Mood:  irritated

By Associated Press

Posted by Joe Anybody at 2:13 AM PDT

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Mood:  party time!

HA  ha  ha

This just keeps getting better

Oh ...heck (dont forget to) catch the ....^{shhhhhh Terrorists}

Miami airport security cameras see through clothing

Posted by Joe Anybody at 7:00 PM PDT

Updated: Monday, 4 August 2008 7:01 PM PDT

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Mood:  irritated

News > August 4, 2008

Don’t Tase Me, GOP!

By Jacob Wheeler

The St. Paul Police Department is arming itself with Tasers.

Local activists and media say that the department ordered 230 stun guns in late February — adding to the 140 already in its possession — in preparation for protests at the upcoming Republican National Convention (RNC), which St. Paul will host from Sept. 1 to Sept. 4.

Police spokesman Tom Walsh denies any connection between the arrival of the Tasers and the upcoming RNC. “They are not related to the convention in any way,” says Walsh. “A patrol officer suggested months ago that we supply our force with Tasers.”

But some demonstrators are wary of such assurances.

“Our concern is that they’ll have them and that they’ll use them,” says Marie Braun, a member of Women Against Military Madness, which has received a permit to protest in a St. Paul park on Sept. 1. “These are dangerous weapons and people have died as a result of them being used.”

Four years ago at the RNC in New York, the New York Police Department (NYPD) arrested thousands of demonstrators, holding many of them in an asbestos-filled pier on the Hudson River until the convention’s conclusion.

And at an impromptu mass march toward Madison Square Ground where President Bush’s re-election fest was being held, an NYPD officer in civilian clothing reportedly provoked a fight by driving a scooter into the crowd.

St. Paul Assistant Police Chief Matt Bostrom told the online newspaper MinnPost.com in December that no St. Paul police officers would infiltrate protest organizations, and the force will dress in regular uniforms — not riot gear — during the convention.

And spokesman Walsh insists that the department will patrol the streets of St. Paul without help from contract cops or the Secret Service, who will operate only inside the Xcel Energy Center where the convention will take place.

Nevertheless, an underground anarchist group that calls itself the “RNC Welcoming Committee” states on its website that “the RNC, local police and federal agents are likely to get violent.”

The group and other activists cite a Critical Mass bike ride last August in neighboring Minneapolis that led to police using Tasers and pepper spray to break up the event and arrest 19 protesters. The gathering coincided with what the Welcoming Committee calls the “pReNC, a weekend of radical organizing in preparation for the RNC.”

During the subsequent trial of one cyclist, Minneapolis police Sgt. David Stichter reportedly testified that the department had created a task force to monitor Critical Mass because it knew RNC protesters would participate in the ride.

“[They have been] taking every opportunity to try and intimidate the people who live here,” says an activist using the name “Diablo Bush,” referring to the local police.

On March 13, the Welcoming Committee’s website began requesting Taser donations. So far it has received none, according to an e-mail message to In These Times from Diablo Bush.

“Any Tasers we do receive would be simply for day-to-day maintenance of public safety,” jokes Diablo, “and are not at all related to the RNC — just like the St. Paul Police Department’s order [of Tasers].”

In May, the Twin Cities’ alternative-weekly, City Pages, reported that University of Minnesota police were working with an FBI special agent to recruit “moles” to attend vegan potlucks, gain the trust of RNC protesters and report back to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership between federal agencies and local police.

Last summer, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that the nearby Ramsey County Sheriff’s office was preparing to construct pens to hold 5,000 arrested protesters — a report Bostrom of the St. Paul police claimed was news to him.

Says Braun of Women Against Military Madness: “We have as much concern about the police as anyone, because when we look at political conventions in the past, it’s often the police that have a history of overreacting.”

Posted by Joe Anybody at 6:39 PM PDT

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Mood:  sad

 Z3 Readers will not be surprised to read this unscrupulous attack on our personal liberties and privacy when crossing the border. Yes my fellow faithful readers ..we are getting screwed. If you ever thought America had freedom and liberty ...those days are over! Yes now days "freedom and liberty" only means Attacking other countries". Now days expected privacy, personal non-illegal papers, letters, and files all belong to the Homeland Security. Hitler is smiling! The real terrorists are stealing "in the name of the law" Our lives now..... BELONG TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

First we took our shoes off, dumped our baby bottles and chap stick in the trash, background checks, sniffing machines smell us a s we walk by, disrobing, frisking, and now your lap top and cell phone is theirs for life

How does it feel to be "fucked" ...heheh! Good Ole American Freedom at its best .....

