Patriot Watch sends us to this LA Times article and outlines the new powers Ashcroft is seeking:

1. Broadening Material Support
2. Blanket Pre-Trial Detention of Suspected Terrorists
3. Harsher Sentencing and Expansion of the Death Penalty for Terrorists

It's up to all of us to see he fails. Read Law Professor David Cole's commentary in the Washington Post, We've Aimed, Detained and Missed Before :

Ashcroft wants to do more than capture and prosecute individuals who commit or conspire to commit terrorist acts. Understandably, he seeks to prevent the next atrocity from occurring. But the inspector general's report reveals the dangers of Ashcroft's approach. People were picked up on anonymous tips that "too many" Muslims worked in a convenience store, or that a Muslim neighbor kept odd hours, or simply because they were in a place the FBI visited during the investigation into Sept. 11. In the end, the attorney general was shooting in the dark, and virtually every shot missed.

Scientific researchers are moving past polygraphs and touting a new "science" called 'brain printing':

In the quest to build a better lie detector, scientists are seeking to go beyond the body's indirect signals to the very seat of deceit: the brain. One researcher has built a headband outfitted with lights and detectors able to "see" blood-flow changes in the brain. Another uses magnetic resonance imaging to snap several split-second pictures.

....Research subjects wearing the headband are told to answer some questions truthfully and others deceptively. At the moment a subject makes the decision to lie, before even uttering it, there's a milliseconds-long burst of blood flow. Those bursts are read by the sensors and show up as spikes on a laptop computer.

We agree with these critics:

"There's only one thing worse than a lie detector that doesn't work, and that's a lie detector that does work," said physicist Robert Park, a longtime polygraph critic. "It's the last invasion of privacy that you can imagine, and it frightens me that we seem to be almost able to do it."

....Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty program, warns that none of the new technology has been proven to work like the scientists claim. But if it does, Steinhardt said, "then it would become another weapon in the arsenal of those who want to put us into a surveillance society where every action, every deed and one's very thoughts can be monitored, categorized and correlated."

[link via PatriotWatch]

Check out this new Stanford law review article on mandatory detentions under the Patriot Act:

As the USA Patriot Act went into effect, several hundred immigrants remained in government detention under a separate emergency order allowing them to be held without charge for an extended period. The lengthy detention of so many aliens, few of whom were suspected of involvement in the terrorist attacks, generated concern that efforts to protect national security in the wake of September 11 had infringed on the constitutional rights of noncitizens.

....This Note argues that the USA Patriot Act's provisions for certification and mandatory detention contravene the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process of law. By denying noncitizens the opportunity for meaningful review of the certification decision, and by authorizing the detention of aliens on substantively inadequate grounds, the USA Patriot Act raises serious constitutional concerns under both the procedural and substantive prongs of the Due Process Clause."

[thanks to Lisa at Ruminate This and Al-Muhajabah at Veiled 4Allah for the link]

New Yorkers rally to defend the Bill of Rights: Nat Hentoff's latest on anti-Ashcroft demonstrations.

Attorney General John Ashcroft has banned an employee Gay Pride Month event at the Justice Department.

Justice Department officials told DOJ Pride, a group of almost 200 gay and lesbian agency employees, it could not stage the event at the department's Pennsylvania Avenue building later this month because President Bush -- unlike his predecessor, former President Bill Clinton -- has not issued a proclamation designating June as gay pride month

...gay and lesbian groups and some Democratic lawmakers said Ashcroft's decision was discriminatory because other employee associations, including ethnic employee groups, are allowed to hold similar events at the agency's headquarters.

"It's shocking that the agency in charge of protecting the civil rights of all Americans is singling out one group of people for unequal treatment," said David Smith, spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay and lesbian advocacy group. "It sends a very chilling message to gay and lesbian employees that says, 'You are not welcome.' "

Remember the forced Arab male registration program Bush instituted this past year? Where all of the muslim males from several countries had to register with the Government as part of the plan to make us safer? 13,000 of those men who followed the directive, believing they would have a chance to argue to stay here, are being deported. Only a few have been linked to terrorism.

Many had hoped to win leniency by demonstrating their willingness to cooperate with the campaign against terror. The men were not promised special treatment, however, and officials believe that most will be expelled in what is likely to be the largest wave of deportations after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The government has initiated deportation proceedings, and in immigrant communities across the country, an exodus has already begun. Quietly, the fabric of neighborhoods is thinning. Families are packing up; some are splitting up. Rather than come forward and risk deportation, an unknowable number of immigrants have burrowed deeper underground. Others have simply left — for Canada or for their homeland.

The New York Times says:

The deportations are a striking example of how the Bush administration increasingly uses the nation's immigration system as a weapon in the battle against terror.

We think the sentence should read:

The deportations are a striking example of how the Bush administration increasingly uses the war on terror as as a weapon against the nation's immigrants.

Chisum Lee, who has been writing some of the best in-depth articles out there on the abuse of civil liberties under Ashcroft in the Village Voice,explains why the Government's treatment of suspected "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla threatens all of our rights.

The Rave Act takes hold in Montana--read this email from a NORML member.

