms, making them either attractive or repulsive.

Temperature is linked with pressure — the hotter something is, the more it expands outward, and the colder something is, the more it contracts inward. To make sure this gas had a negative temperature, the researchers had to give it a negative pressure as well, tinkering with the interactions between atoms until they attracted each other more than they repelled each other.

"We have created the first negative absolute temperature state for moving particles," said researcher Simon Braun at the University of Munich in Germany.

New kinds of engines

Negative temperatures could be used to create heat engines — engines that convert heat energy to mechanical work, such as combustion engines — that are more than 100-percent efficient, something seemingly impossible. Such engines would essentially not only absorb energy from hotter substances, but also colder ones. As such, the work the engine performed could be larger than the energy taken from the hotter substance alone.

Negative temperatures might also help shed light on one of the greatest mysteries in science. Scientists had expected the gravitational pull of matter to slow down the universe's expansion after the Big Bang, eventually bringing it to a dead stop or even reversing it for a "Big Crunch." However, the universe's expansion is apparently speeding up, accelerated growth that cosmologists suggest may be due to dark energy, an as-yet-unknown substance that could make up more than 70 percent of the cosmos.

In much the same way, the negative pressure of the cold gas the researchers created should make it collapse. However, its negative temperature keeps it from doing so. As such, negative temperatures might have interesting parallels with dark energy that may help scientists understand this enigma.

Negative temperatures could also shed light on exotic states of matter, generating systems that normally might not be stable without them. "A better understanding of temperature could lead to new things we haven't even thought of yet," Schneider said. "When you study the basics very thoroughly, you never know where it may end."

The scientists detailed their findings in the Jan. 4 issue of the journal Science.

Corporation-as-carpool dispute curbed

by Jason Walsh

Alas, a disputed carpool lane infraction didn’t loosen corporate America’s grip on election financing, as San Rafael resident Jonathan Frieman’s creative ticket appeal fell on unsympathetic ears Monday at Marin Traffic Court.

Frieman was contesting his $478 carpool lane violation on the grounds that while driving south through the two-passenger lane in Novato last October, a set of incorporating documents constituted a second person in the vehicle—if the U.S. Supreme Court grants corporations the same free speech rights as citizens, as it seemed to in the 2010 Citizens United ruling, argued Frieman, then he and his corporation papers count as two people in the carpool lane.

According to a press release from Kathleen Russell Consulting, the Mill Valley-based firm handling publicity for Frieman’s quest for justice, state vehicle code 470’s definition of a person includes “natural persons and corporations.”

Frieman has vowed to to appeal the ca se all the way to the Supreme Court “in an effort to expose the impracticality of corporate personhood.”

"Corporations are imaginary entities, and we've let them run wild," says Frieman. "Their original intent 200 years ago at the dawn of our nation was to serve human beings. So I'm wresting back that power by making their personhood serve me."

The concept of corporate personhood has been an ongoing controversy for years—but it hit the mainstream in 2010 following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, which held that restricting political expenditures by corporations was a violation of their First Amendment rights to free speech. Implicit in such a ruling, some argue, is that the Constitution grants protections to corporations as if they were people.

Representing Frieman at traffic court was attorney Ford Greene—he, too, says the state vehicle code treats a person and a corporation as equivalent.

" When a corporation is present in one's car, it is sufficient to qualify as a two-person occupancy for commuter lane purposes," says Greene, who’s also a San Anselmo city councilmember. "When the corporate presence in our electoral process is financially dominant, by parity it appears appropriate to recognize such presence in an automobile."

Copyright Vampires Attempt to Suck the Lifeblood Out of Fair Use Video

Update: On January 10, YouTube informed Jonathan McIntosh that his video had been reinstated. The copyright "strike" appears to be removed from his account. YouTube did not wait for the DMCA's 10 to 14 day waiting period to expire, choosing to stand up for its user and putting a stake in this disappointing abuse of the takedown process.

For the past three months, video remix artist Jonathan McIntosh — a self-described "pop culture hacker" whose mashups have been viewed well over 6 million times — has been forced to take time out of making new works in order to address a much less exciting problem: bogus DMCA takedown notices. False accusations of infringement have taken one of his most widely cited videos off of YouTube, rendering it inaccessible through the most popular medium available. (An HTML5 popup version remains available on McIntosh's site).