Homeland Security:

We can seize laptops for an indefinite period

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has concocted a remarkable new policy: It reserves the right to seize for an indefinite period of time laptops taken across the border.

A pair of DHS policies from last month say that customs agents can routinely--as a matter of course--seize, make copies of, and "analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to enter, re-enter, depart, pass through, or reside in the United States." (See policy No. 1 and No. 2.)

DHS claims the border search of electronic information is useful to detect terrorists, drug smugglers, and people violating "copyright or trademark laws." (Readers: Are you sure your iPod and laptop have absolutely no illicitly downloaded songs? You might be guilty of a felony.)

This is a disturbing new policy, and should convince anyone taking a laptop across a border to use encryption to thwart DHS snoops. Encrypt your laptop, with full disk encryption if possible, and power it down before you go through customs.

Here's a guide to customs-proofing your laptop that we published in March.

It's true that any reasonable person would probably agree that Customs agents should be able to inspect travelers' bags for contraband. But seizing a laptop and copying its hard drive is uniquely invasive--and should only be done if there's a good reason.

Sen. Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, called the DHS policies "truly alarming" and told the Washington Post that he plans to introduce a bill that would require reasonable suspicion for border searches.

But unless Congress changes the law, DHS may be able to get away with its new rules. A U.S. federal appeals court has ruled that an in-depth analysis of a laptop's hard drive using the EnCase forensics software "was permissible without probable cause or a warrant under the border search doctrine."

At a Senate hearing in June, Larry Cunningham, a New York prosecutor who is now a law professor, defended laptop searches--but not necessarily seizures--as perfectly permissible. Preventing customs agents from searching laptops "would open a vulnerability in our border by providing criminals and terrorists with a means to smuggle child pornography or other dangerous and illegal computer files into the country," Cunningham said.

The new DHS policies say that customs agents can, "absent individualized suspicion," seize electronic gear: "Documents and electronic media, or copies thereof, may be detained for further review, either on-site at the place of detention or at an off-site location, including a location associated with a demand for assistance from an outside agency or entity."

Outside entity presumably refers to government contractors, the FBI, and National Security Agency, which can also be asked to provide "decryption assistance." Seized information will supposedly be destroyed unless customs claims there's a good reason to keep it.

An electronic device is defined as "any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form" including hard drives, compact discs, DVDs, flash drives, portable music players, cell phones, pagers, beepers, and videotapes.

Posted by Joe Anybody at 12:16 PM PDT

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Mood:  irritated

Panopticon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It has been suggested that Panopticon (Internet culture) be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

Panopticon blueprint by Jeremy Bentham, 1791

The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience."^[1]

Bentham himself described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example."^[2]

[edit] Conceptual history

Bentham derived the idea from the plan of a military school in Paris designed for easy supervision, itself conceived by his brother Samuel who arrived at it as a solution to the complexities involved in the handling of large numbers of men. Bentham supplemented this principle with the idea of contract management; that is, an administration by contract as opposed to trust, where the director would have a pecuniary interest in lowering the average rate of mortality. The Panopticon was intended to be cheaper than the prisons of his time, as it required fewer staff; "Allow me to construct a prison on this model," Bentham requested to a Committee for the Reform of Criminal Law, "I will be the gaoler. You will see ... that the gaoler will have no salary — will cost nothing to the nation." As the watchmen cannot be seen, they need not be on duty at all times, effectively leaving the watching to the watched. According to Bentham's design, the prisoners would also be used as menial labour walking on wheels to spin looms or run a water wheel. This would decrease the cost of the prison and give a possible source of income.^[4]

Bentham devoted a large part of his time and almost his whole fortune to promote the construction of a prison based on his scheme. After many years and innumerable political and financial difficulties, he eventually obtained a favourable sanction from Parliament for the purchase of a place to erect the prison, but in 1811 after Prime Minister Spencer Perceval (1809-1812)^[5] refused to authorise the purchase of the land, the project was finally abandoned. In 1813, he was awarded a sum of £23,000 in compensation for his monetary loss which did little to alleviate Bentham's ensuing unhappiness.

