The FBI is up to new tricks:

The FBI has recently adopted a novel investigative technique: posting hyperlinks that purport to be illegal videos of minors having sex, and then raiding the homes of anyone willing to click on them.

Undercover FBI agents used this hyperlink-enticement technique, which directed Internet users to a clandestine government server, to stage armed raids of homes in Pennsylvania, New York, and Nevada last year. The supposed video files actually were gibberish and contained no illegal images.

Today it's kiddie links, what will it be tomorrow? Links to sites offering information on growing pot? Links to sites offering prescription medicaton? Links to sites critical of the Government?

Be careful where you click, you may be next. [Hat tip to Blawg Review.]

A new study by Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson finds that rising immigration rates in communities do not result in rising crime rates.

studied crime and immigration in 180 neighborhoods in Chicago over seven years, found that first-generation immigrants were 45 percent less likely to commit violent acts than third generation Americans.

"Immigrants have lower rates of crime and there is a negative correlation between the trends," Sampson said in an interview.

The results of Sampson's study showed that incentive to work, ambition and a desire not to be deported were common reasons cited for first generation immigrants, especially Mexicans, not to commit crimes.

Sampson also studied data from police records, the U.S Census and surveyed more than 8,000 Chicago residents. The study showed there was significant immigration growth, including illegal aliens-in the mid-1990s, peaking at the end of the decade.

But during that time the national homicide rate plunged. Crime also dropped in immigration hot spots, such as Los Angeles, where it fell 45 percent overall, San Jose, Dallas and Phoenix.

I hope this is one myth we can now leave behind us. It matches another study I wrote about here, urging an end to the politics of bigotry and fear .

The AP reports:

The FBI acknowledged Wednesday it improperly accessed Americans' telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies.

....[The breach was] caused, in part, by banks, telecommunication companies and other private businesses giving the FBI more personal client data than was requested.

Details will be forthcoming in a report by the Justice Department Inspector General. [More...]

The ACLU and BlackElectorate.com have teamed up to start a new public awareness project focusing on the
"devastating effects of felony disfranchisement on this country’s African-American community."

How bad is the problem?

One out of every seven - or 1.4 million - African-American men is disfranchised and cannot vote due to a felony conviction. This rate is nearly seven times the national disfranchisement rate of one in 41 adults.

Consider the vote in Texas yesterday:

Over half a million Texan citizens will be unable to vote due to a felony conviction. Over 165,000 of those disfranchised Texans are black,” said Laleh Ispahani, Senior Policy Counsel with the ACLU Racial Justice Program. “Disfranchisement runs contrary to fundamental precepts of democracy, human rights, and of giving people a second chance, a chance at true rehabilitation.”

The ACLU's page on felon disfranchisement is here. A state by state guide is here.

By Big Tent Democrat

mcjoan has the details here, here and here:

It's developed from speculation to obliquely sourced possibility to pretty likely that the House is going to cave and give Bush his Protect AT&T Act. For no good reason at all.

Oh they have a reason - they are Democrats. And capitulating to the Republicans for the sake of High Broderist "post partisan unity" is what Democrats do. Anyone think Obama will change that? Me neither.

An ineffectual order purporting to shut down the website Wikileaks has been vacated by the judge who imposed it. The judge who entered the order apparently realized that the First Amendment prohibits a court from shutting down an entire media outlet simply because it published information that was arguably private.

On Feb. 15, the judge, Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco, ordered the American address of the site, Wikileaks.org, to be disabled at the request of Bank Julius Baer & Company, a Swiss banking company, and its Cayman Islands subsidiary. They charged that Wikileaks had posted confidential, personally identifiable account information on some of the bank’s customers. ... In reversing himself at a hearing here on Friday, Judge White acknowledged that the bank’s request posed serious First Amendment questions and might constitute unjustified prior restraint.

Apart from his belated recognition of the First Amendment, Judge White expressed frustration that the site is mirrored elsewhere, effectively rendering his order a nullity. If anything, the publicity that followed the court's ruling probably sent many more readers to the site than it had before the court acted. [More...]

When the government wants to take away our rights, it conceals its intent with the assurance that it simply wants to make us safe. The Boston Police Department's "Safe Homes Initiative" sounds unobjectionable -- who doesn't want a safe home? -- but it's important to look behind the marketing to understand what's really motivating the Boston police.

