New York City Erases Bike Lanes to Appease Hasidic Men Who Object to Seeing Women in Bike Shorts
By JEREMY OLSHAN and JAMIE SCHRAM
New York Post
December 8, 2009
Groups of bicycle-riding vigilantes have been repainting 14 blocks of Williamsburg roadways ever since the city sandblasted their bike lanes away last week at the request of the Hasidic community.
The Hasids, who have long had a huge enclave in the now-artist-haven neighborhood, had complained that the Bedford Avenue bike paths posed both a safety and religious hazard.
Scantily clad hipster cyclists attracted to the Brooklyn neighborhood made it difficult, the Hasids said, to obey religious laws forbidding them from staring at members of the opposite sex in various states of undress. These riders also were disobeying the traffic laws, they complained.
Brian Branch Price
Two cycling advocates were apprehended by the Shomrim Patrol, a Hasidic neighborhood watch group, as they repainted a section of bike lane at 3:30 a.m. yesterday, but when cops arrived, no one was arrested and no summonses were issued, police said.
“These people should apply for a job at the DOT,” neighborhood activist Isaac Abraham said of the repainting. “You put it on, they take it off — and they will probably do this again.”
A Department of Transportation spokesman said: “We will continue to work with any community on ways we can make changes to our streets without compromising safety.”
A source close to Mayor Bloomberg said removing the lanes was an effort to appease the Hasidic community just before last month’s election.
Abraham contends the bike lanes put children at risk of getting hit by cars or bicycles as they exited school buses.
But Baruch Herzfeld, who has tried to bridge the gap between hipsters and Hasids with a bike-rental program, said safety is not the issue so much as xenophobia.
“They don’t want the hipsters in their neighborhood,” he said. “It’s like in Howard Beach back in the day when they didn’t want black people in the neighborhood.”
The cycling advocacy group Transportation Alternatives has not taken sides in the dispute.
But bike lane or not, “cyclists have a right to be on Bedford Avenue,” said Wiley Norvell, a group spokesman.
Additional reporting by Maggie
President Obama ‘creating torture impunity’
Press TV– December 11, 2009 06:20:21 GMT
A US civil rights group says that President Barack Obama by creating impunity is following his predecessor into allowing torture policies to continue in the country.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said on Thursday that the US president has failed to provide accountability on torture.
Director of ACLU’s National Security Project Jameel Jaffer said “the Bush administration constructed a legal framework for torture and now the Obama administration is constructing a legal framework for impunity.”
“We’re frustrated by the growing gap between (the) Obama administration’s rhetoric on accountability and the reality,” Jaffer added.
In April, Obama said that CIA interrogators who had used waterboarding on suspected militants would not face prosecution. He also released Bush-era memos specifying that the practice did not constitute torture.
Republicans, however, criticized Obama for leaving the door open for the prosecution of former Bush officials who authorized harsh CIA interrogations due to releasing the memos.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were among those accused of masterminding the Bush-era torture policy.
Jaffer noted that “on every front, the administration is actively obstructing accountability by shielding Bush officials from civil liability, criminal investigation and even public scrutiny for their role in authorizing torture.”
“It’s the last month of 2009, and not a single torture victim has had his day in court,” ACLU Attorney Ben Wizner said. “Not a single court in a torture case has ruled on the legality of the Bush administration’s torture policies.”
Israel seizes Bil’in anti-wall protest leader
File Photo – Maan Images
10/12/2009 21:49
Bethlehem – Ma’an – Israeli forces seized Abdullah Abu Rahmah, a member of the Popular Committee against the Wall ofthe village of Bil’in early on Thursday, according to Palestinian Authority police.
PA police said Abu Rahmah was seized from a house in the At-Tira neighborhood in Ramallah.
Iyad Burnat, the head of Bil’in’s Popular Committee confirmed that the arrest took place at around 2:30am. He said Abu Rahmah was likely taken to the military prison in the settlement of Ofer, on the outskirts of Ramallah.
Abu Rahmah is a high school teacher in the Latin Patriarchate school in Birzeit near Ramallah.
Last Thursday Palestinians in the village said the Israeli military seized Rani Najar, 23, from his house at 2am.
The villagers say the nighttime raids are an attempt to quash Bil’in’s weekly nonviolent demonstrations against the wall Israel is building across the town. Thirty-one people have been arrested from the village since June; 16 remain in prison.