While the design did not come to fruition during Bentham's time, it has been seen as an important development. For instance, the design was invoked by Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) as metaphor for modern "disciplinary" societies and its pervasive inclination to observe and normalise. Foucault proposes that not only prisons but all hierarchical structures like the army, the school, the hospital and the factory have evolved through history to resemble Bentham's Panopticon. The notoriety of the design today (although not its lasting influence in architectural realities) stems from Foucault's famous analysis of it.

[edit] Panoptic prison design

Prison Presidio Modelo, December 2005

Prison Presidio Modelo, Inside one of the buildings, December 2005

The architecture

incorporates a tower central to a circular building that is divided into cells, each cell extending the entire thickness of the building to allow inner and outer windows. The occupants of the cells are thus backlit, isolated from one another by walls, and subject to scrutiny both collectively and individually by an observer in the tower who remains unseen. Toward this end, Bentham envisioned not only venetian blinds on the tower observation ports but also maze-like connections among tower rooms to avoid glints of light or noise that might betray the presence of an observer

—Ben and Marthalee Barton ^[6]

The Panopticon is widely, but erroneously, believed to have influenced the design of Pentonville Prison in North London, Armagh Gaol in Northern Ireland, and Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. These, however, were Victorian examples of the Separate system, which was more about prisoner isolation than prisoner surveillance; in fact, the separate system makes surveillance quite difficult. No true panopticons were built in Britain during Bentham's lifetime, and very few anywhere in the British Empire.

Many modern prisons built today are built in a "podular" design influenced by the Panopticon design, in intent and basic organization if not in exact form. As compared to traditional "cellblock" designs, in which rectangular buildings contain tiers of cells one atop the other in front of a walkway along which correctional officers patrol, modern prisons are often constructed with triangular or trapezoidal-shaped buildings known as "pods" or "modules". In these designs, cells are laid out in three or fewer tiers arrayed around an elevated central control station which affords a single correctional officer full view of all cells within either a 270° or 180° field of view (180° is usually considered a closer level of supervision). Control of cell doors, CCTV monitors, and communications are all conducted from the control station. The correctional officer, depending on the level of security, may be armed with nonlethal and lethal weapons to cover the pod as well. Increasingly, meals, laundry, commissary items and other goods and services are dispatched directly to the pods or individual cells. These design points, whatever their deliberate or incidental psychological and social effects, serve to maximize the number of prisoners that can be controlled and monitored by one individual, reducing staffing; as well as restricting prisoner movement as tightly as possible.

[edit] Panopticon-inspired prisons

• Carabanchel Prison — Madrid, Spain
• Caseros Prison — Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Chi Hoa — Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
• Huron Historic Gaol — Goderich, Ontario, Canada
• Kilmainham Gaol — Dublin, Ireland
• Koepelgevangenis (Arnhem) — Arnhem, The Netherlands
• Koepelgevangenis (Breda) — Breda, The Netherlands
• Koepelgevangenis (Haarlem) — Haarlem, The Netherlands
• Millbank Prison — London, United Kingdom
• Modelo Prison — Barcelona, Spain
• Mount Eden Prisons — Auckland, New Zealand
• Old Provost — Grahamstown, South Africa
• Panóptico — Bogotá Prison (today the National Museum of Colombia)
• Pelican Bay State Prison — Del Norte County, California, USA.
• Port Arthur, Tasmania Prison Colony — Port Arthur, Tasmania, Australia
• Presidio Modelo — Isla de la Juventud‎, Cuba
• Round House — Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia
• Stateville Correctional Center — Crest Hill, Illinois, USA.
• Twin Towers Correctional Facility — Los Angeles, California, USA
• Insein Prison — Insein, Burma

[edit] Other panoptic structures

The Panopticon has been suggested as an "open" hospital architecture: "Hospitals required knowledge of contacts, contagions, proximity and crowding... at the same time to divide space and keep it open, assuring a surveillance which is both global and individualising", 1977 interview (preface to French edition of Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon").^{[citation needed]}

The Worcester State Hospital, constructed in the late 19th century, extensively employed panoptic structures to allow more efficient observation of the inmates. It was considered a model facility at the time.

