INS Detainee Protest Site Up Soon

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I’ve been working on the web site for this week’s INS Immigration Roundup Protests going on in various locations around the country all week. I’ve got more footage from the Dec 23 protest, footage from yesterday’s protest, and footage from the SF protest everyday this week (This Friday, January 10, is the big day guys!)
Anyway, sorry for leaving my post here for a couple days. It’s been *really* hard to wrap my head around this crazy stuff going on over at the agency-formerly-known-as-the-INS (now part of Homeland Security). It’s hard to believe that poor planning and a series of administrative gaffs are the only excuses our government has for the incarceration and subsequent brutal treatment of thousands of people. But that’s what’s happening alright.
I’ve been assembling all of the information together and collecting it into a website that will hopefully help you to understand everything quickly — so you can all do what you can to help. It’s really important.
Okay — Back in a flash! I’ve got an excellent Daily Show Interview with Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor of “The Nation”, I’ll be uploading in a second to tide you over until I can get the other stuff up later this morning.
Thanks!

A Tiny Win For The Freedom Of Information Act…For Now

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Have we finally found a Judge that doesn’t feel for one reason or another that the Bush Administration is above the law?
Court Denies Office of Homeland Security Motion

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly last week ruled that the White House office must show it had no independent authority in a ruling denying a motion to dismiss a privacy group’s lawsuit seeking material under the Freedom of Information Act. The ruling was made public on Thursday.
The Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center last March requested Office of Homeland Security records on proposals for standardized U.S. driver’s licenses, records associated with a “trusted-flier” program and other proposals concerning biometric technology for identifying individuals.
The Office of Homeland Security sought to have the case against the office and its director Tom Ridge dismissed, arguing that it could not be subjected to the Freedom of Information Act information requests because it was not an agency and that its sole function was to advise and assist the president.
President Bush established a U.S. Department of Homeland Security in November and nominated Ridge to head the new Cabinet-level agency.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling granted the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s request to obtain information that would establish the status of the White House Office of Homeland Security.

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The Paradox Of Shrub’s War Games Strategy

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Games Nations Play
By Paul Kruger for the New York Times.

So you might be tempted to conclude that the Bush administration is big on denouncing evildoers, but that it can be deterred from actually attacking countries it denounces if it expects them to put up a serious fight. What was it Teddy Roosevelt said? Talk trash but carry a small stick?
Your own experience seems to confirm that conclusion. Last summer you were caught enriching uranium, which violates the spirit of your 1994 agreement with the Clinton administration. But the Bush administration, though ready to invade Iraq at the slightest hint of a nuclear weapons program, tried to play down the story, and its response

“Special Registration” Brings Back Memories From WWII

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Detentions today remind of yesterday’s
By L.A. Chung for the San Jose Mercury News

Critics have scoffed at protesters’ comparisons of the detentions with the well-known internment camps that detained 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans from 1942 to 1946.
Successive restrictions
But ask someone who is intimately familiar with the events affecting the Japanese-American community after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The initial calls not to blame a community. The gradual restrictions. Curfews. Registration. Finally, internment…
Lest we forget. It is time to turn up the volume. Next Friday, at the INS building in San Francisco.

More on the protest going on all next week in front of INS Buildings all around the country!

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Enjoy The Police State! – Current Events From The Daily Show

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Usually I’m using Daily Show Clips to help teach history lessons. This time it’s a fun lesson in current events.

This one’s only funny cuz it’s true — making it a little less funny perhaps after you think about it for a second…

I’ve made the video available in high, medium and low resolutions, along with an MP3 of the audio (5 MB).

So You’re Living In A Police State – 46 MB
So You’re Living In A Police State – 35 MB
So You’re Living In A Police State – 22 MB
MP3 – So You’re Living In A Police State – 5 MB

Shrub Continues Unprecedented Enron Cover-Up

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If there’s nothing to hide, why not cough up the documents? Like every other administration.
It’s called being accountable.
Government Openness at Issue as Bush Holds Onto Records
By Adam Clymer for the New York Times.
I’m beginning to wonder if the Shrub is covering up a lot more than Cheney’s involvement in the Enron mess.
I wish that Enron videotape would resurface…whatever happened to that thing anyway?

