Dan Gillmor

The NYT has the text of President Bush’s radio speech in which he announces his veto of legislation that would have banned the CIA from torturing suspects. See: Text: Bush on Veto of Intelligence Bill for the sickening reality that Bush aims to go down in history as the president who proudly and unapologetically endorsed torture as America’s state policy.

He has shamed himself so many times now that it’s commonplace. But he shames us all — and Congress in particular, unless the lawmakers recover enough of their honor to override this travesty.

Telegraph: Heathrow airport first to fingerprint. All four million domestic passengers who will pass through Terminal 5 annually after it opens on March 27 will have four fingerprints taken, as well as being photographed, when they check in.

The culture that created the Magna Carta is utterly turning its back on liberty. The current American government merely wishes it could do stuff like this, but there’s still just enough left of the Bill of Rights to prevent it — for the time being, anyway.

I avoid Heathrow for many other reasons. This attitude on the part of the authorities there provides one more.

Saddest of all: The British people are happily letting their government turn the nation into a police state. They will rue their inaction, but probably not until it’s too late.

Boing Boing: Remixing the London police’s anti-photographer terrror posters.
Responding to the London Metropolitan Police’s new anti-photographer snitch campaign, wherein posters urge Londoners to turn in people who might be taking pictures of CCTV cameras, many people have taken a crack at redesigning the posters to point out the absurdity of them.

This is how people, creating their own media, can help expose government (and other) overreaching. Another way in this case would be to encourage everyone to take photos everywhere.

The speed with which the U.K. is turning into a police state is just amazing, and frightening.

Wall Street Journal: The Bernanke Reflation. The people who aren’t being fooled by all this are the American people. They don’t pay their bills with “core” dollar bills, and they know those dollars buy less with each passing month. This explains their rising economic anxiety — and anger — better than trade or job losses do, especially since the job market has remained relatively healthy. Inflation is the great thief of the middle class, as even Americans who don’t recall the 1970s are learning. With its all-in reflation bet, the Bernanke Fed is gambling with their money.

They are exactly right about this. To “cure” the hangover from the credit bubble — which the Fed helped create — the Fed is now aiming us into potential hyperinflation.

Scary.

I have a column running on the Guardian’s website today. It’s entitled “Freedom of information” — and is reprinted below:

What does a Swiss bank that does business in the Cayman Islands have in common with a Hong Kong actor who jets around the globe? They are object lessons this month in a reality that anyone handling information needs to understand. Like toothpaste squeezed from a tube, information, once out in the wild, is all but uncontainable.

The Julius Baer Bank is a protagonist in the now-famous Wikileaks case. The bank’s lawyers managed to persuade a US federal judge, Jeffrey White, that the first amendment of the US Constitution had no meaning, obtaining an injunction and follow-up order that, among other things, required blocking the visibility of the domain wikileaks.org in the internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). A former bank employee had posted documents on the anonymous whistle-blowing website, allegedly describing shady dealings – hmmm, Cayman Islands, Swiss banks – on behalf of clients.

“The orders don’t just direct the take down of existing content, they also enjoin any future publication of the material,” says David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society (of which I’m a co-founder). “Even more significantly, the second order requires anyone who receives notice of the order to refrain from publishing, distributing or linking to the documents.”

In a blog post on the project’s site, Ardia called the judge’s action “unthinkable”:

“He issued an order that is so broad I haven’t been able to find a single example in the US that comes close: he ordered the complete shutdown of the Wikileaks website. He did this not by ordering that the parties shut off access to the offending documents (that came in a second order), but by ordering that [Wikileaks's domain registrar] erase the ‘navigation information’ that directs people to the site … . That is like telling a newspaper it can continue to print its paper, but the delivery drivers all have to go home.”

The judge blatantly abused his power. Luckily, due to the nature of the internet and the anger of the online community, it had precisely the opposite effect of what was intended.

First, Wikileaks’s proprietors are not stupid. They have several “mirror” sites with other domain names (such as wikileaks.be) where the bank documents, among 1.2 million other documents contributed by whistle-blowers around the world, can also be found. Meanwhile, people sympathetic to Wikileaks immediately began putting up their own mirrors and distributing the documents in question. And due to the judge’s (and bank’s) utter cluelessness about how the internet actually works, the injunction (essentially a rubber-stamp of something the bank’s lawyers wrote) didn’t prevent the Wikileaks site from being visible via its more direct URL – http://88.80.13.160/ – which the DNS translates into words we recognise.

