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Saturday, May 3, 2003
Summary of Hawash Case
The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has a good article on the Mike Hawash case. It's as good a summary of the case as I've seen, noting the difficulty the government faces in identifying and prosecuting domestic terrorists, as well as looking realistically at both the results and consequences of those efforts.
[...] As with the detention of Mr. Hawash, the case against the Portland Six also has drawn criticism from civil libertarians and others who feel that the government has been overly zealous. When the six were arrested in October, Attorney General John Ashcroft called the event "a defining day in America's war against terrorism," and said that "a suspected terrorist cell within our borders" had been "neutralized." Evidence that has emerged so far, however, appears to give little support to the contention that the group was a real terrorist cell. Despite months of intensive surveillance of the defendants by the FBI before their arrests, no allegation has been made that they were plotting any violent action after they returned home from China. Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said that the department views sleeper cells to be any group that "conspires to support terrorists," regardless of whether it was planning any violent action here.The criminal complaint and lengthy affidavit in the Hawash case offer little actual evidence of what Mr. Hawash's intentions were. The sole exception is a partial transcript of a conversation recorded by a confidential FBI source with one of the other defendants in the case, Jeffrey Leon Battle. In it, Mr. Battle said a "Palestinian" who was "married to a white woman ... left with us to go fight." [WSJ Online]
Terry Frazier at 11:15 AM
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Monday, August 26, 2002
Barr's Loss is Loss for Privacy Fight
The newly gerrymandered Georgia Congressional District 11 pitted Republican incumbents Bob Barr and John Linder against each other last week. From what I understand from friends, this race was one of the most prominent in the nation. This synopsis of Barr by Declan McCullagh highlights Barr's contradictory nature, and the issues that made this race so difficult.Is it possible to be both glad and disappointed to see someone leave office?
CNET NEWS.COM By Declan McCullagh - Internet privacy loses a voice in D.C..WASHINGTON--Georgia Rep. Bob Barr is an irascible conservative, an unyielding foe of abortion, gay marriage, and any drug more potent than nicotine. A floor manager during Bill Clinton's impeachment, Barr had lobbied for the president's ouster long before anyone knew of an intern's unfortunate affections inside the Oval Office.
Yet even Naderites should recognize that Barr's defeat in Georgia's Republican primary last week removes the fiercest champion of privacy in the U.S. House of Representatives, and his electoral loss will be a gain for the surveillance state.
As a member of the influential House Judiciary Committee, which oversees criminal laws, Barr has been in a unique position to advance privacy-friendly proposals while thwarting his opponents' more heinous schemes. Barr tried to limit government snooping on Americans' bank accounts (it failed, in a 129-299 vote), successfully campaigned for more oversight of the FBI's Carnivore monitoring system, and opposed a plan to let police obtain customer records from Internet providers and telephone companies without search warrants.
In 1999, Barr, a former CIA analyst, pressed for hearings to investigate the extent of the National Security Agency's shadowy Echelon surveillance network. "If Congress doesn't exercise regular as well as periodic oversight, then agencies are going to get away with as much as they can," he told me at the time.
[ ... ]
Barr says he's not giving up the privacy fight. "It's an issue that has been very close to my heart during the entire time that I've been in the Congress," Barr said last Friday. "A lot of it stems from the fact that I've been a prosecutor and I've been at the CIA and I know from prior public service just how powerful government is. It's given me a very healthy skepticism of giving government more and more power."
Barr is an unusual political phenomenon: An unapologetic Republican--boasting a 100 percent voting rating from the Christian Coalition and a zero percent rating from the League of Conservation Voters--who frequently allies with left-leaning groups on privacy topics. The American Civil Liberties Union applauds his approach to privacy, and even the liberal diehards at People for the American Way say they agree with Barr on the invasive nature of "legislation proposed and passed since September 11."
[ ... ]
Libertarians may applaud Barr's suspicion of government eavesdropping, his support of low taxes, and his vigorous defense of Second Amendment rights. But that's about it. [Privacy Digest]
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This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:06:57 GMT