“My client’s arrest is another blatant illustration of the Israeli authorities’ application of legal procedures for the political persecution of Bil’in residents,” said attorney Gaby Lasky, who represents many of the Bil’in detainees in a statement.
“The Bil’in demonstrators are being systemically targeted while it is the State [of Israel] that is in contempt of a High Court of Justice ruling; a ruling which affirmed that the protesters have justice on their side and instructed 2 years ago that the route of the Wall in the area be changed, which has not been implemented to date,” she added.
Three teenage boys were also detained by Israeli soldiers at the Huwwara checkpoint south of the city of Nablus on Wednesday night, the police said. The detainees were identified as Ayman Nehad Shaker Masheh, 16, Mussa Yousif Abu Abieh, 16, and Amir Abed Fawzi Sawalma, 16. The three are from Balata Refugee Camp in Nablus.
The Israeli military said it detained five “wanted” Palestinians in the West Bank overnight.
The military said a pistol and a homemade explosive device were found in the home of one of the people its forces detained, south of the city of Ramallah.
According to a report from the Palestinian Monitoring Group of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Israeli forces arrested 205 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in November alone.
The military carried out 677 raids the same month, the report said.
Obama wants suit against Yoo dismissed
By Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle
December 8, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO — The Obama administration has asked an appeals court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing former Bush administration attorney John Yoo of authorizing the torture of a terrorism suspect, saying federal law does not allow damage claims against lawyers who advise the president on national security issues.
Such lawsuits ask courts to second-guess presidential decisions and pose “the risk of deterring full and frank advice regarding the military’s detention and treatment of those determined to be enemies during an armed conflict,” Justice Department lawyers said Thursday in arguments to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
Other sanctions are available for government lawyers who commit misconduct, the department said. It noted that its Office of Professional Responsibility has been investigating Yoo’s advice to former President George W. Bush since 2004 and has the power to recommend professional discipline or even criminal prosecution.
The office has not made its conclusions public. However, The Chronicle and other media reported in May that the office will recommend that Yoo be referred to the bar association for possible discipline, but that he not be prosecuted.
Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor, worked for the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003. He was the author of a 2002 memo that said rough treatment of captives amounts to torture only if it causes the same level of pain as “organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.” The memo also said the president may have the power to authorize torture of enemy combatants.
In the current lawsuit, Jose Padilla, now serving a 17-year sentence for conspiring to aid Islamic extremist groups, accuses Yoo of devising legal theories that justified what he claims was his illegal detention and abusive interrogation.
The Justice Department represented Yoo until June, when a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the suit could proceed. The department then bowed out, citing unspecified conflicts, and was replaced by a government-paid private lawyer.
Yoo’s new attorney, Miguel Estrada, argued for dismissal in a filing last month, saying the case interfered with presidential war-making authority and threatened to “open the floodgates to politically motivated lawsuits” against government officials. The Justice Department’s filing Thursday endorsed the request for dismissal but offered narrower arguments, noting its continuing investigation of Yoo.
Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was arrested in Chicago in 2002 and accused of plotting with al Qaeda to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb.” He was held for three years and eight months in a Navy brig, where, according to his suit, he was subjected to sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation and stress positions, kept for lengthy periods in darkness and blinding light, and threatened with death to himself and his family.
He was then removed from the brig, charged with and convicted of taking part in an unrelated conspiracy to provide money and supplies to extremist groups.
Padilla’s suit says Yoo approved his detention in the brig and provided the legal cover for his allegedly abusive treatment. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White refused to dismiss the case in June.
The Justice Department’s filing Thursday said Padilla is asking the courts to determine the legality of Yoo’s advice, Bush’s decision to detain Padilla, the conditions of his confinement and the methods of his interrogation – all “matters of war and national security” that are beyond judicial authority.
E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.
Google chief: Only miscreants worry about net privacy
‘If you don’t want anyone to know, don’t do it’
By Cade Metz in San Francisco • 7th December 2009 19:56 GMT
If you’re concerned about Google retaining your personal data, then you must be doing something you shouldn’t be doing. At least that’s the word from Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Schmidt tells CNBC, sparking howls of incredulity from the likes of Gawker.
But the bigger news may be that Schmidt has actually admitted there are cases where the search giant is forced to release your personal data.
“If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines – including Google – do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”
There’s also the possibility of subpoenas. And hacks. But if any of this bothers you, you should be ashamed of yourself. According to Eric Schmidt.
