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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 June 15, 2022
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- Michael Smith Commentary – Recall Of District Attorney Chesa Boudin
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Opposition Grows Against Florida’s Don’t Say Gay Law
In April, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law the Parental Rights in Education bill, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
The bill bans instruction or classroom discussion about LGBTQ issues in kindergarten through third grade. Older students may discuss gay and transgender issues if they are “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate.” Florida’s legislators believe that classroom education about sexual orientation and gender shouldn’t start at an early age, and that parents can have the final say about what their children learn and when.
Sex education has already been banned in Florida and many other states until the fifth grade. Critics contend the new law focuses on a problem that doesn’t exist for the state’s youngest students. By limiting discussions about LGBTQ issues, it could stifle conversations for kids who need to process their own gender or sexual-identity questions, they say.
Many school librarians have accused their schools of removing race- and LGBTQ-related books from their shelves to avoid a fight. The Washington Post reported that schools with small budgets cannot afford to contest court challenges that the law will surely draw. Some schools are reportedly peeling off rainbow safe-space stickers from windows. As with other restrictive laws, the chilling effect is already being seen in schools across the nation.
Joining us today is K&L Gates attorney Michael Komo – a triple alumnus of George Washington University. Michael is well known for his work on behalf of the LGBTQ community and has been recognized at the local, state, and federal level, with accolades including Pittsburgh Magazine’s 2021 40 under 40 honorees and City and State PA’s 2022 Pride Power 100 honorees. He co-founded the LGBTQIA+ Anti-Human Trafficking Initiative with the FBI, started the Pride Night Series for Pittsburgh’s professional sports teams, and serves as the chair of the LGBT Rights Committee of the Allegheny County Bar Association.
Guest – attorney Michael Komo is well known for his work on behalf of the LGBTQ community, with accolades including Pittsburgh Magazine’s 2021 40 under 40 honorees. He co-founded the LGBTQIA+ Anti-Human Trafficking Initiative with the FBI, started the Pride Night Series for Pittsburgh’s professional sports teams, and serves as the chair of the LGBT Rights Committee of the Allegheny County Bar Association.
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Investigating The Assassination Of Palestinian American Journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh
The Zionist colonial settler state of Israel is not the moral legatee of the victims of the Holocaust much less the moral legatee of the ancient prophets of the Jewish people.
Never has this been more evident than last month with the exposure of the Israeli army’s assassination of the beloved Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh. Assassination is a political murder.
Shireen had covered the Israeli military’s occupation of the West Bank for Al Jazeera for 25 years. The day she was killed she was reporting on the Israeli military invasion of Jenin, an Arab town on the West Bank occupied by the Israeli army for 55 years. She was wearing a helmet and a protective vest marked “PRESS.”
It is the practice of the Israeli army to shoot journalists and otherwise suppress the truth of their war crimes including the illegal theft of Palestinian lands. Israel’s brutal occupation has been going on since it illegally seized the West Bank as a prize of the 1967 war between Israel and three of its neighbors. Since then the Israeli military has ruled the native Arabs. Shireen is the 86th journalist to be killed while covering Israel’s illegal occupation since 1967.
The murder of Shireen was not adequately exposed by the U.S. press. The United States supports Israel politically, ideologically, economically, and morally. The U.S. gives the state of Israel more than $3.8 billion a year in weapons. Shireen was killed by a high-velocity armor-piercing 5.56 mm bullet fired from a Ruger Mini-14 semi automatic rifle – a weapon made in the U.S.
Israel has refused to conduct an investigation of Shireen’s assassination, because it “would provoke opposition and controversy within the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] and in Israeli society in general,” according to the Israeli government. Although complaints have been filed in the International Criminal Court against Israel, the court does not appear to have the political will to thoroughly investigate those charges.
There is an apocryphal story of three rabbis dispatched from a Zionist congress in Vienna many years ago to report back on the situation in Palestine. They reported back that the bride is beautiful but she’s married to another man.
The claim of the Zionist is that Israel was built on a land without a people for a people without a land. This is Israeli propaganda. This propaganda is less and less swallowed by the new generations in the United States and Europe as they witness Israel taking over more and more of historic Palestine and attempting to prevent the truth of what they are doing from coming out.
Guest – Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi is a Palestinian American historian of the Middle East, the Edward Said professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and Director of the Middle East Institute of Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. He was educated at Yale and Oxford universities and is the author of many books on the Middle East. He is also the author of Under Siege: PLO Decision Making During the 1982 War, Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East and recently The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017.
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Law and Disorder June 6, 2022
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Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants
California has a water crisis that is rooted in racism. About 1 million Californians in 130 communities still do not have access to clean, safe drinking water. Most of these people live in rural areas primarily populated by farmworker families.
