Recommended Reading

January 24, 2012 "TSA: Fail"
February 2012 "2013 Federal Budget Limits Body Scanners, But Expands Domestic Surveillance"
February 2, 2012 "U.S. Press Freedom Fell 27 Places Last Year to 47th in the World"
February 9, 2012 "Silent State: The Campaign Against Whistleblowers in Washington"
February 23, 2012 "Groups Protest CIA's Covert Attack on Public Access"
March 5, 2012 "A Broken Writ, a Kangaroo Court"
March 6, 2012 "How To Get Anything Through TSA Nude Body Scanners"
March 9, 2012 "Sealing Loose Lips: Charting Obama's Crackdown on Leaks"
March 23, 2012 "Documents Show NYPD Spied on Liberal Political Groups"
April 19, 2012 "FAA Releases Lists of Drone Certificates--Many Questions Left Unanswered"
April 26, 2012 "Is CISPA SOPA 2.0? We Explain the Cybersecurity Bill"
April 28, 2012 "You Are All Suspects Now. What Are You Going to Do About It?"
April 29, 2012 "The Obama Contradiction: Weakling at Home, Imperial President Abroad"
April 30, 2012 "What happens when government is no longer by the people"
April 30, 2012 "Imperialism didn't end. These days it's known as international law"
May 1, 2012 "Since bin Laden's death"
May 1, 2012 "Osama bin Laden's death has had zero impact on America's security"
May 2, 2012 "Police Warrant Squads Were Used to Monitor Wall Street Protestors, Suspects Say"
May 2, 2012 "Police Adapts Tactics, Use 'Snatch and Grab' Arrests During May Day"
May 2, 2012 "Violence, USA: The Warfare State and the Brutalizing of Everyday Life"
May 4, 2012 "The real threats the government ignores"
May 4, 2012 "TSA Reveals Passenger Complaints ... Four Years Later"
May 4, 2012 "FBI: We need wiretap-ready Web sites - now"
May 6, 2012 "Fareed's Take: U.S. has made war on terror a war without end"
May 7, 2012 "Media silent when administration targets sources"
May 8, 2012 "The Trouble with Profiling"
May 9, 2012 "An Enduring Condition: On War Time"
May 10, 2012 "Obama's predilection for military force"
May 10, 2012 "Timeline: How Obama Compares to Bush on Torture, Surveillance and Detention"
May 11, 2012 "Americans want to slash defense spending, but Washington isn't listening"
May 15, 2012 "The National Security State Wins (Again): Why the Real Victor in Campaign 2012 Won't Be Obama or Romney"
May 15, 2012 "How FBI Entrapment Is Inventing 'Terrorists' - and Letting Bad Guys Off the Hook"
May 16, 2012 "Ninth Circuit Presses Government Lawyer on Watch Lists: 'What Would You Do?'"
May 18, 2012 "Congressmen Seek To Lift Propaganda Ban"
May 20, 2012 "Welcome, Nato, to Chicago's police state"
May 22, 2012 "FBI quietly forms secretive Net-surveillance unit"
June 6, 2012 "Muslims sue to stop NYPD spying program"
June 8, 2012 "The War on Whistleblowers"
June 10, 2012 "Daniel Klaidman's love affair with drones"
June 11, 2012 "Obama's drone wars and the normalisation of extrajudicial murder"
June 13, 2012 "U.S. drones deeply unpopular around the world"
June 13, 2012 "U.S. expands secret intelligence operations in Africa"
June 18, 2012 "NSA: It Would Violate Your Privacy to Say if We Spied on You"
June 19, 2012 "House Committee Approves Sweeping, Warrantless Electronic Spy Powers"
June 21, 2012 "Poland shaken by case alleging an illicit CIA prison there"
June 21, 2012 "Obama Administration: It's Totally Possible a Yemeni Drone Killed Anwar al-Awlaki"
June 21, 2012 "Drone strikes threaten 50 years of international law, says UN rapporteur"
July 11, 2012 "How Many Millions of Cellphones Are Police Watching?"
June 13, 2012 "That's No Phone. That's My Tracker"
July 13, 2012 "White House gives Homeland Security control of all communications systems"
July 17, 2012 "MBTA adding thousands of security cameras, thanks to federal grants"