The video, a commentary on representations of gender roles in popular media titled "Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed," has quite an impressive set of fair use credentials. For one thing, a whole host of major publications favorably reviewed the short film — ranging from the LA Times to the Boston Globe to Slate to Vanity Fair. It has racked up over 3 million views around the Web. But even more to the point, last summer McIntosh joined EFF to screen his film at the 2012 DMCA exemption hearings as an example of a transformative noncommercial video work. His remix was mentioned by name in the official recommendations by the US Copyright Office as worthy of protection.

There are many clear cases of fair use, but this one is about as unambiguous as they get.

That fact hasn't stopped Lionsgate Pictures (the studio with the rights to Twilight), through its enforcement agent MovieClips, from lobbing accusations of infringement and attempting to exploit his work. McIntosh has written up the whole episode on his blog, and it's well worth reading the whole thing. Here's the short version.

What a Broken Copyright System Looks Like

Last October, Lionsgate sent a message through YouTube's algorithmic content detection system — Content ID — that the video "matched third party content." It began running ads over his video, which automatically prohibited the clip from playing on iOS devices. McIntosh filed a dispute, but only the accuser reviews these claims, and Lionsgate chose to reject it. McIntosh then filed a formal appeal with the assistance of attorney Art Neill and New Media Rights, including a 1000-word fair use analysis of the film. A month later, his appeal was accepted and the video was reinstated.

The same day, though, Lionsgate issued a second claim, and once again McIntosh went through the dispute-rejection-appeal process. After another month of waiting, YouTube unceremoniously sent a notification that it had removed the video for infringement and had sent his account into a probationary mode.

It's now been three weeks. The video, which normally gets over 30,000 views a month, remains offline. As McIntosh puts it, "This is what a broken copyright enforcement system looks like."

That's an Awfully Nice Video. It'd Be a Shame if Something Happened to it...

Indeed, it's not news that the DMCA process is subject to abuse. And as McIntosh's case shows, the incentives provided by the law enable that abuse. One section of the DMCA, section 512(f), is supposed to discourage abuse by holding false accusers liable. But as examples like this one demonstrate, the threat of section 512(f) is not enough.

In fact, the senders of this notice were quite brazen about the shakedown operation they were executing. When McIntosh contacted the rightsholders, he got this message in response:

Had our requestes to monetize this video not been disputed, we would have placed an ad on the cotent [sic] and allowed it to remain online. Unfortunately after appeal, we are left with no other option than to remove the content.

No consideration of fair use, no conception that the remixer may be in the right. Simply: allow us to generate revenue off your video, or we will shut it down.

The Real Victim: Fair Use

Fair use is commonly called the safety valve of copyright law. In an era where the content industry pushes for ever more aggressive laws in the Congress and the courts, that safety valve is more important than ever. Lionsgate has shown how easy it is to abuse the DMCA takedown system and to misuse YouTube's Content ID system to undermine fair use. That works to the detriment of remix filmmakers and the public.

McIntosh and his lawyer have filed a counter-notice, and hopefully the video will be restored. Even so, Lionsgate was able to pull down the video for this long within the scope of the Content ID system, and the DMCA allows for at least 10-14 days of more censorship "free," during the counter-notice period.

Even more distressing is the thought of how many artists aren't able to navigate similar situations. For every example of a fair use activist like Jonathan McIntosh, there may be countless others who don't have the expertise or willingness to fight these battles.

EFF is working on fixing the DMCA. Most prominently, in Lenz v. Universal EFF is asking federal court to protect the fair use and free speech rights of a mother who posted a short video of her toddler son dancing to a Prince song on YouTube. Judge Fogel heard summary judgment in October, and we are awaiting a ruling on the interpretation of the DMCA and section 512(f).

Yours, Mine, but Not Ours

by Corey Robin

Why the politics of national security means that we’re all living in failed Hobbesian states.

Political fear is universal, but its language is particular. Racism is one language of fear; risk assessment is another. There is little doubt, however, that security — whether national or domestic — is the most potent and pervasive language of all.

Security is the one good, political theorists like John Dunn and Bernard Williams agree, that the state must provide. It has the ability, like no other argument, to mobilize the resources and attention of the state and its citizens. It has arguably inspired — and, in the case of nuclear deterrence, certainly threatened — more devastation and destruction than any other ideology of the modern era.

It has also provided the single most effective and enduring justification for the suppression of rights. Why that is so — why security has furnished what appears to be the strongest reason for eliminating or otherwise limiting rights — is the question I’d like to address here.

At first glance, this may seem like a question that answers itself. When people are afraid for their lives, they will do anything to protect themselves and their families. And when the safety of the nation or the state is threatened, it too will do whatever it takes to defend itself. Limiting the rights of its citizens is the least of it.