Gawker highlights the irony of Schmidt’s typically haughty proclamations. After all, this is the man who banned CNet for a year after the news site published information about him it had gleaned from, yes, Google.
But the larger point here is that Schmidt isn’t even addressing the issue at hand. Per usual. When the privacy question appears, Google likes to talk about the people asking the questions. But the problem lies elsewhere: with the millions upon millions blissfully unaware of the questions.
If you’re concerned about your online privacy, you can always put the kibosh on Google’s tracking cookies. You can avoid signing in to Google accounts. And, yes, you can avoid using Google for anything Eric Schmidt thinks you shouldn’t be doing. But most web users don’t even realize Google is hoarding their data.
CNBC asks Schmidt: “People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?” But he answers by scoffing at those who don’t trust Google at all.
Not that you’d expect anything less. As always, Schmidt’s holier-than-thou attitude is wonderfully amusing. Except that it’s not. ®
Israel’s justice minister calls for Jewish law
December 8, 2009
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel’s justice minister reportedly called for basing the country’s judicial system on Torah laws.
“Step by step, we will bestow upon the citizens of Israel the laws of the Torah, and we will turn halachah into the binding law of the nation,” Ya’akov Ne’eman said Tuesday morning at a Jewish law conference in Jerusalem, according to Ha’aretz. “We must bring back the heritage of our fathers to the nation of Israel. The Torah has the complete solution to all of the questions we are dealing with.”
Ne’eman received applause for his comments. Many rabbis and rabbinical judges were at the convention.
In a statement released later Tuesday, the Justice Ministry’s spokesman clarified Ne’eman’s comments.
“The minister clarifies that his address did not contain an appeal to replace the state’s laws with the laws of halacha, neither directly nor indirectly,” the statement said. “The minister spoke in general and broad terms about returning the glory of Hebrew law and the importance of Hebrew law in the state.” … continue
Torture Survivor Abdullah Almalki Refused Entry to Air Canada Flight
Box 73620, 509 St. Clair Ave. West
Toronto, ON M6C 1C0
(416) 651-5800
For immediate release
Abdullah Almalki Refused Entry to Air Canada Flight
Members of Stop Canadian Involvement in Torture Demand Answers for Why Almalki was not Allowed on Domestic Flight
December 7, 2009 – Members of Stop Canadian Involvement in Torture are expressing major concerns about the fact that, after being given a boarding pass for an Ottawa-to-Windsor flight on December 2, Ottawa resident Abdullah Almalki was not allowed onto the domestic Air Canada flight. Almalki, a Canadian citizen who was found to be tortured with the complicity of his own government, was supposed to have been in Windsor the next day to deliver a talk on “two-tier citizenship” as well as the manner in which the Canadian government was complicit his torture in Syria.
“The very day Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in China talking about the need to respect human rights, we have a Canadian citizen, Abdullah Almalki, turned away from a domestic flight that would have taken him to Windsor to talk about human rights,” says campaign spokesperson Matthew Behrens. “What is going on?”
At the last minute, Mr. Almalki, an Ottawa engineer and father of six, was informed he could fly to Toronto but not carry on to Windsor because he was apparently “restricted from travelling in US airspace.” In addition, Mr. Almalki found that his bag, despite being bound for a domestic flight, was opened and searched, but no sticker explaining that invasive intrusion nor indicating who searched his bag was placed on it.
Mr. Almalki, tortured almost a full two years in Syria based on false allegations and questions that came from Canada and, according to the secretive Iacobucci internal inquiry, based on allegations that were “inflammatory, inaccurate, and lacking investigative foundation,” is seeking an apology, accountability, and compensation for the ordeal that he and his family were put through by the Canadian government.
This incident occurred the day before the House of Commons passed a motion calling on the government to respect a series of recommendations from the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security which, among other things, calls on the “Government of Canada do everything necessary to correct misinformation that may exist in records administered by national security agencies in Canada or abroad with respect to Mr. Almalki, Mr. Abou-Elmaati and Mr. Nureddin and members of their families.” (Mssrs. El Maati and Nureddin, both of Toronto, were also tortured both in Syria and, in Mr. El Maati’s case, in Egypt, based on similarly false allegations.)
