As we pause to honor Veterans Day, ponder this: Boston Police officers assigned to the Boston Regional Intelligence Center—one of dozens of “fusion centers” across the country—have spied on individual peace activists and a variety of groups, including Veterans For Peace’s Chapter 9 Smedley Butler Brigade, the Boston chapter of Veterans for Peace. Not only that, they have labeled these groups “extremist” threats to homeland security.

These details about BPD political surveillance came to light after the ACLU of Massachusetts and the National Lawyers Guild Massachusetts Chapter sued for access to documents and and video surveillance recordings on behalf of five peace groups, four activists and Political Research Associates.

In a letter to the ACLU, a lawyer for the Department explained that “an error in the Department’s software” prevented the records on these peace activists and groups from being purged from the Department’s database.

But that response didn’t acknowledge why the police have been collecting and keeping information about constitutionally protected speech and political activity in the first place—a practice that we were shocked to learn about and are eager to see end.

Since the release of the report last month, more than 1200 people have signed a petition to the Massachusetts state legislature, urging them to support legislation requiring police to have reasonable suspicion of criminal activity before they engage in tracking and monitoring of people’s First Amendment-protected activities.

In honor of Veterans Day, please sign the petition now in support of protecting the constitutional rights of speech and association that veterans have defended.

There are fewer than 24 hours until polls open for Election Day 2012. That means more time for confusion, frustration and half-truths about the policies of this year’s election to continue.

Some Virginia voters are facing the reality that their voter registrations could have been thrown into a dumpster. Wisconsin voters might receive misleading information about voters’ rights—the result of poll watchers’ being armed with erroneous documents about the state’s policies. Spanish-speaking voters in Arizona were told to vote on November 8 (the English-language version on the other side of the voter registration cards states the correct date, November 6). And don’t think Massachusetts is immune– the ACLU of Massachusetts has already been receiving reports about problems that could interfere with people exercising their right to vote, and there are reports of robocalls telling people here to vote on the wrong day.

So be ready!

In Massachusetts:

1. You DO NOT need to show photo ID to vote. You may be asked for proof that you are registered at your current address if you are voting at a new polling place, if you are an inactive voter or if your voting status is challenged.
2. You can bring someone to help you in the voting booth.
3. If you feel intimidated by anyone at the polling station, you have the right to report it immediately to election staff or poll observers without penalty.
4. If you feel threatened or intimidated by election staff or poll observers, you have the right to call 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683), email info@866ourvote.org or tweet @866OURVOTE to notify them of the problem.

Those are the basics of what you need to know in order to vote tomorrow. For more details, see aclum.org/vote!

Boston Police say (B), according to records the ACLU of Massachusetts and National Lawyers Guild Massachusetts Chapter obtained and released yesterday.

Thanks to “cooperation and information-sharing” with other local departments and through partnership with the federally funded Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), Boston Police have monitored protests, tracked activists and labeled groups and individuals as “extremists,” “homeland security” threats and civil disturbances.

Zinn, along with groups such as Veterans for Peace, United for Justice with Peace and CodePink, have records in the Boston Regional Intelligence Center–records that should have been purged after 90 days, in accordance with BRIC’s policies, were it not for an “error in computer software.”

But why did the files about peaceful, lawful protestors exist in the first place?

As a so-called “fusion center,” BRIC was created to fight terrorism and crime–not to keep track of political assemblies or the people participating in them. Moreover, this information-gathering violated both BRIC’s own policies, which prohibited information-gathering “solely on the basis of religious, political or social view or activities” or participation in “noncriminal organization(s) or lawful events,” and federal guidelines, which prohibited information-gathering unless “there is reasonable suspicion that the individual is involved in criminal conduct or activity.”

Unfortunately, BRIC is not alone in either its track record or its disregard for the policies that govern it–and the main reason for its existence in the first place.

Perhaps BRIC’s greatest value is in illustrating the continuing 21st-century value of 18th-century documents like the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Massachusetts Declaration of Rights–and challenging us to work towards legislation to enforce and protect the rights and liberties enshrined in those documents.

Today marks the start of special drug court sessions to deal with the fallout from the Annie Dookhan-Hinton Drug Lab scandal. It’s the beginning of re-litigating the cases against thousands of defendants, one by one, after the prosecution’s house of cards fell, scattering tainted evidence everywhere you look.