That is the theory, at any rate, and it is commonly associated with Thomas Hobbes, whose name is often invoked as the guiding intelligence of our times. But if we look closely at what Hobbes said we find a more interesting and revealing argument about how fear works to abridge rights and limit freedom.

Contrary to popular understanding and scholarly accounts, Hobbes does not argue that the state of nature is a condition where people are naturally driven by their instinct for self-preservation to submit to an all-powerful sovereign. What he does argue is that the state of nature is a condition where people cannot agree upon the basics of morality — about what is just and unjust, good and evil, and so on — and that this disagreement about morality is a leading source of conflict.

The one thing — the only thing — people can agree upon is that each person has the right to preserve his own life and to do whatever he believes is necessary to preserve it. No one, whatever his beliefs, can condemn another person for fearing for his life and trying to preserve it. Acts of self-preservation are blameless and thus are acts we have a right to do.

But as soon as we acknowledge this right, we confront a problem: not only do we have the right to preserve ourselves, but we also have the right to do whatever we think is necessary to preserve ourselves. In the state of nature, each individual is the judge of his own situation, the judge of whether or not he is in danger and of what he must do to protect himself from danger. “Every man by right of nature,” Hobbes writes in Elements of Law, “is judge himself of the means, and of the greatness of the danger.”

But when each of us is the judge of whether we are in danger and of we must do to protect ourselves, we inevitably find ourselves, for reasons unnecessary to explore here, in a state of war. What seemed initially to offer the basis for agreement and the resolution of conflict — the right of each person to seek his own preservation — turns out in the state of nature to generate more conflict, more instability, and less self-preservation.

Though this is by no means what Hobbes had in mind, think of the public controversy in this country over “Stand Your Ground” laws in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case. Though these laws presume to draw upon an intuitive appeal to the notion of self-defense, that notion, in practice, can rest upon a highly specific, and by no means universally shared, understanding of a threat: for some, an unarmed black teenager in a hoodie is a self-evident danger; for others, he’s an unarmed black teenager in a hoodie. Whatever side one takes in that controversy, the mere fact that it is a controversy suggests — with Hobbes — that the right of each people to seek his own preservation does not settle a conflict; it is the source of conflict.

The only solution to this problem, Hobbes concludes, is to create an all-powerful sovereign to whom we cede this basic right — not the right to defend ourselves from certain and immediate danger (a right no one can rationally cede) but the right to be the judge of what might threaten us and of what actions we will take to protect ourselves from what might threaten us. When we submit to sovereign power, Hobbes says in Elements of Law, we are forbidden “to be our own judges” of our security, for the sovereign, Hobbes adds in Leviathan, is he “to whom in all doubtfull cases, wee have submitted our private judgments.”

Returning to the language of fear, we can say that in the state of nature, the fear of death or bodily destruction entitles us to do anything we think might protect us from real or sincerely perceived dangers (as the defenders of George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin, essentially claim). Under the sovereign, however, that fear does not so entitle us — unless, again, we, as individuals, are immediately and incontrovertibly threatened. Once we agree to submit to the sovereign, he becomes the decider of our fears: he determines whether or not we have reason to be afraid, and he determines what must be done to protect us from the objects of our fear.

Hobbes’s argument has three implications that are relevant to contemporary politics. The first is that it is not necessarily a widespread fear of foreign or domestic threats — real or imagined — that compels the state to abridge civil liberties. When the government takes measures for the sake of security, it is not simply translating the people’s fear of danger into a repressive act of state. Instead, the government makes a choice: to focus on some threats and not others, and to take certain actions (but not others) to counter those threats. Merely think of the attention — and money, staff, countermeasures, and air time — the US government has lavished upon terrorism as opposed to automobile accidents or climate change, even in the wake of Katrina, Sandy, and a host of other life-threatening weather events.

Even though this power to define the objects of public fear suggests that danger or harm is whatever the state says it is, Hobbes did believe that there were real dangers that threatened a people. The sovereign had every reason to make the proper determination of what truly threatened the people and to act only upon those determinations. The sovereign’s interest in his own security dovetailed with the people’s interest in theirs. So long as the people were, or at least felt, secure, they would obey the sovereign; so long as they obeyed the sovereign, he would be secure.

Hobbes also assumed that the sovereign would be so removed from powerful constituencies in society — in his time, the church and the aristocracy — that the sovereign would be able to act on behalf of an impartial, disinterested, and neutral calculation of what truly threatened the people as a whole and of what measures would protect them. Because the sovereign’s power depended upon getting these calculations right, he had every incentive not to get them wrong.