Asked by members of Stop Canadian Involvement in Torture how he felt about being turned away from the Air Canada flight, Mr. Almalki stated, “We have the O’Connor report more than three years ago, the Iacobucci report more than a a year ago – both of which confirm the Canadian complicity in my interrogation and torture in Syria – and now we have the MPs who represent the majority of the Canadian people in Parliament voting in favour of the government issuing an apology and correcting in Canada and abroad the huge and terrible misinformation that Canadian agencies falsely spread about myself and my family. When will the government act, and how much longer do my family and I have to suffer? Whose decision was it to prevent me from boarding a domestic flight to Windsor? I need answers, Canadians need answers.”
The refusal to allow Mr. Almalki on the Air Canada flight adds insult to the injury already sustained by the family earlier this year when they found out that his wife and oldest son, aged 15, had problems boarding a plane in Vancouver until his wife showed airport officials a copy of the 544-page Iacobucci internal inquiry report.
Stop Canadian Involvement in Torture is an organization that for a number of years has worked with Canadians who have been tortured with the complicity of their own government. In 2008, it organized two cross-Ontario caravans raising awareness of the issue and organizing speaking events featuring Mssrs. Almalki, El Maati and Nureddin.
For more information, or to contact contact Mr. Almalki, please contact Stop Canadian Involvement in Torture at (416) 651-5800 or visit www.abdullahalmalki.com.
Bedouins in Israel denied elections
Jonathan Cook, Foreign Correspondent
- December 07. 2009 12:53AM UAE
Bedouins have to live in makeshift housing without electricity or water because the Israeli authorities do not officially recognise their communities in the Negrev desert. Ariel Schalit / AP
NAZARETH, ISRAEL // About 35,000 Bedouin residents of Israel’s southern Negev have been denied the right to hold their first local council election after the Israeli parliament passed a law at the last minute to cancel this month’s ballot.
The new law gives the government the power to postpone elections to the regional council, known as Abu Basma, until the interior ministry deems the local Bedouin ready to run their own affairs.
Legal and human rights groups say the move is an unprecedented violation of Israel’s constitutional principles. Taleb a-Sana, a Bedouin member of Israel’s parliament, has written to its speaker warning that “it is not possible to have democracy without elections”.
The vote in Abu Basma was scheduled to take place six years after the council was established under the transitional authority of a panel of mostly Jewish officials appointed by the interior ministry.
Critics say the government changed the law specifically to avoid bolstering the position of the Bedouin residents, who are engaged in a legal battle with the state for the return of ancestral lands confiscated decades ago.
“The Bedouin have a claim on a large area of the Negev and the government wants someone ruling the council who is on its side until the case is settled to the state’s advantage,” said Thabet Abu Ras, who was head of an empowerment scheme for Abu Basma’s residents until 2007.
The residents of Abu Basma are among 90,000 Bedouin in the Negev desert who have been denied any local representation since Israel’s founding in 1948. For most of that time the state has refused to recognise any of their villages.
According to officials, the Bedouin are living illegally on state land and must move to a handful of locations in the Negev approved by the government.
Bedouin leaders counter that their villages predate Israel’s creation and that the approved locales are so tightly confined that they cannot maintain their traditional pastoral way of life.
Israel has faced mounting criticism for its treatment of the 45 so-called “unrecognised villages”, which are denied all public services, including electricity and water. The inhabitants are invariably forced to live in tents or tin shacks because concrete homes are subject to demolition.
Instead, since the 1970s Israel has established a half dozen “townships”, to which the Bedouin in the unrecognised villages were expected to relocate. But the townships, whose rates of unemployment and poverty are the highest in the country, have attracted only half of the Negev’s 180,000 Bedouin, mostly those without any claim to land.
In what many Bedouin hoped was a change of tack, however, the government of Ariel Sharon launched a plan in 2003 to begin a process of recognising nine of the larger villages, home to 35,000 Bedouin.
They were grouped into a new regional council called Abu Basma, with the goal of encouraging the inhabitants of the other unrecognised villages to move into its jurisdiction.
Under the regional councils law, the interior ministry was allowed to appoint a panel of officials to oversee local services for four years while the residents prepared to run the authority themselves, said Gil Gan-Mor, a lawyer with the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI).
He added that the interior ministry then sought, under extraordinary powers, two year-long extensions. But shortly before the deadline for staging elections was reached this month, the government pushed through an amendment to postpone elections indefinitely.
“The aim is to continue controlling the lives of the Bedouin, treating them as though they cannot look after themselves.”
