FC: Civil lib roundup: Free speech, watch lists, libraries

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

--

From: "Trei, Peter" <ptrei () rsasecurity com>
To: "'declan () well com'" <declan () well com>
Subject: NYT OpEd calls for censorship.
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 13:23:18 -0400

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/17/opinion/17KRIS.html
(free registration)

September 17, 2002

Recipes for Death

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

    On my desk is a set of self-help books that I've been
buying at gun shows and on the Internet. If you want to
kill a few thousand people, these are the books to consult.

And if we want to reduce the risk of terrorist attacks using
bio- or chemical weapons, we have a target closer to home
than Iraq: these books and the presses that publish them.
If these presses were in Baghdad, the Pentagon would be
itching to blow them up.

[...]

"I do think that there is forbidden knowledge, and for me the
'cookbooks' fall into that class of information," said
Dr. Ronald M. Atlas, the president of the American Society
for Microbiology. "I do not want to see them out there for
potential use by terrorists."

[...]

We rightly complain about weapons proliferation by China and
Russia. But we also need to confront the consequences of our own
information proliferation. Our small presses could end up helping
terrorists much more than Saddam ever has.

I'm a journalist, steeped in First Amendment absolutism, and
book-burning  grates on my soul. But then again, so does war.
As we prepare to go to battle to reduce our vulnerability to
weapons of mass destruction, it seems appropriate for us in
addition to consider other distasteful steps that can also make
us safer.

[...]

---

From: "Bam Mail" <bam () pocketbook org>
To: "Declan McCullagh" <declan () well com>
Subject: Are You Too Free? Americans' attitudes toward the First Amendment
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 17:32:15 +0100

Dear Declan

Scary opinions.
Have you seen this?

The excerpt below comes from PR Watch's 
(<http://www.prwatch.org/>http://www.prwatch.org/) Spin of the Week email 
news.  This is their summary of the AJR source article: 
<http://www.ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=2617>http://www.ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=2617


ARE YOU TOO FREE?
<http://www.ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=2617>http://www.ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=2617

  "Fear can short-circuit freedom," observes Ken Paulson of the First
  Amendment Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Each year his
  organization conducts an annual survey of Americans' attitudes
  toward the First Amendment. Thanks to 9/11, the results are
  disturbing:
       * "For the first time in our polling, almost half of those
  surveyed said they think the First Amendment goes too far in the
  rights it guarantees."
       * "The least popular First Amendment right is freedom of the
  press."
       * "More than 40 percent of those polled said newspapers should
  not be allowed to freely criticize the U.S. military's strategy and
  performance."
       * "More than four in 10 said they would limit the academic
  freedom of professors and bar criticism of government military."

SOURCE: American Journalism Revew, September 2002


Regards
Bam

Pocketbook: <http://www.pocketbook.org/>http://www.pocketbook.org/
Skyscraper: 
<http://www.pocketbook.org/skyscraper.htm>http://www.pocketbook.org/skyscraper.htm


---

Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 14:20:01 -0700
From: "Jeffrey St. Clair" <sitka () attbi com>
To: CP List <counterpunch-list () counterpunch org>,
   Dave Marsh <marsh6 () optonline net>, Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>

You may already be on a watch list

Sunday, September 15, 2002

Here's a snapshot of Juneau's Larry Musarra: Career military
and therefore a patriot. Retired officer and therefore a
leader. So thoroughly a fed that he's supplementing his
Coast Guard benefits with a Forest Service job at the
Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center.

While serving as a helicopter pilot on countless
search-and-rescue missions, Musarra was a hero by job
description and by deed. He risked his life to pluck
civilian boaters and commercial fishermen from disabled and
sinking watercraft in Alaska's storm-swept seas.

Mission success never was guaranteed. He was as good as his
equipment, his training and the courage he could muster
under the circumstances. Lives were saved. Like I said, he's
a hero.

He's also a kayaker, a SCUBA diver and a teacher. In the
summer of 2000, he and his wife and three sons traveled to
Australia where they assembled an ultralight airplane.
Musarra piloted it from one side of the continent to the
other, a rented motorhome trailing behind, in a 21-week
adventure.

With that curriculum vitae, Musarra would be a strong
candidate for a variety of jobs. It would appear he has what
it takes to be an FBI agent, had he chosen to go that route.
Instead, Musarra, 47, has ended up on an FBI terrorism watch
list. It is fair to assume that a guy who spent 23 years in
the Coast Guard and who reached the rank of lieutenant
commander passed his share of background and security
checks. But that was then and this is now - as defined by
the U.S. departments of Justice and Transportation in the
name of homeland security.

What does it mean to be on an FBI watch list?

You learn when you show up at Juneau Airport with your wife
and your 12-year- old developmentally disabled son for the
flight to his special school in Oregon that you cannot
complete the automated self-check-in. You don't know why, so
you ask an Alaska Airlines attendant for help.

She also can't get your boarding pass to print and doesn't
know why. A supervisor gets involved and calls the company's
headquarters in Seattle. Thirty minutes later you find out
why:

"She said, 'We are having trouble clearing your name.
Actually, we can't clear your name. You are on an FBI list,"
Musarra told the Empire's Julia O'Malley in recalling the
airport experience that took place in June and which has
been repeated, with variations.

The presumably dangerous people on the list can be cleared
to fly on commercial jets. You may be a potential terrorist,
but if you are screened with metal-detecting wands, offer
your shoes for X-ray, remove your belts, and submit your
bodies and your baggage to a thorough search - with
appropriate results - you can board the plane.

"Next terrorist please step forward."

Big government incurs no penalties for conducting showy
searches of retired lieutenant commanders as distinct from
identifying visiting Muslim extremists who have roots in
rogue nations, radical mosques or al-Qaida cells and who are
paying cash for expensive flight lessons. It's hard to do
good work and easy to make work. Somebody probably has a
form to fill out.

