In July, TChris trumpeted the death of the CAPPS II, the intelligence plan that would have collected massive amounts of information on ordinary Americans, yet warned of a planned "CAPPS III." For those unfamiliar with the details of CAPPS II, the color coded airline passenger screening plan, here's a short summary.

Internal documents of the Transportation Security Administration were recently released pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by EPIC. The San Francisco Chronicle reveals their details:

The U.S. is deporting 1,500 Cambodians. Many have lived here for decades and with the exception of relatively minor offenses, like driving under the influence or assault, have been productive citizens.

Ho Beua will soon be handcuffed, loaded onto a U.S. government-chartered plane and banished to a country as foreign to him as the moon. He was 14 when he and his family arrived in the U.S. as refugees from Cambodia. Within years, he'd be in trouble with the law. Now a 38-year-old father of three, with his time already served for assault and DUI convictions, Beua is among 1,500 Cambodian criminal offenders in the U.S. being expelled to the Southeast Asian kingdom.

What awaits Ho Beua in Cambodia?

Conservatives in Colorado, insistent on implementing a policy restricting the free speech of professors in hopes of minimizing liberal thoughts and ideas, have adversely affected the rights of both students and teachers, according to testimony provided at a legislative hearing yesterday.

A university president and a Democratic state lawmaker said rules put in place this year to protect conservative views on Colorado campuses have led to death threats against professors and a harmful effect on free speech.....A handful of college officials and students went before the Legislature's Joint Education Committee on Thursday to report on efforts to enforce the Academic Bill of Rights. All state-funded colleges adopted the policy this year under pressure from Republican lawmakers.

Colleges agreed to implement a stripped-down version of the policy after lawmakers killed a measure that would have required them to allow students to file grievances against professors if they felt they were being harassed for their political or religious beliefs.

Among the off-limit topics: stem cell research which some Republicans claim amounts to abortion.

Chicago has big plans for citizen surveillance....2,000 cameras are about to be installed in public places.

More than 2,000 surveillance cameras in public places would be tied in to a network that would use sophisticated software to spot emergencies or suspicious behavior under a plan announced Thursday by Mayor Richard Daley. "Cameras are the equivalent of hundreds of sets of eyes. They are the next best thing to having police officers stationed at every potential trouble spot," Daley said.

Officials said the bulk of the cameras already are in use at O'Hare International Airport, on the city's transit lines and in public housing, parks and schools, along with 30 police are using to try to curb violent crime. An additional 250 surveillance cameras still to be bought will raise the number available to more than 2,000. Locations for the new cameras have not been determined.

Does anyone doubt they will be installed in poor neighborhoods where their main catch will be small-time druggies? How many terrorists do you think will be found in public housing?

Chicago will be in good company (not)...a similar plan is being proposed for Shanghai in China, according to the September 7 edition of the South China Morning Post (free subscription required.)

Have you ever wondered why you need a Government-issued ID to board an airplane? It started well before 9/11, but why? John Gilmore sued the Government to find out. The Department of Justice's response? They won't tell. It's a secret.

The Justice Department has asked an appellate court to keep its arguments secret for a case in which privacy advocate John Gilmore is challenging federal requirements to show identification before boarding an airplane. A federal statute and other regulations "prohibit the disclosure of sensitive security information, and that is precisely what is alleged to be at issue here," the government said in court papers filed Friday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. Disclosing the restricted information "would be detrimental to the security of transportation," the government wrote.

Gilmore's response:

We're dealing with the government's review of a secret law that now they want a secret judicial review for," one of Gilmore's attorneys, James Harrison, said in a telephone interview Sunday. "This administration's use of a secret law is more dangerous to the security of the nation than any external threat."

Gilmore, a privacy advocate who is co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, alleges that the ID requirement "was vague and ineffective and violated his constitutional protections against illegal searches and seizures." His case was dismissed is now in the appeals courts.

[link via Rachel at Alternet.]

After the release of the 9/11 report, President Bush created a civil liberties commission. Good news? Not exactly. It appears Bush has pulled a bait and switch. Richard Ben-Venistem a member of the Commission and Lance Cole, a law professor and consultant to the 9/11 commission, write in the New York Times:

Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the government has acquired powerful new legal tools, including those provided by the Patriot Act, to collect intelligence on Americans. Government agencies are using "data mining" and other techniques to identify potential terrorists and cut off sources of terrorist financing. As the commission's report noted, the shift of power and authority to government must be tempered by an enhanced system of checks and balances to protect the personal liberties that define our way of life.