Here’s an idea: rather than drain our public coffers to re-try non-violent offenders and re-incarcerate them in over-crowded facilities, let’s instead invest scarce public dollars creating community-based oversight and treatment reentry programs.

It’s time to get smart on crime, and the drug lab scandal is a chance to do it right.

Relitigating the estimated 34,000 cases tained by the drug lab scandal is a colossal waste of time and money, according to a letter that the ACLU of Massachusetts and Families Against Mandatory Minimums sent to Attorney General Martha Coakley, Suffolk DA Dan Conley, and other prosecutors.

First, the money. Mr. Conley last week gave a starting estimate that prosecutors will need at least $50 million to re-try all these cases. Defense attorneys will need at least that much to ensure a fair process. Moreover, the tax bill is likely to grow. Preliminary reports say that Ms. Dookhan had unusual contacts with prosecutors and police — a pretty good indication that the number of tainted cases will multiply.

Re-prosecuting tainted cases one by one might make sense for violent crimes, but for drug crimes it does not. Throwing drug addicts in jail doesn’t keep anyone safe. As a recent Massachusetts Bar Association task force has found, those cases have made “not a dent” in drug use.

Mr. Conley and the other prosecutors should work with Attorney General Martha Coakley to instead drop all the drug cases involving defendants who were not charged with violent crimes or weapons offenses, and spend that money instead on community-based treatment and job-training programs. That’s precisely what the ACLU of Massachusetts and Families Against Mandatory Minimums have asked prosecutors to do.

The vast majority of non-violent offenders are incarcerated for crimes directly related to drug addiction — drug possession, small sales and small-time theft to pay for drugs. Filling our jails and prisons with these people doesn’t address the underlining cause of their criminal activity — drug addiction. It certainly doesn’t guarantee that they will stop using drugs since we know that drug use is commonplace in our jails and prisons. Rather than waste millions of dollars to warehouse people, we should provide them with treatment services.

For such a program to be truly successful however, we need to look beyond the standard treatment box of 30-day treatment and 12-step programs. Drug addiction is a symptom of much larger personal and social issues. And if we want people to end the cycle of addiction, incarceration, detox and then relapse, we need to look at people as a whole.

Community-based treatment plans should be developed for each individual with addiction services being only one aspect of the required treatment. Individualized treatment plans should also include, if applicable, GED classes, anger management, parenting classes, job training and family counseling — and ALL of this would still cost only a fraction of re-litigating these cases and filling our jails with drug addicts.

We also need to invest in meaningful re-entry and job training services for folks who have been locked up based on faulty evidence and will be returning to the community.

Mayor Menino, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis and Mr. Conley have begun to talk publicly about community re-entry strategies for the estimated 500 to 700 people who are likely to be released from local jails and prisons.

Good for them for thinking about the big picture. Wise investments in our communities are essential for righting the injustice these folks have suffered as well as for ensuring public safety. It’s common sense to put some resources into helping them get back on their feet.  In addition to help finding housing, connecting with health services, other case management and peer support, people returning to the community need job training and basic pre-job skills. It’s in our collective interest to prepare these individuals for productive, meaningful lives. I look forward to seeing the specific investments the city will make to ensure that their re-entry is as smooth and successful as possible.

Adopting these proposals will repair the integrity of the Commonwealth’s justice system, save taxpayer dollars and bring some justice to this scandal’s victims. Let’s take this opportunity to improve the lives of real people, their families and our communities by helping them become productive members of society. The black cloud of the drug lab scandal can, in fact, have a silver-lining and help us get smart on crime and build safer communities.

Ordinary politicians become great leaders when they take a principled stand, even at the risk of political backlash—what President John F. Kennedy captured in the phrase “profiles in courage.”

Massachusetts voters got a glimpse of that kind of political leadership last week when Senator Cynthia Stone Creem (D-Newton), the Senate Chair of the Joint Committee on the Judiciary, dissented from a conference committee’s approval of a crime bill that would expand unjust and wasteful mandatory sentencing, by forcing judges to impose one-size-fits-all sentences, regardless of the facts of an individual case.

At the final conference committee meeting, Senator Creem—joined by Senator Bruce Tarr (R-Gloucester)—made a bipartisan show of good sense by pressing to allow at least a little judicial sentencing discretion. It would have allowed an individual offender to be parole-eligible after serving a substantial portion of the required maximum sentence, “in the interest of justice.”

Although the conference committee ultimately scrapped that provision and settled on a bill with a one-size-fits-all sentencing structure, the two Senators who tried to bring fairness and discretion back into the bill deserve our thanks. So do the six other Senators who joined Senator Creem in voting against the bill on Thursday, July 18, when the Senate passed it 31-7.

The bill is now on the Governor’s desk.

Senator Creem and those who voted with her understand that our hugely overcrowded prisons and county facilities house hundreds of individuals serving mandatory sentences. Any new law requiring more people to serve more and longer mandatory sentences will make that worse, at a cost to Massachusetts taxpayers of almost $50,000 a year, per prisoner.

Imagine how many folks could get clean and get a job if we had $50,000 to invest in rehabilitation and job training for each person, rather than incarceration. Locking people up regardless of the specific facts of their crime isn’t justice. It’s a waste, in both human and economic terms.

Sadly, so-called “tough on crime” bills can move forward through the legislative process, with woefully insufficient attention to matters of fairness that are essential for a criminal justice system.

Now it’s Governor Deval Patrick’s turn to do the right thing.

The Governor has said that he wants positive and meaningful sentencing reform, vowing that he’ll sign only a “balanced” bill. What the legislature has given him, while arguably improved over previous versions, remains way out of balance. It would take Massachusetts in the wrong direction, locking up more people without individualized determinations of justice, at extraordinary costs to taxpayers and public safety.

It’s time for Governor Patrick to exercise his leadership at this critical moment. He should reject or propose significant improvements to this legislation, not simply sign the bill before him.

In short, it’s Governor Patrick’s “Profiles in Courage” moment.

Please urge Gov. Patrick not to accept the harsh mandatory-sentencing bill as written.

That’s strong language to use against a beloved patriot and civil rights legend of Harry Belafonte’s stature.

Harry Belafonte has indeed said things that people might or might not agree with, like in 2006 when he called President Bush “the world’s greatest terrorist.” But, as Steve Hurley of the ACLU of Massachusetts says of the controversy Belafonte sometimes stirs up, “how could one agitate for social change and equal justice for more than half a century without doing so?”

To be perfectly honest, one important reason that the ACLU of Massachusetts cares about this controversy now is that we plan to give Harry Belafonte our Roger Baldwin Award—our highest honor, named for the ACLU’s Massachusetts-born founder—at our annual Bill of Rights Dinner on May 22. And, of course, we would love it if you were there.

But there’s another reason: Harry Belafonte, in addition to his tremendously successful career as a musician, is a hero. Calling out Nate Little, Steve Hurley writes:

Perhaps Mr. Little is unaware of Harry Belafonte’s record of courage and leadership in the struggle for equality in our country? Maybe he doesn’t know that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called Belafonte’s popularity and commitment “a key ingredient to the global struggle for freedom and a powerful tactical weapon in the civil rights movement here in America.” Quite possibly he’s unaware that Belafonte served our country in the U.S. Navy and as an advisor to the Peace Corps, or that he became only the second American to be appointed as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. He may not know that Belafonte’s activism has reached far past our borders, to include setting in motion the events that led to the “We Are the World” benefit for African famine relief, and serving as a leader of the campaign to end apartheid in South Africa and to free his friend, Nelson Mandela.

And that’s not even all. On March 29, 1960, the New York Times ran a full-page ad called “Heed Their Rising Voices,” an appeal to support the civil rights movement, co-written and signed by Harry Belafonte. Through a series of events and lawsuits, that ad led to a landmark Supreme Court decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which revolutionized libel law and paved the way for expanded news coverage of the civil rights struggle. In the words of Justice William Brennan, the ruling ensured discussion of public issues that is “robust, uninhibited, and wide open.” We are all the beneficiaries.

Anyone who can look at Harry Belafonte’s lifetime of work and sum it up as “extreme,” “repugnant,” or “dangerous” needs to take a look inside themselves. Harry Belafonte is not “anti-American.” Harry Belafonte is a great American.

Christopher Ott is communications director for the ACLU of Massachusetts.

After 18 years, it’s finally over. The American military’s discriminatory “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy – which threw out soldiers for being openly gay – was repealed today. There’s still much work to be done – including fighting for fair treatment of those who were discharged under the policy – but it’s worth taking a moment to celebrate a big step forward for LGBT equal rights.

Campy film director (and longtime Provincetown resident) John Waters has a very funny quote about progress in this country: “I thought the privilege of being gay was that you didn’t have to get married or join the Army”. At least in our state, things have changed – and the exclusions Waters’ jokingly calls “privileges” have washed away.

In this victory, I’m reminded of my own local friends who were affected by the policy. In my western Massachusetts college, I knew several LGBT women who were either in ROTC training or enlisted in the armed forces. My roommate’s girlfriend, in fact, was an Army mechanic who had to hide her relationship from all of her coworkers, and she had to keep out of any publicly posted photos, for fear that someone she knew could “out” her to a commanding officer.

I have another friend, a veteran and a happily married heterosexual guy from Lynn, who speaks passionately about the gay and lesbian soldiers he served with, and how disgustingly unfair the policy was to him. He’s since traded in his uniform for an array of Red Sox and Celtics jerseys, and his weapons for Emergency Medical Technician equipment, but I know his heart still goes out to his LGBT brothers and sisters. He’ll be celebrating tonight, for them.

The ACLU of Massachusetts has been fighting discrimination in the military since long before it was part of the national conversation. Back in 1974, when the modern gay rights movement was barely five years old, “the ACLU of Massachusetts filed suit on behalf of two lesbians who were discharged from the military”. Not to brag, but we’ve been active in fighting for LGBT rights well before that – since the 1930s, in fact, so perhaps it’s no surprise.

We still have plenty to fight for – the Federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) still adversely affects legally married same-sex couples in the Commonwealth, and we’re continuing to fight for full Transgender rights. Of course, there’s still the question of any MA LGBT service members kicked out before today, which touches on the subject of today’s earlier On Liberty blog.

But for today, I’m content to be proud of my country and my state, and proud of all of our brave service men and women, LGBT or not, who are now part of a stronger, freer organization. Thank you for your service.

Today, the ACLU of Massachusetts, along with 33 other state-based ACLU affiliates, filed a public records act request to uncover information about warrantless cell phone tracking.

As of December 2010, over 96 percent of the overall population of the United States carried a cell phone—an estimated 302.9 million people. But while Americans have quickly embraced cell phones and the convenience they offer, the widespread use of cell phones has given the government the unprecedented ability to track people’s movements by tracking the geographical location of their cell phones.

What’s revealed by location tracking can be intensely personal. For example, as one court recently wrote, knowing someone’s location can reveal whether a person “is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”

Location information is so sensitive that the authorities should only be able to get it by demonstrating probable cause to a judge and getting a warrant – just as they must do to intrude on your privacy in other ways. The Fourth Amendment protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures, and there is nothing reasonable about tracking our movements without the approval of a judge.

Unfortunately, not all police departments agree that probable cause and a warrant are necessary.

That is why the ACLU filed public records act requests to uncover information about warrantless cell phone tracking. We have a right to know about how the police are using cell phones to track people. We want to know:

• Do the police show probable cause and get a warrant to track cell phones?

• How often do the police obtain cell phone location information?

• Once the police get cell phone location information from a cell phone company, do they keep it forever or do they get rid of it after a limited time?

• How much money are the police spending to get cell phone location information?

We’ll keep you posted on what we learn. In the meantime, the ACLU will be continuing to work in the courts, in Congress, in state legislatures across the country, and with companies to better safeguard sensitive location information. We hope you will join us and contact your member of Congress to urge them to support new location privacy bills introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). This public records request and our efforts in Congress are part of our broader Demand your dotRights Campaign to make sure that as technology advances, our privacy rights are not left behind.

Government agents should not have the right to seize property from travelers at the airport without reasonable suspicion of a crime, like they did with David House.

David is a 24-year-old activist who lives in Cambridge. After questioning him about his involvement with the legal support network for accused WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, Homeland Security agents actually confiscated his laptop, camera, and flash drive–for nearly two months–even though David had done nothing wrong and Homeland Security had no reason to suspect him of wrongdoing.

The government eventually returned David House’s property–after the ACLU sent a letter demanding its return–but that isn’t enough.

We filed a lawsuit this morning in federal court in Boston challenging the search and seizure of David’s electronics. The ACLU wants the return or destruction of personal data still in government custody, and we want to know what’s been done with it.

Of course there’s a larger principle at stake. Targeting people for unlawful searches and seizures based on who they know or what lawful activities they participate in is unconstitutional and un-American. Given that so many people now carry a cell phone or laptop while traveling, with information they might not want to share with government officials (such as financial records, contact lists, years of personal correspondence, family photos, or proprietary employer data), we need to have safeguards to ensure that this kind of fishing expedition does not happen to others.

You can learn more about the case at aclum.org/house.

As researcher Darryl Li points out, most of the Wikileaks Gitmo dump consists of US intelligence “’detainee assessments’ that reveal more about the inner fantasy world of the US intelligence apparatus than who the detainees really are.”

Li reminds us of Hannah Arendt’s insightful reading of the Pentagon Papers. Poring through these DoD papers, Li writes, she was “struck by the bureaucratic self-deception and “defactualization” that thrive in environments of official secrecy, and the same rings true here: The Guantanamo jailers saw what they wanted to see – and found what pressures from above and their own cultural presuppositions pushed them to find.” (Emphasis mine.)

We have known for a long time that Gitmo was built on a foundation other than the rule of law. These documents show us that the world inside of Gitmo has been constructed purely by the US military imagination, where officials are free to conjure up demons out of thin air (i.e. the Casio watch) in an environment shrouded from public scrutiny. The democratic processes of press oversight and extra-military accountability (for example, in US courts) that would have encouraged a basic separation of fact from fiction regarding its prisoners and their supposed ‘crimes’ have been systematically excluded from the space. Our state apparatus and its willing apparatchiks in Congress warn us that we mustn’t know, lest the terrorists win.

The Wikileaks Gitmo files reveal the extent to which the fundamental separation of innuendo, rumor or pure fabrication from studied, provable fact helped to construct and maintain an environment in which torture and humiliation became common practice. Nothing was certain; therefore everything was permissible. But crucially, the recently leaked intelligence assessments never mention US torture of prisoners. Therefore the ‘defactualization’ process is not simply marked by carelessness, innocent omission, and cultural bias; it is fundamentally a fictional process, with less than savory and legally troublesome details purposefully excluded from the official record.

This nightmarish scenario adds a twist to the Red Queen’s declaration: “Sentence first…verdict afterwards!” In Gitmo, it has always been, “Sentence first…verdict unnecessary!” Or perhaps better stated, “Sentence first…verdict secret!”

Just as Hannah Arendt discovered when she read through the Pentagon Papers, we can now confirm that the most dangerous part of Gitmo’s operation was and is that the detention regime operates behind an iron wall of secrecy. There can be no open trials, no public hearings of evidence or defense. Justice Damon Keith’s famous warning that “democracies die behind closed doors” seems like a quaint reminder of a more innocent time, when ‘serious’ people could openly debate the value of secrecy or transparency.

But his warning is more relevant than ever, for our society at large. As our government quietly develops and extends its vast surveillance network throughout the nation and the world, we should remember that it is secrecy itself that is the enemy of freedom.

The government will always claim that secrecy protects us, but Gitmo painfully demonstrates that this is a false claim. It should come as no surprise now, after ten years of blatant extra-legality and government sponsored terror, to find that state secrecy often exists solely to protect the government from embarrassment or charges of criminality. Tragically, our courts have not stepped in to fulfill their constitutional mandate to check those abuses.

For the prisoners on the island base, the overwhelming majority of whom have not been – and likely never will be — convicted of any crime, Gitmo is the horrific marriage of Orwellian and Kafkaesque nightmares. It is a regime constituted by torture and humiliation mixed with bureaucratic denials and ‘mistakes’ that can’t be corrected, governed under a top-to-bottom prohibition against meaningful accountability or challenge, wrapped up neatly in a package of immunity and secrecy.

As Thomas Paine said, “He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

If we allow our government to continue to operate behind the thick wall of state secrecy, we won’t know when our enemy is being oppressed. And when we allow for the destruction of others’ liberty in secret, we endanger ourselves further, for we won’t even know when our own liberty has been usurped.

The Gitmo files reveal what secrecy begets. Let us take heed of that warning as it applies to all of us, imprisoned in a CIA black site, locked up indefinitely without charge in Guantanamo, or not.

Kade Crockford is Privacy Rights Coordinator at the ACLU of Massachusetts. You can contact her at kcrockford [at] aclum [.] org.

Apparently, Baker doesn’t agree. Dubbing the civil rights legislation the “bathroom bill,” Baker vowed to veto the bill if he is elected — as did State Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill, who is running for governor as an independent.

In contrast, Governor Deval Patrick said, “I feel very strongly that discrimination should not appear in our Constitution or in our laws.”

Calling this civil rights bill a bathroom bill is blatant fear-mongering. Personally, I don’t spend time checking out other people’s private parts in public restrooms. I don’t think it’s any of my business. Then again, I have a hard time figuring out how it is Charlie Baker or Tim Cahill’s business, either.

The scary bathroom trick is the same one that was used in the 1930s to warn against “Bolsheviks breeding in your washroom.” Opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment trotted out the old saw again in 1970s, warning that equal rights would lead to men and women sharing public bathrooms.

Well, 34 years after passage of the state ERA, I’m not aware of any women trying to beat down the door to public men’s rest room (no thanks, gents’; we’d rather wait in long lines for the women’s rest room). It’s silly to suggest that ensuring equal rights will mean that sex-segregated facilities will be used any differently than they are now.

But we all know that this public debate isn’t about bathrooms. It’s about ensuring equal protection under the law for everybody: a fundamental principle of American democracy.

It also is about the use of fear in politics.

So, let’s talk about transgender equal rights and fear.

Maybe you or someone you know is afraid of people who may have been born with indeterminate sex characteristics or who otherwise feel as if they were born in the wrong body. It’s a medical condition that actually is more common than you think. In fact, one estimate is that one out of every 100 people is transgender.

Maybe you think that it is weird or scary. Well, imagine how people who are born the wrong gender feel — and how scary it must be for them!

And if you are too afraid to walk in their shoes, then at least try to imagine how their families might feel. Imagine if medical doctors told you that your baby had been born with unclear genitalia and you had to decide whether to raise your child as a boy or a girl? Pretty scary, right? Now imagine that you guessed wrong. Should your child somehow be treated as a second class citizen as a result?

I hope you answered no.

Listen to the words of Ken and Marcia Garber, of Quincy, whose 20 year old son died after years of harassment based on his gender identity. Ken, a square-jawed fire fighter with a grey crew-cut, spoke at the State House today about how hard it was for their son to live as a second class citizen.

“When you discriminate against transgender people, you discriminate against everybody who loves them,” said Ken.

Another parent, Marion Freedman-Gurspan, said “In my wildest dreams, I never thought that I’d have to stand here and beg for basic civil rights protections for my child. I thought that went out in 1964!”

Another father, David Hardy, spoke about his concern for the safety of his three kids: the one who is on duty in Kabul, the one who is a rock-climber, and the one who is transgender. “We really worry about him,” said Hardy.

Ultimately, what you or I think about transgender people is irrelevant. What matters is that all people should be afforded equal protection under the law. A personal decision that somebody else makes about their own gender identity is just that: personal. It’s not my business; it’s not yours; and it certainly should not be the business of the government — or fear fodder for a political campaign.

There could be circumstances in which the use of these weapons is called for, and nobody one wants to see the police outgunned in those situations.   The oft-cited tragedy in Mumbai is, of course, a noteworthy example.  However, the analogy fails to acknowledge that Pakistan and India are warring nations separated only by motorboat ride – and Bamford admits that Boston faces no similar threat.

Moreover, the article suggests that Bamford wants to hand out the guns to local police, enabling them to patrol the city’s neighborhoods outfitted with military assault rifles.

Finally, it is worth exploring whether these kinds of arms encourage excessive use of force, or whether the cause-effect relationship Bamford is implying is truly sound – the presence of sophisticated weaponry has not always proven the best measure against terrorists, as 9/11 taught us.

As with any issue regarding lethal force, we need to ask questions. What are these guns truly capable of? Who will get to use them, and under what circumstances – and who will be in charge of making those decisions?

Questions like these have come up before with far less-lethal weapons than military assault rifles.  Consider the case of Victoria Snelgrove, who died in Boston in 2004 after a Boston Police officer shot her in the eye with a pepper spray bullet.  At the time, the ACLU provided recommendations for “less lethal force” policies.  If even weapons like this can cause problems, we should be much more careful when talking about semiautomatic assault rifles.

http://www.aclum.org/news/2007…

http://www.aclum.org/docket/va…

The first involves the 2003 unlawful detention of King Downing — ironically, a national expert on racial profiling — at Logan Airport.

The second involves Jason Vassell, an African-American former UMass Amherst student who faces charges much more serious than the two white men who attacked Vassell in his dorm in February 2008.

The ACLU does not endorse or oppose candidates for elective or appointive office.

With the debate over Guantanamo going on in Washington, we’re giving our annual Roger Baldwin Award to Capt. James Yee, the Muslim former U.S. Army Chaplain at Gitmo.  While he was ministering to prisoners, the government arrested and imprisoned Yee in a Naval brig for 76 days, falsely accusing him of spying, espionage, and aiding prisoners. They held him in solitary confinement and subjected Yee to the same sensory deprivation techniques that were being used against the prisoners in Cuba to whom he had been ministering — but after months of investigation, the government dropped all charges and reinstated him.

Also, today’s Boston Banner carries an interview by Talia Whyte with “vigilante pundit” and Onion editor Baratunde Thurston, who will also speak at the dinner.

Dinner details here.  The Roger Baldwin Award is named for the Massachusetts-native founder of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The news release is here:

http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/gen/39572prs20090512.html

A YouTube video, which includes an interview with Lisbeth Ceriani of Newton, Mass., is here:

http://blog.aclu.org/2009/05/13/liberate-the-breast-cancer-genes/

The patents granted to Myriad give the company the exclusive right to perform diagnostic tests on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes and to prevent any researcher from even looking at the genes without first getting permission from Myriad.

http://www.aclum.org/scorecard/

In my friend’s case, he was traveling with his boss, from another country, who didn’t understand what was going on.  He thought they didn’t actually have to comply with the search, which just made the police more aggressive.  It all turned out OK: they swabbed his backpack for explosives and eventually let him through, but he wondered, “Where are they getting the money to this, in this economy?”

In light of this Globe article, Cities cutting police work, it’s a good question. The police do have the right to conduct searches in the MBTA, but is it really making anyone safer, and is it the best way to spend scarce dollars?

But the administration is going ahead anyway.  The regulations allow a broad range of health care workers and facilities to refuse to provide care, information, and counseling about reproductive services they personally disagree with, potentially even in emergency situations. At the same time, it fails to require refusing providers to either notify their employers or their patients of their objections to providing care.

In other words, no one else might know that these providers are withholding information or refusing to provide the full range of reproductive health options.

Among other things, this means that women seeking family planning services at federally funded health centers may no longer be able to get it; patients in need of other services such as end-of-life care, HIV/AIDS treatment, and mental health services could be denied; and hospitals could refuse to treat a pregnant woman experiencing a miscarriage.

More details are available here.

The national ACLU, which works with the No on Prop 8 campaign, has produced this video featuring the stories of three families.  They talk about why marriage matters to them.

Please share, and ask friends in California to vote NO on Prop 8.

Here, too, is Ban this Booklist, a top-50 from the ACLU of books that touch on civil liberties themes — and which have been banned by those who… just. don’t. get. irony.

WHO:

Eric Alterman, The Nation

Ellen Hume, MIT Center for Future Civic Media

Callie Crossley, Program Manager for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Harvard Univ.

Emcee: Barry Nolan, veteran TV journalist

WHEN:

Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2008, 6 – 8 p.m.

WHERE:

Boston Public Library

700 Boylston Street, Copley Square, Rabb Lecture Hall

Questions to be discussed include: why isn’t the media doing a better job of covering civil liberties issues, what does it mean that the media itself has come under attack when doing its job, and where can we find the best coverage of key constitutional issues?  The event is held in honor of Constitution Day on Sept. 17, and is free and open to the public.

For more information, go to:

http://www.aclum.org/events

The past eight years of the Bush presidency have seen a remarkable shift in many aspects of our nation’s political strategies and adherence to established laws and principles.  Key among these is our government’s use of torture and kidnapping to apprehend and interrogate persons of interest all over the world.

For years, the ACLU has been at the forefront of efforts to hold our government accountable for these actions.  Which is why we are excited to be part of a conference taking place this weekend in Andover, Mass., that will look at different ways of bringing high level government officials to justice.  The conference is free to the public, and the information can be found at www.war-crimes.info. Hope to see you there!

Problems That Don’t Exist: Flag Burners

That’s the point behind a great Globe editorial today.  The way investigators have handled DNA samples collected as part of the investigation of Christa Worthington’s murder on the Cape has not been reassuring.

The ACLU of Massachusetts has sued to stop the creation of a “shadow” databank of DNA profiles, and last month, one of our clients got his DNA sample back.  That’s a step in the right direction, but it’s not just the samples that matter.  The DNA profiles created from the samples need to be addressed as well.

The ACLU has written to Kennedy to say thank you, and we urge others to do the same.  While you’re at it, you can write to Michael Mukasey, too.

And finally, here’s a little levity, to remind us just how fast what used to seem like a joke, well, isn’t anymore.

The MBTA responded by getting a temporary restraining order on Aug. 9 that prevented the students from discussing their findings any further, even though their research was based on publicly available information.

That’s exactly the wrong response.  We raised questions about the security of other systems the MBTA was putting in place for the Charlie Card and Charlie Ticket more than three years ago, and we wish that the MBTA would focus on ensuring the security of its systems instead of trying to silence the messengers.  It’s better to find out that there are problems in a system like this through the marketplace of ideas than through a malicious attack.

Carol Rose, Executive Director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, has an op-ed in today’s Globe called They Could Be Eavesdropping.  It’s about the so-called Act to Further Protect Children.  The bill is moving forward in the name of fighting sexual predators in a variety of ways, but one of its provisions (the amendment to section 17B of Chapter 271 of the General Laws) gives unchecked power to district attorneys and the attorney general to request records of anyone’s Internet use simply by asking for them, with no warrant, and with no notification to the person whose records are being requested.

As Rose points out, it’s shocking that the Legislature would do this, given the unanimous vote last week by the Massachusetts Congressional delegation to oppose the collapse on FISA.

It’s called Driving While Immigrant, and it’s a look at what she hears meeting with people around the state on this issue.  Sort of like “Driving While Black,” police seem to target brown-skinned immigrants too, whether they’re doing anything unusual or not.

We think it’s bad for all kinds of reasons: it’s not fair; it encourages immigrants to avoid and mistrust the police instead of going to them when public safety is really at risk; and it even creates problems and frustrations for immigrants who are here legally.

Kennedy and Kerry opposed amnesty to the telecoms that went along with the White House’s illegal warrantless wiretaps earlier this week, and it’s great to see this unconstitutional bill stopped in its tracks.

More details here.

At least Kerry and Kennedy voted against it.  McCain supported it.  Clinton and Obama didn’t vote. The final vote was 68-29.

Nearly everyone else, from tech bloggers to Republicans like former White House Counsel John Dean seem to recognize what an incredibly bad idea this is — why is it so hard for so many members of Congress?

I’d recommend it to anybody.  It has its Hollywood moments and oversimplifications, but overall it does a really good job of showing how much of the moral high ground the U.S. has lost, and how and why our methods are probably creating more terrorists than we’re capturing or killing.

Like Bruce Springsteen said on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago:

“We’ve seen things happen over the past six years that I don’t think anybody ever thought they’d ever see in the United States. When people think of the American identity, they don’t think of torture. They don’t think of illegal wiretapping. They don’t think of voter suppression. They don’t think of no habeas corpus. No right to a lawyer… you know. Those are things that are anti-American.”

And here’s a little more about work by the ACLU of Massachusetts that gets highlighted.

Since then (and starting the very next day, in fact) something interesting has happened. While publicly taking issue with our assertion that Endgame uses tactics similar to the ethnic cleansing we saw in the Balkans during the 1990s — lightning raids, mass arrests, packed detention centers, and mass deportations — ICE has quietly removed documents about operation Endgame from its website.

Fortunately, we anticipated this and saved copies.  You can see what they’ve taken down and when here.