Right to Record, a website devoted to the legal aspects of recording police officers, has the scoop. A panel of the First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the right of citizens to openly record police officers.

Gathering information about government officials in a form that can readily be disseminated to others serves a cardinal First Amendment interest in protecting and promoting “the free discussion of governmental affairs.” Moreover, as the Court has noted, “[f]reedom of expression has particular significance with respect to government because ‘[i]t is here that the state has a special incentive to repress opposition and often wields a more effective power of suppression.’” This is particularly true of law enforcement officials, who are granted substantial discretion that may be misused to deprive individuals of their liberties. Ensuring the public’s right to gather information about their officials not only aids in the uncovering of abuses, but also may have a salutary effect on the functioning of government more generally.

Read the whole thing. It provides a great discussion of the developing legal landscape, as well as some juicy details — like the fact that the attorney defending the statute for Massachusetts wrote her student note about how the Massachusetts wiretapping law is unconstitutional.

This decision is a big deal. The case comes from Massachusetts, one of two states (the other being Illinois) that continues to criminalize recording audio in public. It’s the latest in a string of victories against the Massachusetts wiretapping law that has become a useful tool for police who want to shield their actions from public scrutiny. A Massachusetts District Attorney recently refused to proceed with charges against a woman who recorded a vicious police beating, the D.A. declaring that police officers have no reasonable expectation of privacy while on duty and in public. Cop Block founders Pete Eyre and Adam Mueller were just acquitted on felony wiretapping charges for openly recording their encounter with police officers Massachusetts.

Moving on to the other holdout, Illinois, a woman who surreptitiously recorded Chicago Police Internal Affairs officers trying to persuade her not to file a sexual harassment complaint against police officers was acquitted of felony wiretapping charges. All of this sets the stage for the ACLU v. Alvarez, a lawsuit seeking to prevent future wiretapping charges against citizens who record on-duty police in public.

For more Cato work on the right to record police, take a look at this video and this post on Anthony Graber’s victory over abuse of the Maryland wiretapping statute. Speaking of which, Right to Record provides a page on the Maryland wiretapping statute, supplying the decision in Graber’s case for anyone who faces similar charges in the future.

First Circuit Affirms Right to Record the Police is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

My Washington Examiner column this week is on TSA, the federal agency that’s its own reductio ad absurdum.

In the latest TSA atrocity, the agency forced a wheelchair-bound, 95-year-old leukemia patient to remove her adult diaper, for fear she might be wired to explode. “It’s something I couldn’t imagine happening on American soil,” her distraught daughter told the press: “Here is my mother, 95 years old, 105 pounds, barely able to stand, and then this.”

My God, what is she on about? Proper procedure was followed!

As I point out in the column:

in a classic case of “mission creep,” TSA is taking its show on the road and the rails.

Remember when, pushing his bullet-train boondoggle in the 2011 State of the Union, President Obama cracked that it would let you travel “without the pat-down”? Not funny—also, not true.

Earlier this year, Amtrak passengers in Savannah, Ga., stepped off into a TSA checkpoint. Though the travelers had already disembarked the train, agents made women lift their shirts to check for bra explosives. Two weeks ago, armed TSA and Homeland Security agents hit a bus depot in Des Moines, Iowa, to question passengers and demand their papers.

These raids are the work of TSA’s “Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response” (VIPR or “Viper”) teams—an acronym at once senseless and menacing, much like the agency itself.

All this is happening at a time when al Qaeda looks more harried, pathetic, and weaker than ever. But hey, you can never be too careful, right?

Feel Safer?

Beware the Depends Bomber? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The New York Times‘s Charlie Savage reports that the FBI is preparing to release a new Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG), further relaxing the rules governing the Bureau’s investigation of Americans who are not suspected of any wrongdoing.

This comes just three years after the last major revision of FBI manual, which empowered agents to employ a broad range of investigative techniques in exploratory “assessments” of citizens or domestic groups, even in the absence of allegations or evidence of wrongdoing, which are needed to open an “investigation.” The FBI assured Congress that it would conduct intensive training, and test agents to ensure that they understood the limits of the new authority—but the Inspector General found irregularities suggestive of widespread cheating on those tests.

Agents can already do quite a bit even without opening an “assessment”: They can consult the government’s own massive (and ever-growing) databases, or search the public Internet for “open source” intelligence. If, however, they want to start digging through state and local law enforcement records, or plumb the vast quantities of information held by commercial data aggregators like LexisNexis or Acxiom, they currently do have to open an assessment. Again, that doesn’t mean they’ve got to have evidence—or even an allegation—that their target is doing anything illegal, but it does mean they’ve got to create a paper trail and identify a legitimate purpose for their inquiries. That’s not much of a limitation, to be sure, but it does provide a strong deterrent to casual misuse of those databases for personal reasons. That paper trail means an agent who might be tempted to use government resources for personal ends—to check up on an ex or a new neighbor—has good reason to think twice.

Removing that check means there will be a lot more digging around in databases without any formal record of why. Even though most of those searches will be legitimate, that makes the abuses more likely to get lost in the crowd. Indeed, a series of reports by the Inspector General’s Office finding “widespread and serious misuse” of National Security Letters, noted that lax recordkeeping made it extremely difficult to accurately gauge the seriousness of the abuses or their true extent—and, of course, to hold the responsible parties accountable. Moreover, the most recent of those reports strongly suggests that agents engaged in illegal use of so-called “exigent letters” resisted the introduction of new records systems precisely because they knew (or at least suspected) their methods weren’t quite kosher.