Some people consider it unpatriotic to question government
at all, much less during times of national security stress.
But that's what is required when government undertakes
broad-stroked assaults on constitutionally protected
liberties. If a government can extend its reach deeply into
our lives - and put patriots on watch lists - during times
of national stress, don't be surprised if terrorism alerts
are generated endlessly.

If the government "alerts" us often enough, some incident
actually may correspond with the warning period. In which
case, it will be claimed, the system worked.

Space does not permit a full listing of the denials and
excuses offered by federal agencies in response to questions
from the Empire about Musarra's status, the origins of and
basis for the watch list, who controls it, who gets on it
and how anyone gets off it.

Musarra believes he was watch-listed because a computer was
programmed to create variations of Middle Eastern names. Is
that all it takes? Since our story was published on
Wednesday, we did receive a visit from one newly assigned
federal security agent. His message: By writing about the
Musarra case, we helped the enemy.

To the extent he and his ilk employ form over substance in
their search for enemies of the republic, my recommendation
is that they look in the mirror. Steve Reed is managing
editor of the Empire. Contact him at
<streed () juneauempire com>.


---

Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 10:19:37 -0700
From: "Jeffrey St. Clair" <sitka () attbi com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: CP List <counterpunch-list () counterpunch org>,
   Dave Marsh <marsh6 () optonline net>, Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
Subject: Now They Check the Books You Read

Now They Check the Books You Read
by Joan E. Bertin
Newsday

In the post 9/11 world, there is undoubtedly a government
official whose job is to invent innocuous-sounding, if not
reassuring, acronyms for government initiatives against
terrorism.

Operation TIPS is a case in point. The Terrorism Information
and Prevention System will recruit millions of utility,
transportation and other workers to report on "potentially
unusual or suspicious activity in public places." In other
words, Operations TIPS is using private citizens to spy on
each other.

The Bush administration's reliance on acronyms with
public-relations punch was apparent as early as last October
when, still reeling from the events of Sept. 11, it proposed
and Congress swiftly passed the USA Patriot Act ("The
Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate
Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism" Act of
2001). Like Operation TIPS, the label doesn't tell the whole
story.

Among the less well-known aspects of the Patriot Act are
provisions permitting the Justice Department to obtain
information secretly from booksellers and librarians about
customers' and patrons' reading, Internet and book-buying
habits, merely by alleging that the records are relevant to
an anti-terrorism investigation. The act prohibits
librarians and booksellers from disclosing these subpoenas,
so the objects of investigation don't know and therefore
cannot defend themselves and their privacy, or contest the
government's actions in court.

In a sample of 1,000 libraries responding to a survey last
February, 85 reported receiving requests to turn over
information about patrons to police or FBI agents. We have
no way to know how many other libraries, and how many
booksellers, received similar requests. We don't know how
many requests were made under the Patriot Act, because of
its secrecy provisions. What we do know is that the Patriot
Act authorizes the government to obtain information secretly
from librarians and booksellers about customers' and
patrons' interests and activities, and that law enforcement
officials are seeking such information. The Justice
Department has refused to provide any data about these
investigations, even to Congress.

Librarians and booksellers have voiced their dismay at being
conscripted, under court order and threat of prosecution, to
report covertly on their patrons and customers. Secretly
obtaining information about what people read, to try to
figure out what they think, undermines more than privacy; it
threatens core First Amendment principles, as many
librarians and booksellers understand.

The Constitution clearly protects the right to read a book,
embrace an idea or express a thought - even an unpopular or
"unpatriotic" book, idea or thought. The freedom of thought
and expression is so fundamental to our democracy that, as
the Supreme Court recently noted, the "government may not
prohibit speech because it increases the chance an unlawful
act will be committed 'at some indefinite future time.'" In
so holding, the court relied on the "vital distinction
between words and deed, between ideas and conduct." In other
words, the government is free to prohibit and punish illegal
conduct, but may not criminalize ideas or punish people for
their thoughts. Perversely, under the Patriot Act, reading
certain books or researching certain topics - both
constitutionally protected activities - now apparently
provide grounds for criminal investigation.

The Justice Department's recent decision to repeal the
domestic terrorism surveillance guidelines unmistakably
sends this signal. The guidelines were adopted in 1976 in
response to revelations that, under the infamous COINTELPRO
("counterintelligence") program, civil rights and anti-war
activists who were neither accused nor suspected of crimes
became targets of government investigation because of their
outspoken criticism of government policies. To prevent such
abuses, the 1976 guidelines authorized surveillance of
political, religious and other groups only if there was
actual evidence of criminal activity. Without this
restriction, covert surveillance of political dissidents
with no known connection to criminal activity is bound to
resume.

According to a brief recently filed by the Justice
Department in defense of secret immigration hearings, the
"First Amendment creates no general right of access to
government information or operations." The gag order imposed
on librarians and booksellers goes even further in
withholding information from the object of an investigation.
As a result, proceedings under the act will be shrouded in
secrecy, not only making it impossible for targeted
individuals to counter the government's allegations, but
also preventing the public at large from making an informed
judgment about whether the government is effectively
countering terrorism or unfairly targeting innocent people.

The rush to enact programs with reassuring-sounding names
may have been understandable a year ago. Now, however, it
would be patriotic to consider whether, despite their
appealing acronyms, some hastily enacted programs threaten
the freedoms we value most. It is peculiar, to say the
least, for our government to fight terrorists by adopting
their techniques - secrecy and intimidation.

Besides, exactly how many terrorists does the FBI expect to
find through the local library or the bookstore?

Joan E. Bertin is executive director of the National
Coalition Against Censorship.




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