From the prepared remarks of the State of the Union: Obama urges reform for children of undocumented workers.

Today, there are hundreds of thousands of students excelling in our schools who are not American citizens. Some are the children of undocumented workers, who had nothing to do with the actions of their parents. They grew up as Americans and pledge allegiance to our flag, and yet live every day with the threat of deportation. Others come here from abroad to study in our colleges and universities. But as soon as they obtain advanced degrees, we send them back home to compete against us. It makes no sense.

The Obama Administration announced today that it was scrapping the high-tech border fence project known as SBI.

The project cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion and covered 53 miles along the border. It also was hugely invasive. Boeing was the builder, and as I wrote in 2007, there were plans to extend it across some 6,000 miles of the Mexican and Canadian borders in segments in coming years. It was also very privacy intrusive: [More...]

Longstanding, extensive police harassment of Hispanics and Latinos in East Haven, CT appears to have triumphed. The wheels of justice grind so slowly that despite a Justice Department civil rights investigation, the commencement of a criminal investigation by the FBI, and a federal civil rights lawsuit brought by students at Yale, Hispanics are unable and unwilling to continue being subjected to the abuse, selling their homes and moving.

Santiago Malave, a probation officer who works in New Haven, says the racial abuse is so bad that he crosses the town line into East Haven only to go home. He and his wife are now preparing to sell their house and move, joining an exodus of Hispanics who say police have hassled them with traffic stops, false arrests and even jailhouse beatings.

It's not just a few rogue officers. It's a blatant systemic problem. [More...]

In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. - President Barack Obama, May 21, 2009

December 21, 2010 ProPublica report on the proposed Obama Administration executive order on indefinite detention:

[T]he [proposed] order establishes indefinite detention as a long-term Obama administration policy and makes clear that the White House alone will manage a review process for those it chooses to hold without charge or trial.

(Emphasis supplied.) The proposed executive order reported on by ProPublica is not only a violation of the promises made by the President himself; in my view, it is likely a violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Constitution. I'll explain my view on the flip.

The Washington Post has an ominous report on a huge domestic intelligence database being built by the feds and shared with state and local law enforcement.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.

The Post dubs it Top Secret America and shows how it plays out state by state. Check your state out here.

Update: Cyber-army gains strength.

Operation Payback, hackers waging 'cyberwar' against those who oppose and stop doing business with WikiLeaks, continues. But Facebook and Twitter have cut them off.

The Netherlands has arrested a 16 year old in connection with the Paypal-Mastercard attacks.

Related: Time Magazine has an article saying the U.S. case against Julian Assange is weak. The AP reports the London extradition case may be shaky.

The 9th Circuit's oral arguments on Prop 8 and gay marriage are being televised on C-Span. You can watch here.

The panel will first consider if the group that put the measure on the ballot is eligible to appeal since its members aren't responsible for enforcing marriage laws. Outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown refused to challenge the ruling. The panel will then hear arguments on the proposition's constitutionality.

Howard Mintz of the San Jose Mercury News is live-blogging from the courtroom. So is Teddy at Firedoglake.

The TSA searches are inspiring a new line of Fourth Amendment products. This shirt has metallic dye that will show up on the scanner. I like TalkLeft's Fourth Amendment Tote better.

(larger photo here and here.)

And, you don't have to continually launder it or remember to wear it. You can have it with you at all times to remind everyone searching your bags, from subway cops to courthouse security officers to entry monitors at sports arenas, that the Fourth Amendment is alive and well.

Of course, if you really want a 4th Amendment t-shirt, we have that too. Order now for Christmas -- especially for your kids, nephews and nieces who will be traveling home from college for the holidays.

Imagine waking up and logging on to your blog and finding this notice:

"This domain name has been seized by ICE — Homeland Security Investigations, pursuant to a seizure warrant issued by a United States District Court."

ICE and Homeland Security shut down a number of websites Friday (perhaps as many as 70) because of their "association" to online movie and music piracy. Apparently, the sites don't need to be a participant in the activity, just associated with it. Is linking to one of them enough? According to one site's owner, it was: [More...]

For 14 years, from 1994 to 2008, I flew somewhere every ten days, if not more frequently. Between the five legal boards I served on that met quarterly or every four months, there were 17 trips (34 flights) a year to board meetings in cities around the country. Add to that the task forces I served on which met every other month in cities around the country, the six or eight criminal defense lectures I gave every year to out of state organizations, the blogger events I went to, in Amsterdam, NY, DC, Las Vegas and San Francisco. Even covering the Scooter Libby trial meant 3 weeks of going back and forth between Denver and D.C.

Add to that my out of town cases: In 2007, I added another 12 trips to the other 18, just going to Omaha and Telluride, where the courts were.

By the end of 2007, I was fried. The 2007-8 Iowa caucuses in late December, early January were the final straw. [More...]

The TSA says it doesn't store the body images its agents scan. But the images leak out anyway.

Joel Johnson and Gizmodo have obtained a hundred improperly stored body scan images through a Freedom of Information Act request. And, of course, they promptly published them.

The scans were made by U.S. Marshals in Orlando and were apparently improperly stored. Though this particular machine does not offer the cringe-inducing resolution that some others do, it highlights a major problem with the machines more generally: these photos will leak out. Or, as Johnson puts it, "That we can see these images today almost guarantees that others will be seeing similar images in the future."

It's not just airports using the scanners. It's courthouses around the country. U.S. Marshals in Orlando stored 35,000 images from the Gen 2 millimeter wave scanner, made by Brijot Imaging Systems, Inc.

Based on each organization’s specific policies and procedures, GEN 2 offers the ability to turn on or off its recording features. In recording mode, up to 40,000 events can be recorded and stored by date and time, along with a snapshot image of the subject that shows the detection boxes, as well as the correlating millimeter wave images, for easy recall of event details. The system also offers the ability to manually initiate a video capturing session, used independently from the detection engine, such as to record the search of a specific individual for future reference.

[More...]

Arizona's radical immigration bill will be front and center at oral arguments today.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit will hear Arizona's appeal of a lower-court ruling that blocked the most-contested provisions of the law from taking effect. The law, signed in April by Gov. Jan Brewer ®, empowers police to question people whom they have a "reasonable suspicion" of being in the country illegally.

The Associated Press has more.