Among others, an Egyptian blogger, winner of a Reporters Without Borders award last year was detained by the Egyptian government during a peaceful protest in favor of a more independent judiciary as covered by Reporters without Borders on May 12 in Egypt. You can get more information at Free Alaa!, at the Reporters Without Borders links just given, on Alaa’s own website (he is blogging from prison it appears). I’m not sure what you can do, but people are mobilizing to cover the story by doing what I’m doing, namely writing a short piece and including a link that uses the word “Egypt” as anchor text and links to http://freealaa.blogspot.com/ in an effort to make that one of the top-ranked sites for a search on “Egypt”.

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I’ve been caught out reading conservatives again. I always think it’s noteworthy when there’s widespread agreement between the ideological left and the ideological right in criticizing a policy or a politician. Somehow I ended up at the Cato Instutite website and spied Power Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush, an anti-Bush screed by Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch, know primarily for their anti-Clinton screeds. Anyway, their white paper makes for an interesting read. Nothing new, but it is a concise analysis of Bush’s presidency ranging from signing the McCain-Feingold legislation to harrassing non-violent protesters (both action the authors see as attacks on First Ammendment rights) and contrasting this with Jefferson pardoning persons convicted by the Supreme Court under the Sedition Act, saying that in Jefferson’s opinion, the judiciary had trammeled the First Ammendment rights of the convicted. They also discuss the administration’s torture memos, expanded authority to arrest and more. The paper is littered with pearls like:

Under this sweeping theory of executive power, the liberty of
every American rests on nothing more than the grace of the White House.78

Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power.

Anyway, it’s worth a read.

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I just came across this in Wired News online. An affidavit in support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against At&T details the existence of a setup in the Worldnet headquarters that allows the NSA to grab data off the fiber optic lines that carry a huge percentage of the country’s internet traffic. Specifically, Mark Klein, the retired engineer who gave the affidavit says that “it appears the NSA is capable of conducting what amounts to vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the internet — whether that be peoples’ e-mail, web surfing or any other data.” See the full story in Wired Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room as well as a complete copy of the affidavit.

I often see the bumper sticker “Freedom isn’t free”. I guess it turns out that the price of freedom is surveillance of all your communication. Land of the wiretapped, home of the scared!

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I generally don’t like to merely comment on news stories, but since this one hits on several issues mentioned here before, here it is: Google, U.S. Clash Over Online Searches – Yahoo! News

I don’t even know if the Bush administration is in fact being evil in the case at hand. Maybe there is a compelling interest in protecting youth in subpoening search records from major search engines, the putative rationale for the subpoena. What the case shows me, rather, is that they just don’t get it. Hot on the heels of a myriad of allegations of human rights abuses from detentions without trials, first encouraging torture and later insisting on refusing to take a firm stance against it, and finally with illegal wiretapping, they just don’t seem to get that more and more people fear and distrust the Bush adminsitration. Effectively, the Bush administration is like a convict on probation with everyone on the left and many traditional conservatives who are in favor of limited government. Anything with a semblance of wrongdoing is going to be interpreted as malfeasance, given their consistent record of malfeasance, but they still seem to think that they have some ethereal political capital to spend based on the narrowest of electoral victories. All in all, I’m starting to like the Bush adminstration more and more, since I can’t think of anyone since Nixon who has done as much to harm the Republican party.

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Quick quiz: what does the Bush administration stance on torture, and their stance on wiretaps have in common? Disregard for constitutions and treaties? Well, that’s obvious, but how so? Disregard for human and civil rights? Sure, but exactly how so? There is something fundamental that ties together much of the Bush administration’s policy from the Ashcroft inJustice Department to the Gitmo detentions without trials. Before reading on and having your mind corrupted by my screed, think for a couple seconds about your take and drop it in a comment.
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