Recommended Reading: Drones Edition

March 1, 2012 "How Obama's drone war is backfiring"
April 16, 2012 "The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War in Secret"
May 1, 2012 "'Targeted Killing' Policy Disregards Human Rights Law"
May 2, 2012 "Why the Obama Administration's Drone War May Soon Reach a Tipping Point"
May 11, 2012 "Why is the New York Times enabling a U.S. government smear campaign against reporters exposing the drone wars?"
May 13, 2012 "America as a Shining Drone Upon a Hill: On Staring Death in the Face and Not Noticing"
May 21, 2012 "Drones, missiles and gunships: Welcome to the 2012 London Olympics"
May 22, 2012 "Drones' new weapon: P.R."
May 29, 2012 "Under Obama, Men Killed by Drones Are Presumed to Be Terrorists"
May 29, 2012 "Obama set to arm Italy's drones in milestone move"
May 29, 2012 "America's murderous drone campaign is fuelling terror"
May 30, 2012 "How Obama is helping al Qaeda"
June 2, 2012 "Journalism in the service of killing"
June 2, 2012 "We are sleepwalking into the Drone Age, unaware of the consequences"
June 5, 2012 "Praying at the Church of St. Drone: The President and His Apostles"
June 6, 2012 "U.S. Attacks, Online and From the Air, Fuel Secrecy Debate"
June 8, 2012 "What We Misunderstand About Drones"

Just a Reminder

Backscatter scanner:














Millimeter wave scanner:

Recommended Reading

April 28, 2010 "Drone Pilots Could Be Tried for 'War Crimes,' Law Prof Says"
September 11, 2011 "The 9/11 Decade and the Decline of U.S. Democracy"
October 2, 2011 "Will drone strikes become Obama's Guantanamo?"
November 7, 2011 "The CIA's unaccountable drone war claims another casualty"
December 1, 2011 "He was 22...She was 12...: Lessons From the Dead in a No-Learning-Curve World"
December 8, 2011 "Fighting 1% Wars: Why Our Wars of Choice May Prove Fatal"
December 16, 2011 "The Defense Bill Passed. So What Does It Do?"
December 19, 2011 "Sweating Bullets: Body Scanners Can See Perspiration as a Potential Weapon"
December 20, 2011 "The Drone That Fell From the Sky: What a Busted Robot Airplane Tells Us About the American Empire in 2012 and Beyond"
December 20, 2011 "Smoke Screening"
December 21, 2011 "Did Congress Just Endorse Rendition for Americans?"
December 30, 2011 "Was Teen Killed By CIA Drone a Militant--or Innocent Victim?"
January 4, 2012 "Speeding Up Security: The TSA Wants to Screen Before They Scan"
January 9, 2012 "The TSA Proves its Own Irrelevance"
January 10, 2012 "WaPo Censors Iran Sanctions' Regime Change Intent"
January 16, 2012 "DHS media monitoring could chill public dissent, EPIC warns"
February 4, 2012 "Obama terror drones: CIA tactics in Pakistan include targeting rescuers and funerals"
February 8, 2012 "Democrat balks over secrecy on Awlaki killing"
February 9, 2012 "Suit challenges new Guantanamo mail rule"
February 11, 2012 "Righteous indignation rant of the day"
February 28, 2012 "Exclusive: Homeland Security Kept Tabs on Occupy Wall Street"
March 2012 "EPIC v. Department of Homeland Security: Media Monitoring"
March 5, 2012 "When the US Government Can Kill You, Explained"
March 8, 2012 "Rogers' 'Cybersecurity' Bill Is Broad Enough to Use Against WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay"
March 13, 2012 "Trumpeting the Superpower Status Quo"
March 15, 2012 "Occupy Miami Raided, SWAT Team Draws Weapons on Children"
March 16, 2012 "Democratic Senators Issue Strong Warning About Use of the Patriot Act"
March 18, 2012 "Ever More and Ever Less: The Unstoppable Legacy of the War on Terror"
March 21, 2012 "NSA Chief Denies Domestic Spying But Whistleblowers Say Otherwise"
March 22, 2012 "Will Democrats Strip Civil Liberties from Their 2012 Platform?"
March 22, 2012 "Repress U, Class of 2012: Seven Steps to a Homeland Security Campus"
March 22, 2012 "Govt to keep info on Americans with no terror ties"
March 29, 2012 "Secrets and Lies"
March 29, 2012 "US anti-terrorism law curbs free speech and activist work, court told"
March 30, 2012 "Fighting Terrorism, French-Style"
April 3, 2012 "Data Mining You: How the Intelligence Community Is Creating a New American World"
April 8, 2012 "U.S. filmmaker repeatedly detained at border"
April 8, 2012 "Special report: Rendition ordeal that raises new questions about secret trials"
April 11, 2012 "The Maddow Doctrine: We Need to Make War Hard Again"
April 16, 2012 "Personalizing civil liberties abuses"
April 18, 2012 "Why I'm suing the US government to protect internet freedom"
April 20, 2012 "CIA wants to expand campaign to kill men with guns and beards"
May 1, 2012 "Charts: The Real Cost of Killing Bin Laden"
May 8, 2012 "Could airport scanners detect latest Al Qaeda non-metal bomb?"
May 8, 2012 "Plot Shows War On Terror Failure"