This inequality can be traced to the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North at the beginning of the 20th Century. Met with discriminatory real estate practices, they were forced to build or rent homes in colonias with no water mains, sewer lines or lighting.
That racist legacy continues to plague people (primarily of Mexican descent) who live in San Joaquin Valley, one of the richest agricultural areas in the world. Growers who pump large amounts of water from the soil are at the top of the chain when it comes to water access. Next come residences and businesses. At the bottom of the water access chain are the residents of the colonias.
But the people are organizing and they have achieved a victory in their decade-long struggle for equal access to water.
Photojournalist David Bacon has documented this shameful inequality and the legislation the people have secured in his article, “The Color of Water,” which was published in April by The Nation and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Guest – David Bacon is an author, political activist, and former union organizer who has focused on labor issues, particularly those related to immigrant labor. He is Senior Fellow at the Oakland Institute and the author of several books and numerous articles. His most recent book is “More Than a Wall/Mas que un muro” which documents the communities on either side of the Mexico/U.S. border in photographs and journalism.
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Disturbing Shift Away From Passwords And Into Biometric ID Systems
Are passwords becoming obsolete? Recently our own Heidi Boghosian published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times on the disturbing shift away from passwords to fingerprints, eye scans, and other biometrics authentication systems. A consortium of businesses is working with security experts to develop more secure ways to access online accounts. Each year the United States loses TRILLIONS of dollars from avoidable data breaches. And that figure is growing. Compromised login credentials are responsible for at least one fifth of all these breaches.
Enter the FIDO Alliance, or “Fast Identity Online.” Alliance members Google, Apple and Microsoft are working on enabling a password-free world, suggesting users switch to a simple verification of their fingerprint or face—or biometrics.
What are the benefits and risks of such a transition? Heidi is here to fill us in on some biometrics basics, and to demystify how new password-less systems might work, and when we can expect to see them.
Guest – Attorney Heidi Boghosian is executive director of the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute, a charitable organization providing support to activist organizations. Before that she was executive director of the National Lawyers Guild. Her book is coming out in July 2021(Beacon Press). She received her JD from Temple Law School where she was editor-in-chief of the Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review. She has an MS from Boston University’s College of Communication and a BA from Brown University. Heidi is the author of the 2013 book, Spying on Democracy, and the recent book I Have Nothing to Hide”: And 20 Other Myths About Surveillance and Privacy.
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Law and Disorder May 30, 2022
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Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s Leaked Draft Opinion
In 1973, the Supreme Court held in Roe v. Wade that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to abortion until the fetus becomes viable, that is, when it can survive outside the womb (which is about 23 weeks of pregnancy). Nearly 20 years later in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Court reaffirmed the central holding of Roe and said restrictions that placed an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to abortion were unconstitutional.
In perhaps the most significant leak in the history of the Supreme Court, Politico published a draft opinion that Samuel Alito wrote in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which would overturn Roe and Casey. At least four other members of the Court would have to sign Alito’s draft in order to overrule the constitutional right to abortion.
But Politico also reported that, in a straw poll following oral argument in December, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett voted to overrule Roe, Casey and the constitutional right to abortion, and they all continue to hold that position. The Court will issue its final opinion in Dobbs by the end of June.
Although two-thirds of the American people believe that Roe should not be overturned, it appears that the Supreme Court is poised to do just that. Moreover, if the Court says that abortion is not a constitutional right, many other so-called “unenumerated rights” that are not specifically mentioned in the Constitution will also be in jeopardy.
Guest – Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of Berkeley Law School. Dean Chemerinsky is one of the nation’s preeminent constitutional scholars. He has written 14 books, including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction. He also represents clients and has argued several times before the Supreme Court.
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Government Agencies Delay Food Safety FOIA Requests Part 2
The US Freedom of Information Act is a 1967 federal law requiring federal agencies to disclose information to the public. The logic being: “a government of, by and for the people, is transparent and accountable to those people.” In the last half-century, FOIA requests have became critical tools for both journalists and activists seeking to illuminate federal agency activities.
However, since 2014 it’s gotten harder to wrest information from recalcitrant government agencies. Federal agencies began both heavily redacting information, or ignoring requests entirely. Delays have also been noticeably lengthier. The law gives agencies 20 business days to respond. Yet by 2019, the average wait time for a reply to your FOIA request was nearly six months (177 days).
Today’s guest experienced this frustrating process— waiting seven years for the US Fish and Wildlife service to respond. He filed his FOIA in 2014, receiving nothing for ten months, and finally a reply with much the data blacked out. This forced him to sue.
Guest – Attorney Nicholas Arrivo, managing attorney and champion of endangered species at Humane Society of the U.S.
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