The new rules will also permit agents to rifle through a person’s garbage when conducting an “assessment” of someone they’d like to recruit as an informant or mole. The reason, according to the Times, is that “they want the ability to use information found in a subject’s trash to put pressure on that person to assist the government in the investigation of others.” Not keen into being dragooned into FBI service? Hope you don’t have anything embarrassing in your dumpster! Physical surveillance squads can only be assigned to a target once, for a limited time, in the course of an assessment under the current rules—that limit, too, falls by the wayside in the revised DIOG.

The Bureau characterizes the latest round of changes as “tweaks” to the most recent revisions. That probably understates the significance of some of the changes, but one reason it’s worrying to see another bundle of revisions so soon after the last overhaul is precisely that it’s awfully easy to slip a big aggregate change under the radar by breaking it up into a series of “tweaks.”

We’ve seen such a move already with respect to National Security Letters, which enable access to a wide array of sensitive financial, phone, and Internet records without a court order—as long as the information is deemed relevant to an “authorized investigation.” When Congress massively expanded the scope of these tools under the USA Patriot Act, legislators understood that to mean full investigations, which must be based on “specific facts” suggesting that a crime is being committed or that a threat to national security exists. Just two years later, the Attorney General’s guidelines were quietly changed to permit the use of NSLs during “preliminary” investigations, which need not meet that standard. Soon, more than half of the NSLs issued each year were used for such preliminary inquiries (though they aren’t available for mere “assessments”… yet).

The FBI, of course, prefers to emphasize all the restrictions that remain in place. We’ll probably have to wait a year or two to see which of those get “tweaked” away next.

FBI’s New Guidelines Further Loosen Constraints on Monitoring is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As Chris Preble noted early Monday morning, Osama bin Laden is dead. In addition to celebrating V-OBL Day, we should take a moment to reflect on wars of the last decade and the civil liberties we have sacrificed since September 11, 2001. Malou Innocent makes the case for reconsidering our foreign policy, and Jim Harper asks if he can have his airport back. We lay out these thoughts in more detail in this Cato video, After bin Laden.

The phrase “after bin Laden” has a nice ring to it. Cato held counterterrorism conferences in 2009 and 2010, and there’s more Cato work on counterterrorism and homeland security here.

After bin Laden is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The controversy over citizens getting arrested for recording on-duty law enforcement officers is prompting legislation. Connecticut has a two-party wiretap law (the audio of a recording is the justification for arrest) and is looking to pass a statute that specifically protects citizen journalism. This is preventive medicine more than anything — Maryland, Illinois, and Massachusetts have been the chief offenders — but a welcome development nonetheless.

The headset cameras I’ve written about are going to make their reality TV debut on Police POV on the TruTV network. The series will show footage of officers in Cincinnati, Chattanooga, and Fort Smith, Arkansas, all filmed with cameras mounted on the officers. The promotional footage shows at least one SWAT raid, proof positive that if you’re willing to strap on a helmet and 45 pounds of body armor and gear, a couple of extra pounds of camera aren’t a bridge too far, and ought to be required.

While Radley Balko has highlighted some shenanigans with police reality TV shows, creating a new normal where officers not only accept the prospect of being filmed on the job but embrace the technology for evidentiary and liability reasons is a step in the right direction. I make the case for more cameras in law enforcement operations with Radley and Clark Neilly in this video:

Cops and Cameras: Legal and on TV is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Wall Street Journal law blog has a piece up on how the budget crisis is impacting public defenders:

Funding constraints have prompted states and counties to lay off public defenders, hold the line on salaries, and reduce the amount defenders can spend case investigators and staff training, the WSJ reports.

Public defenders maintain that they should be insulated from budget cuts for two reasons, the first being that they were sorely underfunded before the recession came along.  Secondly, they point to the fact that states have a duty, enshrined in Gideon v. Wainwright, to provide indigent criminal defendants with the right to counsel.

Stephen J. Schulhofer and David Friedman recently published a Cato Policy Analysis, Reforming Indigent Defense that proposes a free market solution: use vouchers instead of public defenders. This would eliminate the overhead of keeping defense attorneys on the public payroll and improve the quality of representation. As they put it in a related op-ed:

Vouchers would greatly improve the quality of defense representation, because attorneys hoping to attract business would have to serve their clients well. Better representation will, in turn, produce at least three benefits for society. First, improving defense services will reduce the potential for mistakes. It will be less likely that innocent persons will be wrongfully convicted and less likely that the actual perpetrators will remain free to repeat their offenses.

Second, improving defense services will minimize adverse consequences even for those who would be acquitted under current systems of indigent defense. A better defense makes it more likely that the innocent will be released from custody sooner, with less disruption to their lives and less expense for the jails that hold them.

Third, improving indigent defense will bring better information to the sentencing process — making it more likely that appropriate, cost-effective punishments will be imposed on those who are guilty.

My colleague Tim Lynch will speaking on Capitol Hill today at a related event, The Last Sacred Cow: How Congress Can Cut Criminal Justice Spending Without Compromising Public Safety.