If I were a customer of that bank, I’d quickly withdraw my business on several grounds, not least the institution’s inability to keep records secure in the first instance but also the way it flailed about once the records were public. (If I were a member of the US Congress I’d be launching an official inquiry into judge White’s fitness for office as well, though Congress is not noted these days for its understanding of, much less appreciation for, the Constitution.)

But the bank’s dilemma does elicit some sympathy, and suggests a larger issue that proponents of whistle-blowing and transparency – count me loudly among them – should acknowledge. The dissemination of information may be all but unstoppable, barring an absolute crackdown on and censorship of all online data (which could never be fully effective in any event). But there are troubling implications.

Consider, in that context, the sad case of Edison Chen, a Vancouver-born actor who now makes his base in Hong Kong. He famously took photographs of himself and at least five women (sequentially, not all together) in sexual situations and stored them on his laptop computer. After he took the machine for repairs, the photos made their way to the internet, apparently copied by a technician at the shop and then put online. It is trivially easy to find the images online now.

This was not about blowing whistles on possible corruption. Chen doesn’t deserve this, however foolish he was to leave the pictures, unencrypted, on a disk that he put in someone else’s hands. The women especially don’t deserve it, however foolish they were to participate in the photo sessions. These pictures were never meant to be public, and the people who participated in their distribution – including, in my view, anyone who continues to send them around – are morally and legally wrong. (Disclosure: I did obtain them to verify how easily this could be done, and then immediately deleted them from my computer.)

Chen, the women and the authorities can and probably should pursue various legal remedies to punish whoever put the photos on the internet. Apart from asking the rest of us to be decent and honourable, however, they have few further options.

The situations of Julius Baer Bank, Edison Chen and a host of others are fodder for the control freaks of our age. Governments and big business fear their power will dissolve. Moral crusaders fear almost everything. They all quake at the consequences of what they consider liberty run amuck.

So there are powerful forces at work to clamp down on this infinitely valuable medium. It can never be a 100% solution, of course, because digital information can be encrypted, disguised and otherwise manipulated to make porous even the most seemingly impenetrable barriers. But the rich and powerful interests that want to control our lives can make it vastly more difficult to have any measure of free speech.

I tend toward the absolutist side of the argument. Yes, there are negative consequences to freedom. Liberty brings risk. We take those risks because they are essential to progress, and to fundamental human rights. Abuses by the wielders of great power are much more dangerous than those by the rest of us.

But that doesn’t absolve us from doing the right thing. Let’s keep the control freaks at bay, but exercise some self-control, too.

My friend Larry Lessig explains “why I am not running” (for Congress). I’m sorry to hear this, but his reasons are good enough for him, and therefore good enough for me.

Firedoglake: The FISA bill passed by the Senate is a disgrace. By legalizing warrantless spying on Americans and granting retroactive amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms, the Senate seeks to ensure that the Bush administration’s illegal spying programs are never investigated or subjected to the rule of law. The Senate bill is a profound betrayal of the votes of millions of Americans who voted in 2006 to put Democrats in control of Congress in order to increase, not eliminate, checks and oversight on this administration, and to restore the rule of law to our country.

The above link goes to an online petition that you will want to look at, and perhaps sign.

It is frightening to watch our elected officials systematically shred the Bill of Rights. Now they’ve given a free pass to a president and his lapdog telecommunications companies that deliberately, knowingly broke the law to vastly expand government surveillance of U.S. citizens in their own homes and businesses — we still don’t have a clue how widespread this practice was, or remains — without even the pretense of a warrant or honoring explicit legal prohibitions against such acts.

