Many civil libertarians refused to vote for President Barack Obama given his dismal record in the expansion of the security state, surveillance law, and assertions of unchecked executive power. The Administration went into radio silence on such issues during the campaign in an effort to win back liberals (as they did on medical marijuana) only to announce after the election that they would resume the same policies. The Democratic leadership has shown the same duplicity on civil liberties for years — including hiding knowledge of the Bush torture program and surveillance programs as well as blocking any meaningful investigations into those alleged crimes. Now, some Democrats have reportedly put that hypocrisy on public display again. Senator Patrick Leahy introduced the bill which, as originally written, required warrants for the reading of emails and was heralded by Democrats during the campaign as their showing of fealty to privacy and civil liberties. The Justice Department then took the bill and flipped it to serve as a sweeping denial of privacy rights . . . and some Senators are pushing on passage now that the election is over. The bill includes warrantless access to university email systems.
The re-written bill now authorizes warrantless access to Americans’ e-mail for over 22 federal agencies with only a subpoena and no probable cause. State and local agencies will have access to email system, including university emails. Internet providers will have to give notice if they are thinking of informing customers of access given to such agencies. Such notification can be postponed by up to 360 days. While not speaking for his Democratic colleagues, Leahy says that he does not support some of the exceptions. Leahy was once an ally for civil libertarians but is now viewed with great suspicion given his authorship of the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act as well as the Protect IP Act. An article in The New Republic concluded Leahy’s work on the Patriot Act “appears to have made the bill less protective of civil liberties.” He also inserted controversial portions of the Patriot Act. Leahy however insists that he will oppose rollbacks. Yet, the Justice Department has objected to protections in the bill according to reports and some Senators are pushing for the restrictive version of the bill. Leahy’s staff says that he will push a draft closer to the original in committee. [Update: CNET is standing by its story
and says that Leahy only backdown after criticism following its story and that Leahy is abandoning amendments of his own making].
There is no denial of the opposition to the privacy protections by the Administration.
However, the Obama Administration is quoted as objecting that privacy protections would have an “adverse impact” on national security investigations. Democratic members doing the bidding of the Administration will find likely allies in the GOP, including Senator Chuck Grassley who has warned about the dangers of too much privacy.
The control of the security establishment over both White House and Congress appears now completely unchecked and unabashed. After securing reelection, President Obama wasted no time in returning to his prior record of disregarding privacy and civil liberties concerns. Once again, both the media and liberals are muted in any response when the same re-writing of the bill would have produced outcries under the Bush Administration. Of course, Obama can certainly point out that liberals should have had no illusions. On torture, military tribunals, surveillance, undeclared wars, and other issues, Obama made himself painfully clear. His campaign was one of personality over principle and only the personality remains.
[UPDATE: after the CNET story gained national attention, Leahy’s people went into full action in denying that Leahy supports warrantless access to email communications. However, there is still no denial of the quoted Administration officials opposing the privacy protections. Moreover, there is confirmation that a number of versions — including some with these exceptions to the warrant requirement — are being circulated. The bill can be changed in Committee or on the floor. Likewise, if the civil liberties community rallies to oppose warrantless searches, the Administration could seek to kill the bill or gut the provision to leave the status quo.]
Source: CNET
Hi, yup this paragraph is genuinely fastidious and I have learned lot
of things from it about blogging. thanks.
I tend not to leave a response, but after reading through a few of the responses here
Democrats Introduce Privacy Bill Before Election .
. . Obama Administration Reportedly Opposes Privacy Protections After Election
| JONATHAN TURLEY. I actually do have a couple of questions
for you if it’s allright. Could it be only me or do some of these responses appear like they are written by brain dead people? 😛 And, if you are writing at additional social sites, I would like to keep up with you. Could you list of all of all your social networking pages like your linkedin profile, Facebook page or twitter feed?
It’s in fact very difficult in this full of activity life to listen news on TV, so I just use internet for that reason, and take the newest news.
Woah! I’m really loving the template/theme of this blog. It’s simple, yet effective.
A lot of times it’s tough to get that “perfect balance” between usability and appearance. I must say you have done a excellent job with this. Additionally, the blog loads very fast for me on Safari. Outstanding Blog!
Look for an “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the e-mail.
ECPA Amendment Passes, As Senate Judiciary Votes To Require Warrant For Email Snooping
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/29/ecpa-electronic-communications-privacy-act_n_2211889.html
Posted: 11/29/2012 1:10 pm EST Updated: 11/29/2012 1:17 pm EST
Will President Obama Restore the Rule of Law During His Second Term?
Friday, 23 November 2012 10:30
By Stephen Rohde, Truthout | Op-Ed
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/12913-will-president-obama-restore-the-rule-of-law-during-his-second-term
Excerpt:
“According to news reports, President Obama maintains a list of alleged militants to be assassinated. Some are U.S. citizens. None will get to plead his case. The president tells us to trust that this is all perfectly legal and constitutional, even though Congress is not allowed to see any legal justification.