One of the ways the commission sought to balance these competing objectives was to recommend the creation of a board within the executive branch to protect civil liberties and privacy rights. Unfortunately, the board created by the president has neither the right makeup nor the right powers to accomplish this objective.

Bush's board is fundamentally defective, beginning with its composition.

How stupid can one school's educators be? So stupid that the incident made the New York Times. The award of shame goes to Grayson High School in Gwinnett County, Georgia:

Terrell Jones, a student in Gwinnett County's Grayson High School, was weeded out of a classroom by a school administrator because he wore a shirt that read: ``Hempstead, NY 516,'' a reference to the Long Island town and its telephone area code.

According to Jones' family, which moved from Hempstead to the Atlanta suburb, the school thought the shirt referred to marijuana. Jones wasn't allowed to return to class until he persuaded school officials to search the Internet for the town name.

No suprise here, the first four detainees at Guantanamo to have a hearing have been adjudged "enemy combatants." They only got the hearing after the Supreme Court said they were entitled to them. Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration settled on rules that ensured a lack of due process and fairness....such as the detainees would not be allowed to have a lawyer present at the hearing; would not be allowed to review all the evidence against them; and would have their fates decided by three military officers.

Elaine Cassell explains:

A welcome reform has been instituted for those who are not security threats but who have overstay their visa while visiting the U.S.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert Bonner said that unless they are seen as security risks, these visitors will not be handcuffed, searched or denied entry if it turns out they had stayed a few days longer than they should have on earlier visits.

The new policy affects visitors from 27 countries, the majority in Europe, where travelers to the United States are not required to have a visa for up to a 90-day stay. Bonner said the policy would grant a one-time parole to visitors from these visa-waiver countries who have previously overstayed, allowing them to remain in the United States for the duration of their trip, rather than for a night in a cell and a seat on the first flight home.

Update: The Guardian has news of the latest police strategies for handling protesters.

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Slate's Dahlia Lithwick is a guest columnist this month for the New York Times. Today she tackles planned restrictions of protesters at the RNC in New York.

So it has come down to this: You are at liberty to exercise your First Amendment right to assemble and to protest, so long as you do so from behind chain-link fences and razor wire, or miles from the audience you seek to address.

The largely ignored "free-speech zone" at the Democratic convention in Boston last month was an affront to the spirit of the Constitution. The situation will be only slightly better when the Republicans gather this month in New York, where indiscriminate searches and the use of glorified veal cages for protesters have been limited by a federal judge. So far, the only protesters with access to the area next to Madison Square Garden are some anti-abortion Christians. High-fiving delegates evidently fosters little risk of violence.

Where, Dahlia asks, is the connection between protesters and terrorists? Nowhere, except in the minds of Bush and Ashcroft:

Congress voted last year to authorize $1 billion for immigrant health care. So far so good. Here's the catch:

...to get the money, hospitals would have to ask patients about their immigration status, a prospect that alarms hospitals and advocates for immigrants. When Congress decided to provide the money last year, state officials and hospital executives saw it as a breakthrough. For years, they had argued that the federal government was responsible for immigration policy and should cover the costs of medical care for illegal immigrants because it had created the problem.

But federal health officials, under guidelines developed in the last couple of weeks, said hospitals had to ask questions about immigration status to make sure the money would be used as Congress intended, for "emergency health services furnished to undocumented aliens."

Hospital executives and immigrant rights groups said the questioning would deter undocumented immigrants from seeking hospital care when they need it, and some hospitals said compliance might cost them more than they would receive in federal aid. Marcela G. Urrutia, an analyst at the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic civil rights group, said: "We are extremely concerned about this requirement. It will deter Latino communities from seeking emergency care. That could lead to serious public health problems, including the spread of communicable diseases.''

Health care should be universal. Everyone in this country should receive it - citizen, resident alien and undocumented worker. Hospitals should be in the business of providing health care to needy patients--not spying on them for the Government or Republicans in Congress who want them gone.

Scary stuff. Wired News reports on the emerging "surveillance-industrial complex" and says a new ACLU report shows that our Government is increasingly hiring big companies in the private sector to play the role of big brother.

The government is increasingly using corporations to do its surveillance work, allowing it to get around restrictions that protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, according to a report released Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that works to protect civil liberties. Data aggregators -- companies that aggregate information from numerous private and public databases -- and private companies that collect information about their customers are increasingly giving or selling data to the government to augment its surveillance capabilities and help it track the activities of people.

Because laws that restrict government data collection don't apply to private industry, the government is able to bypass restrictions on domestic surveillance. Congress needs to close such loopholes, the ACLU said, before the exchange of information gets out of hand.

If it's not too late already. Hasn't this been going on for years?