The administration’s most publicized fight over secrecy, and its biggest victory to date, has come over its efforts to keep the investigative arm of Congress from gaining access to records of the energy task force led by Vice President Cheney.
This fight is only the showiest of many battles between the Bush administration and members of Congress over information. Such skirmishes happen in every administration. But not only are they especially frequent now, but also many of the loudest Congressional complaints come from the president’s own party, from Republicans like Senator Grassley and Representative Dan Burton of Indiana.
The vice president framed the fight as being less about what the papers sought by the General Accounting Office might show than over power

John Perry Barlow: Pretending To Be Asleep

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Here’s another excerpt from the letter I just quoted from John Perry Barlow.
This really hit home, because I feel like I’m one of those people who got woken up last year.
I think more people are waking up every day.
Maybe we can even wake up some of the possums.

Actually, I have finally figured out what’s going on with a great many of us. Shocked into a kind of political catatonia by the multitudinous Uh-Oh’s of the Uh-Oh’s, we are pretending to be asleep. This is the only explanation I can think of for our political passivity.
If we were actually asleep, we would have been shocked into alertness by the wanton ruin of our economy in only two years, the overnight establishment of an oligarchy that makes Mexico’s look enlightened, the detailed repudiation of the Constitution enacted by the USA PATRIOT Act, and the breezy willingness of our government to commit us to simultaneous wars in separate hemispheres.
If we had really been sleeping, these and many other shocks to the conscience would have us bolt upright by now. The real patriots would be well out of bed, rushing to defend America against the Junta, rather than ratifying it with their absence from the polls.
But there is an old Navajo proverb you’ve heard me quote before: “It’s impossible to awaken someone who is pretending to be asleep.” Never has that phrase seemed more bitterly and poignantly true than now. It is also impossible to teach someone who’s pretending to be asleep. And, finally it is impossible to administer a pop quiz to possum players.

Happy New Year: Welcome To The Uh-Oh’s

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John Perry Barlow has come up with a great idea for what to call this decade: THE Uh-Oh’s.

As in: Total loss of privacy. Uh-Oh. The death of copyright. Uh-Oh. Children more powerful than their parents. Uh-Oh. Bill Gates ruling the world. Uh-Oh. Ten million Americans in prison. Uh-Oh. Black market plutonium. Uh-Oh. Absolutely everyone packing a cell phone. Uh-Oh. And constantly talking to everyone else. Uh-Oh…
I mean, I ask you, how many times in the last two years have you found yourself thrust into a ripe opportunity, whether public or personal, to say “Uh-Oh?” Or, at the very least, something that translated into “Uh-Oh?”
Like, first plane. Uh-Oh.
Second plane. Uh-Oh.
America turning into a mad, homicidal bully with 7000 nuclear weapons and a stated willingness, as well as a proven ability, to use them. Uh-Oh.
As I said back then, you get my drift. I sure as hell don’t need to spell it out now. Nor need I detail, Dear Friends, all the pending Uh-Oh’s visibly in the pipeline. And I refer merely to the ones we can predict without going as orthogonal as things like to get these days. Uh-Oh, indeed.
So, the next time you’re looking to refer to this decade by a name, please consider my proffered suggestion. I think it’s a meme that bears spreading, and not merely because I dreamed it up. We have to call them *something.* Might as well be a name that requires no adjective – as in Psychedelic Sixties or Roaring Twenties – to evoke their essential flavor.

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Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Pavlovich

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I’ve made the Pavlovich Decision available in HTML too (that’s true to the PDF document page-number-wise – for easy printing, citing, etc.).
Let me know if you need me to embed a link for you for a specific purpose. (That’s the point of having these documents available online — So we can all reference them and cite specific portions directly.)
Supreme Court Intervenes in DVD Dispute
Supreme Court Urged to Settle DVD Copying Dispute; Could Be Landmark for Online Content

The Supreme Court has temporarily intervened in a fight over DVD copying, and the justices could eventually use the case to decide how easy it will be for people to post software on the Internet that helps others copy movies.
More broadly, the case against a webmaster whose site offered a program to break DVD security codes could resolve how people can be sued for what they put online…
The California Supreme Court ruled in November that the former webmaster, Matthew Pavlovich, cannot be sued for trade secret infringement in California. Justices said he could be sued in his home state of Texas, or in Indiana, where he was a college student when codes that allowed people to copy DVDs were posted on his Web site in 1999.

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