According to Rep. Kucinich, “targeted killing of suspects is becoming institutionalized as a permanent feature of the U.S. counterterrorism strategy, without any oversight, transparency or accountability. Victims of drone strikes – including U.S. citizens — are secretly stripped of their right to due process and are arbitrarily deprived of their life, in violation of international human rights law.”
As the authors of a recent groundbreaking report by Stanford and New York Universities on drones in Pakistan powerfully stated:
“In the United States, the dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the U.S. safer by enabling ‘targeted killing’ of terrorists, with minimal downsides of collateral impacts. This narrative is false.”
Four years into the Obama administration’s vast expansion of the program, members of Congress and the public are still being denied access to internal legal memos, which purportedly serve as the basis of the legal justification for such killings.
“These strikes do not occur in a vacuum,” according to Rep. Kucinich. “They have very real consequences for our long-term national security. In Pakistan, they have fueled significant anti-American sentiment and serve as a powerful recruitment tool for terrorists. According to some estimates, our drone strikes have resulted in the death and injury of thousands of innocent civilians. Despite repeated claims that such drone strikes are vital to ensuring our safety, the number of ‘high-level’ targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low — estimated at just two percent.”
At the Congressional briefing, Rep. Kucinch declared:
The world is now our battlefield. Our credibility as a voice for human rights has been undermined. A dangerous precedent has been set for all nations. We must reject the notion that Congress and the American people have to be kept in the dark when it comes to modern warfare. We must begin with a full and robust debate on the ramifications of these policies. We must insist upon full accountability and transparency.
Finally, President Obama’s legacy will forever be tarnished, and our constitutional system forever diminished, if he persists in blindly refusing to authorize his Justice Department to launch a comprehensive investigation (and if warranted to file criminal charges), to determine whether officials in the Bush administration violated federal law and treaty obligations in its eight-year “War on Terror.”
Was it all cynical electioneering when President-Elect Obama told the Boston Globe in 2007, with reference to specific executive powers the Bush administration had claimed or exercised, that he rejected “the view that the President may do whatever he deems necessary to protect national security, and that he may torture people in defiance of congressional enactments;” that the “detention of American citizens, without access to counsel, fair procedure, or pursuant to judicial authorization, as enemy combatants is unconstitutional,” that “[w]arrantless surveillance of American citizens, in defiance of FISA, is unlawful and unconstitutional”?
The president itemized the specific counts of an indictment yet in his first four years he utterly failed to take any step whatsoever to hold the Bush administration accountable for any of its crimes, preferring instead to use the vast resources of his Justice Department to actual defend members of the Bush administration on the one hand and vigorously prosecute whistle-blowers on the other.
Progressives, civil libertarians, faith leaders and Democrats by and large held their noses during the 2012 presidential campaign regarding the president’s abject failure to restore the Rule of Law and worse yet his dangerous expansion of unilateral executive power, fearing far worse if the right-wing of the Republican Party took over the White House and, in addition to implementing other catastrophic policies, secured the power to solidify a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for generations to come.
But that disaster has been avoided. And now everyone who cares about the future of the Constitution must organize, advocate and demand that President Obama spend a considerable share of his political capital to fulfill his constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
For if he is excused by the rest of us from his solemn duty, we should tremble over the prospect that the unrestrained executive powers, born in the Bush administration, to subject citizens and non-citizens alike to ever widening abuses, including unwarranted surveillance, indefinite detention, torture and targeted killings, which have since gone unchecked and indeed have taken root and been cultivated during the Obama administration, will spread and grow even stronger in future administrations, blossoming with poisonous thorns and unbreakable branches, choking off constitutional rights, suffocating dissent and strangling democracy.”
Well the security state didn’t work out too well for Petraus.
Don, Mr. Turley is much too honorable and sane to accept a political appointment.
I & others called on our government reps yesterday & I see today this one bill has been pulled, at least for now.
My message was as short as I could get it. I recommended the senator put forward Jonathan Turley’s name to Prez Obama for a replacement for Holder as the new US Attorney General.
😉 So sorry Mr. Turley, I know it’s a messy job, but I know we can trust your good work.
I also recommended Jim Sinclair of jsmineset.com for US Treasury Secretary.
In order to fix some of the US’s current problems we need sharp leaders right now, so I hope you also recommend to your Reps people you think would do a good job for the country instead of them working only for Wallst Wallst Banks/Insur/Energy companies.
The Democrats we get are as bad as what we settle for.
We’re settling for worse and worse. I voted for Jill Stein this year…Obama has gone too far over the line for me (on civil liberties, on attacking Social Security, and on blowing up foreigners for corporate profits).
