Good for the ACLU (again):

The American Civil Liberties Union sued Alabama elections officials Monday over what it says is an overly expansive policy disenfranchising felons, amid concern from voting rights groups nationwide that voting lists are being culled with too great alacrity by many states.

Alabama bars felons from voting only if they've been convicted of a crime of "moral turpitude." According to the ACLU, the state legislature limited that fuzzy phrase to specific crimes: "murder, rape, sodomy, sexual abuse, incest, sexual torture and nine other crimes mainly involving pornography and abuses against children." Alabama's attorney general, Troy King, has expanded the legislature's list to include about a dozen more (mostly nonviolent) crimes, including the distribution of marijuana. The ACLU takes the sensible position that it's the responsibility of the legislature, not the attorney general, to make the law. [more ...]

It's good to know that there's no crime in Maryland. That must be the case if the Homeland Security and Intelligence Division of the Maryland State Police found time to mount undercover operations to spy on people who support progressive viewpoints.

Undercover Maryland State Police officers repeatedly spied on peace activists and anti-death penalty groups in recent years and entered the names of some in a law-enforcement database of people thought to be terrorists or drug traffickers, newly released documents show.

What did Maryland taxpayers obtain in return for investing tax dollars in these spying missions? What terrible crimes were the peaceniks and death penalty opponents committing?

[N]one of the 43 pages of summaries and computer logs - some with agents' names and whole paragraphs blacked out - mention criminal or even potentially criminal acts, the legal standard for initiating such surveillance.

Note to the Maryland police: dissent is not a crime. It's not even suspicious. It's a right. Learn to respect it, would you please? [more ...]

Maricopa County (Phoenix, AZ) Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who instituted such ridiculous shaming punishments as forcing male inmates to wear pink underwear, making juveniles serve on chain gangs and bury the dead, and requiring inmates to sleep in tents, is the subject of a new class action lawsuit by the ACLU and others for racial profiling of Latinos.

The suit alleges Arpaio has been conducting "crime suppression sweeps" of Latinos in an effort to enforce federal immigration laws.

Claiming authority under a limited agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE that actually prohibits the practices challenged here, Defendants have launched a series of massive so-called "crime suppression sweeps" that show a law enforcement agency operating well beyond the bounds of the law.

More...

Update: Robyn Blumer in the St. Petersberg Times has more on how the meatpacking plant abused the workers.

A New York Times editorial today takes on the meatpacking plant raids in Postville Iowa. It quotes from the essay of a professor and court interpreter at the subsequent criminal proceedings:

Dr. Camayd-Freixas’s essay describes “the saddest procession I have ever witnessed, which the public would never see” — because cameras were forbidden.

“Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment, sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10.”

[More...]

This is all you need to know about John McCain's stance on disability rights:

A wheel-chair bound woman asked McCain about the Community Choice Act, a piece of legislation for disabled Americans that would give individuals greater freedom on where to live. “What that would do is it would end the institutional bias,” the questioner said, then asked him if he would consider supporting it.

“I will not,” McCain responded, “because I don’t think it’s the right kind of legislation.” A trio of people in wheelchairs left the room shortly after his response.

It's not "the right kind of legislation" because it would actually be useful. The Wall Street Journal response, naturally enough, is not to criticize McCain's position, or even to suggest that it might merit criticism, but to applaud his "straight talk."

Yahoo is not the government. It has no obligation to respect your right to free speech. In fact, you give Yahoo the right to delete anything you upload if it contravenes Yahoo's difficult-to-discern standards. When Yahoo deletes publicly displayed content (or when TalkLeft does, for that matter) it is not playing a "governmental role," as this writer asserts. Substitute "managerial role," and the writer has a point.

Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.

The governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services - from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video - become more central to public discourse around the world.

Sometimes those judgments seem arbitrary: [more ...]

As a result of a copyright infringement lawsuit between Google and Viacom,

Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.

The viewing log, which will be handed to Viacom, contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details.

This decision appears to affect You Tube watchers world-wide. Google raised privacy issues with the court, to no avail:

[I]t said privacy concerns expressed by Google about handing over the log were "speculative".

Google isn't blameless in this latest threat to our privacy. [More...]

If you thought racial profiling was on the way out, think again:

The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups.

.... Currently, FBI agents need specific reasons — such as evidence or allegations that a law probably has been violated — to investigate U.S. citizens and legal residents. The new policy, law enforcement officials told The Associated Press, would let agents open preliminary terrorism investigations after mining public records and intelligence to build a profile of traits that, taken together, were deemed suspicious.

Among the factors that could make someone subject of an investigation is travel to regions of the world known for terrorist activity, access to weapons or military training, along with the person's race or ethnicity.

Our thanks are due to the ACLU and the EFF for their tireless efforts to safeguard our privacy in the age of electronic information. As technology changes, the government finds new ways to circumvent the Fourth Amendment. These organizations do their best to stay on top of the government's intrusion into our electronic lives.

The ACLU made a Freedom of Information Act request (pdf) to the Justice Department seeking information about the government's warrantless tracking of cell phone locations.

The ACLU filed the FOIA request in November following media reports that federal officials were using Americans' cellular phones to pinpoint their locations without a warrant or any court oversight, the groups said. Some government officials at the time said they did not need probable cause to obtain tracking information from mobile phones. In addition, the reports said some federal law enforcement agents had obtained tracking data from wireless carriers without any court oversight.

The Justice Department declined the request. The ACLU and the EFF responded by filing suit (pdf) to compel the disclosure.

So now we learn that 37 years ago, the FBI illegally wiretapped phone phreak Joe Engressia because J. Edgar Hoover deemed him a threat to national security (because only the FBI should be entrusted to do illegal things with telephones). What do you suppose we'll be learning about 37 years from now?

Four advocacy groups and three voters filed a petition with California's supreme court yesterday asking the court to remove from the November ballot a citizen's initiative that would amend the state constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. The petition cites two grounds.

First, the initiative was sold as a "preserving the status quo" measure. Voters who signed petitions in support of the initiative were told that man-woman marriage was already the law, and the initiative merely preserved existing legislation. That's no longer the case after the California Supreme Court recognized that people of the same sex have an equal right to marry. In other words, the Marriage Protection Act should properly be titled the Marriage Discrimination Act, and that isn't necessarily what its supporters signed up for.

On the other hand, most folks who signed the petition probably did intend to discriminate against gay marriage. The second and more persuasive argument is that the initiative actually seeks to revise the state constitution, not to amend it. [more ...]

Philosophy from a police officer who watched Celtics fans celebrate Boston's NBA Championship yesterday:

Disorderly, drunken “celebrations” in the middle of public streets - otherwise known as riots - are not good times to have discussions of civil rights or the First Amendment with the police officer holding a large stick.

That's particularly true when the stick-wielding officer views drunken revelry as a riot.