State Secrets, No-Fly List Showdown Looms 216
schwit1 writes "The Obama Administration and a federal judge in San Francisco appear to be headed for a showdown over the controversial state secrets privilege in a case about the U.S. government's 'no-fly' list for air travel. U.S. District Judge William Alsup is also bucking the federal government's longstanding assertion that only the executive branch can authorize access to classified information. From the article: 'The disputes arose in a lawsuit Malaysian citizen and former Stanford student Rahinah Ibrahim filed seven years ago after she was denied travel and briefly detained at the San Francisco airport in 2005, apparently due to being on the no-fly list. In an order issued earlier this month and made public Friday, Alsup instructed lawyers for the government to "show cause" why at least nine documents it labeled as classified should not be turned over to Ibrahim's lawyers. Alsup said he'd examined the documents and concluded that portions of some of them and the entirety of others could be shown to Ibrahim's attorneys without implicating national security.'"
sudden outbreak of judicial mental clarity (Score:5, Insightful)
Warrant (Score:5, Insightful)
Just the things being investigated and when can tip off associates, or, in the case of mistaken identities due to similar names, the real target.
While I am all for increased legislative oversight of all spy and terrorist-related investigations, good luck with this. The real Constitutional crime is not just warrantless stuff, but warrantless without cursory review by elected legislators or judges.
Re:No tech content? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Executive branch claims it and it alone can authorize access to classified information. If this is deemed as stupid as it sounds, especially in a supposedly free society and by a President that campaigned on unprecedented transparency, then this may be the start of something wonderful.
Re:No tech content? (Score:5, Insightful)
There should never have been a non-fly list (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:sudden outbreak of judicial mental clarity (Score:5, Insightful)
That mental clarity is why he'll never get nominated. Presidents aren't looking for sharp judicial minds, they're looking for reliable votes on whatever the successor case to Roe v Wade will be.
The sharp judicial minds have this annoying habit of thinking for themselves and coming to conclusions that are significantly different from the politicians who put them on the court. Some examples of this: David Souter, John Paul Stevens, John Roberts. What most politicians actually want is another Clarence Thomas.
parasite (Score:0, Insightful)
APK is a parasitic creature, nestled between mountainous testes, sucking the life out of them. AKA, a queer sumbitch.
Fix this exploit, Slashdot! No one likes to scroll for three minutes to get past the spam!
Re:Please, stop with the hype (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a sad day when you can tag someone anti-American who is pro-Constitution.
Re:There should never have been a non-fly list (Score:5, Insightful)
What puzzled me to no end about this whole "no fly list" debacle was: Are these people dangerous only on a plane? Let's assume that list is actually accurate. You know what I mean, let's assume these people are dangerous. Dangerous enough that we'd have to assume they blow up a plane when we let them on one. Because, well, why else should they not be allowed on a plane?
Then why are they no threat at all if not on a plane?
This question alone makes the whole list questionable IMO. Either someone is a threat to national security or he is not. There's no "on a plane". It almost feels as sane as the "on the internet" laws.
Re:sudden outbreak of judicial mental clarity (Score:3, Insightful)
Why did you only mention to pro-life judges?
Re:There should never have been a non-fly list (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No-fly list should be a no fly (Score:4, Insightful)
The constitution is alive and well; the First 7 articles are alive and very well. It's the bill of rights that was add as a compromise in 1792 so that a few state representatives would feel confortable with the document and sign that is "under fire".
However if you consider your rights to be self evident, you don't need a document defining those rights for you.
Understanding is not a requisite of cooperation or fulfillment of citizen related beneficiary obligations: obey the law, pay taxes and submit to jury duty. If you have a problem with the way government is conducting business, you should take more action about those issues than rant about stuff on /. or making suggestions that some hackers take actions that would threaten the dignity of our public servants or the policies they choose to implement. That type of action will only justify a reaction that will result in new policies that are more similar to the proverbial "shaved, sterilized and destroyed" processing of our remaining freedoms.
The single best way to make changes is to get people in your community organized in a way that can productively send a clear and constructive message to our leaders.
Re:Boston Legal episode..."Nuts" (Score:5, Insightful)
Luckily for all of us (except you, perhaps) that OP made no such claim, and didn't even hint that that might be a solution.