~
Didn’t vote for the duplicitous O-creep specifically and mainly for anti-civil liberties record.
Another aspect to the “good” guy – presidential pardons.
Pardons and commutations can be given by governors for people convicted of state crimes. Presidents can give them for federal crimes.
http://www.propublica.org/article/obama-has-granted-clemency-more-rarely-than-any-modern-president
Excerpt:
Obama has given pardons to roughly 1 of every 50 individuals whose applications were processed by the Justice Department. At this point in his presidency, Ronald Reagan had pardoned 1 of every 3 such applicants. George H.W. Bush had pardoned 1 in 16. Bill Clinton had pardoned 1 in 8. George W. Bush had pardoned 1 in 33.
Obama also has been stingy with commutations, applications for early release by those still serving federal prison sentences.
Under Reagan and Clinton, applicants for commutations had a 1 in 100 chance of success. Under George W. Bush, that fell to a little less than 1 in 1,000. Under Obama, an applicant’s chance is slightly less than 1 in 5,000.
He has commuted the sentence of one individual, a woman with terminal leukemia whose case was championed by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin.
David Blauw,
SOYLENT GREEN, Interesting that that reactionary, Charlton Heston, played the major role in what amounts to a grand climate change catastrophe flick.
I consider viewing Obama as the lessor of two evils a bit like doing business with Lucky Luciano because Al Capone plays dirty.
Nevertheless, I certainly didn’t begrudge anyone their vote, nor do I subscribe to the “people get what they effing deserve” school of thought. That’s a bug, not a feature. Many sincerely believed that voting the man rather than voting a strategy was the way to go. So what we have is what many warned us about; a president who may arguably be the better man, marginally I would argue, but who will get his destructive policy through an obedient Senate far more effectively than the other mobster who regardless of his intentions, would have been up against a gridlock in the legislative branch where the Dems were required to play the same game of obstruction the Republicans are playing now. We also lost an opportunity to send a message to the Democratic party machinery, which has become pretty much as reactionary as Charlton Heston, that we the progressive part of the Democratic electorate would hold any politician to account any more than Obama’s justice department is holding any of the 1% to account for the breathtaking crimes they have committed. For those two reasons alone, we can expect both Obama and the TBTF banks and insurance companies and fossil fuel industry and the military industrial complex to double down on their behavior. The sucking sound will continue to get louder, and it won’t just be civil liberties that disappear. We won’t know if the gridlock strategy might have worked, so it’s probably not worth worrying about, but let’s fact it, even had it significantly slowed the damage, it would have been a grim choice anyway.
I would also mention that I do not see women being exempted from these bills. Women will be spied upon just as men, they will suffer the same reductions to Social Security and/or Medicare. They will continue to be evicted from their homes just as men due to illegal foreclosures that Obama’s administration completely ignores in an incestuous effort to <foam the runway for the too big to fail mortgage servicers. On climate change, there is no clause in nature that gives women a free pass from the disastrous consequences Obama’s e wanton policy of unrestrained development of oil reserves, oil extraction, coal and fracking. Even on such issues as woman’s rights over her own body, Obama’s technique is to pay lip service when it suits him and yet use woman’s hard won rights like cheap bargaining chips when push comes to shove.
The ACLU or some organization with skill and funds needs to bring some lawsuits in specifically chosen venues to strike down the many provisions. A best approach would be to attack a privacy theft by the most innocuous federal agency in a favorable venue. As a former atty from Missouri I would suggest shying away from former slave states which, like Mizzoura, remain Unreconstructed to the federal constitution. California might be a good venue. First Fourth, Fifth Amendments, and Fourteenth but do not forget the sleeper here, the Ninth Amendment and the right of privacy. 42 U.S.C. Section 1983 and 1988 for damages. How do we employ this when it refers to State action not federal? Sue a state employee who has gotten ahold of your email from the feds. Sue for damages and you get a jury. Sue for big money and you get their attention.
For a historical parallel one must not forget that we prosecuted the Germans and in particular, Judges, for failing to uphold human rights during the Nazi era. Google: The Judges Trial. Herr Alstoffer (sp?). We are getting right up there with the Nazis arent we? Or down there. Gotta do anything to get those commies, they burned the Reichstag. Gotta do anything it takes to get those muslims, they crashed into the Twin Towers.
Just a note: The story at CNet appears to be wrong: He got a draft put forward by Chuck Grassley that was never seriously considered. (see http://tinyurl.com/aqractb)
This does not means that what comes out next week will be good, it will probably suck, because that is what the Obama administration is demanding.
But it does mean that this report, and BTW, the reporter who “broke” the story is now claiming that he’s responsible for a “retraction”, is not credible.
Neither is the reporter, who manufactured the “Al Gore created the internet” meme in 2000.
Democracy always collapses following loose fiscal policy; always followed by dictatorship.
-Alexis de Tocqueville