national security

It's really sad when you think about it. During the Bush years, Patrick Leahy was a man that stood on the side of privacy. Now that a Democrat is in the White House, he stands on the side of spying:

A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans' e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law.

CNET has learned that Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns. A vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans' e-mail, is scheduled for next week.

Leahy's rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies -- including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission -- to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge.

Legislation like this is the very reason I argue for two parties willing to work together. It's the best form of checks and balances we have, just like a warrant is a form of checks and balances over law enforcement. Hopefully that will happen here. If not, then you need to really watch what you EMail and sit back as our Constitution dies a little more.

The Republicans are having a hard time grabbing the national security stage. I mean when they have to look at facing President Obama next year, the man who got Osama Bin Laden, they really don't have much to go on.

So what is a poor Republican candidate to do? Make shit up!

Republican presidential candidates have claimed that the Obama administration is cleansing government files of references to radical Islam, an assertion so juicy that politicians keep repeating it — even though it's a wild exaggeration.

The latest to run with the story is former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who told a crowd in Des Moines that the president "actually ordered all references to Islam and Muslim sanitized out of our national security documents."

And over the weekend, Newt Gingrich told a veterans' forum in Des Moines that the administration has "issued instructions, for example, that in developing training papers on terrorism that no mention should be made of radical Islam."

Rep. Michele Bachmann paved the way on Oct. 28, when she told 75 Republican faithful in Iowa that "Obama is allowing terror suspect groups to write the FBI's terror training manual."

It turns out that all this came from an incident in 2009 when someone from the FBI gave a speech that drew a lot of criticism from the Muslim community. An order to review training material was given and some is being rewritten, but not by "terrorist" groups as Bachmann claimed. Instead it's being taken care of by a couple FBI agents and three outside experts from terrorist organizations such as Yale University and Johns Hopkins.

Of course facts are pesky things, as another famous Republican once said (**cough** Ronald Reagan) and Bachmann still believes that Barack Obama started the Iraq War.

The retirement of Justice Stevens is really not good news for those of us on the left:

The leading prospects -- U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan and federal appellate judges Merrick Garland and Diane Wood -- are relative moderates. Kagan has backed strong presidential authority over national security; rulings by Garland and Wood suggest they would expand rights only gradually.

“The candidates who are truly liberals aren’t really on the table,” said Tom Goldstein, a Washington appellate lawyer whose Scotusblog Web site tracks the court. “You can just tell that it’s not where the White House is headed, and the groups themselves seemingly accept it.”

Sadly this was to be expected. Obama is not a liberal, despite how much the right (and some on the left) wants us to believe it. As I’ve said before, he is actually to the right of Hillary Clinton.

President Obama is pushing his administration about what is being done for Haiti and what more can be done:

Meeting with officials from his National Security Staff in the last hour, President Obama was direct.

He’d just gotten off the phone with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet to talk about rescue and relief efforts after the Haitian earthquake. A larger meeting in the Situation Room is scheduled for 7:15 pm EST.

“I expect a full report at 7:15,” the president told his team, according to NSS chief of staff Denis McDonough. “I want to know why it is we’re doing what we are -- and why it is we’re not doing more.”

ABC has a great rundown of Obama’s response since finding out about the disaster yesterday.

Last November a document got leaked out, which outlined a new Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) being authored by the Obama administration. The internet part of this is really infuriating:

• * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
• * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
• * That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.
• * Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)

Andrew Breitbart has obtained a leaked memo stating that the detainees at Guantanamo will be moved to Illinois. Senator Dick Durbin and Governor Pat Quinn are applauding the move, but government officials are saying that no final decision has been made yet and the memo is only a “draft”.

This brings me to another issue – the leaked memo. We are dealing with a leaked government document that deals with national security. Should the Obama administration take the Bush approach and investigate the leak? Hell why not put Breitbart under oath and force him to reveal how he got it? This practice was championed by people like Breitbart when it was done under Bush’s regime, so he should welcome it again, shouldn’t he?

This is a priceless move by several House Republicans yesterday:

When it's a choice between strengthening the Patriot Act, or showing up for the Tea Party Patriots, what's a GOP lawmaker to do? We'll give you one guess...

Several Republican members of Congress yesterday blew off votes on the signature anti-terror legislation of the post 9/11 era to attend Michele Bachmann's Tea Party rally against health-care reform.

Why do Republicans put politics and face time above national security? Why don’t the Democrats start asking this question more and more, especially in the coming months?

That picture is the proof. I mean look at all those terrorists! John Boehner proves it in his new “Do You Feel Safer” video.

But wait.

Are those terrorists?

Hispanic Democrats are furious and demanding an apology over an image wedged in a new GOP web video on terrorism that shows members of the Hispanic Caucus sitting at a table with President Obama.
“On behalf of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC), we write to demand an apology for the inclusion of the picture of the CHC meeting with President Obama in the video on your official website entitled “Do You Feel Safer?,’” the CHC wrote in a letter being sent to Republican Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), whose office created the video.

So Boehner figured he would make people think “terrorist” by seeing Hispanics. But these aren’t any Hispanics. These are his colleagues in the House.

Of course Boehner is having none of that. Here’s what his spokesman said:

“This is beyond silly,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel responded. “The video also includes an image of the President speaking at the House Democratic Retreat in Virginia. Is the Congressional Hispanic Caucus suggesting that every Democrat in the House is connected with terrorists? Of course not. America’s national security is serious. This complaint is not.”