Crackberries beware. If your phone is being wiretapped by the feds, or at the state level in California, Arizona and Illinois, to name a few places, your text messages are being read as well.

Chicago Police will start intercepting text messages during their investigations now that Gov. Blagojevich has signed a bill expanding state-authorized wiretaps beyond "oral communication."

Lt. John Rowton of the Chicago Police Narcotics and Gang Investigation Section said the department will dismantle computer software that blocks text messages that are retrieved during state-authorized wiretaps of phones. The feds already have the capability to intercept text messages, but Illinois law had lagged behind other states such as California and Arizona, Rowton said.

"This is a great tool," Rowton said of the new law. "We have done wiretaps where you get a text message at a crucial time and are in the dark. You don't know what you are missing."

This is just another step down the road of intruding on our private conversations in the name of fighting crime. With a wiretap, the listening agents are required to minimize (stop listening) to the call once they determine it is not pertinent to the matter they are investigating. How do they do that with a text message?

The ACLU will be filing suit today against random subway bag searches.

The lawsuit, to be filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that the searches are "virtually certain neither to catch any person trying to carry explosives into the subway nor to deter such an effort." It also says that many riders have been selected in a "discriminatory and arbitrary" manner, creating the potential for racial profiling.

Also check out TalkLeft's 4th Amendment subway tote (click on larger version.) Somehow, it seems appropriate to hand a bag that reminds the officer of the wording of that great Amendment as he or she is searching through your personal items without a warrant or probable cause.

by TChris

Alberto Gonzales, speaking for the Bush administration, has taken a surprisingly rational position that won't find support among right wing extremists who have labored to make it difficult to vote:

The Voting Rights Act has been one of the most successful pieces of civil rights legislation ever enacted and should be reauthorized, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday.

...

He said particular emphasis has been placed on requirements that election materials be translated for voters who speak English as a second language. The department has filed more cases on the minority-language provisions in the past four years than in the previous 26 years those requirements applied.

"Right here in Texas, in Harris County, turnout among Vietnamese eligible voters doubled following Justice Department efforts," Gonzales said.

Boston is among the cities that, according to the Justice Department, have failed to translate ballots adequately.

by TChris

Random searches of New York subway passengers have been unproductive, leading some to advocate for racial or ethnic profiling:

If "looks like a young Muslim" or "looks Middle Eastern" is an easily visible characteristic that terrorists are likely to have, it belongs in the profile.

Apart from the legal and ethical issues that surround profiling, its advocates build their case on a false premise: that terrorists are visually identifiable.

Horror story of the day:

About 30 children, some as young as 3 months old, were left without their parents after immigration agents raided a poultry plant and took the parents away to face possible deportation. While some of the arrested workers were able to call and arrange care for their children, others were not and a local church had to help make arrangements.

..."A lot of those families had kids in day care in different places, and they didn't know why Mommy and Daddy didn't come pick them up," Arkadelphia Mayor Charles Hollingshead said

.....Jose Luis Vidal said his sister and brother-in-law left behind children aged 10, 5 and 1 as they were deported to Laredo, Mexico. "The children are very sad, especially the baby. She cries all the time," Vidal said in an interview conducted in Spanish.

The Secret Service has responded to an inquiry by Sen. Ken Salazar and Reps. Diana DeGette and Mark Udall as to whether criminal charges will brought against the unidentified Republican operative who posed as a Secret Service agent and ejected three Denver activists from President Bush's social security event at Wings Over the Rockies in March.

According to the letter, which you can read here, (pdf) the matter was presented to the U.S. Attorneys' office for investigation of a possible violation of this federal law making it a crime to impersonate a federal official. The U.S. attorneys' office declined the prosecution.

Salazar, DeGette and Udall have responded with this statement, which I received by e-mail.

by TChris

States that offer personalized license plates often want to control the message that plate buyers can convey. There's little doubt that states can prevent the issuance of plates that use offensive words (of the George Carlin variety), but it's less clear that states can censor political messages that state bureaucrats find offensive.