The reality of modern state power, however, is that we have inherited some of the worst aspects of Hobbesian politics with none of its saving graces. Governments today have a great deal of freedom to define what threatens a people and how they will respond to those threats. But far from being removed from the interests of and ideologies of the powerful, they are often constrained, even defined and constituted, by those interests and ideologies.

To cite just one example: it is a well known fact that African Americans have suffered as much from the American state’s unwillingness to protect them from basic threats to their lives and liberties as they have from the willingness of white Americans to threaten those lives and liberties. Throughout much of US history, as legal scholar Randall Kennedy has shown, the state has deemed the threat to the physical safety of African Americans to be an unremarkable danger and the protection of African Americans an unworthy focus of its attentions.

In the Hobbesian account, this constitutes a grievous failure; in America, it has been a semi-permanent boundary of state action. At the most fateful moment of white-on-black violence in US history, in fact, the national government deemed the threat to African Americans a relatively minor item of public safety, unworthy of federal military protection; by contrast, it deemed the threat to employers from striking workers an public emergency, worthy of federal military protection.

Or consider the US government response to the threat of terrorism. According to the two official commissions appointed to examine what led to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, one of the major reasons US intelligence agencies did not anticipate 9/11 was that turf wars and government infighting prevented them from sharing information. The “obstacles to information sharing were more bureaucratic than legal,” write David Cole and James Dempsey in Terrorism and the Constitution, and had little to do “with the constitutional principles of due process, accountability, or checks and balances.”

But while the government has run roughshod over constitutional principles since 9/11, it has been slow to remove these bureaucratic obstacles. Even the Department of Homeland Security, which was supposed to unite competing agencies under one aegis, “is bogged down by bureaucracy” and a “lack of strategic planning,” according to a 2006 wire report.

Thus, it is not just threats to the well being of citizens — or even the citizenry’s fears of those threats — that compel governments to take action against those threats and certainly not the rights-abridging actions government officials so often do take. It is threats that the government deems worthy of public attention that will be acted upon. Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu gave us a sense of this when, in the course of condemning the Bush Administration’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina, she said, “I often think we would have been better off if the terrorists had blown up our levees. Maybe we’d have gotten more attention.” In acting upon threats, government officials will be inspired by a range of considerations — ideological, political, economic, and so on — that have much less to do with the threats themselves than with the specific constituencies and interests for which the government speaks.

The problem is not that we live in a world of Hobbesian states; it is that we live in a world of failed Hobbesian states.

The second implication of the Hobbesian argument is that if security is the foundation of political legitimacy, people will only believe themselves obliged to obey if they think that their security is imperiled or potentially at risk. Once people stop worrying about their security, they may forget the reasons why they should obey. “The end of obedience is protection,” Hobbes writes in Leviathan, but if people don’t feel themselves in need of protection, they won’t sense the need for obedience.

That is why, late in life, Hobbes decided to write an account of the English Civil War. It had been nearly three decades since the conclusion of the war, but Hobbes thought it critical to record and recall its evils, he explained in Behemoth,there being “nothing more instructive towards loyalty and justice than…the memory, while it lasts, of that war.”

Relying upon a simple fear of danger to underwrite obedience, in other words, is not enough. Dangers can slip from view, and when they do, obligation is thrown into question. Hobbes was quite attuned to this problem, and hoped that it could be solved by the sovereign supplying the people with “prospective glasses” by which they could “see a farre off the miseries that hang over” them but which they did not immediately perceive.

But how does a state make a particular danger or disaster that lies far off appear up close? How does it turn hypothetical dangers into immediate threats? By developing an intellectual apparatus that dispenses with the ordinary requirements of evidence and proof, by articulating a set of arguments, and pithy slogans, that enables the state to take extraordinary measures against postulated perils: fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here; the Domino Theory; MAD and other theories of nuclear deterrence.

It was Cardinal Richelieu, of all people, who declared, “In normal affairs, the administration of justice requires authentic proofs; but it is not the same in affairs of state….There urgent conjecture must sometimes take the place of proof; the loss of the particular is not comparable with the salvation of the state.” The more severe the threat, the less proof we require that it is real in order to take action against it; the less severe the threat, the more proof we require of its reality in order to take action against it. If we underestimate serious threats, the consequences will be great — so great, suggests Richelieu, that we may have no choice but to overestimate them.

