Just because you haven't flown lately, or worked at an airport or on a cruise ship, don't think you are home free. The U.S. has contracted with WorldCheck, a private, overseas company to compile a financial watch list--a list of people who, in the company's judgement, are likely to commit financial crimes. The assessment is based on an assortment of public records and data.

"There's a real risk in a situation like this because there's really no accountability," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group based in Washington devoted to privacy issues. "People can find themselves on a watch list incorrectly, and the consequences can be very serious."

Mr. Rotenberg likened the trial program at the department to a Pentagon operation disclosed last year in which JetBlue airlines agreed to turn over data on millions of its passengers to a private contractor doing antiterrorism work for the military. In both cases, Mr. Rotenberg said, government officials effectively "outsourced" the job to private firms "in order to develop profiles on people and circumvent U.S. privacy laws."

Aliakbar and Shala Afshari worked at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. They have been in the U.S. for 18 years, working and raising a family. On May 5, they were fired suddenly--being told only that they had The failed a secret background check.

What does that mean?

They have been told they were fired for national security reasons that remain secret. When their lawyer requested the documents used to justify the action, he was told none existed. When he asked for copies of the agency's policies relating to the background checks, he received a generic personnel handbook.

Finally, they sued.

Yesterday it was airline passengers. Tomorrow, it will be airport and cruise ship employees.

The change, included in the intelligence bill passed by Congress this week, means hundreds of thousands of additional names will be compared with those on two lists - one for people suspected of terrorism, the other for people the government says require additional scrutiny for some other reason.

What other reason?

December 10 is Human Rights Day, so named by the United Nations in recognition of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. Some thoughts:

Don't forget Darfur. Or Tibet.

In Pakistan:

The United Church of Christ in Cleveland prepared some television ads welcoming members of the gay community as part of the Advent season. All three major networks refused to air them. NBC and CBS found them too controversial or amounted to advocacy.

For the season of Advent, the United Church of Christ had planned a nationwide television ad campaign extending an open welcome to all people, especially gays and lesbians. The message was simple: "Jesus didn't turn people away; neither do we, the United Church of Christ." The visuals dramatized people, including two men holding hands, being turned away by bouncers at the door of a church.

CBS said the ads promoted gay marriage. The ad made no mention of gay marriage. Does Christianity have to be evangelical and conservative to be aired mainstream?

Right-wing/fundamentalist Christianity has so dominated the media that many Americans don't believe liberal/progressive Christianity even exists. The fundamentalist message is the de facto Christian message because such groups have the money to not only buy airtime but to have their own shows. And every time Jerry Falwell blames gays or feminists for society's ills, he shows up on the news.

Think about this "no advocacy" policy. Where was it when the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy put anti-drug ads on the Superbowl? Military recruitment ads during wartime--is that not an endorsement of war? A federal court in Massachussets last week said the transit authority could not refuse to carry ads advocating reform of the drug laws.

Some independent stations are airing the ads anyway. Good for them.

This is your Civil Rights Commission on acid. The liberals in charge have departed and Bush appointed conservative Republicans to take their place. .

Over the past three years, Mary Frances Berry and Cruz Reynoso presided over U.S. Civil Rights Commission meetings that were so frigid that members would sometimes snap at one another or sit back and stare coldly. But after Berry, the liberal chairman, who is black, and Reynoso, the liberal vice chairman, who is Latino, stepped down Tuesday, the composition of the commission changed. President Bush appointed a black Republican, Gerald A. Reynolds, to replace Berry as chairman, and another black Republican, Ashley L. Taylor, to replace Reynoso as a member. Abigail Thernstrom, an independent who is conservative and white, became the new vice chairman.

What was a 5 to 3 liberal majority is now a 6 to 2 conservative majority.

by TChris

A series of United Nations seminars entitled "Unlearning Intolerance" teach an important message: people should not be judged by their membership in a particular religion. The focus six months ago was on anti-Semitism. Yesterday's forum confronted Islamophobia.

[Secretary-General Kofi Annan] stressed that Islam "should not be judged by the acts of extremists who deliberately target and kill civilians."

Seyyed Hussein Nasr, professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, said Islamophobia was a question not only of fear but also of hatred -- often by people who know little about the religion.

Equally important was the message of R. Scott Appleby, director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame:

In the United States, Appleby said, patriotism should require a willingness to recognize differences and honest self-criticism, not condescension towards people cast as "the other."

by TChris

The ACLU has filed a federal lawsuit challenging California's Proposition 69, which will eventually require all Californians arrested for a felony (whether or not convicted) to furnish a DNA sample.

"Proposition 69 is an extraordinary assault on the privacy and security of all Californians," said Maya Harris, an ACLU attorney and director of the Racial Justice Project. "It turns the presumption of innocence on its head."

In light of the genetic information revealed by DNA, the lawsuit contends that the collection of DNA from presumptively innocent people (unlike a mug shot or fingerprint) constitutes an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. (TalkLeft last wrote about the issue here.)

U.S. border agents are going high-tech at the Canadian border. By the end of December, visitors from Canada will face fingerprinting. Also in use will be "motion-detecting sensors and land- and air-based surveillance of deserted stretches."

This is not a first.

Fingerprinting has already started at Mexican border crossings in Arizona, Texas and California. All land border crossings will be included in the program by the end of 2005.

by TChris

Volunteers at a monthly middle school dance, hosted by the Center for the Arts in Grass Valley, California, asked a 13-year-old girl to take off her clothes to prove that she wasn't in possession of marijuana. The executive director of the Center claims the strip search was an appropriate implementation of its "zero tolerance" policy.

The Center apparently has "zero tolerance" of the privacy rights of minors. Kudos to the local police, who realize that the Center erred.

"Officers advised staff that what they did was unlawful," Grass Valley Police Sgt. Michael Hooker said Tuesday. "It's not criminal, but it's a civil wrong. It's an invasion of her privacy."

Human Rights Watch has released a new report with evidence that the Iranian judiciary employed secret interrogation squads to torture Internet journalists and political activists in an effort to gain "confession letters" from them.

Evidence obtained by Human Rights Watch confirms that secret squads of interrogators—primarily former intelligence officers purged in the late-1990s by President Mohammed Khatami but now employed by the judiciary—forced the detainees to write these “confession letters” under extreme pressure as a condition for their release on bail. In an attempt to cover up the government’s illegal detention and torture of detainees, interrogators have coerced them to write self-incriminatory letters that describe detention conditions as satisfactory and confess that civil society organizations are part of an “evil project” directed by “foreigners and counter-revolutionaries.”

Human Rights Watch has documented an extensive pattern of forced confessions by political detainees who have later retracted their statements, which they have attributed to their interrogators. The Iranian government continues to pursue a project to strangle critics and activists, one that Human Rights Watch documented in the report, “Like the Dead in Their Coffins.”

Democracy dies behind closed doors. Secret detentions, interrogations and squads in Iran. Secret arrests, detentions, interrogations and closed door hearings in the U.S. The Bush/Rumsfeld/Ashcroft Administration may be the most secretive administration ever. With the array of new powers contained in the 9/11 Intelligence Reform Bill, we are sliding backwards. Democrats in Congress should take their blindfolds off.

The ACLU launches its new campaign Tuesday to stop the FBI from spying on political and religious activists. Freedom of Information Act requests will be brought In ten states and the District of Columbia. Colorado is one of the states - background and details are available here.