What was actually suggested was that PICTURES accompany NAMES on the No-Fly List, since there are frequently multiple people with the same name in the USA (note that I have an unusual surname, and yet I've managed to run into several people who knew someone with my FULL NAME)...
Re:Boston Legal episode..."Nuts" (Score:4, Insightful)
First, I realize this, I'm in IT. But it's a good monologue. Pocket device != large database.
Second: he wasn't saying give everyone an iPod. He was using it as an example, a token of "look what an innovative company can do... maybe hire THEM instead of some guy"
Even in 2001 (or whatever) the idea of a distributed system wasn't unheard of. Heck at our college we had access to large-infrastructure database systems shared among campuses across the country. Said databases had searchable articles with bilbiographic meta-data, images of the pages, and a whole bunch of features. I can't speak for whether it was encrypted but I do know you needed a login.
The systems are obviously already networked to be able to get to the (I imagine) encrypted database. I can't imagine a scenario where a 2001-era PC would have a hard time also getting extra meta-data besides just a names-list (age, gender, etc). Heck we were even doing pictures.
And as Alan Shore said in the monologue: this is a country with some innovative tech companies are there. Apple, Microsoft (yeh they count), Google, loads of small companies. All advanced. All innovative. All doing incredible things at the time.
And you're saying the best that they could do, after throwing billions of dollars at the problem, was come up with a simple encrypted names list? No meta-data? No pictures? Nothing?
Fine, maybe slightly more expensive but wouldn't it be better to have a BETTER system than a names list that count stops a 10-year-old from getting on a plane?
We've come a long way in 12 years. But even back then things were advanced enough to do a better job on the system they picked.
Re:Warrant (Score:5, Insightful)
Just the things being investigated and when can tip off associates, or, in the case of mistaken identities due to similar names, the real target.
Which just goes to show that no one in the intelligence community was consulted before the list was created in the first place. Someone you suspect of being a terrorist shows up at the airport and his experience is suddenly radically different than everyone around him? That's a flashing neon sign, isn't it? I'm sorry, but I had the idea that when you suspect someone of being an enemy agent, you do nothing to alert them to the fact you suspect them, right up until the point where you bring the hammer down. You don't want a bomber to know you're coming. That's a good way to get blown up. It should have been the Pay-Really-Close-Attention-and-Screen-Really-Well List, not the No-Fly List.
Re:No-fly list should be a no fly (Score:4, Insightful)
Good thing he's gone and it's all better. It's well past time to hold the "new" regime responsible for its own abuse.
I know you never said it wasn't Obama's fault, but when you continue to blame Bush for what Obama is doing, it helps create a cover for him.
The fact that Obama commits the same sins does not excuse Bush43 from committing them in the first place.
Re:No tech content? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two main reasons I think this sort of thing about keeping unnecessary secrets is happening.
First, is a power play by the executive branch (it happens in the other branches too, don't get me wrong). Ie, when asked to do anything the knee-jerk response at all levels is to say "no", and when being forcefully asked or ordered again, the response is "NO" even louder. Like a petulant child being asked to go to sleep. It's pervasive because it's not a directive that comes down from upper management but just a natural response that most people have.
The second big reason is to protect loss of face and avoid embarrassment. Ie, these aren't national security secrets, but embarrassing secrets. Not even embarrassing in the sense of explosing malfeasance, but embarrassing because it makes someone looks stupid, or it makes a policy look stupid, or it makes someone who said "no" earlier look stupid if it's discovered there was no reason to say "no".
Re:No tech content? (Score:2, Insightful)
> If every politician is a crook, then only crooks become politicians.
That's how the system is designed (ie Money = power). It's not mindless cynicism, it's demonstrable cause and effect.
Re:No tech content? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not mindless cynicism. It is a recognition that US politics operates on a purely tribal basis.
You have Democrats who really honestly believe Obama is a peacenik who has reduced the number of troops in Afghanistan every single year of his presidency. I'm not joking -- I saw this exact comment in my local paper's comment section by a die-hard Obamabot.
You have Republicans who believe that forcing people to pay premiums to private for profit insurance companies is Marxism (as opposed to crony capitalism or corporatism, the softer brother of fascism). I see this in my local paper's comment section all the time from the mainstream-GOP-subverted Tea Baggers.
Combined, the purely tribal Democrats and Republicans probably account for about 60% of the population. The remainder will be largely filled by people who vote for a "lesser evil" and a few single digit percentage pointers who support "fringe" third parties. I'm in that last group, have been actively engaged with the fringe, stood out in the sleet and rain holding signs for that fringe, will not vote for any candidate affiliated with either the DNC or the GOP under any circumstances -- I am the fringe -- and I know there is no hope short of a scandal so egregious that one of the parties basically has to reinvent itself. Seriously, Obama's presidency should be all the demonstration one needs that to most people, policies are irrelevant, only party affiliation matters.
Re:There should never have been a non-fly list (Score:4, Insightful)
The worst part about all this, besides the over-reach of inept agency and the slow descent into a police state:
To detect "threats to national security as well as immigration law violators"
X-ray trucks for "explosives, weapons, anything unusual", "radiation, explosives, and drugs".
You simply cannot trust people in a position of power to keep a narrow focus when you grant them broad and reaching powers to do a specific job. Once they have those tools, they ARE going to use them for anything and everything under the sun that they think they can help with. Part of it is the infatuation with a new toy. When all you have is hammer, or even when the hammer just solved a difficult problem for you, EVERYTHING starts looking like a nail. And it's natural. The people working in anti-terrorism department, spending all that time not finding any terrorists, feel the need to be productive and find another reason for doing their job. Nobody wants to lose their job.
I would LOVE to have some method of identifying everyone who really wanted to fuck over America. Or everyone that transported too much explosives. Or tried to make Anthrax. But the people that are trying to get the powers to do such things simply cannot be trusted with said power.
Because while certain immigration and certain drugs are a moderately bad thing, there is no fucking way I'm letting these piddly little problems justify the transformation of the USA into a police state.
Re:No-fly list should be a no fly (Score:4, Insightful)
However if you consider your rights to be self evident, you don't need a document defining those rights for you.
The purpose wasn't to define them for you, it was to enumerate them as being specifically beyond the ability of the government to take away. Unfortunately, the interpretation of the Constitution has gone from the original "The government is empowered to act only where specifically granted authority" to "The government is empowered to act whenever not specifically denied authority, and if government lawyers can come up with some pretzel-like, taken-out-of-context, and misinterpreted reading of a specific prohibition that makes it not say what the plain text says, then the government can act there, too."
Re:No tech content? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd like to believe that but as I said, Obama's presidency is proof against your assertion. Take for example Marty Lederman. He used to excoriate the GWB administration for using secret memo to support due process free detention (Gitmo). When he became part of the Obama administration, he began _writing_ Obama's secret memos "authorizing" (*) due process free execution.
Exactly what besides "my tribe uber alles" can account for that 180 degree switch in position on the core question of whether a person is entitled to trial before punishment is exacted?
Or try to have a conversation with an Obama apologist, and try to get a straight answer to the question: why was it wrong for GWB to put people in jail without trial, but not wrong for Obama to kill people without trial? Eventually, after all the deflections, slogans, and GWB-blaming, you'll get down to the core: I trust Obama and I did not trust Bush. I did this once with a frequent poster on my local paper's website and that is exactly what he said. His avatar is a picture of Bush with "worst ever" written over it. That is tribal politics, nothing else, and I think it accounts for much more of what we see than it is given credit for.
The ways in which Obama has extended the GWB era policies are legion. I started to list those before burning out on the project -- I've not updated this in a year, but you can sort of get an idea: http://nothingchanged.org/ [nothingchanged.org] Despite the plain facts, people still support him, and nothing can explain that besides the fact that he's a member of their tribe. The silence we hear from "progressives" is proof positive that policy doesn't matter because if it did, the same people that burned GWB in effigy, would be doing that to Obama. He's that bad from a policy perspective. And of course, all those GOPers should be praising him as much as Dick Cheney has praised him. But they don't. They call him a Marxist for coming up with a health care plan to the right of that proposed by Nixon. It really is tribal, at least for the most part.
(*) legal memos written by your own lawyers are not laws, they are opinions, so to suggest there is some authority there is ridiculous.