Glenn Greenwald summed it up well:

What were the consequences for the President for having broken the law so deliberately and transparently? Absolutely nothing. To the contrary, the Senate is about to enact a bill which has two simple purposes: (1) to render retroactively legal the President’s illegal spying program by legalizing its crux: warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, and (2) to stifle forever the sole remaining avenue for finding out what the Government did and obtaining a judicial ruling as to its legality: namely, the lawsuits brought against the co-conspiring telecoms. In other words, the only steps taken by our political class upon exposure by the NYT of this profound lawbreaking is to endorse it all and then suppress any and all efforts to investigate it and subject it to the rule of law.

No one who cares about national security — and that includes people who oppose this abdication of duty by the senators — has ever opposed surveillance on actual terrorists or suspects. A system in place for several decades has ensured timely surveillance, and after the fact approval by a special court (a rubber stamp, for the most part). But it has at least ensured that Americans aren’t spied upon by their government without any oversight by anyone.

Yesterday’s majority comprises people who no longer believe that liberty matters. They do believe that power is all, and they and their friends hold it at the moment. They are people who believe that the rest of us answer to increasingly draconian laws and the people at the top answer to no one but themselves. This line of thinking appears to apply almost universally in the Republican party, and widely among elected Democrats.

Not a single Republican — what bogus “conservatism” they practice — voted to hold these companies, never mind the lawless administration, responsible for their lawbreaking; instead Republican senators, and a crew of Democrats who followed like the political cowards they have become, voted to make the criminal behavior legal. John McCain voted against an amendment that would have taken away this retroactive immunity for criminal corporations. Obama voted for the amendment but didn’t vote on the final bill. Clinton was entirely absent; she has little credibility on civil liberties in any case.

I wonder if people who call themselves conservatives are comfortable about having given this kind of power to a President Obama. Possibly, because they probably believe his actual honor will prevent him from abusing it against them. Do they rely on the same notions regarding a President Hillary Clinton, who may soon enough be wielding this power in a brutal fashion against her many enemies, not just terrorism suspects? She is at least as ruthless, I suspect, as Bush, Cheney and their collaborators. For all the wrong reasons, they may come to regret their lockstep dismantling of civil liberties during the current administration.

There are few heroes in this sad tale. One semi-heroic organization is the New York Times, which broke the story about this lawbreaking but held it, at the fervent request of the Bush administration, for more than a year — a story it knew about during the 2004 campaign but kept under wraps until after Bush had won another term in office. For all that, right-wing critics called for the newspaper’s prosecution.

The other hero is Connecticut’s Democratic senator, Chris Dodd, who made restoring presidential lawfulness a centerpiece of his failed campaign for the nomination and who fought this bill, hard. He is a champion of liberty, a true one.

Now it’s up to the House of Representatives to hold firm on at least keeping corporate America halfway honest. It’s too likely that the Democrats there will fold as well, but let’s hope for the best.

The first step toward a police state is to create a surveillance state, and to let the powerful collaborators in this practice break laws with impunity. We are now moving down a path that should make true patriots fear for the future of the republic.

Couched in bogus language like “waterboarding,” a torture technique that this country used to convict Japanese soldiers of war crimes after World War II, our government has made it official that we feel free to torture people.

This is un-American. But it’s just one more example of the corruption of this nation in the past few years.

And it will come back to haunt us. We have just given permission to the rest of the world to torture Americans if they choose.

We should be ashamed. Too many of us are not.

The Citizen Media Law Project has launched the first iteration of its Legal Guide, which

addresses the legal issues you may encounter as you gather information and publish your work. The guide is intended for use by citizen media creators with or without formal legal training, as well as others with an interest in these issues. You can search by keyword, browse by state, browse by section, or simply jump right in.

This is prodigious work by David Ardia, Sam Bayard and a team of interns at Harvard Law School. Congratulations to all.

BBC: Afghan senate backs death penalty. Afghanistan’s upper house of parliament has issued a statement backing a death sentence for a journalist for blasphemy in northern Afghanistan. Pervez Kambakhsh, 23, was convicted last week of downloading and distributing an article insulting Islam. He has denied the charge. The UN has criticised the sentence and said the journalist did not have legal representation during the case.

This case shocks the conscience. Journalists — all of us — should be trying hard to stop this outrage.

If Afghanistan kills this man it will lose support from people who care about liberty, and at a time when it most needs that support. Surely Americans will ask themselves why our soldiers are dying to preserve such a loathsome regime. I know I will.