The First Amendment wilts on the streets

Serious journalism has always been a dangerous business. It continues to be dangerous now, even for folks who want to make a record of how law enforce officers are cracking down on people reporting on protestors expressing their First Amendment rights. Tim Karr of Free Press reports:

While it’s important to take a day to recognize our right to speak and share information, threats to our First Amendment freedoms happen all the time, everywhere. It's a threat that will become very real on the streets of Chicago this weekend as a new breed of journalists and onlookers attempt to cover the protests surrounding the NATO summit. Just ask Carlos Miller. The photojournalist has been arrested three times. His “crime?” Attempting to photograph police actions in the U.S. Most recently, in January, Miller was filming the eviction of Occupy Wall Street activists from a park in downtown Miami. In a twist that’s become too familiar to many, the journalist became the story as police focused their crackdown on the scrum of reporters there to cover the eviction. Miller came face to face with Officer Nancy Perez, who confiscated his camera and placed him under arrest.

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Precursor to newest Constitutional Amendment: Only the government may own cameras

Long Island police make mother of three pay for taking photos of decorative helicopter in front of airport. This case involving Nancy Genovese is but one of many cases where law enforcement officers have been exposed for harassing and hurting people who are guilty of absolutely nothing. It's a long trend here in the United States. The government can spy all it wants, while the people are increasingly prohibited from expressing themselves or even from being curious. A lot of people are squeamish about Wikileaks, but it Wikileaks is an organization that does nothing different than the New York Times claims to be doing, yet the United States has illegally forced it into submission. And although Nancy Genovese did not claim to be doing serious investigative journalism, the American Vision News reports that she was was acting as a citizen journalist:

Nancy Genovese stopped her car on the side of the road across the street from the airport in an area that is open and accessible to the public, and crossed over the road to the airport entryway that is also open and accessible to the public to take a picture of the helicopter display. While still in her car, she took a picture of the decorative helicopter shell with the intention of posting it on her personal “Support Our Troops” web page.

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John Yoo is immune from civil suits based on torture invited by his memos

John Yoo, the Bush attorney who authored memos authorizing torture is immune from civil lawsuit invited by his memos, based on a recent ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. This ruling is unsurprising, in that it comports with a disturbing trend. Glenn Greenwald explains: [C]onsider these two facts:

(1) not a single War on Terror victim — not one — has been permitted to sue for damages in an American court over what was done to them, even when everyone admits they were completely innocent, even when they were subjected to the most brutal torture, and even when the judiciary of other countries permitted their lawsuits to proceed; and, (2) not a single government official — not one — has been held legally accountable, either criminally or even civilly, for any War on Terror crimes or abuses; perversely, the only government officials to pay any price were the ones who blew the whistle on those crimes. That is how history will record the behavior of American federal judges in the face of the post-9/11 onslaught of anti-Muslim persecution and relentless erosions of core rights.
The trend is further supported by a recent report that out of almost 1800 FISA requests (most for eavesdropping) filed by the federal government in 2011, none of them were denied. This statistic begs for the following commentary by Greenwald:
This is a perfect expression of how the federal judiciary, in general, behaves in the face of claims of National Security from the Executive Branch: as an impotent, eager rubber-stamping servant.

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Federal judiciary unmoved by CIA blatant misconduct

Glenn Greenwald has documented more CIA abuse, this time with a nod of approval by the federal courts:

In November, 2010, the Obama DOJ — consistent with its steadfast shielding of Bush-era criminals from all forms of accountability — announced that the investigation would be closed without any charges being filed. Needless to say — given how subservient federal judges are to the Executive Branch in the post-9/11 era — the federal judge who had ordered the CIA to preserve and produce any such videotapes, Alvin Hellerstein, refused even to hold the CIA in contempt for deliberately disregarding his own order. Instead, Hellerstein — who, like so many federal judges, spent his whole career before joining the bench as a partner for decades in a large corporate law firm serving institutional power — reasoned that punishment for the CIA was unnecessary because, as he put it, new rules issued by the CIA “should lead to greater accountability within the agency and prevent another episode like the videotapes’ destruction.” In other words, as I put it in a Guardian Op-Ed about Hellerstein’s CIA-protecting decision: the CIA has promised not to do this again, so they shouldn’t be punished for the crimes they committed.
The story gets much worse, as Greenwald describes how Jose Rodriguez, is now gloating about how he destroyed the these torture videos. He is doing this with the view, apparently correct, that no law enforcement authority and no court is going to do anything about any of his misconduct.

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Illegal downloading: more like trespass than stealing

This ABC news report reframes what it means to illegally download intellectual property.

[Professor Stuart Green from Rutgers University Law School] says illegal downloading is more similar to the crime of trespass than it is to theft. "To say that there was a trespass is traditionally understood to mean that there was a temporary use of someone's property without permission," he said. "If someone trespasses on your property it means that they've come uninvited but they haven't deprived you of use. They haven't deprived you of the basic possession of the property. "But to say that someone's stolen something is to say something much more serious. It's probably the single most substantial form of property crime that we have. "And that's exactly what the music and movie industries in the United States would like to happen. They want people to think that illegal downloading is just as bad and should be punished just as severely."

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