doj

President Obama said that it would be unprecedented for the Supreme Court to overturn a law passed on economic issues on Monday. Yesterday President Obama even went further into explanation of those remarks:

MR. SINGLETON: Mr. President, you said yesterday that it would be unprecedented for a Supreme Court to overturn laws passed by an elected Congress. But that is exactly what the Court has done during its entire existence. If the Court were to overturn individual mandate, what would you do, or propose to do, for the 30 million people who wouldn’t have health care after that ruling?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, let me be very specific. We have not seen a Court overturn a law that was passed by Congress on a economic issue, like health care, that I think most people would clearly consider commerce -- a law like that has not been overturned at least since Lochner. Right? So we’re going back to the ’30s, pre New Deal.

And the point I was making is that the Supreme Court is the final say on our Constitution and our laws, and all of us have to respect it, but it’s precisely because of that extraordinary power that the Court has traditionally exercised significant restraint and deference to our duly elected legislature, our Congress. And so the burden is on those who would overturn a law like this.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX)

A top House Republican is planning to propose that Internet service providers be required to store information about their customers to aid police in criminal investigations, CNET has learned.
But a recent draft has one huge exception: wireless companies aren't included.

That appears to be the result of lobbying from wireless providers, which don't want to have to comply with any new governmental mandates. But the exemption has already drawn the ire of the U.S. Justice Department, which says it doesn't go far enough and is likely to attract strong opposition from cable and DSL providers that would be the ones singled out for regulation.

CTIA, the wireless trade association, declined to answer questions about its involvement in drafting the exception, saying through a spokesman only that "we are committed to working with the committee on the legislation."

The committee preparing the bill is the House Judiciary Committee, headed by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, who has previously expressed support for mandatory requirements governing the retention of user data. The bill will be part of a larger measure dealing with strengthening criminal sanctions against child pornography.

From a press release issued by Time Warner:

“The recent news regarding the negotiations between Level 3 and Comcast has raised many questions about the way peering agreements are negotiated between Network Operators and has been inappropriately lumped into the issue of network neutrality.   These agreements have been and continue to be negotiated based on the amounts of traffic, not the type, being delivered to each party’s network by the other.   When the amount of traffic being delivered between two networks is generally balanced a “Settlement Free” peering agreement is likely the result.  However, when the amount of traffic is not balanced, it is commonplace for the network operator receiving the greater level of traffic to insist on compensation for the added costs that are faced as a result.    Again, the issue in these negotiations is the amount, not the type of data being transported.  Additionally, regardless of whether two Network Operators reach an agreement, end users will still be able to receive any data or content they wish to reach as that traffic will find an alternate route over other available interconnecting networks.   Because there is no discrimination among different types of content, and no blocking of content, peering agreements between Network Operators don’t raise Net Neutrality issues and have never been part of the Net Neutrality debate.”

It’s amazing. The big media types all jumped on that ACORN video earlier this year, despite it being edited to be taken totally out of context. Now we this story of Shirley Sherrod, someone who has lost their job due to the journalistic malpractice of one Andrew Breitbart.

Over at the San Francisco Chronicle, a strong case is made to bring Breitbart to justice over this:

While he says he intended to harm the NAACP, he picked Shirley Sherrod to do it. She did not ask for this. Breitbart altered a video to twist her words.

Andrew Breitbart may be a target for the U.S. Department of Justice' Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section ("CCIPS") which is in the Criminal Division. The website, which was forwarded to this blogger by the DOJ on another issue, covers various types of crimes that involve a computer.

If Breitbart altered the video of Shirley Sherrod to make it look like she was making a statement he then called racist, he's certainly guilty of defamation of character against Shirley Sherrod.

Breitbart may also be guilty of Internet harassment. He certainly should be made a high-profile example to discourage others from these uses of the computer and The Internet to harass a person. Enough is enough.

There have been cases against internet commenters, let alone the publisher of an internet “news” site.

If in the “new media” age we want to be treated the same as traditional media, then all bloggers should get behind any legal action against Andrew Breitbart. He hurts the blogosphere as a whole by his intentional lies and smears published on his sites. Sure the left and right blogosphere disagree and they must to thrive, but to resort to such lying in order to advance an agenda and your own site; well that is unacceptable no matter if you are the most liberal or conservative of blogger.

(Updated below the fold)

The Justice Department has subpoenaed indymedia.us for it’s visitor logs for a certain date. While this raises big flags regarding online privacy, something else happened with this action that is very odd. They recipient of the subpoena was told she could not talk about it unless authorized by the Justice Department – an essential gag order.

Of course news like this would send the right into a full frenzy that Obama is trying to silence the media, even a left leaning site like indymedia. Here’s Hot Air’s take on it:

Did the White House try to open up a two-front war on the media?   Before the Obama administration launched an all-out battle with conservative-leaning Fox News Channel, the Department of Justice demanded the records of all visitor information of left-leaning Indymedia.us in an remarkable subpoena of a media outlet, for one specific day.  No one can recall any precedent for such a wide-ranging probe into the records of a media website, but it may provide a challenge to a national-security law if the DoJ presses hard enough:

But there’s a problem with this “blame Obama” mentality. The original source of the article is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and this is what they say about the subpoena:

Last week Bush made an unprecedented request for the Department of Justice to investigate Ohio voter registrations. Something like this has never been done so close to an election. Well now it looks like the DOJ is ignoring Bush:

The Department of Justice will not require Ohio to disclose the names of voters whose registration applications did not match other government databases, according to two people familiar with discussions between state and federal lawyers.

The decision comes about a week after an unusual request from President Bush asking the department to investigate the matter and roughly two weeks after the Supreme Court dismissed a case involving the flagged registration applications.

For the DOJ to ignore this request shows that they must have some serious questions about it. My guess is that they are worried about the fallout it could create. Bush is on his way out and a lot of officials at the DOJ are looking to their futures. With the possibility of a Democratic controlled government growing greater by the minute, they also realize that congressional investigations will have more merit now, and a DOJ already embroiled in scandal from the U.S. attorney purge, which was a result of bogus voter fraud calls, has to play it very careful here on out.

Just now breaking on MSNBC. More as the details come out.

UPDATE 1:
The DOJ will be holding a news conference at 1:20pm est today to discuss the charges returned by the grand jury.

UPDATE 2 (and bumped)

A PDF of the indictment is available here. The news conference is just now starting (1/2 hour late).

Or more specifically - their chairman? Raw Story has an exclusive about San Diego GOP's new chairman and how he was heavily involved in pirating software. Besides being totally anti-business (something I would think the GOP would shun), let's not forget what our Attorney General, Michael Mukasey said earlier this month:

Criminal syndicates, and in some cases even terrorist groups, view IP crime as a lucrative business, and see it as a low-risk way to fund other activities.

Sounds like the DOJ should open an investigation.