ACRI and another group, Adalah, a legal centre for Israel’s Arab minority, will challenge the law in the Supreme Court next month.
Alaa Mahajneh, a lawyer with Adalah, said the regional council’s current panel was dominated by Jewish officials and headed by Amram Kalaji, a former director general of the interior ministry identified with the right-wing Orthodox religious party Shas.
Mr Abu Ras, a geography professor at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, said it was impossible to separate the postponement of the elections from the wider issue of Bedouin land claims.
Abu Basma is the only one of 47 regional councils in Israel that does not have territorial continuity, he said. “The council’s jurisdiction is restricted to the built-up area of each village and does not include the lands between the villages or the surrounding land. Despite the Bedouin way of life, Abu Basma has not been allocated any agricultural areas.”
He added that the chief concern of Israeli officials, although unspoken, was that the Abu Basma region was the only territorial buffer between the West Bank and Gaza. “If there is a Palestinian state, Israel does not want the Bedouin controlling lands that connect those two Palestinian territories. It would rather the Bedouin were concentrated in as small a space as possible.”
According to Nili Baruch, an Israeli planner, Abu Basma has been starved of land compared to its Jewish counterparts. Its jurisdiction extends to only 3,400 hectares, making it the most densely populated regional council in the country.
By contrast, the 10 other regional councils in Israel’s south – home to a total of 45,000 Jews – have jurisdiction over a vast swath of rural land, nearly 1.2 million hectares.
Yeela Ranaan, a lecturer at Sapir College in Sderot and spokeswoman for the Regional Council for the Unrecognised Villages, an unofficial Bedouin advocacy group, said the creation of Abu Basma had been a “partial victory”.
Recognition meant those homes of Bedouin living in the centre of the villages were no longer under threat of destruction, roads could be paved, and schools opened, she said. But the planning process in all the villages was stalled and land claims were not being addressed.
The Bedouin’s land dispute with the government is more than 80,000 hectares. Mr Abu Ras said he believed the government hoped to force an evacuation of all the unrecognised villages over the next three years, forcing the inhabitants into the already confined areas available to Abu Basma.
Tal Rabina, a spokesman for Abu Basma council, said the criticism that Bedouin rights had been violated by the law change reflected a “political agenda”.
“At this stage, when there are still many disputes between villages and families, most of the residents prefer that someone outside the community makes decisions. The current leadership brings a great deal of experience and professionalism to the task.”
Yahoo Sells User’s Private Email Contents to U.S. Agencies
Mathaba
December 5, 2009
Yahoo isn’t happy that a detailed menu of the spying services it provides to “law enforcement” and spy agencies has leaked onto the web.
After earlier reports this week that Yahoo had blocked an FOIA Freedom of Information release of its “law enforcement and intelligence price list”, someone helpfully provided a copy of the Yahoo company’s spying guide to the whistleblower web site Cryptome.org.
The 17-page guide, which Yahoo has tried to suppress via legal letters to the Cryptome.org site run by freedom of information champion John Young, describes Yahoo’s policies on keeping the data of Yahoo Email and Yahoo Groups users, as well as the surveillance and spying capabilities it can give to the U.S. government and its agencies.
The Yahoo document is a price list for these spying services and has already resulted in many people closing down their accounts in protest. However, closing a Yahoo account is not as easy as one might expect: users have reported great difficulty in finding the link to delete their account, and, Yahoo will still keep data for another 90 days.
If you ask Yahoo! to delete your Yahoo! account, in most cases your account will be deactivated and then deleted from our user registration database in approximately 90 days. This delay is necessary to discourage users from engaging in fraudulent activity.
Please note that any information that we have copied may remain in back-up storage for some period of time after your deletion request. This may be the case even though no information about your account remains in our active user databases.
Many government leaders and officials around Africa, Asia and Latin America are known by Mathaba to widely be using Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail in spite of these Email services being hosted on U.S. computers and the ease that gives the hosts to access their data.. Mathaba has also long been aware of a great many business people, politicians and even Presidents who use the “free” web-based email services of Yahoo for their Email communications, thus making it easy for the U.S. and its owners to spy on them with negligible cost.
Cryptome also published lawful data-interception guides for Cox Communications, SBC, Cingular, Nextel, GTE and other telecoms and Internet service providers.
But of all those companies, it appears to be Yahoo’s lawyers alone who have been stupid enough to try to issue a “DMCA takedown notice” to Cryptome demanding the document be removed. Yahoo claims that publication of the document is a copyright violation, and gave Cryptome owner John Young a Thursday deadline for removing the document.