The Uses of Sexual Humiliation

Naomi Wolf has written a terrific article in The Guardian that sums up the truly scary Florence ruling and all its implications:

The political use of forced nudity by anti-democratic regimes is long established. Forcing people to undress is the first step in breaking down their sense of individuality and dignity and reinforcing their powerlessness....

I interviewed the equivalent of TSA workers in Britain and found that the genital groping that is obligatory in the US is illegal in Britain. I believe that the genital groping policy in America, too, is designed to psychologically habituate US citizens to a condition in which they are demeaned and sexually intruded upon by the state--at any moment.

I am so grateful for Wolf's article. More people need to be saying things like this.

Why No One Cares

I've been trying to figure out why so few people in this country care about civil liberties. (I was going to add "anymore," but that's assuming they ever did, and I'm not convinced that's true.) Almost every day, it seems, there's a new law, executive order, policy shift, or Supreme Court decision that violates our ostensibly sacred Constitutional rights or the dictates of international law, all in the name of national security or law enforcement. Police officers spy on law-abiding Muslim students, pepper-spray non-violent protesters, conduct stop-and-frisk and "suspicionless" searches (talk about an Orwellian phrase), and Taser people at traffic stops. The no-fly list is so monstrous as to be useless, and electronic strip-searches have become ubiquitous. The DHS monitors social-networking sites for criticism of its policies. (Hi, guys!) The FAA is changing its rules to allow unmanned drones in U.S. airspace. The NSA is building a "spy center" in the Utah desert five times the size of the U.S. Capitol. Nowadays, even indefinite detention and targeted assassination elicit responses ranging from vociferous support to an apathetic shrug. Not to worry, though: apparently a private meeting in the Oval Office qualifies as "due process." Of course, government officials would prefer to keep their Constitution-shredding policies as quiet as possible and will relentlessly pursue anyone who tries to tell the American people what their own public servants are doing. But at least we still have the right to free speech...as long as we stay within the confines of the "free speech zones" the authorities so graciously provide for us.

What's happening here? I wait for the outrage, but it never comes. Some of the above items made it into the headlines of major news outlets for a day or two before they disappeared. Each story follows a predictable pattern:

1. The administration enacts the policy quietly, usually on a Friday afternoon to avoid press scrutiny.
2. Civil libertarians react with an angry and/or bewildered: "Say, what?"
3. Supporters of the policy (wealthy defense contractors, politicians angling for re-election, etc.) fear-monger about terrorism, opine that "everything changed on 9/11," and marginalize said civil libertarians as radical, unhinged, anti-government whack-jobs or long-haired hippie Occupyers who can't face reality.
4. The story vanishes from the headlines and the public consciousness, quickly normalized and incorporated into the National Security State.

Not a peep of protest from anyone in a position to do anything, Democrat or Republican. The halls of Congress resound with the usual chest-pounding and saber-rattling by politicians eager to shore up their anti-terrorism bona fides. Cite the Constitution and discuss implications as much as you like, your words will fall on deaf ears. Sometimes a lawsuit works its way through the courts, only to be quashed by the uber-conservative judiciary. Maybe a celebrity or other public figure comes up against the policy, makes a YouTube video detailing their experiences, and it briefly makes headlines again. But read the articles closely: most of the People on the Street^TM interviewed for the article have already accepted the new normal. They are quoted saying things like: "Well, as long as it keeps us safe..." or "I'm not doing anything wrong, so what's the big deal?" The blind trust boggles my mind.

I was thinking about this pattern again recently when I read about the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders that a person arrested, even for a minor offense, may be strip-searched at will, regardless of whether prisons officials "suspect the presence of contraband." Justice Anthony Kennedy, once again the deciding vote, apparently thinks courts shouldn't "second-guess" the decisions of corrections officers. I'd love the opportunity to ask Justice Kennedy and the other four pro-strip-search justices of that illustrious body a series of questions:

1. Who should second-guess the decisions of corrections officers, if not you? What the hell are courts for, anyway?
2. Do you believe corrections officers should be given the same free rein we've given to law-enforcement officers, national security agencies, private military companies, etc.?
3. How can I get in on that action?
4. Are there any government entities which should be subject to oversight?
5. Have you ever been strip-searched? Would you consent to a strip-search before deciding to inflict the procedure on other people, many of them innocent?