In 1950, Learned Hand invoked a similar rule in his decision in United States v. Dennis: in or order to decide whether or not to suppress the rights of the leadership of the Communist Party, Hand wrote, government officials must first weigh “the gravity of the ‘evil’” — and then make sure that that gravity is “discounted by its improbability.” The graver the evil they (or any other threat) pose, the higher degree of improbability we demand in order not to worry about it. Or, to put it another way, if an evil is truly terrible but not very likely to occur, we may still take preemptive action against it.

As I have argued in the London Review of Books and elsewhere, the run-up to the second Iraq war — and the statements of Bush and Richard Perle in particular — shows that these are not ancient or academic formulations. And the support many liberal Democrats gave to the arguments of the Bush administration demonstrates that this is by no means an exclusively conservative phenomenon.

The language of security, and the discourse of imminence, is a bipartisan idiom, providing the state with the means to exaggerate threats, and to take preemptive action, including the abridgment of vital rights, to avert those threats.

It is not the people’s simple, unmediated fear of danger — or their conservative leaders’ interpretation of that danger — that compels this exaggeration and the turn away from evidence and proof. It is a highly elaborated political argument, which is based on the principle, in the words of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, that it is “better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too confident a security.”

The third and final implication of Hobbes’s argument is that the sovereign can be the judge of our fears and of how we are to respond to those fears only if it possesses a unity of will and judgment. If the sovereign is to be the decider, it must be able to decide; if it is to decide, it must come to a determinative judgment and a single, unified will. There can be no division or conflict; the sovereign must think and act as one.

As much as people try to resist this authoritarian dimension of Hobbes’s argument, many politicians and scholars, across the political spectrum, accept some version of it. It’s often said that a people hoping to protect themselves from fundamental threats must agree that they are in fact threatened and agree as to how they will meet that threat. According to liberal scholar and former Obama administration official Cass Sunstein, citizens must “have a degree of solidarity and…believe that everyone is involved in a common endeavor” in order to convince “the enemy that it faces a unified adversary.”

Throughout the first five years of the second Iraq War, to cite another example, Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman argued that any disagreement — not only about whether the war should be fought but also about how it should be fought — emboldens the enemy and should be avoided. In 2005 he declared, “It’s time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years and that in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.”

Invoking the language of treason, Lieberman wondered aloud during a congressional hearing whether a non-binding Senate resolution opposing Bush’s proposed escalation of American troops in Iraq “would give the enemy some comfort.” On Fox News Sunday, Lieberman declared again that the resolution would “encourage the enemy” and that “war is a test of wills, and you don’t want your enemy to be given any hope.”

When it comes to matters of security, then, we are good Hobbesians, at least rhetorically. I say “at least rhetorically” because the fact remains that all states, even the most authoritarian, suffer from a fundamental lack of unity regarding their assessments of danger and of how to respond to danger; they also lack sufficient coercive power to enforce those assessments.

Many states, particularly liberal democracies, are divided at the center — with different elements of their war-making powers parceled out to a legislature and an executive, and sometimes even a judiciary — and federalist states are divided between the center and the periphery. It is not likely that such states will reach a consensus about what threatens them, and even if they do, it’s not likely that the state’s various and often fractious officials will agree on how to respond to threats.

Even regimes that come closest to the storied vision of unified state power — Hitler’s Germany, say, or Stalin’s Russia — seldom exhibit that unity. Think only of the bitter arguments that divided the SS from other sectors of the Nazi regime about whether Germany’s interests during World War II were better served by using the Jews as slave labor or by exterminating them.

Nor do fundamental threats to the survival or integrity of the state necessarily furnish that unity. Consider the War of 1812, when British troops threatened the American state with the greatest challenge to its existential survival it had ever faced — and arguably would ever face — from abroad. As of September 1814, the British had taken control of Washington, DC, burned the Capitol and the White House to the ground, and sent the federal government into exile. They also had massed a terrifying army on Lake Champlain, blocked ports up and down the North Atlantic seaboard, seized a good chunk of Maine, and seemed ready for an invasion of Boston. Desertions from the army were spreading, and many states were left to defend themselves.

At that very moment, leading citizens in New England, who had opposed the war, proposed to meet in Hartford, Connecticut, to discuss measures the region might take to extricate itself from the war. That fall, antiwar candidates were elected to Congress; secession was favored by at least half of the population of Massachusetts; and influential citizens and newspapers throughout New England argued for non-payment of federal taxes, declarations of regional neutrality, and refusals to cooperate with any federal conscription bill should one be passed. The governor of Massachusetts even sent an emissary to the British to secretly negotiate a separate peace, in which the British would promise to help the New Englanders defend themselves against any federal effort to suppress the rebellion.