We estimate Yahoo stands a near-zero chance of success given that Young has thousands of intelligence and other leaked documents on his site and in the past decade has yet to remove a single document upon legal threats, the same 10-year track record held by Mathaba on documents on British Intelligence in spite of having computers seized and properties raided.
Mathaba is now also hosting the Yahoo leaked document on its servers around the world, and the cat is long out of the bag with the original document having been downloaded and distributed by many already.
When John Young was asked if there was anything he wouldn’t reveal on his site — a fault in the President’s Secret Service detail, for instance — he said, “Well, I’m actually looking for that information right now”, much to the chagrin of those who believe that the U.S. government and its hopelessly corrupt agencies should have a right to suppress information from the public.
The Compliance Guide reveals, as has been known to Mathaba prior to the leak via our own sources, that Yahoo does not retain a copy of e-mails that an account holder sends unless that customer sets up the account to store those e-mails. Yahoo also cannot search for or produce deleted e-mails once they’ve been removed from a user’s trash folder.
The guide also reveals that the company retains the IP addresses from which a user logs in for just one year. But the company’s logs of IP addresses used to register new accounts for the first time go back to 1999. The contents of accounts on Flickr, the photo sharing and storage site which Yahoo also owns, are purged as soon as a user deactivates the account.
Chats conducted through the company’s Web Messenger service may be saved on Yahoo’s server if one of the parties in the correspondence set up their account to archive chats. This pertains to the web-based version of the chat service, however. Yahoo does not save the content of chats for consumers who use the downloadable Web Messenger client on their computer.
Instant message logs are retained 45 to 60 days and includes an account holder’s friends list, and the date and times the user communicated with them.
Young responded to Yahoo’s takedown request with a defiant note:
I cannot find at the Copyright Office a grant of copyright for the Yahoo spying document hosted on Cryptome. To assure readers Yahoo’s copyright claim is valid and not another hoary bluff without substantiation so common under DMCA bombast please send a copy of the copyright grant for publication on Cryptome.
Until Yahoo provides proof of copyright, the document will remain available to the public for it provides information that is in the public interest about Yahoo’s contradictory privacy policy and should remain a topic of public debate on ISP unacknowledged spying complicity with officials for lucrative fees.
Note: Yahoo’s exclamation point is surely trademarked so omitted here.
The company responded that a copyright notice is optional for works created after March 1, 1989 and repeated its demand for removal on Thursday. For now, the document remains on the Cryptome site.
Threat Level reported Tuesday that muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian had asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, to provide him with a copy of the pricing list supplied by telecoms and internet service providers for the surveillance services they offer government agencies. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that the information was proprietary and that the companies would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.
Yahoo wrote in its objection letter that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it “to ’shame’ Yahoo! and other companies — and to ’shock’ their customers.”
“Therefore, release of Yahoo!’s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies,” the company added.
The price list that Yahoo tried to prevent the government from releasing to Soghoian appears in one small paragraph in the 17-page leaked document. According to this list, Yahoo charges the government about $30 to $40 for the contents, including e-mail, of a subscriber’s account. It charges $40 to $80 for the contents of a Yahoo group.
Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other U.S. “social networking” sites are at minimum providing information in similar fashion to U.S. agencies, and in some cases have also received substantial funding by U.S. government related entities as a most efficient and cost-effective means of spying on their users around the world.
— Includes extensive reporting by Wired.com‘s Kim Zetter
Taser trouble
Stun guns are taking a toll
Salt Lake City Tribune Editorial
12/03/2009
The autopsy results are in. But, despite the definitive findings the verdict is still out on the weapon that killed Brian Cardall.
Cardall, a promising research scientist and Utah native, died from “ventricular fibrillation following conducted energy weapon deployment … .” In other words, death by Taser.
Here’s what happened. In June, Cardall, 32, was returning to Arizona after visiting Utah when he experienced a manic episode brought on by his bipolar disorder. He pulled his car to the side of the road, got out, removed his clothes, and began flagging down vehicles on State Road 59 outside Hurricane.
Cardall’s wife gave him medication, called the police, informed the dispatcher of her husband’s psychotic condition and the fact that it would take a while for the medicine to take effect. But Cardall ran out of time.
