The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Thursday blasted a proposed plan that would allow Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents to consider a person’s race, religion, or ethnicity in deciding whether to open a terrorism investigation. CAIR decried the plan as “unconstitutional and un-American,” saying that it could allow security agents to target Muslims and Arab-Americans for harassment. A US Department of Justice spokesman responding to press reports on the plan - which has neither been finalized nor formally announced - denied that the new guidelines would allow profiling, noting that ethnicity is only one of many factors to be considered and that it is only when all those factors as a whole are deemed suspicious that an investigation can be opened. Under the proposed guidelines as explained to AP by unnamed sources, agents would be able to initiate investigations even in instances where there is no evidence of a crime, something required under current guidelines. AP has more. Fox News has additional coverage.
Rights complaints by Muslims in the US rose 25 percent in 2006, according to an annual report on civil rights released by CAIR last year. The group attributed the jump to a rise in anti-Muslim bias. The majority of reported complaints came against government agencies, including the DOJ.
Its wrong on every level m’dear reader.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.-Ben Franklin 1755
On this day in which we 'celebrate' uber-nationalism and militarism..think about the Bill of Rights and the signing of our Constitution. Think about what is more important..our freedoms or our perceived safety from those faceless, nameless terrorists that BushCo keeps banging into our heads 365 days a year.
If the top story doesn't piss you off, then try the next one on for size...also from Jurist:
Federal judge orders Google to turn over YouTube user data in Viacom lawsuit
A judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of New York Tuesday ordered Google to turn over databases containing logs of every time any IP address has accessed any YouTube video. Viacom had requested access to the databases in a lawsuit brought for copyright infringement, arguing that Google and YouTube knowingly made copyrighted material available on their websites without permission. District Judge Louis Stanton rejected Google's claim that turning over user information would invade users' privacy in violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act, finding that an IP address or YouTube username alone was not enough to identify users. The court did, however, reject Viacom's bid to compel Google to turn over larger databases which include user-provided text summaries of hosted videos. Technology and privacy advocates sharply criticized the order, saying that it would set a dangerous precedent for internet privacy. Computerworld has more. BBC News has additional coverage.
Google has recently started to push for stronger online privacy protection after strong criticism by privacy groups. In September 2007, Google called for stronger privacy legislation at a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conference. In June 2007, Google announced that it would reduce retention of user search data to 18 months in response to a European Commission investigation into whether the company complied with EU privacy rules.
What I took from this is..the EU's privacy rules are stronger than ours evidently. Go figure..