Even when there is agreement that the nation is threatened and that it must resist rather than surrender to the threat, there will still be disagreement about how best to defend the nation, and these disagreements can be as divisive and threatening as disagreements about whether the nation is threatened or should resist. As John C. Calhoun wrote of the divisive effects of war, which he ascribed to struggles over the distribution of material resources that accompanies any national mobilization: “The whole united must necessarily place under the control of government an amount of honors and emoluments, sufficient to excite profoundly the ambition of the aspiring and the cupidity of the avaricious; and to lead to the formation of hostile parties, and violent party conflicts and struggles to obtain the control of the government.”

America’s involvement in the First World War offers an instructive example of just how divisive these disagreements about means rather than ends can be. Just after the United States entered the war in April 1917, an official from the War Department testified before Congress about what the military would need to fight the war. When he announced, almost as an afterthought, that “we may have to have an army in France,” the chair of the Senate Finance Committee declared, “Good Lord! You’re not going to send soldiers over there, are you?” Many in Congress and the public had believed that America’s participation in the war would require little more than sending arms to Europe. But what began as an almost charming display of naiveté rapidly became the subject of bitter dispute.

When President Wilson finally proposed a draft, the Speaker of the House declared that “there is precious little difference between a conscript and a convict.” Though the conscription bill eventually passed, opposition to military service remained widespread. Roughly three million men evaded the draft, and as many as sixty percent of the men who registered may have requested exemptions from fighting.

In addition to conscription, Americans argued about the mobilization of public resources. Conflicts within the military were particularly intense. Despite pressure from Wilson and other officials, the army resisted changes to its outmoded procurement systems, making for inefficiencies, redundancies, and obsolescent weaponry. So chaotic were the army’s procedures that its top administrator wound up hoarding twelve thousand typewriters in various government basements. “There is going to be the greatest competition for typewriters around here,” he explained, “and I have them all.” Businessmen consistently opposed wartime regulations of the economy, arguing that private initiative and the free market were sufficient to fight and win the war.

Financing the war was also contentious. While progressives persuaded Wilson of the need to tax wealthy interests in order to fund the war, their efforts were thwarted by industrialists and corporations, leading California Senator Hiram Johnson to complain, “Our endeavors to impose heavy war profit taxes have brought into sharp relief the skin-deep dollar patriotism of some of those who have been loudest in declamations on war and in their demands for blood.”

Forced to fall back on war bonds, the Wilson Administration tried to turn the war into a genuine “people’s war.” But the government’s “Liberty Loan” drives met with lethargy and opposition, leading the Treasury Secretary to declare, “A man who can’t lend his government $1.25 per week at the rate of 4 percent interest is not entitled to be an American citizen.” Hoping to overcome this popular resistance, Congress inserted a provision into the 1918 Sedition Act that made it illegal to “say or do anything” with intent to impede the sale of war bonds — though the legislature exempted from prosecution investment advisers who urged their clients not to buy war bonds for “bona fide and not disloyal” reasons, i.e., because war bonds were a bad investment.

On the one hand, then, we have an ideological imperative toward unity and solidarity. On the other hand, the modern state lacks that unity and solidarity. It seldom agrees upon the threats it faces, and even when it does, it can dissolve over arguments about how to meet those threats.

What do these three implications — states have a great deal of freedom to determine what threatens a people and how to respond to those threats, and in making those determinations, they are influenced by the interests and ideologies of their primary constituencies; states have strong incentives and have been given strong justifications for exaggerating threats; and while states aspire, rhetorically, to a unity of will and judgment, they seldom achieve it in practice — tell us about the relationship between security and freedom? What light do they shed on the question of why security is such a potent argument for the suppression of rights and liberties?

Security is an ideal language for suppressing rights because it combines a universality and neutrality in rhetoric with a particularity and partiality in practice. Security is a good that everyone needs, and, we assume, that everyone needs in the same way and to the same degree. It is “the most vital of all interests,” John Stuart Mill wrote, which no one can “possibly do without.” Though Mill was referring here to the security of persons rather than of nations or states, his argument about personal security is often extended to nations and states, which are conceived to be persons writ large.

Unlike other values — say justice or equality — the need for and definition of security is not supposed to be dependent upon our beliefs or other interests and it is not supposed to favor any one set of beliefs or interests. It is the necessary condition for the pursuit of any belief or interest, regardless of who holds that belief or has that interest. It is a good, as I’ve said, that is universal and neutral. That’s the theory.