Just 42 seconds after Hurricane Chief of Police Lynn Excell and officer Ken Thompson arrived at the scene, Thompson claims, a confused Cardall, who refused to get on the ground as ordered, stepped toward the officers. Thompson fired his Taser, striking a naked and unarmed Cardall in the chest over the heart. When the Flagstaff resident attempted to rise, Thompson gave him a second jolt. Within minutes, Cardall was dead, one of about 350 Americans to die after a Taser deployment since 2001.
Had the incident occurred 20 years ago, before Tasers came on the market, Cardall, who weighed just 156 pounds, would have been physically taken to the ground and handcuffed. He may have suffered bumps and bruises, cuts and scrapes. The police officers would have risked same. But nobody would have died.
Cardall’s family says the officer used excessive force, a claim rejected by investigators, who determined that Thompson adhered to both his department’s use-of-force policy and Utah law. No charges were filed. And, because the policy and not the officer was at fault, none was deserved.
Thompson certainly didn’t mean to kill Cardall. In fact, along with officers in 14,200 police, military and corrections agencies in 44 countries, Thompson had been taught that the Taser can prevent physical altercations that cause injury, and negate the need for deadly force. That it saves lives. As a result, Tasers have become the “nonlethal” weapon of choice in law enforcement circles. But that could change.
In the months since Cardall’s death, Taser International, which manufactures the stun guns, lost a wrongful-death lawsuit, a first. A California jury determined that the company failed to adequately educate police about the risk of cardiac arrest from using the weapon.
Plus, the Arizona-based company recanted its long-standing advice to aim at center body mass, and advised police not to shoot suspects in the chest.
And, the American Medical Association determined that Tasers can do more harm than good. In a report issued the same month Cardall died, the AMA said “Tasers are used too frequently … and may contribute to the death of suspects directly or indirectly.” The group said more research is needed to determine if Tasers are safe for use on suspects in altered states, like Cardall.
The next move belongs to police departments, which should change their policies regarding Taser use. Tasers should be used sparingly, a weapon of next-to-last resort, until all of the evidence is in.
Guantanamo writings cost ex-prosecutor his new job
By Peter Finn
Washington Post
Saturday, December 5, 2009
The former chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay has been dismissed from his current position as an assistant director at the Congressional Research Service for penning an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and a letter to The Washington Post that offered strong opinions on the prosecution of detainees held at the military prison in Cuba.
The American Civil Liberties Union wrote Friday to the CRS, a branch of the Library of Congress, demanding that retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis be reinstated. If he is not, it said, the CRS would face a lawsuit charging that Davis’s First Amendment rights were violated.
A spokesman at the CRS, which provides neutral policy and legal analysis to Congress, declined to comment on a “personnel-related matter.” But in a Nov. 20 letter to Davis, the director of CRS, Daniel P. Mulhollan, said Davis had not shown “awareness that your poor judgment could do serious harm to the trust and confidence Congress reposes in CRS.”
The letter, which was released by the ACLU, said Davis would not be kept on after his one-year probationary period at CRS ends Dec. 21. The dismissal was first reported on Newsweek’s Web site.
In the Nov. 10 Journal article, Davis wrote that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s decision to use both federal court and military commissions to try detainees was “a mistake.”
“It will establish a dangerous legal double standard that gives some detainees superior rights and protections, and relegates others to the inferior rights and protections of military commissions,” Davis wrote.
Davis’s opinions about Guantanamo Bay are well known, and he has been a critic of military commissions since he resigned in 2007, alleging that prosecution decisions were corrupted by political interference.
In a letter to The Post that was published Nov. 11, Davis said former attorney general Michael B. Mukasey was engaged in “fear-mongering worthy of former vice president Dick Cheney” when he raised security concerns about bringing detainees into the United States for prosecution.
Davis said he was writing in his personal capacity, and neither the op-ed nor the letter identified him as an employee of the CRS, where he is an assistant director in the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division. Davis also said he had previously spoken at events on Guantanamo with permission and without incident.
“Military commissions are not my area of responsibility,” Davis said. “Library of Congress policy says people are encouraged to write, teach and speak on areas that are outside their official responsibilities. The ultimate irony is we are in the James Madison Building but the First Amendment doesn’t apply for those who work in the building named for the guy who wrote it.”