Reforming Indigent Defense is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The police in Austin, Texas will be testing nine different body-mounted cameras over the next 30 to 60 days. This is a positive development for both officers and citizens. It’s good legal defense for officers against false claims of excessive force and a training tool to show trainees best practices. It’s good incentive for officers to act within the bounds of the law. Video also makes for solid evidence in court. Many jurisdictions require law enforcement officers to record confessions and/or interrogations. Steve Chapman argued last year that the FBI should adopt such a policy.

Recording should be mandatory in SWAT raids, the most intense law enforcement encounters. I make the case for recording SWAT operations with Radley Balko and Clark Neily in this video:

Cop-Cams on the Rise is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

At the Britannica Blog I write:

Many commentators have seen a shift to the right in American politics over the past two years — the reaction to spending, bailouts, and Obamacare; the rise in conservative self-identification in polls; the 2010 elections. But there’s another trend going on as well. I described it in 2009 as a “civil liberties surge.” And this week there’s new evidence.

A new study from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds long-term growth in support for legal abortion, gun rights, marijuana legalization, and gay marriage.

The graphs on all these topics from Pew are pretty impressive, as is another one from the General Social Survey included in the Britannica post. I go on to note:

These new poll results should be no surprise. Part of the American project for more than 200 years has been extending the promises of the Declaration of Independence — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — to more and more people. America is a country fundamentally shaped by libertarian values and attitudes. In their book It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marx write, “The American ideology, stemming from the [American] Revolution, can be subsumed in five words: antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism.” If Herbert McClosky and John Zaller are right that “[t]he principle here is that every person is free to act as he pleases, so long as his exercise of freedom does not violate the equal rights of others,” then marriage equality and marijuana freedom are only a matter of time.

And none of these socially liberal results challenge the general perception of a conservative trend, as long as that trend is understood as a reaction to bailouts, takeovers, and other elements of “big government.” Americans continue to tell pollsters they prefer “smaller government with fewer services” to “larger government with more services.”

New Polls Show Support for Civil Liberties is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The L.A. Times has an article highlighting the twentieth anniversary of the Rodney King beating and how video of that event introduced the LAPD to modern citizen journalism.

Today, things are far different and the tape that so tainted the LAPD has a clear legacy in how officers think about their jobs. Police now work in a YouTube world in which cellphones double as cameras, news helicopters transmit close-up footage of unfolding police pursuits, and surveillance cameras capture arrests or shootings. Police officials are increasingly recording their officers. Compared to the cops who beat King, officers these days hit the streets with a new reality ingrained in their minds: Someone is always watching.

“Early on in their training, I always tell them, ‘I don’t care if you’re in a bathroom taking care of your personal business…. Whatever you do, assume it will be caught on video,’ ” said Sgt. Heather Fungaroli, who supervises recruits at the LAPD’s academy. “We tell them if they’re doing the right thing then they have no reason to worry.”

That’s progress, and as I’ve said before, a video camera is an honest cop’s best friend.

There’s still plenty of room for improvement. The LAPD paid $1.7 million to a news camera operator injured by its officers at the 2007 May Day melee. LAPD officers have also been caught on camera assaulting a bicyclist and illegally detaining a man for taking photographs on a public sidewalk. You can track police intimidation of citizen journalists at Cop Block’s War on Cameras interactive map, patterned after Cato’s own Raidmap.

Here is the Cato video, Cops on Camera:

For more on cops and cameras, check out the event Cato hosted last year and Radley Balko’s feature at Reason, “The War on Cameras.”

Cops on Camera: LAPD Edition is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

You are probably familiar with the story of Brian Aitken, the responsible gun owner wrongly convicted of violating New Jersey’s draconian gun laws. Governor Chris Christie commuted Aitken’s sentence, and his appeal is still pending.

As Radley Balko often says, libertarianism happens to people. It happened to Brian Aitken:

Aitken never thought of himself as a libertarian, but two years in the clutches of the state system has changed him completely. Before the arrest, the young, apolitical entrepreneur was on his way to a successful career in digital marketing.

“I never considered myself a person who is really interested in politics,” Aitken says. “But after all this happened I am definitely a hardcore libertarian now.”

Read the whole thing.

Libertarianism Happens to People is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The DEA and San Francisco Police Department conducted a really wrong door raid:

The SFPD and DEA found no piles of marijuana money at 243 Diamond St., one of six addresses raided simultaneously in San Francisco that morning. Instead, they found Clark Freshman, who rents the penthouse at the two-unit building. Freshman, a UC Hastings law professor and the main consultant to the television show Lie to Me, was put into handcuffs while in his bathrobe as agents searched, despite Freshman’s insistence that they had the wrong place and were breaking the law…

Soon they may be called defendants in a lawsuit. A furious Freshman has pledged to sue the DEA and the SFPD for unlawful search and seizure of his home…

[Officer] Biggs describes 243 Diamond as a “two-story, one-unit” building in the warrant. There’s no mention of Freshman or Larizadeh’s son-in-law or seven-months pregnant daughter who were detained in the downstairs unit that morning. But property records — and a quick visual scan of the property — reveal it to be a three-story, two-unit building. That mistake alone may be enough to invalidate the search warrant.