The only industrial building ever to be built on the Panopticon principle was the Round Mill in Belper, Derbyshire, England. Constructed in 1811 it fell into disuse by the beginning of the twentieth century and was demolished in 1959. ^[7]

Contemporary social critics often assert that technology has allowed for the deployment of panoptic structures invisibly throughout society. Surveillance by closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in public spaces is an example of a technology that brings the gaze of a superior into the daily lives of the populace. Further, Middlesbrough, a town in the North of England, has put loudspeakers to the CCTV cameras. They can transmit the voice of a camera supervisor.^[8][9]

[edit] In popular culture

• Closed-circuit television is similar to the methods used in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four by the thought police to control the citizenry. At any moment, a person may or may not be being observed via a telescreen, though whether one is being watched at any given moment is unknown to that person.
• The popular film Gilda (1946) features a panoticon-style headquarters in the casino of Nazist crimelord Ballin Mundson (George Macready). This menacing office and control base allows Mundson to oversee his gambling empire, and also provides Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) with a means to keep a check on the activities of the film's eponymous femme fatale (Rita Hayworth).
• In the British TV science fiction series Doctor Who, the main room of the Capitol on Gallifrey (the Time Lords' home planet) was called the Panopticon, although it apparently did not have a panoptic design. (It may have been called that because events there were televised to the whole planet.)
• The 1993 science fiction film Fortress features a heavily panoptic multi-level structure, albeit wholly underground. Most of the control over the structure and the inmates is given to the prison's central computer in similar vein to above literature, with ultimate leverage still exercized by the half-cyborg prison director.
• In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novella, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the Vicario brothers spend three years in the "panopticon of Riohacha" awaiting trial for the murder of Santiago Nasar.
• The 2004 sci-fi adventure The Chronicles of Riddick employs a similar underground structure, which is set deep within the recesses of a planetoid enduring extreme ground temperatures day and night.
• The 1998 video game Sanitarium features a mental asylum designed as Panopticon.
• In the 2004 video game Silent Hill 4: The Room, there is a prison that is seemingly based on the Panopticon design.
• Post-metal band Isis's 2004 album Panopticon takes both its title and its central lyrical theme from the Panopticon design.
• In the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas there is a desolate area of countryside named 'The Panopticon'.
• In the television show LOST much of how the Others watched Jack Shepherd, James "Sawyer" Ford, and Kate Austen was very similar to the Panopticon. The character John Locke even takes the name of Jeremy Bentham in Season 4.

• In the book "The disreputable history of Frankie Landau-Banks" by Lockhart, E. panopticon is referenced many times and acts as a subplot for the book.
• John Twelve Hawks writes about panopticon as a model for society in his book The Traveler

[edit] Criticism

The growth of panoptic monitoring technologies has provoked backlashes by privacy advocates. However, some observers argue that these technologies don't always favor the hierarchical structure outlined by Orwell, Bentham, and Foucault, but can also enable individuals, through inverse surveillance or sousveillance, to appropriate technological tools for individual or public purposes. Still others predict a balanced state of a universal "participatory panopticon" in which there is an equiveillance, or equilibrium of monitoring and control structures between parties.

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault
• Big Brother, a character from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Big Brother, the popular reality television series
• London's "ring of steel"
• Governmentality, and the Foucaultian idea of Biopower
• Information Awareness Office
• Mass surveillance
• Omniscience
• Right to privacy
• Totalitarianism
• The Transparent Society by David Brin also Kiln People
• The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks
• video surveillance
• Panopticon (album) by Isis (band)
• Panopticon (Internet culture)
• Total institution

[edit] External links

• Panopticon — by Jeremy Bentham (online version)
• Special Issue on the Panopticon — Surveillance and Society
• Scare tactics: embedded reporting and the Panopticon effect

Posted by Joe Anybody at 10:49 AM PDT

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Mood:  don't ask

June 30th, 2008

Z3 Readers Check out he Big Brother Article I found here:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1368&tag=rbxccnbzd1

Big Brother Getting Bigger Part 1: USA

The FBI has confirmed to Popular Mechanics that it’s not only adding palm prints to its criminal records, but preparing to balloon its repository of photos, which an agency official says ‘could be the basis for our facial recognition.’ It’s all part of a new biometric software system that could store millions of iris scans within 10 years and has privacy advocates crying foul. Quoting: ‘The FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) system, which could cost as much as $1 billion over its 10-year life cycle, will create an unprecedented database of biometric markers, such as facial images and iris scans. For criminal investigators, NGI could be as useful as DNA some day — a distinctive scar or a lopsided jaw line could mean the difference between a cold case and closed one. And for privacy watchdogs, it’s a duel threat — seen as a step toward a police state, and a gold mine of personal data waiting to be plundered by cybercriminals.

