Yet another case of overreaction

The governor of Virginia recently signed legislation which required an ultrasound--in almost all cases by vaginal probe (although the text of the legislation is careful to obscure that)--for any woman who has a abortion.  This is in spite of her desires, or those of her doctor.  Whatever you think of abortion, this is a clear violation of any principle of self-ownership.  So I suppose we shouldn't be surprised when (a) people protested, and (b) a state which has no regard for people in any case called out the storm troopers.
At least it made for some visuals, courtesy of http://militantlibertarian.org and Style Weekly.

 
Now all they need is a tank.

Related articles

• The Virginia abortion ultrasound law is still wrong, but there is a silver lining (drjengunter.wordpress.com)
• Forced Vaginal Probing A Source Of Levity Among Virginia Legislators: VIDEO (towleroad.com)
• Virginia governor backs off mandatory ultrasounds in abortion bill (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• News Analysis: Ultrasound: A Pawn in the Abortion Wars (nytimes.com)
• Your Body Under Arrest: Police in Riot Gear Remove Peaceful Women's Rights Protestors in Virginia (the2012scenario.com)
• Virginia Senate Passes Ultrasound Abortion Mandate (washington.cbslocal.com)

How to recognize who you are dealing with

In case you get confused this holiday season (too much eggnog, perhaps) Visually provides this handy guide to recognizing who you are dealing with.

If you are only interested in distinguishing TSA agents from everyone else, here's the simple rule: you don't ask, or pay, the TSA to do what they do, and you can't turn down their services.

Can it get any more stupid?

Our ever-reforming, ever-improving, "open" government hit some new lows this year. The most amazing thing is that some can claim that they really are making progress. Compared to what?

• Government report concludes the government classified 77 million documents in 2010, a 40% increase on the year before. The number of people with security clearances exceeded 4.2. million, more people than the city of Los Angeles.

• Government tells Air Force families, including their kids, it’s illegal to read WikiLeaks. The month before, the Air Force barred its service members fighting abroad from reading the New York Times—the country’s Paper of Record.

• Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees were barred from reading the WikiLeaks Guantanamo files, despite their contents being plastered on the front page of the New York Times.

• President Obama refuses to say the words “drone” or “C.I.A” despite the C.I.A. drone program being on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers every day.

• CIA refuses to release even a single passage from its center studying global warming, claiming it would damage national security. As Secrecy News' Steven Aftergood said, “That’s a familiar song, and it became tiresome long ago.”

• The CIA demands former FBI agent Ali Soufan censor his book criticizing the CIA’s post 9/11 interrogation tactics of terrorism suspects. Much of the material, according to the New York Times, “has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.”

• Department of Homeland Security has become so bloated with secrecy that even the “office's budget, including how many employees and contractors it has, is classified,” according to the Center for Investigative reporting. Yet their intelligence reports “produce almost nothing you can’t find on Google,” said a former undersecretary.

• Headline from the Wall Street Journal in September: “Anonymous US officials push open government.”

• NSA declassified a 200 year old report which they said demonstrated its “commitment to meeting the requirements” of President Obama’s transparency agenda. Unfortunately, the document “had not met the government's own standards for classification in the first place,” according to J. William Leonard, former classification czar.

• Government finally declassifies the Pentagon Papers 40 years after they appeared on the front page of the New York Times and were published by the House’s Armed Services Committee.

• Secrecy expert Steve Aftergood concludes after two years “An Obama Administration initiative to curb overclassification of national security information… has produced no known results to date.”

• President Obama accepts a transparency award…behind closed doors.

• Government attorneys insist in court they can censor a book which was already published and freely available online.

• Department of Justice refuses to release its interpretation of section 215 of the Patriot Act, a public law.

• U.S. refuses to release its legal justification for killing an American citizen abroad without a trial, despite announcing the killing in a press conference.

• U.S. won’t declassify legal opinion on 2001’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program.

• National Archive announced it was working on declassifying “a backlog of nearly 400 million pages of material that should have been declassified a long time ago.”

• The CIA refused to declassify Open Source Works, “which is the CIA’s in-house open source analysis component, is devoted to intelligence analysis of unclassified, open source information” according to Steve Aftergood.

• Twenty-three year State Department veteran gets his security clearance revoked for linking to a WikiLeaks document on his blog.

• The ACLU sued asking the State Department to declassify 23 cables out of the more than 250,000 released by WikiLeaks. After more than a year, the government withheld 12 in their entirety. You can see the other 11, heavily redacted, next to the unredacted copies on the ACLU website.

2011 in Review: The Year Secrecy Jumped the Shark | Electronic Frontier Foundation

What we don't know can't hurt us. Right?

As if the written provisions of the PATRIOT Act weren't bad enough, Danger Room | Wired.com reports

Two Senators have been warning for months that the government has a secret legal interpretation of the Patriot Act so broad that it amounts to an entirely different law — one that gives the feds massive domestic surveillance powers, and keeps the rest of us in the dark about the snooping.

“There is a significant discrepancy between what most Americans – including many members of Congress – think the Patriot Act allows the government to do and how government officials interpret that same law,” wrote the Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. “We believe that most members of the American public would be very surprised to learn how federal surveillance law is being interpreted in secret. ”"

Of course, most Americans--and most Senators--don't care.

Good news on the rule of law

The Bush administration had considerable success in stopping review of its actions by claiming that those who couldn't prove they had been under surveillance, or otherwise affected by secret executive actions, had no standing to bring a case before the court.  The Obama administration, despite the candidate's pledge to stop this practice, has taken it and run with it.

At least in the area of warrantless eavesdropping there is some good news.  A unanimous three-judge appellate court has ruled, in a case involving political activists, that there is a reasonable fear of surveillance, and real harm.  They ruled that the plaintiffs' fear is reasonable given the sweeping powers the FISA law vests gives the president, and this allows them to challenge the constitutionality of the FISA Amendments
Act:

This is a note of sanity in response to an otherwise insane doctrine. Just because you do something in secret shouldn't mean that nobody can sue you over it.


For a more detailed analysis, see Glenn Greenwald in Salon.