"Civil-rights groups and immigration advocacy organizations are protesting one element in the government's security procedures announced yesterday in anticipation of war in Iraq--a decision to jail asylum seekers from dozens of mostly Muslim nations while officials check out their claims of persecution in their home countries."

"It's a shocking development,'' Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil-rights group, said of the asylum policy. "Many asylum applications can take years. It seems unfair to put people in jail who are escaping persecution and who have done nothing wrong just because they are from certain countries.''

Agree or disagree about whether we should go to war Glenn Reynolds makes a good point on his MSNBC blog:

It's pretty obvious that, barring a miracle of some sort, we'll be at war shortly. And my next advice is equally applicable to war supporters and opponents: Keep your eye on the civil-liberties ball, and don't be distracted.
I predicted on September 11 itself (and in this column just a couple of days afterward) that bureaucrats would take advantage of 9/11 to slip through items that had been on their wishlists for years, and they did. There's now a "Patriot II" bill floating around in draft form. I wouldn't be surprised to see someone try to slip it through Congress while everyone's attention is on the war. Most members of Congress who voted on the original "Patriot Act" hadn't even read the bill (which makes them unpatriotic in my estimation -- what about that oath they take?)

Let's not let it happen again. Keep your eyes open.

That was our exact sentiment last month, as we posted here. Watch out, because once surrendered, rights are very difficult to get back.

"Senator Ron Wyden (D.-Ore.), who earlier this year spearheaded an effort to cut off funding for the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program, won Senate Commerce Committee approval last week of an amendment to require Congressional oversight of the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II) being developed by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA)."

Along with Ashcroft's expanded reach on terror and spying, come concerns...and not just from the left.

Even some of his conservative peers complain that Mr. Ashcroft may have grown too powerful. To his critics, Mr. Ashcroft is a Big Brother figure: an attorney general whose expanding scope has allowed the Justice Department to use wiretaps, backroom decisions, and an expanded street presence to spy on ordinary Americans, read their e-mail messages, or monitor their library checkouts, all in the name of fighting terrorism. And the department's consideration of proposals that could give it still greater, secret counterterrorism authority has provoked a fresh round of concerns.

Among Ashcroft's contributions are these:

He has given agents new powers to spy on possible terrorists, detain suspects and look for patterns that could predict terrorist attacks. He has centralized power at the Justice Department among a small inner circle of political appointees, frustrating some career officials and prosecutors in the field who complain that the attorney general has undercut their authority in order to further his own agenda. And, working with the White House, he and his aides have pushed for a more conservative ideology on the judiciary and on appellate issues like the Michigan affirmative action case being considered by the Supreme Court.

This is a very long article, we recommend reading the whole thing. It contains far more praise for Ashcroft than we like to see in a news article, but it also presents some of the criticism. It is distressing to see how Ashcroft and his supporters justify the erosion of our rights in the name of fighting terrorism when so few of his proposals are likely to be effective in making us safer.

"The Chinese Government has ordered the Rolling Stones to drop four of their best-known songs from their concerts in the country next month, according to a tour organiser.

The band were told they cannot play Brown Sugar, Honky Tonk Woman, Beast of Burden and Let's Spend the Night Together, said Chen Jixin, head of Beijing Time New Century Entertainment.
The Stones are due to play two concerts in the country, in Shanghai on 1 April and in Beijing on 4 April. "

From a Professor at the University of Idaho regarding last week's pre-dawm visa raid by 120 armed FBI agents at the University of Idaho:

Well, yesterday was an exciting day in my small town. The FBI flew in 120 agents, fully armed in riot gear, on two C-17 military aircraft (I think -- they were BIG planes) to Moscow Idaho (population 17,000 +/-) to arrest one Saudi graduate student for visa fraud. The raid went down in University of Idaho student housing at 4:30 a.m. in the morning, terrorizing not only the suspect's family (he lived in student housing with his wife and three elementary school age children) but also the families of neighboring students who were awakened by the shouting and lights and were required to remain in their homes until after 8:30 a.m.

At least 20 other students who had the misfortune to either know the suspect or to have some minor immigration irregularities were also subjected to substantial, surprise interrogations (4+ hours) although none were detained or arrested yesterday. Now, however, a witch hunt for additional unamed suspects who supposedly helped the guy who was arrested is on.

The INS and FBI are working together using gestapo tactics to question the students -- threatening their immigration status (and hence their education) if they don't answer questions which are really aimed at the criminal investigation. They have also threatened their partners and spouses with perjury charges if they don't talk.

I spent yesterday working with our immigration clinic director and local criminal defense attorneys to organize legal representation for the students who are being swept into the hunt for co-conspiritors. We have reached out to our entire area (40 -mile radius) to find enough attorneys. Now I'm working on getting resources and support to them.

The Saudi government is providing financial support. Reading about this stuff is one thing. Having it in your backyard is another. The international students at the University of Idaho are terrorized and scared.

Rrelated links:

DOJ

More

USA Today

Thanks to Peter Goldberger, Esq., appellate whiz, of Ardmore, PA for the information.

Red Alert for Bill of Rights by Nat Hentoff is up at the Village Voice. It's another Ashcroft bashing, this time for Patriot Act II. How's this for an opening quote?

"This nation . . . has no right to expect that it always will have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. . . . [If] the calamities of war again befall us, the dangers to human liberty are frightful to contemplate. --United States Supreme Court, Ex Parte Milligan, 1866, declaring Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and other abuses of the Bill of Rights unconstitutional

If you'd like to know more about Patriot Act II, here's the ACLU's 19 page analysis.