Read more thoughts on the subject here:

The Slashdot article mentions that Privacy advocates are up in arms over this, and rightly so.  From the Washington Post article that Slashdot comments on:

To enable global sharing of data, NGI is to be built to technical standards shared by the departments of Homeland Security, Defense and State, as well as by Britain, Canada and other countries, Bush said.

Which is great, because those organizations have such a prooven track record of building things to secure technical standards (you should note the sarcasm).  The Washington Post article continues:

The FBI also hopes to offer a service allowing employers to store employees’ prints, subject to state privacy laws, so that if employees are ever arrested, the employer would be notified.

Great.  Joint privacy abuse by government and commercial… exactly what America needs more of.  A final point about privacy from the Washington Post article:

Privacy advocates said that the work is proceeding before the technologies have been prooven. “Congress needs to do a better job of assessing how taxpayer dollars are being spent, particularly on programs that impact the privacy rights of Americans,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

That bold portion reads so obvious, but there it is.  We’re going to spend billions on something that is eroding our privacy.  It’s a celebration, so enjoy yourself.

You know, I think I watched a movie about this… there were these things called pre-cogs and they could predict the future…  and they’d know if you committed a crime before you knew you’d commit the crime.  Then these military police forces would come arrest you and you’d have no idea what was going on, and there was no point in running, because all over the streets were these biometric devices that could scan your face and recognize you and have the police on you within seconds.  No point in running, that is, unless you are Tom Cruise.

Despite my fiendishly good looks and charming wit, I am not Tom Cruise, and this scares the jeebus out of me from a privacy standpoint (that’s not a mis-spell, it’s a Homer Simpson quote).  I’m not sure I’m as worried about the police using it against me (since I’m not a criminal), as I am about the precedence it starts to create.  I think that technology is currently far outpacing our government’s capability of keeping up with it, which I’m assuming puts the fear into them.  I fear a world where our government makes snap decisions on things it may not understand that could have lasting ramifications.  I also fear the rapid loss of our civil liberties that’s occurred since 9/11. 

Posted by Joe Anybody at 7:08 PM PDT

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Mood:  sad

Death of the 4th -

Funeral for the Fourth Amendment Ceremony in Portland

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2008/06/377200.shtml

author: Joe Anybody        e-mail: iam@joe-anybody.com

Funeral for the 4th Amendment video 6-26-2008

Posted by Joe Anybody at 1:57 PM PDT

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Mood:  irritated

FBI Sought Authority

To Detain Thousands

Associated Press
Sunday, December 23, 2007; A16

Former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had a plan to suspend the rules against illegal detention shortly after the Korean War began and arrest as many as 12,000 Americans he suspected of being disloyal, according to a newly declassified document.

Hoover sent his plan to detain suspect Americans in military and federal prisons to the White House on July 7, 1950, but there is no evidence to suggest that President Harry S. Truman or any subsequent president approved any part of the proposal.

Hoover had wanted Truman to declare the mass arrests necessary to "protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage," the New York Times reported yesterday in a story posted on its Web site.

The plan called for the FBI to apprehend all potentially dangerous individuals whose names were on a list that Hoover had been compiling for years.

"The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven percent are citizens of the United States," Hoover wrote in the now-declassified document. "In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus."

Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, is a bedrock legal principle.

All apprehended individuals eventually would have had the right to a hearing under Hoover's plan, but hearing boards composed of one judge and two citizens "will not be bound by the rules of evidence," he wrote.

The details of Hoover's plan was among a collection of Cold War-era documents related to intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955. The State Department declassified the documents Friday.

Posted by Joe Anybody at 12:38 PM PST

Updated: Sunday, 23 December 2007 12:42 PM PST

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Mood:  chatty

Second-Amendment

Showdown

The Supreme Court has agreed to take up a case that will affect millions of Americans and could also have an impact on the 2008 elections. That case, Parker v. D.C., should settle the decades-old argument whether the right "to keep and bear arms" of the Constitution's Second Amendment is an individual right -- that all Americans enjoy -- or only a collective right that states may regulate freely. Legal, historical and even empirical reasons all command a decision that recognizes the Second Amendment guarantee as an individual right.

The amendment reads: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." If "the right of the people" to keep and bear arms was merely an incident of, or subordinate to, a governmental (i.e., a collective) purpose -- that of ensuring an efficient or "well regulated" militia -- it would be logical to conclude, as does the District of Columbia -- that government can outlaw the individual ownership of guns. But this collective interpretation is incorrect.