Read the whole thing. Professor Freshman’s closing quote is priceless. (H/T Uncle)

Really Wrong Door Raid is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The American criminal justice system has long been flawed. This probably isn’t news to you. What is news is the emergence of a broad chorus of organizations and leaders from across the political spectrum speaking out in support of serious reform. A few examples:

The Smart on Crime Coalition released its recommendations (and in pdf) for the 112th Congress, providing ways that the federal government can help fix the criminal justice system. Congress creates, on average, a new criminal offense every week. The urge to overcriminalize just about everything needs to be replaced with serious thought about how broadly Congress writes laws so that the drive to lock up a few bad actors does not make felons of a large portion of the citizenry.

The Smart on Crime report also points out the need for reform of asset forfeiture laws, building on the excellent Policing for Profit report produced by the Institute for Justice last year.

Conservatives see the need for reform as well. Right on Crime makes the case for a number of policy changes that not only focus law enforcement resources but aim to save taxpayer dollars.

Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, a signatory to Right on Crime’s Statement of Principles, points to recent reforms in Texas at National Review:

When the Lone Star State’s incarceration rates were cut by 8 percent, the crime rate actually dropped by 6 percent. Texas did not simply release the prisoners, however. Instead, it placed them under community supervision, in drug courts, and in short-term intermediate sanctions and treatment facilities. Moreover, it linked the funding of the supervision programs to their ability to reduce the number of probationers who returned to prison. These strategies saved Texas $2 billion on prison construction. Does this mean Texas has gotten “soft on crime”? Certainly not. The Texas crime rate has actually dropped to its lowest level since 1973.

The lesson from Texas is that conservatives can push reforms that both keep Americans safe and save money, but only if we return to conservative principles of local control, performance-based funding, and free-market innovation.

As Radley Balko recently wrote at Reason, there are points where libertarians and conservatives will differ, but there is cause for optimism in the recognition that we can’t continue to lock up so many of our citizens. The United States accounts for 5% of the world’s population, yet 23% of the world’s reported prisoners. Hopefully Jim Webb’s National Criminal Justice Commission Act will end his Senate career on a positive note, and prompt serious changes to the way that the states and federal government deal with crime.

To gain an appreciation of the scope of the problem, check out Tim Lynch’s In the Name of Justice: Leading Experts Reexamine the Classic Article “The Aims of the Criminal Law” and Harvey Silverglate’s Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.

The Growing Chorus for Criminal Justice Reform is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

First, the good news: Last night, civil libertarians had a rare excuse to pop champagne when an effort to fast-track a one-year reauthorization of three controversial Patriot Act provisions–set to expire at the end of the month–failed in the House of Representatives. As Slate‘s Dave Weigel notes, the vote had been seen as such a sure thing that Politico headlined its story on the pending vote “Congress set to pass Patriot Act extension.” Around this time last year, a similar extension won House approval by a lopsided 315-97 vote.

Now the reality check: The large majority of representatives also voted for reauthorization last night: 277 for, 148 against. The vote failed only because GOP leadership had sought to ram the bill through under a “suspension of the rules”–a streamlined process generally used for the most uncontroversial bills, limiting debate and barring the introduction of amendments–which required a two-thirds majority for passage. Given last week’s developments in the Senate, it’s still a near certainty that the expiring provisions will be extended again before the end of the month. In fact, there’s a Rules Committee meeting today to get the bill back on the House floor. Also, while the defection of 26 Republicans who voted against reauthorization is the first real pushback against leadership we’ve seen since the GOP took the House, some of the talk that’s circulated about a Tea Party backlash against the surveillance state seems premature. As Weigel notes, just eight of the 26 Republican “no” votes were incoming freshmen, and many representatives prominently associated with the Tea Party were on the other side. Some of the resistance seems to have been generated by the fast-track approach, as there haven’t been any hearings or mark-ups on Patriot legislation.

That said, the tide does seem to be shifting somewhat. The failure of the fast-track vote means that we may see the reauthorization introduced under rules that would allow amendments aimed at remedying the civil liberties problems with the three expiring provisions, or with the still more controversial Patriot expansion of National Security Letter authority, which under current law does not expire. For those just tuning in, the sunsetting Patriot provisions are:

Lone Wolf

So-called “lone wolf” authority allows non-citizens in the U.S. who are suspected of involvement in terrorist activities to be monitored under the broad powers afforded by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), even if they are not connected to any overseas terror group or other “foreign power.” It was passed after FBI claimed the absence of “lone wolf” authority stymied efforts to monitor the infamous “20th 9/11 Hijacker”–but a bipartisan Senate report found that this failure was actually the result of a series of gross errors by the FBI, not any gap in government surveillance powers. Moreover, Lone Wolf blurs the traditional–and constitutionally significant–distinction between foreign intelligence, where the executive enjoys greater latitude, and domestic national security investigations. The way the statute is written, Lone Wolf authority is only available in circumstances where investigators would already be able to obtain a criminal terrorism wiretap. Given of the sweeping nature of FISA surveillance, that more narrow criminal surveillance authority should be employed when the special needs imposed by the involvement of a “foreign power” are not present.

