-- From: "Trei, Peter" <ptreiat_private> To: "'declanat_private'" <declanat_private> 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" <bamat_private> To: "Declan McCullagh" <declanat_private> 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" <sitkaat_private> To: CP List <counterpunch-listat_private>, Dave Marsh <marsh6at_private>, Declan McCullagh <declanat_private> 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 <streedat_private>. --- Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 10:19:37 -0700 From: "Jeffrey St. Clair" <sitkaat_private> MIME-Version: 1.0 To: CP List <counterpunch-listat_private>, Dave Marsh <marsh6at_private>, Declan McCullagh <declanat_private> 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ Recent CNET News.com articles: http://news.search.com/search?q=declan CNET Radio 9:40 am ET weekdays: http://cnet.com/broadband/0-7227152.html -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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