The reality, as we have seen, is altogether different. The practice of security involves a state that is rife with diverse and competing ideologies and interests, and these ideologies and interests fundamentally help determine whether threats become a focus of attention, and how they are perceived and mobilized against. The provision of security requires resources, which are not limitless. They must be distributed according to some calculus, which, like the distribution calculus of any other resource (say income or education), will reflect controversial and contested assumption about justice and will be the subject of debate. National security is as political as Social Security, and just as we argue about the latter, so do we argue about the former.

Even when it comes to the existential survival of the state, diverse constituencies will respond to that threat in diverse ways, depending upon their proximity to physical danger, their identification with the state, the level of sacrifice that might be expected of them, and so on. And while we might think that a threat to the existential survival of a people — say, from a genocidal regime — would provide an instance of a neutral, universal definition of security around which a people could unify, such threats seldom inspire that unity of will and judgment. Instead, genocidal threats can prompt a return to the Hobbesian state of nature, wherein individuals and families act upon their own definitions of danger and take whatever actions they deem necessary to secure their own survival.

Because the rhetoric of security is one of universality and neutrality while the reality is one of conflict and division, state officials and elites have every motivation, and justification, to suppress heterodox and dissenting definitions of security. And so they have, as Hobbes predicted they could and would. But because a neutral, universal definition of security is impossible to achieve in practice, repression for the sake of security must be necessarily selective: only certain groups or certain kinds of dissent will be targeted. The question then becomes: which groups, which dissent?

Because government officials are themselves connected with particular constituencies in society — often the most powerful — they will seldom suppress challenges to security that come from the powerful; instead they will target the powerless and the marginal, particularly if the powerless are mobilizing to threaten the powerful. So the US government during WWI made it illegal to urge people, like the Socialists, not to buy war bonds — but it did allow a Wall Street adviser to counsel his client not to make a bad investment.

Or, when Congress passed the Sedition Act in 1918, which made it illegal to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the United States government or the military or to bring these institutions “into contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute,” the Republicans attempted to insert an amendment that would have protected themselves and their constituencies, who were aggressively criticizing Woodrow Wilson and the Democratic leadership of the US government. “Nothing in this act shall be construed,” the amendment read, “as limiting the liberty or impairing the right of an individual to publish or speak what is true, with good motives and for justifiable ends.” Suppressing dissident socialists or activists against the draft was fine; suppressing dissenting Republicans was not.

But there is a second reason why security has proven the most potent justification for the suppression of rights. And that has to do with the liberal tradition, which historically has offered the greatest theoretical resource for opposition to the suppression of rights. While liberalism as a theory has given us excellent reasons to oppose the use of coercive state power on behalf of religious or moral orthodoxy, it has given us far fewer reasons to oppose the use of that power on behalf of security. In fact, if we look at three touchstones of liberal discourse — Locke, Mill, and Oliver Wendell Holmes — we find that each of them actually provides excellent justifications for the use of coercive and repressive state power in the name of security.

Each of these writers tried, in his way, to prevent the state from using its coercive power on behalf of some controversial question of ideology or belief: for Locke, it was religion; for Mill, it was morality; for Holmes, it was politics. And each of them formulated a test or condition for when the use of such power was legitimate: for Locke, it was to protect “the security and safety of the commonwealth”; for Mill, it was to prevent harm; for Holmes, it was to thwart a “clear and present danger.”

The assumption behind the proscription against using coercive power in the first set of cases — religion, morality, and politics — and the endorsement of it in the second set of cases — the security and safety of the commonwealth, harm, or a clear and present danger — was not only that the first set was a source of controversy and division while the second set was not. It was that the first was by its very nature a source of controversy while the second was by its very nature a source of unity. Unlike religion, morality, and politics, in other words, security offered the basis for an uncontroversial exercise of coercive state power.

As we have seen, this assumption has not been borne out by reality. But that failure has not stopped liberals from arguing, as the saying goes, that politics stops at the water’s edge. And so when they have tried to chastise conservatives for using security for political ends (even though they do the same thing themselves), they have often found themselves, particularly since the Reagan years, hopelessly outgunned. Having endorsed — indeed, invented — the idea that security is not, properly speaking, a subject of and for the political arena, liberals cannot possibly hope to beat their opponents at a game which their chief theoreticians claim does not even exist.

Malaysian state's Sultan bars non Muslims from using the word 'Allah'

Kuala Lumpur: Non Muslims in Malaysia's Selangor state have been barred from using the word "Allah" as it is a sacred word exclusive to Muslims. "The Sultan (Sharafuddin Idris Shah) made a decision and decreed that the word Allah is a sacred word specific to Muslims and it is prohibited to be used by any non-Muslim in Selangor, as stated in a 'fatwa' and gazetted on February 18, 2010," a statement from Selangor Islamic Affairs Council Secretary Mohd Misri Idris said on Tuesday.