Roving Wiretaps

Roving wiretap authority allows intelligence wiretap orders to follow a target across multiple phone lines or online accounts. Similar authority has been available in criminal investigations since 1986, but Patriot’s roving wiretaps differ from the version available in criminal cases, because the target of an order may be “described” rather than identified. Courts have stressed this requirement for identification of a named target as a feature that enables criminal roving wiretaps to satisfy the “particularity” requirement of the Fourth Amendment. Patriot’s roving taps, by contrast, raise the possibility of “John Doe” warrants that name neither a person nor a specific “place” or facility–disturbingly similar to the “general warrants” the Founders were concerned to prohibit when they crafted the Fourth Amendment. Given the general breadth of FISA surveillance and the broad potential scope of online investigations, John Doe warrants would pose a high risk of “overcollecting” innocent Americans’ communications. Most civil liberties advocates would be fine with making this authority permanent if it were simply modified to match the criminal authority and foreclose the possibility of “John Doe” warrants by requiring either a named individual target or a list of specific facilities to be wiretapped.

Section 215

Section 215 expanded the authority of the FISA Court to compel the production of business records or any other “tangible thing.” While previously such orders were limited to narrow classes of businesses and records, and required a showing of “specific and articulable facts” that the records sought pertain to an agent of a foreign power, Patriot stripped away those limits. The current law requires only a showing of “reasonable grounds” to believe records are “relevant” to an investigation, not probable cause, and has no requirement that people whose information is obtained be even suspected of any connection to terrorism. And the recipients of these orders are barred from Proposals to restore some of the previous checks on this power–requiring some demonstrable connection to terroris–initially received bipartisan support last year, but were torpedoed when the Justice Department objected that this limitation would interfere with a secret “sensitive collection program.” Several senators briefed on the program have expressed concern that this sweeping collection authority was being reauthorized without adequate public understanding of its true purpose.

So those are the sunsetting provisions–though a lot of the debate last year very justifiably centered on the need to reform National Security Letters, which we know to be constitutionally defective, and which have already been subject to serious abuses. One reason reform keeps getting postponed is that Congress is busy and tends not to make time for these issues until the sunset deadlines are right around the corner–at which point a reliable band of pundits and legislators imply that absolute bedlam will ensue unless every single surveillance authority is extended–meaning reform will have to wait until later, at which point it will be an emergency all over again. Once you start looking at the numbers, though, all these Chicken Littles begin to look faintly ridiculous.

The Lone Wolf provision is such an essential intelligence tool that it has never been used. Not a single time. And again, by the terms of the statute, it only applies under circumstances where a criminal wiretap warrant would already be available if Lone Wolf authority didn’t exist. Roving authority is granted by the FISA Court an average of 22 times per year, and in many (if not most) of those cases it never actually has to be used–surveillance is limited to named facilities. To put that in context, the FISA court issued 1,320 electronic surveillance orders in 2009, and that was the first time in 5 years the number fell below 2,000. So we’re talking about maybe 1 percent of FISA surveillance, which judging by internal oversight reports, is a good deal less than the portion that ends up sitting untranslated for months anyway. Similarly, there were 21 business records orders under §215 issued in 2009–and remember, that authority doesn’t disappear if this provision sunsets, it just reverts to its narrower, pre–Patriot version, where the court needs to see actual evidence that the records have some connection to a suspected terrorist. Surveys by the Inspector General’s office found no instances in which a major case development resulted from 215 information. The idea that we’d somehow be in grave danger if these provisions lapsed for a few months just doesn’t hold up, but there’s no reason Congress can’t pass a two-month extension while they consider some of the reforms already on the table, just as they did last year.

So let’s stop living in a state of perpetual panic. Some of these provisions we’d be better off without. Some, like roving wiretaps, just need minor tweaks to close loopholes for misuse. Some–I’m looking at you, National Security Letters–require substantial reform. Many of these changes ought to be common sense, and have attracted bipartisan support in the past. But let’s stop kicking the can down the road and saying we’ll debate the proper limits on the surveillance state when there’s time. It’s important enough that Congress can make time.

Patriot Reauthorization Vote Fails… Now What? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Federalist Society has a podcast up, Miranda & Terror Suspects, debating whether terrorism suspects should be given Miranda warnings. University of Utah law professors Paul Cassell and Amos Guiora debate the issue, and Richard D. Klingler of Sidley Austin LLP moderates. Cassell provides a slideshow to go with the audio file.

Listening to the podcast, I’m struck at how so many of the concerns cited by Cassell are already dealt with by existing case law. The Quarles case created a “public safety” exception to Miranda that allows officers to ask questions without giving Miranda warnings when there is an ongoing threat to public safety. In Quarles, a revolver hidden in a supermarket was enough to create the exception.

As I wrote at Townhall.com in August, the “public safety” exception has already been applied broadly in the terrorism context in United States v. Khalil:

In 1997, NYPD officers raided an apartment where two men had constructed pipe bombs and planned to detonate them on a subway or bus terminal. During the raid, the police shot and wounded the bomb maker as he lunged for a black bag containing the explosives.

After bomb technicians discovered that a switch on one of the pipe bombs had been flipped, officers questioned the wounded bomb maker about the number of bombs, how many switches had to be flipped to set them off, whether there was a timer, what wires to cut to disarm them, and whether they were intended as suicide devices. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit let all of the answers come into evidence via the public safety exception.

The public safety exception is settled law and has been ruled on by every federal circuit and over half the states, allowing police to deal with all manner of emergencies. Courts have allowed questions about the existence or location of guns, bombs, assault or kidnapping victims still in danger, accomplices and their identities, and plans for future crimes.