On the surface —- as with virtually all government actions diminishing liberty —- the initiative appears benign. The program is “designed” to help parents who have so little control over their children that they cannot —- or do not want to —- search their rooms to discover if their young charges are hiding firearms in their homes. Boston’s police chief, Edward Davis, graciously has agreed to fill this parental void by sending teams of officers to the homes of parents with children the police or other “community members” believe might be harboring hidden firearms. The “search teams” would then ask the parent or “other responsible adult” (whomever that might be) at the home for consent to search for guns.

What's the problem with "asking" for consent to search entire homes on the basis of unfounded rumors? Bob Barr explains:

The First Amendment right to a free press generally prohibits a court from restraining the publication of information. Whether that doctrine applies to any or all of the whistle-blowing documents collected at Wikileaks.org, a court's decision to order the website "disabled" is an obvious affront to the First Amendment. Talk about killing the messenger.

On Friday, Judge Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco granted a permanent injunction ordering Dynadot, the site’s domain name registrar, to disable the Wikileaks.org domain name. The order had the effect of locking the front door to the site — a largely ineffectual action that kept back doors to the site, and several copies of it, available to sophisticated Web users who knew where to look.

Judge White's order is tantamount to ordering the New York Times to cease publication because some of its stories are based on leaked information. Shouldn't the same right to a free press apply to internet websites, the most accessible means of publishing information to a wide audience?

Fortunately, the Times was kind enough to tell us where to find the information that Judge White doesn't think we should read: [more...]

Amtrak has announced it will start searching bags.

Amtrak passengers will have to submit to random screening of carry-on bags in a major new security push that will include officers with automatic weapons and bomb-sniffing dogs patrolling platforms and trains, the railroad planned to announce today.

You know what to do, right? Make sure the bag they search has the Fourth Amendment printed on it.

larger version here.

Let the 4th Amendment speak for you as you hand your bag over for a search by a train, subway or airline security guard. It's a silent protest and reminder to authorities that you consider searches without reasonable suspicion or probable cause to be an infringement of your privacy rights.

You can get your's here. They make great gifts for college kids who are probably more likely to take Amtrak than we are.

It's time to play ICED! (I Can End Deportation.)

In the game, you can step inside the shoes of one out of five immigrant teens, each of a different ethnicity and immigration status. The game teaches how immigration laws deny due process and violate human rights to all immigrants.

Go on over and play.

It doesn't matter how carefully laws are tailored to preserve a balance between the interests of national security and the privacy interests protected by the Fourth Amendment when those laws are ignored (as they have been in the Bush administration) or when those tasked with releasing private information to the government inadvertently go too far. National attention has focused on the former threat to privacy, but the NY Times reminds us that the latter threat is just as real.

A technical glitch gave the F.B.I. access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network — perhaps hundreds of accounts or more — instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode. ...

The episode is an unusual example of what has become a regular if little-noticed occurrence, as American officials have expanded their technological tools: government officials, or the private companies they rely on for surveillance operations, sometimes foul up their instructions about what they can and cannot collect. The problem has received no discussion as part of the fierce debate in Congress about whether to expand the government’s wiretapping authorities and give legal immunity to private telecommunications companies that have helped in those operations.

How often do the distributors of private information screw up? [more..]

This is classic Joe Klein:

Over the past few weeks, I’ve asked Constitutional Law professors from Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago about the immunity provision. There are differences of opinion—no one is thrilled about immunity, to be sure—but the bottom line is, essentially, that this is a lesser issue diverting attention from the passage of an important law.

The importance of telecom immunity is NOT a legal issue that gives law professors any special insight on its relative importance. Your opinion or my opinion is as valid as yours or mine.

But what is more interesting is that Klien basically falsely states what one of the two law professors he actually quotes says. David Barron of Harvard did NOT agree with Joe Klein that telecom immunity should be allowed. He said the opposite. Cass Sunstein, who has supported the bush Administration's illegal activities for 7 years now is not surprising when he does so again now. That is like asking John Yoo on this issue frankly. And he does not disappoint Klein here. Sunstein has been an embarrassing shill for the Bush Administration on FISA since day one. His opinion on this to me is less than meaningless.

In short, a classic Klein post, ignorant, misleading and wrong.