To analyze what "the right of the people" means, look elsewhere within the Bill of Rights for guidance. The First Amendment speaks of "the right of the people peaceably to assemble . . ." No one seriously argues that the right to assemble or associate with your fellow citizens is predicated on the number of citizens or the assent of a government. It is an individual right.

The Fourth Amendment says, "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . . " The "people" here does not refer to a collectivity, either.

The rights guaranteed in the Bill of Right are individual. The Third and Fifth Amendments protect individual property owners; the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments protect potential individual criminal defendants from unreasonable searches, involuntary incrimination, appearing in court without an attorney, excessive bail, and cruel and unusual punishments.

The Ninth Amendment protects individual rights not otherwise enumerated in the Bill of Rights. The 10th Amendment states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Here, "the people" are separate from "the states"; thus, the Second Amendment must be about more than simply a "state" militia when it uses the term "the people."

Consider the grammar. The Second Amendment is about the right to "keep and bear arms." Before the conjunction "and" there is a right to "keep," meaning to possess. This word would be superfluous if the Second Amendment were only about bearing arms as part of the state militia. Reading these words to restrict the right to possess arms strains common rules of composition.

Colonial history and politics are also instructive. James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to provide a political compromise between the Federalists, who favored a strong central government, and the Anti-Federalists, who feared a strong central government as an inherent danger to individual rights. In June 1789, then Rep. Madison introduced 12 amendments, a "bill of rights," to the Constitution to convince the remaining two of the original 13 colonies to ratify the document.

Madison's draft borrowed liberally from the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and Virginia's Declaration of Rights. Both granted individual rights, not collective rights. As a result, Madison proposed a bill of rights that reflected, as Stanford University historian Jack Rakove notes, his belief that the "greatest dangers to liberty would continue to arise within the states, rather than from a reconstituted national government." Accordingly, Mr. Rakove writes that "Madison justified all of these proposals (Bill of Rights) in terms of the protection they would extend to individual and minority rights."

One of the earliest scholars of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, confirmed this focus on individuals in his famous "Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States" in 1833. "The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms," Story wrote, "has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of republics, since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers . . ."

It is also important to consider the social context at the time of the drafting and adoption of the Bill of Rights. Our Founding Fathers lived in an era where there were arms in virtually every household. Most of America was rural or, even more accurately, frontier. The idea that in the 1780s the common man, living in the remote woods of the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania and Virginia, would depend on the indulgence of his individual state or colony -- not to mention the new federal government -- to possess and use arms in order to defend himself is ludicrous. From the Minutemen of Concord and Lexington to the irregulars at Yorktown, members of the militias marched into battle with privately-owned weapons.

Lastly, consider the empirical arguments. The three D.C. ordinances at issue are of the broadest possible nature. According to the statute, a person is not legally able to own a handgun in D.C. at all and may have a long-gun -- even in one's home -- only if it is kept unloaded and disassembled (or bound with a trigger lock). The statute was passed in 1976. What have been the results?

Illegal guns continue to be widely available in the district; criminals have easy access to guns while law-abiding citizens do not. Cathy L. Lanier, Acting Chief of Police, Metropolitan Police Department, was quoted as follows: "Last year [2006], more than 2,600 illegal firearms were recovered in D.C., a 13% increase over 2005." Crime rose significantly after the gun ban went into effect. In the five years before the 1976 ban, the murder rate fell to 27 from 37 per 100,000. In the five years after it went into effect, the murder rate rose to 35. In fact, while murder rates have varied over time, during the 30 years since the ban, the murder rate has only once fallen below what it was in 1976.

This comports with my own personal experience. In almost 14 years as prosecutor and as head of the Homicide Unit of the Wayne County (Detroit) Prosecutor's Office, I never saw anyone charged with murder who had a license to legally carry a concealed weapon. Most people who want to possess guns are law-abiding and present no threat to others. Rather than the availability of weapons, my experience is that gun violence is driven by culture, police presence (or lack of same), and failures in the supervision of parolees and probationers.

Not only does history demonstrate that the Second Amendment is an individual right, but experience demonstrates that the broad ban on gun ownership in the District of Columbia has led to precisely the opposite effect from what was intended. For legal and historical reasons, and for the safety of the residents of our nation's capital, the Supreme Court should affirm an individual right to keep and bear arms.