Well, you may or have not heard by now but the Rave Act has hit very close to home. On the 30th of May the Billings chapter of Montana NORML/SSDP had organized a highly publicized and expensive benefit concert featuring a number of local acts, the proceeds from which would have gone to help the medical marijuana campaign in Montana in 2004. Unfortunately, not only did my probation officer arrest me the day before, but the DEA came and shut things down the day of. The reason being of course that due to the RAVE Act anyone caught on the premisis with marijuana would automatically subjects our generous venue to a fine of $250,000.

Not only did this cause us to lose money, hope, and face, but it will seriously endanger the chance of trying anything like this again in Billings. What the hell happened to my first amendment?

This just in:

DOJ Inspector General Thrown In Brig With Padilla, Hamdi Ashcroft, Rumsfeld Mum

Dateline: Washington, D.C.
June 2, 2003 3:24 p.m.

A few hours after the Justice Department's Inspector General, Glenn A. Fine, issued a 239-page report critical of the FBI and the INS in their handling of post-9/11 detainees, black helicopters landed on the lawn in front of Fine's office building. Minutes later Fine was bundled into one of the choppers by black-clad troopers. "They just barged in and grabbed him," sobbed Fine's secretary.

Responding to reporters' questions, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer confirmed that Mr. Fine has been designated an "enemy combatant" and would be detained without charges (and without the right to counsel) for the duration of the war on terror. "We can't afford to take any chances," stated Fleischer. "We took a second look at his resume and realized he had studied abroad at Oxford, in the U.K. Now, the Al Qaeda shoe bomber, Richard Reid, was also from the U.K., so you can see the obvious connection. If and when Mr. Fine is cleared of any and all connections with Mr. Reid and Al Qaeda, we will consider releasing him. But it could take a while to sort this all out."

Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, at an undisclosed location with Vice President Chaney, declined to comment.

* NOTE: This is a parody, courtesy of Immigration Lawyer Dan Kowalski -- but you weren't really sure, were you?

Bump and Update: The report is out and available here.
A six page summary of the report by DOJ is here. Time Magazine examines the report here.

Certain employees of the Justice Department have been advised to hire lawyers to defend them in a spate of lawsuits that could be filed shortly by people who were detained in the wake of 9/11.

CNN files this report.

******************

A new report by the Justice Department's investigatory arm, the Office of Inspector General, is scheduled for release Monday on "allegations by civil rights groups and private attorneys that those detained [in the aftermath of September 11] were being deprived of their rights."

The reported findings:

...Immigration and law-enforcement authorities were indifferent to civil rights in the frenzied effort to investigate suspects and to avoid another catastrophe, according to people familiar with the inquiry.

....One conclusion, according to a Justice Department official, is that several dozen people were held beyond the 90-day Immigration and Naturalization Service deadline for deporting or releasing detainees.

The official said that in some cases, the report concludes that the delays were the product of bureaucratic bungling. The official also said, however, that a number of violations may have been ''deliberate.''

[thanks to Patriot Watch for finding the link to the report]

Update: We forgot to include the link before, sorry. It's in now.

Unfortunately, we are not making this up. We'll call it Ohio's dumb practice of the week.

Students in Akron will be fingerprinted beginning this fall to identify them in school lunch lines. The technology, instituted for security reasons and for bookkeeping purposes, is being used in Ohio's Garfield Heights district and in a sprinkling of colleges, universities, and businesses across the country.

Students' fingerprints will be put into a scanner that will make a template of binary numbers corresponding with the swirls and arches of each print. When students go through the lunch line, they will place their finger on a scanner identifying them based on the stored template.

The school board has received numerous complaints, and not only from parents. The ACLU, for example, has expressed concern that "the scans will be used to track students' eating habits."

Raymond Vasvari, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said systems such as the one adopted by Akron raise serious privacy issues. He said school leaders must take steps to ensure that the fingerprint images do not end up in the wrong hands. ''The question remains: Is there information that would be useful to someone and how can you be sure this information is not shared?'' he said.

The system will cost $700,000. It was voted on by the school board and approved. Did they even consider whether the money might not have been better spent on providing higher quality food, more free lunches, teacher salaries or after-school programs?

Nat Hentoff in today's Village Voice:

From what I can find out, Ashcroft's plan may be not to introduce Patriot II as a whole, but rather to slip sections of it into bills dealing with national security. Fortunately, the ACLU's Washington staff and other civil liberties organizations keep a very close watch on bills the Justice Department can use to set more land mines for the Constitution.

But it is important to realize that the more than 100 civil-liberties-zone resolutions around the country include a requirement--sent to each of the federal legislators representing that community--that those members of Congress actively work to repeal laws and combat executive orders that violate the civil liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights. I would also suggest messages of support to those members of Congress who already are demanding of Ashcroft, the FBI, the CIA, the Homeland Security Department, and others in the ever expanding web of surveillance that they tell us precisely how they are implementing these expanding threats to individual liberties.

Our understanding is the same as Hentoff's about the probable piecemeal approach Ashcroft may take. We wrote about the likely sneak attack on May 8 in discussing the passage of the Schumer-Kyl bill, S. 113, expanding the definition of terrorist for FISA wiretap purposes to include persons not affiliated with a foreign power (the "lone wolf" provision.)

Could this be the beginning of an attempt to pass the provisions of Patriot Act II piecemeal, thereby avoiding the controversial label "Patriot Act II" ? If another section of PA II gets introduced and passed this way, we foresee a monumental problem. The Schumer-Kyl bill was originally introduced on January 9, the same date on the draft of Patriot Act II. A coincidence?