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Who You Gonna Believe — Jack Bauer or Joe Navarro? - SpyTalk
In the battle for public opinion on torture, Joe Navarro doesn’t stand a chance against Jack Bauer.
The hero of the Fox action series “24,” now entering its seventh season, seems to have cast a spell over the country — including high level Pentagon, CIA [...]
SpyTalk: We Rage, Europeans Yawn, Over Domestic Counterterrorism Ops
Outside the United Kingdom, which invented civil liberties with the Magna Carta, ordinary Europeans couldn’t care less about wiretapping, national ID cards, preventive detention and police spies in mosques.
Counterterrorism Blog: Jihad Against Freedom of Speech at the United Nations
The United Nations’ Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has no problem with its members suggesting that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job” perpetrated by the United States on itself … Denying the role of Jihadists in the 9/11 attacks is apparently perfectly acceptable freedom of [...]
The DHS announcement today awarding REAL ID grants seems to be a positive step in meeting the recommendation of the 9-11 Commission to make identification documents more secure. With the adoption of a “verification hub” approach, where states work with other states to verify identities, DHS is letting the folks who issue driver licenses control their own processes – previously a source of irritation for many Governors.
Responsible and effective public order activities will be evidenced by the proactive policing of order, rather than the reactive policing of disorder. What is increasingly looking like the inability on the part of Denver to engage with the protesters and include them in the planning process rather than alienating them does not bode well for proactive policing of order.
The ongoing bipolar inconsistency of the U.S. Congress — that institution responsible for drafting our laws on immigration, among other things — was once again on display this past week. Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey kicked it off with a harangue in which he accused federal immigration agents of everything from racism to general rudeness. Why? For enforcing the laws that Congress passed.
Much has been written and discussed in the past few weeks regarding the medical care of detainees held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. I don’t know how to avoid coming off as an insensitive, cold and heartless human being in coming to the defense of ICE and the management of its detainee health care program but I’ll give it a try.
This is another instance where human rights abuses and the arrogance of security forces turn the oppressed against the security forces (and supporting governments), hampering the ability of the police and army to successfully do their jobs (in this case, prosecute the war on drugs).
Cato-at-liberty » E-Verify Debunking Exposes Debunking Errors
Congratulations are due once again to the Department of Homeland Security for engaging in open dialogue about its programs, even controversial ones like “E-Verify” — a system that Congress may require all U.S. employers to use for running federal background checks on every single new employee.
Openness is healthy, and [...]
CQ Politics | Film Exposes the Seduction of Secrecy
This vivid and disturbing exposure of the human dimension of the conflict between the government’s duty to keep secrets and the peoples’ right to know deserves a national audience.
One of its more interesting insights is how sexy secrets are.
“Secrecy is something like forbidden fruit,” former NSA official [...]
Harris writes: “Increased airport security and scrutiny of foreign visitors are not the primary causes of America’s global image problem. The excesses of Abu Ghraib, the existence of the Guantanamo prison (which all the presidential candidates say they want to shutter) and our controversial and passionately debated interrogation practices have done more to diminish our global standing than some gruff Customs officials or aggressive airport security personnel.”
Seven years after the horror of September 11th, these cultural sophisticates exude a kind of national-security ennui, bored with the hassles of visa paperwork and ready to go back to the way it was on September 10th. For them, even common-sense security measures are viewed with resentment and are held up as evidence that America is no longer that shining city on a hill but one turned inward with in fear and loathing.
ShaneHarris.net: Surveillance Standoff
No one should believe that real-time government surveillance of the communications network is an idea born of the 9/11 attacks or that it results solely from the Bush administration’s aggrandizing of executive power. The legal arguments that the government has asserted to support increased surveillance of digital space were first put forth in [...]
To listen to the paranoid debate now taking place over the REAL ID Act in Congress, some state legislatures and the blogosphere, one might think that this legislation was some Bush administration plot to create a national identity card and spy on innocent Americans. The reality is much more serious and mundane. In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombings and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, there is a need to set some kind of minimum standards to ensure that driver’s licenses and other forms of government-issued identification cannot be tampered with and used by terrorists.