Add to this the fact that statements given before Miranda warnings are still admissible to impeach a suspect who changes his story when he gets to court, and that physical evidence obtained without Miranda warnings remains admissible.

So, here’s a practical proposal: the above list ought to be distributed to counterterrorism task forces across the nation. Instead of spending time and energy on a measure that is out of Congress’ power, have government lawyers create a pamphlet to educate the local, state and federal officers who will capture tomorrow’s aspiring terrorist. Boil down the law to bullet points and put it on a business card so that they have it on hand when the next emergency unfolds. That’s a tool first responders can use.

Miranda Ain’t Broke is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Tennessee ACLU sent a letter to public schools warning them not to celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday. The Tennessee Fusion Center (H/T Uncle) put the communication on its map of “terrorism events and other suspicious activity”:

“ACLU cautions Tennessee schools about observing ‘one religious holiday,’” the website’s explanation reads.

Also among the map’s highlights: “McMinn County Teen Brings Gun to School,” and “Turkish National Salih Acarbulut Indicted in Chattanooga for Alleged $12 million Ponzi Scheme.”

Mike Browning, a spokesman for the Fusion Center, said “that was a mistake” to label the ACLU letter as a suspicious activity. He said the Fusion Center meant to use the icon that means merely general information. The icon was changed after the ACLU sent its news release, he said.

“It’s still on the map,” Browning told The City Paper. “It has been reclassified into the general information category.”

But a look at the website shows there is no icon for general information. Instead, the icon for the ACLU letter now signifies “general terrorism news,” according to the website’s legend.

This follows a long line of fusion center and DHS reports labeling broad swaths of the public as a threat to national security. The North Texas Fusion System labeled Muslim lobbyists as a potential threat; a DHS analyst in Wisconsin thought both pro- and anti-abortion activists were worrisome; a Pennsylvania homeland security contractor watched environmental activists, Tea Party groups, and a Second Amendment rally; the Maryland State Police put anti-death penalty and anti-war activists in a federal terrorism database; a fusion center in Missouri thought that all third-party voters and Ron Paul supporters were a threat; and the Department of Homeland Security described half of the American political spectrum as “right wing extremists.”

The ACLU fusion center report and update lay out some good background on these issues, and the Spyfiles report describes how monitoring lawful dissent has become routine for police departments around the nation. Cato hosted Mike German, a former FBI counterterrorism agent and co-author of the ACLU fusion report at a forum on fusion centers, available here.

We’re All Terrorists Now is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has commuted the seven-year sentence of Brian Aitken, the man wrongfully convicted on firearms charges under that state’s draconian gun laws. Good.

While a full pardon seems more appropriate – the judge in this case should have given the jury instructions on the “moving exception” that protected Aitken – this is at least recognition of an injustice and relief for one man and his family.

The New Jersey state judicial system’s webpage describes the grand jury’s function as “a screening mechanism to protect citizens from unfounded charges.” That didn’t happen in this case. For more on this phenomenon, read this Cato Policy Analysis, “A Grand Façade: How the Grand Jury Was Captured by the Government.”

For more Cato work on criminal justice, check out Tim Lynch’s excellent book, In the Name of Justice.

Brian Aitken’s Sentence Commuted is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I wrote an op-ed for National Review (Online) last week showing how conservative exploitation of the Supreme Court’s broad misreading of the Commerce Clause to reach intrastate medical marijuana facilitated liberal exploitation of the same to create the individual mandate in Obamacare.

A principled stand on the limits of federal power does not begin and end with health care. The Commerce Clause is a double-edged sword: Conservatives cannot wield it in the drug war without making it a useful tool for advancing progressive visions of federal power.

I’m happy to see Barton Hinkle, winner of the 2008 Bastiat Prize for Journalism, pick up on my writing and drive the point home in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch:

So far, many conservatives outraged over Obamacare do not seem to have reconsidered their enthusiasm for national drug prohibition. Whether they do so could provide a good indication as to whether they’re standing up for a principle — or merely against the president.

Hinkle points to a recent Heritage Foundation paper opposing Prop. 19, California’s referendum on marijuana legalization. The Commerce Clause makes a prominent appearance:

In 2006, the Supreme Court held in Gonzales vs. Raich that the Commerce Clause confers on Congress the authority to ban the use of marijuana, even when a state approves it for “medical purposes” and it is produced in small quantities for personal consumption. Many legal scholars criticize the Court’s extremely broad reading of the Commerce Clause as inconsistent with its original meaning, but the Court’s decision nonetheless stands.

Yes, the decision “nonetheless stands.” That doesn’t make it right. Several prominent conservative drug warriors signed on to an amicus brief in Raich endorsing an expansive use of the Commerce Clause. Copy, paste, and replace the word “marijuana” with “health insurance,” and you just wrote a Department of Justice brief for any of the suits defending Obamacare across the nation.

Or, for a good laugh, go read former Oklahoma congressman Ernest Istook, now working for Heritage, who frames the health care debate as “Obamacare vs. Limited Government.” As he puts it: “Straining to find a constitutional basis for mandating that everyone must buy health insurance, Obama’s lawyers resorted to the all-purpose Interstate Commerce Clause.” Istook signed on to the drug warrior brief in Raich.