Shattering “Israel’s” image of ‘democracy’
In the Negev, an area targeted for so-called ‘development’, lies the Israel that its government does not want to be seen
by Ben White, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 December 2009
A struggle over land, home demolitions, and an Israeli government working with Jewish agencies to “develop” the land for the benefit of one group at the expense of another. It could be a picture of the illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, but in fact, it’s inside Israel – in the Negev.
The Negev, or al-Naqab in Arabic, is an area that since the inception of the state has been targeted by Israeli governments, along with agencies like the Jewish National Fund (JNF), for so-called “development”.
This investment in the country’s periphery is characterised by systematic discrimination against the Negev’s Bedouin population, many of whom live in “unrecognised” villages or townships. Recent developments bring these policies into sharper focus, as well as pointing to fundamental problems with Israel’s image as “the Middle East’s only democracy”.
First, three vital clinics serving Bedouin women and children have been shut down, with the result that the nearest equivalent facilities are now hours away. The official reason is a shortage of staff, but this does not sit well with the severity of the health problem among these Bedouin children, where the infant mortality rate is more than three times higher than in the Israeli Jewish community.
Second, in mid-November the Knesset passed an amendment to prevent around 25,000 Bedouins from voting for their mayor and regional councillors. Elections had already been postponed for two years, but now the law means “that as long as the minister of interior deems the residents not ready for elections, the elections will be postponed”.
Finally, six weeks ago, lawyers acting on behalf of the Bedouins who live in the unrecognised village of Umm al-Hieran appealed against a previous court decision ordering the eviction of the community’s residents.
Ironically, this village had been established by the Israeli military in the 1950s as part of a wider-scale forced relocation of Bedouins from territory intended for Jewish settlement. Now they are once again being targeted for removal, labelled “intruders”, to make way for the planned creation of a Jewish town, Hiran.
Meanwhile, there have been reports about a Bedouin “mini-intifada” in the Negev, with Israeli military personnel targeted on the roads near a key base. Such fears are not new: a Haaretz article in 2004 predicted that a “Bedouin intifada” was “on the way” – a conclusion supposedly shared by senior government and military leaders.
What then, is the wider context? As a Human Rights Watch report put it last year, “the state’s motives for these discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive policies can be elicited from policy documents and official rhetoric”. The Israeli state’s aim: “maximising its control over Negev land and increasing the Jewish population in the area for strategic, economic and demographic reasons”. Professor Oren Yifatchel of Ben-Gurion University has put it bluntly: “the government wants to de-Arabise the land”.
This is the common thread that runs through Israel’s approach to the Negev since 1948: from physical expulsions and the legislation used to exclude communities from official recognition, through to budget allocations, creating Bedouin townships, and the flipside of “development” – demolitions.
In 2003, then-PM Ariel Sharon announced a new initiative calling “for the establishment of some 30 new towns” in the Galilee and Negev. One of the PM’s advisers at the time, Uzi Keren, told a radio station that it was important to locate the new towns in “the places that are important to the state, that is, for Jewish settlement”, in order to “strengthen settlement in areas sparse in Jewish population”.
One of the groups helping the state is the Jewish Agency for Israel. A few years ago, the organisation’s foreign media liaison officer was quoted on the JTA news website as describing the goal of the joint venture with the Israeli government as “a Jewish majority in all parts of Israel”.
Another key organisation involved is the Jewish National Fund. Its UK website, for example, talks about how “the future of Israel lies in the Negev” and says the goal of the “major initiative” known as “Blueprint Negev” is to “revitalise Israel’s southern region”.
In January, the chief executive of JNF in the US, Russell Robinson, expressed his concern that “if we don’t get 500,000 people to move to the Negev in the next five years, we’re going to lose it”. To what – or who – went unsaid. In 2005, Robinson was clearer about the consequences of the JNF’s “project to remake” the demographics: “such an influx” of Jews would mean “a certain amount of displacement” for the Bedouin.
Robinson actually tried to present this as helping tackle Bedouin unemployment. With their slick focus on “environmentally friendly” initiatives and helping the disadvantaged Arabs, groups like the JNF do their best to make sure that scenes like this go unnoticed.
This is the Israel that its government and propagandists do not want to be seen, the Israel where non-Jews are a demographic “threat”, and the state works with agencies (often funded by western donors) to “secure” a Jewish majority. It is the reality behind the myth of Israel as the region’s only democracy, and away from the weekly twists and turns of the peace process, such policies shed light on the root problem preventing a resolution of the conflict just as well as, or better than, the number of housing units in Gilo.
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