The state of Utah can't block a woman from using her license plate to tell the world "GAYSROK," a judge has ruled. The state has no good reason to prevent Elizabeth Solomon from having that plate -- which can be read "Gays are OK" or "Gays Rock" -- or another one saying "GAYRYTS," according to Jane Phan, an administrative law judge with the Utah State Tax Commission.

The judge ruled that a reasonable person wouldn't find the plates "offensive to good taste and decency," not that motorists have a First Amendment right to convey political messages. But state censorship of political messages raises First Amendment concerns, a fact not recognized by Barry Conover, deputy director of the commission, which oversees Utah's Department of Motor Vehicles:

Hundreds gathered to protest the Minutemen posse in New Mexico Saturday.

Hundreds of demonstrators marched through the streets Saturday to protest a controversial civilian border patrol group, calling the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps racist and un-American. The League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the oldest Latino civil rights organizations in the country, organized the march and rally to show that Minuteman volunteers were not wanted in the area.

Mary Jane Garcia, the majority whip of the New Mexico State Senate, called on the federal government to take action against the Minuteman volunteers and work on real reform of immigration laws. Forcing Hispanic immigrants out of the country is not the answer, she said.

by TChris

Accountability is a distraction, and the Justice Department doesn't want to be bothered with it. After all, whenever the government has been honest about its efforts to gather data about the American public -- most notably in its development of the Total Information Awareness program -- Congress has overwhelmingly disapproved. And so the Justice Department would prefer to bypass Congress, which is why it opposes a provision in the House bill to renew the Patriot Act that "would require the Justice Department to report to Congress annually on government-wide efforts to develop and use data-mining technology to track intelligence patterns."

[A] set of talking points distributed among Republican lawmakers as the measure was being debated warned that the Justice Department was opposed to the amendment because it would add to the list of "countless reports" already required by Congress and would take time away from more critical law enforcement activities.

Translation: the provision would require accountability, and that's something the Justice Department hates. So, apparently, does Rep. Peter Hoekstra, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who fears (despite a provision that would permit classified information to be disclosed in a separate, confidential report) that classified information "would be shared with the judiciary committees instead of the intelligence committees." Hoekstra apparently doesn't regard any committee other than his own as trustworthy. But every committee with oversight responsibility should have the information it needs to do its job, and oversight is exactly what the Justice Department fears.

by TChris

Last month, TalkLeft reported an apparent violation of the Privacy Act by the Transportation Security Administration. The Government Accountability Office has made it official: TSA broke the law.

The Transportation Security Administration violated the federal Privacy Act by creating a database of aviation passenger records that merged airline records with commercial data in an improper way, government auditors said Friday.

Desite its promise not to collect and store passenger data, TSA retained data on more than 43,000 passengers.

posted by Last Night in Little Rock

The N.Y. Times and CNN report that random bag searches have begun in New York City subways as a response to the London Underground bombings.

Remember we all thought that the terrorists would win if our way of life changed? It has, and they are.

The OKC bombing was described by many post-conviction lawyers as "the crime that killed habeas corpus" because the following year it led to AEDPA, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.

9/11 is the crime that killed the Bill of Rights. The USA PATRIOT Act is only a symptom. Now the disease is starting to consume the body.

"We're from the government and we're here to help you. Let's see your purse, granny. Assume the position, gramps."

The FBI has been collecting files on civil liberties groups and anti-war protesters.

"I'm still somewhat shocked by the size of the file on us," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the A.C.L.U. "Why would the F.B.I. collect almost 1,200 pages on a civil rights organization engaged in lawful activity? What justification could there be, other than political surveillance of lawful First Amendment activities?"

The Government's excuse?

...they stressed that as a matter of both policy and practice, they have not sought to monitor the political activities of any activist groups and that any intelligence-gathering activities related to political protests are intended to prevent disruptive and criminal activity at demonstrations, not to quell free speech. They said there might be an innocuous explanation for the large volume of files on the A.C.L.U. and Greenpeace, like preserving requests from or complaints about the groups in agency files.

We'll be waiting for that innocuous explanation. WaPo has more on groups that were monitored during the Republican and Democratic conventions: