The FBI Claims a Constitutional Right to Lie to the Courts

The FBI has claimed a right to lie to courts, not just withhold state secrets. This is amazingly brazen. It's also incredibly stupid, but I'll get to that in a second. The court's response:

The Government’s in camera submission raises a very disturbing issue. The Government previously provided false and misleading information to the Court. The Government represented to the Court in pleadings, declarations, and briefs that it had searched its databases and found only a limited number of documents responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA request and that a significant amount of information within those documents was outside the scope of Plaintiffs’ FOIA request. The Government’s representations were then, and remain today, blatantly false. As the Government’s in camera submission makes clear, the Government located a significant number of documents that were responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA request. Virtually all of the information within those documents is inside the scope of Plaintiffs’ FOIA request. The Government asserts that it had to mislead the Court regarding the Government’s response to Plaintiffs’ FOIA request to avoid compromising national security. The Government’s argument is untenable. The Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court.

The United States Constitution entrusts the Judiciary with the power to determine compliance with the law. It is impossible for the Court to determine compliance with the law and to protect the public from Government misconduct if the Government misleads the Court. The Court simply cannot perform its constitutional function if the Government does not tell the truth....

Photography Is Not a Crime, Despite States' Best Efforts to Make it One

This is an issue that's been around for a while, but only in the last year has it really started to pick up incredible steam. A Gizmodo post from earlier this summer, titled "Are Cameras the new guns", has made the rounds, bringing a little more attention to the issue.

In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.

The post refers to Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts, where people have been convicted for recording police officers on duty. These were not arrests for surreptitiously recording cops either, we're talking video cameras in hand, recording their own arrest, or their loved ones'. The very idea that it could be a crime to record cops acting out in the open, where there is no "expectation of privacy" (the relevant legal term), while they are speaking at a volume that is naturally audible, is so absurd it defies words.

The Court Dabbles in Terrorist McCarthyism

Today the Court came down with a decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. A lot of writing will be done in the next few days about how this decision distorted the First Amendment's doctrine, so I figured I'd jump in the fray. First, the Times Editorial's synopsis (because they did it for me, so why write my own?):

The case arose after an American human rights group, the Humanitarian Law Project, challenged the law prohibiting “material support” to terror groups, which was defined in the 2001 Patriot Act to include “expert advice or assistance.” The law project wanted to provide advice to two terrorist groups on how to peacefully resolve their disputes and work with the United Nations. The two groups — the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party — have violent histories and their presence on the State Department’s official list of terrorist groups is not in dispute.

But though the law project was actually trying to reduce the violence of the two groups, the court’s opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. on behalf of five other justices, said that did not matter and ruled the project’s efforts illegal. Even peaceful assistance to a terror group can further terrorism, the chief justice wrote, in part by lending them legitimacy and allowing them to pretend to be negotiating while plotting violence.

That's pretty perverse. Talking to terrorist groups, giving them legal advice, is now material support and thus illegal. The Court premised this on the old argument that money is fungible so aiding one section of a group (the humanitarian/political vs. the terrorist) is aiding all the others. While this argument is not obviously true with money (see, e.g., the US tax code, which separates the political non-profits from the apolitical, even if they're the same people), the Court then expanded it saying that by teaching them how to navigate the legal system or to act politically to achieve their goals rather than violently, a person is freeing up resources that the group would have used to now be used on terror. This just makes no sense. If they're acting as a terror group, they're never going to spend resources on teaching themselves how to act peacefully, so someone convincing them to do so is adding a service - it's not all zero sum.

More on Obama's National Security Strategy

My last post pointed to some of the good and bad rhetorical devices in Obama's National Security Strategy. While rhetoric and language choice are important, I'd also like to highlight a post on the ACLU Blog of Rights about how terrible and hypocritical it is functionally, once you get past the rhetoric.

While the strategy makes some vague commitments on human rights, it contradicts its own promises. It states that "our moral leadership is grounded principally in the power of our example," but then goes on to outline a strategy involving indefinite detention without charge or trial on the very same page.

Fox Refuses Climate/Security Ad

The "reducing dependence on foreign oil helps security" argument has been made many times, but Fox just refused to air an ad making that claim because it's "too confusing."

Of course, because Fox is always telling its viewers that they need to be anti-climate and tough on national security, it probably would confuse a great deal of them.