There’s no good reason for this inconsistency. State attorneys general from both sides of the aisle opposed the federal intrusion in Raich. Deep red Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana touted their drug warrior prowess but argued against an overly broad Commerce Clause reading on federalism grounds. True blue California, Maryland, and Washington argued that the Controlled Substances Act did not bar states from regulating intrastate markets.

I make many of these points in a Cato Podcast, Conservatives, Obamacare, and the Commerce Clause. For some more Cato work on the drug war, check out how Portugal decriminalized drugs without the social ills that conservatives forecast, and how ending the war on drugs would save billions annually.

Obamacare and the Drug War is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I’ve got a piece in today’s New York Post that points out some inconvenient truths about the body scanners now installed at airports across the country. Building on Jim Harper’s excellent post, body scanners are not being installed because of a well-reasoned risk analysis.

As Timothy Carney pointed out in the Washington Examiner, this is a sop to the companies that make the body scanners. The machines don’t work as well as advertised – a March GAO Report determined that it is not certain the technology would have found Farouk Abdulmutallab’s suspicious package, and that a cost-benefit analysis needed to be conducted before spending $340 million each year to run the labor-intensive equipment.

The same report found that cargo screening was a weak spot that ought to be addressed, but it took terrorist cargo bomb plots to get the TSA to momentarily escape the clutches of regulatory capture and tend to this threat. The British have been much more candid about the limitations of this technology as applied to low-density explosives, noting that the scanners probably wouldn’t have stopped the 2006 liquid bomb plot at Heathrow.

Of course, you can always opt out of the body scanners in favor of a groping on par with the one that motivated my colleague Penn Jillette to report his sexual assault to the police.

You could opt out entirely. TSA Director John Pistole says you won’t fly, but if you publicize your objections, the TSA may try to fine you $11,000.

Keep a stiff upper lip. I’m sure that this will all be much smoother and less invasive when TSA screeners unionize.

Body Scanner Blues is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Commerce Department will soon come forth with a ”stepped-up approach to policing Internet privacy that calls for new laws and the creation of a new position to oversee the effort.”

Meanwhile, with nearly 22 months in office, President Obama has still not named a single candidate to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that Congress established to review the government’s actions in response to terrorism. Had he appointed a board, it would have issued three public reports by now, and we would be awaiting a fourth.

Physician, Heal Thyself is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I see ACLU’s Jay Stanley has penned a reply to my post from a couple weeks back on the civil liberties group’s report arguing for the urgency of net neutrality regulation. The main thrust of my post was that many of the examples advanced to show there’s an imminent threat to the open Internet, requiring regulatory action on the double, don’t really show anything of the sort. Stanley allows that some of their examples are “not violations of Internet network neutrality in the strictest sense” but that they “speak to the motives, intent, and trustworthiness of major telecommunications firms in treating the speech of their customers fairly.” But I’m not sure they really show that either. In fact, if I can be forgiven a little digression, two more egregious corporate offenses against net neutrality that turn out not to be.

First, one I’d missed from the ACLU report: Vague terms of service agreements. Apparently, AT&T’s terms of service had a list of grounds for suspension of service that ended with the rather nebulous provision bolded below:

AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.

Based on the company’s explanation, it sounds like they intended this as a sort of catch-all for behavior that wasn’t covered by their policy or the law, but was sufficiently clearly abusive to damage the reputation of a provider who allowed it. But you can certainly understand why people read it as reserving the right to disconnect people who criticize the company, and in any event, it does seem way too vague: Who wants to risk losing their service based on such ill-defined criteria? Significantly, though, I don’t see anybody claiming that AT&T or Verizon (which had similar language) ever actually did suspend a user’s account for this reason. It appears to have been one more overbroad bit of legal boilerplate drafted by a lawyer paid to shield the company from liability in as many contingencies as possible, and promptly changed when users complained. More importantly, and at the risk of stating the obvious, this isn’t really a question of network architecture. Such a broad provision could surely be enforced in a way that was contrary to the spirit of the open Internet, but it’s ultimately a provision about how AT&T treats its customers, not about how routers treat packets. Many things might be wrong with it, but violating the end-to-end principle embodied in the TCP/IP protocol isn’t one of them. Indeed, there’s nothing really Internet specific about this at all: An offline business could attempt to refuse service to people who publicly criticize the company in the newspapers. Mercifully, such behavior seems rare, but if you’re worried about the potential for a certain class of abusive contracts aimed at squelching speech isn’t that where the remedy should aim?

Second (via Seton Motley), there’s the ongoing scuffle between Cablevision and Fox. Presumably in hopes that Cablevision would be under more pressure to cut a deal for Fox cable channels if their subscribers couldn’t just get Fox content online, Fox blocked access to their Internet video content for Cablevision subscribers, prompting Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge to fret about the danger to the open Internet. He acknowledges that normally, folks worried about neutrality have focused on the threat of ISPs leveraging access over the pipes to control content, but asserts that “it shouldn’t matter who is keeping consumers away from the lawful content.”

This is just weird. Media companies “keep consumers away from lawful content” all the time! Netflix won’t let me stream their movies unless my subscription is paid up. If I try to access academic articles on JSTOR from home, whoops, I’m blocked! I have to be visiting from an IP address at Cato or some other academic institution that’s made a deal with JSTOR for access. BBC won’t let me watch Sherlock or Doctor Who on their Web site, because they’ve sold the U.S. rights to PBS and SyFy, respectively. “Net Neutrality” and “Open Internet” have a dizzying array of different definitions, but even so, the idea that either obligates content providers to make their content equally available, for free, to every user is… novel.

