Jose Rodriguez said about his destruction of CIA torture tapes:

The videos showed CIA interrogators using waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique that's widely considered torture, on terrorism suspect Abu Zubaydah. The videos showed that interrogators did not follow the waterboarding procedures authorized by the Bush administration, the documents indicate.

Jose Rodriguez, the agency's top clandestine officer, worried the 92 tapes would be "devastating" to the CIA if they ever surfaced, the documents show. He approved the destruction of the tapes. Rodriguez told Goss and others he "felt it was extremely important to destroy the tapes and that if there was any heat, he would take it," according to a November 2005 e-mail.

The chances of Jose Rodriguez facing any "heat from the Obama Justice Department is zero. A Medal of Freedom is more likely. The only one who needs to worry about heat from the Obama Justice Department is the person who leaked the e-mail to the Washington Post. Change you can believe in.

Speaking for me only

The Arizona House has passed a bill similar to one passed by the state Senate criminalizing undocumented presence in the state. With some minor reconciliation changes, it will go to the Governor for signing into law. Included in the bill are provisions that:

• Create a new state misdemeanor crime of willful failure to complete or carry an alien registration document.
• Allow officers to arrest immigrants unable to show documents proving they're legally in the country.
• Ban so-called soft immigration policies at local police agencies and allow people to sue if they feel a government agency has adopted a policy that hinders the enforcement of illegal immigration laws.
• Prohibit people from blocking traffic when they seek or offer day-labor services on street corners.
• Make it illegal for people to transport illegal immigrants if the drivers of vehicles know their passengers are in the country illegally and if the transportation furthers their illegal presence in the country.

This bill gives cops the power to stop and verify the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being undocumented. What a mandate for racial profiling. I hope people boycott Arizona and products made there if this bill gets signed into law. Let their tourism industry suffer the consequences. Visit New Mexico or Colorado instead. [More...]

12 year old Alexa Gonzales doodled on her desk with an erasable marker, was yanked from class, brought to the dean's office, searched, arrested, handcuffed behind her back (not in front, big difference), perp walked in front of her classmates, brought to the station and left handcuffed to a pole for two hours.

She and her mother filed a notice of intent to sue the city education department and the NYPD for $1 million in damages.

What did she doodle? ""I love my friends Abby and Faith." The city acknowledges it made a mistake. This is going to be an expensive lesson for them -- and rightfully so. It's also not the first lawsuit of its kind. [More...]

The Washington Post has obtained a memo from an ICE official to field agents outlining plans to ratchet up the number of non-criminal deportations. It was written by James M. Chaparro, head of ICE detention and removal operations:

Beyond stating ICE enforcement goals in unusually explicit terms, Chaparro laid out how the agency would pump up the numbers: by increasing detention space to hold more illegal immigrants while they await deportation proceedings; by sweeping prisons and jails to find more candidates for deportation and offering early release to those willing to go quickly; and, most controversially, with a "surge" in efforts to catch illegal immigrants whose only violation was lying on immigration or visa applications or reentering the United States after being deported.

"These efforts must be sustained and will be closely monitored," Chaparro told field directors in the e-mail, which was obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting and The Washington Post.

The memo is here (pdf). ICE responded to the Post with what seemed to be a backtrack. [More...]

As part of their immigration reform legislation, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Chuck Schumer are proposing all Americans get national ID cards. The cards would be high-tech social security cards and required to obtain employment in the U.S.

“We would require all U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who want jobs to obtain a high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security card. Each card’s unique biometric identifier would be stored only on the card; no government database would house everyone’s information,” they said. “The cards would not contain any private information, medical information or tracking devices. The card would be a high-tech version of the Social Security card that citizens already have.”

The problem: It will be expanded far beyond that purpose: [More...]

The National Mall in Washington is ready for today's March for America. Maybe now that the Dems have their 216 votes and the vote won't happen until this evening, it will get some attention.

Tens of thousands of people are expected from all over the country. You can follow along here or on Twitter here or on Facebook.

Facebook has now overtaken Google as the most visited website. How smart is it to share your life on Facebook or other social networking sites? This week, the keynote speaker at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival proclaimed privacy is not dead in the era of social networking, it just needs fixing. The speaker, Danah Boyd, works for Microsoft.

I disagree. It's very much dead, not only for social media but for e-mail. The evidence? Take a look at Facebook's subpoena and search warrant guide -- or Google's or AOL's or anyone else's. Or, take a look at the Stored Communications Act (18 USC 2703) and see how easy it is for law enforcement to get your personal information and contacts, and with a search warrant, the content of your communications.

How are you going to find those guides? I'm not going to publish them, but you can find them on Cryptome.org. I will tell you a little about what they will turn over: [More...]

Fired C.U. professor Ward Churchill is appealing the trial court's decision (available here)not to order his reinstatement after a jury ruled in his favor that he was terminated in retaliation for unpopular remarks about 9/11. The judge vacated the jury verdict, finding university officials had absolute immunity because they were acting as quasi-judicial officers in firing him. The jury had awarded Churchill $1.00 in damages,

The ACLU, American Association of University Professors and National Coalition Against Censorship today filed an amicus brief on behalf of Churchill. The brief argues the trial court was wrong to grant CU Regents absolute immunity, and given that there was a proven First Amendment violation, the presumed equitable remedy is reinstatement.

The brief is here. Background is here and here.

Update: Good recap of oral arguments with quotes here.

Bump and Update: Reports are coming in on the oral arguments held this morning in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals over whether the Government can get cell phone companies to turn over data showing the location of a cell phone without first obtaining a court order establishing probable cause.

Judge Dolores Sloviter, one of a three-judge panel, told Eckenwiler the government's case raised questions about the government's rights to track individuals.

"There are governments in the world that would like to know where some of their people are or have been," she said, citing Iran as a government that monitors political meetings. "Wouldn't the government find it useful if it could get that information without showing probable cause? Don't we have to be concerned about that?"

[More...]

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals today upheld San Francisco's policy of strip-searching arrestees without individualized suspicion they were concealing contraband. The opinion is here.

"The record reveals a pervasive and serious problem with contraband inside San Francisco's jails, as well as numerous instances in which contraband was found during a search, indicating that arrestees' use of body cavities as a method of smuggling drugs, weapons, and items used to escape custody is an immediate and troubling problem for San Francisco jail administrators," Ikuta wrote for the majority. She said the policy was reasonably adopted by the jail for "maintaining security for inmates and employees by preventing contraband smuggling."

..."[W]e conclude that San Francisco's policy requiring strip searches of all arrestees classified for custodial housing in the general population was facially reasonable under the Fourth Amendment, notwithstanding the lack of individualized reasonable suspicion as to the individuals searched."

Hopefully the case will now get to the Supreme Court as other federal districts disagree. In fact, even the Supreme Court this year put some limits on strip searches. [More...]

The ACLU has released an issues brief arguing against the criminalizing of the undocumented. It's both unlawful and harmful to public policy.

The use by states and localities of criminal laws to go after undocumented immigrants simply for being undocumented is generally unlawful, because the federal government has sole power to regulate immigration.

[More...]

Via C-Net:

• FBI wants records kept of Web sites visited
  

• Police want backdoor to Web users' private data

• Police survey provides glimpse of Net-surveillance figures

What's this all about? A NTIA/Commerce Department meeting yesterday for the Online Safety and Technology Working Group Meeting (OSTWG). What's NTIA?

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the executive branch agency principally responsible for advising the President on telecommunications and information policies.

What's OSTWG? [More...]