There is a boycott of Delta Airlines in place for their participation in CAPPS II.

What is CAPPS II? It stands for Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II. As we wrote here earlier this week,

It is a new security program of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) that subjects airline passengers to more stringent screening that involves checking personal financial and other information and assigning a color-coded threat level to each passenger. The vast majority of passengers will be rated green and subjected to only the usual checks; those rated yellow will undergo more thorough screening, and those rated red won't be allowed to fly. It went into effect on Feburary 24. It is at place in three airports. Only Delta airlines is cooperating so far but officials are expecting to extend it to Northwest Airlines and other airlines within the next 10 to 16 months.

What does Delta's participation mean? From the boycott site:

WHAT WILL DELTA DO?

Run a credit check on you; Investigate your banking history; Run a criminal background check.

You will then be assigned your own Threat Assessment Color. Greens will pass through security as normal. Yellows would require additional screening. Reds are not allowed to fly.

How will they determine what color you are? No one knows. Does a bad credit rating make you a terrorist? No one knows. Will an unpaid parking ticket flag you ‘red’? No one knows.

WHAT DO WE KNOW?

For starters, this is an incredible invasion of privacy. All the information gathered will be stored for fifty (50!) years on computers that may or may not be safe from malicious hackers out to steal your identity... By their own admission, Delta’s computer servers are attacked over 500 times a day.

DELTA : CREDIT KILLER

Every time a credit report is run on you, it hurts your credit rating. Frequent fliers will not only have a nice thick Delta dossier, but a damaged credit history to boot.

Zero Base Thinking has more.

Eric Muller of IsThatLegal got a phone call today from Rep. Howard Coble, whom Muller has been pursuing relentlessly for his comments on the WWII Japanese Interment camps. Eric softens somewhat after the call, but not entirely.

Good move on Coble's part--it's always easer to attack someone you've never met. In our experience, while views don't change because of in-face or voice conversations, the tone with with criticism is delivered is likely to become more modulated.

The offending t-shirt.

"The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has confirmed that it is testing a new security program that subjects airline passengers to more stringent screening that involves checking personal financial and other information and assigning a threat level to each passenger."

The program is called Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II (CAPPS II). It is at place in three airports. Only Delta airlines is cooperating so far, "but officials expect it to be rolled out to all passengers at Northwest Airlines and other carriers within the next 10 to 16 months."

CAPPS II is drawing fire from civil liberties groups and privacy advocates, who say it will collect an unprecedented amount of data on individuals and give no assurance of accuracy. They also say the plan lacks sufficient controls over who would have access to the information.

"The federal government now has the authority to seize information from wherever they can grab it, whether or not it's accurate, to create a dossier on you," said Charles Samuelson, executive director of the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union. "The TSA claims these records are going to be restricted, but according to these regulations, they're not. They're so open-ended that damn near anybody has access to these records."

The data collected would include bank records, credit reports and some law enforcement data, according to transportation officials.

The system rates passengers' risk potential under a color code. The vast majority of passengers will be rated green and subjected to only the usual checks; those rated yellow will undergo more thorough screening, and those rated red won't be allowed to fly. According to regulations published in the Jan. 15 Federal Register, a government publication, the system went into effect Feb. 24.

So far only Delta Airlines is particpating. Northwest will join in shortly. Mother Jones has more in Terror and Bad Credit.

Dubbed the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II, the program would analyze each passenger's financial records, along with other sources, then assign travelers a color-coded terrorist risk level. Under the system, green means all-clear to fly; yellow means more in-depth screening is needed; red means you're riding Greyhound. Not surprisingly, civil liberties groups are up in arms over the program. ...."'The federal government now has the authority to seize information from wherever they can grab it, whether or not it's accurate, to create a dossier on you,' said Charles Samuelson, executive director of the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union. 'The TSA claims these records are going to be restricted, but according to these regulations, they're not. They're so open-ended that damn near anybody has access to these records.'

Jan Glidewell in the St. Petersberg Times says this program is not something to shrug off--and questions its ability to catch terrorists.

In case you weren't listening closely, that "thunk" you just heard was another chunk of your civil rights hitting the floor in the name of homeland security.

I'm talking about CAPPS-II, the second generation of the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System, with which the government now wants to pry into your credit and banking records before deciding whether you can board an airplane.

I guess if you are overdrawn on your checking account or in serious arrears with the Book of the Month Club, you automatically become some sort of a threat.

Now the government plans on snooping through my credit and banking records to see if I am patriotic enough to fly. Guess I'd better juice it up by using my credit cards to buy some of those "America, Love It or Leave It" bumper stickers and making conspicuous contributions to the Republican National Committee. And that's part of what makes all of his silly in a Condition Yellow (if that's what it is today) America.

Is it going to take hijackers long to figure out that they should use something other than their Bank of Baghdad MasterCard to buy tickets?

Update: Boycott Delta

"GUILDERLAND, N.Y., March 5 - The management at Crossgates Mall Wednesday asked the Guilderland Police Department to drop the trespassing charges against a Selkirk man. This came after about 100 protestors descended on Crossgates Mall that afternoon. Their "Mall Walk for Peace" protested the arrest of 60-year-old Stephen Downs, who was charged with trespassing Monday night when he wouldn't leave the mall after he refused to remove his T-shirt bearing a peace message." [link via Atrios]