Welcome to Law and Disorder Radio
Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 150 stations and on Apple podcast. Law and Disorder provides timely legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, right to dissent and practices of torture exercised by the US government and private corporations.
Law and Disorder May 11, 2020
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Library Freedom, TOR And Right To Privacy
Libraries in this country have long been sanctuaries in which to read, think, dream and pursue intellectual pursuits free from judgment or outside intrusion. But historically outside forces HAVE tried to intrude on this sanctitude. During the Cold War, for example, librarians exposed the FBI’s efforts to recruit library staff to spy on certain patrons, especially Russians, through the so-called Library Awareness Program. And after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the USA Patriot Act’s Section 215 has often been dubbed the “library provision” because it allows patron’s library records to be accessed and monitored by law enforcement agencies without a warrant.
In 2015 Law & Disorder reported on a New Hampshire Library that installed the Tor relay node to allow patrons to privately browse computers. Tor is anonymizing software that lets users conduct online searches without being monitored. Soon after, the Department of Homeland Security contacted local officials who visited the library, warning that Tor could aid criminal behavior.
Alison asks to please visit your local library website and facebook pages to increase their usage metrics which in turn help when applying for funding.
Guest – Alison Macrina was one of the people responsible for the New Hampshire library’s privacy tools. Alison is a librarian, privacy rights activist, and the founder and director of the Library Freedom Project, an initiative that helps educate librarians and their local communities about surveillance threats, privacy rights and law, and privacy-protecting technology tools to help safeguard digital freedoms.
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Julian Assange Extradition Update
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition hearing began in January but is on hiatus at least until September 2020. At the January appearance, the prosecution pleaded for the media to stop characterizing the US effort as a politicized war on journalism. In response, Julian’s defense provided a comprehensive summary of the many reasons that journalists and human rights activists have called Julian’s indictment a threat to a free press.
James Lewis argued for the Crown Prosecution Service, which acts on behalf of the United States in its extradition request. Lewis explicitly asked journalists covering the case not to report that it represents a matter of free speech or the right to publish. Lewis depicted the indictment as solely a matter of exposing informants in the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and the State Department cables.
Julian’s defense lawyer Edward Fitzgerald detailed how extradition proceedings constitute an abuse of process. He asserted that they have been brought for ulterior political purposes, as an attack on freedom of speech, and fundamentally misrepresent the facts in order to extradite Julian to the US, where he faces torture, unusual and degrading treatment.
Guest – NYC attorney Nathan Fuller, Executive Director of the Courage Foundation.
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Law and Disorder May 4, 2020
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Nobody’s Child: A Tragedy, a Trial, and a History of the Insanity Defense
Public opinion surveys of knowledge, attitudes, and support for the insanity defense show that Americans dislike the insanity defense. They want insane law-breakers punished, and believe that insanity defense procedures don’t protect the public. Polls also show that most overestimate the use and success of the insanity plea.
In the book Nobody’s Child: A Tragedy, a Trial, and a History of the Insanity Defense, forensic psychologist and attorney Susan Vinocour tells the story of a three-year-old child found dead in his mentally-ill grandmother’s home. Vinocour agreed to evaluate the defendant. She explains how the legal terms”competency” don’t reflect psychiatric realities, and how, in criminal law, the insanity defense has to often been a luxury of the rich and white.
Nobody’s Child is an engaging portrait of injustice in the United States, and a complex examination of the troubling intersection of mental health and the law.
Guest – Susan Vinocour is a retired clinical and forensic psychologist, a former prosecutor and a former associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester School of Medicine.
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President Donald Trump And The White House Response To Pandemic
The place to start in understanding Trump and Trumpism is to accurately define what he represents. A disease cannot be countered unless it is correctly diagnosed.
Mainstream liberal commentators refuse to associate the Trump phenomena with fascism, calling him a right wing populist or a nationalist. But it really matters what Trump is called if we are to fashion a resistance to him with the possibility of triumph. Analysts on the left like Noam Chomsky , Chris Hedges, and Cornell West understand that he and the constellation of forces that make up his movement – principally big business and white non-college educated middle-class people – are fascists.
The poet, playwright, and political thinker Berthold Brecht was asked about German fascism in 1935: “How can anyone tell the truth about fascism, he replied, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth.”
It was the failure of a united socialist movement in Germany in the early 30s that allowed Hitler to gain power. We have seen with the Bernie Sanders phenomena the possibilities of building a socialist movement in the United States. This is our hope.
Guest – John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and the editor of the venerable independent socialist magazine “Monthly Review”. Professor Foster is the author of “Trump in the White House: Tragedy or Farce.“
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Law and Disorder April 27, 2020
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EFF: Google And Apple Virus Contact Tracing And Privacy
From China, to Israel, and now the U.S., governments seek to enact broad surveillance measures to contain the spread of COVID-19. Already a majority of the public has said it favors such tracking, even though leadership has not shown how this tracking might actually stop the spread. According the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the measures must quote “be scientifically rigorous, and based on the expertise of public health professionals.”
Absent such a showing, many believe it’s too early to warrant the privacy intrusion this surveillance would bring, with uses we may not be able to foresee.
In a rare collaboration, tech competitors Google and Facebook have collaborated in creating a tracking app. It allows users to voluntarily share data through Bluetooth Low Energy transmissions and approved apps from health organizations. It would keep extensive data on phones that have been in close proximity with each other. Official apps from public health authorities will get access to this data, and users who download them can report if they’ve been diagnosed with COVID-19. The system will also alert people who download them to whether they were in close contact with an infected person.
Guest- Senior Staff Attorney Adam Schwartz from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Adam’s legal expertise on surveillance includes such areas as warrantless smartphone searches, location tracking, warrantless smartphone searches at the borders, and biometric surveillance. Adam worked at the ACLU of Illinois for 19 years, and clerked for Judge Betty B. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
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Perpetual Line Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition In America
The presence of surveillance cameras across the United States has enabled targeted facial recognition surveillance at essentially any place and any time. Each day law enforcement puts in place more and more cameras, including CCTV cameras, police body cameras, and cameras on drones and other aircraft. The FBI’s Next Generation Biometric Identification Database and its facial recognition unit, FACE Services, can search for and identify nearly 64 million Americans, either from its own databases or through access to state DMV databases of driving license photos.
It’s likely that government agencies will soon be able to pinpoint your location and even with whom you’ve been, just by typing your name into a computer.
The release of Apple’s IPhone X has drawn scrutiny to this technology. Despite civil liberties and privacy concerns, there are few limits on facial recognition technology. In March 2017 Congress held a hearing to discuss the risks of facial recognition surveillance. There is concern that facial recognition can be used to get around existing legal protections against location tracking, opening the door to unprecedented government monitoring an logging of personal associations, including protected First Amendment-related activities. Knowledge of individual’s political, religious and associational activities could lead the way to bias, persecution and abuse.
As with many technological advances, there are benefits, too. Facial recognition can assist in locating missing persons or for other public safety purposes.
Guest – Clare Garvie, Clare is a Law Fellow at the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology. Her research with the Center is on face recognition use by law enforcement and the disparate impact of payday lending on vulnerable communities. She worked on the Center’s 2016 report on facial recognition technology.
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