Of course, I know the answers to these questions, but I'd love to ask them just the same. What I don't know is what, if anything, will happen next. I certainly don't expect much in the way of checks and balances from either of the other two branches of government. In fact, Barack Obama's Justice Department urged the Court to rule in favor of the strip-search law. Congress, meanwhile, is populated by self-serving politicians desperate to keep their jobs and therefore averse to taking any unpopular stand. And let's face it, civil libertarians are a distinct minority.

The humiliation suffered by Albert Florence, the plaintiff in the case (and innocent of the crime for which he was arrested, by the way!), is heartbreaking. And now all arrestees will be subject to the same treatment, without the requirement of "probable cause" and without any legal recourse. This includes not just men and women charged with murder, rape, assault, or drug offenses, but also those detained for trespassing or protesting or living in this country without legal documentation. The threat of a degrading strip search in front of an audience will no doubt be an effective tool for intimidation, along with the others I've already mentioned. Is there any line that, if crossed, will finally make people sit up and take notice?

Why don't people care? The first and easiest answer is fear. The collective PTSD from which this country has been suffering since the 9/11 attacks clearly hasn't abated. Since that day, the American people have seen existential threats around every corner. But I think the answer is a little more nuanced than that. The truth is, most people's lives will not be affected by the Florence ruling or by the PATRIOT Act, illegal wiretaps, indefinite detention, or any of the other manifestations of the National Security State. The vast majority of People on the Street^TM will never be more than a little inconvenienced by our massive military, intelligence, and law-enforcement apparatus (aside from economically, of course), while those directly affected are, for the most part, powerless to do anything about it. And it's easy to discount the rights of powerless minorities: prisoners, the poor, immigrants, Muslims. Americans who loudly proclaim their love of the Constitution in the abstract often start to equivocate when it comes to specifics. "Free speech!" is soon qualified with "...as long as you don't burn a flag or criticize Israel or join a protest march..." People who soliloquize about freedom and small government and personal liberty aren't always prepared to extend those privileges to everyone. Why do red-light cameras make some people angry enough to join an anti-government militia and fight the coming police state, while extraordinary rendition and extrajudicial assassination barely register? Because those things are happening to somebody else. Somebody who probably deserves it, right?

Albert Florence didn't.

Recommended Reading

January 23, 2011 "Domestic use of aerial drones by law enforcement likely to prompt privacy debate"
April 26, 2011 "Free Bradley Manning"
September 27, 2011 "Even Those Cleared of Crimes Can Stay on F.B.I.'s Watch List"
September 30, 2011 "CIA Drone Slays American Citizen in Yemen"
October 20, 2011 "Is the National Security Complex Too Big to Fail?"
October 21, 2011 "The Iraq War Ain't Over, No Matter What Obama Says"
October 21, 2011 "About that Iraq withdrawal"
October 24, 2011 "Government Could Hide Existence of Records under FOIA Rule Proposal"
October 28, 2011 "Police Disguise Protest Sabotage As Public Safety"
October 29, 2011 "U.S. Planning Troop Buildup in Gulf After Exit From Iraq"
November 3, 2011 "Pakistani civilian victims vent anger over US drones"
November 4, 2011 "CIA Drones Kill Large Groups Without Knowing Who They Are"
November 27, 2011 "Idea of civilians using drone aircraft may soon fly with FAA"
November 29, 2011 "Senate Approves Requiring Military Custody in Terror Cases"
December 1, 2011 "Congress endorsing military detention, a new AUMF"
December 2, 2011 "A Little Straight Talk on National Defense"
December 12, 2011 "The growing menace of domestic drones"
December 15, 2011 "Obama to sign indefinite detention bill into law"
December 20, 2011 "VIPR: TSA extends policy that preys on the innocent"
December 20, 2011 "TSA Seeks to Expand the Airport Experience Into Everyday Life"
December 21, 2011 "Local police stockpile high-tech, combat-ready gear"
December 23, 2011 "2011 in Review: The Year Secrecy Jumped the Shark"
December 27, 2011 "TSA Agents On Patrol at Union Station to Conduct 'Suspicionless' Spot Searches"
December 28, 2011 "Report: Scant Oversight in Obama's Drone War"
December 31, 2011 "With reservations, Obama signs act to allow indefinite detention of U.S. citizens"
January 23, 2012 "Supreme Court: Warrants needed in GPS tracking"