The Sultan had stated that stern action could be taken against anyone who questioned the 'fatwa' that was issued according to state laws, he said. The Sultan had expressed shock and regret over opposition DAP party's secretary general Lim Guan Eng's recent remarks urging the Malaysian Government to allow the word "Allah" to be used in the Malay version of the Bible, Mohd Misri Idris said. Lim, who is the Penang state Chief Minister, had made the remarks in his New Year message.

Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said that Sultan Sharafuddin had every right, as head of the State's Islamic affairs, to issue the decree.

Texas Schools Are Forcing Kids To Wear RFID Chips. Is That a Privacy Invasion?

By Will Oremus

Two San Antonio schools have joined others in Houston and Austin in requiring students to wear cards with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips embedded in them, allowing administrators to track their whereabouts on campus.

The scheme, reported last month by Wired's Threat Level blog, is drawing fresh attention now that the school year has begun. Most students and parents have acquiesced to the tracking, accepting the schools' explanation that it will make students safer and help administrators more accurately report attendance. Since many public schools are funded in part based on their average daily attendance, the RFID trackers can bring in thousands or even millions more for a large district by allowing them to count students who are on campus but not at the morning roll call. The tags can only be read from on campus, so students aren't being tracked outside the building.

Still, a couple of students and parents have raised a fuss. Among them is a father named Steven Hernandez, who objects to the devices on Biblical grounds. He compares the RFID cards to the "mark of the beast" in the Book of Revelation, and his daughter has reportedly refused to wear them, despite the school's offer to remove the chip from her card. Some outlets report that she has been banned from voting for Homecoming king and queen as punishment, but that's not quite it. Pascual Gonzalez, communications director for the Northside Independent School District, told me that all students are required to present their ID in order to do various things on campus, including vote in student elections. The student in question declined to present hers.

Still, the homecoming anecdote as served its purpose for opponents of the chips, who have so far been dismayed by the general lack of outrage over the schemes. Right-wing sites like Glenn Beck's The Blaze and World Net Daily are now running with the story, joining privacy groups on the left such as the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (Funny, I haven't seen the same outrage from the right about voter-ID laws for national elections.) The ACLU and EFF, among other liberal groups, have endorsed a position paper by a campaign called Chip Free Schools, which argues that RFID tracking of students carries "profound societal implications." Among the concerns raised in its position paper:

• Dehumanizing uses. While there is an expectation of supervision and guidance in schools, monitoring the detailed behaviors of individuals can be demeaning. For example, RFID reading devices in school restrooms could monitor how long a student or teacher spends in a bathroom stall.
• Violation of free speech and association. ... For example, students might avoid seeking counsel when they know their RFID tags will document their presence at locations like counselor and School Resource Officer (SRO) offices.
• Conditioning to tracking and monitoring. Young people learn about the world and prepare for their futures while in school. Tracking and monitoring them in their development may condition them to accept constant monitoring and tracking of their whereabouts and behaviors. This could usher in a society that accepts this kind of treatment as routine rather than an encroachment of privacy and civil liberties.

The first two issues, and several of the others that privacy advocates have broached, amount to concerns that schools will abuse the information provided by the RFID tags. That's possible, of course, but it's going to be difficult to convince school administrators of that, since it amounts to saying that they and their personnel aren't trustworthy.
The third concern, though, is interesting. The argument, in essence, is that the more privacy we're forced to give up, the more we're willing to give up. Is it true? Well, check out this snippet from a (generally quite positive) San Antonio Express-News story about the RFID program:

Northside's decision generated alarm among national conservative media outlets, criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union and a protest outside the middle school on the first day of classes in August.

But after a few weeks of carrying and using the ID cards, students at Jones shrug when asked about the uproar. Some have decorated their badges with stickers or dangle them from Hello Kitty lanyards.

Gonzalez, the school district's communications director, maintains that students have never had an expectation of privacy on campus. "By virtue of the fact that you are a student at a school, there is no privacy. ... It is our responsibility to know where every single one of those 3,000 students are while they are in our care during the school day."

He has a point. A lot of things that would be rights violations if imposed on the population at large are perfectly acceptable in school settings. That said, it's understandable that privacy groups are wary of policies that acculturate students to electronic surveillance. Considering that just two out of 4,200 students at the two schools involved in the San Antonio district's RFID pilot program have complained, though, that ship may have sailed long ago.