I harp on this because I think it indicates how muddled a lot of the debate over “neutrality” has gotten. People have a whole welter of heterogeneous concerns about the future of the Internet that increasingly seem to be lumped under the rubric of “non-neutrality” or “network discrimination,” which both obscures the plurality of potential problems and begs the question of whether, assuming a policy remedy is necessary, “neutrality” regulation is actually the ideal silver bullet response to all these diverse concerns. If there were no downside to mandated neutrality—if there were no risk of opening the door to regulatory gamesmanship, and if every imaginable deviation from neutrality were plainly harmful—then this might not be such a big deal. If there are potential downsides, though, it behooves us to get a little more granular and look specifically at what we’re concerned about, and whether there are less sweeping mechanisms that would work to address the problem.

The ACLU puts the threat of content-based restriction of expression at the forefront of their argument, but this also seems like the concern with the weakest empirical basis, even in a relatively oligopolistic broadband market. First, to the extent that content-based filtering would be executed by means of Deep Packet Inspection, it would almost certainly run afoul of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which permits carriers to “intercept” the contents of a communication only when this is a “necessary incident” to the provision of their service. As my colleague Tim Lee lays out at greater length in his excellent paper “The Durable Internet,” there is ample evidence that consumers will react with enormous hostility to efforts to literally cut off their access to the sites they want to visit.

If we’re worried about wholesale blocking of domains, then, I think transparency-based regulation should be sufficient. That is, an ISP claiming to offer “Internet access” shouldn’t be able to restrict access to a site while making it look as though it’s the result of some kind of technical problem—perhaps even the blocked site’s fault. On the other hand, if Comcast wants to openly and transparently offer the option of a whitelisted “family plan” to conservative parents who don’t feel up to fussing with client-based blocking software, that strikes me as the sort of limitation on “expression” that is neither a serious threat to the larger Internet architecture—the effect is only to substitute for filtering the parents would do client-side were they more tech savvy—nor a proper civil liberties concern. Again, I expect a transparency requirement would be sufficient to preclude misbehavior on this front precisely because most consumers don’t want their carrier deciding what sites they’re allowed to access, and this, more than the fear of pressure from advocacy groups or even the FCC, will tend to make ISPs hesitant to do so if they can’t do it covertly. At the very least, again, if there are potential downsides to neutrality regulation, I can’t fathom why you wouldn’t try this more modest step first and watch to see if some more radical remedy is necessary.

Of course, consumer pressure is more effective in competitive markets, and as Stanley notes, if you focus on wireline broadband, the picture is not that encouraging in much of the United States. But the fact that wireline may have the characteristics of a natural monopoly doesn’t mean that last-mile broadband necessarily does: What sectors are “natural” monopolies turns out to be highly contingent on the available technology. As 4G wireless networks roll out, and as users consider the appeal of cutting the cord, the stranglehold of the incumbent monopolists and duopolists is attenuated. Wireless broadband, of course, is not a perfect substitute—fiber will probably always have a significant speed advantage—but imperfect substitutes can exercise competitive pressure too. Rail is a natural monopoly, but Amtrak still has to worry that dissatisfied consumers will drive, fly, or take Bolt Bus—even though these alternatives differ from train travel along multiple dimensions.

Moreover, specific deviations from neutrality that respond to consumer demand may themselves help secure the very competition Stanley and I both agree will help discipline carriers and keep deviations from neutrality limited to those that serve genuine consumer interests. So—and consider this a strictly illustrative hypothetical, please—Netflix now accounts for something like 20 percent of downstream bandwidth at peak home use times. Probably there are no small number of people who’d find it appealing to cut the cord if they were assured they could come home to a movie or an episode of Firefly streaming smoothly in HD. Their cable provider, of course, can guarantee this by bundling your Internet with a dedicated video service running over the same pipes—and, of course, no pretense that there’s any parity of treatment between those two types of “traffic.” It’s at least conceivable that permitting similar bundling and cross-subsidy between wireless broadband and Netflix could hasten the demise of the effective wireline duopoly that exists in many markets, eroding the very conditions that undergird the argument for fearing non-neutral routing could be anti-consumer.

Now, to be sure, you can paint a doomsday scenario based on extrapolation from this model that I find every bit as unappealing as Stanley does: A Balkanized Internet on which every ISP has exclusive deals within one player in each online service category to provide high-bandwidth routing, while the rest of the Net limps along at speeds too slow to make innovative services viable unless backed by big corporate money. (Though this would really be a concern about innovation, not free expression: There’s actually very little reason to fear that deliberate viewpoint discrimination by ISPs under transparency rules is either likely or, more to the point, feasible.) If this were to start to happen on a larger scale—despite the demonstrable preference of most consumers for an open Internet over such a curated walled-garden model, it would be worth revisiting the question. But to impose architectural mandates in advance of such experimentation—to assume a priori that any and all deviations from neutrality would impose such great costs to expression and innovation as to trump any possible consumer gains in price or quality of service—seems very much contrary to the spirit of end-to-end.

More Net Neutrality Violations That Aren’t is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog