Month: September 2012

You can say that again.

The Obama administration has fought tooth and nail to keep the details of its surveillance activities hidden from the public. For years it has insisted that its snooping on Americans’ phone and email communications fell perfectly within the law (that is, the extremely broad and invasive FISA Amendments Act, which authorizes warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international communications, checked only by a secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that doesn’t make it’s activities and procedures available to the public.) Despite repeated demands by civil liberties groups, the administration refused to disclose how many times they gathered intelligence about American citizens.

But now, the ACLU, “after months of litigation,” has been provided with some details. And it doesn’t look good:

ACLU:

Justice Department documents released today by the ACLU reveal that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans’ electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability.

The documents, handed over by the government only after months of litigation, are the attorney general’s 2010 and 2011 reports on the use of “pen register” and “trap and trace” surveillance powers. The reports show a dramatic increase in the use of these surveillance tools, which are used to gather information about telephone, email, and other Internet communications. The revelations underscore the importance of regulating and overseeing the government’s surveillance power.  (Our originalFreedom of Information Act request and our legal complaint are online.)

Pen register and trap and trace devices are powerfully invasive surveillance tools that were, twenty years ago, physical devices that attached to telephone lines in order to covertly record the incoming and outgoing numbers dialed. Today, no special equipment is required to record this information, as interception capabilities are built into phone companies’ call-routing hardware.

This news will be completely ignored by the network news outlets, so voters will by and large know nothing about it. It will not inform people’s voting decisions. But even if it did, the question again arises, as it was so elegantly put by The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf earlier this week, how much “evil” are lesser evil Obama voters willing to accept?

Charlie Savage in the New York Times, Election May Decide When Interrogation Amounts to Torture:

In one of his first acts, President Obama issued an executive order restricting interrogators to a list of nonabusive tactics approved in theArmy Field Manual. Even as he embraced a hawkish approach to other counterterrorism issues — like drone strikes, military commissions, indefinite detention and the Patriot Act — Mr. Obama has stuck to that strict no-torture policy.

By contrast, Mr. Romney’s advisers have privately urged him to “rescind and replace President Obama’s executive order” and permit secret “enhanced interrogation techniques against high-value detainees that are safe, legal and effective in generating intelligence to save American lives,” according to an internal Romney campaign memorandum.

While the memo is a policy proposal drafted by Mr. Romney’s advisers in September 2011 — not a final decision by him — its detailed analysis dovetails with his rare and limited public comments about interrogation.

“We’ll use enhanced interrogation techniques which go beyond those that are in the military handbook right now,” he said at a news conference in Charleston, S.C., in December.

Here we run into the problem repeatedly met by those trying to predict what a Romney presidency would look like. He says he’d be more hawkish on Iran, but will he? He surrounds himself with neocons, but will he really seek to reshape the map of the Middle East through military force? It can be hard to parse through what are probably miscalculated GOP talking points and what some people argue would be a more measured, pragmatic Romney presidency.

But we can only take the indications we have and it seems here like Romney knowingly signaled that he would reinstitute torture of terrorist suspects. [As a side note, Obama doesn’t have a clean record on torture, despite his early executive order against it.]

The problem with this is that there is also every indication that Romney would adopt and perhaps expand the central policy that has made torture obsolete: drone wars. Obama’s embrace of drones to kill suspects in non-war zones has replaced any pretense of locking them up without trial. Thus, torture in a Romney presidency would be as outdated a policy as it is in the Obama administration, and Romney’s public rubber stamp for torture was probably just election season rhetoric (like every thing else that comes out of his mouth).

In the news section today, it has been revealed through declassified documents that WikiLeaks Julian Assange has been designated an enemy of the state by the US military, a legal classification also assigned to al-Qaeda and which could allow Washington to kill or detain Assange without trial.

Via Democracy Now, Assange spoke “via videolink from the Ecuadorean embassy in London” and “addressed a side meeting of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday evening.”

This heartbreaking trailer gives a short preview of the new documentary “Tears of Gaza,” from the Norwegian director, Vibeke Løkkeberg. The film will premier at the Varsity Theater in Davis, CA on September 30th, and it documents the bombing of Gaza in 2008 – 2009 by the Israeli military. There will be a discussion at the theater following the showing. Go here for details.