Mr. Cox is the attorney general of Michigan.

Posted by Joe Anybody at 11:09 AM PST

Updated: Friday, 23 November 2007 11:10 AM PST

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Mood:  irritated

Grad student suspended

after pro-gun-rights e-mail

The nonpartisan civil liberties group FIRE, which stands for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, has taken up Scheffler's case, but with no luck so far. In a letter to FIRE on September 28, Hamline's attorneys said the school would not reconsider Scheffler's punishment 

Scheffler had sent the pair of e-mail messages after Hamline offered students counseling after the Virginia Tech shooting in April, which took place half a continent away. His response was that, if administrators were truly concerned about safety on campus, they should "lift a ridiculous conceal carry campus ban and let the students worry about their own 'security.'"

Scheffler is licensed under Minnesota law to carry a concealed sidearm, which requires a background check and specific training.

In May, after word got out about Scheffler's punishment but before FIRE became involved, conservative blogs rallied to his defense. A psychologist in Tennessee called it a case of university officials learning that "a conservative is on the loose on campus." Captain's Quarters interviewed Scheffler about so-called gun-free zones and concluded he was a "nice guy caught up in the academic manifestations of political correctness."

That's the high-level summary. Some of the details are important, though.

Angry e-mails: One point is that while Scheffler's e-mails were not threatening, they were angry and had sexist and racist overtones. Read them for yourself: The first, to Vice President of Student Affairs David Stern, said: "I myself am tired of having to pay my own extremely overpriced tuition to make up for minorities not paying theirs. On top of that, I am sick of seeing them held to a different standard than the white students (Of course its a lower and more lenient standard)."

The second message, to President Linda Hanson, said: "For a 'Christian' university, I am very disappointed in Hamline. With the motif of the curriculum, the atheist professors, jewish and other non-Christian staff, I would charge the school with wanton misrepresentation...3 out of 3 students just in my class that are 'minorities' are planning on returning to Africa and all 3 are getting a free education ON MY DOLLAR." (Hamline is affiliated with the United Methodist Church and claims to promote "the ethics and values of the United Methodist tradition.")

Even some libertarians who think Scheffler was ill-treated have criticized his grammar and approach. A professor at Brooklyn College who believes the suspension was unjustified said he was nevertheless "dismayed that (Scheffler) has progressed to the master's degree level without having mastered some aspects of basic grammar."

"Privacy" rights: What's odd is that Hamline initially claimed the e-mail messages were "threatening" and placed Scheffler on an indefinite suspension that required him to undergo a mental health evaluation, a possible "treatment plan," an interview with the dean of students, and so on. The possibility of "further" internal discipline was also mentioned.

But then, after FIRE pointed out being suspended for expressing political views violated the school's freedom of expression policy, President Hanson retreated to a fallback position. Hanson said that the suspension was also based on "critical input from various members of the Hamline community."

The bizarre thing is that to this day, Hamline has never informed Scheffler what those anonymous allegations were (or who his anonymous accusers are). It claims that Scheffler's formal waiver of his rights under federal privacy law is insufficient because it has to "protect the privacy rights and interests of these other individuals."

FIRE's Harvey Silverglate quipped: "Confidentiality is so protected at American colleges and universities that they don't even let the students know what the charges are!"

Hamline's response: I spoke with Hamline spokesman Jacqueline Getty on the phone on Wednesday and exchanged six e-mail messages with her, but never actually got an answer to why the school wouldn't answer general questions about student free speech rights and due process.

All she gave me was this statement:

Hamline has never suspended a student for advocating for gun rights, nor for advocating for any other rights...As we have already informed FIRE, federal privacy laws that protect the rights of that student actually prevent the university from correcting each item of misinformation on FIRE's press release and from articulating in detail what may have transpired with this student.

This misses the point. If there are serious allegations against Scheffler, he has a right under the student code to hear them and be able to respond. It's hardly appropriate to base a suspension and mandatory psychological evaluation on anonymous and undefined allegations that may not even exist.

It's also inappropriate, especially in light of the Cleveland shooting on Wednesday, to try to squelch discussion of whether holders of concealed carry permits should be able to bring their sidearms on campus. It's already legal at the University of Utah and other states are considering the idea of eliminating victim disarmament zones. That may be a good idea; it may not. But universities should try to encourage debate rather than punish students for poorly written rants broaching the topic.

Posted by Joe Anybody at 5:04 PM PDT

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